Italy -- April 2013
I flew into Bergamo on Saturday night and took a bus to Milan, where I wandered around overnight. I wasn't particularly impressed with that label-conscious, soulless city, but the Duomo was spectacular.
I took a train to the tourist-crowded city of Florence, home of another beautiful Duomo...
...at which point I decided to stop taking pictures of cathedrals. In Florence, I visited the Museo Galileo, home to the Medici collection of Renaissance-era scientific equipment. I was delighted to find a globe with the words "pars orbis incognito" across the region we today know as Antarctica.
The absolute highlight for me was to see two of Galileo's telescopes and an original copy of his Dialogues.
I next spent a rainy overnight in San Marino, a delightful hilltop nation that isn't really worth the visit. The high fortifications are impressive, but there's little else to see.
I next traveled north to Como, a city on the southern shore of the famous Lake Como, to catch the finals of the NextGen finals. The match between the youth teams of Aston Villa and Chelsea was surprisingly poorly attended, but the ambiance was quite enjoyable. There were plenty of future stars on show.
I next traveled to Rome where tourists are required to take a picture of the Colosseum.
A bit more true to my priorities, I took a walk over to Via Panisperna, the stomping-ground of Fermi, Segrè, Majorana, and others before WWII broke out. It's a persistent mystery why so many great physicists came from small research communities, but I can shed no light on the Rome school.
I next traveled to Naples, which is a delightful city. However, in the interest of maintaining ownership of my camera, I decided not to take any pictures. Naples was probably my favourite city in Italy. Finally, I took an overnight ferry to Palermo, Sicily, where I wandered around, read, and caught a flight home. I was surprised and delighted by Sicily's rocky geography.
