Italian observations: misc.
- most surprising experience: how common English is in (tourist) Italy, especially compared to other non-Italian languages -- apparently 50% of tourists speak English.
- we quickly picked up a small visual recognition vocabulary via the Rosetta Stone method (many signs were in multiple languages)
- art fatigue is very real; one museum had over 5000 objects and another had over 1,500 paintings...
- there are lots of stray cats; Rome alone apparently has 200,000 stray cats. people feed them but don't let them live with them. Apparently the law protects them from removal, etc., and Italians are very squeamish about castration and so don't fix cats. You run into them in the weirdest places; there's a group of about 4 in the middle of the hiking trail we did for example. Someone had put a supply of cat food there with a sign "please feed only cat food", but judging by the way the cats reacted to the sound of backpacks being opened, I think they were getting ham sandwiches on the sly.
- tourist demographics were interesting. Cinque Terre as a beach town had Italian families who came in via a short train ride, a lot of vacationing Europeans -- probably the kind of crowd you'd expect at Cancún Mexico, and some long-distance tourists there more for the cultural experience. Rome had mostly the later, with a lot of religious visitors -- we saw more nuns under 50 in one catacombs tour group that we've ever seen in our life. Venice tended towards a much older crowd, including the locals. We think the younger tourists were staying at cheaper resorts outside of Venice and only came in during the day.
- the award for most annoying/rudist tourists goes to the Brits. The few Americans we met were well behaved, so we are wondering if the Italians can't tell English speakers apart. (I'm assuming the difference is due to the demographics mentioned above; Americans on spring break undoubtedly are much worse.)
- we saw one instance of Italian "laziness": we had finished walking through one of the museums and were headed back to the beginning to browse in the gift shop at 1:45, when we are told that the museum was closed. All the signs very clearly said close at 2 p.m. and there were 4 staff guys sitting around shooting the breeze waiting to go home. We are pretty sure they just decided to knock off early, which was quite annoying because the gift shop might have had toy catapults and other cool things.
- we quickly picked up a small visual recognition vocabulary via the Rosetta Stone method (many signs were in multiple languages)
- art fatigue is very real; one museum had over 5000 objects and another had over 1,500 paintings...
- there are lots of stray cats; Rome alone apparently has 200,000 stray cats. people feed them but don't let them live with them. Apparently the law protects them from removal, etc., and Italians are very squeamish about castration and so don't fix cats. You run into them in the weirdest places; there's a group of about 4 in the middle of the hiking trail we did for example. Someone had put a supply of cat food there with a sign "please feed only cat food", but judging by the way the cats reacted to the sound of backpacks being opened, I think they were getting ham sandwiches on the sly.
- tourist demographics were interesting. Cinque Terre as a beach town had Italian families who came in via a short train ride, a lot of vacationing Europeans -- probably the kind of crowd you'd expect at Cancún Mexico, and some long-distance tourists there more for the cultural experience. Rome had mostly the later, with a lot of religious visitors -- we saw more nuns under 50 in one catacombs tour group that we've ever seen in our life. Venice tended towards a much older crowd, including the locals. We think the younger tourists were staying at cheaper resorts outside of Venice and only came in during the day.
- the award for most annoying/rudist tourists goes to the Brits. The few Americans we met were well behaved, so we are wondering if the Italians can't tell English speakers apart. (I'm assuming the difference is due to the demographics mentioned above; Americans on spring break undoubtedly are much worse.)
- we saw one instance of Italian "laziness": we had finished walking through one of the museums and were headed back to the beginning to browse in the gift shop at 1:45, when we are told that the museum was closed. All the signs very clearly said close at 2 p.m. and there were 4 staff guys sitting around shooting the breeze waiting to go home. We are pretty sure they just decided to knock off early, which was quite annoying because the gift shop might have had toy catapults and other cool things.