dear readers are cautioned that the proposed material reflects only the personal views of the author, for which we are responsible can not, do not want and will not?

At this time we managed to repeatedly disrupted idea - look at Italy. To some extent, this trip was an adventure - it provoked us to friends, suggested going back four in the spring, and we agreed, though, in our opinion, it was a bit early - just six months ago digested Pyrenean tour ... But when the mechanism trips began to unwind, something happened in our companions, they changed their minds, have canceled an order for tickets, well, we've already decided not to stop - how many times you can put it off? Prepare a decent enough: buy tickets for the aircraft to Alitalia by the relatively low price and we need the days: there - in Rome, back from Milan, booked online a decent hotel in all four cities where going to stop, found out the schedule and fares for train which had to move around the country. Familiar already visited Italy, supplied us with several books and maps, as well as a mass of useful tips, significantly adding to our knowledge of the Italian super podcherpnutyh available from our 3.2 guidebooks. Moreover, our baby went home before the New Year in Milan and Venice, and from him we learned much valuable information.?

In Rome and Milan, we expected to stay for several days in Florence and Venice, as well as a trip to see the Tivoli, Siena and Pisa.?

Unlike previous trips to foreign countries, especially our first - Paris, individually, in that I had only the organizational - economic issues. Ideologist and motor trip was Paradise, impelled her personally "touch" to the world's iconic classics, she wanted to get on the show "La Scala", make sure that Venice is really worth on the water, etc., etc. Shadow of a modest gymnasium teachers Bacheya (as it turned out, his son and son-in-Vyatka Archimandrite large Odessa general) so easily in 1912 povezshego their Nedoroslev Petya and Pavlik on vacation in Italy, would not let her, deprived of such opportunities in my homeland Soviets, to rest, I I think, since 1957, when it was published novel about the adventures of a family of Odessa on the Apennines ...?

Another feature was that we first met on their own to go to a country where it is impossible to communicate either in Russian or Hebrew, and anything other than weak, to put it mildly, English and French, we does not possess. But on the other hand, where we did not disappear in the Israeli tongueless years? I think that now I'll be able to negotiate with the natives, even in Polynesia ...?

PRIOR?

so happened in my life that my attitude has always been to Italy, most likely a cold. It began with the Renaissance artists, who have never been out of favor with the authorities shovels, and idiosyncrasy to the words "Renaissance", "humanism" and the names of most, the greatest I shlopotal even in the age of five, when experienced stretching, I think, months, event to celebrate the 500 th anniversary of Leonardo, in which, besides the continuous gundevshego grandmother loudspeaker participated very interested me, illiterate in those days, magazines Ogonyok, propagate the best of his small printing features masterpieces by Leonardo, Raphael and Rubens joined them and especially my beloved "Crocodile", where a shaggy-haired and dusky old Leonardo from room to room triumphed over kozloborodym in stars and stripes top hat, Uncle Sam - Social realism in the great iconic classics Kukryniksov-Efimov ...?

then in my youth I fell in love with the Spanish El Greco and Goya, and artists of the late XIX - early XX century, especially the French Impressionists, and so is my preference so far ...?

to music, where the Italians were leading 300-400 years, creating, in essence, but the vast reservoir of world culture is also applied to the present day technology, composition and performance, which continues to integrate, even by the twentieth century wonders of audio, I communed much later, with the help of Raina. Italians love Vivaldi and Paganini, but they are not only perform and not just in Italy! .. The famous Italian singing in the first place, the great pompous opera, stand with difficulty, and this process is only exacerbated with age ...?

As for antiquities, after the Pyramids, Jerusalem and quite abundant in Greco-Roman heritage in the Land of Israel, I was hard as a surprise. Again, the Russian-Soviet educational tradition of studying the history of the ancient world, with its obvious bias in favor of antiquity and untimely for the 11/12 year olds umishek, also inherited the Soviet children without concomitant aura of Graeco-Latin cramming, you could feel the gymnasium Petya and Pavlik Bachei that makes this untimeliness of information indigestion, nothing but a cold distaste for Roman history in my memory has not left. An adult, I realized, moreover, that it was the Romans committed the greatest crime against the Jewish people in its history - destroyed suschestvovashuyu thousand years of Jewish statehood and dispersed the Jews throughout the world. In my eyes, even the Holocaust during the Second World War looks less crime. The Jewish War, which ended with the destruction of the temple, the captivity and slavery recalcitrant Jews ate probably a much larger share of the then Jewish people than in our era it was able to Nazism and his henchmen. Incidentally, the Italian Fascists, as far as I know, there is little involved in the "Final Solution," Hitler ...?

History of the Middle Ages and modern times have also been studied very badly, and from all foreign countries it is clearly dominated by the English and French, so the poslerimskoy history of the land, where we went, I had a very vague idea, except that he remembered the age of five on the existence of the Renaissance, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Boccaccio, and other giants, but had almost no idea of