Rome is one of my favorite cities – miles of black cobblestone streets winding through burnt orange and red aged stucco buildings, endless options for pizza, pasta, gelato, and plenty of people walking the streets, touring the historical areas and dining outside. After completing a Carnival Magic...

On my Carnival Magic tour, the ship stopped in Naples, Italy. There’s plenty to do in this port – you could choose to spend time in Capri, or the towns on the Amalfi Coast. But I decided to go to Pompeii, because I had always been fascinated by the doomed city in the shadow of Mt. Vesuvius.  The...

On our second port stop, the island of Sicily, off the coast of Italy – I took my first Carnival Magic excursion. Taormina is a walled city which sits high upon a hilltop, about 45 minutes south of the port city Messina.  While a large part of Taormina was built in the 13th century, the two gates...

While cruising on the Carnival Magic a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to walk around the port city of Messina, Sicily for a couple of hours after returning from an excursion to Taormina.  These are a some of my favorite pictures from my short jaunt.         This...

  Photo courtesy of Creative Commons By Marla Cimini, Contributing Writer Visiting Italy is always a thrill, no matter how many times you’ve strolled across the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, devoured a gelato in Sorrento, or tossed a coin into the magical Trevi fountain in Rome. But some of my...

I’ve been on sailboats before. But I had never been on a big cruise ship until a few weeks ago, when I joined the Carnival Magic for its inaugural cruise through Europe. The 9-day cruise through the Mediterranean started in Venice, where I spent several hours exploring the sunken city’s...

The theme for this week’s Photo Friday is NIGHT.  Pictured is a late night photo of an angel on the bridge leading over over to Castel Sant’Angelo (Castle St. Angel) – in the background is St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican.  

As I’ve written before, I’m not religious. But when we found ourselves in Rome during Easter Week in 2009, I figured we’d go all out and attend Mass at the Vatican (plus I figured that seeing the Pope would score enough points with my Catholic mother-in-law to get me in her good graces...

My favorite building of all time is the Pantheon, in Rome. I’m not sure why I’m drawn to it so much. Maybe it’s because it’s one of the oldest monuments of the Roman Empire that’s still left standing. Or maybe it’s that after more than 2,000 years, the Pantheon’s...

We went to Rome in April on a work trip, mostly so I could work on a story pegged to Dan Brown’s book Angels & Demons. Read the story here. We were in the Eternal City for five nights before heading up to Tuscany. I must say, we packed a lot into those five days. This was my third trip to Rome...