Tuscany

Ahhh, to have a car and wi-fi!  Today we left our little piece of heaven for a couple of hours to strike out on our own and visit Siena and Florence.  For sure the trip was too short to really experience either city, but the trip was full of beautiful images.  You can hardly drive a mile before taking a picture of the contryside.

  After driving around Siena twice trying to find the old city center and then a parking space, we walked the streets of the city and found its most famous landmark, Piazza del Campo.  It is a huge concave area in the shape of a shell with the bottom of the shell in front of a huge church.  In the picture below, Pat is taking my picture sitting in the piazza as I am enjoying her gelato.

 

Then another hour north to Florence.  We will visit Florence again when we take the train to our next destination on Sunday.  The main geographic feature is the Arno River that divides the city.

The buildings of the north side of the Arno seem much brighter and cleaner that many of the cities we have been through.  Maybe they are newer.  The river itself is quite dirty looking and has an odor similar to the one I have when I open my septic tank...yuch!  

One of the eight bridges of the city is called the Punta Vecchio which means literally Old Bridge.  It is distinguished from the others by the fact that the bridge is covered by jewelry shops from end to end.

It is not very attractive from the outside, but the inside is awesome, with store after store of dazzling necklaces and gems.

 

And of course just like all the other cities, these people like their motor bikes.

Here are a few more pictures of our farmhouse on the top of the hill.

And finally the view from our door into the patio covered by a beautiful rose trellis.

Pantheon and Capitoline Museum

Yesterday was our final day in Rome, so we visited some areas we missed on our tours.  The Pantheon is a wonderfully preserved building which you will recognize if you have seen the movie Angles and Deamons.  It is the building with the free standing dome with the huge oculus at the top.  It is a place of worship now.  There are many outstanding works of art that are too numerous to post here.

 

The Pantheon, built in 27 BC is the oldest building in Rome that is still intact.

Next we walked to the Capitoline Museum which houses many of the treasures of the region.  The most important item is a huge bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius on his horse. 

Again, there are hundreds of pieces of artwork on display, enough to make your head spin.  The statue below was interesting to me.  It depicts some poor soul that pissed off one of the roman gods and he was bound in this position to remain for eternity.

Rome is a very clean city.  There is never any litter or trash on the street...even though there are Americans here.  The reason is that they clean the streets and pick up the trash and empty the trash containers every day.  There is an army of workers that sweep, drive trash trucks, run sweeping machines, etc.  You know they are there because they all wear uniforms.  The first time I saw one of these guys, I thought he was a fireman because of the uniform...see below.

Different workers wear different uniforms...highway workers wear the same uniform in yellow, city road crews wear red, etc.  It really gives a professional look to the government employees.

Today we got our rental car (a Lancia) and drove to Siena.  The toughest part was getting out of Rome.  The guy at the car rental company said just drive straight down the road the car was parked on to get to the main highway that circumnavigates the city.  Well friends, there is no such thing a straight road in Rome.  And most of the roads are one way in the opposite direction of the way you want to go!  It took us about an hour and a half of wandering around to accidentally finding our way out.  There are few if any street signs to help you.  The names of the streets are carved into the sides of the buildings at the second story level, not on signs where you can see them.  By the time you see a street sign, you have just passed the street you were looking for!  It really makes you appreciate the bus drivers and the taxi drivers.

Eventually, we arrived at our apartment...a few rooms in an old farmhouse near Siena.  It is a fantastic place with stone walls inside and out and a view to die for.  The old couple who own the place are just adorable.  They only speak a few words of English, but we managed to comunicate well enough to check in and get directions to a restaurant.

Before we could even sign the rental agreement, the old man, Mario, opened a bottle of his wine and a bag of cookies and toasted our arrival with us.  He proudly said, "Faccio il vino, e Lei fa i biscotti",  which means I make the wine and she makes the cookies.

Pompei

Tuesday we had a guided tour of the ancient city of Pompeii which is situated east of Naples.  In about 79 AD the volcano Vesuvius erupted, spewing volcanic ash over everything in the area, completely burying the city of Pompeii.  The devastation was so complete that the city was not rediscovered until the 16^th century.  Since that time archeologists have uncovered and cleaned up about 25% of the city.   The ash killed every man, woman, child, and animal in the area, and only the stone buildings and streets remain.  All of the wooden structures were completely destroyed. The ash preserved some of the stucco walls which were painted with murals.

Interestingly, many of the people and animals were left as shells, the flesh and bone completely burned away.  The archeologists were able to fill the shells with plaster to cast an image of the people in the exact position they were in when they perished.

The remarkable preservation lets us see exactly how the city was laid out, and provides clues as to how people lived in those days.  For example, the city had running water, provided through lead pipes that are clearly visible.  There are ruins of temples, a huge forum area, shopping areas, courts, etc.

A well preserved home that was apparently owned by a wealthy family has painted plaster walls, an atrium, mosaic tilled floors, and an altar for the house gods. 

A well preserved spa had hot baths, with heated floors, and work out areas. 

There was a huge theater that had acoustics so good that people in the top row could easily hear the orators on the stage below.

It is clear that this city was built using a master design.  It was built in a beautiful setting in a valley between a chain of mountains and Mt. Vesuvius.  The views from the forum area are fantastic.

That's Mt. Vesuvius in the background.

Capri

This week we went on a tour bus through Naples, Pompei, and Sorrento.  We stayed in a four star Hotel in Sorrento.  The bus never stopped for pictures in Naples or Sorento, and pictures from inside the bus were not so good.  But we took lots of pics in Pompei, which we will post later.

Today we are on the isle of Capri.  We landed yesterday and had a walking tour of the island...we are bushed.  One of the things we did was take a chair lift to the top-most part of the island where you can get almost a 360 degree view.

The rock formation behind Pat is take from a beautiful garden on the northwest corner of the island.  

The formation just above her hat is actually two rocks that tourist like to ride between...the opening is quite narrow, but you can hire a boat to take you through.

The very first excursion on Capri was to visit the Blue Grotto.  This is something we probably would have passed on had we planned the trip ourselves, but Becky put it into our itinerary, and we are glad she did.  The grotto is a huge cave that has a small opening from the sea that is only accessible when the water is fairly calm.  You get on a row boat and actually have to lie down on your back to get through the opening.  The man who rows the boat has to pull us through with a chain that is attached to the wall of the cave and has to do something akin to the limbo to get through.  Once inside, the cave is about 30 feet high and the water glows blue from the light streaming through the small opening that we just came through.  It is beautiful.  The rowers all sing once inside to demonstrate the acoustics...wonderful!

Bellow is a picture from inside looking towards the cave opening.  It is a bit fuzzy, but there is not much light for taking pictures.

Leonardo DeCaprio sends his reguards.  Ciao for now.

Around our place

The living conditions are fine.  We expected a small apartment and that’s what we got.  There’s room for a kitchenette dining table, couch, tv, and some storage on the main level. Upstairs there is a bathroom and loft bedroom that overlooks the main floor (comfy king size bed).  The ceiling is open beam construction (not just for looks, really an architectural feature) and the floors are all tiled.  The large window overlooks the street (alley?) called Via Della Reginella; we are door #6, second floor.  Here is our door.  It is about 9 feet tall and leads into a hallway and then a set of very uneven steps to our appartment.

 Here is a picture taken of our street close to our apartment.

Here is a picture of our apartment from the loft.

 

Here is a picture of Piazza Mattei right at the end of our street.

Everywhere you go there is something neat to look at.  Just around the corner we found ruins of a theater constructed by Caesar called Teatro Marcello.  Interestingly the foundation was still in good enough shape that 15 centuries later another building (I think it is a monastery) was built on top of it.

 

When we visited the Vatican, there were thousands of people there and I felt a bit like a sardine.  The light was not good for photography, so I am not real happy with most of the pictures.  There are so many wonderful things to see, you really don’t know what to photograph.  I decided to just post a few of the better pictures and not worry about the subjects.  I found the ceilings and the floors very interesting.  There is a picture below of a section of the floor tiled in thousands of little dark blue tiles, so fine you can’t pick out the individual tiles.  All of the floors are some kind of stone laid in intricate detail. 

 

There are a couple of pics below of ceilings in the Vatican Museum.  There is a very blurry picture that I included just to show the mass of people we were moving with and the length of the hallway.  This hallway contained mostly tapestry and the entire ceiling was filled with paintings.  I took this pic about half way down the hall.

 

The hallway ceiling looked like this all the way down.

 

This is a picture of a ceiling in the museum that appears to be sculpted figures, but our guide assured us that it was entirely flat figures made to look that way…how about that 3-D way back then.

 

There are tons of statues.  I include the picture below to show just a few.

 

Colosseo

What an experience to actually go inside the Roman Colosseum.  Imagine...it has been standing for over 2000 years, and still the mortar is in place and you can walk on the concourse.  Of course lots of structure is missing but Hell, the Brown's stadium needs $30 million of renovations already!  I can't believe this stadium that held 60,000 people took only 8 years to build, considering the lack of machines that we take for granted today.

We also stopped at the Termini, the main train and bus station...amazing.  It is as big as 4 football fields under roof and is two stories of shops...looks like a mall.  .There are 50 platforms you can use to board trains.

We also visited the Trevi Fountain.  Look at all the people surrounding the pool of water.  Behind the fountain itself is a magnificent wall of statues.

Things to know

OK, here are some things to know if you visit Rome.  There are no Wal-Mart type stores.  All of the stores sell only one type of thing…the pharmacies (Pharmacia) only sell drugs and drug supplies (no groceries, tobacco, candy, etc) and the stores are on about every other corner and all have the same sign, tobacco shops (tabacchi) sell smokes, lottery tickets, bus tickets (huh?) and a few odds and ends, leather shops sell leather products, etc.  Markets sell food (but not peanut butter!) and little else.  There is no such thing as one stop shopping.  In the vicinity of where we are staying there are about 200 restaurants (that is a conservative estimate) and hundreds of single purpose stores.  The stores are tiny by our standards.

Buses are everywhere and if we ever figure out where they go, we will use them. 

Traffic is awful.  It takes a strong stomach to drive here.  There don’t seem to be any rules, except stop at red lights and allow pedestrians to have the right of way.  Most corners don’t have stop signs, so it is every man for himself and the feint hearted will have to wait.  If I were to live my life over, I would buy stock in motor scooters and Smart cars…they are everywhere.  I don’t understand why more people don’t die on motor scooters…they weave in and out of traffic and the auto drivers just seem to expect that and don’t run them down.  Smart cars don’t parallel park, they just back straight into a half a spot.

The roads are very narrow, but that doesn’t slow anybody down.  Park wherever; there is hardly an inch between parallel parked cars.  I watched a guy park in a space waaaay too small…he just backed in until he hit the car behind , then hit the scooter in front, backed into the guy behind again and finally got about 80% into the space and turned off his engine.  Just about all of the cars in the city have some kind of dent.

Dining is expensive.  If you go to a nice ristorante, expect to pay 70 euro (about $90) for a dinner for two (plus tip).  At the other end of the dining scale are the Bars…yes you can buy a drink, but they mostly sell sandwiches (panini), salads, desserts, but are closed by dinner time.   There are also tratoria, tavalo caldo, and other moderately priced places, but I haven’t had a meal anywhere for less than 20 euro for the two of us and that was today’s lunch…two Panini, two waters, one coffee, and two dessert rolls at a really neat bar.

Most of the people here will try to help you, even if the language gets in the way.  They go out of their way to be polite.  It is a pleasure to listen to them talk, even when I have no idea what they are saying.  They seem to sing the words.