Erin Beth Photographer» Italy

portraits of people

Erin Beth — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:30:30 +0000

To wrap up Italy, I thought I would share a series of portraits of some of the people we met and came across while traveling. I must say that native Italians are every bit as warm hearted, caring and kind as I imagined them to be. To me, this is why traveling is so important – it’s the people you meet and interact with. You begin to realize that we all really aren’t that different from one another.

Stay tuned because it’s back to “sneek peeks”, I have a lot of shoots to post!! It’s been a crazy couple of weeks since we got back and I have lots to post!! Have a great Friday!!

Laundry + The Camera

Erin Beth — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 17:25:42 +0000

Anyone who has backpacked to another country knows that you have to pack light because all you think about is that you have to carry this big backpack everywhere!! So about 8 days into our trip our clothes were really needing a good washing. =) So while in Sorrento we found a laundromat…and of course I took my camera along. It was pretty funny because it took Mike and I awhile to figure out the directions in Italian!!

Sorrento

Erin Beth — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 01:55:49 +0000

Back to Italy…we stayed in Sorrento for three nights, Sorrento is located in Southern Italy, part of the Amalfi Coast. Sorrento was our home base from which we did Pompeii and the Island of Capri excursions. To get to Sorrento we took a ferry from Naples, it was about a 45 minute boat ride. Sorrento is a quaint town which sits on steep cliffs overlooking the bay of Naples. Our hotel – Hotel Settimo Cielo was located on the Via Del Campo which is about a 10 minute walk from downtown Sorrento. The views from our hotel were amazing…the best views of any hotel we had stayed at thus far. You literally walk on the balcony of our hotel room and all you could see was the ocean. It was stunning…not to mention the pastries as well. =)

All of the following pictures were taken from our balcony…see I wasn’t kidding!

Capri

Erin Beth — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:08:45 +0000

For another excursion we left Sorrento by ferry and went over to the island of Capri. This really was a beautiful island, we walked around, had lunch at a little cafe and people watched and then took a boat tour around the island.

Pompeii

Erin Beth — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:17:34 +0000

From Tuscany we took the train to Sorrento which is a little coastal town. We stayed in Sorrento for three nights. We used Sorrento as our home base to visit other areas of the coast. Our first stop was Pompeii. Remember back in elementary school learning about Pompeii?

Back in 79 AD, Vesuvius which was a volcano located within a short distance of the city of Pompeii erupted. It caught the local population utterly unprepared. This city was completely destroyed during this volcano eruption, buried under 9 feet of volcanic ash. People were literally frozen in time, doing what they were doing at the moment of the eruption. It wasn’t until 1748 that archaeologists discovered Pompeii. In fact what is really interesting is that only 75% of the city has been uncovered from the ash. They are still doing evacation of the city itself today. Amazing…they have been uncovering this city for over 250 years.

We were there for about 1/2 a day and then we just hopped the train back to Sorrento. Pompeii is about a 45 minute train ride from Sorrento so it’s just a 1/2 day excursion.

Tuscany

Erin Beth — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:23:37 +0000

After leaving Pisa we traveled to Siena which was a lovely city, I only wish we would of had more time to explore it. From Siena we picked up our rental car and drove about hour in half to Tuscany. Or as most Europeans call it Toscana. Now, if your thinking of backpacking or traveling to Italy and want to go to Tuscany and then head down South like we did to Naples or Capri then trust me when I say DO NOT pick up your car in Siena. This was probably our biggest mistake of our trip, the reason being is we backtracked up north to return the car in Siena and then we hopped on the train in Siena and headed down south to Naples by passing Tuscany again – just where we had been!! We probably wasted 4 hours of travel that we did not need to do!! Instead take a train to Chiusi and pick your car up there – explore Tuscany and then return your car back in Chiusi and head south down to Naples from Genoa.

OK, so that is my one piece of advice, we had to learn the hard way! So we spent two nights in Tuscany – Tuscany is not a town but a region. Within the region of Tuscany there are several beautiful hill towns to stay in. Mike and I choose to stay in Montepulciano, a beautiful little hill town that is well known for it’s wine and it’s fine art galleries. Not every hill town in Tuscany is known for their wine – you would think all of them are well known but that’s not true. We really wanted to taste the local wines and explore the galleries so that is why we choose Montepulciano.

We took advantage of all the beautiful and quaint wine tours not to mention the delicious wine…=)

Montepulciano had the most amazing cheese and meat markets. We would meander along the main street and stop here and there and try their samples. We brought plenty home to enjoy.

This picture is of a little doggy who was just so cute. I never was sure if he had a home or not, he seemed to live in the square but he did have a water bowl that someone had put out and he seemed like he was being fed. What breaks my heart the most is seeing dogs that don’t have homes and we saw quite a bit of that in Rome and in Southern Italy. At one point I was so overwhelmed with seeing them in Sorrento that I saved some bread after dinner and as we were walking back to our hotel I tried to give some to them but not one dog ate the bread!! I told Mike I think it’s because they are used to having the best Italian food scraps in the world and stupid ol’ bread isn’t even good for these homeless dogs! I finally gave up and threw the bread away.

The best part was coming home from a long day exploring Tuscany and having a glass of wine waiting for us up on the terrace.

Below is our hotel – Meuble il Riccio. Gio and Ivanna run this little place with their son and his wife. It only has 6 rooms and they truly took care of us, we were so sad to leave them.

Look in the far right picture below, that cute little dog pops up again.

Finally, here is our car! Wow! That was a long post!

Pisa

Erin Beth — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 17:03:46 +0000

On our way to Tuscany we stopped in Pisa. There isn’t much to see in Pisa besides the leaning tower which is simply amazing to stand in front of and imagine the engineering that has gone into place to keep this tower from falling over and falling over it is. They say that in 100-200 more years the tower will fall and there won’t be anyway to stop it, it was built in 1173 and leans southeast due to a poor foundation. The leaning tower is in Pisa’s Piazza del Duomo which means Cathedral Square. Below is some pictures of the rest of the buildings in Piazza del Duomo.

Of course we had to do the touristy thing and portray that we were “trying to hold” the leaning tower up. It was so crazy how many people were doing this exact same thing. Whenever I have seen these pictures before I always thought that they were fake but they aren’t!! As you walk into the square, about every 3 feet people were doing exactly what we were doing below. It was so funny. The pictures almost look fake, don’t they? It almost looks like a backdrop that we are standing in front of but I promise you it’s the real thing. It’s all in how you stand and how you place your hands.

Vernaza

Erin Beth — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 19:10:27 +0000

This whole week I will be blogging our trip from Italy! So check back daily! After leaving Venice we then headed over to Cinque Terre which is part of the Italian Rivera. Cinque Terre is comprised of 5 coastal towns so after doing much research we choose to stay in the town of Vernaza which is comprised of only 500 people. It has one main street and one church and it was amazing. What is so great about the Cinque Terre is you can hike on the coastline to all 5 towns which is exactly what we did in these pictures. I wouldn’t say it was an easy hike, in face I would say it was rather difficult after we got to the next little coastal town Monterosso we stopped and had lunch and of course shared some beers.

The 12 days we were in Italy we also took every mode of transportation that you can think of. Including, planes, trains, automobiles, taxi’s, ferry’s, speed boat, I think the only thing we didn’t do was a motorcycle.

Italy

Erin Beth — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 17:41:35 +0000

It’s hard to put into words our experience in Italy. It was so much more then just a vacation but rather I think for both of us it was a life changing experience. Italy represents all that is beautiful in this world – the history, the architecture, the romance, the people, the places we visited were breath taking. Several times throughout our trip I found myself standing somewhere with tears coming down my face simply because I was so overwhelmed with the beauty of what I was looking at that I had no other emotion that could suffice. For Mike and I, backpacking throughout Italy was the way to go. We rode the train through the countryside, had quite a few laughs trying to drive in Tuscany, stayed at the most quaint family owned bed and breakfasts. Where Ivana serves you homemade sweet cakes and a good cup of cappuccino in the morning and her husband Gio drives you around on wine tours and when you come in from a long day touring the countryside there is a nice glass of wine waiting for you to take up to the terrace to enjoy. I miss how the galleries and stores closed for lunch each day for 3 hours so the owners could go home and have lunch with their families. I miss sitting at little cafes drinking an Americana coffee and watching passersby. I miss the idiosyncrasies of Italy – the Irish bar we came across in Sorrento where they played “Bye Bye Miss American Pie” blasting from their speakers so loud you could hear it out in the streets and the owners who were Italian sang their lungs out behind the bar while serving us Guinness beers. I miss sitting with my husband in a quaint lounge bar late at night listening to a pianist play to only us in the room – it felt like we were being serenaded. I miss standing in the Sistine Chapel looking up at the ceiling and being completely struck by the beauty of Michaelano’s fresco’s. But, most of all? I miss standing in Vatican Square on our last day in Italy, the sun setting directly over St. Peter’s Basilica, pigeons flying everywhere, children were running and laughing, priests were walking around and as I was holding Mike’s hand I was overwhelmed with such a feeling of love and happiness. I knew at that moment standing there in this most magnificent spot I had come as close as I could to the most perfect place in my heart and that is God. If we had to leave Italy, there was no better way then leaving with that last experience in Vatican Square.

So yea, I guess you could say we had the most amazing time, one that will remain with me always. My recommendation? If you can – GO. Go now, make the time, save the money, throw out your expectations of what Italy should be – the shopping, the extravagant well dressed Italy, forget it and instead embrace the culture, talk to the locals, get lost in Italy, ride the train, do something you have never done before and do it in Italy, it truly will be a trip you will never forget. So for now I tuck this little bit of Italy in my heart and hold it close until next time…

We are back!

Erin Beth — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 02:53:20 +0000

I am completely jet lagged but we are back from Italy. Stay tuned for a ton of pictures! I promise to post some by Monday. Ciao!