Italy photos

Well, here goes! I'm not sure what the best way is to do this, but my first shot is just to upload all the pictures into one album. I'll give a brief description here that should help to navigate the album, but we'll be putting much more detail into a series of pages that will highlight the stops on our trip and give background and fun side notes. That is a work in progress, however, so please have patience!

By the way, the non-Bredenberg in the pictures is Betsy Agal, a good friend of ours from Amy's college days. She has gone on several trips with us in addition to medical conferences with Amy, as she is a Nurse Practitioner in Michigan.

Here is the link to our Italy photo album on Ofoto.com. The photos are arranged in chronological order, so I'll give a brief description of our trip to help make sense of all the different shots. Some photos have been graced with comments already.

(Warning: There are 141 photos in this album! While that's less than half of all the pictures we took, viewing may take a while...)

We flew into Milan and immediately took a train to Varenna, a small town on the shore of Lake Como. There, we stayed in a hotel that is perched on the side of a mountain. Fortunately, they had a lift to help get there, as by the time we reached the foot of the hill, we had been going entirely too long on not much sleep...

After two nights in Varenna (yes, I'm glossing over tons of details), we took a train to Vicenza (near Venice), rented a car, and drove back to Verona to watch a performance of Carmen in the 2000-year-old Arena. Then we drove back to Vicenza to sleep, as there were no hotel rooms available in Verona when we started looking in May!

Our next stop was Venice, which is easy to spot in the pictures! After a busy day there, we drove across Italy (from the eastern coast to the western coast) to Vernazza, one of five towns in the Cinque Terre, known as the Italian Riviera. This is a little town perched on the coast in the valley between mountains that dump right into the ocean. As you can see, the town itself looks like it could fall right in!

After Vernazza, we had had enough of towns whose names started with "V", so we drove down to the Tuscany (Toscana) region (stopping in the town of Siena along the way) and stayed in a bed and breakfast for four days. One of those days we spent on a trip to Florence, when we saw Brunneleschi's Dome (see that massive dome in the pictures?) and a ton of other art and sculpture, including Michelangelo's David. Unfortunately, no pictures were allowed...

On the way out of Tuscany, we stopped in Orvieto, home of what is widely acclaimed to be the prettiest cathedral facade in all of Italy. True to form, it was covered in scaffolding so we settled for a postcard. I did take a few pictures of the details, though.

We then took a train down to the Amalfi Coast, where we stayed in Sorrento and Positano (once we escaped Naples...). There was a beautiful drive along this coast we took in a bus, though the insane speed of the bus made it difficult to take many pictures...

When we left Positano, we stopped in Pompeii for a brief tour, and then went on to Rome for the last few days.

Like I said, that's a pretty brief summary, but it will have to do for now. It leaves out all of the fun details like our experiences driving in Italy, our interactions with people, our frustrations and successes in getting around, and all of that great stuff. Look for more in the coming weeks...