Molly Broz

Dear (Cute) Molly,

We wanted to thank you for helping make our honeymoon the adventure of a lifetime. Because we wanted to share photos of your gifts, we decided against sending more traditional thank-you cards; instead, below is a picture gallery of what your contributions made possible!

<nerdy statement> A decade's worth of psychological research suggests that experiences make us happier than material possessions. </nerdy statement> Because we're fortunate enough to share a home with the appliances and furniture we need (IKEA furniture, but hey), we opted for a less traditional spin on wedding registries. It was our hope that a Honeyfund would offer a month's worth of incredible experiences—from dinners to sightseeing, from train tickets to hotel rooms—that we could directly attribute to the loved ones who made those experiences possible. We even carried a spreadsheet with us everywhere we went that indicated who had sponsored each activity, which helped guide us through each day.

Please enjoy the photos and captions below! If you'd like to see more pictures of our honeymoon travels, you can view the full gallery here.

Thank you again for your generosity and friendship, and for making this first chapter of our marriage possible.

Love from,

What you sponsored: Nights in Rome and Venice

Thanks to you, we stayed in two excellent hotels in Rome and Venice! Our hotel in Rome was a bed and breakfast just south of the Tiber River in Trastevere, Rome's hip, local-centric district. We were just steps away from Ponte Sisto, which headed straight into the city center. In Venice, we stayed at Casa Alla Fenice, which offered just as excellent a location!

Rome

The facade of our bed and breakfast, Tree Charme. Its location couldn't have been more perfect: It faces the Tiber river and one of Rome's oldest bridges (which heads straight into the heart of Rome), but sits in Trastevere, Rome's hipster, millennial, and local-centric district.

The view of the bridge across the Tiber from our bedroom river. It took us less than three minutes to get into the heart of Rome, and less than 30 seconds to get into the heart of Trastevere.

We landed in Rome with about 45 minutes of sleep (we're not good plane sleepers), so we freshened up a bit, packed our backpacks, and headed out to explore!

Trastevere

More Trastevere. It's such a picturesque neighborhood...

Ponte Sisto, built in the 1400s. We crossed this bridge at least twice a day.

Breakfast at Tree Charme was perfection: We'd pile our plates (not pictured: freshly made omelettes and bacon) and head outside to a little patio with our own Nespresso machine.

Previously mentioned patio with a Nespresso machine.

There was so much bougainvillea around Trastevere!

Heading from our hotel deeper into Trastevere, where there are more piazzas (plazas), restaurants, and hang-out spots.

Ryan led the way through his favorite neighborhood in Rome. (:

Cortile dell'arco degli acetari. Jess tracked this place down from a single postcard that she fell in love with while in the Catacombs of Priscilla.

Sant'Ivo alla Sapienza, where Ryan performed for two summers in a row as an undergraduate.

A shot of Rome, not far from the Tiber river near Trastevere.

Venice

So I'm super bummed I never got a photo of Casa Alla Fenice, but in my defense, we arrived at the hotel a little worse for wear. For our first meal in Venice, Jess was just about to die for some pesto--so we stopped at a "pasta street food" shop that serves pasta in little to-go containers meant for picnicking in the streets. Unfortunately, Jess didn't realize their pesto included walnuts (which she's allergic to). After being violently ill in a random alleyway (during which a pigeon flew by and pooped all over her), she spent three hours of our first day passed out in bed with three Benadryl in her system. The hotel employees were kind enough to deliver (nut-free) cookies and tea to her bedside.

All that to say, Casa Alla Fenice was a fun choice for a hotel--and since we don't have any photos of it, here's a Google photo of our exact room. (It was in a turquoise-and-gold "grotesque" style.)

A canal close to our hotel. The hotel was perfectly situated in the heart of Venice, roughly between the Ponte Rialto and the Palazzo Ducale (Doge's Palace).

We'd gotten so used to Rome's and Florence's lion's head style of water fountains that we found Venice's approach particularly neat.

The Ponte Rialto, Venice's most famous bridge.

The Doge's Palace (Palazzo Ducale), or the palace of Venice's chief magistrate. The Doge was always chosen by popular vote, and ruled with extreme transparency when it came to economic and social policies, which made him very loved by the people. Unlike most other major cities in Europe, the Doge never saw civil unrest or attempted coups.

Saint Mark's Basilica (the Basilica di San Marco), Venice's most famous church. It joins five domes that were originally built in 828 to house the body of the evangelist Marco, brought from Egypt to Venice by the duke. Because Venice once sat at the heart of so much intercontinental trade, particularly between Europe and the Middle East, its architecture represents Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman styles.

A neat (but sobering) installation in Venice's Grand Canal to draw attention to the impact of global warming on the city, which is no match for the rising water levels.

A view of Piazza San Marco (Saint Mark's Square) far below, and the rest of Venice off toward the horizon. This was taken from the campanile (bell tower) in the plaza.

We took a quick morning trip to the colorful island of Burano, which is in the Veneto lagoon not far from Venice.

Burano was a particularly neat island known for its lace shops. The neighboring island of Murano is known for its blown glass.