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Travel experiences in Italy:

Being the daughter of former Italians, I had the opportunity to experience Italy differently than most tourists. My parents made sure that we hit all the classic spots, but as they'd already seen these places at some point during their lives, they also wanted to see new things too. This lead to many different adventures, like getting lost in Venice, getting hit on by some Italian teenagers in Rome, and enjoying the most wonderful "gnocchi verdi" in a little trattoria just outside of Trento.

On my childhood trips my parents made sure to do all the classic tourist things, like visiting the Vatican, the catacombs in Rome, taking a gondola ride in Venice, that kind of thing. Sometimes being a kid really helped out, like the time we were at the Vatican when I was 11. We had been walking inside the cupola on our way to the Vatican's roof (tourists can go up top to see all the statues there, and to take in the view of the piazza below, which is well worth the trek) when we were stopped.

Apparently there were capacity issues in the narrow staircase, so we had to wait for the group ahead of us to clear. Now, being only 11, walking up stairs like that was a tad boring, and I must have looked quite bored when the security guard noticed me. He leaned over and spoke to my mother for a moment, which I thought was strange, until she started to smile. He came over to me and asked me to walk to the other side of the cupola and put my ear next to the wall. This seemed like a very strange thing to me, but, being a tad bored, I headed on over. If you've ever seen midnight Mass from the Vatican over Christmas, you'll know that the cupola is rather large, so it took me a couple of minutes to get to the other side.

My sister joined me too because, I found out many years later, my mother had told her what was going to happen, so she wanted to see too. We got to the other side of the cupola, and I leaned towards the wall. And I heard the guard ask me if I liked ice cream. I nearly jumped over the rail when I heard his voice! I was so surprised because the guard wasn't near me at all. My sister explained what happened: the interior of the cupola is a large mosaic, and it conducts sound very well. That was a wonderful experience.

As I got older, we didn't visit as many "classic" touristy places on our summer vacations, but we did see some interesting things. On the trip after I'd read Romeo & Juliet in high school, I wanted to go to Verona and see some of the

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