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Articles Tagged ‘Florence’

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Florence and the Cinque Terre

Friday, January 19th, 2007

Our visit in Florence was short (two nights), but a good mix of what we like to do and see in any city: visiting museums (the Bargello, with mostly sculpture), visiting churches, having one good meal out to try the local foods, walking around the city to see the sights and to get a sense for the city’s atmospheres, taking a walk up and out of town — for views of the city and, in this case, to see all of the olive trees, and visiting with the other travellers at our hostel.

On Wednesday, we took the train to the Cinque Terre (“Five Lands”) region on the northwestern coast of Italy.  Five, small, mostly car-free villages hug the rocky, Mediterranean coastline.  The steep slopes around and between the villages are covered with mostly vineyards, but also some olive, lemon and orange orchards.  A hiking trail with marvelous views of the sea and villages winds its way between the villages and among the vineyards.

Dan and I hiked most of the trail yesterday, and we met up with a fun, young woman, named Laurie (sp?), from Nova Scotia, Canada.   Today, we’ll hike some more of the trail and tomorrow we leave Italy for Nice, France.

More details later,

Tim

Posted in Pre-Trip | No Comments »

Palermo and a touch of Florence

Monday, January 15th, 2007

Well, guess what? We are now in Florence after two and a half days in Palermo.

Okay, on to what we did there.
The first night we got there we wandered around for awhile. The city has an energy level like Naples…meaning there is lots of noisy traffic and alot of people. There are many neat buildings to look at, not to mention, if we are by the sea, cool cliffs and neat rock formations. We saw Palermo’s Cathedral. It has a very different “look” to it. It is “Arabic” looking. I am not an expert on what “Arabic” buildings look like or anything so take my comment with a grain of salt and look at the Flickr site to see if we have posted a picture of it (I think it will make it in there). After more wandering, we called it a day and went back to the hostel. We went out that night. We didn’t party up a storm in anyway because there is a midnight curfew at the place we were staying. We only had one beer after wandering around night-time Palermo a bit. Next day, we went to the water front. There wasn’t a beach there but it had some good cliff views. We, then, went to the (in my mind) “biggy”. There is a church with some catacombs that have over 8000 viewable dead bodies. Oh Yea! You can’t even picture how macabre and creepy this was. They weren’t all laid out in graves for the most part…Oh no. They were hung up and stood upright in thier niches. Babies, old people, young people, recognizable facial characteristics, unrecognizable skulls, all done up in their sunday best! Okay, I will stop. It was quite a sight though. After that, we did a bit more walking but called it a night.
The next day was the last day we were in Palermo, we were catching a night train to Florence at 7pm. We went to Mondello beach. This beach is about half an hour north by bus. It was gorgeous. Tim was walking along the water line bare-foot and I ended up doing it as well since a wave caught my right shoe and sock in a wet embrace (how do you like those word choices ;)).
This morning, myself a little bleary eyed, we wandered Florence a bit. We saw the Cathedral and went to a market. We saw a fun bridge somewhat like the Rialto bridge in Venice (there are shops on it) but better.

Well, that’s it for now.
Write later,
Dan

Posted in Europe | 1 Comment »