Barcelona

Wow...it takes just as long to catch up as the number of days of your vacation. So after finally catching up I realized that I never talked about Barcelona, Canne or Liverno. I'll combine them into a two blog entries and you'll see why in a moment.

Barcelona was indescrible! It was such a beautiful city and the countryside was breathtaking. We began by visiting the Old City walls. Their cathedral is there so we got to visit it too. Unfortunately, they were doing a lot of construction work so you couldn't get the full beauty of it. Then we drove through the city and our guide pointed out a number of buildings designed by Gaudi. The masterpiece however was Sacra Familia church. It is a private church, owned now by an organization, and it is almost overwhelming. It is an immense structure and the designs and carvings on the outside of the church are so intricate and detailed. The Nativity scene takes up the whole front side of the building. The Passion on the back side includes scenes of his passion and death. The detail is unreal.

After touring this magnificant church we were taken to Montserrat. This is a mountain northwest of Barcelona. There is a Benedictine monestery at the top of the mountain that hosts the Black Madonna statue of Montserrat. Tradition says they tried to move the statue but could not and that Mary wanted the monestery built there around the statue which is what they did. We returned to Barcelona and visited a garden designed by Gaudi before returning to the ship.

I'll cover our trip to Canne, France and Liverno, Italy - really Florence - in my next blog. Until then...God bless.

posted by: crossman at 09:44 | link | comments |
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