Category: Florence

March 29, 1963 - Leaning.......over

3/29/2011

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From Venice we went to Firenze (Florence] but there was no room in the Hostel. So we went on and got stuck in a snowstorm near Bologna. We drove to Pisa and went straight to the tower. What a sight! It leans 14 feet off center due to slip of land during construction. It was was the perfect place for Galileo to do his experiments on gravity. Even the Cathedral and Baptistry lean, but not like the tower.

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A daily diary of a journey in 1962. Please post comments about where you were then on the Background page.

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1962 was pivotal. This is the background:

It was a year colored by the Cuban Missile Crisis, an escalating involvement in Vietnam, the Berlin Wall and the Cold War with Russia, Civil Rights issues, a nascent space program, Nelson Mandela in prison, Betty Friedan's, The Feminist Mystique, the Beatles, Rolling Stones and the death of Marilyn Monroe.

In the face of all of this, Pat, Judy and I blithely took off for Europe with the intention of traveling through Europe and North Africa until our money ran out. We had a travel guide and a book titled Europe on $5.00 a Day. Since we had all read The Ugly American in preparation for the trip, we thought we were very smart to buy a used Volkswagen with Dutch license plates. We dubbed the car "Louie" since a cute guy from Switzerland named Louie had helped us acquire it.

There was no such thing as a cell phone, a computer, Twitter or Facebook. Our parents didn't hear from us for weeks on end. We wrote regularly, but letters took forever to deliver and we only vaguely knew where we would be next. It was a very cold winter and we followed the sun.

March 29, 1963 - Leaning.......over

1962 was pivotal. This is the background:

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