ciao Italia

Our time in Italy has come to an end. Tomorrow we say goodbye to this beautiful country at the airport and take off for our Overseas Adventure Travel tour of Greece and Turkey. We will be sorry to leave this beautiful and much more varied than we had realized country. We talked at dinner tonight about where we would choose to visit again and couldn't eliminate any of the places we saw. It has been a joy.

We did make it to Croatia, to Zagreb to visit former Rotary exchange student Ida ("ee - dah" and her family. They were fantastic hosts and showed us their beautiful city. Fortunately, the weather was clear on our flight over and we saw that the country itself is lovely too. I've included a picture or two of Ida in the photos below.

Unfortunately, our friends Judy and Fred did not make it out of England in time for the reunion we had hoped to have with them here in Rome. Today they were supposed to fly from London to Naples, as their original plan was. We are so sorry to have missed them, but hope they have as great a time as we have had here.

Since yesterday when we came back to Rome, we've done a bit of sightseeing. We went to the Pantheon and Trevi fountain, Piazza Navona and Campo di Fiori, and today we went to St. Peter's and the Vatican Museum. I have finished "The Agony and the Ecstasy" and HAD to see the Pieta and Sistine Chapel. I was not disappointed; both are magnificent! It's almost too much to take in and I left as awed as I had expected to be.

Photos: from top left, slightly out of chronological order: the main square in Zagreb from our hotel window, each of us tossing a coin into the Trevi fountain to be sure we'll come back to Rome; the market in Zagreb; Ida (left) and her sister Sanya; Ida and her parents Branka and Egidio Cepulic - both doctors; wonderful pasta - how we'll miss it!; and Michaelangelo's Pieta.