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This is just an update on the first few days of my recent trip to Italy. We flew into Rome and headed over to our hotel called Hotel Colombo and then bounced out to hit up the night scene around the Colosseum area. We sat down to a pretty jive little street restaurant and I got an amazing olive oil, chicken and ham calzone, and also had my first Gelato (lemon and raspberry).

These are all original pictures I took while I was there from Oct. 3rd to Oct 14th.

We headed back to the hotel and got some needed rest. The time change was a little rough but we had somewhat of a big day coming up so we did our best. First thing (7:00 am) the next morning we headed out to The Vatican for a tour. We hired a Vatican tour guide, which gets you past the long lines and get early admittance compared the 4 hour wait for general admission. I was quite amazed at how amazingly huge The Vatican is. They ransacked all of Italy for ancient greek statues, and even confiscated some pretty priceless works of art, as well as commissioned many to be created specifically for The Vatican. I did snag some good pictures when guards were other wise occupied of an original painting of DaVinci, one of their halls of art, and The Sistine Chapel, The Laocoon, The Pieta and more- and I swear we didn’t mess with any holy water. The Vatican has it’s own post office (being it’s own country-state) and I sent a postcard to myself from that post office and received it the day I got back.

After the Vatican, the 12 of us (it was a ridiculously large group) headed back to the airport just to pick up our three rental cars. My dad, me, and my sister carol and her husband James took off first to head up to the Villa we rented for the rest of our duration. The manager had been waiting for us, and we were already going to be late. The other 2/3 of our group had to wait for a few items to be recovered back at the hotel before they came up an hour behind us. One of those items was a GPS. Since we didn’t have one, we tried our best to follow maps, and written directions to get the Villa. Which was ridiculous and quite stressful. Luckily, we all made it there (2 and 1/2 hours north of Rome) that night with out any snags. Italians drive wicked fast (140 kph was quite slow)- and getting used the street signs at night weren’t the best way to initially be exposed.

The Villa is pretty stinking old. But has been updated and restored in many ways. It had a separate private veranda which we ate breakfast on each day, a fairly large pool, and pretty much the compliment of a normal house. Laundry was nice, and used by all because we packed light. The bottom right as seen in the picture was originally a stable; apparently a few hundred years ago the animals lived under the house to help produce heat in colder times. We hardly had any neighbors, and most of the time you could only hear church bells randomly donging through out the day from the different villages and towns in the far distance on hill-tops all around.

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