Aelyria Mireiswen wrote:Now, see. . . those are the things that I would have loved to have visited. I had hoped to visit the catacombs, but we did not have the time. Also, Rome was probably the city in which our schedule was tightest (I was chaperoning a group of high school students). We had no chance to explore for ourselves, the way we did in every other city. Perhaps that is why I don't have the connection to Rome the way I do to Florence. I could seriously live in Florence.
I did feel at a disadvantage in Italy because I spoke no real Italian. (My tour director [who grew up in Italy and France] and our Italian bus driver tried to teach me Italian curse words, but I did my best not to remember them.
) It was a change from France where my French wasn't great, but it was good enough to do basic business and to understand what people were saying. Almost everyone was super nice to us, and most spoke English very well. It was a real treat when I would speak to them in French--their eyes would light up, and their smiles would become more warm.
Anyway, some day I would love to go back to Roma and have the the insider's tour, now that I have seen all of the famous monuments.
Ahh, high school students... if there's a more unruly mob of tourists, I have yet to meet it (even the Japanese hordes are more orderly)! But the catacombs are really beautiful... Back at home, I live nearby, so I used to go there often when I was a kid, both to play in the park over the catacombs and to visit the catacombs below. Did you know that they haven't completely explored them yet, and that they suspect all the different catacombs actually join together into a network beneath all of southern Rome? And that when you visit, they warn you not to go alone in side passages because you might get lost and they might never find you?
Yes, unfortunately as a rule Italians don't speak very good English; I'm afraid even though technically we are given English classes since elementary school, most students simply don't understand why they need it, and therefore learn very little. A friend of mine was once giving lessons to a 15-year-old girl, and suddenly the girl asked her why should she learn English, because "nobody speaks it anyway!"...
But despite this, arguably major flaw when dealing with foreigners, most of us are a warm and welcoming people, and this is especially true in central and southern Italy
