The first place I went in Italy was Geneva where Cristopher Columbus was from. When I got off the train almost the first thing I saw was the house he grew up in right there in the middle of the city preserved with a large statue of him out front. I walked around and got some soccer shorts for like 30 bucks which I thought was ridiculously expensive.

Near the Columbus statue I went into a Pizza place for some pizza, which I had thought a lot about because pizzas where invented in Italy and were supposed to be good there. After I paid for it I went to sit down but the guy who sold me the pizza came up to me and said I had to pay more money. An Italian guy sitting there told me in English: ''In Italy if you want to sit down you have to pay extra, I know it's weird''. I think I paid the guy and sat down there. The pizza was good but different than in America. The pizzas in Italy are on a very thin soggy crust so you can't eat them like the thick American ones; you have to fold them over themselves. They are also very plain with very sparse toppings, but the cheese was good.

I took a bus many switchbacks up a hill to a hostel that was a dorm room for college students when school was in. I bunked in a big room with three American guys. The view of the sea from up there was beautiful.

The next day I took a train to Pisa because I wanted to see the famous leaning tower. Pisa is a very beautiful place. It has a river running through it with many ancient colorful buildings. The tower was a little smaller than I expected. It was undergoing renovation to keep it from falling over in the form of tons of cement blocks and cables attached to one side pulling it up. They surely could uprighted it, but they obviously got a lot of tourism from it because there were tourists all over the place, and there were about a hundred venders selling post cards, miniature leaning towers and tea shirts and such. Across from the tower was a beautiful and historic church from the same time period.

The next city I went to was Florence. I met a girl on the train who took me to a cool travelers hostel where I met a lot of other people who all ate together. It even had a little movie theater in the basement. It was here where I noticed that about half of the travelers I met in Europe were Australian.

Florence is one of the most historically significant European cities because of a family called the Benedicci who ran Florence during the Renaissance. Florence is regarded as the birthplace of the Renaissance, or the ''enlightenment'', which was a new interest in the artistic culture of the Roman empire that happened in the 14th century.

On my first day I saw the central cathedral which was mind blowingly elaborate in it's mosaics and statues hanging off the outside wall. The inside was beautiful also, with many side rooms dedicated to Catholic themes. Across from the church was a smaller octogon church that is the oldest building in the city, over a thousand years old. I also saw the museum in the old Benedicci mansion. It had many hallways and huge rooms filled with statues made by the likes of Leonardo de Vince and Michelangelo. I wanted to go in the museum that had the famouse sculpture of David, but it costed ten bucks so I didn't. I saw some replicas, but some travelers I talked to said it was incredibly beautiful and worth the money.

The next day I toured the walled in garden of the Bendichi family with an Australian guy who knew the history of the area well. The garden was absolutely huge and filled with lakes, gardens, and lined trees. Next to the entrance of the garden was another museum that was filled with more amazing artwork. What I remember most was sculptures that are objects carved within objects carved within objects. The museum had many of these object that were so amazing I couldn't even imagine how they were made. They obviously took an incredible amount of time to make. I think they were made by the catholic monks.

Florence is a very beautiful city. All the buildings are stone with red tiles, and the city is filled by Cypres trees. It also has a river running through it that is lined with coffee houses.

After a couple days in Florence I went to Rome. In the subway I met a couple of travelers who where going to a youth hostel so I followed them. This was another large hostel that had its own huge cafeteria. There I met the first Americans in my whole trip. I was very excited to come to Rome because I took three years of Latin in high school and knew the history of Rome.

My first day there I did a tour of the two thousand year old senate buildings which looked the same style and size as the government buildings in DC, and they were still in use! I also saw an old Castle from I think before Roman times. Then I did a tour of the Vatican. The most interesting thing for me was how the Vatican guards dress. They have these puffy stripped red and orange suites and funny hats. They must have been wearing those uniforms for like a thousand years. St Peters cathedral was amazing. The 500 year old dome was huge and the entire place was mosaiced and full of huge one piece marble statues. One statue I remember is of the world with God sitting over it and his foot over England. The Pope who had the cathedral made was angry at England for separating from the Church. There was a stairway on the other side of the dome that I took to the terrace on the top and looked over the city. The skyline of Rome was just old buildings; I didn't see one skyscraper. That was kind of surprising.

After the Vatican I walked towards the Coliseum. But on my way there I think some kids tried to pickpocket me because about five of them approached me and held a map up to my face asking me where they were, and a couple of them were directly behind me. I was about to try to help them out when they suddenly lost interest and walked off. I thought I felt the flap of my backpack fall down. There wasn't anything missing, so I think they must have noticed someone noticing them trying to get me. The Coliseum was just about what I thought it would be, except I was surprised about how disjointed the stones on the top were. That must me what happens after two thousand years of earthquakes. The inside the Coliseum was super interesting because it was just like a modern coliseum. When I was walking up the indoor stairs and the hallways behind the stairs I was tripping out about how going to a competition 2,000 years ago would have been the same as now; with vendors and everything. There were some things different though; the stairs were a lot steeper and there were rain gutters on the side which was odd because they were inside. The inside of the coliseum was all exposed basement which I didn't know about. The Coliseum has a pretty interesting history. Back in the day, besides the gladiator fights to the death, they used to pit Bears and Lyons against each other and even fill the thing up with water so they could have ship battles.

Right next to the Coliseum was the Forum where all the politics of ancient Rome took place. This place was really interesting because of the way it is organized. It had all the statues lined up along the central walkway that was lined with different buildings for various functions. This was also the only place I saw in all of Rome that still had multiple stories of ancient buildings intact; which gave me another vision of how back then Rome must have been quiet a sight to any foreigner coming there for the first time. At the end of the Forum were the stairs where Julius Caesar was murdered. On the top of the steps was a two thousand year old statue surrounded by two other political buildings, and the stairs went down the other side. Between the Coliseum and the Forum was the famous triumphant arch. I read the ancient Latin text written on it. It said something about what it was and when it was made.

I crossed an old aqueduct a couple hundred meters to the west of the Coliseum. The bricks were thinner and longer than the ones in America. A couple hundred meters from the aqueduct was the Circus Maximus, where they had the Chariot Races. It was just a field, but there was a section of brick bleacher on the south east end that still exists. On the east side were multi-level ruins of the Forum. I was impressed they still existed standing so high.

After the Circus Maximus I walked a couple blocks south towards the baths. There were giant pillars strewn on their sides all over the median of the street, which made me think about how Rome was so big and developed that two thousand years later the remains of the columns are still lying there on main street. The baths were also amazing because they were so huge. Everything about them was huge, the garden area before the entrance, the 50 foot high arched roofs, and the complex of various baths. There was a big welcoming room, and then a long corridor with ten meter square baths on either side. At the end was the large bath that was about 50 by 20 meters. The beautiful mosaics on the floor of the baths were still intact.

After the baths I walked towards the Tiber river island that I knew so well from the models and maps of Ancient Rome. I wanted to see if the island looked the same now as it did them. I remembered that in ancient times it was built up with large buildings and wanted to see if it had the ruins of the buildings or was in use like in the old days. I was surprised how close it was to Circus Maximus, and that part of the ancient bridge was still intact. It was vey well made. It was a lot narrower than the modern bridge right next to it, but was made in the same style. The island had a couple of large buildings and it looked very similar to how it did in ancient times. With the bridge I had seen all the things that I was dying to see, so I took the metro back to the hostel. In the hostel I had a few beers with some of the Americans I met there, including an older guy who was bike touring across Italy who said it was very windy.

The next day I took a bus with a French Canadian kid to the catacombs. I hadn't heard about them before then, but they were very interesting. There were different places around the city where Catholics built elaborate tunnels to bury their leaders. We did a tour of one that went down pretty deeply and had quite a few simple narrow tunnels with various other tunnels branching out to house their relics. I heard there was another catacomb that had a room that was constructed entirely of bones of priests.

It was cool how ancient Rome was evident throughout the whole of the city. If the ruins of an old pillar weren't evident, then a modern building built into a two thousand year old aqueduct was. I remember seeing a huge erect Egyptian pillar that the Romans brought from Alexandria two thousand years ago.

The next day I took the train down to Naples with my French Canadian buddy and stayed in a beautiful hostel up on a hill. On the train ride out of the city I noticed some more ancient aqueducts again; they seem to lead into the city from every direction. I remember seeing them from like 50 miles north of Rome and they were huge. They must have done a great job building them if they can last so long.

While I was in the hostel in Naples I met an old American guy who claimed to be the last remaining little Rascal, and was explaining about all the bad things that happened to the other little Rascals, but nobody seemed to be listening to him. That night I walked around for a bit with a guy from San Francisco. Naples is a nice little city nestled between the sea and the hills, but to my dismay I didn't find a central pedestrian area.

The next day I took a train to the ruins of Pompey with the guy from San Francisco and two French Canadian guys. Pompey is a small city to the south of Naples that has some amazing ruins of a sexual vacation city for the rich Romans that was destroyed in a Volcanic eruption two thousand years ago. Because the whole city was completely covered in ash and wasn't unearthed until 75 years ago, it was perfectly preserved. Even the paintings on the wall were preserved. So I felt like I was walking through the place just like it was then. There is a perfectly preserved stadium there right next to the rest of the city. The roads were paved with stone and had six inch deep grooves in them. We guessed they were to help guide the carraiges. There were stone bocks in the intersections which we couldn't figure out the use for. Now I think they were to help the people cross the roads without having to step into the muck where the wheels rolled. The bars were interesting because the ceramic vases for holding wine and water where still there built into the tables. We couldn't help but noticing that there where phalic symbols all over the place. The brothel was the only building that was completely intact with the roof and tiles, paint and everything! Inside we saw the stone beds in the various rooms. On the walls everywhere were paintings and stone carvings of people having sex. We also saw intact pipes built into the walls and ground. They didn't have copper or plastic pipes then, so they made ceramic cups that they connected together to make pipes. Another place that caught my attention was a strip of apparent shops that were holes in the wall decorated with pillars on either side.

The most interesting thing about Pompey was all the petrified people. The destruction of the place was so fast that the people didn't have time to escape before they were enveloped by ash. So there are mummies of people frozen in place. There was a mummy of a woman with her arms around her baby, and one of a man covering his head. Most of them are lying on their side in the fetal position, and I could still see their teeth which where in surprisingly good condition. I think I could even make out a facial impression of agony on one of them. We went into the local museum and saw a bunch more just sitting around in glass boxes waiting to be displayed correctly. The area of the ruins was huge, and we could have spent a couple days there roaming around the city and not walked down the same road or entered in the same room twice.

After Naples I decided to take a train up north to Venice. I got there at night and spent a couple hours walking the streets and taking the water taxis looking for a place to stay, but everywhere was booked for the night so I took a train to the farthest city to the east and slept on the pavement outside of some apartment buildings. Venice was very interesting because it is a city like any other ancient Italian city, but instead of having roads, it has water. I walked all over the city, and it was smaller than I though it would be, but there were no cars at all. The layout is like any other city. There is a central avenue of water with smaller streets of water faning out. It was kind of a pain in that if I wanted to cross the street I had to walk until the end of the block to cross on the bridge. No jaywalking in Venice. I had dinner at one of the larger hostels after I found out it was full. It had a huge dinning room totally full of young tourist eating their buffet meals. Another thing I was surprised about Venice was how close the water was to the sidewalk. If it was any closer it would have been overflowing.