As promised, below are a bunch of photos of the second half of our Italian Adventure, spent in Rome. Our gorgeous little bed and breakfast was literally across the street from St. Peter’s Basilica, we could walk to the Coliseum in about 45 minutes, and we discovered a no-kill, volunteer run cat shelter in an unexcavated ruin in the middle of downtown. The Vatican Musem, Spanish Steps, the Sistine Chapel, Trevi Fountain, more granite/marble penises and breasts than I care to remember, the Pantheon, oodles of gorgeous Italian cathedrals, and maybe the most delicious red wine (tapped straight out of a cask, not out of a bottle) that I’ve ever had.

And yes, as one of the pictures attests, we were literally about 10 meters away from the Pope at one point. I’ve been papally blessed.

I wanna go back.

Hold on to your pants, there’s a lot of these.

… hmm, a few plugins to update, gimme a sec here…

… done!

Ok, back to the issue at hand. Some people may know that on October 23, Shannie and I celebrated our 10 year anniversary. Ten wonderful years of her putting up with me is no small feat, and as such deserved to be celebrated. We’d always talked about doing a European trip for our 10th, and since we’re already here now, suddenly the process of doing so became a whole heck of a lot easier.

Italy is always a country I’ve wanted to visit, so for our anniversary we decided to spend 10 days in the boot. Our plan involved flying from Amsterdam into Venezia, spending 4.5 days there, then taking a half-day train to Roma, followed by another 5 days.

Long story short: Italy was absolutely gorgeous. Everything we had dreamed it would be. The weather was extremely cooperative as well, only giving us rain on one day out of ten. Every other day was sunny warm. Really, we couldn’t have asked for anything better (except for maybe more days).

Still working our way through the roughly 800 or so photos that we took, but here’s a selection of pictures from Venezia. Highlights from this city include: attending a performance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons by a string group in authentic period costumes, eating delicious gelato 37 times a day, some of the most delicious red wine I’ve had in my life, an evening of Miles Davis music at the Venice Jazz Club, and taking a “bus” (read: “ferry”) trip around the entire island.

Click on an image to view it full-size. Note the little “Previous” and “Next” links at the bottom of the popup when you do so.

Roma pictures and a description of how I almost met the Pope to follow soon.