We spent our second week of spring
break traveling around Italy and Greece.
Our first day we left Venice and headed for Verona. All I knew about Verona was it had the Romeo
and Juliet balcony, so I wasn’t all that excited for it. We got there and walked around the town for
most of the day. There was a festival
that had a bunch of stands that were giving out free samples.
After Verona we made our way down
to Rome. We used Rick Steves podcasts as
our tour guide for the forum, the coliseum, and the Sistine chapel. I was very surprised with how nice the
podcasts worked, and I liked it a lot more than walking around in a big group. The forum was basically the center of the
ancient Roman empire. The Roman empire
lasted for 1,000 years, from 500 B.C. to 500 A.C. They controlled basically all of Europe and
did it all without any way to easily communicate with people in other parts of
their empire. After the fall of the
empire, the city of Rome was almost completely abandoned, and stayed that way
for a long time until people decided to return.
The main reasons why the empire fell was because of Germanic tribes
always attacking their borders and corruption.
It was crazy that we were able to walk in buildings that were made over
2,000 years ago.
The coliseum was another place that
we toured during our time in Rome. I
knew they had jousting competitions in the arena, but I didn’t know how many
other things that happened there. They
would put different kinds of wild animals in the arena together and watch them
fight to the death. When Romans would
conquer a new land, they would bring back some of the people as slaves. They would put a slave in the arena with wild
animals like lions and bears and watch the animal eat the slave. Not only was the slave be unarmed, they also
were put in a big maze type thing that was put on the floor of the arena and
have no idea where the animals were. They
would also put a knight in the area to fight the animals. There was one festival that they had where
people had to walk around the coliseum with bottles of perfume to mask the
smell of all the blood that was around. I
can’t believe people back then went to events to watch things like this.
Our final (and my favorite) stop
was in Santorini. Santorini is a little island
off the coast of Greece. The island is
so small that in most places you can see the water on all sides of you. We rented ATVs to get around since there was
no public transportation running during the off months. We spent most of our time there just laying
on the beach relaxing. The weather was
amazing there, and it made it really hard to come back to cold and cloudy
Olomouc.
Oh and there were cats all over
the island, scroll down to see them.
Verona
Rome
Santorini
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