Benvenuto In Italia

For today’s staycation, we toured Italy with the girls. My husband went to Italy this summer on a music department trip, and I had traveled with my sister in the summer of 2005.

We started off by showing the girls our travel photos. Squid was not so thrilled about all of the naked dude statues in Florence. Wormy was a little too excited about the naked guy statues…..I had been to Florence/Pisa, Rome/Vatican, and Naples/Pompeii. My husband had gone to Venice, Rome/Vatican, and Florence/Pisa.

After we were done, we had lunch. I made my mom’s Spaghetti Carbonara recipe. I had also picked up some sparkling Italian sodas from Aldi the last time that they had the Italian-themed foods.

We watched a travel video on Rome and the Vatican, where Squid decided she was going to become a world-famous sculptor. She plans to sculpt fully-clothed people eating food in various poses. We also decided that all of the beautiful floor-to-ceiling paintings must have been the result of a different time period of self-quarantine! We’re debating whether we can cover our house in some Renaissance-style paintings….

We took a few great virtual tours. We visited the Leaning Tower of Pisa through this link: https://www.touristtube.com/Things-to-do-in-Pisa/Leaning-Tower-of-Pisa-360 and we did this FANTASTIC tour of the Vatican through this link: http://www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/collezioni/musei/tour-virtuali-elenco.html. We followed that up by learning some great Italian phrases through this site that pronounces them all for you, too: https://www.transparent.com/learn-italian/phrases.html#Basic%20Phrases. After that, we were going to go outside to play Bocci ball, but it was raining when we looked out the window. Instead, Wormy was inspired by the walls around the Vatican and built her own walled fortress….

The girls haven’t been sleeping the best lately (has anyone?!?!), so we all decided it is nap time now. After that, maybe we’ll check out some Bocci Ball. Tonight, we are going to do takeout from the best Italian restaurant around – Napoli’s in Burlington. We are all looking forward to that! We’ll probably snuggle in afterwards and watch “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” because that’s as Italian as I can get with kids’ movies…

I’ll leave you with this beautiful Italian sunset to inspire you to look on the bright side. My dad always takes sunset pictures on vacation, and it is definitely something I’ve inherited as an important feature of any of my vacation photo collections as well!