Rome, After the Vatican

After a brief stop at the Vatican bookstore, where I bought an art history of the Vatican, we headed on foot to the Castel St. Angelo and across bridge into Rome proper.  There was a wedding party having pictures taken on the bridge.  Everyone's attention was on the bride.  Michael sought out the groom, standing nervously to the side, and congratulated him.  The groom gave him such a smile of pleasure and relief at the recognition.

 

We walked through back streets, some of them pedestrian only, to the Piazza Navona. This very rococo rectangle is decorated with high renaissance art and appears to be the location of a permanent street fair.  Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers is the centerpiece.  We paused to admire the sculpture and fountains, watch the people and take pictures.

 

I plotted a route on the map to take us to the Pantheon by the shortest route.  Little did we suspect that it was a government district.  There were armed guards on the streets and in guardhouses near big imposing grey buildings.  We saw several black limousines pulling out from one building.  Later when we stopped at a tiny café for lunch, Michael noticed the same scene on a local news channel.  Neither of us speaks Italian but it appeared that the Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, was on his way to one of his many court appearances.  Three trials are underway alleging corruption and there is another trial over a sex scandal. He has even more problems than Obama. It's fortunate that I did not try to take pictures there. I might have lost my camera.

 

I was eager to see the Pantheon because it has been in continuous use for almost two thousand years. The dome is the largest such structure of unreinforced concrete ever built.  The Pantheon was initially a Roman temple to many gods.  A seventh century pope converted it to a Catholic church.  Over time, its gilt bronze ornamentation was stripped away.  The exterior is simple and austere. The interior is beautifully ornate, lighted only by the doorway and the oculus, the "eye" or opening to the sky at the top of the dome. My interior shot shows the tomb of Raphael, the renaissance painter.  A number of notables are entombed in the walls including Victor Emmanuel II, the first king of unified Italy.

 

After a short lunch of salami in a tiny café on a side street, we headed toward the Trevi Fountain.  We came across a tiny piazza with a large rococo church fronting it.  Michael and I ducked inside to escape the heat for a while.  The church was a stunner!  We had stumbled upon the Church of St. Ignatius di Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit order.  We spent a marvelous half hour admiring the statuary and paintings.

 

We finally arrived at the Trevi Fountain in the early afternoon.  It was beautiful but was difficult to see because of all the people crowded into its smallish square. On my next trip to Rome, I'll try to see it early in the morning before the crowds block the view.

 

A surprising thing about Rome is that most of the major tourist attractions are within walking distance of each other.  Part of the fun of walking from one to another is the opportunity to see the Rome that is not tourist land.  I'm sure Rome has more churches per square mile than Venice. The number of architectural styles of the various buildings is amazing.

 

Rome, the Ancient Ruins

We could have visited the Spanish Steps but I chose instead to spend our remaining time and my remaining stamina in visiting the Roman era ruins.  The ninety-five degree heat was tiring us both.

 

Michael told me we were getting close when we spotted the Victor Emmanuel Monument.  This huge structure was completed in 1905 according to my research but many people think Mussolini built it in the nineteen twenties.  It is certainly massive enough to be a Fascist structure and its construction required destroying some Roman era ruins.  Mussolini was responsible for the road: Via del Fori Imperiali, that runs from the monument to the Coliseum and cuts through the site of the Roman, Trajan and Imperial Forums.

 

The remains of the various forums, columns and arches are heart of Rome.  I had a great time walking the Via del Fori Imperiali and photographing many sites. Even though I had studied the map before the trip, the reality looked very different than I had imagined it.  Excavations and restorations have been ongoing for hundreds of years.  Remains of Republican and Imperial Rome overlay each other.  The early Christians also built their churches on the site or repurposed Roman buildings as churches.  Everything is jumbled together: forums, walls from many eras, remnants of columns, triumphal arches.  There are even walls from Trajan's market, perhaps the earliest known indoor shopping center.  We walked the approximately half a mile to the site of the Coliseum marveling at the diversity of ruins.

 

The Coliseum was as large as I had expected, however there was much less traffic than I anticipated.  The land at the back of the Coliseum and Constantine's Arch has been blocked off from traffic.  The street on the North side was very busy but the rest of the area has become a pedestrian only zone.  A wire fence prevents visitors from touching Constantine's Arch.

 

Michael and I were able to climb only partway up the Palatine hill.  The paths on our map had been blocked.  A gate prevented us from walking in the original Roman Forum, along the Via Sacra, from seeing the arches and remains of the temples there and the residences on the hill.  It was hot, we were tired and somehow I just did not feel like spending six Euros each to see them up close since we had been viewing them from a short distance while walking the half a mile of the Via del Fori Imperiali. I'm sure that had it been ten degrees cooler I would have been happy to spend another hour inspecting Roman ruins.

 

As it was, we were happy to discover that we could get a bus from in front of the Coliseum to Rome's main railway station.  The bus was cleaner than the railway trains. In about twenty minutes, the bus deposited us in the square in front of Rome's Central Terminal.

 

When we bought our unlimited rail, subway and bus passes early that morning we also got a map of Rome and a Train schedule for trains between Rome and Civitavecchia.  The schedule worked fine in the morning.  We reached the platform for the train departing at 3:40 p.m. and discovered that it was a train to Naples, not to Civitavecchia.  The actual train to Civitavecchia departed ten minutes later from a track completely at the end of the station and beyond on a set of tracks off to the side of the train shed and attendant buildings.  Michael and I walked briskly but took the entire extra ten minutes to get to the right train.  We boarded the last car no more than a minute before the train departed.

 

The train was a local.  It made every stop on the line between Rome and the port.  The cars were filthy.  Graffiti was scrawled everywhere. I don't think the car had been cleaned or its windows washed since the rail line had taken delivery some years ago.  We had no air conditioning but luckily, we could crank the window open a few inches.  This provided a view as well as some air.  I was surprised at the amount of farm and open land  relatively near to Rome. Michael and I spent a long two hours riding back to Civitavecchia and the Silver Wind.  I consoled myself with the thought that we left later and arrived sooner than the people who took the air-conditioned tour bus.

 

Granted, I have only seen a small part of the city but Rome did not seem as huge as I expected.  The seven hills so not seem all that high.  The things I wanted to see were mostly accessible.  By walking everywhere, I was able to see a living, breathing city, not just the standard tourist fare.  There were certainly many, many tourists.  July is, after all, part of the high tourist season.  It would probably take three or four days to see Rome properly.  I hope to do that someday, but not on a cruise.  Cruise stops only give one a taste of a place.  I think Michel and I made the most of our short visit.

 

Pictures from Pompeii

A Day in Herculaneum and Pompeii

Pictures from Sorrento and Herculaneum above

 

The Silver Wind anchored off the Italian town of Sorrento early on Sunday, July 3^rd.  Michael and I had signed up for an all-day tour of the Roman ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii.  We saw little of Sorrento itself, just the view from the tour bus as we passed through on our way north.

 

Francesca, our tour guide, told us that Sorrento is actually several small communities strung along the cliff tops.  The residences all seem to have gardens in their back yards.  Olives and grapes are grown commercially in the area as well as in individual gardens.  My reaction to Sorrento, in fact to all of the part of southern Italy we saw that day, was that it all seemed very familiar.  This part of Italy resembles the Italian neighborhoods in the New York area where I grew up.  In fact the names of many of the small towns are names of families I knew when I was young.  These small towns haven't changed much in the past hundred years.  The Italian immigrants to the U. S. built homes similar to the ones they left behind.  Both the U.S. and Italy have modernized but the spirit of the old neighborhoods remains.  The big difference is that Sorrento is semi-tropical: palm trees and olive trees don't grow in the northeastern United States.

 

Sorrento is an hour or so south of Naples, a very large Italian city.  Sunday meant beach day and thousands were on the road headed south from Naples toward the coast and its narrow stony beaches below steep cliffs.  It was fortunate that we were headed north in the opposite direction.  Our bus kept going north past the autostrada exit for Pompeii.  The autostrada is a toll road equivalent to a U.S. interstate highway.  Francesca said that the crowds at Pompeii are greatest in the morning. Our small group would visit it in the afternoon.  We headed toward Herculaneum the less well-known city also destroyed by the A.D. 79 eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.   Ash and lava preserved these two towns exactly as they were at the end of August A.D. 79.

 

We spent several hours at the Herculaneum excavation.  It is better preserved than Pompeii but covers a much smaller area.  Ash and cinders buried Pompeii while Herculaneum was covered first by a pyroclastic flow of superheated gas and mud followed later by lava. It was buried deeper and was harder to excavate.  Excavation has been limited by the fact that the modern town of Ercolano sits atop a good part of the site. A small wealthy community on the sea, which no longer reaches this far inland, Herculaneum shows how a segment of Roman society lived daily life.

 

After lunch we toured Pompeii, only a few miles south east.  Here the site is more open.  Excavation is more complete as Pompeii was buried in ash and cinder, which was much easier to remove.  Pompeii was more of a commercial center.  There were more storefronts, taverns, wine shops and markets.  It had a fine amphitheater and a school for gladiators.  Both Herculaneum and Pompeii had piped in water from aqueducts and public sanitation.  Unique to Pompeii were the plaster casts made of citizens and animals.  An Italian archeologist discovered that he could reconstruct the shapes of figures that had perished in the ash and cinders by pouring plaster into the airspaces he and others discovered in the debris.  The actual remains have turned to ash but the space the bodies had occupied remained as empty bubbles in the ash.  I took lots of pictures of mosaics, remnants of murals, pillars and statuary.

 

My main fear for both sites is that they are being loved to death. Excavations started in the late 1700's before modern archeology was invented.  Much was lost in a hunt for treasure and statuary before people appreciated the value of the site.  Modern archeology has revealed a great amount of detail about how the 1^st century Romans lived. These two places are a snapshot in time – August 28^th A.D. 79.  Tourists, including me, want to see it.  Unfortunately, people touch the remnants of two thousand year old murals and walk on the carefully pieced together mosaic floors.  I do not have high hopes that these wonderful things will last, especially as money for preservation efforts will be scarce for the foreseeable future.  I count myself fortunate to have had the opportunity to see these sites.

 

We sailed from Sorrento a little bit early.  Captain Michele Macarone Palmieri, a character if there ever was one, took the Silver Wind on a short tour of the Sorrento coast.  Passengers got a close up view of the cliffs form the water, the houses clinging to the rocks above, the stony beaches below and the switchback paths between the two.  He tooted the ship's horn as we turned toward Naples and the Tyrrhenian Sea (the name of the waters between Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily and western Italy.) Rumor has it that he was bidding hello to his sister who lives in the north of Sorrento.  I think he may have just been showing some whimsy.  A man who wears a baseball cap with his full name on one side and "captain" on the other cannot be completely serious.

 

Night fell as we rounded the cape of Naples and city lights came on.  It was most beautiful. 

Taormina, Three Cities on a Mountain in Sicily

 

The day after leaving Dubrovnik was a sea day. The Silver Wind traveled from the Adriatic Sea across the sole of the boot of Italy then northwest towards Sicily.   I spent time with Michael and attended a cooking demonstration.  I caught up on my blog thru Corfu.  There is really too much to see and do on a sea day to spend a lot of time writing.  Come to think of it, there is even more to do at home so I am completing this travel journal rather slowly.

 We anchored in Naxos Bay off Taormina on Saturday, July 2nd.  As on all our prior stops, it was "chamber of commerce" weather.  Michael and I were not taking a tour but we managed to be in the first tender ashore supposedly reserved for tour participants.  We were on the first shuttle bus up the mountain to Taormina.

There are really three towns here.  Giardini Naxos is at sea level.  The tender landed there.  Giardini Naxos is a small community with many beaches and beach hotels.  Taormina is on the mountainside several hundred feet up.  Taormina can be reached by bus or car but only official vehicles and delivery vans are allowed in the semi walled part.  Hundreds of feet higher up is Castelmola, a small town clinging to the top of a nearby peak. It is accessible by a very windy road or hundreds of steep steps. Taormina is the main tourist attraction of the three.  It is an archetypal scenic Mediterranean village.

Really, the main tourist attraction for our Bay of Naxos stop was Mt. Etna.  Many of the people taking tours were on an all day trips partway up the slopes of Etna followed by a long lunch and an hour or so at Taormina.   It proved to be an exciting day for a trip to the volcano.  Etna is still active even though it only occasionally spurts ash and steam.  Lava flows, when they occur, are slow moving and do little damage.  We saw clouds of ash and steam coming from the mountain as we anchored.  Later, around noon, when we were at the fort at the top of Castelmola we heard an explosion and more clouds could be seen swirling around the volcano.  Later, when we heard from passengers who had made the visit to Etna, they reported that there hadn't been much to see – just clouds and the smell of ash.  Michael had visited Etna on his prior trip to Taormina and found the trip to the then-quiet mountain somewhat disappointing.  That is why we decided to spend our day visiting Taormina and Castelmola instead.  Mt. Etna was just entering a more active period while we visited the area.

Taormina is a pretty town.  It is also full of tourists.  We walked through the main streets and saw, along with the usual picturesque churches, stores selling pottery, fashion, tourist type gifts, wine and liquor.  Many small coffee and pastry shops lined the streets and small squares.  I gave in to the temptation of a large chocolate cannoli displayed in a small bakery.  Michael had a small pistachio cake.  They tasted wonderful. As we walked I saw a number of places selling tee shirts picturing Marlon Brando as the Godfather.  How can tourists be so silly as to fall for something so phony?

Taormina's main attraction is a Greek theater.  The ancient Greeks built an amphitheater on a hill overlooking the bay with views of the nearby mountains.  Much of it remains.  It is used today for musical and theater performances and even the occasional motion picture.  The day we visited, the present day operators were setting up for a rock performance.  Michael and I were able to climb around the ancient stones then sit in a shady place and watch the boats on the bay and the train station hundreds of feet below. We visited the bookshop perched at the highest point.  I decided not to buy a picture calendar of Taormina, as my pictures are at least as good as the ones in the calendar.

Leaving the theater, we wandered around the streets some more.  One of the more interesting sights was an unexpected find.  We visited a church built on the site of the Greek Odeon. An Odeon is a small theater where plays were performed and speeches and recitations were given.  A Christian church had been deliberately sited on top of the pagan ruin.  The surprise was behind the church.  We could see the stone seats and remnants of ancient stone walls of the Odeon.

Michael wanted to visit Castelmola at the very top of the mountain.  It was a worthy goal.  We started to walk uphill following the map we had with us.  The distance was about two miles.  Very quickly, we found that it was very steep and there was no shade. The temperature was above ninety degrees.  There was no sidewalk and we were dodging Italian drivers.  Have you heard? Italians drive very fast and swerve at the last second.  It was prudent to return to the square by the town gate and hire a taxi to take us to the uppermost town.

Michael "bargained" with the taxi driver and agreed to his initial asking price with a tour of Santa Maria del Rocca thrown in.  Santa Maria del Rocca is a church carved from rock at the top of another hill above Taormina.  It is most picturesque.  We arrived at Castelmola in comfort and spent half an hour exploring the old fort at the summit.  I took many pictures.  Santa Maria del Rocca had breathtaking views but the church itself was closed.  The ride up and down the very twisty roads was fun.  Passing other vehicles was sometimes challenging.  I think we got our money's worth.

Back in Taormina, we wandered around the square by the cathedral.   We happened upon a wedding in progress.  We were able to peek into the cathedral and see the couple getting a final blessing from the priest.  When he pronounced them man and wife, the whole congregation applauded.  I have never seen that before.

We sat down at an outdoor table at the tavern across the square and ordered beers.  We observed the post wedding festivities while we cooled off.  All the Sicilian men wore black suits and looked very serious.  Mafia clichés came to mind although there was no evidence that this was anything but an ordinary Saturday wedding.  Everyone congratulated the bride and groom.  The photographer took pictures.  The tiny ring bearer and flower girl looked adorable in their miniature formal outfits.  Groomsmen escorted Grandma to the tavern to use the restroom.  By the time we finished our beers, the florist was already removing the floral arrangements and village life returned to normal.  Scenes of real life and real people are what make visits to places like this memorable.

Michael and I returned to the Silver Wind tired but happy after a fun five hours ashore.