Eight Boots Abroad

We actually started our final two weeks in Italy with a quick stop in Bavaria (Germany) to spend time with another one of our previous au pairs and her family. Sara was our very first au pair and joined our family just a few weeks after we became parents! She’s now married with sweet babies of her own – it was so great (and wonderfully surreal) to watch our kids play with her little ones.

Following our much-too-brief visit with Sara, we dropped off our rental car (which we had lived out of for a month – good luck to the poor soul who had to clean the kids’ backseat area) in Munich and met up with my parents to begin our exploration of central Italy! Our crew of six traveled together from Munich to the small Italian costal town of Levanto by overnight sleeper train.

From Levanto, we spent four days camping and exploring the Cinque Terre region along the Ligurian Coast. We hiked between the small seaside villages of Monterosso and Vernazza and took trains and boats to visit four of the five costal villages – Riomaggiore, Manarola, Vernazza, and Monterosso. We spent our days open water swimming and cliff jumping into the sea. My favorite Cinque Terre adventure was when Howie and I headed to Vernazza for a quiet evening to watch the sunset after the chaos of cruise ship tourists had left for the day.

I also enjoyed the day we splurged for a swanky beach club with an oceanside lap pool – complete with Team Silleck swim practice! Yay!

My least favorite Cinque Terre adventure was how we had to constantly dodge heaps of jellyfish while swimming. Sadly, on our final day in Levanto Mira was stung by a large jellyfish (“medusa” in Italian) as we were doing a momma-kiddo swim and diving for hermit crabs. The sting was extensive and covered a significant portion of her thigh, lower leg, and foot. Italian beachgoers yelled “Medusa! Medusa!,” and stopped to investigate her leg as we helped her hobble along the beach.

Other challenges in Cinque Terre included the clock tower located next to our campground which tolled at a deafening volume and incessantly… every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day. The ever-tolling bell along with oppressive heat made our nights in the tent here a bit of a challenge.

After four days in Cinque Terre, the six of us traveled again by train to Firenze/Florence. When we arrived, the walk from the train station to our apartment was about 15 minutes… but felt like forevvvverrrr with heavy packs in the intense 95 degree midday heat. However, on this special day instead of setting up our tent in the sweltering sun, we reached the apartment and we had air conditioning! There were definitely tears of joy! After nearly 7 weeks of camping in a tiny backpacking tent we finally had walls… and beds… and a toilet… and air conditioning! We immediately chilled the apartment to 65 degrees and wallowed in absolute luxury.

We were very brave and ventured out of our fantastically chilled apartment to spend four days exploring historic Firenze. The entire city is breathtakingly beautiful, like an open-air museum oozing history and art (and many tourists)! We visited Michangelo’s statue of David and admired all the Renaissance art in the Uffizi Gallery. We climbed to the top of the Duomo (super-cool!) and Giotto’s Bell Tower. My parents decided it was their duty as grandparents to spoil the kiddos with gelato at least once or twice every day, and our kiddos happily obliged!

After four days of art, history, and gelato in Firenze, we again packed up and traveled by train to the small, picturesque Tuscan hilltop town of Montepulciano.

The quiet atmosphere of Montepulciano was a welcome change after the busy streets of Florence! We toured the De’ Ricci Cantine Storiche winery in the heart of town. The wine aging cellar is located deep underground within the city; huge caverns (dating back to 500BC) with amazing cathedral-like ceilings hold oak barrels which age their different wines. Sadly, my palate is definitely not refined enough to fully appreciate the nuances between a €30 bottle of wine and a €300 bottle of wine, but the whole experience was still very educational and enjoyable. In fact, everyone in our crew of six had quite a bit of fun here!

We also took an afternoon to hike from the nearby town of Montefollonico back to Montepulciano, winding our way on small paths and gravel roads through the Tuscan countryside. It felt like we were walking through a movie scene, surrounded by quaint rustic farmhouses, vineyards, and olive groves.

Our final stop in this two-week Central Italy segment with my parents was Rome! What a crazy transition from the quiet, cobblestone pedestrian alleys of Montepulciano to the hustle, bustle, and heat of the “Eternal City.” We knew from the outset that navigating such a massive and historically important city over just a couple of days with our kiddos and my parents in their 70s was not going to be an easy task. There’s just sooooo much to see!

We decided the most enjoyable way for our entire crew to experience a decent bit of Rome would be a private golfcart tour! It. Was. Wonderful. Our guide was knowledgeable and amusing – and we spent the evening zipping through side streets and alleyways together on an extra-large golfcart, stopping to see so many historical places along the way!

We also scored first-entry tickets to the Roman Colosseum and had it all to ourselves (just our little family… for a few brief minutes!) before the masses of tour groups descended onto the monument. It was a very special (albeit fleeting) moment.

Other highlights of our time in Rome included a sunset with a view of St. Peter’s Basilica, a quiet sunrise at Palatine Hill (The Forum), and visiting the enormous Roman Baths of Caracalla.

With our time in Rome complete, we had to say goodbye to my parents. I’m going to be honest – before we started, I was pretty nervous about having all of us travel together for several weeks (due the logistics and stress of keeping six people with different mobility levels and travel expectations happy) … but I’m happy to report, it went far better than I anticipated! It was incredibly special to be able to share a part of this year with my parents, and of course the kiddos LOVED being spoiled by daily gelato stops with their grandparents!

In addition to creating special family memories, the other fantastic thing about having my parents meet up with us is that they were able to take alllllll of our climbing gear and tent back to the US with them! They took back a huge duffle with helmets, climbing harnesses, ferrata lanyards, sleeping mats, some clothes we no longer needed, and our tent! How amazing is that?! All of our flights from this point forward will be helmet-free! No more funny looks and giggles from the other passengers on our flights (well, not for that reason at least).

Thanks Italy for the past six weeks of adventure! You always have a special place in our hearts. Now, on to Greece!

Italy – Cinque Terre, Firenze, Montepulciano, Rome – Howie’s Addendum

Meeting up with Sonya’s parents for a portion of our trip through central Italy was a treat! After weeks and weeks of sleeping in a tent, preparing meals in campgrounds with a tiny camp stove, and hiking daily in the mountains, we were all ready for a little comfort. Nanna and Pop-pops spoiled us thoroughly, taking us out for amazing dinners and treating the kiddos to more gelatos than they could count. Firenze (Florence) was the only location during this section of our trip where I had previously visited, so it felt like a fantastic adventure to explore some locations full of ancient history that were completely new to me. Living in Colorado, where our “old” buildings date back 150 years, I still find it wild to see the layers of thousands of years of history so visible and accessible, overlapping and blending with the modern city. Even the ancient ruins of the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde would count as relatively new structures within Rome’s timeline! 

Thoughts on each of our individual stops in this section of our travels:

Cinque Terre: I love camping, but this last stop on our camping itinerary finally broke us. It was so hot in Levanto that being in the tent felt overwhelming. We resorted to cold showers with our shirts on to get a break from the heat, and at night it felt so stuffy that getting to sleep was difficult. On the positive side, camping out was incredibly helpful to our budget throughout the summer, allowing us to spend more time in incredibly expensive European locations than otherwise would have been possible. We are looking forward to moving to some more budget-friendly locations where sleeping indoors is back on the agenda! 

Time at the beaches of Levanto and Manarola was a wonderful break from the heat – the crystal clear water was beautiful for swimming and cliff-jumping. Had it not been for the minefield of jellyfish along the coast, Sonya and I would have been open water swimming for hours each day. We did make an attempt at swimming a section between the towns of Vernazza to Monterossa (two of the five villages in Cinque Torre), but we turned back when the jellyfish density got way too high.

I loved the colorful villages along the coast – even more so in the evenings after the cruise ships had departed. Hiking from village to village in the early morning among the olive groves and vineyards clinging to the steep hillsides was a definite highlight.

Firenze: Climbing to the top of Brunelleschi’s Dome and the campanile (bell tower), walking along the ancient streets and alleys, and visiting numerous world-class museums were all great experiences for our family. It has felt like flipping through the pages of my high school art history textbook, with works by Da Vinci, Botticelli, Giambologna, and Michaelangelo around every corner. H in particular is so keen and open to learning as much about the history of art as possible – always making sketches and designing buildings in Minecraft inspired by each day’s new explorations. We also had the chance to explore the Galileo Science museum – a place that for me as a chemistry teacher was clearly going to be a big hit. The most amazing pieces – the original objective lens from the telescope Galileo used to discover the moons of Jupiter, and two of his original telescopes!

Also a highlight – sleeping in a real bed!

Montepulciano: I didn’t entirely know what to expect from our stop in this Tuscan village, but it ended up being perhaps my favorite spot we visited during this section of our trip! Whereas Firenze felt like walking through an art history textbook, Montepulciano felt like walking through a painting itself. In particular our hike between Montepulciano and Montefolloncino, the village perched on the next hilltop over, had a dreamy, perfectly Italian vibe. Starting out through a dense oak forest, the path then passed by olive groves and vineyards along an empty dirt road, all the while looking up towards the hilltop city sitting like a fortress beneath the gathering afternoon clouds. We ended the day’s hike gathering handfuls of wild blackberries from bushes along the road as we made our way to the elegant Sanctuary of the Madonna of San Biagio at the edge of town. It was a perfect day.

Our tour and tasting at the De Ricci winery in town was also fascinating – it was my first time ever doing a wine tasting, and I was reminded that I do not like wine. Had he been with us, my dad would have not missed the opportunity to remind me that good wine would only be wasted on my unrefined palate, and I would not have missed the chance to tell him that red wine in particular is a waste of perfectly good grapes. I said what I said.

Rome: It was here that I yet again wish to celebrate Sonya’s incredible planning skills. Rome is notorious for being overrun by tourists, and yet somehow my amazing wife’s planning led us to be the very first people inside of the Colosseum for the day. The kiddos both entered the arena like gladiators, looking up in silence at the ruins of the empty stands. Another magic moment in our year. And as an added bonus, we were also among the first people into the forum and Palatine Hill – it was beautiful to see the ruins before the masses of tourists poured in for the day. Hooray for waking up early! 

Final thoughts:

Most fun: Jumping from cliffs into the Ligurian Sea in Manarola, and hiking across the Tuscan countryside in Montepulciano

Least fun: The enormous amount of scaffolding up around numerous monuments in preparation for next year’s Jubilee in Rome

Best meal: Truffle Carbonara at the Ristorante degli Archi, Montepulciano

Worst meal: “Carbonara” at a cafe in the Piazza del Duomo, Firenze

Ciao Italia – off to Greece!