New Year's and Alberobello, Italy

Let's face it, I'm officially bad at blogging recently! Since New Year's we've been away almost everyday this month and I simply have not had anytime to update everyone on what we're doing...I'm going to attempt to blog a lot in the next two weeks to make up for it! Let's start with New Years and our trip to Alberobello, Italy :)

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New Years in Naples in nothing short of incredible- I've never seen such amazing fireworks go on an on like they do here. Karl and I have a great advantage in that our house sits on top of a huge volcano, so we get all the best panoramic shots of the festivities. If you've ever seen pictures from our house (or been to visit), you know you can see all the way out to the islands and on New Years you can see fireworks going off all the way across the bay and out to the islands! We were going to leave for our trip on the 30th, but Karl didn't want to miss the show!

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It is kind of hard to see, but all those lights across the Bay are actually fireworks!

Happy 2009! On January 1, all three of us headed out for our first Italian vacation since Parker was born! From the recommendation of a friend, we headed to the southeast region of Italy to a small town, Alberobello. This has to be one of my new favorite places in Europe- the town was breathtaking and the people were so wonderful (they were calling us by name on day 3- most Italians can't pronounce Parker's name, so they just call him "angelo" which means angel). The town is made up of houses called trulli which are over 500 years old on average. There are many theories behind the origin of the design. One of the more popular theories is that due to high taxation on property, the people of Puglia created dry wall constructions so that they could be dismantled when inspectors were in the area. They have conical roofs and are suprisingly spacious inside! It was pretty chilly, so we always had to bundle the little one up!

These are some of the famous trulli with the paintings on the roofs.

The trullo church.

Our trullo for four days :)

The town in miniture- it's not a very large city as you can tell from the few streets.

While on this trip, we went on a zoo safari in Fasano...check back for some of the most amazing pictures we've had from a trip here in Europe!