Verona and Vicenza

Verona and Vicenza are two cities in northern Italy that we spent a few days in. They are quite similar in many ways so forgive me if I mix them up.

Verona is home to both ancient roman ruins, medieval ruins. You may know it as the town where the story of Romeo and Juliet took place (we went to "Juliet's home" and saw the famous balcony but I think its a hoax).

Stitch from atop the castle.

Courtyard of the Castle

one of the walkways

The somewhat shady structure holding up one of the floors haha

weapons

helmets

Three musketeers?

Giant sword that was about 6ft long

The supposed balcony of Juliet

Statue of Juliet

Another church 

locks on a bridge (apparently this type of thing can be seen all over Europe. One person puts a lock around something metal and then others follow. 

Vicenza is a very similar city with many beautiful buildings including the Teatro Olimpico.

Statue looking up to the giant bell tower we climbed

One of the panoramas from above

The last stairwell at the top

Giant lemons from the market below

Stage at the teatro olimpico (only remaining renaissance theater in europe)
Made entirely of wood (no stone as i may look)

The street you see through the arch is actually a false perspective made to look like a city street.
The floor slopes up and the ceiling slopes down to help with the effect.

I found this pretty funny...

Andy in my picture again

Brion Cemetery

The Brion Cemetery is a Carlo Scarpa project which he spent most of his life on. This is what Scarpa himself had to say about his desgin:

"I would like to explain the Tomba Brion...I consider this work, if you permit me, to be rather good and which will get better over time. I have tried to put some poetic imagination into it, though not in order to create poetic architecture but to make a certain kind of architecture that could emanate a sense of formal poetry....The place for the dead is a garden....I wanted to show some ways in which you could approach death in a social and civic way; and further what meaning there was in death, in the ephemerality of life—other than these shoe-boxes."


The cemetery is full of beautiful detail work and metaphors on life. After his death, Scarpa was buried here in a standing position, wrapped in linens in the same fashion as a knight.

Water troughs

Andys  multiplying again

Part of the sanctuary

Sanctuary Ceiling

Island in the reflecting pool that is not accessible to visitors of the cemetery. It is said to be a metaphor for the afterlife. 

Wall corner detail
The outer walls all leaned in toward the courtyard. If you walked along next to them it sounded as though someone was walking along with you because of how the sound bounced off the concrete.

Raising Peter from the dead haha

Villa Barbaro

Villa Barbaro is a famous residence designed by Andrea Palladio in the 1500's. We spent a lot of time studying this building for one of our arch history classes a few years ago so it was kind of cool to see it in person. Otherwise most of us didn't find this building particularly interesting, so we had some fun with our cameras...

Andy did some posing for me...

Having some fun with the photo-stitch. hes multiplying...

Ok enough of that for now. Here are a few interior pics of the frescoes by Alessandro Vittoria. Most of them are poor pictures because picture taking was not permitted inside so I had to just took some blind shots haha.

Crazy spike ball on fence with statue in the background

Shot of the tree lined path between the vineyards in front of the villa.

North Trip

I have returned home from my travels north which included Verona, Venice,  and Vicenza (all in Italy), and Berlin and Paris. I have many pictures and videos to go through and post. I hope to have them all up by the end of the week.

Churches

There are over 900 churches within Rome's city limits... here are my pictures from 4 of them.

St. Paul outside the walls. (one of the four main basilicas)

Beams of sunlight pouring in

There are more marble/ granite floors in Italy than carpet... way more.
I think I've seen 2 buildings with carpet and a few dozen that are marble or granite (basically every church or nice public building)

Altar looking back. On the left where the people are gathered are the steps leading down to where Saint Paul is entombed.

Smaller church called Santa Maria in Cosmedin

One of its two main attractions... the mouth of truth.
Long ago people would place their hand in the mouth to see if they were lying or not.
Turns out there was a guy with an ax on the other side of the wall and he decided if you kept your hand or not.

The other attraction... the head of St. Valentine

St. Mary Major

Large urn that is said to contain wood pieces of the True Cross.

Kate, Steph, and Julie outside Hard Rock. This ones for you Aunt Debbie!

On Sunday we got up early to go to the Vatican because on the last Sunday of every month the Vatican museums are free. Sadly we got on the wrong bus and ended up on the other side of town for a while so we didnt make it there until late morning. When we got to the Vatican the line for the museum was about a mile long (and this was only the part of the line we could see). So we just went into St. Peters and went to mass instead! (this was quite interesting being neither catholic or Italian... haha) There will be another blog sometime soon with the rest of my Vatican adventures.

Nave that can hold up to 60,000 people for mass.
Walls, floors, ceilings all marble. This place has more marble than a quarry.

Altar

Main Dome. To give you a sense of scale there are people walking around the rim of the dome up there... and you cant even see them in this picture

No the pope was not there, but he called and told me we could do lunch sometime next week.