Il Bel Paese

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June 2, 2015 by chloehathway

I’m pretty sure that when it’s time for me to actually leave Italy, someone is going to have to drag me out of the country. I am completely in love with it. Over the past few weeks I have been lucky enough to take two extended trips, one to le Cinque Terre and another to Rome (oh, and sit an exam…).

In the middle of May a friend and I took a weekend trip to the National Park of the Cinque Terre, which is a group of 5 coastal villages in Liguria, near to La Spezia. Over hundreds years people have built houses on the coastline which are unreachable by car (and to be honest, sometimes on foot!). They are connected by a train line which runs on the outskirts of each city, but the real way to see these villages is to hike along the coastline. So of course, this is what we did! Unfortunately the path connecting the first 3 villages was shut due to falling rocks (so, probably for the best!) so we took the train from Riomaggiore to the final village, Monterosso al Mare, and hiked to the fourth, Vernazza. Let me tell you, if you’re not an experienced hiker, one hike is enough! Admittedly we did the hardest route, but it was completely worth it. We climbed up and up for ages, only to go down exactly the same distance and up again, climbing up onto rocks as there was no tourist-friendly path. The views were spectacular. We went the day after a storm which meant that the sky was clear, the sea was a perfect blue and the woodland we were walking in was so green. This country is beautiful, and the Cinque Terre demonstrates this perfectly.

After seeing so many photos of it on the internet (yes, Pinterest…sorry.), I was pretty certain they had all been photoshopped to make the villages look better than they really were. Surely nowhere is that colourful?! I can happily tell you that they’re even more beautiful than the photos. If you can ignore all the tourists and the selfie sticks and look past it all, you’ll see what these villages truly are and what they represent. I promise you that you will find the magic of Italy. I did! Hiking in the blazing sun was 100% worth it when Vernazza started to appear round the corner.

We walked, and we hiked. We ate fresh seafood with our hands and we got rained on and we took our shoes off and stood in the sea for the first time this year. We found all kinds of plants and were pretty sure we had missed a trick with a career as a botanist, almost took in some homeless cats and found some friendly French people and a precarious looking bridge. What a great trip! If you don’t believe me, here’s the proof:

Riomaggiore

Probably the only flat path we found all day…

First sea of the year! Who knows why I chose to go in the moment it clouded over…

Monterosso al Mare

Views from our hike. Unbelievable!

For anyone who loves this country, the Cinque Terre is a must-see. However, no semester in Italy would be complete without a trip to the Eternal City. I went to visit my Roman friend who I met in Nantes a few months ago. We became such good friends and I was so excited to see them again, given that they stayed in France while I left… to go and live in their own country! When I left Rome he said that Erasmus is not what you have while you’re living in the country but what you have left when it’s all over, and that’s lifelong friendship. He was absolutely right! I cannot thank him enough for taking me in for a few days and showing me one of the most beautiful cities on Earth, and speaking Italian to me all the time when we could have picked up where we left off in French!

If I explained all the things we did, this blog post would be pages and pages long. In Rome, there is a never-ending list of things to do and see, people to meet and places to go. It’s called the Eternal City for a reason! Every road you turn down there is something wonderful to see, positioned so unassumingly you can barely imagine that it’s over 2000 years old, or designed by a genius. Rome is wonderful because it doesn’t make a song and dance about its jewels. It leaves them standing, proud and unassuming, exactly where they were left. Romans are proud of their history and let it live amongst their daily life because it’s a part of them. It’s so strange to see, but also so refreshing. Take the Pantheon, for example. Life has been built up around it, layer upon layer, and although it is a huge tourist attraction, it hasn’t been commercialised with gift shops, man-made queues and ticket offices. We arrived at 8am and were lucky enough to have a pre-breakfast viewing. I think we were 3 of about 8 people inside, and it was fantastic. My mind will never comprehend how something so old can be so mathematically and naturally perfect. All I can say is that we should bow down to the Romans and the Ancient World. It is like nothing I have ever seen before!

An ancient work of absolute genius.

Having friends who live in Rome was the greatest thing ever because they showed me all kinds of things that only Romans appreciate. I didn’t feel like a tourist! They took me to the Giardino degli Aranci (which is a garden at the top of Rome that looks out onto the whole city) as the sun was setting as my first introduction to Rome. You could say I was sold there and then! They also managed to take me to La Sapienza (Rome’s first university) and got the archives opened up for us to see which was amazing! We rode round Rome at night on mopeds (cue Lizzie Maguire movie opening credits), went to some of the most unknown and spectacular churches in the city, cooked, saw everything touristy that’s in all the guidebooks, ate ice cream and went to the biggest vintage market in Europe and I just realised that whatever another city can do, Rome can probably do it better.

Gli scavi of the Eternal City

Iconic Rome

Degustazione of Italy with a wonderful friend.

I also snuck off to the Vatican City on my own during my stay. The Church has a noticeably strong presence in Rome and I saw so many religious places and people. Once you’ve been to the Vatican City, it’s easy to see why. I can’t even imagine how wealthy the Papacy is, but their art collection in the Musei Vaticani is unrivalled across the whole of Italy, and probably Europe/the world. To see and appreciate it all, you would need to be in there for days. Still, I squeezed in a whistle-stop tour of a lot of the Museum, including the Sistine Chapel and Raphael Rooms. After studying and writing about these works of art in my second year of university, seeing them in the flesh felt like a rite of passage that I needed to tick off my year abroad to-do list. It’s actually hard to imagine that they were created by a human hand, let alone about 500 years ago. Although the Vatican itself embodies a celebration of God, I actually also saw it as a celebration of mankind. What other species in the world is capable of creating things that are so huge, monumental and beautiful? La Basilica di San Pietro, La Cappella Sistina and Le Stanze di Raffaello are just a handful of examples.

“Senza aver visto la Cappella Sistina non è possibile formare un’idea apprezzabile di cosa un uomo solo sia in grado di ottenere. // Without having seen the Sistine Chapel one can form no appreciable idea of what one man is capable of achieving.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 23rd August 1787.

La Basilica di San Pietro

I Musei Vaticani

I Musei Vaticani

La Basilica di San Pietro

Visiting some of the most beautiful places in Italy has been a huge highlight of the past three weeks. However, I haven’t just been gallivanting around the country! I’ve sat one of my exams and been working on a piece of coursework, so there’s definitely been a healthy balance of fun and work. In a week or so I will be done with all assessment for my year abroad (if all has gone well), and I can’t quite believe that the official bit is over. I still have lots of things to do, and I may even be staying over summer, but it really is the beginning of the end. How did that come around so fast?!