Venice and Florence

July 9, 2009
Venice was wonderful. We stayed at a guy’s house. He had turned half of it into rented out rooms. It was quaint and cute. And he threw in a free Italian pizza because he owned a restaurant too. There were canals everywhere which made things tricky because the canals curve all over the place, and there wasn’t any road signs that I could understand so TJ and I got lost quite a bit. One night we were lost and we asked some guy on the street where the train station was because we could find our way from there. He explained and a he went on ahead and a little while later more people stopped him and asked him the same thing. This time he took them, and us, part way then explained it again. People getting lost in Venice is a common occurrence, might as well consider it part of the experience and enjoy it. There are no cars allowed on the island of Venice so the boats bring the supplies to the little shops. It was fun to see them tossing things out of boats for the shop keepers to catch.
After Venice we went to Florence where we camped out. The campsite had showers and gave us a map of the city. There are some great old buildings. We didn’t see the actual David sculpture, but there were replicas of him in 2 other places in which we did see. Florence has the 3rd oldest bridge (according to our pamphlet) and one of the only bridges with store buildings on it. Something we noticed about Italy so far is there seems to be an overwhelming amount of police everywhere. Also, they sure love their gelato (their version of ice cream). They have a shop at every street corner. I also have never seen some many naked statues. I think 50% of all the sculptures have absolutely no clothes on, and there is a lot of statues. Silliness! We are now on our way to Roma. We are going to try to camp there also because it worked out so well in Florence.