Greg and Kat's blog

The last two days have been spent cruising to cities that aren’t ports: Florence and Rome. Both days involved a 1.5 hour bus ride from the local cruise ship port into the city. So, all of a sudden, our 12 hour port days shrunk to 8 hours in the city.

In Florence, we stumbled on the Galileo Museum, which was very cool: collections of old scientific instruments from Renaissance Europe, including some stuff from Galileo. At the time, science was all about showing off at your benefactor’s parties, so a lot of the instruments were built to look cool. Finding that was a happy accident.

But the biggest highlight, by far, was lunch. We had copied some pages out of Italy for the Gourmet Traveller to bring with us and managed to find one of the places for lunch. Look at our lunch. Just look at it! Best food of the trip, by a wide margin. (Although I’m hoping Naples tomorrow will give it a run for its money.)

Today was Rome, starting with a tour of the Vatican. The Vatican is full of all this, like, old stuff. Mostly with pictures of Jesus and Saint Peter on it. The rest of Rome is full of old stone stuff.

I don’t know why I’m the one writing about Rome, frankly. Kat’s much more into old things than me: I tend to zone out the moment a tour guide mentions a year.

The Sistine Chapel is a helluva thing, though. And I’d like to point out that I Totally Did Not take any illicit pictures of the ceiling by holding my camera in front of me and casually pressing the shutter.

Tomorrow: Naples.