Saving the Worst for First

…Or, You Are Going to Bed Without Supper, Young Lady!

 Padua (Padova), Italy  Day 8.  First day in rental car.  Home of St Anthony and the Scrovegni Chapel.  The day I was most looking forward to.

So I spent 2 weeks in Italy.  I’m going to tell you about each and every day there.  But then I realized, there is no rule saying I have to tell you each and every day in chronological order.  I can tell it in the order I want.  My Blog, My Rules!

So we had one Bad Day on our trip.  Granted, a bad day in Italy is better than a good day at work.  No one got injured, no one got arrested, we weren’t in a car accident, we weren’t robbed….It wasn’t a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.  It just was us not at our best.

(Pausing here so you can all say “wah-wah! Poor Denise had a bad day in Italy!)

 

One bright spot in the day was the rental car!  We decided to pick up our car in Venice.  But as Venice is a pedestrian town, we thought we would sign up for it in Venice and have to take a van to somewhere deep in the countryside to pick it up.  Nope, we got our actual car right there in Venice.

Okay, it was by the train station, and we immediately drove out of town, but still…

And it was a Fiat Panda!  Cool car, with 4 doors, and a trunk big enough for our bags.  It was pretty comfy and BF said it had some zip to it.

 

Now, back to the doom and disaster…..

One of the things the Blog Fodder (BF) dislikes the most is not knowing exactly, precisely where he is going.  And as I am the appointed Instigator, it is usually my fault when he doesn’t know.

 

One of the things I dislike the most is after having said something one hundred million times, not being believed.

I was fairly organized on this trip.  I had my binder with tour information.  I had a big map of Italy.  I had our apparently useless in Italy Garmin GPS.

What I didn’t have was any kind of specific instructions on how to get to Padua.  I was mostly relying on information from Rick Steves Italy Guide book, and it really only gave directions if you were taking a train to Padua.

 

NOTE TO SELF:  Next time, stay an extra night in Venice and take the train to Padua.

 

I may have mentioned this fact to the BF once or twice.  Or maybe one hundred million times.  I mentioned as far out as six months and as close in as that morning.

I was completely, utterly and much more than normal clueless on how to get us into Padua.

But BF was apparently feeling cavalier, and said “How hard can it be?”

Let me tell you, it was hard!  Really, really, really hard!

To make a long story short, we followed the signs for the Basilica.  We followed the signs for the Centro of town.  We followed the signs for Parking.

And BF was in the wrong dang lane every time!

 

But eventually, we found a parking lot.  Phew! 

Did I mention I really needed to find a bathroom at this point?

However, the lovely attendant told us we didn’t want to park there, we wanted to circle around town again, and park over there.  Sigh!

By this point, a few swear words may have been uttered.  Possibly even by me!

So we circled, we found the lot (eventually) and we parked.  We then stared at the parking payment machine to try to figure out how in the world we pay!  Luckily, a lovely lady explained to us in Italian, that we pay as we exit.

We then hiked to the BIG church we passed several times.  As it turns out, it was not St Anthony’s

So after some map consulting and some local asking, we were on our way to St Anthony’s Basilica.

After a brief potty break…yup, one of those kind of potties!

 

Just to let you know, Saint Anthony is my absolutely favorite Saint.  It might be that I just like saying St Ant’ny, it might be that he was a talker, but he is on the top of my Saint list.  This will get me into trouble later, when we get to Assisi.

We entered the Basilica (no photos allowed) and were awed by the grandeur.  Those 13^th century Italians know how to put on a show.  We went to the Treasury Chapel and saw artifacts, including St Ant’ny’s jaw bone and tongue.  We circled St Ant’ny’s tomb.  It was peaceful, it was uplifting.

 

We then left and found our hotel.  I booked us in Al Santo, which is a more modern hotel.  We had a nice lunch at the attached restaurant and took a short nap.  Our room had a view of Saint Ant’ny’s Basilica, not that we looked at it.

 

 

 

I woke up with the mother of all headaches!

But, I had arranged for us to enter the Scrovegni Chapel!  They only let small groups of 25 enter at a time for 15 minutes.  I was not missing that.

What?  You’ve never heard of it?  Really?

I hadn’t either until I was doing my research.  It was built as an apology by a young man who wanted his father to get to heaven.  Dad was involved in usury, which was frowned on at the time.  So son built the chapel in the early 1300’s and had Giotto paint it. 

Giotto was considered the first painter who took art from Medieval to the Renaissance. 

 

 

And anything with limited availability gets my attention! 

We were instructed to show up an hour early to get our tickets.  We used the time to visit the museum.  It had a lot of more recent art, like only 200-300 years old, but also had the original cross from the chapel.

 

When our time came, we went to the door of the chapel.  They let us into a glassed in room, where we sat for 15 minutes in air conditioning to dehumidify, and watched a film on the creation of the chapel.

The doors then opened, and we were allowed in.

The paintings were exquisite.  The expressions were moving.  They were arranged like a cartoon strip, with boxes that told the story.  One row was the story of Mary’s parents, then Mary, then Jesus.  The end panel was a huge painting of the Last Judgment.  We brought binoculars so that we could see the paintings on the top.  No photos were allowed, so we spent our 15 minutes just absorbing the beauty.

Sigh!

 

Then, after this beautiful, peaceful experience, we had to trudge back to the hotel to find out where we could park, then back to the dang parking lot.  BF got into a big Italian yelling match with another car while trying to exit.  I kept thinking about the rule in physics where two bodies, like cars, can’t occupy the same space at the same time.  But we avoided accidents, found the free parking street, re-found the hotel with only a minor break down on my part.

And by this point, I was drained and took several aspirins and went to bed, without supper!  We didn’t even get gelato that day.

 

And it was apparently such a bad day that neither of us took a single picture of Padua!

Fortunately, the rest of the trip went smoother, and we wound up having a pretty special day, regardless.