We stayed at a hotel just a few blocks from the legendary St. Mark’s Square, though we didn’t go into the Basilica until a couple of days in. (In classic theme park fashion, the Basilica is free to enter but many parts of the interior charge an entrance fee.) On the recommendation of the guides we read, we spent a lot of time just walking around visiting the numerous campi (squares) and the six sestieri (divisions) that make up this city. Even a good map is marginally useful at best. Many streets are so small they don’t show up on maps, signs can be ambiguous, and there are even directional signs spray-painted on the walls to augment or contradict the official directional signs. Getting from point A to point B requires careful knowledge of landmarks in the area.

We spent the better part of one day heading towards Il Ghetto, the historically Jewish section of Venice and the origin of the term now used worldwide. Aside from a few small shops and a museum of Venice’s Jewish history, there’s not much to see here. If it weren’t for our map, Il Ghetto would have blended in well with many of the other squares and historic neighborhoods.

We quickly learned to pace ourselves and opened up to the different forms of water transport. We took several vaporetti (water buses) to get to our hotel and around town. There are also traghetti, very short-distance gondolas that cross a canal for €0.50 per passenger and basically substitute for a bridge. We learned the hard way that many stop running as early as 1:00 PM.

On the recommendation of the porter/bartender at our hotel, we took an unnecessarily-long vaporetto up to Murano, a section in northeast Venice reachable only by boat and famous for its glass. Although undeniably touristy, Murano is much quieter than the rest of Venice and feels much more relaxing. There are no umbrella-wielding group leaders herding people to hotspots; the whole neighborhood feels as though it is itself a landmark. There are still many glass factories in operation and many shops peddling glass baubles, though some shops accuse others of selling more cheaply-made Chinese glassware. There’s also a museum, though after we followed all the signs and wandered around near the “Museo” vaporetto stop for a while, we couldn’t find the entrance.

There are many museums and churches worth seeing in Venice, but the great attraction of the city comes from just walking around and finding little nooks and crannies. For every dead-end street of residences there are several hidden art shops, restaurants, cafes, and gelato shops that wouldn’t show up in any guide. As Americans we were pretty much guaranteed of getting ripped off, so it’s best to pretend like €1 equals $1 and enjoy the city all the more.

One last water shuttle brought us to Marco Polo Airport, where we blew the rest of our euros on espresso and duty-free merchandise. They’ve got a great selection: one of the duty-free shops at the airport even sells fresh meats and cheeses from a refrigerated case. Once back in New York, we were ready to start readjusting to American time and ready to celebrate my great-aunt’s 80th birthday in, of all places, the Bronx’s Little Italy.

We took a little detour into Siena, passing a little too deeply into the town’s historic area before getting out and walking around. (We may have entered a ZTL, or Zona a Traffico Limitato, where unauthorized cars are photographed and get tickets in the mail. That assumes, of course, that the local authorities care.) Siena is best known for the Palio, a horse race in the main town square between the various wards of the town. We arrived just days before the July 2 race so preparations were in full swing. There were grandstands set up all around and colorful banners representing the wards were on display and for sale all over the place. Sadly, not only did we miss out on the race itself, but I had packed my camera away so I didn’t get any photos of Siena.

My parents discovered Prato through a New York Times article about places off the beaten path in Italy. Still retaining all the charm of historic cities in Tuscany, Prato has far fewer tourist traps but enough shops and restaurants to keep us fed and happy for the few days we spent there. It also seems to attract tourists more from within Italy, so fewer restaurants had English-language menus or bilingual staff. I liked that; it felt a lot more immersive than where we had been.

About a half hour away by train from Prato is Florence, famous home of the Medici family. We spent a day there, our visit framed by our reservation at the Uffizi gallery, a remarkable collection of paintings and sculptures from the Renaissance. There’s a lot to take in; we also took in some refreshments at a cafe inside midway through our visit. If you go in the summer, definitely make reservations ahead of time. The standby line was hours long.

We also visited Lucca, proud birthplace of composer Giacomo Puccini, whose 150th birthday was being celebrated all over town. We traveled toward the sea to meet up with our cousin Fabio and his family who live in Genoa. (The printed family tree linking my mom with Fabio is four pages wide.) On a Sunday morning we got to see how peaceful an Italian town could get as we walked around with Fabio, his sons Luigi and Filippo, and a few others. We walked to the top of a tower with trees atop it and snapped some great pictures of the town (including one house with an unusual English message on top) before sitting down to lunch at a restaurant which, bizarrely, employs a Scottish waitress who speaks both Italian and American-accented English.

Photos from Tuscany: June 28 (Florence) and June 29 (Lucca).

Rome is an impressive place: it’s an undeniably historic city and yet there’s a strange balance between tourist attractions and day-to-day life. The Coliseum, for instance, is über-touristy — the interior is well-preserved but outside there are throngs of guides for hire and costumed gladiators posing for pictures — but just up the hill is a university in a much more secluded setting. The Pantheon, a building nearly 2,000 years old, has a modicum of tourist-oriented shops around it but otherwise blends in well with the area. For every stereotypical tourist trap there was a 10-minute walk to get at least somewhat away from the hordes of tourists and tourist shops.

For me, though, the real highlight of Rome was to see how people who actually live there go through their lives. Witness how many men and women in suits and dresses hop off a Vespa bound for a meeting. I was impressed also at how the government buildings, including the Prime Minister’s residence, are so accessible that you can practically walk up to the front door. Historic buildings are just a fact of life. Our hotel had been built as a palace in the 14th century and I’m sure many of the little hole-in-the-wall places serving beer and pasta were in buildings just as old.

Lastly, the Vatican has the museum to end all museums. We withstood nearly hour-long lines just to enter St. Peter’s Square until we learned that Pope Benedict XVI was actually speaking there, live. (We didn’t stay long as we could only see him on video monitors, he was speaking Latin or Italian, and we’re not Catholic. When the Pope is absent, so is the huge security line.) We then went around the block to enter the Vatican Museums. Wow. It’s remarkable to see a culture with so much art they put it on every surface, including ceilings and floors, and they still have a museum complex so large it takes a couple of hours to get to the Sistine Chapel. Most of the sculptures and artwork on display are originals, too. Catholic or not, every visitor to Rome must visit the Vatican. Just schedule your visit around the Pope’s to avoid delays.

Photos from Rome and the Vatican: June 24, June 25, and June 26.

We traveled on public transport about a dozen times and were asked to show valid tickets maybe twice. The payment process on most trains is pretty simple: you buy your tickets, stamp them on the platform, then be ready to show them to a conductor on board. (The stamping machine prints the date and time on the ticket so the conductor can see if you’re trying to reuse an old ticket.) We started on the Leonardo Express, a non-stop train from Leonardo da Vinci Airport to Rome’s Termini station. Our tickets cost €11 each and nobody ever asked to see them. We used our transit passes on buses in Rome, where there are stamping machines on board but where drivers don’t collect fares or inspect tickets; nobody checked those passes at all. Rome’s subway systems required valid passes to pass through automated turnstiles, but there was nobody watching for fare-jumpers. On two medium-distance train routes in Tuscany, we dutifully bought and stamped tickets to go from Prato to Florence and from Prato to Lucca. Nobody looked at those tickets either. By that time my dad was a little upset at having spent over €100 on tickets nobody had bothered to inspect.

Venice takes an interesting approach to tickets on its water buses, called vaporetti. ACTV, the public agency which operates the vaporetti, has a nifty radio-tag system for tickets. You buy a ticket and touch it against a special sensor before boarding. There are also ACTV employees on every boat to help dock and undock at stations, but they don’t actively check tickets. They do sell tickets. “If you board without a ticket,” starts an encouraging note on the ACTV web site, “you must request one from the marinaio (sailor/attendant) at the board platform and before boarding.” Translation: you can pay the normal fare of €6.50 by asking the attendant first, but if he asks you for a ticket and you don’t have one, you have to pay a fine. We were asked to show our tickets on a single vaporetto but without a physical stamp the attendant would have had to scan our cards electronically to see if they were valid. He just looked at them and walked away.

Fittingly, the very last transport we took in Italy was the most stringent on tickets. Alilaguna, a private company, runs frequent water shuttles from places in Venice to Marco Polo International Airport. As we sailed towards the airport, imagine our shock as a conductor took our printed, stamped, €12 per person tickets and actually punched holes in them! Leave it to a private company to properly check that it’s getting fares from its passengers.

Compare this to the roads. We rented an Opel Zafira, a diesel-powered “compact MPV” that snugly fit us all and our luggage. Adam used his laptop with a USB GPS receiver to navigate us out of Rome. There is no single highway that runs through Rome; modern maps show a patchwork of tunnels, boulevards, and bypasses that connect the inner core to the modern ring road and eventually to the A1 autostrada (highway) that runs as far south as Naples and as far north as Milan, over half the length of the Italian peninsula. Once on the autostrada it’s pretty smooth: the roads are in great shape, signage is pretty good, and there are rest stops everywhere. The speed limit is 130 km/hr (about 85 mph) and is enforced about as strictly as are transit fares. We paid for this convenience in two ways: many of the autostrade we took were tolled at rates higher than the turnpikes we’re used to in New York and Pennsylvania, and gasoline is extraordinarily expensive. You want to complain about $4 a gallon? Try €1.50 for a liter of diesel, or about $9 for a gallon. Our little Zafira cost about €64, or about $100, to fill from 1/4 of a tank. With tolls and the rental car cost, it would have been much less expensive to go from point A to point B on a train (though we couldn’t detour to points C and D, as we did en route to Prato).

Once off the autostrade, the real fun begins. Roundabouts are everywhere. Adam’s GPS software can offer directions like “take the 2nd exit,” but there’s little time for judgment about whether the parking lot counts as the “first exit” out of a roundabout. My dad usually likes to complain about too few road signs when he’s in an unfamiliar American city. Italy is the opposite way: there are literally dozens of arrow-laden signs after exiting any highway, erected by governments, hotels, shops, historic districts, and in some rare cases, vandals! We thought we were free to ignore these signs with the GPS to guide us, but our hotel in Prato was only accessible by slavishly following the road signs. We ended up illegally parking about a half mile away (my dad guessed, correctly, that the cops wouldn’t care) and having Gianni, a worker at the hotel, guide my dad to the right parking lot. Gianni suggested that we get around Tuscany using the trains. We did so happily.

Incidentally, if you need to return a rental car in Venice, don’t go to the garage next to the big lighted rental car company signs. Go to the tiny barely-marked garage across the street. Trust me.

Last month I flew out to Providence for my friend Meg’s wedding. (Congratulations to Mike as well, married the same day in Boston; I was unable to attend.) The next day I employed five different transportation means just to get to Kennedy Airport in New York, meeting my parents and brothers in the terminal to board our first flight all together in over 5 years — and our first overseas family trip.

We got a taste of things to come shortly after takeoff. Ignoring all instructions to remain seated, several passengers tried to stand up and walk to the bathrooms well before the seat belt sign was turned off. Delta flight attendants, most of whom spoke English only, could barely stem the tide of passengers who’d apparently spent their waiting time drinking coffee and beer. Once the seat belt sign was actually off, passengers started milling about the cabin like on few other flights. It was like being in some kind of a lounge. Only during final approach, when the lone Italian-speaking flight attendant could instruct everyone in person, did the aisles clear.

Lesson learned: Italians don’t care about rules.