Getting Lost in the Research

Our trip is just three and a half months away.

WOW.

It still feels so far away, but the reality is that it is just around the corner. Time to start digging in to some of the details of the planning. Our flights, hotel and apartments have been booked for months. We've spent the last many months reading, watching travel shows and documentaries on the History Channel and National Geographic, talking to friends and doing everything else we can do to educate ourselves enough to make good decisions on how to spend our time. Now let's get down to the nitty gritty.

A re-cap of some of the "education" we've been doing.

Movies we've watched:

• Roman Holiday - 1953 Starring Ms. Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck. A classic. I bought this one.
• Under the Tuscan Sun - 2003 Starring Diane Lane - Beautiful scenery, filmed around Cortona. Total chick flick, but gives you a nice feel for the beauty in the region.
• Midnight in Paris - 2011 Academy Award winning film by Woody Allen starring Owen Wilson. This movie is like crack to me. Bought this one, too. As I will be searching out Hemingway's Paris, this was a no-brainer for me. Well done, even if you aren't a big Woody Allen fan.
• PBS' The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance -  Not terribly exciting, but very informative.
• The History Channel's Engineering an Empire - Details about the engineering feats of ancient Rome. Very interesting if you like this sort of thing. I do.
• The Da Vinci Code - Of course. 2006 starring Tom Hanks and Katherine Zeta Jones. An exciting story, some history, and some Parisian scenery. You can actually take a Da Vinci Code walking tour of Paris.
• Angels and Demons - 2009 starring Tom Hanks and Ewan McGregor. This one takes place in Rome. Loved it.
• The Borgia - and The Borgias - These are both series that started about a year apart. Both are fun to watch and give you a good idea of some of the stories (which I'm sure are theatrically embellished) around the Borgia family and how it ruled, or tried to, in Rome and all over Italy circa 1492. Warning, these are not child friendly AT ALL (sex and violence).

Books we've read (or books I've read):

Some of these books I've read over the years and not just in our research for this particular trip but I thought it might be helpful to include them here.

• The Birth of Venus - by Sarah Dunant: Very loosely based on the happenings in Florence around the same time as the Borgias were ruling in Rome. A bit of chick lit but well written and when I finished it I felt like I learned something and was entertained in the proces = Win.
• The Paris Wife - by Paula Mclain: I'm a sucker for Hemingway's Paris. This is the tail of Hemingway's time in Paris as told from the point of view of his first wife, Hadley Richardson. LOVED IT.
• Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. - by Jeremy Mercer: Again, crack for me. The memoir of a Canadian journalist who lived with other writers in the bookstore in the late 1990s.
• A Movable Feast - by Ernest Hemingway himself: Posthumously published, Ernest tells of his time in Paris in the 1920s when he hung out with Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Salvadore Dahli, Pablo Picaso and other creative lightweights. This is beyond crack.
• The Agony and the Ecstasy: A Biographical Novel of Michelangelo - by Irving Stone: OK, so I haven't read this, but I aspire to. I'm told it's a must if you are going to spend time in Florence, but it's a long one. 784 pages. Didn't they make a movie? Why yes, they did.

There is so much left to do, and so little time. I'll update these lists as we add to them.

Starved for Information - Rick Steves to the Rescue

While out trip was still nearly 10 months away, both Kris and I were very eager to get the planning started.  Eager may be quite right...we actually couldn't think of much else the first few weeks.  Just about every conversation we had revolved around the vacation.  We were starved for information and to the internet we went.   We visited many blogs and websites, the most useful which are listed to the right.

While doing some Christmas shopping on Amazon in late November I ran across the Rick Steves Travel Guides.  The were pretty inexpensive and the name seemed to be everywhere with books about every far away place.  They had to be good....right?  I didn't really care, they were only $10 and I was starved for information.  I bought the 2012 Rome, Paris and Florence/Tuscany guides and eagerly awaited their arrival.  As an Amazon Prime member I get free 2 day shipping so the wait was not long. 

These books pretty much cover everything.  Chapters include:

• Sights
• Self-Guided Walks and Tours
• Sleeping
• Eating
• Sleeping
• Nightlife
• Connections
• Nightlife

As this was still the early stages of information gathering, I decided to read everything.  I think I read or skimmed almost 300 of the 470 pages of the Rome book the first night.  There is really a lot of valuable information in these books, especially if this is your first trip abroad like it is for us.  I found the initial chapters the most valuable while only skimming the eating and sleeping sections.  The maps were also very helpful, but I found better ones that I will talk about in a future post.  At this point what I valued was the basic general knowledge of traveling to and in Italy along with the recommended sights.  Picking specific restaurants, bars and neighborhoods would come a bit later as there is only so much information you can process at once. 

I am thinking that a more proper review of what we found really helpful should be a post all in itself.  So I say buy these books, and if you wanna know more about why...stay tuned for another post coming soon.