An Introduction to Italy

A couple months ago my best friend and I decided that we were going to take a trip to Italy. I thought that this would be a great trip as new "adults" and would be sort of like a coming of age trip like you see in the movies, where two best friends go on a European adventure together and try all sorts of things like pizza, gelato, and Italian men. You feel? Mostly, I wanted this trip to fulfill my Lizzie McGuire and Liz Gilbert (the chick from Eat. Pray. Love.) fantasies such as vespa rides, Paolo, and pasta carbonara. We picked Rome as the place we would be spending most of our time in and basically planned our trip around that. Later, we decided to buy train tickets to Florence and Naples (then from Naples to Sorrento and Positano) so we could explore both Northern and Southern Italy as well.

Planning this thing was a hassle since both my friend and I were new to this whole "traveling alone" thing. I had taken a trip to Costa Rica without parents or friends when I was 16, but I had gone with a volunteer group, and the only thing I was responsible for planning out was how I was going to get to and from the airport, so that didn't really prepare me for this trip. Also, my friend and I go to different schools, so most of our planning happened over text messages rather than face to face communication, which was pretty slow and tedious. Luckily, I had a lot of friends who had traveled to Italy before so they gave me some great recommendations on where to eat and which museums to go to as well as tips about taxi drivers and what to pack, etc. But mostly, my man, RICK STEVES saved us on this trip. His book on Italy was my bible throughout the whole 11 days we were in Italy. Bless your heart, Rick, you truly are a gift to the world.

Anyway, that was a little intro to the posts to follow about the journey of two, pretty clueless, 18-year-old girls in Italia! Aye! Pizza! Spaghetti! Roma!

xo,

Kristina