Southern Italy- full version

Some of this will be repeated from the last post, but this is with details!

We got on the bus and left Florence at 6 am. It was rough, but awesome because we got to watch the sun rise. I'm one of those people who can't sleep once I'm up, so I got to watch the Tuscan countryside wake up. At one point there was mist on the Apennines and the sun rising behind them, and a castle on a hill close to me, and it is probably one of the most beautiful sites I have ever seen. I was on the opposite side of the bus, so I couldn't take a picture, but I don't think I needed to because it is burned in my brain. It was a 6 hour drive down to Naples, and we didn't even stop anywhere before going to Vesuvius. We drove in the bus most of the way up which was one of the most terrifying things ever. Imagine a 55 passenger bus driving up the side of a mountain (which means sharp turns). The bus driver had to continually honk because he couldn't see if people were coming or not and he took up both sides of the road whenever he was turning, which was a lot. Sometimes it even took multiple tries to get around turns. But we had a beautiful panoramic view of Naples, until we got into the clouds. We couldn't see much from the top, not even the inside of the volcano. But its still awesome to say I've been at the top of Vesuvius!! Then we drove about an hour to Sorrento where we stayed in a 4-star hotel! We hadn't eaten lunch so a bunch of us went for a quick lunch at 4 when we had a 3 course meal at 7. We were starving though, so I was still able to eat all of my dinner. The first course was this DELICIOUS cheese-filled crepe. Mom: we're going to find a recipe so I can learn how to make this!! The second course was leg of lamb with some sort of asparagus sauce, which was pretty good. And we had a tiramisu cake like thing for dessert. After that we went for a Limoncello tasting and then walked to a lookout point where we could see all of the bay of Naples.
Saturday was our day on the Isle of Capri. We had a continental breakfast at the hotel, which was the highlight of the morning because it was absolutely delicious and awesome to eat a big breakfast for the first time in a long time! When we got to the ferry it was raining and we had a pretty rocky ride over to Capri. Then we got on another boat and took a tour around the island, and by that point it had stopped raining and seemed like it was clearing, but when we got off back at the marina, it was thundering. Luckily, it cleared up about 30 minutes later and we ended up having a beautiful day! I wandered around with 3 other girls. We checked out some of the streets and found a nice place to eat, and then got gelatto at apparently the best gelatto shop our tour guide Luca has ever tasted. It was pretty good, but I'm not sure about the best. Then we went to the beach for the rest of the afternoon, where I got sunburned on the backs of my legs. oops. It's mostly gone now though! That evening we went to a pizzeria for dinner where we had three different slices and a tasting of different fried appetizers. Pizza order: cheese, then spinach, artichoke and mushroom, and the third one was ham. One of the fried things was fried mozzarella which was so good (mom we're gonna play around with that too).
On Sunday we got to sleep in a little before heading to Pompeii. Pompeii was amazing. It is crazy how this entire city was just lost for so long! It was cool to learn about how it happened and have seen the volcano already and know just how destructive it was. Honestly, from the proximity of the volcano to Pompeii, I'm surprised that the city wasn't more destroyed. The tour took a long time and by the end we were all exhausted and ready for lunch and sitting for 6 hours on the way back to Florence.
Today thus far, I had a midterm in the morning which I most certainly could have done better on, but he only gave us a small amount of room to write and no instructions for how specific to be, so it was a little frustrating. Then we watched a video on the calcio storico, which is the historic soccer game played here in Florence on the day dedicated to St. John the Baptist, which we are going to see on our last day in Florence. It's pretty intense and I'm really excited for it now. In my other class we toured the Medici Riccardi palace and then the inside of the Palazzo Vecchio, which I had no idea was so big!! It took forever and we were all so tired afterwards. Now I have to go prepare a short presentation on the facade of the Santa Croce for tomorrow. Hopefully I'm going over to my aunts house for dinner, which will be awesome because I've hardly spoken any Italian since I've gotten here, and Febrizzio is hopefully going to teach me how to make something amazing! I'll write again tomorrow, but for now I should get to work. Miss you all!!

--Amy