Surprisingly, at our last night in Florence, Italy, we ate at a Mexican restaurant. We packed our bags and the next morning we headed for Rome. Along the way, we stopped in San Gimignano and Siena. San Gimignano was a hilly town with beautiful scenery. We walked along the streets, took pictures, and headed for Siena. We found that Siena was the most beautiful place we had visited. Besides the beautiful scenery, the town offered many restaurants and handmade pottery (陶器). Siena proved to be one of the best places to buy gifts for family members at home.

We arrived in Rome late that night and started the next morning with a full-day tour of the city. Our guide was a local who knew about everything there, everything about Rome and its history. We hit all the major sites — the Coliseum, the Trevi Fountain, the Pantheon, the Vatican, plus much more — and were attracted by all of them. The history of Italy was much more obvious in Rome compared to the other cities we had visited.

After our long day in Rome, we headed back to the hotel and left for America at 5:30 the next morning. Our homecoming was both bitter and sweet — we all missed our families and friends, but Italy had become a second home. We loved everything about Italian culture and history, and had truly enjoyed every minute of our trip. It was an enriching experience. Though it was an art trip, we gained much more knowledge. Our job now is to use what we learned and the photographs we took to create an art project for the spring art show.

On July 11th Virgin Galactic finally realized the promise that it would take passengers on life-changing trips in its spaceships. For 4 minutes, its six temporarily weightless passengers, including the firm's co-founder, Sir Richard Branson, saw the planet's curvature (曲度) against the blackness of outer space. He may have gloated (窃喜) over beating Jeff Bezos（much richer）, Amazon's retired boss, who would go slightly higher, for slightly less time, in a vehicle built by his own company, Blue Origin, on July 20th.

The two are among a growing group of enthusiasts who believe space tourism's time has come. Suborbital (亚轨道) tourism is part of a broader space economy that has boomed over the past decade thanks to technological advances. Those at Morgan Stanley expect the entire space economy to generate$1trm in revenue by 2040, from $350bn today. UBS (瑞银集团) expects the entire space economy to produce $800 billion by the end of this decade. Space tourism，it thinks, will make “a big contribution” to that total.

But that is highly unlikely. For example, space tourism is not even Blue Origin's main goal. The company is focusing on developing a large new rocket for launching satellites, on selling advanced rocket engines to other companies and on winning NASA contracts such as that for a system to land humans on the Moon. In the long run, Mr Bezos doesn't see Blue Origin as provider of services to thrill-seekers.

The business could be profitable once regular flights begin to offset (抵消) the rockets' development costs. But how fast and by how much is uncertain. Without tourist-friendly destinations to visit, space tourism, with its far higher ticket prices, will not be a huger earner.

Another challenge—and the biggest uncertainty—relates to safety. History has shown that a disaster can set progress back by years. Even with no accidents, problems may arise. Strict top down regulation could mean that industry will no longer have the freedom to pursue new approaches to improving safety.

Space tourism may remain a hobby for a few superrich with a desire to take risks and lots of time to spare. Not exactly a mass market, then, for the time being.