I’m still processing my 26 days in Italy and it took me forever to go through all my pictures but finally accomplished it.
I’ve been looking forward to going on the VI tour for some time and it lived up to all the great reviews. I usually combine solo travel on both ends of a RS tour. This trip I spent 3 nights in Bologna, then 3 nights in Padua before the tour. The tour started in Padua on April 7 and then we were off to the races until Orta San Giulio ending on April 20. I then took the train to Milan and I was there 6 nights. Be aware, I love art and enjoy museums and love going through churches. So there will be a lot of that in this report.
I enjoyed Bologna, great college town vibe. I walked everywhere, gave up taking pictures of porticos because they aren’t kidding when you read that Bologna is known for them. They are everywhere! I went to 2 museums and 6 churches. I really liked the group of churches that made up the Basilica of San Stefano, some were so old and they kept adding more to the complex through the centuries.
Took the train into Padua, very easy, and I really enjoyed my time there before the tour started. I stayed in the tour hotel so I had 5 nights in one place which was pretty sweet. I was very taken with the Basilica of St Anthony. I was in it several times as a tourist and went to mass there as well. He is truly the hometown hero and very revered. I was very touched by the piety displayed by people of all ages, men and women, visiting his tomb. I am Catholic, but didn’t grow up with hometown saints and relics being a part of my experience. I could tell the feeling in Padua was a different story. Besides that, the basilica itself is amazing, so many side chapels and art everywhere. I also went to the Scrovengi chapel before the tour because I knew I’d want to see it twice. It is stunning. But also stunning was the Duomo Baptistery with art by Giusto de’ Menabuoi. He was an incredible artist I kept running into on this trip, probably a student of Giotto. I went to the Botanical Gardens and 3 museums and 6 more churches in Padua.
Our tour was such a great combination of different places and events. Our guide, Trina, loves the VI tour, it’s the only one she now does for RS. She’s been guiding for 19 years with them! She was a wonderful historian and over the days she gave us Italy: rising from the sea eons ago to present day politics. There were 19 of us on the tour, some first timers and some old hands, and everyone was fun and happy to be traveling together. This was tour #11 for me and this was probably #3 from the top for people I really clicked with. But out of 11, I can say I haven’t had a bad group yet. (Probably should not have put that in writing— Loire and South of France is coming up in October!)
We learned about wine and sampled a lot. Also had a round of Aperol Spritz’s one afternoon so everyone could check them out. It felt like we ate together a lot along the way too. I was happy with all our hotels, I was a single and all my rooms were big, no obvious, ‘oh this is definitely a single person room’.
The tour has amazing cathedrals, Etruscan antiquities, a dog truffle hunting demonstration, an in depth description of the Palio in Siena, very small medieval towns, gorgeous mosaics in Ravenna, a cooking lesson, pottery demonstration, a full day in the Cinque Terre, Michelangelo’s marble quarry, walking the walls of Lucca, and ended in a small town on a lake.
My favorite things were the big cathedrals/basilicas. St Anthony, St Francis , Siena, and I really loved the church and the town of Orvieto. Beautiful! Also the mosaics in Ravenna were spectacular. Padua, Assisi, Siena and Ravenna were bucket list places for me so this tour gave me that and everything else was a great