New Pictures! http://erickson-family.net/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=2376
We used our villa in Barberino as a "home base," and took day trips to several cities around the area.
Greve was an interesting city, but getting there was more of an adventure than the actual town. As I noted in my last post (complete with illustrations), the roads in Tuscany are little different than in the States. Besides being much smaller, however, the other thing that makes driving in Italy difficult is the lack of road names. Only the biggest roads get names, or if the smaller roads do have names, they are not posted anywhere along the roads or on the maps. Instead of names, Italians use directions towards cities to identify roads. For example, instead of calling I-94, "I-94," Italians would call it "the road towards Chicago" (Assuming they were in Detroit. If they were already in Chicago it would be "the road towards Detroit." But I digress...)
Anyway, this is very confusing when you don't know any of the cities. In trying to get to Greve, we took several wrong turns, and in one case we ended up driving on what we thought was the correct road, but turned out to be a long driveway. You know you are lost when the road just ends in front of a house. But we eventually made it to Greve. We saw some sights, ate a great meal, and I got a humorous anecdote of the whole thing, so all in all a good day.
Another trip was to the city of San Gimignano (pronounced "Jimmy-Yano") This town is ancient, but all of the buildings are still in use! Those pictures are not of ruins, those are the stores and homes of the people who live in the town. It blows my mind when I try to think about how many generations of people have lived inside those walls. And I really like the picture of the "seven towers" of San Gimignano. (the first picture in the album) Those towers are probably significant for some reason, but I just like them because they make a good postcard.
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4 comments:
In going through the albums, how come Paul doesn't smile in pictures? He rarely does, and I'm curious.
By the end of the trip, everyone was pretty much sick of posing for pictures. My Dad has already posted 200 (the best and most representative of more than 400), and he hasn't even touched any of the pictures from my sister's camera or my brother's camera. Combined between the three, I bet we took about 1000 pictures in Italy. Paul has been there the longest (posing for pictures for all of his friends), so maybe he was more sick of pictures than the rest of us.
Or maybe he just didn't feel like smiling. Who knows?
Maybe Paul would know. I bet if you asked him he might be able to offer some insight.
Then again he's a giant jerk-face (in which I still hate) so he might not give you any answers.
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