Chapter Two: Rome (+Florence)

After Napoli, we took the train back up to Rome for a few days. I have A LOT of pictures of Rome already, so I actually didn't take a ton on this trip. I just tried to take it in with my eyes and enjoy being there again. However, we go out and see a lot of the coolest tourist things at night. Out past 9:30pm this time woot woot! Monuments and buildings are so much more awesome at night!

Gelato/granita in hand always. Shae complimented the gelato man on his panna (whipped cream) so he gave us extra the next day when we went again. #winning

Piazza Navona is probably my favorite piazza,

 and that fountain was even more gorgeous lit up at night.

Same with Trevi. Maybe this is my favorite fountain actually?

 How can you actually pick one? I don't know.

The vatican at night is empty. Guess those missionaries gotta be home at 9:30 too.

Shae taught me that all the angel statues on this bridge in front of Castel Sant'Angelo are holding a different object attributed to the Atonement of Jesus Christ. Look at that, me taking a lesson from Shae in art history! So proud.

No shortage of Colosseum pictures in my library.

The cool thing about Rome is that while it's super huge and there's so much to see, you can actually hit all the main tourist spots in one night, like we did here, because everything is well connected with the metro, and it's actually not very far to walk between some of the key spots.

Shae has a v special talent of ALWAYS ordering the very best plate at the table when we eat out. 

He just has a great talent for ordering the best dish possible (even though he does take a while to settle on his choice haha), and his meal is always better than mine. 

He went for the gnocchi this time, which was the right choice. 

My pasta was good too, of course, but I thought about that gnocchi for days after.

We got to take a little trip up to Ladispoli, which is a city on the coast of Rome where I served for six months. We got to spend the evening with one of the best families ever - The Giorgianni Family. And lucky for us, their mom was in town who we knew from Messina, so we got a taste of Sicily in our trip as well! And the I got to meet the baby S.lla Giorgianni was pregnant with when I served there! Such a great night with the greatest people.

Here's the part about the EARTHQUAKE. While we were in Rome, there was a 6.2 earthquake in central Italy, so just north of Rome. We woke up in the middle of the night to our entire building shaking (our Airbnb where we stayed was on the 6th floor of an apartment palazzo). It felt like we were on a bumpy train ride. Shae thought I was just being annoying and shaking the bed, but yeah that wasn't me buddy. All the italians were out on their balconies yelling and freaking out, but really, Rome didn't have any damage at all. The damage was up in the smaller mountain cities on the very northern border of our mission, and it was so devastating! I'm praying for all the people up there.

So that was my first earthquake experience, and sometimes even now when Shae rolls over at night and makes the bed shake a little bit I wake up all worried that it was a mini earthquake. Yeah ... So hopefully I get over that soon haha.

We took a train ride up to Florence for a day because that wasn't part of our mission, but it was one of my favorite cities I saw on my study abroad.

That duomo is almost too much for real eyes to handle. It's so beautiful and intricate and HUGE.

Italy tip: if you don't want people in your pictures, go out between 1-4pm and it will be a ghost town. Pranzo naps are real.

Florence was a cool time.

One thing that we didn't really expect to have happen while visiting our mission is that it gave both of us a really good sense of closure. Being there felt like being at home, but it also felt completely different from when I was a missionary there. 

When you leave your mission, you're pretty sad about it. You think about it all the time and you miss it and you want to go back. Going back to visit after the fact, with a new mission president in place and new missionaries that are too young to remember that you even served there, you definitely feel like you aren't meant to be there anymore. I don't feel this longing to be out there anymore. And I think that's a really good thing. 

I will always love Italy and love to visit there and miss the people I met, but it's nice to finally know that that chapter can be closed now and I can feel totally good about it. This trip gave me a really good ending to what I started there. Italy will always feel like home, and I'm so glad I got to go back and reminisce about how much being there impacted my life.  Italy, ti voglio bene.

Next is Chapter Three: London.

Chapter One: Napoli

We decided to take a big trip to Italy this summer. Neither of us had jobs over the summer, we don't have kids, and Shae is going to dental school next year, so we figured this would probably be our best time to go back and visit our mission. 

After flying on a sweet plane (literally Shae's favorite part of the whole trip haha) from LAX, over Iceland and through the northern lights (!!!!) to Rome, we took a train down to Napoli, and then a little trenino down to Castellammare di Stabia, Shae's very first area in his mission where he served for six months, and then again at the very end of his mission for six weeks.

Holy cow, that place was so pretty! I never served in the Napoli zone myself, and now I see why all the missionaries who served there thought they were the real shiz. It's gorgeous, the food is the best, and the people are SO LOUD. It was awesome! All my Napoli dreams came true.

PS - Mount Vesuvius is covered by a cloud in the above photo, too bad.

Right when we got off the train at Castellammare, Shae went straight to the nearest store and bough a ball of mozzarella di bufala and we just ate it plain outside the station. ITALIA THANK YOU FOR YOUR FOOD.

We stayed with some awesome awesome members, Vincenzo and Lucy. When Shae first started his mission, he and his companion had given Lucy a little bigliettino for English Course at the church, and then by the time he got back at the end of his mission, she and Vincenzo were baptized! And now he's the branch president. Whaa

We had a big pizza party with most of the ward. It lasted from 8pm to midnight (sleepy face emoji) and there was no shortage of yelling in dialect and hand motions. I give that night a 10/10.

The next morning got back on the little trenino again went down the coast a little bit to Sorrento. Lovely little spot.

Getting ready for our "mini cruise" down the Amalfi coast. We paid like 30 euro each and it turned out to be WAY AWESOME. Even Vincenzo was like, "Oh, yeah you guys got a great deal." It's always nice when an italian tells you you didn't mess up and look like a dumb old tourist.

The cruise took us out to the island of Capri and we got to swim out in the bay where those sweet rocks are. IT WAS V SALTY WATER. So salty that we pretty much just floated. And it was a blast.

After swimming we climbed back in the boat and went further down the coast, first to Positano and then Amalfi.

Shae had driven down the Amalfi coast one time on a P-day, but he said he liked seeing it from the boat too. I'm kind of partial to boats myself. And what a pretty coast. At one point we were like, "I feel like the earth is really showing off right now." Good job, earth.

After Amalfi, we slept on reclining chairs on top of the boat for the whole two hour ride back to Sorrento and it was BLISS.

The next day a really sweet family, the Tariffas, took us to their favorite beach. It had a sweet view of Vesuvius, the water is super warm, and the sand was literally covered in jewels. The mediterranean is my favorite sea.

Elia helping me collect some jewels.

Ok, that is my literal worst fear right there. I handled it about as well as Elia did.

Shae was fine.

The beach was only accessible by canoe, so that was fun. At the end of the day when we were canoeing back to where the car was parked, the sun had gone down, the houses all over the coast were turning on their lights, and then out of nowhere a firework show started over the sea. I stopped paddling the canoe and looked back at Shae and was like, "What is our life right now!?"

That octopus later became this:

They treated us to dinner too! And that right there is the number one reason why we came back to Italy. Pasta con le cozze!!! It's linguine with sea food in it: octopus and mussels mostly. And that red thing is a fresh crab. It was kind of crazy that we ate the stuff we caught on the beach that very day. Holy cow it was so good though. 

We love you, Tariffa family!

We went to church on Sunday morning, and they had Shae give a talk. He did great. It was pretty awesome being able to speak with and understand everyone that loves Shae so much. Several people took me aside to tell me how "Bryant" was just the best missionary and they wanted to trade out their current ones for him to come back again LOL. Hearing those nice things and seeing how overly crazy excited they all were to see him come back was the actual very best part of the trip. It was better than swimming at Capri AND the pasta with cozze combined. 

Coming up next, Chapter Two: Rome.