Italy: an overview

I just started trying to write a trip report and it's just going to take too long. So I thought I'd write a brief summary of where we went and hope that would satisfy people for now.

Places we went:

• Florence - Duomo, the Duomo Museum, the Bapistry, the Accademia, Santa Croce, the Uffizi Gallery, the Ponte Vecchio, the Medici Chapels, the Straw Market, the Piazza dei Signorina, the Uffizi Loggia, and our own Piazza dei Annunziata.
• Vernazza in the Cinque Terre
  
• Pisa - the Field of Miracles, but we just looked at the outsides of the Leaning Tower and the Duomo before skedaddling. We didn't like Pisa.
  
• Tuscany: San Giminano, Siena, Monteriggiano, Pienza, Volterra. We went into the Duomos of most places.
• Rome: the Campo dei Fiori, the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, the Piazza Novena, the Colosseum, the Forum, Palentine Hill, the Borghese Gallery, St. Peter's, and the Vatican Museum, including the Sistine Chapel.

Things we learned:

• Italians love babies. They passionately love babies. They shower babies with affection. A ate it up.
  
• Carrying your baby gets you special treatment. Places with ridiculous amounts of stairs sent us to the elevator; we were waved through security checkpoints and X-ray machines. I was tapped firmly on the shoulder at the Sistine Chapel and told to follow a security guard. I thought I was in trouble. He walked me over to a bench (most of the Sistine is standing room only aside from benches in one corner), unseated a man, and sat me down.
  
• Most Italians have not seen a baby carried in a wrap and so they're fascinated by it and thrilled to talk to the baby face-to-face. A now smiles when you say, "Ciao, bambino!" to him.
• Packing light is a wonderful thing. We had two carry-on sized bags and a day bag, plus the car seat. That was grand for traveling. I wore a shirt/skirt combo or a dress every day and that was fine.
  
• Those mesh packing cubes that seem like an incredible waste of money are fabulous. Everyone had a cube for their clothes: me, C, A. When you're going from town to town pretty regularly, it keeps you organized and makes the repacking easier. We had some other things in ordinary Ziplock plastic bags, and they were too slippery to make for good packing.
• At some point, you have to stop swabbing everything your baby touches with an antibacterial wipe.
  

It was amazing to have a baby with us in Italy. In the US, I often feel like I'm apologizing for having my baby with me unless it is a patently kid-friendly place, like the Zoo. He yells or squeals in a restaurant and we've got him out of the room quickly.

In Italy, it was like everyone was related to us. Everyone (with one exception in the entire country) was thrilled to see him. He yelled in museums and churches and people still cooed and called him beautiful, asked about his weight, his teething. In Italy, they expected babies to be babies and didn't care when he made noise. It was amazing how much that added to my enjoyment of life. I'm not suggesting the US goes baby-crazy, but it was certainly a refreshing two weeks.