Babymoon-Vatican, Pisa, Cinque Terre, and Milan

Hi friends! Today I am sharing the rest of our time in Italy. I hope you are all enjoying the updates! We began with a tour of the Vatican. We purchased a tour for the morning which helped save us a bunch of time! 

We began at the Sphere Within the Sphere.

Our tour guide Maria showed us all her favorite things in the Vatican Museum, which I didn't know existed until we got there, but apparently it's the second largest museum in the world.

This was an entire hall of sculptures. All of the sculptures used to be painted but have since worn off.

Then I took a bunch of other pictures so enjoy!

The tapestries are beautiful!

Jesus' eyes follow you in this one whichever way you look at him!

The ceiling in the map room was gorgeous!

Our tour guide loves the map room the best, and it was beautiful!!

After the museum we headed into the Sistine Chapel. Unfortunately they don't let you take pictures in there. I was surprised at how crowded it was in there. People were everywhere!

The pope currently lives in an apartment in one of these windows as opposed to the traditional pope mansion they usually live in.

Lastly we headed into St. Peter's Basilica.

This is a famous statue that someone tried to destroy at one point and is now the only one housed behind glass.

These portraits are incredible. They look like paintings but are actually made from mosaic tiles!

Then we headed to look at the altar which sits atop where Peter is buried.

We headed outside and spotted one of the Swiss guards.

We had fun hanging out in St. Peter's square. 

We headed back to our car with one last view of the walls around the smallest country in the world.

We continued on to Pisa. There seemed to be no rules for driving in Italy especially in the cities. Sometimes there was two lanes of traffic and other times one, but the road was always the same width. The countryside is filled with tunnels which seemed to serve no apparent reason. Matt thought they should rename the country to tunnel-y. We drove through one tunnel that seemed to go on and on forever. We looked it up and it is over six miles long!

We arrived in Pisa to check out the leaning tower and other gorgeous buildings.

It was really funny to watch everyone take pictures like this!

One more baby bump picture, this time holding up the leaning tower of Pisa.

We headed over to the area of Cinque Terre. 

It is just as beautiful as all the pictures you see on Pinterest!

We stopped at Vernazza which is about halfway through the Cinque Terre route which runs through five cities. The road along Cinque Terre is very narrow and windy. We couldn't even drive down to the city so we parked and walked about a half mile down the hill to get into the town. There were grapes growing everywhere!

The town was stunningly gorgeous!

We headed down to the water to watch the sunset.

Then we found a spot to eat dinner. The food was amazing! This Italian food beat out our gas station food for best Italian food on the trip.

It seemed like almost all the visitors in the town were American. It looks like a great place to stay and relax for several days! We continued on the scary, windy road and checked out the town from above. As you can see, it's a super tiny town.

We spent the night in Milan. I took a picture of this thing in our bathroom because I couldn't really figure out what is was. I think it was a blow dryer, but it definitely did not have very good pressure.

We woke up the next morning and checked out the Milan Cathedral. I had seen pictures of this thing and was so excited to see it in real life.

So beautiful!!

These were the other buildings in the square next to the cathedral.

Milan had beautiful landmarks but man oh man, the town smelled terrible and was very dirty!

We made one quick stop at The Arch of Peace before leaving town.

Final thoughts on Italy-the waiters are very aggressive at lunch time to try to get you to eat at their restaurant. We never ate during typical meal times, but there were a handful of times we were walking near restaurants around lunch time. It was crazy! Nobody was really fighting for our business when we came to eat a 2 o'clock. 

There were selfie sticks EVERYWHERE!!! People were selling them like crazy in all the tourist stops, and all the tourists had one. Obviously, we did not participate which was not from lack of trying by the salesmen. ;)

See you back tomorrow for our cold trip to Switzerland.

Babymoon-Rome

Hello, friends! Welcome back! Today we are continuing our journey through Italy. I have to mention about our stop at the Autogrill before we got to Rome. It is basically a truck stop, and they were all over the place. Most of the time they spanned across the highway like an arch, but the one we ended up stopping at was just on the side of the road. They had the biggest chip bags and largest popcorn I have ever seen. Think Costco or Sam's Club, and triple that! Big Bang Theory must be popular over there. We watched a marathon while getting ready for bed in London and the series was for sale at Autogrill. We had the best Italian food at the truck stop, up to this point in our trip. Maybe American Italian food is based on Italian gas station food, but nevertheless we thought it was delicious! Plus it was very clean, had free bathrooms, a kids' play area, and a great selection of drink choices. Enough ramblings about the truck stop, onto Rome!

We didn't realize Italy was going to end up being such a huge part of our journey, but we had such a great time while we were there! Even though Italy was such a huge part of our trip, we only spent 24 hours in Rome. We had a lot to see!! We started at the Colosseum. Luckily, I had some other friends visiting Rome in a couple weeks who had an extra set of skip the line tickets which saved us some time!

We did not pay for a tour or download any audio guides so Matt gave us a tour via Wikipedia. It was very informative!

At one point he even showed us a video of what it would have been like to see the Colosseum when it was in its prime.

After the Colosseum, we walked past Palantine Hill. 

We did not go in, but it looked like it would be fun to see the home where Caesar used to live. 

I saw a stone that I thought was shaped just like Nebraska!

We also walked past a park where they used to race chariots. The amount of history is just so crazy!

We walked past several other buildings, but I can't even tell you what they are.

We thought this building was really cool! I think it's called Piazza Venezia.

We walked some more to find the area sacra which is where Caesar was killed.

More walking until we found the Pantheon.

We made a wish at the Trevi Fountain.

We stopped for gelato and then walked into this tiny chapel that was absolutely gorgeous! It was totally off the beaten path and not on our list of things to see.

Our final stop took us to the Spanish Steps to watch the sunset.

At the top of the steps sits another cathedral so we went to check it out while waiting for the sun to set a little bit more.

Such a beautiful view! We walked A TON today. As we looked over the city we realized we saw a lot, but there were so many places we didn't see. There were tons of buildings we didn't even get close to!

We hopped on public transportation to get back to our hotel. I must say, Rome seemed to be the easiest city to get around by public transportation. As we walked back to our hotel we saw tons of these trees. Doesn't is seem like they belong in Africa?

That night, Matt had quite the experience ordering pizza for us. There was a little pizza place behind our hotel so Matt walked over there to order. It was pure Italian speaking, and he said he struggled a bit! But the pizza tasted great so he seemed to do a good job, and I think it will be a great memory for him! See you back here tomorrow so I can show you our visit to the Vatican.