Italian summer [a video journal] 🍋

Now the goal of this video is basically to be a video journal of my whole trip to Italy in the summer and also be like a reminder of what I did and also share it with you. So to start off the Italian summer, we had our first breakfast at the Milan Starbucks Reserve Roastery and although it's not very Italian to go to Starbucks, their cold drinks with tea infusions and food was delicious and actually worth the price unlike normal Starbucks restaurants. They also had a variety of different croissants and baked goods as well as coffees from around the world to choose from and I really enjoyed having breakfast there. Soon after to keep on with the chill day, we walked across the park and saw some dogs and turtles in a pond while we rested and refreshed ourselves from the heat. Milan being one of the world's most relevant fashion capitals made it the perfect place for me to purchase my first designer item from Vivienne Westwood and this is a purchase I had been thinking about for many months before this trip. I really did think about which necklace I wanted to get or if I wanted to get earrings instead because it was like kind of a big purchase for a small jewelry item. However, I really like Vivienne Westwood and all the history behind her and the idea she had for like her movement in fashion so I ended up getting the new Diamante Heart pendant necklace and I truly love the red accents on it and I'm glad I chose this red one instead of the silver one. Now the next day, we headed off to the train station in Milan to get to Varana and visit Lago di Como and the vibrant towns the area offers such as Bellagio and so we had a quick breakfast in the station soon before leaving on the two-hour ride and I really loved taking trains during this trip because I was able to appreciate the different sceneries and nature of each region and it was really different to where I live from where we go in car everywhere and this public transportation and being able to see everything and be so convenient, I really love it and it's one of my favorite parts of this trip. After this train ride, we took a ferry to Bellagio which is a town across the lake in which we spent most of our day walking around. We looked at local shops and we had lunch. They had a variety of different local shops. They had clothing stores, they had gelato, they had many restaurants and they also made fresh pasta. This was one of my favorite parts of the whole trip in general to Italy because being such a small town made it really easy to walk around and also the weather was really nice and I mean all the nature was beautiful and really different to what I'm used to here where I live in Costa Rica and also just looking at the lake being so blue and turquoise was beautiful and the food was delicious as well. Then we went back to Verona and walked around the town as well. Gardens, they had a lot of gardens and also we had ice cream. Today was not as hot as I expected although still too warm for my liking so it was easier to walk more around the place without getting too tired and overall the experience in Milan was beautiful including Lago Ecomo and we stayed three days in Milan in total and I believe it was the right amount of time to enjoy everything. Now the second place we visited was a town in northern Italy called Bolzano which was influenced by Austrian culture and architecture as well as gastronomy making it very different to the most popular Italian regions many people talk about. So for example here as breakfast I had a peach drink and a piece of bread which resembled a German pretzel in texture and it was really good. In Bolzano I really loved to walk across the extensive market with fruit, cheese, vegetables, spices, bread and flowers. It was a very beautiful place and the market made it even more colorful and vivid. During this day we also went to a small vineyard next to an old castle before stopping to eat at a pastissiere and chocolatier. My mom had a coffee while my sister and I had bubble tea which we found down the street and we had desserts to accompany from the restaurant we went to and the tiramisu was my favorite one. It was the best that I ate in the whole trip. Then to change things up from the chill vibe of the trip on our second day we were taken to another nearby town located next to the Dolomites. One of them was Ortisei and we went on a hike however we were not really informed that we were going to hike so our clothing was not very suitable as you can see but despite this it was really fun and beautiful to experience hiking next to Dolomites and appreciate the nature and the landscape and to end the visit in Bolzano we had a delicious pizza and I really loved the experience here. It's definitely one of the best places I've been to in travel in general. Now unlike Bolzano as we moved down to Italy our next stop was Venice known for its canals and it's a much more popular place and for lunch we had Asian food because we had been eating pasta bread and pizza for almost a week now and we needed a change in flavors. We went to the Peggy Guggenheim's museum which centers around her art collection and despite the art being modern art and contemporary the art movements I don't usually gravitate to. After seeing the art in the museum and reading the works I can say I really enjoy this type of artwork now unlike myself before seeing it live. It's a really different art movement to what I'm used to and to the other artworks I have seen in museums so it was definitely a fun and interesting experience and I would definitely do it again. It also had a beautiful view of the canals and after this we had some desserts and I also got a nice coffee. The amount of books they had was amazing and they also had old books for sale and even older books as decor. Overall the whole vibe was really cozy and I really loved visiting this place. This is an example of the older books they had as decor and now going back to the cats. The bookshop also offered books of those cats and even more books centered around cats in general which I found really interesting and fun. So as a result after searching here I bought two posters for my room and got them rolled up in a tube which I carried around for the day and I was also very lucky to have this cat as my cashier. Extremely cute. I love this place. I want to go back really but don't think I'm the only one being crazy about cats. There were many other ladies that were also crazy about cats. And here you can see me carrying the huge tube across Venice but it was fun. It was not that bad and that afternoon we went to a terrace on the top of the building in which Venice could be seen from a new perspective from the top and it was really beautiful however it was extremely windy so it was kind of uncomfortable because my hair was going everywhere but the view was very nice. The last thing we did in Venice was stopping at a family-owned art shop with their artworks including handmade miniature bookshelves, paintings, and masks and I loved it really much. I even left them a message in one of the notebooks they had for people to write on because I loved it as that much. I really enjoyed walking around Florence. It was more beautiful than Milan and we also had to get gelato and I know like I haven't filmed a lot of gelato but we had it many times I just didn't want to film it all the time and it also started raining which is weird for summertime but it's okay we still walked around and it was beautiful anyway. These were like some of the things that we saw in some of the local shops. They are all hand painted and really beautiful and of course since we're in Florence we obviously visited Galleria dell'Accademia to see the David by Michelangelo which truly matched the hype behind it. The sculpture was as impressive as I pictured it or even more impressive. The details he added to his work is truly amazing but also this room full of busts and sculptures was a surprise for me because not many people talk about it and I spent more time in this room than looking at the huge sculpture outside and after this we decided to have lunch at a vegetarian restaurant. They had delicious mocktails and the food was really good. I just forgot to film it before I ate it but trust me it was delicious. Now since Florence is in Tuscany we had a full day outside of the city at a winery with wine tasting and we walked around the whole like property and we were also walking around two different towns but out of the two my favorite was San Gimignano and during this day I realized I love Tuscany and its architecture and nature which is very different from the tropical nature I'm used to and it's really different I don't know I really like it and also I met another cat which was extremely cute he wanted to get outside of his house to say hi I wanted him to go out of his house to say hi as well and after he got out he didn't want to get back in and the lady that was his owner just left him outside but I think he enjoyed it and overall I can say Tuscany is one of the most beautiful places I visited. We took a train from Florence to Rome and it was about like two hours we walked around the city for like an hour and then we went to Castello San Angelo from there you could see beautiful view of Rome and the next day we visited the Colosseum and also all the ruins which did match my expectations and I found it really interesting to learn about the history behind the ruins the Colosseum and all the different structures and why they were done and it was really interesting to me and the guy that was with us really made the experience enjoyable. Here you can see some clips that I filmed of the Colosseum up close not only from the outside but also from the inside which was really impressive and much bigger than what I expected like I mean it's the Colosseum but I thought it was I don't know it felt bigger than what I thought. I really enjoyed walking around these small gardens although this was one of the hottest days it was really tiring although it doesn't seem like it it looks really dark it was really hot but it was still really interesting to walk around as I just mentioned before and learn about all the history behind everything. There was even a small fountain with fish which made the place even prettier. I really liked how like the fish added more life to the ruins and it was like a nice contrast between it. The next day we also went to the Fontana dei Trevi which was also just as beautiful as shown in the pictures. The water from the fountain was really turquoise and I really enjoyed being there despite the crowd although it went in the morning so there weren't as many people as there usually is in the afternoon but it was still too many people and of course we also visited the Vatican including the Vatican Museum and the Sistine Chapel which was painted by Michelangelo including the famous painting the creation of a man however I don't have any footage of the inside of the Sistine Chapel because it was prohibited to film and take pictures so I couldn't take pictures of that but it was really beautiful however there were so many small details like overall in the walls and the ceiling of the chapel that I didn't know existed and it was kind of difficult to find the creation of man but it was still beautiful this Italian summer was very beautiful and fun I enjoyed it very much and I hope this video journal was entertaining because I really tried to capture all the beautiful moments we spent in Italy and I hope I was able to do that justice