And Finally...Some Interesting Italians

I expect my readers are becoming somewhat tired of stories about Italy, so this will be the last one. Here we describe some of the more interesting people we saw in Italy. At many popular gathering places or tourism hot spots, one would find individuals (I suppose you would call them mimes) who were dressed like a statue of some kind and who would stand completely still until someone dropped a coin or two into their cup. Then they would perform in some small way or engage the donor. Here is one we saw near the Ufizzi in Florence.


Police and other authorities were always present. I was never completely clear on whether we were seeing state police, municipal police, carabinieri, or other military officers. There were several distinct uniform types. Sometimes they were simply on foot patrol. We also saw them in various vehicles and at the airport. All had handguns, and a few carried machine guns or pistols of some type. Since this is not something one sees here as readily, it felt a little disconcerting, though we always felt quite safe. At any rate, these two sharply dressed officers were kind enough to pose with Kathie. The subsequent photo was taken at the entrance to a major administrative building in Rome.



We previously mentioned a couple of tours we took. The first introduced us to the ruins and ancient buildings of Rome. Below is our tour guide for this tour. Each tour guide has his or her "flag" of some kind to help the guided tour group keep from getting lost. The interesting thing about this individual was the freedom he took in presenting history and "facts" to us. Kathie and I were frequently in doubt of some of his explanations and stories during. One would assume that a tour company would make sure of the accuracy of the information presented. However, we have researched some of the information presented to us since getting home. As we suspected, this tour guide greatly exaggerated or misrepresented certain things. I'm willing to bet we learned more in the end, just because we were motivated to do more background reading.


At the monument to the unification of Italy is a tomb for the unknown soldier, which is guarded around the clock as shown below. We just missed seeing one changing of the guard. Of course, this reminded me of the many times I saw a similar site and honor guard at Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, DC.


Finally, though I previously posted the photo below, it is worth a new comment or two. This street performer appeared in the Piazza Navona in Rome. He had a whole series of routines that involved dressing up his hands with little puppets, such that his fingers were the arms and legs of the puppets. He could make his "little people" demonstrate all kinds of moods and emotions. For example, he did a famous Charlie Chaplin routine--the Little Tramp. This was just one of the many amazing and quite good street performers and musicians we saw.