Italy Part 1

We stayed in Italy for almost one month. We did a little bit of everything, visited some friends, did a short drive to Lake Albano (in a town where Pope Leo's summer home is, did a long drive to Sicily, and made our way to Malta.

We flew into Rome from Morroco which was a big upgrade in a good way because of my experiences in Marrakech. The next day or two after we arrived to Rome, we met up with an old friend of my parents and got lunch with them in their neighborhood of Garbatella. Garbatella is interesting because it is in Rome but the homes look like classic Italian homes with no high rises. It was not touristy and the food was spectacular. While in Rome, we mostly walked around and went to a few parks while repeatedly eating pasta and pizza. Before we left to our next destination, we had dinner at Verso Sera (which is a family restaurant of my parent's friend) and it was a good way to end our Rome stay.

Our next stop was Sicily and it was a long eight hour drive but we broke it up by spending some nights along the way, including Pompei. Pompei is a small city near Mount Vesuvius. When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, Pompeii was buried by 15-20 feet of volcanic ash and rocks. The site is very nicely preserved and there was a museum where the cast of the bodies were displayed, people frozen in time trying to escape the eruption. Some bodies were even found with jewelry on them. The entire city was well preserved with homes (some with murals), shops, and theatres.

Our drive from Pompei to Sicily was long and included a thirty minute ferry and our destination was Trapani. We stayed with a friend named Dario and he made an amazing breakfast every morning. In Trapani, we spent a lot of time walking around and exploring restaurants and gelato shops. We knew we wanted to go fishing so we walked to the pier and found a group of men and they led us to a shop filled with boating equipment. They told us about a guy who could take us and we located him and scheduled to go fishing on his boat and our goal was to catch tuna. The night before we went fishing, I was so excited I didn't fall asleep until four in the morning so I was extremely tired. We started our morning catching bait fish and caught around fifteen small mackerel. For the style we were going to troll the live mackerel around the tuna grounds and so we waited from 8:30 am to 5:30 pm. The entire time we were seeing them on the fish finder and drifting the mackerel right in front of their faces but they just weren't hungry. Even though we didn't catch tuna, it was still a fun day.

To get to Malta, we took a ferry which took 2.5 hours. In Malta, we stayed at my uncle's place and it was right on the water. We didn't do any fishing here but we did some shopping at a mall that was right behind the apartment. We ate pretty good in Malta, there was a good Poke bowl restaurant and my mom cooked also.