Or so I thought.

Let's pause a moment and take a step back. I mentioned in a previous dispatch that travel in the Middle East seemed to sensitize my eyes to color; that traveling through mile after mile of featureless desert had primed our appreciation for any oasis of color we happened to stumble upon: the red bluffs of Wadi Rum, the bright tomb walls of Egyptian kings.

Well, "featureless desert" is an apt metaphor for Middle Eastern food as well. The food isn't bad or bland, it is just unchanging and monotonous. From Cairo to Istanbul, the variations are small. All dishes are lamb or chicken (Muslims don't eat pork) served with rice. The rice tastes like lamb, the lentil soup tastes like lamb, the chicken tastes like lamb. In Syria, for some reason, the lids of soda cans even smelled like lamb. The style of flat bread varies here and there and in Turkey you eat doner sandwiches instead of felafal for lunch, but other than a few isolated deviations the food is unmentionable, neither exceptionally good nor exceptionally bad. Dinner wasn't something we dreaded, just nothing to get excited about. Like watching a re-run of Friends for the third time.

So after three months wandering in this culinary desert my taste-buds were an empty canvas, thirsty for any color. It was in this state of gustatory despair that we boarded our Alitalia flight from Istanbul to Rome.

The plane took off and I settled into my usual travel regime of reading, writing, and sleeping. I didn't pay much attention to as the flight attendants came down the aisle with lunch until I heard Sarah gasp audibly. I looked over and she was staring with an open mouth down at her tray. Dominating the tray, dwarfing all the other items, was a HUGE chocolate tort. The thing was gigantic. The shrink-wrapped sandwich and the iceberg lettuce salad were tucked around the edges. I think Sarah was afraid to pick up her fork for fear it was just a mirage. I thought maybe I should hold her hand and comfort her, the shock was that extreme.

I asked for a vino rosso (practicing my italiano with what I thought was a pretty good accent until I saw the flight attendant stifle a laugh) and even though it had a twist-off lid it was infinitely better than any Syrian red on the market.

But that wasn't the end. Next came the coffee. Real Italian coffee. It was the kind of coffee that even when you order it black comes with that creamy foam of Pure Coffee Goodness swirling across the top.

It had come as quite a shock when I left Seattle last year to discover that for most of the world "coffee" is synonymous with "Nescafe" (instant coffee). I tried choking the stuff down during the first few weeks of our trip, but by the time we reached China I had given it up altogether, switching instead to tea. This lasted a few months, but like a nicotine addict I couldn't stay off the stuff for long, and soon I began dabbling with Nescafe, the only form of the drug available. I told myself it was real coffee as I forced it down, and by the time we reached the Middle East I was actually beginning to like it. In Syria I was pounding three or four cups a day, swirling it around in my mouth like an expensive Cabernet, thinking it was the best coffee I had ever tasted. I continued deluding myself throughout Turkey, where I even convinced myself that the rancid Nescafe knock-off they serve on those long bus rides was eminently drinkable.

But all that came crashing down on my Alitalia flight, when, like a man who's strayed from Jesus and is born again with a flash of divine inspiration, I caught my first glimpse of real coffee. So creamy. The deep dark smell of nuts and chocolate. That taste -- oh, the taste! -- it nearly brought a tear to my eye. I was sold on Italy and I wasn't even there yet.

Italy has a bad reputation among those of us who see things through an orderly northern European perspective. You hear so much about its corruption and inefficiencies and postal strikes. I expected the trains (if they were running at all) to be late, but in fact our connections were seamless. A high speed train whisked us from the airport into central Rome, then another train zipped us right up to Florence in under two hours. It was an odd feeling on that train, not being the center of attention. Usually when I Sarah and I are on public transportation, we are the Main Event. Whether on a Syrian bus or a Chinese train, us big white westerners stick out like Larry Bird in a Volkswagen. Our fellow passengers spend most of the ride staring at us or talking to us or sharing their food. But here, in Italy, we were just like everyone else and the other occupants were far more concerned with their cell phones and cigarettes than with us.

At the train station in Florence we hit our next wave of culture shock when we were forced to stand in line for a taxi for half an hour. We were used to a vast over-abundance of service providers, of being swarmed by touts selling rides and hotels and tours. But here in Florence it is the services in short supply, not the tourists. A favorite theme of world-travelers is to whine about the constant hassle of dealing with touts, but the flip side is you always get a cheap ride and a nice room, people bidding for your business.

Florence has some of the world's greatest art collections. The Uffizi gallery is the museum of Renaissance art, priceless sculptures like Michaelangelo's "David" crowd every piazza, and architecturally stunning cathedrals are jammed along its narrow streets. There are gardens and palaces. Historical sites. Monuments to poets and painters. Elaborate tombs of the merchant princes. Florence has enough cultural fodder to turn Randy Moss into Walt Whitman.

Yeah, all that's great, but for Sarah and I it was a just a glorified way to occupy time between meals. Sure I saw Boticelli's "Birth of Venus," but more importantly I had a maiale di griglia that could make a Muslim cleric think twice about that whole 'no pork' thing. Mornings were silky Italian coffee taken with the locals at a marble bar, slamming little cups of espresso. Lunches were wood-fired pizza or salami and local cheese or pasta. Dinners were multi-coursed marathons of culinary decadence. Throw in some cheap Chianti, some tiramisu, a gelato here and there . . .

Florence was swamped with more tourists than we've seen anywhere else on this trip. Many were Americans, which was something we weren't used to, and the backpackers were less the Aussie and Kiwi variety and more often US college students clutching a beer in one hand and a Let's Go in the other. Lines outside museums stretched into two- or three- hour waits. We managed to get into the Uffizi by getting up early and arriving 45 minutes before it opened, but even that didn't eliminate all the problems; I got in a yelling match with the leader of a Japanese tour group after she marched her group of 40 right up to the front of the line because those of us who had a arrived earlier were sitting rather than standing in a manner she thought made up an official queue.

Miraculously, the brilliance of Florence shone through its elbow-to-elbow crowds. I can't think of another city in the world that is so sublimely historic, through and through, without any modern glass or concrete monstrosities to shatter the mood. We climbed the Duomo one afternoon, and from the balcony high atop the dome we looked out over the red tile roofs and twisty medieval streets. The town is surprisingly small. If you were so inclined, you could probably walk from one end of the central district to the other in just fifteen or twenty minutes (though with all the temptations along the way like coffee bars, gelati, and picturesque town squares walking that quickly is nothing more than a hypothetical "what-if"). We will be back some day. I will come back, though perhaps in the cold drizzle of February when a few of the tourists have been scared away.

We had arranged to meet my parents in Rome where we had just a day and a half to pack in as many sites as possible before heading further south to a villa we had reserved in Calabria. Florence exudes a sort of quiet elegance, but Rome is loud and brash. The traffic is fierce (in Florence, cars are forbidden from most of the central area) and all the buildings look like they've been super-sized. The Pantheon, St. Peters, The Coliseum -- they are over-the-top big, designed to impress, and impress they certainly do.

The Sistine Chapel is one of those cliche sites that you hear so much about you expect to be underwhelmed by. We arrived early to get in line, made the long march through the Vatican Museum, descended a narrow stairway, and finally walked through a small door emerging into the front of the chapel itself.

As with Italian cuisine, my first impression was colored by my three months in the Middle East. Muslim law forbids any human or animal representation in art, so mosques and palaces utilize geometric design, colored stone, and pattern tile, but they are entirely devoid of portraits and statues and other images of people or animals. Italy, however, and the Sistine Chapel in particular, exhibits the antithesis of this aesthetic. The Catholic churches we toured in Florence felt ridiculously packed with bodily forms: rows of saints, frescoed ceilings, tombs with statues. Martyred faces staring down for everywhere.

The Sistine Chapel doesn't have statues or tombs, but Michealangelo's frescoes are an explosion of fleshy humanity. The ceiling is painted with scenes from the Old Testament, and it is crowded with the usual parade of prophets and saints and muses and angels. But it is his "Last Judgement," a massive work that covers the entire front of the chapel, that grabs your attention. The wall is painted a velvety glowing blue, and popping off the wall like hundreds of living people are a flood of naked bodies being cast into hell or raised into heaven. It looks more like a snapshot of a mosh pit at a Limp Bizkit concert than a composed portrait. It is all chaos and madness, too big to take in as a whole. You have to look at the individual forms, each bursting with its own struggle. Like so many of the "Great Sites" -- Angkor, Petra, The Great Wall -- the Sistine Chapel was different than I expected, but no less impressive.

Leaving the chapel we saw that the line to get in had grown. And grown. I know my way around a long line (after all, I've camped out for concert tickets and I've survived Egyptian customs) but this was the longest line I have ever seen in my life. It stretched all the way from the entrance of the Vatican Museum, south to the corner of Vatican City, and west to St. Peters. It's not often you see a line that stretches 1/4 of the way around an entire country.