Travels in Europe and Africa! Part I: Italy

I am back after two weeks of traveling! I returned to Poitiers last Sunday, the 22nd and classes started right away on the 23rd. During my short winter break, I visited three countries—Italy, Spain, and Morocco.

In Italy, there was confetti in the streets, the children laughed freely and dressed up as princesses, frogs, and Roman soldiers, and the people smiled and made small talk with strangers. I visited five cities in all in Italy—Milan, Verona, Venice, Florence, and Rome—and traveled with two friends, Maria and Luis-Felipe, from Sciences Po.

At every city we arrived at, my friends and I would just ask for a map from the welcome desk at the hostel and visit all of the main points of interest. In Milan we saw so much—the Castello Sforzesco (Sforzesco Castle), the Duomo di Milano (Milan Cathedral), and Galleria Vittorio Emanuele.

Milan was a very cosmopolitan city, with a broad collection of designer shops gracing nearly every broad avenue. Fashion billboards were very prominent throughout the city, and people were smartly dressed. However, it was very different from Paris in that people had a more laid back approach to vogue and their city’s own renown. A lot of people dressed trendily but there were nearly just as many who didn’t. And parents allowed their children to dress comfortably and even goofily—I saw a couple of little boys with hats decorated with felt green triangles meant to be dinosaur spikes and one small girl wore pink wings. Although Poitiers may not be the center of cutting-edge fashion, people here are constantly fashionably dressed and their children always look like they’ve walked out of a Zara catalogue. After living so long in a country where wearing sweats is treated as a sin and children are seen yet not heard, it was a pleasant surprise to see that in one of Italy’s most metropolitan cities, people had other priorities.

Verona was a romantic, picturesque town—very fitting, as it was the setting for Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. The houses in the town were rose, orange, and yellow-coloured and carnival confetti was on every street, sprinkled over the strawberry-colored town like a light layer of sugar. In the center of the city, there was a fountain and around it an outdoor market were vendors sold a range of novel little trinkets—from marionette Pinocchios, brass plates, and postcards to red, white, and blue felt hats.

While there, we visited the House of Juliet. The walls leading to the courtyard of the house were laden with little graffitied love notes and couples’ names. I quickly found myself falling head over heels for Verona, and this little town might have easily stolen my heart if it weren’t for Venice.

Venice was absolutely charming. It was quietly raining when we arrived there by train, and a silvery canopy of clouds veiled the sky. When it rains in Poitiers, I sigh and dig for my umbrella underneath the pile of shoes in my closet. When it rains in D.C., I grumble and pull on my rainboots. When it rained it Venice, all I saw was the way the damp stone-and-brick bridges arched over the blue-green water, how the flecks of gray rain skimmed the slender, black-painted gondolas boats drifting along the Canal Grande and how the houses seemed to be straddling both land and the waves, standing upright within the water.

Our French teacher, who goes to Italy fairly often and advised us on what to do had told Maria, “Il faut se perdre à Venice.”* She was right. We wandered the city, only half-following the map and wondering at the sights. I awed at everything—the swelling canal engulfing the dock in places because of the overflowing caused by the rain, the network of public water transportation and the slow, lethargic sway of the waterbus from stop to stop, the weathered, pale-colored houses lining the back alleyways, and how the thick layer of stone of some buildings, eaten away by age, gave way to red brick.

From time to time, while walking along the paved walkway bordering the water, there was a break in the pavement that would give way to a stairway, jutting out into the water and descending below it. I found myself wondering how far beneath the water these staircases descended, if they stopped only to where the eye could no longer discern whether or not they ran to the bottom of the water canal or if they actually did reach to the sands below. And if so, who were the staircases for? Nymphs? Mermaids? I laughed at myself. Venice had me bewitched.

Florence, however, quickly broke that spell with its Tuscan pragmatism and historic richness. Widely known as the birthplace of the Renaissance, this city was well endowed with architectural and artistic treasures, the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore being one of my favorites. This green-and-white cathedral is so surreal looking—when I first saw it, it looked as if it had been painted into its surroundings. We also saw the House of Dante and the Fountain of Neptune, among other things.

Rome was overwhelming. There was so much to do! We saw the Colosseum, the Arc of Constantine, the Pantheon, Trevi Fountain, the Vatican, and loads of other sites! We spent the most time here—three days—but we didn’t even end up seeing everything. There were the most tourists in this city and I even met a couple of people from the Sciences Po Paris site at the student hostel where we stayed.

Overall, I loved my time spent in Italy and hope to be able to visit the country sometime in the very near future. Next time, I’d like to go to the town of Pisa and see its famous leaning tower.

Well, it’s nearing 1 am here, and I have a class in the early morning tomorrow, so I am going to bed and I will try to finish writing about my travels in Spain and Morocco later on. Arrivederci!

*rough translation: You have to get lost in Venice; One must get lost in Venice, etc.