After a brief stop in Verona, we travelled onwards on our way to
Shakespeare's other contemporary Italian city - Venice.
We arrived in
Venice as the sun was setting, so after settling in to our hotel, we
headed out as a group to a nearby restaurant for my birthday. Oh yeah,
it was my birthday. Did I forget to mention that?
Here's something I've learned from 2 years on the road - if a city has a claim to fame, however loose, they will try and milk it for all it's worth. Whether it's the Hans Christian Andersen museum in Odense, Cong's giant statue of John Wayne, or the Tolkien branding over all of New Zealand, it's true all over the world.
However, few cities have a longer or more enduring claim than Verona: the setting of Shakspeare's (arguably) most famous play, Romeo and Juliet.
If you ask me, no trip to Rome is complete without two things. Fresh
pasta, and a visit to the Vatican City. So, having made fresh pasta (and
eaten plenty more in the city), we spent our last day in Rome at the
Musei Vaticani.
This was a huge day for me - I've been fascinated with the Vatican City
and wanted to visit it for basically as long as I can remember. I love
visiting the holy sites of different religions, and the Vatican is
probably the holiest site for over a billion people worldwide. On top of
that, the little independent nation inside Rome is also home to some of
the world's largest and rarest art and artefact collections - and as a
pair of history nerds, the chance to see even a tiny fraction of that
collection was too good for us to pass up.
If there's one thing I knew about Rome before coming, it was this: Rome is a mecca for foodies. And, for the most part, this has proven true - we've had so much excellent pasta and pizza while we've been here. Too much pizza, in fact - and yes, such a thing is actually possible!
As a chef, though, I wanted to do more than just eat. Finding a cooking class is easy, finding a class that works with locally sourced ingredients and uses traditional cooking methods is far more challenging. Luckily we stumbled upon Convivio.
They are a small family run business (just Australian expat Sally and her Italian husband Guido), and they run private (or very small group) hands-on cooking classes, rather than just demonstration, and best of all they do all this from their olive grove-adjacent home in the medieval city of Toffia just outside of Rome.
