A weekend retreat

For his business Rod purchases through a company called Louise & Company. They had invited some of their US Distributors & sales people to a town called Rimini that is on the Adriatic coast about half way down. Rimini is a summer seaside resort town with 1000 hotels along the sandy beach. (more on this later). Rod had made arrangements to hook up with his salesman that planned to be here to tour the SCM factories and tag along for the day. So the whole family decided to make a weekend break for it since Gio had Thur & Fri off of work for the Italy's celebration of 150 years of unification. Besides, it had been raining in Milan for tthe past week and some of us hadnt even left the house for a few days. Rod & I rented a car since there is 6 of us and we followed the Criscione's toward Ravenna-- out first stop on the trip. Rachael & Gio's car
Little Isaac excited to see more of Italia.

We follow Rick Steve's travel advice and seek out suggested hotels. This is Hotel Diana close to the center. The rooms are very small but very comfortable and they come with Italian continetal breakfast of juices, coffee (hot chocolate for us) and pastries along with meat & cheese plate.

The Italian contryside along the road
Driving along the narrow roads of Ravenna. If you are a pedestrian you have to watch closely. This town is big for locas to bicycle around. We loved how crooked this tower is.
We walked around the crowded streets, found an amazing restraunt-- One of the best meals we had experienced.
As we walked around the old town after dinner we found this lit up building down a side street that was open. And let me tell you -- it was amazing. Ravenna is famous for its mosaics-- Art made from small pieces of glass as big as your fingernail that are attached with a cement mixture like tiles. The colors and the way the light hits it is amazing! And many of the pieces in Ravenna were created in the 1st Century-- Only a few years after Christ's death. There are depictions of what these peope believed in and many of the expressions follow my beliefs.
This is in the ceiling of the small building. Inside was a baptisrty. And this art was on the ceiling. The 12 apostles surrounding a depiciton of Christ's baptisim by John the Baptist with Gid the Father to his right and the Holy Ghost symbolised by the dove. We saw many other buildings with amazing mosaic depicitons in the day that we spent in Ravenna and then we drove on to Rimini.