Experience. Explore. Learn. Enjoy.

Visiting Italy

When traipsing through Italian towns I have to admit that I ponder on the past.   I pause as I pass a church, linger at a fountain, poke my nose into a doorway musing  “Who goes there…?”

My mind echoing historical fiction at random moments as I mosey along until I have to ask my self why am I here and what am I looking at?  It can’t be just for the beauty of stone and mortar can it?   I think not!  How much do I really know about what I am experiencing? I don’t!

Truthfully any place but home sweet home seems different, but why do we in droves long for the cobblestone streets and the charming alluring European shops that cozy up next to us as we walk the lanes that have endured hundreds of years in the very same place.

I truly feel it is the historical knowledge shared, and the people that made it.  I am not a historian, not into high ranking literature.  Surely there is a short cut to knowing more about what I am seeing as I go about my touristy days a field.  I often find books a clumsy distraction as I walk about, as I favor to rest my eyes on what is about me.

Learning about our how ancestral links at home sometimes brings us to another country I find lately there are so many ads out for ancestry.com or familyresearch.org.   Yet when we travel we seem to forget that people make the places we cherish to visit, people fought and died so we could walk these streets, people lived and traveled about with our same longing.

We have a saying that ‘Rome was not built in a day’, then why I ask you, do we expect to take one day and see all of Rome or a ½ day in Florence?

Not everyone wants or needs a private guide or even a guided tour.  There is something in us all that longs for the private walk and the treasure we alone find.  After all here at home we know our territory, our history around us so perhaps we feel we can travel to another country, just stick our nose in or is it out and determine we have seen enough to satisfy our souls in one day?

However with out really knowing; who, what, where?  Are we really getting our moneys worth out of our sightseeing? It is worth the price of the airline ticket to just pass by something and say “I saw that”.  I think not.

That is why I encourage everyone one, no matter how experienced or well read to take a private tour or an escorted tour so that the true revelations can be known as to what we are seeing and how history has brought us to this very place and the relevance it has for today.

I want to visit the real Italy the one laid out before me.  I want the historical senses to come alive as someone with only the proper educational back ground can give to me on my level.

Did you know:

• Italy has the highest number of cultural sites recognized by UNESCO world Heritage.
• Napoleon spent his first exile on the Italian island of Elba.
• The Italian peninsula is surrounded by five seas (the Adriatic, Ionian, Tyrrhenean, Ligurian, and Mediterranean).
• The colors of the Italian flag represent three virtues: hope (green), faith (white), and charity (red).
• An engineering marvel of the ancient world, Cloacus Maxima, is the sewer of Rome
• Before Rome became a republic and an empire, it had seven kings.
• The area around Venice is one of the wealthiest region in Europe
• Italy has more hotel rooms than any other nation in Europe.
• Mt. Vesuvius last erupted in 1944, destroying a number of neighboring villages and the city of Pompeii
• The Monumental Cemeteryof the Capuchin Brothers has used the bones of over 4,000 Capuchin monks, some skeletons fully intact, to create symbolic works of art in its series of chapels
• Rome’s Coliseum, a huge amphitheatre which could seat 50,000 people is one among theSeven Wonders of the World
• The Baths of Caracalla although in a bad state now, were once in their prime days spread across 27 acres and could handle 1,600 bathers at any given time. Built in the 3rd century, they are the largest survivors ofRome’s imperial era

Come find the Real Italy, join us on our travels with our Escorted tours or design your own private touring.