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Ravello is one of the towns along the southern side of the Amalfi coast, only a few miles (but about an hour’s drive) from Positano. It’s higher up in the mountains, which gives it a bit of a different feel from the other towns that we visited. We were totally shocked to discover that: a) there’s a whole network of small towns up there, and b) they’re not entirely inhabited by gnomes or, in fact, any other kind of mythical creatures. We spent the day there walking around the town and then doing a hike along a goat path to some of the even smaller ones nearby. Here are a few pictures of the church there, the view, the local health food store, and some of the nearby vineyards.

And here’s one of the “roads” that we spent a while walking along. Not only was it almost possible to almost touch both sides of the “road” by stretching your arms out, but it was two way and also served as a walkway between towns. Seriously.

And here’s a picture of the local entrant into the creepiness olympics. It’s hard to see, but what we have here is about a liter of some poor guy’s blood in a glass container, which is proudly (and disgustingly) displayed in an altar there. They even have a painting nearby of a woman kneeling beside a recently decapitated body, drying her tears with one hand while collecting a bit of spraying blood in a jar with the other. People are seriously strange.

And finally, here’s a picture of a local “don’t do that” sign, posted in the piazza. If anybody has any idea what the thing in the top middle means, please add a comment. And forget about writing “don’t kick tanks” either. That’s mine.

This will be part I of the “our trip down south” series, which will probably take forever for me to finish, since we had so much fun and took so many darn pictures. I promise it will be fascinating, though - especially if, like most people, you’re fascinated by looking at other people’s vacation pictures. :)

On our way down to Positano, we stopped at a little medieval town called Orvieto, which was quite beautiful. Like a lot of the towns in that area, Orvieto is perched rather precariously on the top of a large cliff and surrounded by some highly serious (and seriously high) city walls. I had a great time being juvenile - as usual - and imagining the cauldrons of boiling oil being prepared at the tops of the walls and the unfortunate people below somehow not seeing it coming. For some reason that I can’t quite explain, I think that boiling oil, in the medieval sense, is really, really funny. In any case, we got into the city just fine but quickly found that the modern fortifications involve roads that are completely nuts and a total lack of street signs. This was my first time driving outside of the US, and cruising around completely lost in a city that looks like it hasn’t changed at all since the 1200s didn’t quite compute. In any case, we finally found our hotel, and even a parking space around the corner with only minor losses to the local population. Here’s a picture of me dreaming of boiling oil and of the surrounding valley from the edge of town.

Once we settled into the hotel, it took us about 15 minutes to figure out why the room was available and relatively cheap…. because there was a clock tower outside that went off every 15 minutes, all night long. Each time it rang once for each hour, and then with a separate bell once for every 15 minutes past the hour. Luckily we were tired from driving, and it wasn’t much of a problem. Here’s a picture of the beautiful/evil thing from our window.

We only had a few hours the next day to visit the town because we needed to get back in the car to head down to Positano, but it worked out just fine because it was quite small. Aside from the general beauty of the town, Orvieto seems to be best known for the huge cathedral there that hangs over the edge of the cliff. There’s a funny story about the building of the thing… apparently a priest came to town and expressed his doubts about transubstantiation to some people there. Later on, he was giving mass when blood started to spontaneously pour out of some part of the church onto a linen cloth. It sounds fishy to me, but the Pope was so excited to hear about it that he ordered them to build a massive church and a shrine for the cloth. Here’s a picture…

In addition to that church, there were a number of other, older ones in town. Here’s a picture of one that was built in the 10th century.

Another interesting thing about Orvieto is that there’s quite a network of caves dug underneath it that has been expanded and used for all sorts of purposes over the years. We toured some of the caves that were used as everything from a bathroom to a grave to a wine cellar that, among other things, made us quite happy not to have had any wine there. There was also an incredibly deep well in the caves, that was apparently put out of service when the water started to taste bad because somebody threw some French people down there. No lie. Here are a final few pictures from around town and of some local Etruscan finds we saw at the museum.

A few weeks ago, we finally stopped procrastinating and went into the Basilica at St. Mark’s, and judging by the crowds that are already piling up outside of the place, I’m glad we didn’t wait any longer. I’ve learned a lot about Venice since we’ve been here (obviously), but it’s pretty funny now to look back and what my idea of it was before. And since pretty much the only things I knew about it before were that there were canals and St. Mark’s here, this seems like a pretty good time to look back on it…

One thing I had only a vague idea about but that everybody else seems to see as the highlight of Venice is the pigeons. There are A LOT of pigeons in general, but the piazza at St. Mark’s really takes it to a new level. And for some reason, when confronted with such a sea of pigeons, at least 75% of the tourists just completely lose their minds. I can’t think of another way to explain the sudden, uncontrollable desire to have giant rats with wings land on you, which is what everybody does. Here’s a picture of a woman who is probably sane in other circumstances covered in the things, along with one of the crazy people who sell pigeon food all day in the square to enable this insanity.

Another thing I didn’t know was that St. Mark’s is so named because the remains of the man himself are kept there. I also didn’t know who St. Mark was, but hey. In any case, St. Mark was one of the four evangelists (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), who seem to be the upper echelon of saint-dom, at least here in Italy. In the early days of the Venetian republic, some local merchants went to Alexandria, appropriated Mr. Mark’s remains, and brought them back here, where he became the city’s new patron saint. Venice already had a patron saint at the time - Theodore - but he was pushed aside in favor of the new one. Theodore is supposed to have killed a dragon, which is pretty cool by me, but I guess they liked Mark better. The evangelists each have a symbol (Eagle, Ox, Human, and Lion - Mark), so the lion became the symbol of the city, and today there are lion decorations on all manner of things. A funny side note here is the Venetian justification for the theft… Mark was supposed to have passed by the lagoon in a boat and had a vision that he would be laid to rest there. The funny part is that Venice didn’t even exist at the time. Sounds fishy to me. Anyway, here’s a picture of the man himself and an (admittedly bad) one of a mural on the facade of the church that depicts the body arriving there, and is also the oldest known image of what it looked like.

Another thing I didn’t know about Venice was that most of the things here were stolen (ok, plundered) from other places. The facade of the church itself looks a bit like a patchwork because it was used as a gallery of loot for a few hundred years. There are also some really impressive sculptures of horses, called the Triumphal Quadriga, in the upstairs of the church that were taken from Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade when Venice laid a smack down on that city. Here are some pictures of the facade and the horsies.

And to wrap things up, here are some pictures of the interior of the church (yeah, it’s about solid gold), the Piazza and Piazzetta from the balcony, and of course the obligatory creepy shriveled hand relic thing. I can’t help myself, I’m sorry.

Last weekend there was a big art fair in Bologna, so of course I was dying to go, and I managed to convince Hannah to come along. She’s a pretty good sport like that. The fair itself had 240 galleries from all over the place (but mostly from Italy), and it was huge. There’s so much to see that by the end of the day your feet hurt like crazy and you basically have no idea what you’ve just seen. This was my personal favorite, though… I’m a sucker for this pen and ink stuff.

While we were there, we decided to spend Sunday touring around Bologna. I had no idea what to expect, and after spending most of Saturday at the art fair, which is in the industrial part of town, I wasn’t expecting too much. When we got to the city center, though, we found that it is really quite a beautiful place. There were some great things to see, and the fact that it’s a university town seemed to make it seem really ‘alive’. One interesting thing was that almost all of the streets have arcades, like the one here.

Funny how all of these cities seem to have their own distinguishing characteristic. I imagine the city planners hundreds of years ago saying “How can we be different from Florence? I know, let’s build crazy arcade things!” or “I know, let’s build our city in the middle of a lagoon!”

Apparently there was quite a contest going on to see who could build the biggest tower in Bologna, with seemingly unpleasant results. Our guidebook said that there were over a hundred of them but that now they’re down to 15. Not a great success rate, and given the lean on one of the towers that was near our hotel, it’s pretty clear that these things don’t end well. They said that this thing was tilting by 3.5 meters.

We climbed the taller tower in the background of that picture (only 1.5 meters lean) and got a fantastic view of the city.

There was a huge basilica there that was originally supposed to be bigger than St. Peter’s in Rome. I thought this was really funny, but the Pope apparently told them that they weren’t allowed to make it bigger, so they just stopped building it. It’s still pretty darn huge… the third picture here is of the corner of the thing, where they clearly just lopped it off when they had to stop building. It’s also in the center of the first tower view picture above.

Just because I seem to have to add some ‘creepy’ things to each post here, I’ll throw these in. They have what they call an anatomy theatre at the old university, which is where the students would dissect cadavers back in the day. The room was amazingly immaculate, with wooden sculptures of various people, but right in the middle there were these crazy skinless guys. Cool, but creepy!

Other than the really creep relics, the Santa Maria dei Frari was a really amazing place. It’s a huge church that was built by the Franciscans in 1338 and is probably big enough to hold at least 4000 full grown elephants. Here’s a picture of the interior.

Aside from the size of the place, the most striking thing was the altar, which has an amazing painting by Titian, which Hannah says is his masterpiece. She’s usually right, too.

Some more points of interest… among the monuments in the church was this pyramid sculpture, a monument to a sculptor named Canova. Thanks to wikipedia, I just learned that his heart, but not the rest of him is buried there. There’s a picture of the pyramid, not the heart, below. There was also a strange looking thing attached to one of the walls, and when we looked at the plaque underneath it, we realized that it was a German bomb from World War II that had hit the church and not exploded. Nutty.