Buon viaggio!: Amore in Italia

Venezia, Italia

Ciao!

This post should have been written months ago, but I was just too lazy to write it. But now, since I've been living in Italy for more than 5 months (seriously??:'o) and it seems like I've traveled to not too many places, I just want to share some of my experiences.

When you hear someone goes to Europe, you will expect that he won't stay at one place. Oh come on, this is Europe, the borderless land. You can 'walk' as far as you want (and you can). Literally, walk. If you have time (and money), exploring this land won't be a bad idea, right? And living in Italy is one of the things I should be thankful of. This country is not only famed for its food (who doesn't love pizza? :p), but also for its dozens of famous tourism destinations. I, perhaps, haven't gone abroad as many times as my friends did, but exploring this lovely country is not less wonderful.

Amore in Italia means "love in Italy". In last September, I managed to visit two places in Italy that are famous with their romance. Both of them starts with initial "V", can you guess? Yes, they are Venice and Verona (now I feel like Dora the explorer). Trento was such a boring city and nothing to see but mountains, that was what I thought. So, I planned to spend my weekend in those cities, which are not too far and still feasible to visit even without a well-prepared plan.

Venice a.k.a Venezia

Last September was my first time visiting Venice with Mba Ajeng, a friend of mine from Yogyakarta, who lived in Padova. And my first impression for Venice was...incredibly beautiful crowded and at some point it looked like Malioboro as it was full of people and souvenirs stalls :)) I'm kidding. I don't really understand how people measure the romance level, but the city is truly beautiful. A floating city. Well, it's not really floating, but it is surround by water so that it has a lot of canals and small rivers and also bridges. And every bridge in Venice looked so nice that I always wanted to take a picture every time I found a bridge.

The water city

People use water transportation here. Even local people have boats as their private transportation instead of cars. Water taxi as the public one. And also those famous Gondolas for rich tourist. Well, it's expensive to be shared for only two of us, around 80 euro if I'm not mistaken. But the experience might be worth it. Riding on a romantic Gondola with your partner and the man in red-white stripes T-shirt sings for you two, won't it be nice? Well, since I didn't go with my partner, I didn't really find it that nice tho :p

Since we couldn't afford to have a ride, let's just take a selfie with Gondola

"row, row, row, your boat..."♪ ♫

Don't call yourself visiting Venice if you don't go to Piazza San Marco, the famous large square in Venice (also in Italy). There you can see people are very excited feeding the birds (but I wasn't) and you can see and visit St. Mark's Basilica (I saw but didn't go inside).

And the famous Grand Canal bridge was still under maintenance when I was there, but I could still enjoy the view of the canal.

Grand Canal. Sengaja minta foto pas gondolanya lewat.

Since it still had summer atmosphere in September, I understood why it was too crowded, even for walking we had to be like queuing. Among the crowd, we had seen some Asian people whom we were quite sure that they were Indonesians. And when I was amazed by Antonio Stradivari's museum, I met a girl that I had passed by before and unhesitantly asked her, "orang Indonesia ya?". A simple question to ask her to join us.

Then, we continued our walk to check the landmark lists on the map we bought from newspaper stall in front of the station. The interesting thing was Mba Siska, the girl's name, told us there was a building that was used to be a church but then turned to be a mosque. Since I never heard about it, I googled it and it might be true. Not sure but we still headed to that building and unfortunately found it close. Either it was a wrong building or it was indeed close. But the area was quite calmer there, probably it wasn't the tourists area. On the building wall I could see the some traces that might belong to statues that we usually could see on church wall. Well, it was just my guess tho. But discovering something related to Islam in Europe, even a little, attracted me a lot.

In another occasion, in the beginning of January this year, I managed to visit Venice for the second time. Actually, I came only to accompany Azka, also a friend of mine from Yogyakarta who lived in Brussels. But it turned out to be an exciting trip since I had a chance to visit Burano Island! This island is very famous with its colorful houses. And they are soooo cute! I like Venice, but I like Burano more :p The weather wasn't too good that time. It was even snowing badly in areas around Venice, but it was 'only' rainy in Venice. But still, I couldn't resist the cuteness. If it weren't that expensive to get there (7.5 euro one way from Venice), I would like to go again.

Pose mau nyemplung (1)

Pose mau nyemplung (2)

That's my story about the water city. I think I have to visit this city again, in the future, with my future partner, only to prove that this city is indeed romantic :p

Verona

Do you know Romeo and Juliet? This is the city where the story belongs to. Shakespeare might have succeeded to make girls crazy for their love story. I have ever watched "Letters to Juliet" which was taken place in Verona. That's why I was wondering how romantic the city was. I went there on the next day after I visited Venice in September. I stayed a night in Padova, and went alone to Verona. But then, I explored the city with my Turkish friend who came from Trento.

The first landmark we visited was Verona Arena. It looked like Collesseum, but may be smaller. We just took some pictures in front of it since it costed us to enter, and considering the long line and the desire that wasn't so much.

Ini Verona, bukan Roma

Next, we headed to the place I was so curious of, casa di Giulietta (house of Juliet). It was sooo crowded there. We went inside the house and we could see some properties and the scripts of the play. The famous place is the balcony of the house where, according to Wikipedia, Juliet stood when Romeo declared his love. We had to queue only to take picture there. The picture would be better if it was taken from downstairs or from the opposite house. But too much effort to do that. So we just took some pictures: I took hers, she took mine, and we took selfie.

Rumahnya Mbak Juliet

Wondering if our Romeo was down there...

So, in the movie I watched, I remembered that there was a place where girls usually put their letters to Juliet and she will write them back. I was wondering where the place was and finally found that Juliet could do better with technology. Now, she has email! Amazing! So people now can just write from computers provided there and she will write them back via email. Don't underestimate Juliet :))

In front of the house, there is a bronze statue of Juliet. I didn't notice it that time because it was too crowded. The belief was one who touched the right breast would find her true love. Even though, according to probability theory, the events are fully independent (oops, just ignore this unimportant statistical comment).

And then, nothing attracted me anymore. I only wanted to visit that house actually. So we decided to walk and see around the city. We found a river and we just sat on the bench aside the river while enjoying gelato. Then, we walked to a higher place where we could see the view of the whole city. Such a fascinating view!

Verona from top

We killed some times there for random talk and getting know each other. Interesting part regarding Islam (again) that I figured out that in Turkey, people always do Salat Rawatib Muakkad besides the Wajib one. And apparently women don't go to mosque for Salat Ied because she confessed that she didn't even know how to do it.

After going around the city for some times (visiting Romeo's house that turned out to be a private house -__-), we decided to go back to Trento. A good trip with a good friend in another people-called-romantic city.

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Well, in the end, it seems like this post doesn't represent the title, huh? You might have expected that I could explain the romance in those cities very well. But in fact, I'm not a romantic person so you can't trust me to do it :p Or I challange you to prove it yourself! Dare you?