ITALY'S GREAT CITIES - 2010

9 days incl. travel, or 8 days from Rome to Rome (ZJ)

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Vacation Overview

This vacation shows you Italy’s most famous cities and landmarks—from St. Peter’s, the Sistine Chapel, and the Colosseum in Rome and Michelangelo’s David in Florence to St. Mark’s Basilica, Doges’ Palace, and the Bridge of Sighs in Venice. Local Guides in these cities will answer all your questions. Also included: a welcome dinner with wine in a Roman restaurant, as well as stops in Pisa to admire the Leaning Tower and in Romeo & Juliet’s Verona to see Juliet’s balcony and the Arena. Enjoy scenic vistas along the Tyrrhenian coast, the Lombardian plains, the flat Po area, the wooded Etruscan Apennine mountain range, and Tuscany’s Chianti wine country. In Venice, a private boat ride and a glassblowing demonstration are included.

Things to see on your vacation: View Vacation Photo Slideshow

A Vacation Story Pisa

"It was the most perfect experiment in the history of science. Holding both a cannon ball and a small musket ball, the 30-something Pisa native Galileo Galilei scaled the steps of his city’s famous Leaning Tower, and held them dramatically over the edge. Eight stories below, the town’s most learned scholars and priests were gathered as observers. They watched as the two balls dropped to the ground at the same speed – disproving, with a single stroke, the ancient idea that objects fall at different rates depending on their weight and size. This archaic concept, which had been espoused by the ancient Greek author Aristotle, had been accepted without question for more than 2,000 years, Galileo’s great innovation was to put it to a practical test of observation. Unfortunately, this famous story is probably not true. Galileo never wrote about it himself – it was recounted in a late biography penned by his secretary, Vincenzo Viviani. Most historians now believe that it was Galileo’s imaginative disciples who invented the Leaning Tower tale in order to make the theory so clear that even a child could understand it. "