Italy
Genoa
Jade: In Genoa, we walked to this beautiful street – I think the thing that made it beautiful is that in the alleyways, with two houses on each side, they would string wires across from each house and hang up as many umbrellas of different colours as they could hang up in the sky.
Rome
Mady: I love Roman and Greek mythology. It is obvious when you go to Rome that there is a lot of Roman mythology. There are statues, beautiful 100, 300, 500 year-old statues. I love mythology, I don’t see the statues as statues but instead as real people.
Jade: One of the first things we did in Rome was go to see the Colosseum, which was a really great experience. It has four main floors, but the fourth floor got destroyed when an earthquake hit it. The centre piece was shaped like an oval, and that is where the gladiators did their battle and fight for money, and sometimes slaves would fight too for enough money to gain their freedom.
Mady: In Italy there is a small country inside Rome that became independent from Italy, it is called Vatican City. We went there, it is where the Pope lives. There is also a beautiful museum with a famous painting of God reaching for Adam and they are hardly even touching, just reaching for each other. It is a famous painting by Michelangelo. I felt very grateful to have this opportunity to see it.
Tuscany
Mady: I love Tuscany, it is beautiful here and this is the first place that feels like home, because of the nature.
Jade: In Tuscany we live in the countryside in a big house up on the mountain. I can look over vast valleys and we have a whole big field to ourselves. There are three girls living beside us. The oldest one is 10 and her name is Luna. The second oldest is 8 and her name is Alma. The youngest is 3 and her name is Mila.
Florence
Jade: Gelato is very famous in Italy and we’ve had lots of that! There are a lot of flavours of ice cream. We went to Florence – it is a small city where Gelato was first invented.
Mady: In Florence, we saw a building that had a face carved into a stone on the side of the building. It was a plain and simple face, facing sideways – Michelangelo did that carving!
Mady: In Florence, I loved crossing a famous bridge. In WWII, the Nazis bombed all the bridges along the river, but they didn’t bomb that bridge. That bridge was special because the people could sneak over the river and back again without the Nazis knowing! When you are on the bridge you can look out, but it is like a street – it has cobblestones, it has houses on the side of the bridge over the water, it is a market across the river, if you are afraid of heights you wouldn’t even know it was a bridge!
In the middle of the bridge there is a statue with a gate around it. It is a statue of love – there are a whole bunch of locks with people’s initials on them (small, tiny, ginormous locks of all different colours) on the fence and gate around the statue.
The Galileo museum was great because it showed you how an arm could be a lever, and it showed the first telescopes and then how they improved over time, along with other inventions and science experiments.
Venice:
Jade: The wonderful thing about Venice, is, drumroll… the streets are water, the buses are boats and the taxis are fancy boats. All the cars are boats. I wonder how the people feel because boats for cars is normal for them, as cars are normal for us. They probably think we are crazy, not them. The city is built on water and the cement blocks go all the way to the seabed floor. In winter, when it floods you can’t live on the first floor because it will flood.
Jade: My birthday happened. The best part of turning 11 was I got my Hogwarts letter stamped with pink wax. Getting the letter means I can to to Hogwarts (magic school). Also, the first gift I opened was tiny, I thought it was a polished stone or gem – but then I saw it was a blue paper dolphin cutter. As a family adventure, we are going to a water park in Crete. And as Mady got a camp care for elephants for her birthday, I’m going to a sea turtle rescue centre in Athens, Greece where you take care of sea turtles.
Jade: We also got to go on a gondola ride for my birthday where your ride in a boat through the canal steered by a guy in the back. It was amazing because I had never done that before.
Mady: In Venice, as some people know, I finally got my shoes. The four month quest is over, and I finally found what I was looking for – Colourful, high heel, closed toe, boot. Special thanks to Barb Stewart and my Grammie Fran for Christmas money, and Grammie and Grampie for Birthday money which made my shoe dreams and everything else come true.
