Where in the World Wednesday: Bella Italia!

Buona sera, and welcome to Where in the World Wednesday!

The idea of WITWW is to post a picture of you in someplace in the world... it doesn't have to be somewhere foreign or tropical. Just a picture of you somewhere that you consider traveling.

- Classy in Philadelphia

As you might have gathered already, we're going to Italy this week, which is where I was in July 1999, on the last leg of a trip to Europe with my high school French class.

We left off last week in the south of France. From Nice, we drove along the coast to Pisa (home of the Leaning Tower--which was still leaning then) for the day. On the way from Pisa to Montecatini, we stopped in Lucca, a Tuscan city known for the walls that surround the heart of town that date back to the Renaissance.

It's also where my Italian roots are! You'd never be able to tell by looking at me, with my German/Swedish blond hair and blue eyes, but I have a sliver of Italian in me, too. In another life, I was a Frediani! My mom and I managed to dig up a phone book at a random shop and found a whole page full of Fredianis. Distant cousins, perhaps? We'll never know. The picture is of me in Lucca. I have no idea if the building had any significance or if we just liked the arches. Either way, it was cool to go home after the trip and tell my grandmother that we'd been to Lucca.

After a night in Montecatini, we made our way to Florence, where my mom took another picture of me with some arches. (I'm sensing a theme.) I don't remember the significance of this building, either, so I'm just going to give credit to the arches.


After Florence we spent two days in Rome, touring ruins, storming the Vatican, avoiding predatory Italian men, and such. Then it was time to say ciao, bella to the boot and jet it back home to the mitten.

Looking back, I'm realizing that I sure did get to do a lot in high school. I don't know if my sixteen-year-old self deserved it, but I sure am grateful to have had the experiences that I did. Maybe someday I'll take my Italian husband back to his motherland and show him some arches.

In the meantime, we have to settle for the ones here in Lemoore:




I guess all the rain and nastiness that started yesterday wasn't for nothing.