Sulmona

 Sulmona is one of our favortie places in Italy.
We have pictures of the villa we all (all 14 family) stayed in 2 years ago.  It's very cool...8 bedrooms, 9 bathrooms and all the luxuries of home.  We have pictures of friends that live here...they are amazing people.  Enrica to my right speaks perfect English, Franca to my left doesn't and Nunzeo doesn't speak English either.  He a wonderful artist..trained in Florence.

Rieti

Reiti is a small village we found by accident.  Just driving to Sulmona looking for a place to stay for one night.  I was a beautiful village...some of the pictures were taken from our hotel room window.

We especially liked the game stop store....we needed to share that with Jacob.

http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/features/story.aspx?id=818

http://planetearth.nerc.ac.uk/features/story.aspx?id=818

We passed thru L'Aquila today. The earthquake took place April 2009. The attached story from planet earth is worth watching.

Florence

There are just a few pictures from Florence.  It was raining so we didn't get to see very much of the downtown.  We're staying in a hotel that isn't close to the downtown area...we had to take a bus..everything was very crowded and the rain didn't help thin out the crowds.  As we leave today and head south, we hope to get more pictures of the countryside.  Hopefully more to post later.

Venice

The first few pictures are of our hotel and hotel room.  We were fortunate to have a view overlooking the canal. Most of the pictures of boats and gondolas are pictures from our room. The green boats are the garbage (trucks) boats, it was amazing the way they haul bagged garbage from the streets along the canal, then the garbage gets lifted onto the boat and crushed like an actual garbage truck.
The city is beautiful with amazing architecture, beautiful churchs.  People are very friendly and most speak perfect English.
We had a tremendous thunder storm last night...as a result you can see pictures of how easily the canals flood showing St. Marks square flooded.
Also...many, many doggies and NO dog poop.  Go figure.  I wish we could've taken pictures of all of them.  I guess we are home sick for our kids...2 legged and 4 legged.
The markets and shops were filled with beautiful Murano glass, masks, feather pens and so much more.
Just one last entry about the pigeons....they are disgusting...you can pictures of them in the square..people actually let them land on their arms.  YUCK!
Tomorrow we're headed to Florence.  Will update our blog after 2 days in Florence.  Ciao!