The (Long) Overdue Italy Post, Part 2

Picking up where we left off: going to Sabaudia for the FOT!

We caught our train and made it to the train station near Sabaudia without any incident. When we arrived, we found other Church members waiting for the van to pick them up. We all had a lovely chat and tried to figure out where we had met before.

We arrived at La Kufra hotel about an hour before dinner was to be served. The Italy Feast site revolves around food. We would spend about 5 hours a day (when we weren't on a tour) in the dining hall. The food and wine was so delicious.  It was also great to spend that time meeting new people and getting to know old friends better.

Over the course of the week, we went on four tours with the Church group: the Vatican Museum, a WWII museum, Pompeii, and a return to Rome.   

Vatican – The Vatican was great to see, but it was too crowded to even enjoy the beauty of the art that it had to offer. Some of the statuary inside was just breathtaking. The painted ceilings were inspiring. But you couldn't really spend too much time looking at them, otherwise you would get separated from the tour group.

WWII museum – Piana Delle Ormo Museum is not just about WWII, but also local Italian agricultural history, and vintage toys.  They also sell original WWII equipment!  A huge place…

Pompeii – We decided to do a self-guided tour of Pompeii because we wanted to see as much as possible in the short amount of time we had there. We ran into a young American couple that had a map of the ruins. We took a picture of it and made our way around to the different areas. We searched for the concrete casts of the people who died when Mt. Vesuvius buried the town. They were harder to find than I feel they should have been. There was also a lot of reconstruction and restoration happening, so we were not able to enter many places. It was amazing to see some of the buildings that still have the plaster and paint on the walls.

Roma – When we went to Rome with the group we didn't go on the tour of Rome because we already spent 3 days exploring the city. So we used this time to do our shopping! Darren picked out a Roman helmet as his Feast present and I picked out a pair of Italian leather boots as mine.