View from the top of San Gimignano, Italy (Click on photos to enlarge.) Kids were referring to this as "St. Jimmie John's" a favorite place back home!
Matthew and Mark both really liked San Gimignano, an Italian hill town. Since it is located at the top of a very large hill, the views from there were just beautiful.
The buildings date from Medieval times to the Renaissance (it is referred to as the "Medieval Manhattan" for its urban-ness at the time as the residents were prosperous, building 72 brick towers for protection...14 still standing). It was a slower pace, so that felt good after all the hustle and bustle of Rome and Florence.
They performed at the church there...beautiful frescoes inside the church. They were only there a couple of hours so they ate paninis and Gelato for lunch and had a long bus ride across the Apennines to northeast Italy where they visited Padua.

At Padua they visited the Basilica of St. Anthony of Padua and sang the
Ave Maria at the end of the evening Mass there.

While they were in Padua, since it was the 4th of July, they gathered at the town park around the fountain and sang the American national anthem just for fun for themselves. The guide even held up a little American flag! (Mark and Matt are just inside the photo...Matt's white belt so he could have something red, white, and blue and Mark's 4th of July fireworks shirt...how patriotic are they??) Dinner was an "endless stream of food," course after course, all very good from the accounts here. (Prosciutto and cantaloupe, pasta with a white sauce, rice with a mushroom sauce, pork medallions, beef in a tomato sauce, etc....and Gelato at the end.)
This might be a good place to talk about the food, since that is something Italy is known for and something nearly everyone raves about when they return. Many of the singers are not adventuresome eaters...they would fill up at the American style meals and just pick at the Italian ones...the Gerth guys are not fussy eaters: they will try most anything and love to go on these tours to taste the different types of food, etc. They both noted, however, that Italians eat their pasta very "al dente" which means that there is a bite (sort of a crunch even) to their cooked pasta. While we don't like our pasta mushy, we don't like it to crunch either, so that was something notably different for them. Lunches were a lot of sandwich type things, one day it was pizza which they all thought was just wonderful, and dinners were all 4-5 courses of food each evening, which even Mark thought was way too much food on a regular basis, and we all know how much Mark loves Italian food! When they got home Sunday to my cooking, the supper of their choice was grilled salmon, three different kinds of vegetables, and fresh fruit. Whew...I was afraid I was going to have to learn how to cook a whole lot more Italian food than is in my current repertoire. It's nice to be appreciated for what I am good at already!

One of the great things about being in ICC is that Mr. Leck is just a wonderfully well rounded person. He knows kids and what they like and always has special things lined up for them to do. He is so proud of them and he loves each and every single one of them. His wife is the same. They are excellent role models for the kids with all their community work and when they travel together, at every meal, before they eat, Mr. Leck leads all the singers in prayer with a song of thanksgiving. It is really moving to see all these kids sing this beautiful song of thanks to God before their meals. (Photos are from dinner in Florence and Mr. Leck warming them up to sing grace.) How lucky to know them are we?

(Photo is Matt's of Greg's favorite thing about Italy: Gelato!) Gelato, of course, was the favorite of ALL the kids...and the adults! I don't think I heard tell of a day without gelato somewhere along the line. You don't need to envision them waiting in line with 105 people in the group at the Gelato shops because when they roam about, they do it in "family" groups of 5-6 kids each with their chaperone or sometimes more if a couple of the groups are roaming together, like Matt and Ali's groups who roamed together a lot. We noted that the t-shirt colors selected for the trip this year reflected all those nice bright Italian Gelato flavors...we are already thinking of it as the Gelato tour! Very fun times for these kids...they will never forget these experiences. (And if they do, we have tons of photos...these digital cameras are great!)