Rambling: A Week in Northern Italy

Ok, I know this post looks super long, but there were just too many pictures to choose from!  What a beautiful country.  I was ushered out of London by a plane full of chatty Italian teenagers, and my arrival to Italy was marked by their joyful clapping and cheering when we touched down – two things I haven’t seen in the past week (people being loud ??).  This set the tone for a week in Italy.  Since I had done my homework, I knew a train leaves from the Torino airport to the city center every half hour.  However, when I found the train terminal, it was completely deserted and actually eerie (which made me calmly freak out for about a minute).  A couple of conversations in English/Italian/Spanish later (I’m dubbing it Spanglishtalian) and I stepped off the bus, checked in to my hotel, and met my friend Molly!  She’s one of my best friends from high school and made all our plans - she’s currently on a 7 week trip (China, Vietnam, Italy, and Israel) after taking the BAR exam and before starting at her law firm.  Not only does she love all things Italian but studied in Florence for a semester in college and speaks the language well – helpful things for me!

We toured around the northern part of Italy over 5 days – Torino, Genova, and Cinque Terre (near La Spezia).  After the busy sightseeing of London it was nice to spend more time eating, sitting, sleeping, wandering through random churches, etc.  My first night we had the bessssst dinner – the cheese course and pasta was perfect, the setting outdoors in a local piazza was awesome, and our server made us a sampling of 3 desserts because we couldn’t decide!  We started talking to two girls our age next to us and I learned a lot about Italian life, mostly about how different the people, food, and dialect are from one area to the next (makes sense, since Italy used to be a bunch of separate city-states.  They don’t celebrate Independence Day, but Unification Day instead).  One girl even invited us to the bar she works at the next night, but we were leaving in the morning – my first invitation from a new friend abroad!!  

Piazza full of restaurants

Random Egyptian museum in Torino - this is a mummified alligator

D Rose ??

This church has 'The Shroud' - a cloth believed to be the one Jesus was wrapped in (you can google it, we couldn't take photos of it).  No idea what's happening in this photo - there seemed to be some sort of event going on involving mainly crowds pushing and posing for photos.

Haha this sign is great - motorcylces are everywhere! 

Genoa (Genova in English) is a port city and reminded me a lot of Viña del Mar/Valparaiso in Chile.  It’s known for focaccia bread and is the birthplace of pesto - yum.  It has Europe’s largest aquarium so we visited – I said I wouldn’t take a lot of pictures there and of course, ended up with a ton.  Anyway, photos: 

View from our hotel in Genoa - I love the laundry everywhere

Ok, this was supposed to be "hey cool, we're eating amazing salt/cheese/beer focaccia bread and drinking Italian beers on the sidewalk at 3pm".... but instead it's just this.

Love doesn't care about color, shape, or species in the ocean :-)

Cutie pie

Jellies!

Cool basement wine bar for aperitivo - you order a glass of wine, and it comes with a spread of finger food

So. much. pesto :-)

Then we headed to ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL PLACES IN THE WORLD, Cinque Terre.  It’s five medieval fishing villages near each other, all on the coast of the Mediterranean sea.  You get to one from another by train, ferry, or (the best way) walking the trails through the hills.  We checked in to our perfect, perfect hotel in town #2, Vernazza, and immediately walked the trail between Vernazza and town #1.  It took about an hour and forty five, and immediately after we went swimming in the Mediterranean.  Evening consisted of dinner in the piazza and randomly coming across a Michael Jackson impersonator show. We spent the next day by walking from town #5 to town #4 on the easiest route, called Via dell'Amore <3  Awwww.   We then set out on a mission to find a winery for winetasting – something that is surprisingly hard to find here, considering the towns are SURROUNDED by vineyards carved into the hills.  After asking at least 5 locals for directions, hiking through the middle of nowhere, and wondering if we were lost at least 3 times, we arrived sweaty at a nice tasting room.

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View from our hotel.

Vernazza.  It's perfect.

Hiking between the towns.   Evidence of the terrible flood last year - most of the damage has been rebuilt (we had a server who was from a nearby town who said when it happened he MOVED here for 4 months just to help dig and build).

The good ol' Michael Jackson impersonation show - all the locals were there to support.  This man was cray.

Day 2 - one of the towns from a ferry.  I love the vineyards cut into the hills.

Walking through Via dell'Amore... hahaha

Romantic locks on Via dell' Amore

Just walking through some olive trees on a 45-minute long quest to find a winery

Success!

This place is seafood city. Off-menu plate recommended to us by a local from San Fransisco. I tried octopus!

Oh Italy - 'Snack di Parmigiano Reggiano' on the Dollar Menu

Gelato for breakfast.  This is my kind of place.

From Cinque Terre Molly and I parted ways and I headed to Venice for the weekend!  Photos of that in another post.  Ciao Amici!

P.S. I've started writing this on a train and the couple next to me is basically sitting in each others’ laps and rubbing their hands over each others’ arms – SO Italian.  Yesterday I saw a couple, standing up and facing each other, just rubbing each others’ hair for at least 10 minutes.