Arrived in Italy

Note: These posts about Italy were made after I came back to the United States.

My Northwest flight arrived in Rome's Leonardo da Vinci Airport (Fiumicino) at around 10:30am. The food wasn't as good as Japan Airlines, but each seat did have video on demand (whereas on JAL, there each movie was on a separate channel and continually replayed). There was also a networked trivia game, but only a handful of people played.

At around 1pm, we left the airport to go to the Starhotel Michelangelo which is located a couple blocks from the Vatican. There, we met our tour director, Igor Spinelli, and checked into our rooms. Since we had a little free time before having to meet back at 5pm, my father and I walked over to St. Peter's Square to look around.

After the meeting at 5pm where we met the rest of the group (46 people total on the tour) and Igor went over some things, we took a bus into the city for our welcome dinner. Just about all the dinners on the tour had four courses. Normally this consisted of a antipasto (cheese, cold cuts such as prosciutto ham, etc), a pasta dish (occasionally containing different types), a meat dish (which was often veal or pork and sometimes fish), and a dessert. Tonight, dinner consisted of an antipasto of cold cuts (ham, salami, etc.), tomato bean pasta soup, some sort of cheesy pasta, thin cuts of pork and pan fried potatoes, and peach and strawberry gelato.

A continental buffer breakfast was included for free each day, but all lunches were on our own.