Photos were not allowed in any of the museums so my picture taking rate declined a bit in Florence. A few shots of the city:

The Ponte Vecchio

The Arno river

Pallazo Vecchio

A view of Florence from near the campground

Accademia

The last museum stop of the day was the Accademia. Again, I had a reservation which saved me from waiting in line. When you walk into the first gallery and turn to the right you see Michelangelo’s David dominating the room. It really is an amazing piece of art. It was my favorite piece of art on the entire trip. It is huge too. You can walk up close and look at the detail like the muscles and veins on his arms and it is like you are looking at a living breathing person. I probably spent at least 30 minutes walking around looking at that one statue. I highly recommend seeing it in person. There are several other Michelangelo’s which are unfinished in the same gallery. The Captives look really cool because they are like a living person bursting out of a solid block of marble. After seeing this one gallery with David, everything else in the museum is not much to look at.

Bargello

Next stop was the Bargello which contains many famous sculptures including some by Donatello and Michelangelo. Once again the statues were amazing.

Uffizi

Next up was the Uffizi. It was good that I had made a reservation for the Uffizi, for if I had not, the line would have been nearly 2 hours long. I rented an audio guide for the first time on my trip and it was very helpful for understanding the significance of the paintings. The Uffizi has a pretty extraordinary collection of art including a large collection of works by Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rafael, Titian, Giotto and Botticelli among others. You can read more here I was very impressed by the Uffizi gallery.

Ninja Turtle Art Day

Saturday was a big museum day and possibly the more prolific art day of my entire trip (if you’ve read everything so far that is quite a claim) I had reservations to visit the Uffizi and the Accademia museums and I ended up seeing the Bargello and the Cappelle Medicee as well. It was a pretty amazing day. I began with the Cappelle Medicee which is a crypt where members of the Medici family are buried. Inside there are several Michelangelo sculptures, which are not his most famous, but are still pretty amazing.

Camping Michelangelo

You may be wondering how I managed to stay at a campsite without a tent or other camping gear. The answer is that a lot of European campsites have housetents (pictured above) and shower/laundry facilities so you don’t actually need any gear. This campground had been recommended by many travelers I had met on my trip and although I was still skeptical when I arrived, it turns out they were right.
+It is perched on a hill overlooking Florence. It was far enough away that you were out of the city, but close enough that it was an easy walk in. The views were nice.
+Although it was a campground there were housetents, showers, washing machines, a supermarket and a little café to hang out in.
+It was one of the more social places that I stayed with everyone hanging out and having fun together at the café in the evenings
+It was cheap at 15euro a night
-Rain is not so good for camping

Napoli-Firenze

On Friday I woke up and started packing up my stuff to head to Florence. It was raining a bit throughout the morning and I was hoping it would let up when I had to go to the train station. Instead it turned into a torrential downpour. It was kind of funny watching the vendors outside clamor to cover up their stuff as their umbrellas blew away. Fifteen minutes later I had to venture out into the rain, without the aid of the umbrella that I left in Switzerland, for the 10 minute walk to the train station. It was a bit of an adventure, but I made it. What’s up with all of this rain in Italy?
The train ride was uneventful. It seems like Italy is bracing for a terrorist attack against their train system as both times I have taken the Eurostar Italia, the high speed train, there have been carabinieri with machine guns walking up and down the aisles.
I was greeted in Firenze (Florence) by even more rain. I took a bus to the campground I would be staying at. It was basically raining off and on all afternoon so the day was a bit of a writeoff. I met an Aussie girl and two Irishmen on the bus ride over and we hung out at the campground cafe drinking beer and swapping stories all afternoon.

From Pompeii I took the train back to the hostel to hang out for a bit. The other guests at the hostel were a German couple and a Japanese girl. At the suggestion of the Germans we played this game where everyone writes the name of a famous person on a piece a paper and then you pass it to someone else. They put it on their forehead Indian poker style and start asking yes no questions to try to figure out who they are. The first person who figures it out wins. After I few rounds I decided to write down Julius Caesar, being in Italy and all, and I gave it to the Japanese girl. To our astonishment, she had no idea who Julius Caesar was. According to her, people learn almost nothing about European history in Japanese schools. I thought that was surprising considering how much world history we get in the U.S.
I had dinner at another pizza place called Trianon which was also very good. Napoli is worth visiting for the pizza alone in my opinion.

Vesuvius looms over Pompeii as a reminder of what caused the destruction. I was surprised that Pompeii wasn’t even all that close to the volcano. It is several miles away yet still could not avoid the eruption. It makes you wonder if some day Napoli might suffer the same fate although on what would be a much larger scale.

This is supposed to be the best preserved Roman amphitheatre anywhere in the world. Being buried for thousands of years helps I guess.

This is a plaster cast that had been made of a void where a body was found in the ash. You can vividly see the ghastly expression on the face of the person as they suffocated.

This one villa at the north end of the site was amazingly well preserved. The wood roof has obviously been rebuilt but everything else I believe was as it was when the disaster happened.

ruts from chariot wheels in the paving stones

Frescoes

Some of the mosaics and frescoes from the walls of houses were well preserved as well. The best artifacts from Pompeii have been taken to a museum in Napoli so I didn’t even get to see those.

Pompeii

Pompeii was amazing (history of the site here). It is interesting to see the scale of the site that was buried in ash 2000 years ago when Vesuvius erupted. It was a decent sized city. It is amazing how well some things were preserved. Many of the buildings are nearly intact. Some of the mosaics and frescoes from the wall were well preserved as well. It was cool just to wander around. I took a lot of pictures.

Vesuvius from the Autostrada on the way to Pompeii

Mt. Vesuvius

Thursday I decided to visit Mt. Vesuvius and Pompeii. I caught the circumvesuvio train and got off at Ercolano (Herculeaum) where I could catch a bus to the top of Pompeii according to my guidebook. When I got off I discovered that the buses no longer left from that location every hour, but only twice a day instead. Conveniently there was a fleet of taxis who would take you to the top and bring you back down for the sum of 20euros. It seemed a little fishy that the bus system was gone and these taxi operators were cleaning up instead. I suspect there was some bribery going on there with the people who make the schedules. Reluctantly I agreed to take the taxi to the top. The taxi driver was absolutely ridiculous with his honking on the drive up. He must have honked 200 times during the 15 minute drive on the way up around every corner, every time there was a driveway, it was nuts. They dropped me off at the top and I offered money, but the guy wouldn’t take it then. It did cost 6 euros to enter the Vesuvius park and hike 10 minutes to the crater which was a little much. There were tons of tourists up there. Napoli is a big cruise ship destination and they bus all of the tourists to the top of Vesuvius and to other nearby places like Sorrento and Capri. The hike was on a trail that was fenced off. It led up to the rim of the crater, but you weren’t allowed to go to the very summit of the volcano. I was a little disappointed. It wasn’t a very clear day either, so the views from the top weren’t great. It was still fun to be on such a famous mountain.
When I got back to the parking lot the bus down to Pompeii was sitting there and I wasn’t really in the mood to take the taxi down and then take the train to Pompeii. It worked out that I didn’t have to pay for the taxi and the bus driver was nice and didn’t make me pay for the bus either. So I went from almost getting scammed into having to pay for the expensive taxi to not having to pay at all. Not a bad deal.

Some views of the area around the hostel.

Pensione Mancini - Napoli

The hostel I stayed at in Napoli was right next to the train station and wasn’t in the nicest of areas, but it was still pretty good.
+ Convenient location
+The owner was very nice and eager to tell you what sights to see and where to go. When I first got there he answered all my questions about the best places to eat, how safe the city was.
-+It was very small, I believe there were only 8 beds or so. There was only one toilet and it had a kind of weird setup.

I took another funicular back down to the water just in time to see the sunset. It was really nice and I got to touch the Mediterranean for the very first time. After a nice dinner with some frutti di mare pasta it was back to the hostel for the evening.

The funicular led up to the top of a rocky hill above the city. The view from up here was great. It was very cool looking over the brightly covered rooftops of the city and seeing Pompeii looming in the distance.

Funicular

I added another new mode of transportation to my resume when I took a funicular up the hill in Napoli. It is kind of a cross between a cable car (the skiing kind, as opposed to the San Francisco kind) and a train. The car is fixed to a cable which moves it up and down the tracks.

I’m not sure what this was, but it was cool

Lazy Dogs

Another thing you see a lot of in Naples were feral animals running around, or sleeping in this case. I had never seen so many feral dogs. I saw one lady covertly feeding a feral cat and she was looking around for police with a guilt look on her face like she was committing some horrible crime. If only the graffiti artists felt that way.

Again with the graffiti in Italy. These kids were tagging on the pedestal of this statue during the middle of the day and they weren’t trying to hide it either.

church of Gesù Nuovo

The exterior of this church is covered in volcanic rock. Another example of local building materials, but it did look a little odd.

With my belly full I set off to wander around the town a bit more. I was glad to discover that the dirty napoli near the train station was not like the rest of the city. It was nice as I walked down by the waterfront. There was this big castle down by the water which looked like it belonged in England rather than Italy.

Roma-Napoli

Next stop in Italy was Napoli (Naples). I took the train down on Wednesday morning and checked into my hostel right away. Naples has a reputation for being pretty seedy and dirty and emerging from the train station you get that impression right away. There are vendors everywhere selling counterfeit and stolen (presumably) goods. My hostel was a short walk from the train station. The hostel owner was very nice. He gave me a map of the city and recommended some things to do. He also showed me where the best pizza places were. Napoli is famous for being the home of pizza. Many travelers who I had met on my trip had told me that the pizza in Napoli was spectacular. I went to Da Michele and got a whole pizza and a beer for 4.70€. Quite a deal. It is not often that highly touted food places live up to their reputation, but this one did. It was great and very fatisfying (satisfying + fattening. I picked that up from a friend in New York). Good pictures of their pizza here

I found some more roman ruins and then my camera battery died so you will just have to imagine the rest of the day (without pictures to jog my memory I can’t really remember either). I had a nice seafood dinner at a Sicilian place near my hostel. I do remember seeing this ancient manhole cover called La Bocca de la Verita

.