FROM THE COLOSSEUM TO THE EIFFEL TOWER - 2010

11 days incl. travel, or 10 days from Rome to Paris (HFF)

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Vacation Overview

Discover Europe with your family on this fun-filled vacation! Begin in Rome with guided sightseeing that visits the Vatican Museum, Sistine Chapel, St. Peter’s, and the Colosseum, where you get a family picture with a gladiator (if available). On to Pisa’s Leaning Tower, then the spa resort of Montecatini for an overnight. In Florence, see Michelangelo’s David, the cathedral, the Baptistry’s “Gate of Paradise,” and sculpture-filled Signoria Square. Enjoy a pizza party lunch at a local pizzeria and learn how they are made! Enter Venice by private boat, create your own Venetian mask, take a vaporetto ride, and enjoy guided sightseeing that includes St. Mark’s Square, Doges’ Palace, and the Bridge of Sighs. Continue to charming Lake Maggiore, cross Simplon Pass, and ride a cogwheel mountain train to Zermatt at the base of the Matterhorn. Spend a night in Montreux on Lake Geneva, then travel to Lausanne and ride the high-speed TGV train to Paris. Guided sightseeing includes Notre Dame Cathedral and a bird’s-eye view of the city from the top floor of the Eiffel Tower—an unforgettable vacation!

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Extend Your Vacation in London by Eurostar Train (HFFT)

Things to see on your vacation: View Vacation Photo Slideshow

A Vacation Story Eiffel Tower

Imagining Paris without the Eiffel Tower is like London without Big Ben or San Francisco without the Golden Gate Bridge. But no sooner had the architect Gustav Eiffel beaten his 700 competitors in the design competition for the 1889 Centennial Exposition, celebrating a century since the French Revolution, than a vocal outcry began to halt construction of the edifice. Three hundred famous French artists and writers signed a petition in the newspaper “Le Temps” denouncing Eiffel’s radically modern design as “useless and monstrous,” a blight upon the elegant fabric of the City of Light. Others critics were even more vicious, describing the proposed tower as a “tragic street lamp,” a gymnasium apparatus…incomplete, confused and deformed,” “a giant ungainly skeleton,” “a half-built factory pipe,” “a carcass” and even “a hole-riddled suppository.” Nature-lovers argued that it would disturb the flight patterns of Parisian birds. Even as the iron lattice began to rise, Parisians continued to refer to it by the less-than-flattering nickname, “the metal asparagus.” Of course, no sooner had the tower opened in 1889 than the rabid criticism evaporated.