glo GOES

Italy

“They just kind of amazed me,” she says. “(Michelangelo) just started with a block of stone and started chiseling away, and everything is so fine and life-like.”

by Jaclyn Youhana Garver

Donna Kaiser and her husband celebrated their 50th anniversary in 2018 by going on a Hawaiian cruise. It’s the 50th state they’ve visited.

However, they’d never been to Europe, and Kaiser had wanted to go to Italy for her entire adult life. She wanted to visit the Vatican, and she was fascinated by the history.

Then she learned that her church was going, so the two would be traveling with close friends.

“My friend was saying to her husband, ‘Well, Tom will go if you’ll go,’ and I’m saying, ‘John will go if you go,’” said Kaiser.

Well, that worked for Tom and John.

Kaiser traveled with St. Charles Borromeo Catholic Church to Rome, Florence, Siena and Assisi for 10 days in October 2019.

“It’s the cradle of civilization,” she said. “It was just absolutely amazing to me that we were walking on ground around these monuments that were there 2,000-some years ago and even before the birth of Christ. It was pretty awe inspiring that we were there.”

There are a million reasons to visit Italy, but for Kaiser, it was first and foremost a pilgrimage. St. Charles had set it up so its priest could lead mass daily in a different basilica. Kaiser even gave one of the readings.

True to her expectations, Kaiser cites the Vatican and seeing the pope as one of the trip’s highlights. She loved walking the grounds of the Coliseum and the Roman Forum, the plaza in the center of the ancient city that houses some of the city’s most important statues, buildings and monuments.

She also enjoyed Assisi—its quaintness, its cobblestone walks and the hills. And, of course, there was the food. The shopping. The wineries. The museums. Like Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, which is the home of Michelangelo’s David. What most surprised Kaiser about the museum wasn’t just David, but Michelangelo’s unfinished works on display: four male figures that, according to the museum’s website, “give the impression of being trapped in the block of marble in search of a way out of the stone.” Perhaps one of the most surprising things about the trips was the driving: Roads are narrow, and Italian drivers are regularly rated Europe’s worst drivers in surveys. Kaiser’s group traveled in a large tour bus, and she often wondered if it would fit on certain streets, especially when cars would zip around the bus.

“I just don’t think, for my first time in Europe, I could have ever gotten to all the places we went with the ease that we did,” she said. “It was definitely nice to be with that group.” a