Today was full of travel, but we still had some time for sightseeing in a new region of Italy! This morning we said farewell to Tuscany and departed Montecatini Terme for Vicenza in the Veneto region. Vicenza is about 45 minutes west of Venice, and starting today, we will spend our last few days exploring different towns in the Veneto region including Venice! The bus ride from Montecatini Terme to Vicenza took about four and a half hours, but that included a thirty-minute stop at a service station to get lunch items. Once we arrived in Vicenza, we had about 45 minutes until our guided tours, so we had free time to explore some of the city on our own.
I knew absolutely nothing about Vicenza when we arrived, but the first thing I noticed was the architecture. From towers to churches, the architecture in Vicenza seemed extremely ornate and even oversized for a town of only 100,000 people today. My intuition about the architecture turned out to be correct, as most of the iconic buildings in Vicenza were designed by Andrea Palladio (one of the world’s most influential architects, the term “Palladian” is about his style). Palladio designed a total of 23 buildings in Vicenza, and a handful of them including the Basilica Palladiana and Teatro Olimpico (Olympic Theater) are in Vicenza. The walking tour focused on seeing several of his works throughout the city, and even though the weather was overcast, the buildings were still wonderful to see. Towards the end of the tour, we stumbled across what I would describe as the antithesis to Palladio’s marvelous work in the city when we found a cheesy American-themed burger shop. Their crowning decoration was a massive burger chair (photo below), so I posed in it and enlisted an underclassman to get my picture! In retrospect, I should’ve valued posing in front of Palladio’s buildings a bit more than on a burger chair. Thankfully, Palladio also has several masterworks in Verona and Venice that I’ll see in the next few days, so I’ll have more opportunities.
Speaking of American things, for our final leg of the trip we’re staying in a Best Western on the outskirts of Vicenza. After we checked into the hotel we had a great welcome dinner this evening at a nearby restaurant featuring grilled veal with potatoes and string green beans in a cream sauce with tiramisu as the dessert. Tomorrow, we will head to Verona in the morning for a tour of the city, and then in the evening, we have our final concert of the trip in Asiago! This is a slightly shorter blog than usual, but due to the long travel time today and limited time spent in Vicenza’s city center, I don’t have more to relay from today. Thank you for reading, and please stay tuned to hear about our final travels in the Veneto region over the next two days!
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