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Honeymoon Day 14: Bologna (and Florence)

Keeping with the theme of ignoring existing plans, we took a surprise daytrip to Florence today. We’ve really been enjoying Bologna as a base of operations for exploring the surrounding region of Italy. It may be a little too crowded and urban for our general sentiments at the end of the trip, but it sure has worked well as a base of operations.

We found a place in Bologna that does a nice breakfast (and drip coffee; Ben is so happy!), and we filled up in preparation for a full day of adventure. Our stomachs must have known what our feet had secretly planned for the day, as we set a new record of more than 28 thousand steps. Florence is only 35 minutes away by high speed rail. Most north-south trains travel through it on their way across the country, so there was a plentiful, flexible schedule to get us there and back. The rail line crosses through a set of mountains to get there, which gave us a pleasant view of a more rugged countryside than we’ve seen thus far.

For our day trip to Florence, we felt that we wouldn’t have enough time to really spend it inside anywhere, and we instead opted to get a general impression of the city by walking through it. We loved the big cathedral with its green and white facade and its red domes, and the market bridge crossing the river made the Rialto look like nothing at all. We wandered through the long streets across the river from touristy Florence, peaking into artisans shops and picking up a few souvenirs to take back with us. Finally, we passed through the old city walls and climbed a hill outside to take in a full panoramic view of the city. Florence left quite an impression on us, and we’re so glad that it made it into our itinerary.

For dinner, we revisited Marsalino, the place where we had dinner the night before. It has such a pleasant energy, and we enjoyed a delicious sampler plate of meat and cheese from the region as part of our meal. It’s also a great place for people watching. It was the perfect meal to end our adventures in Europe. I don’t think that we will necessarily miss Bologna when we leave tomorrow, but I believe that we have come to respect and understand it a little bit better over the past three days.

We’ve got some packing to do before our flight early tomorrow, and we’ll soon be back in the United States. We’ll write one more post when we’re back I think, but this will be our last correspondence from Europe. See you soon!

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Honeymoon Day 13: Bologna

Today was a misty gray day, but that didn’t stop us from a surprise day trip to Ferrara! We took the train about 30 minutes north to the old city, looking for someplace with smaller crowds and a slightly slower pace. We’re both finding Bologna to be a little too much of a bustle for our current internal speeds. The covered arcades provide plenty of space, but many of the other streets are choked with cars and don’t have much sidewalk to divide between pedestrians.

Ferrara was nice, but it continues to feed our impression that Italy has forsaken those who travel by foot. Sidewalks abruptly disappear into street, forcing you to turn around in search of alternate paths. Old park paths are buried below patches of grass, and you must instead follow dirt cuts where walkers have kicked up their own way. There is parking everywhere: street side, park side, filling the old piazzas; none of it buried or stacked behind facades. It’s all a little confusing to an outsider.

Everything else was great though! We had our best gelato yet, including a dairy-free chocolate option for Lauren. We saw the old castle in the center of Ferrara, complete with moat and drawbridge. Upon returning to Bologna, we had a great meal at a local eatery packed with students. There is one thing that the car-scape of northern Italy will yield to, and that is restaurant seating. Ignoring the smells of car exhaust and cigarette smoke, it’s so nice to have streetside seating everywhere we go to eat here.

Over the day, I think our confusion and anger about the pedestrian condition here has transformed into a puzzled acceptance, much as I imagine it did for the locals many years ago. We are feeling on the up, and look forward to one more day of adventure tomorrow before we start our journey home.

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Honeymoon Day 12: Bologna

Bologna and Venice are only an hour and a half apart by train, but after accounting for getting to the station, waiting for a train, and walking to our hotel, it was nearly 3 in the afternoon by the time we arrived. Ben caught up on some writing during the train ride, and Lauren caught some Zs.

The people who run this little hotel in central Bologna are very friendly; they brought a small welcome gift to our room shortly after we arrived for us to celebrate our marriage. After settling in, we wandered through some of the covered arcades of the old town, ate an early dinner at a slightly pretentious restaurant, and picked up snacks to get us through the rest of the evening back at the hotel. The restaurant had some very nice seating on the street, so we had lots of fun watching all the different people walk by as we ate. The number of cars and mopeds crowding the historic center is a little surprising to us (although coming from Venice perhaps we are biased).

We’ve been hanging out in the room for a bit now, weighing our options for tomorrow. Reading the news, we’re a little nervous about how the weather might affect our flight coming back. But that’s not something we can do anything about now, and we’ve got a few days here to enjoy before that’s upon us. Stay dry everyone!

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Honeymoon Day 11: Venice

For our last day in Venice, we wrapped up the remaining portions of the Bienale, went on a chocolate quest, and revisited our favorite local restaurant from the previous nights. Tomorrow we’ll wake up early and head off to the final stop of our honeymoon tour. It’s going to be hard to say goodbye to Venice, but the promise of Bologna is calling us onward.

We started the day with a boat ride over to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, home to a Benedictine abbey and gardens containing the Holy See’s first ever submission to the Architectural Bienale. The Vatican commissioned a series of woodland chapels for the exhibition, inviting different architects to construct each of the ten structures spaced throughout the abbey’s garden. The responses varied widely in their interpretation of the instruction, creating very different relationships between viewer, nature, and spirituality. The abbey also has a bell tower that is open to visitors, and a quick elevator ride to the top provided us with some spectacular views of Venice.

We then continued on to the Giardini, Venice’s largest park and home to the Bienale’s historic country pavilions and the main exhibition hall. This year’s theme is “Free space”, which has been interpreted in a variety of ways. Our BS-meters were well exercised today, as we had to sift through a lot of nonsense to find the good stuff. Finland had a nice pavilion on public libraries, and Hungary had a well-focused pavilion on a bridge that had turned into a free space during its temporary closure in 2016. The main exhibition hall, containing more submissions by different architecture firms, included a room about legitimizing spontaneous architecture in poor neighborhoods in Hangzhou. Other exhibits decided to approach free space as either park spaces or as the air above other spaces, which felt a little bit like nonsense when you dug into how those spaces might actually be used by the public. The Scandinavian pavilion had a bunch of inflated round structures filled with water and air hooked up to temperature and CO2 sensors, such that the inflated structures would “breathe” in response to changes in the pavilion. The description said something about the structures representing a generosity between humans and nature; as you might expect, they got the BS stamp.

For our last meal in Venice, we returned to the Taverna San Trovaso. Lauren got the duck again, and Ben got squid and cuttlefish in a midnight black squid ink sauce. We’re off to Bologna tomorrow, and we’re spending tonight figuring out what exactly we’ll be doing when we get there. We’ll let you know when we figure it out!

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Day 10: Venice

It’s sort of hard to believe we’re already on day 10 of our honeymoon: we both feel like there’s so much adventure to be had and places to explore! At the same time, though, it’s hard to believe it’s only day 10: Vienna feels like it was at least a month ago, and our feet absolutely killing us.

Our original plan for today was to take a boat over to Burano, an island known for its lace manufacturing. However, we realized that the lace museum is closed on Monday, and there wouldn’t be enough to do there to warrant a 45-minute boat ride in each direction. Plus, Lauren picked up a cold in Salzburg and wanted to take the day easy. (If you can consider 25,000 steps “easy.”) We decided to visit some of the beautiful churches in Venice, especially those near our hotel in Dorso Duro. Then, we checked out some of the many, many shops around Venice! We tried on fancy scarves, marveled at glass jewelry and knickknacks, and imagined our dream apartment as decorated by Venetian artisans. (Ben would buy all of the fancy ceramic+metallic cups and bowls, while Lauren would adorn the walls with antique illustrations of fish and sheep.)

In the afternoon, we stopped by the Guggenheim museum. It was modern and weird, but good. There was some Calder, which is always appreciated.

We finished the day with another round of fantastic pasta and wine. The owner of the small canal-side restaurant was busy, but that didn’t stop him from coming to chat with us very enthusiastically (in Italian, so we mostly nodded and grinned). We watched the sun set over the water and pointed out all of the cute dogs that passed by our table. We made sure to grab some more gelato and sorbetto before turning in early.

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Honeymoon Day 9: Venice

After a peaceful breakfast, we set out on foot to take in the classic Venetian sights. We wandered through San Marco first up to the Rialto Bridge, a tall crossing over the Grand Canal lined with little shops on either side of a central footpath. It was pretty, and big, but I think there are other parts of Venice that our more our speed.

After pausing to enjoy the sights and sounds of St. Mark’s Square (a beautiful basilica, an imposing tower, a platform of musicians dressed to the nines, a horde of tourists, and pigeons and gulls bathing in the square’s large puddles) we moved on through a quieter part of the city towards the Arsenale, where our first official order of business was located.

We toured half the Bienale Architettura today, which contains a mix of displays submitted by architectural groups and government organizations from around the world. We particularly liked Ireland’s pavilion on the social function of public market spaces in small towns, as well as a series of model towers presented by a Hong Kong group and the Latvian exhibition on block apartments. We both agreed that about two thirds of the exhibitions were total nonsense that used big abstractions and pretty objects to puff up the countries or firms being represented. But the other third contained some real gems. We were goofs and forgot to take pictures, so you’ll have to wait for us to go see the other half before you get to see anything cool.

We got lunch, took a short siesta because lunch was big and carby (hello, Italy), and then took a Vaporetto cruise around the city (a vaporetto is basically the public bus system, but with boats). The sun was just starting to set as we left, and the brilliant colors of dusk transitioned to lamp light as we boated down the Grand Canal. We wrapped up the night with some gelato and sorbetto, and now we’re doing a bit of laundry!

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Honeymoon Day 8: Venice

Lauren is busy drying out our shoes while I (Ben) write this; it’s been a rainy evening here. We’re loving Venice so far, but I should first catch you all up on the trip south from Salzburg.

We woke before the dawn and left the Villa Trapp early to catch our 6:50 train from the main station. It was well worth the effort because the pinks and oranges of the morning light cascaded so beautifully across the mountains at sunrise. From our lightly populated train car, we had a spectacular view. Crossing briefly into Germany, we had an uneventful morning train to Innsbruck. The train from there down to Venice was a little more crowded, but it was nothing that reserved tickets couldn’t handle.

This train traveled higher through the mountains than any of our previous trains, and we were afforded excellent views of the ridge lines and valleys through the Brenner pass from up high. Crossing over from Austria to Italy, there were several changes to note. First, the streams started flowing the opposite way, signaling the beginning of our descent from the highest point. Next, we started seeing shorter, fuller trees characteristic of the Italian countryside. The tall, thin alpine trees of Austria had no place here. Finally, there were vineyards everywhere; if it wasn’t made of rocks, there were grapes on it! We were crossing the water into Venice by two in the afternoon, concluding our seven-hour trip by train.

With our half day in Venice, we did a bit of walking and then ducked into the Gallerie dell’Academia to avoid the rain that has now settled over Venice for the evening. This art school turned museum houses a collection of works by Venetian artists ranging from the 13th to 18th century. We’ve seen quite a bit of Renaissance art so far on our trip, but the collection of large medieval paintings (many were seven or eight feet tall at least!) was a real treat.

We then got dinner at a nearby taverna recommended to us by the hotel. We both had Venetian style duck and split a plate full of roasted vegetables (no trouble getting veggies here!). I think we’re going to get along with Italian food quite fine on this trip. The rain would not relent, so we splashed back to the hotel and that brings us full circle to the shoe drying. We’re going to air out our wrinkly feet and get ready for our first full day tomorrow. Ciao!

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Honeymoon Day 7: Salzburg

For our last day in the Salzburg area, we took a day trip 45 minutes south to the town of Werfen. The train follows a river valley along this path, tracing a brilliant blue-green river through the steep, exposed mountains.

Werfen features two major attractions: an imposing hilltop castle overlooking the river and town, and a set of ice caves nestled in the mountains above. We have been enjoying our leisurely pace the past few days in Salzburg, so we chose not to attempt cramming both attractions into our day. We gave ourselves the full day to explore the castle, and by the end of things it certainly felt like the right decision.

The castle, built and expanded between the 11th and 15th centuries, is connected to the train station by a shaded footpath that winds along the river and up the hill to its top. Once through the first two gates guarding the castle, we were greeted by a well-decorated castle sporting a variety of amenities for tourists. We puttered through the gift shop and several museum rooms, dined at the castle tavern, and went on a tour of the interior. And then we saw the falcon show.

The castle at Werfen contains a center devoted to the art of falconry, and its splendid birds take flight each afternoon. The birds are released one at a time to soar above the castle in free flight, while a guide lectures on the animals and throws mice up into the air for the birds to catch. Some of the larger vultures on display were less graceful flyers, and they amused the crowd after their short flights with comical walks around the castle grounds. At the end of the show, a bald eagle started splashing around a little pond in the center of the grounds, doing its best to steal the limelight from its avian co-stars.

Altogether, we had a wonderful day in Werfen. The internet was a little too weak to do a full report last night, so we’re writing this morning on the train. The sunrise looks so beautiful over the mountains.

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Honeymoon Day 6: Salzburg & Hallein

Today we took a day trip to the nearby town of Hallein. It’s a sleepy town that gets some tourists due to its historic salt mine, but which was far from crowded. We wandered through Hallein’s twisty old streets until we came upon a creek-side path. We followed this path a ways up the mountain, taking in a bit of natural splendor before heading back into town. Hallein has a great museum dedicated to the prehistoric peoples of the Salzburg region and the archaeological work done in and around Hallein. Kurt the Worm was our guide through the recently renovated first floor of the museum, which contained some of the mpbest museum design that we’ve seen in a long time. We then got lunch at a nearby bakery, because no adventure is complete without food.

After a short break at the hotel, we made our way back to downtown Salzburg to do a bit of shopping. We’ve been finding excellent Christmas ornaments to start our merry married collection of holiday decorations. Having learned how dinner works in Salzburg, we decided to look for food before the Hhunger Games commenced for the evening. Tonight, we visited a Colombian restaurant called Bistro de Marquez. The arepas and banana chips were a welcome departure from the (delicious!) food we’ve been enjoying thus far.

After so many days in a row of record-breaking step counts, we were happy to have a lighter day; we came in under 20,000 today.