So, if anyone can remember my vague threats about deciding I like it in Italy and staying there... you can set your mind at ease. I have to say Italy is not high on my list of places I want to revisit, let alone remain.
Most of the country side was pretty, but a heck of a lot of it reminded me of Queensland. I found La Spezia in particular may as well have been Innisfail or Ingham. The plants were similar, the buildings were similar, the pavement design in the parks was similar, the clusters of old Italian men were similar... I can see why the Italians settled in Queensland in droves - it was just like home, only more humid.
That said, Italy was pretty darn humid. And hot. So very hot. Italy in August was not quite as hot as North Queensland in January, but definitely hotter than Townsville in February. I was told by my tour guide that the weather had been unseasonably warm for the past week, and was likely to get better by the weekend after I left.
Here's an observation about Europeans: Estonians like a lot of personal space, and like to leave comfortable gaps between people in queues (which the Russians have a tendency to try to fill). Germans do not respect the queue, and will cut in whenever they can. Italians will reluctantly queue if they can't push in, but they stand very close. Too close. Close enough to make you continually check to make sure your wallet is still there. Heck, the Italians seem to stand too close even if you aren't queuing.
My Italian tour wasn't quite as good as my Switzerland tour. Sure, it was nice to be based in a hotel and tour out from there, but I felt the included excursions in the Switzerland tour were better, and also the group I was with in Switzerland was a bit more fun. In Switzerland I had a cluster of people my age, and most of the "older" set were cheerful. We were all there to have a good time, and even though it was stressful changing hotels every night (and usually sleeping in pretty rubbish hotels), we all seemed to be having a great time of it.
The Italian group was a slightly different demographic, and the overall mood was more jaded. Not that they were unpleasant, just that they seemed to find the negatives a bit more often than the positives. That sort of thing is catching, and I tend to do it myself if I'm around people like that.
One comment I will make about Cosmos Tours - their choice of hotels is pretty sucky. I'm sure they are running on some criteria that is not based on what people actually want in a hotel. I've just spend 14 nights at the mercy of the Cosmos planners, and that involved about 10 hotels. Of those, about three were comfortable, only a couple were located in a practical position (and, sadly, they weren't the comfortable ones), and one was so bad that I'm going to write negative reviews about it in on Google maps.
Heck, I'll probably dedicate an entire blog post just to elaborating on how bad it was.
On the whole, I found Italy to be a bit disappointing. It's just so full of people. So many, many people - and that's not even counting the tourists. Mostly, every place where tourists *might* gather, you will find droves and droves and droves of people selling the exact same souvenirs. Sure, in Rome they all have "I (heart) Rome" while in Pisa they have "I (heart) Pisa", but apart from that they are identical. And you just know that half the stuff they are selling is probably some cheap knock-off made in Taiwan, or something.
I started feeling like Italy was eating its tourists - like we were cows that were to be milked until we could give nothing more, and then slaughtered for the meat. Yes, that's an ugly analogy, but that's what it felt like.
My highlights in Italy would have to be the public gardens in Rome, visiting a castle where they filmed part of Much Ado About Nothing and seeing the most awesome dedication to a saint ever - the monument to St Barbara at Montecatini was just a random collection of artillery, fire-fighting equipment and assorted other things to do with explosives, mining and mountaineering. It turns out that St Barbara is the patron saint of anything that involves explosives or adventuring.
I managed to get trapped behind a parade of beauty queens in Montecatini. I'll tell you about it later.
The lowlights would be the droves and droves of tourists (and tourist markets) and the overwhelming feeling that Catholicism was still just big business in Italy (particularly in Rome and Assisi). Who needs actual faith when you can buy and sell stuff, right? As for Christianity, well it just doesn't cut it - not when you can focus obsessively on things that were added later because the Bible clearly wasn't interesting enough. I found myself drifting out of the basilica in Assisi really wishing I could find a church. Not some shrine to a saint who would probably be horrified to see what they were doing to honour him, but a place where people come to worship God.
So, I'm not planning on going back to Italy for a while. And I have picked up a tendency to think anyone standing too close in a queue is probably Italian. Strangely, so far I've been right...
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