Rome – Photo Diary

Rome is a city meant to be photographed, at least I think so. This past week in Rome has been amazing, and I’ve made sure to capture as much of it as I could on camera. Here are just a few little snippets of my week in Rome.

Rome off the Beaten Path

We’d planned to see the sights, the Colosseum, the Vatican, the Forum, the Pantheon, but the best part of Rome was discovering its hidden gems, where no one goes, or at least where few tourists go. Many of these places we discovered by chance after taking a wrong turn, or getting lost in Rome’s abundant streets. These were some of my favorite places in Rome because they showed not the Rome that’s expected by tourists, but Rome as it really is.

Shopping Rome

One of my favorite parts of any trip, is shopping. Not just shopping major clothing stores, but visiting local markets, stopping in for snacks at bakeries or coffee shops, and finding new and exciting shops! So being in Rome, of course a morning spent shopping was in order. We decided to group together places we had found interesting while we had been researching Rome beforehand, and drew out a long route that would hit as many as possible. We wound through St. Peter’s Square and crossed the Tiber river to get the Campo de’ Fiori, Rome’s most popular outdoor market, and stopped at the most amazing pastry shop along the way, Il Fornaio. Then we crossed through the center of town and made our way to Zara, and on the way stopped at Danielle, a cute little Italian leather shoe store, and found a lovely little chocolate shop. On our way home, we walked down Via dei

Sicily: A Photo Diary

These are some of my favorite pictures from Sicily last week! Sicily was a beautiful island filled with gorgeous beaches and lots of culture! I am so very excited to share these pictures! Needless to say, Sicily was absolutely amazing, and a very necessary leg of our Italy trip.

Sicily Photo Diary

These are some of my favorite pictures from Sicily last week! Sicily was a beautiful island filled with gorgeous beaches and lots of culture! I am so very excited to share these pictures! Needless to say, Sicily was absolutely amazing, and a very necessary leg of our Italy trip.

Exploring Sicily: Day Trips

Here in Sicily, we are staying in a house only a short walk from the beach. It’s wonderful: instant access to the beach, sunshine, tanning; exploring sea life and floating in the waves. But it’s a pretty secluded area. Sure, there are houses around ours, and locals come to the beach everyday, but other than that, there isn’t much around us at all. That is why it was great to take a few road trips and explore different, wonderful parts of Sicily. 

Beach Reads

I’m usually open to any genre, any type of book. But when it comes to beachside reading, I admit that I’m drawn to easy, fluid reads. Books that you can let your mind gloss over but still feel captivated by the plot, books read purely for entertainment. Maybe it’s the hot sun turning my brain to mush, but those are the kind of books I like to read at the beach. As we have been in Sicily for the past week, we’ve spent A LOT of time at the beach, and that means A LOT of time to read some pretty relaxing but captivating, borderline sappy, books. With my Kindle in hand, these are the books I’ve been reading this week.

Why I Fell in Love with Sicily

As Sicily is one of the only places in Italy I’ve traveled so far (Rome, Umbria and Venice are coming up in the next few weeks!), I don’t know if I have the authority or the experience to comment on Italian culture as a whole, however Sicilian culture has left me with culture shock, in the best possible way. There’s a certain aspect of grunge to the island, the free-spirited, liberating kind of grunge. It has the kind of grunge you’d expect from a second or third world country, while still maintaining the certain level of class expected from a first world country. It struck me so much because it’s so different from the United States, where everything is kept pristine and neat, or at least seems that way after experiencing Sicily. Walking around Cefalù, a beach town on the northern coast of Sicily, the houses and buildings all touch, as if they are all one building, like they do in much of Europe.

How I Survived 24 Hr of Flights and Layovers

Monday morning we left for the airport. 24 hours, three planes, one delay and two layovers later, we had finally arrived just outside of Venice. Needless to say, it was an exhausting day. But I’d like to share some things I did to help me get through an extremely long day of flights. 

Year-Round Travel Essentials

Travel plays a HUGE role in my life. Over the years, I’ve noticed that some things come in more handy than others while traveling. Seriously, I never travel anywhere without these essentials.