Violet Sky

Italy! If only this blog existed when we went to Italy the first time, in 2023. That trip was my first time going to Europe, and my first trip out of North America as an adult. It was also the most exciting two weeks of my life, and I have spent each day with some level of pining after Italy since we came home from that trip. Last year, we went to Ireland and Northern Ireland, but this year, we were determined to find our way back to explore more of Italy.

2025 happens to be a Jubilee year for the Catholic church. 2025 was also the year we had enough airline points across various programs, and I was aiming to reduce our costs on the trip by paying for some of the most expensive parts of international trips (airfare!) with points. When I started looking at award travel into Italy, I found that it was sparsely available. I’ve followed an account on Instagram for a while that focuses on booking travel with points, and while her churning and referral business makes a lot of her travel unachievable for me, one piece of advice she gives out frequently is to find the best use of points that will get you into Europe, because regional flights are so cheap that you can take them onto your final destination once you’ve made it to Europe itself. After some searching, I found some very affordable flights on British Airways via Alaska Airlines miles, which landed in Paris. My husband and I have always wanted to go to Paris, so it did not take much for him to convince me that we should take a bite out of our Italy time and take a full day in Paris before heading onto the rest of our trip.

As we were flying British Airways, we of course had a layover at Heathrow. I don’t mind Heathrow as an airport, but the Terminal 5 business lounges are always so packed with people, and the free food is so aggressively mediocre, it’s hard to see what the fuss is about the lounge situation unless you plan on getting drunk for free there. I prefer to navigate airports and public transit sober, so we skipped the free drinks. My status as a One World Sapphire got us into the lounge, but we ended up leaving to find better food after a bit of a rest.

I have to admit, I was a little nervous about Paris. I really love speaking French and listening to French, but French people, and Parisians in particular, have a reputation for being rude to non-native speakers, and I was nervous that they would squash my appreciation for the language by being rude about my low intermediate fluency. My fears were for nothing, however, as everyone in Paris was so nice. In fact, I found myself smiling at strangers because they were smiling at me as we passed or had small interactions. We stayed in a less touristy area right next to the Luxembourg Garden, but even when we were in the thick of the tourist attractions, we were still treated well by everyone.

We stayed at the Hotel Bonsoire Madam, which I found just by clicking around Google maps and seeing what was somewhat centrally located with good reviews. I had booked a Superior Room (their second tier of room, slightly larger than the Classic Room), but when we arrived after a somewhat challenging use of the RER, we discovered that we had been upgraded to the Terrace Room. The first picture above is of our morning coffee the next day, on the terrace.

As we only had one full day to take in as many sights as possible, we woke up, ate a small breakfast that we had cobbled together the night before from an open mini mart, and set out to see some of Paris’ greatest hits. We started with Notre Dame, expecting a long line to get in. While there was an extensive cordoned off queue area, we walked through it quickly as there were almost no people entering at 9:30 am.

Next, we set off to find the Louvre. We weren’t going to have time to go inside, but we wanted to see the famous pyramid. Along the way, we found the only surviving piece of a larger church that was destroyed during the revolution, and ran across our first fun metro sign. Having found the Louvre and its accompanying pyramid, we discovered, while looking for a public toilet, that there’s an underground mall attached to the Louvre, including a McDonalds and some very nice paid public toilets.

Our next stop being the Eiffel Tower, we decided to walk along the Seine to get there from the Louvre. This was a fun walk for several reasons: the bridge art, accented with gold, was beautiful, there was some fun video game art along the walls the whole way, and we recognized parts of the walk from our time watching the French language Netflix series, Furies.

We had considered going up into the Eiffel Tower, but it seemed that the top floors required several hours to get up and down from, so we settled with a few pictures from the base. While the Notre Dame cathedral was much smaller than I expected, the Eiffel Tower was much bigger than I expected.

The Arc de Triomphe was short ride on the RER away, after which it was time to find some lunch. Given that we were in the thick of the touristic areas, we went with an easy restaurant catering to tourists with a woman flagging potential customers down on the sidewalk.

After lunch, we hopped back on the RER and took it back towards our neighborhood. My husband had discovered that there was a street, not too far from our hotel, that specialized in comic book shops, so we were on a quest to find French language comic and non-comic books. We both found a lot that we wanted to buy, but had to restrain ourselves as best possible, since filling your suitcase with books on day 1 of a 16 day trip is not particularly wise.

Our final stop of the trip was the Catacombs. Getting tickets to the Catacombs is notoriously difficult, and it was only a mix of luck and timing that got us ours. On the day that tickets opened for the one day we’d be available in Paris, I logged on in the morning to find all time slots from open until 4 pm sold out. I asked my husband if 4 pm worked for him, and in the 3 minutes it took him to respond to my message, tickets sold out through 6:30 pm. So I immediately bought 6:30 without asking a second time.

The Catacombs themselves were great. We skipped the audio tour option and just wandered through at our own pace, stopping to read the placards and information presented between different sections of the route. It was super cool down there – both in the literal sense, as we were deep underground, and in the metaphorical sense, seeing the stacks and stacks of bones as we walked through.

We did a little more shopping for tourist items (namely, finding a Starbucks to buy their You Were Here series of espresso cups) and headed in for the evening, as we’d had a 30,000+ step day and were heading to Italy the next day.

We took a flight with ITA Airlines out of Orly, both of which were new experiences for us, but it was a positive experience on both parts. The RER took us directly to ORY, which was small enough to be easily navigated. The man checking tickets before allowing people into security greeted us in French, then smoothly switched to Italian when he saw that our destination was Milan. This was the last interaction with me as the primary language option (my husband understands some French, but doesn’t speak much of it), so it was nice to know that I was going to be handing off my language duties to him for the rest of the trip.

The last time we arrived in Milan, it was at the end of a very long day with an overnight flight where neither my husband nor myself were able to sleep. This time, arriving well-rested and entering into a city where we had some familiarity, was a big improvement. Our Airbnb host was still cleaning the unit, but met us there to drop our bags off, and we immediately left to have lunch at the first place we ate the last time we arrived in Milan. Osso bucco with saffron risotto remains our favorite milanese dish.

We decided to wander through one of the more modern areas of Milan. My husband is a fan of Inter Milan, and so it was a fun pilgrimage to go to the team headquarters – though a short pilgrimage, as they turned out to be less than 10 minutes from our Airbnb. We walked through a public park area, and then found ourselves meandering down a district that had lots of shopping and restaurants.

Tucked back from the street with all the shopping was a relatively small church. I love looking up how old things are when we travel in Europe, so I pulled out my phone, only to discover that this was the Parrocchia San Simpliciano, which was commissioned in the 3rd century and completed in the 4th centrury, and built upon what was originally a pagan graveyard. Incredible.

While the Duomo di Milano is my favorite church to date and my favorite landmark in Italy, Sforza Castle is a strong second, and it conveniently is next to one of the Inter Milan team stores. The castle was closing, so we wandered through, took some photos, grabbed some merchandise at the team store, then returned to our Airbnb and had Campari spritzes at the bar next door.

Through a stroke of luck that involved browsing Reddit half-drunk one evening, I stumbled across a new post sharing that a bunch of tickets were available for viewing The Last Supper right at that moment. The Last Supper had been sold out for our dates during our last trip, so I grabbed some morning tickets, giving us our primary activity for the next day. The mural is beautiful, and the experience is highly structured to ensure that everyone sticks to their assigned times and doesn’t go anywhere they’re not supposed to be.

We took another swing by Sforza Castle on our way to the Duomo, enjoying the rich colors of the inside in the daylight, then headed back to the Duomo.

We spontaneously bought tickets to see the inside again, while standing on the sidewalk, though I didn’t take as many pictures as on our last trip. It remains stunning and my absolute favorite church thus far. I had covered shoulders, but thought my mid-thigh shorts might pass the security team – no such luck, I had to buy a €3 cover up before I would be admitted into the duomo.

Afterwards, we went to Navigli. We almost stayed in the Navigli area, as we heard it’s a happening place and thought it might be fun to stay somewhere new, but ended up at the Airbnb from our first trip that we had loved so much. This felt like the right move once we got to Navigli – it was cute, but seemed overhyped, especially the parallels between its canals and those of Venice.

The next day was exciting – time to visit a new country! We were headed to Lugano, which is less than an hour from Milano Centrale, past Lake Como up into Switzerland. We had a nice 10 am train that was set to get us to Lugano just before lunch time, which was perfect, so we headed to the train station, boarded our train, observed some minor confusion as a Japanese group traveling together ended up being on the wrong train (and were asked to get off at the next stop), and read our books for a time.

As we approached the Lake Como stop, the automated announcements asked us to prepare our identification documents. This was the moment that I realized I hadn’t brought our passports, even though we were indeed going to a new country. My first thought was that we could use the photos I had of our passports on my phone. My second thought was that we could see if they even check the passports going into the country – but then I remembered we would have to get back into Italy, since that’s where the vast majority of our trip was taking place. Seeing no other choice, we got off the train in Como, booked a ride back to Milano Centrale, went to the Airbnb, picked up our passports, went back to Milano Centrale, ate a rushed and stressed lunch, booked another train to Lugano, and got on the train, armed with our passports.

They never ended up checking our passports. Not on the way in, nor on the way back out.

(I concluded that I would have been too stressed, imagining us trapped in Switzerland, to enjoy the day trip had we gone ahead without bringing them, so it’s fine that we lost several hours to this mishap)

Anyway, Lugano!

As you exit the train station, it’s hard to be disappointed by this view. Immediately down the walkway is a church, which we (of course) stepped into for a peek.

Winding our way down the hillside to the lakefront, there wasn’t really a bad view. The lake was bustling but not crowded, and we just walked along for a while, enjoying the atmosphere.

We eventually ran out of beach to walk along, and decided to find the funicular I had read about. It was a bit of a walk, about half an hour, but it was along the lake and the scenery wasn’t unpleasant. We arrived less than 5 minutes before the funicular was set to go up – there were actually two, one to take us up the first section of the mountain, and the second to take us up the steeper section of the mountain. At the top, the views were worth the price of admission – approximately USD$70.

We headed back to Milan after an easy dinner at a tourist spot along the main path in Lugano, and packed up for our move to Bologna the next day.

We arrived in Bologna and walked to our Airbnb, which was inside the historic city center. After our usual grocery shopping trip, we set out to see some of the closer-in tourist sites. After peeking into another 13th or 14th century church, we headed down to see the two famous leaning towers in Bologna. The smaller of the tower is at risk of collapsing, so much of the area around them is blocked off while they try to make the repairs before it collapses.

After a dinner at a Tuscan sandwich shop (which was excellent), we continued wandering around town. We came across the unassuming exterior of a church, poked our heads inside, and found more beautiful artistry.

My husband has been reading Italian language comic books for several years now. One of those series, Diabolik, was having an art exhibition in Bologna during our time there. Shortly before we arrived in Bologna, my husband asked me for the address of our Airbnb; after giving it to him, I heard him say, “Oh damn.” Our Airbnb ended up being part of the same series of buildings that used to be a wealthy person’s estate, but now was residences, small businesses, and an art museum. While I haven’t read the comic books, going through the art exhibition made me want to!

The next day, our first stop was to the Seven Churches. This was a single large complex that had started as a temple to Isis, then was converted to a Christian church and underwent several more series of building and expansion throughout the centuries. Each expansion lent another “church” to the Seven Churches. There was a museum with medieval art and artifacts from throughout the church’s time at the end of the designated tour route. It’s still an active church – we were there on a Sunday, and the main worship hall was inaccessible due to Mass being held.

Our Airbnb host had left a booklet of restaurant suggestions, so we made a lunch reservation for one that had some typical bolognese plates, Trattoria La Montanara. The restaurant was adorable and everything we ate there was excellent.

After some rest back at the Airbnb, because Bologna was very hot and humid, we decided to walk up the famous porticoes along Via di San Luca. It was 3.5 miles from whenever my Garmin picked up the signal to when we made it back down to the bottom of the hill. It was a fun bit of exercise to hoof it up the side of the mountain, and the views at the top were worth it. I brought my modest covering from Milan and thus was able to enter the church – this was the only church of the trip that let visitors back behind the pulpit. It was all stunning.

We originally planned on taking a day trip to Parma or Modena, but it was about midway through the trip, the head and humidity in Bologna was draining, and we decided to play it by ear the next day. “Playing it by ear” ended up with us taking half the day to lounge around the Airbnb in the air conditioning, especially once I discovered that the food tours I had half-hoped to do were sold out or unavailable. We spent the morning walking around a newer (by Italian standards) cemetery, then went to the public library in the evening to check out the Roman ruins underneath it.

The next day, we headed to Genoa, which promised to be 10 degrees cooler than Bologna. We were excited by the idea, and even more so after the train ride to Genoa – it was packed with people and stayed very warm as a result.

When we arrived in Genoa, it reminded me a little of Naples – a grimy, noisy port town with mopeds zipping around all over the place. Our hopes of having an easier time with the weather were dashed, as the much higher humidity essentially cancelled out the lower temperature. We checked into our hotel, went in circles online trying to find a restaurant where both of us could eat the food, and ended up at McDonalds when we couldn’t manage to find one that met our criteria and also was open for an early dinner. This McDonalds served me the most fresh chicken nuggets I’ve ever had in my life, so it wasn’t as bad as it sounds.

Afterwards, we headed out to walk around town. The area set back a bit from the waterfront has a variety of 17th century and earlier buildings, as well as some lovely piazzas. The city started as a small, walled city, then built another set of walls as it expanded, then another set of walls as it expanded yet again, and so on, and so forth. We had fun working our way outwards from the innermost set of walls.

The next day, we set out to wander the city some more. We visited the Doge’s Palace, finding very little there to see or do, then meandered over to a neighborhood where rich people had built a series of enormous houses side by side. These houses were now mostly businesses, resulting in some very dramatic and/or picturesque foyers. Many of the alleys in this area were quite narrow, again lending to the comparison to Naples.

Since we typically eat an early dinner by even American standards, much less Italian standards, we find ourselves eating piatti tipici for lunch. We returned to the hotel after our excursions, changed into clothes we hadn’t been sweating into, and walked down to Il Genovese. There, we had fried zucchini flowers (no egg!), trofie al pesto, and a Ligurian rabbit dish. Every single bite was excellent, but the pasta and the rabbit stole the show. If you follow my recipe roundup series, you’ll see that I immediately returned home from our trip and made both dishes.

A big theme this trip was funiculars, and Genoa was no exception. There was a funicular that supposedly took one up to the best views in Genoa, but it was a bit of a hike from near the train station, where we were staying. One of the funicular stations was showing as closed for repairs, but since it was at the bottom of the line, I thought that some of the stations higher up the line might still be open. We hiked for 45 minutes, entirely uphill (Genoa is built up the side of a mountain), only to discover that I was wrong.

On the plus side, we were almost to the top of the mountain at this point anyway, so the view was still pretty good.

The last thing we wanted to see was the waterfront, so I charted us a course back down the hill to the waterfront. There wasn’t much there to do other than a few tourist traps, but I still enjoyed seeing the gates from various time periods still built into the newer buildings, the mural on the side of the prison where Marco Polo was allegedly held captive, visited a church that was striped inside and out, and ate some focaccia alla genovese.

The next day, we headed to the train station to move onto Turin. We intended to drink our second espresso shot of the day inside the station, but were cutting it close time-wise and headed straight to the platform without thinking. Luckily, the platform also had an espresso vending machine. Very Italian.

After checking into our Airbnb in Turin, we bee-lined for one of our favorite discoveries from the last trip to Turin, the Centro Palatino. This is a newer indoor market that happens to have the best vegan pistachio gelato my husband has ever had – I fee very mediumly about pistachio ice cream, and I have to agree that this one is excellent. It was also a fun milestone for my husband, as the last time we had visited this same gelato shop, his Italian had been at a much lower level. This time, the transaction was very easy for him. The market construction also exposed some 18th century ice storage rooms, which had been covered and forgotten for decades. Unfortunately, they were covered the last time we visit, and closed to the public this time. Maybe next time.

We walked around some more, enjoying the city core as we had the last time, and then retired to our top floor Airbnb to enjoy the sunset. The combination of 18th century architecture and the Alps looming in the distance made every night’s sunset a beautiful show.

We were late enough in the trip at this point that we were considering what sort of shopping we had left to do. We wanted to find my husband some more Italian language comic books, and we hadn’t bought our daughter a souvenir yet, so we decided to do an activity in the morning and then do the rest of our shopping in the afternoon. Our morning activity was going to the Lavazza museum, which was quite interesting, but would have been much more interesting if they had given us our espresso shots at the beginning of the self-guided tour, rather than at the end. We decided that we were tired of looking at menus online, and bought some ingredients for an easy pesto pasta dinner at home. Cooking into the tiny Airbnb kitchen was illuminating – if we ever move to Europe, a large kitchen will be essential for me.

While we had immediately returned to our favorite Piedmontese restaurant on the first day, Le Vitel Etonée, I wanted to try another place with piatti tipici. I found Ristorante Consorzio, which is part of the Michelin guide, and made a reservation for lunch on our final full day in Torino. There, we tried anchovies three ways (all excellent), the best risotto I’ve ever had in my life, and extremely tender beef cheeks with mashed potatoes. We split all the dishes and found that it was plenty of food for two people. The risotto was risotto alla bergese and is on my shortlist of dishes to recreate from the trip.

The last time we had visited Torino, I had desperately wanted to visit the Basilica of Superga, which is set atop a hill overlooking the valley that the city sits in. Getting up and back is a multi-hour venture, however, and I had abandoned the idea given we were only spending about 6 hours in Torino the first time. This time, we took a tram to the funicular station, then a funicular up to the top. The funicular goes to the top once an hour, then returns once an hour, leaving approximately 10 minutes after it drops off its latest passengers. This gives you a little over an hour minimum on the basilica grounds.

Back in the 1700s, the Piedmontese duke was fighting an allied Spanish/French force, with the help of the Austrians. He came to the top of the hill to survey the battlefield, and prayed to God that he would win the war. If he did, he promised that he would build a church in honor of the Virgin. He ended up winning the war, and kept his promise to God, resulting in the Basilica of Superga. He later became a king, then abdicated in favor of his son, then tried to reclaim power from his son years later. His son threw him in jail for the attempt, where he eventually died. His remains are buried on the grounds.

This church was probably my favorite church on the inside, even though it was less luxurious than some of the others we’ve seen. I particularly loved the grey and white stone used as pillars and elsewhere.

Back in the 1940s, a plane carrying the Torino soccer team crashed into the back of the mountain housing the basilica, killing everyone aboard. A memorial to the team can be found on the backside of the basilica.

We finished off the day with some focaccia for dinner from Mercato Palatino, and enjoyed the sunset one last time from our rooftop patio.

Now, originally we were slated to fly back home out of Milan, making Turin a sensible last stop of the trip, being only an hour away from Milan by train. Our British Airways award flight was originally leaving at 11 am. A few months before the trip, they cancelled the 11 am flight and put us on the 7 am flight – this was vexing, as someone who always shows up 3 hours early for an international flight, but we decided to deal with it. Later, I discovered that our premium economy seats had been unassigned. When I called to find out what was going on, we were told that our seats were under airport control and we should get to the airport even earlier to sort it out.

Looking at ExpertFlyer, I saw that business class and premium economy were entirely sold out; other research showed that airport control often happens when a flight is oversold, so I began to worry that we were in the process of being bumped from our premium economy seats. I cancelled the flight and found another award flight, this one on American airlines, leaving from Naples the same day. This had the added benefit of giving us a day in Naples, which I had enjoyed quite a bit on our last trip.

We stayed at the Palazzo Caracciolo Naples, which I cannot recommend in the slightest. If it had been for more than one night, we probably would’ve considered eating the cost of moving to a different hotel, but we dealt with it for the single night. Despite this, we still enjoyed roaming around the historic center of Naples, buying comic books from the used book sellers near Piazza Dante, and eating a fried pizza. The energy of Naples is unlike any other city I’ve been in, and while it’s a grimy port town like Genoa, it’s more chaotic, louder, and more difficult to manage. I love it nonetheless.

We had one last espresso standing up at the bar in the Naples airport, and found ourselves flying back home. Just like the last trip to Italy, the entire thing was magical – there’s something about Italy that really vibes well with my husband and I. That being said, we also really enjoyed our side trips to Paris and Lugano, so much so that we’re planning on doing a trip through France next summer. Southern Italy will remain out of our grasp for the next few years, but I have no doubt that we’ll be back someday soon.