Day 2: Rome (Christmas Day)

     We settled in to our hotel, the Grand Hotel Tiberio (my favorite hotel of our trip) and had an amazing nights sleep! We slept in, had a nice continental breakfast, and enjoyed our Christmas morning. The weather in Rome was absolutely beautiful. Probably around 65-70 degrees, blue skies, and sunny. While most people in the world were sitting near a Christmas tree unwrapping presents in their pajamas, I unwrapped an entire city. It was the best Christmas present I could imagine.

     Rome was my second favorite city of our trip.  I loved seeing all the art that I've studied for the last 4 years in my art history classes, but I was so much more in love with the little things. Like the colors in the city, the colors were truly amazing. It was like a photography majors dream. On any given building there were 10 colors that you would never imagine putting together and having them compliment each other, but it was so beautiful. And since the buildings are so old, they have been slowly deteriorating and there were so many textures to take in. Everywhere I looked I wanted to take a picture. And I absolutely LOVED the windows and terraces. You'll probably get sick of looking at all the window pictures. I found about 100 apartments that I would die to live in some day.

     Here's a list of the things I unwrapped on my Christmas Day in Rome: the Trevi Fountain, the Piazza di Spagna (Spanish Steps), the Vatican, the Pantheon, Piazza Novana, St. Angelo's Castle, walked around the Travstevere, and saw La Pietà. It was a busy busy day, but one of my favorites from our trip. What a great Christmas present :) It was so fun to hear Miles speak Italian, although by the end of the trip I was getting pretty frustrated never knowing what was going on. You see, the Italians just assumed that since Miles spoke Italian that I did too, so they would talk to me and I would just smile and laugh, but really I had no clue what was going on. I did learn a bunch of useful phrases throughout our trip and got really excited to come home and learn Italian.

     There are a LOT of pictures from just Christmas Day, I had over 200 and narrowed it down to these 42. I realize that's still a lot. Happy Viewing!

Day 1: Pisa (December 24)

I have decided to post Italy in parts for three reasons: 1) because I shoot in camera raw format, I have to go through each picture and change them to a readable format like jpegs. I shot over 10 gigs worth of pictures as well as 4 rolls of medium format film.. so it's taking me awhile. 2) because I have so many pictures I don't want people to skip over them just to get to the end of the post, not that I'm accusing you.. I just know that I do that sometimes. and 3) I want people to see the country in a progression, the way I saw it.. with the exception of the film, I need to get in to the lab to develop it and scan the negatives, so that will probably be my last Italia post. So without further ado.. I bring you our Christmas vacations!
First, I GRADUATED FROM COLLEGE! I got my BFA in Photography and am so excited to live life as a postgrad. So after my graduation Miles, Nixon, my parents, my sister and I packed up and left for Connecticut. We decided to bring Nixon along because we (or should I say, I) didn't want Nixon to spend his first Christmas in a kennel in Idaho. So my parents were gracious enough to invite Nixon to their house for Christmas! We went and got some sedatives from the vet and drugged up our poor pup for a 5 hour plane ride. We stayed in Connecticut for a few days and then Miles and I left for Italy on the 22nd. We made it to London and our flight to Rome had been cancelled! We decided to be positive and excited and stood in a very long line to get our hotel voucher (our hotel, dinner and breakfast were free!) and we got to see a bit of London! Mostly I just wanted to take a shower and brush my teeth. The plane ride has 9 hours from NY to London and it was overnight and I hadn't slept. I got too excited by the free movies on the airplane. The next day we took off for Pisa instead of Rome. So we had to change our plans a little bit. We saw Pisa that day and took a train ride down to Rome for Christmas. So.. here is some of Pisa!

  

 

And here are a few from our little point and shoot camera. Call me paranoid but I don't like to hand the Canon over to strangers.. so most of our pictures together are on the point and shoot unless we had made friends with someone somewhere and trusted them to use our good camera.