My wife and I recently went to Rome for a few days and then Slovenia. It was awesome! In the past I’ve written walls of text with a few pics. Ain’t nobody got time for that! This time I’ll focus on the pics.

The tradition of setting up the plant auto-watering contraption before leaving:

They say you haven’t truly arrived in Europe until you’ve drank a tiny and bitter coffee with your fingers up in the air:

Sfogliatella! I’m told this gesture means something extremely offensive and specific in Italian:

this is where they held the first zorb ball battles:

Lots of examples of ancient graffiti. Apparently apples were extremely cool:

they had a floor rebuilt over half, so you could see the chambers below where they had rooms and the animal trap doors that would surprise open up:

Hieronymous Bosch, 2025 (colorized):

I recognized this rock-in-a-tree sculpture as the same artist who had one at Brown where we went to grad school! I guess he has a thing for rocks in trees.

This was an awesome fountain, the Fountain of Four Rivers by Bernini in Piazza Navona:

apparently each of the guys represents one of the rivers of the Ganges, Nile, Danube, and… River de la Plata. One of those is not like the other, but I guess they wanted a new world river under papal authority, which limited their options.

One thing I like a lot about Rome is that it’s been lived in continuously for ages, and the signs are everywhere. People have constantly been recycling and modifying older stuff. For example, these arches in the pantheon originally would’ve been either windows or nooks (for statues/etc), but at some point they were just filled in with more bricks, to make a solid wall:

Vaguely menacing sea creatures flanking a fountain head are a common motif around Rome that I love:

A… rabbit head fountain? Alright:

We also saw the famous Trevi Fountain. I realized before leaving for the trip that I actually had this print of it I found somewhere at some point:

but I had never hung it, because I hadn’t been to it and I was worried the cool kids would call me a poser if they found out I was hanging a print of a place I hadn’t been to.

Well guess who’s cool now, fellow kids 😎

On one day we went to the Vatican. It was pretty great and easy to get overwhelmed with the amount of extremely high profile pieces you see. Unfortunately, our tour only lasted an hour or so, so you basically get to see each great work for about 10 seconds a pop.

One of my favorite sections was the room of animal sculptures:

First doggies sniff…

…then they bite!

another of my favorite mediums (media? that sounds weird) are mosaics, which they had some really good ones of:

check out the 3D effect they make in the banner:

they say Raphael intended the piece to be viewed with a tour guide’s flag stick in the way:

what in tarnation:

Ferrero makes these delicious hazelnut chocolate filled wafers called Tronky, which we thought was very funny:

this was revolting:

Next we were off to Slovenia. We picked up the car at the airport and drove to the capital Ljubljana (which we quickly started referring to as the easier to say “jubjubs”).

Jubjubs is… very quaint compared to Rome. It’s really clean and quiet, and you can walk across it in about half an hour. That said, it’s very pretty and cute in its own way:

One cool thing is that there are huge mountains off in the distance, and you can take a ~10 minute walk up to the castle to get some sweet views. There was music and a little cafe and it seems like lots of people go up there just to hang out at sunset:

Next we were off to one of the main reasons for coming to Slovenia: a big hike. The plan was to do Mount Triglav, which is the highest peak in the country. We actually hadn’t chosen a day to do the hike until getting there, because we wanted to be able to choose a day when the weather would be good. The first night in Jubjubs, we took a look at the forecast and realized that the next day or two would be the only days when there was definitely no rain, so at 11 PM we decided to start the hike the next morning.

So we drove off west. The mountains were quickly getting bigger and more real:

Because we’re fools, we ended up starting the hike at only 1 PM the next day: we had to drive to pick up via ferrata kits from Bled (more on that later), and then drive a long, mostly single lane dirt road to the trailhead. It was lunchtime and there was a little cafe at the trailhead run by an old Slovenian lady who spoke little English, so we then had a leisurely meal of Jota.

As a brief aside, Slovenian food is… not good. Especially not good compared to Rome. It’s confusing, because they share a border with Italy (incredible food), and Croatia also has some good food. It’s also strange because some of the dishes could be good (like their Struklji dumplings), but somehow they end up making them in a kind of bland and unappetizing way.

Anyway, after our trailhead lunch, we started at 1 PM. Here’s the view from the trailhead:

We did the Krma valley trail (which we naturally called “Korma valley, where the korma flows like water”), which is probably the most popular route.

The trail was pretty well marked and the views got only better and better:

I encountered some sort of primitive creature at a watering hole:

the flowers along the trail were great:

this was surprisingly one of the best flowers I’ve ever smelled:

the trail was lined with cyclamen until the alpine region, which is one of my all time favorite flowers with their “inverted” upswept petals that look like little flames to me:

and wild strawberries!

Ha ha ha, silly wife. You wouldn’t be smiling like this if you knew how far we still had to go:

…that’s more like it:

Finally, with a couple hours of light left, we reached the alpine hut where we’d stay the night:

The views were pretty crazy from the hut:

and we even got a visit from a golden goat! A good omen:

we realized that it’s the same goat that’s on the Lasko beer that people drink there:

Anyway, the plan was to do the peak the next day, and then hike back down to the car. It is possible to do the peak in one day, but in retrospect I think it’d be pretty tough, and it’d also probably require starting at about 3 AM (at our pace, anyway), not… 1 PM. We got to the hut at ~6.30 PM, so it was about 5.5 hours up, though I wouldn’t say we were pushing super hard.

To give ourselves plenty of time the next day, we decided to wake up at 4 AM, start the hike in the dark, and ideally get to the peak by sunrise. We also knew that the forecast said some light rain in the afternoon, so we were hoping to be done with high elevation by that point.

So after some pretty lousy sleep, we got up, put our headlamps on, and started towards the peak:

(there was only a little bit of moonlight by this point so the pic was taken with that “night sight” thing)

There were a fair number of memorials to people (I assume, given their ages?) had died up there, which was a bit unnerving…

We were lucky to get some really great views since we started early:

because as we got higher and the day progressed, it got reeaaaal foggy:

Very interesting fogs and cloud, you can see that the left side was pretty clear but immediately to the right it’s thick fog:

This is the hut at the top (a “stolp”), which supposedly has a bunch of cultural importance for the country as a whole:

At this point we were pretty cold (I did it in some light shorts), so we huddled in the stolp to warm up for a bit before going back down. We also hadn’t actually used our via ferrata kits by this point, but for the way down we put on the gear since slipping is usually more likely on the way down.

The hike down was pretty uneventful, but I’m glad we did the peak when we did, because it started drizzling at high elevation on our way down, and it seemed like the views up there were over for the rest of the day.

When we fiiiiinally got down and finished the hike, the weather was beautiful and we drove off to Bled. Immediately we pulled off to follow a sign we saw for homemade ice cream that turned out to be on a dairy farm:

We bought some ice cream and Slovenian sausage and cheese from a very friendly lady who came out of her house to sell it to us. I’m pretty sure the place doesn’t have “hours” so much as she sees a car pull up and runs out of her house to greet them.

Bled is ridiculously cute, and as a result very touristy:

it’s mostly centered around their photogenic lake with a church built on a tiny island (seen on the left in the pic below), but you can also see their castle towering above on the right:

We also had a celebratory piece of their “famous Bled cream cake”, called “Kremsnita”, by the lake. They’re very proud of it there and it’s sold in many places, but we had to try it in the place it was supposedly invented, Hotel Park. It’s nice, very light and pretty mild, but I’m not dying to get more.

We stayed in a room in a little village outside Bled, which was also very quaint:

Pretty much every house has a nice big garden of fruits and vegetables. We also found the Slovenian version of Tronky, called Frondi:

(as you’d expect, the Italian one is a bit better.)

The next day we went to one of the Bled area’s main attractions, Vintgar gorge:

I just finished reading North Woods on this trip, so this cool beetle burrowing pattern really caught my eye:

Beautiful blue green clear water:

A neat slime mold:

I don’t think I had ever seen them in person before (at least since learning about them), but liverworts are one of the three main groups of non-vascular land plants, next to mosses (very common) and hornworts (also less common). So as lame as it was, I was excited to spot them, since they were all over the walls of the gorge.

What would you guess they feel like, to the touch?

I would’ve guessed slimy, and kind of soft/floppy. But they were actually fairly dry and leathery, and a little firm. Hm!

You actually have to take a bus to the gorge from a parking lot you drive to. When leaving the gorge, we just missed the bus, which is every half hour. Since the walk back would be about the same length as waiting, we walked. It was through small hill towns and farmland, and turned out to be one of the prettiest walks I’ve ever done:

We had some vague plans to go to either Trieste (Italy!) or Piran (a cute town on Slovenia’s tiny patch of Mediterranean coast) to spend the evening before / morning of our last full day, but Vintgar gorge had unexpectedly taken most of the day. It also seemed like it was going to rain across the whole country during our last day, so we decided to spend some of the last day where that wouldn’t matter… in a cave!

So I booked us a random cheap (supposedly 4 star?) hotel in the random Jubjubs suburb we happened to pull into, and it was… a strange hotel. Everything was cloaked in purple velvet:

there was a strange “gallery” thing in the wall, with only one part filled:

…purple velvet

On our last day we went to the Postojna cave, which was really cool. Photos really don’t do caves justice, but it was massive and really cool inside. The biggest chamber had been used as a concert hall and the guide said it had held some number that seemed like it might’ve been a translation mistake, like in the 10’s of thousands?

I’ve been in a few big caves before, but this one had some features I hadn’t seen before, like these extremely thin rock sheets that looked like bacon or fabric or something with the light shining from behind:

That’s all! Rome and Slovenia were both awesome, in their own ways. I’d definitely go back to both someday in the future.