That’s not fair, as most of the day was a delightful train ride from Cinque Terre to Venice. The kids and Dwayne enjoy the train ride as much as I do and it felt like the transportation equivalent of a spa. After our 5 hours of first-class heaven, there was just a 15-minute walk from the station to our hotel for the night. Wes went from blissed to pissed (more in the London vernacular of “tired”) and elected to stay in the hotel rather than go into Venice for dinner. With all the discussion of whether or not he’d stay behind, we missed the first bus and then got to Venice later than we wished, keeping us from getting to The Tiramisu Place That Piper Remember With Love From Three Years Ago before it closed. While I love just wandering Venetian streets and over bridges, it is not an enjoyable group activity. The four of us had a dinner that was pretty good in a not bad location and then wasted late hours trying to find the right kind of postcard box to mail our letters before leaving Italy for good. We returned way past princess time and well into pumpkin hours to a room that the five of us had to share before catching an early bus the next morning.
Piper put more effort into taking a picture of a cat than of her mother, which is why I include this picture. If anyone is missing Wes’s antics, he enjoyed riding his suitcase to the bus station.
All that to say, the pictures may say a thousand words, but they’re pretty much lying. And there are no pictures with my three children since Wes stayed behind to play video games and Piper won’t have her picture taken.
I’m buying myself a hanging basket when we get back.
…it will be from a high-speed, first-class train up and down Italy. Once we left Amalfi, we took the ferry down to Solerno, and then a train to Rome. Later, the train took us from Rome to Cinque Terre. Our last leg of Italy took us from Monterosso (Cinque Terre) to Mestre-Venice, probably the most relaxing travel I can imagine. First, I embrace everything that all five of us love, and these trains make the top ten. How often do you travel 3-6 hours and come out completely refreshed and not needing to pee? Second, my happy place is definitely the calm of a quiet train car with few people and roomy seats, with bucolic views at almost every point, giving me mental and physical space to compose posts. I have no conception for a book, but at least I know where it would be born.
Oh, and if I ever want to taste hell again, I will take the Circumvesuviana train from Naples to Sorrento again. The ying & yang of Italian trains!
Admittedly, I won’t sell all my worldly goods to move to Cinque Terre (CHINK-eh Tair-uh), even if I could take loads of Italian train rides, but I will definitely be going back to spend more time trekking further afield.
The “Five Lands”, as translated, are five former fishing villages all perched on the mountainous eastern Italian coastline. They are beautifully quaint, but their real draw is the hiking trails connecting the towns. For a long time, Cinque Terre has been more agricultural and touristy than fishy, and most of the boats today are used for excursions, not for the catch of the day.
There is technically a road by which you can reach CT, but most guests come in by train or boat. Lots of cruise lines and other groups make it a day stop, but adventuring would have to be compromised to do so. And I had adventuring to do!
The towns are connected by one main path that requires a parks pass, broken into 4 unequal segments. While they are not easy trails, they are considerably more moderate than the expert trails that wind their way up and down rocky hills to smaller hamlets. The pass comes with an unlimited day pass for the train, with the idea you could go from one end to the other, and then ride back. In 2014, the two southernmost towns lost their main paths to landslides, making the train or alternative paths necessary.
We had an ideal location in Monterosso town, with a short walk with luggage to our hotel, a long stretch of beach with a Colossal Neptune holding up a cliffside, good restaurants and shops, and more importantly, laundry. And being the northernmost town, it was an ideal spot to start our trek.
Our of cursory politeness, I invited Wes and Piper to join us. Then Kyla, Dwayne and I set out to conquer Cinque Terre on the drizzliest day of our stay. I prepped for this, realizing later that I had just become my father, with practical convertible easy-dry pants, a rain jacket, my sun-rain-mosquito-netting hat, and no style.
Is Cinque Terre a hike with amazing views, or great views you trek to? Either way, our rocky up-and-down path took us past waterfalls, through vineyards, orange and lemon groves, treescapes, over arched stone bridges, and up cliffs overlooking a turquoise Mediterranean where, I swear, I could almost see fish swimming. The paths included lots of steps and rocks, which kept the mud down. It took us less than 2 hours to get to the next town, which was a great place to have focaccia-as-street food before heading to the next town, which was oddly both more kilometers and less time. We took a break from the rain by calling it lunchtime, so I could pour over the maps and choose the next route as a workaround for the next two closed main paths.
Kyla was a trouper who did about 7.5 km on the longer, tougher trails with us through rain and mud. The girl knows when to quit while she’s ahead, though, and took the train by herself back to the hotel*, and Dwayne and I rode to the next town to avoid the closed 3rd segment. But between the last two towns, there was a 1.4km trail that I wanted to do to complete our Cinque Terre day. The map rated it “moderate”, the same as our first two trails, so easy-peasy. Right?
Vertical crawling
We spent the first half of that trail vertically crawling. One might generously call vertical crawling “climbing”, but no, it wasn’t that dignified. I felt more justified when we got to the peak and saw this sign:
I immediately embraced the “expert excursionist” moniker, and shared it with the newly engaged couple we met on the way down. You never know when you’ll meet fellow excursionists and we had the most lovely chat, as we descended to the town of Riomaggiore together. They were staying there and showed us the good gelato and the best spot for pictures.
By the end of the day, Dwayne and I had 29,000 steps (19km), just a thousand shy of our Petra record.
The trails are supposed to be fully reopened in 2026. Who will be an expert excursionist with me in a few years?
*To tell tales: Piper and Wes can leave a hotel, navigate to two grocery stores, get lunch, and find their way back to eat junk food and play video games all afternoon. Kyla can follow the couple we connect with to get on the train and off at the right stop, then get so lost in her book that she can quote important passages almost verbatim, give a character analysis, and discuss if and what tropes are used, before texting us to say she can’t find the hotel that is 50 meters in front of her. We all use our brains differently!
We didn’t improve family harmony by making this tour mandatory, but it seemed sinful to have 5 days in Rome and not see the Vatican.
Yes, it’s true. Swiss guards not only have to secure the Pope et al, but have to do so wearing this. Why do the boots delight me so?
The smallest country in the world has the second-largest museum, after the Lourve, indicating the power, reach, and wealth of the papacy over the centuries. This niggles a factoid loose, that part of the golden extremism came as a counter to the plainness of Martin Luther’s Protestantism. It is easier to wow people with mighty buildings and a sensory overload of ostentatious accouterments. (Oh, crap, did I just revisit America, 2016?!?)
But luckily, our children’s religious affiliations cannot be bought with lots of boring art! They sell their souls only for good Wifi and gelato.
Truthfully, which of these screams “Jesus saves!” to you?
Actually, as soon as you realize that the Vatican museums are not about uplifting the Christian faith, or even Catholic traditions, and are really just showing off all the worldly goods collected over centuries, it becomes much more fun. [Honestly, one of the dreariest things to do in Europe is trying to appreciate a plethora of medieval religious art. Architecture, yes. Art, no.]
These pieces are interesting. The word is that Michaelangelo was deeply inspired by the movement of the left and right* statues and the perfectionism of the middle. These torsos inspired figures in the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, and the face of the Apollo was a model for one of his depictions of Christ.
Oh, and the ubiquitous fig leaf! Check out how many I captured in one shot! And, yes, they were added later during particularly censorous periods.**
The museums lead to the pope’s personal conclave, known as the Sistine Chapel. No cameras are allowed in the place-with-the-famous-ceiling, but Internet has its ways. Honestly, after passing through all sorts of rooms that looked like this,
…it was a little harder to think this was as singular as its reputation.
What does impress me is that this is Michelangelo’s debut fresco, and he had only done a few public paintings before this, though he had an impressive sculpture resumé. To go from chisel to paintbrush, and find that this is what comes out of your palette, is pretty impressive.
View of St. Peter’s from Emperor Hadrian’s Castel Sant’Angelo. And the back of my head, because Dwayne likes his loved ones in his pictures.
The Chapel shoots you out away from the third stop: St. Peter’s Basilica, the largest church in the world. It is enormous and I actually liked walking in and seeing that it was not taken up with benches, showing just how big the footprint was. I haven’t bothered to figure out what separates major (of which there are four and all are in Rome) and minor basilica (18,000 of them lurking around the world), but of course, St. Peter’s is major in every way. It is proud of its size and on the floor are plaques marking how other enormous churches stack up. I will admit that the art isn’t dreary; the basilica is light and airy, and it felt more uplifting than heavily sacred.
And now we’ve done the Vatican–
Won’t have to do that-again!
* * * *
A little extra: Google Maps cracked me up as we mapped our way home from St. Peter’s. While we could walk back to our hotel, we were still in a different country, as noted at the bottom of the map. I think what I most like about the Vatican is that compared to The Holy See, Americans aren’t special snowflakes at all!
*“The Belvedere Torso, which means “the beautiful torso,” could arguably be one of the most important statues in history. This is no small feat for a statue that is lacking legs, arms, and even a head.”This link mentions further influences, including it becoming the base of the famous The Thinker sculpture.
**Perhaps a fig leaf is preferable to castration, but I do think it leads to far more wondering, “What’s under there?” [Underwear, if you are up for an elementary school joke.] Here’s a fun factoid I came across the other day. Penises really are smaller on Greek (and therefore Roman) ancient statues. It is counterculture to today, but modest genitalia symbolized restraint and wisdom. Only the most base of creatures, like satyrs and barbarians, would be portrayed comedically large, signifying all appetite and no refinement. And now you know.
It turns out, “villas” of Rome really meant full, self-contained estates. Kyla, Dwayne, and I took our day trip out of the city to visit Adriana Villa (Hadrian’s Villa for us English-speaking barbarians) and D’Este gardens.
Hadrian was an emperor with the mostest–the most hubris, at least. He’s considered one of The Five Good Emperors but I think it could be argued that he was great, but not really good*. He may be one of the few rulers that visited the entire Empire and was definitely a second century Rennassance man–he wrote versus, designed several buildings, and rebuilt the Pantheon all while running ancient Rome. He also habitually executed senators who disagreed with him. Hadrian built an estate approximately the size of Pompeii that required about a thousand servants, with underground tunnels to keep the workers away from people who needed them but didn’t want to have bother of seeing them. What’s notable about Hadrian’s Villa, less than an hour out of Rome, is how peaceful and lush it is. Birds can be heard chirping, and there’s a stillness among the old statues and pavillians.
Okay, I was amused by this mural in the old building.
More interesting to me was the D’Este Gardens a few minutes away. It is also a grand house, but by this point, we have seen lots of places with extravagantly painted walls and gilded ceilings. Its history includes being a convent until a cardinal came to visit and liked it so much he kicked out all the nuns and declared it his palace. I swear, it is harder and harder to find Christianity in the Church’s historical footprint**.
What is neat-o about this place is the land slopes down, and a river runs near. Dwayne (probably) in a former life built a canal off the river and cleverly ran it through the back forty to create oodles of fountains, ponds, and streams before returning the water to the river at the bottom of the estate. To match the lushness of the waters, the garden is green and vibrant. I’m not saying everything was in excellent taste (and the water organ was clever but truly awful sounding), but I apprecate the level of commitment to spectacular gardening.
Excuse me, I have to go buy land along a river.
*I give him slack though, as one of my favorite characters is named Hadrian, from Michael Sullivan’s Rierya Chronicles and Revelations. Not only is Hadrian an excellent and entertaining protagonist, but he is truly a good man. Okay, and a thief and deadliest soldier. Hmm, I’m not making my case very well, but you should pick up the books anyway.
**Not easy to find it contemporarily as well, but now I’m extra-editorializing.
Dwayne and I choose carefully which activities are mandatory for all the kids and a private guided tour of the Colosseum and adjacent Forum made the cut. Between having a great guide who was excellent with “this-is-going-to-be-boring” kid attitudes and a pretty cool place to visit, it was a pretty decent day*.
One of the best parts of the tour was that it came with a booklet of artists’ depictions of what the Colloseum looked like back in its heyday and how it was used. Unfortunately, we lost the pictures before we left, but it helped understand what we were looking at now and how it was used then.
We got to be on the floor, overlooking the underground animal cages. There were pulley systems and trap doors to not only get the animals up to the flighting floor, but also to have them pop out of unexpected locations for better thrilling entertainment.
I loved our guide but he did like to ruin the Hollywood gladiator myths. There is no evidence of an emperor’s thumbs up or down. Gladiators were too expensive to train and replace to casually kill them off, and each only fought 1-2 times a year. And if the Colloseum ever did have full size boat battles, it would have happened in its first ten years before the underground labyrinth was constructed. Also, the stadium was designed to get thousands of people in and out quickly, but not so much for ships. How disappointing. Luckily, our girls were happy to break the rules and give Gladiator Papa a life or death sentence after falling to the champion, Wirey Wes.
*Bonus Material* I give you…the Colosseum toilets. A reused (notice I didn’t write “reusable”) sponge was part of the experience.
Constantine’s Arch from a Colloseum window.
The Forum, basically the public meeting place, was a field of lovely ruins adjacent to the Colloseum and Palantine Hill, one of the seven hills of Rome, and where the town was mythically born. It’s pretty fun to look out and see all these ancient Lego pieces cast around.
Sometimes us famous archeologists have to create new statues to show how the originals may have appeared.
We’re in Rome! After stomping through the ruins of the ancient Empire, we are finally at its heart.
About 100 AD, the Roman Empire was expansive across the Mediterranean. I’ve highlighted in purple where we’ve been on this trip, and in pink, where we will be going.
Romulus and Remus were raised by wolves. My kids are jealous.
This four-month trip was designed to be a “Round the World as Far as Covid-Restrictions Will Allow” adventure, but other than Kenya, it turned out to be a Grand Tour of the ancient Roman Empire. Not a complaint, just a stubbed toe for all the Roman ruins we have stumbled over for two months.
Observation #1:Rome is crowded.
Corollary: Rain cleans up the streets quite well. Here are the Spanish Steps (leading up to the French church), first on a sunny afternoon, and the next day during a shower.
This obilisk is full of faux hieroglyphs–added later by Romans long before the discovery of the Rosetta stone, just to be Eyptianier. I am amused.
Observation #2: Ancient Rome was obsessed with Ancienter Egypt. Two thousand years before Great Britain was, ahem, “saving” Egyptian antiquities, Rome was pilfering their favorite souvenirs. Rome, just as a city, has more Egyptian obelisks than Egypt does. The obelisks doubled as race markers for chariots to round as they rode hell-bent around cobbled streets to cheering crowds. The richest families built palaces on the race route for the best vantage points.
Observation #3: Rome rocks water. Of course, the many public fountains are filled with water from aqueducts, with Trevi being the most famous*. But there are good drinking fountains as well. One of our guides showed us that some of the fountains have a small hole facing upward. If you use a finger to cover up the spout, water comes out the top hole like a drinking fountain. Neat engineering!
Observation #4: Just because it’s a marble (or similar) statue doesn’t make it beautiful. Honestly, we’ve learned this many times. The Naples museum ruined us because each sculpture was a thing of beauty.
Observation #5: The Pantheon [all + gods] is worth seeing and it’s free. This building is the most intact structure of ancient Rome since its rebuild in 1AD because of its continual use, first as a Roman temple and then, in the 7th century, a Catholic church. The columns in front belie the circular structure of the inside. The dome is open (final picture) to allow light long before electricity was an option. And yes, it absolutely rains through the open ceiling, making useful the many floor drains. I believe the first two Italian kings are interred here, but I found it interesting that this is also the final resting place of the Raphael (under Mary & Child in first picture).
Our hotel was within walking distance of many of The Sights, and I enjoyed walking around our five days here, holding on to my pockets whenever we walked by Trevi Fountain and glimpsing the Colosseum while looking for a restaurant. I won’t go out of my way to return, but I bet Rome and I will meet again.
*The legend is that if you take a coin and toss it over your opposite shoulder, you will return to Rome. None of us bothered. However, they collect thousands of Euros a day for charity from Trevi alone, so I approve.
A view from the website of our rental. I don’t quite know where it was taken, but it captures the essence of the Amalfi coast. At least it captures the beauty. This does not capture the stress.
Wes contemplating the bleakest future when, at first, the wifi didn’t work.
Arriving by ferry to Amalfi, which is a small town among smaller towns on the Amalfi Coast, we already had a taxi ready to take us to our nearby rental. When we passed a pedestrian in a tunnel that barely had enough room for two cars, I got a sense that getting out and about was going to take some thinking. This was confirmed when, with no place to pull over, our driver just stopped driving and threw us out. Luckily, it was close to the rental.
The first evening, Dwayne and Piper made a delicious tomato sauce for our spaghetti dinner.
I have to give credit to our rental– we walked into this on the kitchen counter with no need to figure out grocery shopping or finding a restaurant right away. The owner even arranged pizza delivery the second night for us, giving us another respite of getting the five of us out and back for an evening.
But still, there was laundry to do, gelato shops to visit, and semi-sandy beaches to walk barefoot upon. Dwayne and I grabbed the laundry bag and shopping bags and walked toward Minori for chores and exploration.
Here’s the thing about the road* on Amalfi Coast. In most places, it has two lanes, each about three-fourths the width of a car. For extra excitement, blind corners and parked cars liberally sprinkle the motorway. Motorcycles take the middle as they weave in and out.** Pedestrians get whatever of the road is leftover. Oddly, other than a clipped side mirror, we saw no accidents. I think the entire system is so precarious that everyone is hyperaware. I bet that if you did brain scans of drivers accustomed to different parts of the world, drivers around here would light up far more than, say, ones stuck in Seattle traffic jams.
Again, not my picture. I twitch just contemplating the road. I was inspired to make this joke: What do Amalfi bus drivers do for relaxation? Air traffic control.
With all this in mind, Dwayne and I walked to the nearest town, and I became someone else entirely. Usually, I walk quickly to get a jump on the next adventure or to maximize efficiency, but here, I sprinted to minimize the number of minutes in danger. Dwayne sauntered, taking pictures and pointing out all the beautiful spots, while I constantly calculated the future intersection of every vehicle with each other and myself. Perhaps I worried enough for both of us, because Dwayne was chill on all our forays into towns, where I needed hours of recovery to bring down the nervous twitching.
It wasn’t quite so bad when I did the same route with the kids the next day, but we only took them out the once and had a marvelous beach and scavenger hunt. It was much worse when the two of us went the other direction to the town of Amalfi. I really couldn’t understand why Dwayne would try to have a conversation with me when my every brain cell just screamed “get through this hell!” Again, I had to be anxious enough for the both of us.
But the world tends to balance itself, because we found ourselves up in the small town of Revello, a town so old that cars cannot fit on its streets, and many of the streets are staircases anyway. Dwayne found two villa-estates for us to explore, and I found a bikini in a window, so we all won.
And, since Revello wasn’t along the Amalfi Coast road, we could walk back down close to our rental. You know how long it takes to walk down steps that took a 20-minute taxi ride to reach the top? Actually, it doesn’t matter; it was way less time and effort than it took travelers to walk UP those stairs.
The Amalfi Coast is a beautiful spot with cute towns that I probably will never need to visit again, especially with Cinque Terre on the itinerary in a week!***
Flashback: When we went to the Castera Palace, we rented a car for the afternoon from Sorrento, which straddles the greater Naples area and Amalfi Coast. We added extra difficulty points by getting a manual transmission and choosing a national holiday to make the trip. I tell you, there are few things sexier than a man who can drive the end-of-the-coast road out of Sorrento without injuring my children–or anyone else. I did the navigating and encouraging, and man, that man’s synapses were firing! I was so impressed.
*Not a misprint. There’s truly just one road down the coast, with maybe a few offshoots into towns.
**Motorcycles illustrate the classic rat race. Traffic is terrible, but a motorcycle can avoid most of it by just riding down the center, and going around cars to be the first to punch it out of a stoplight or construction stop. This makes traffic worse, encouraging more people to be on motorcycles. And we quickly learned that any ambulance would have several motorcycles trailing behind it, making the most of the wake behind it.
…and Wes can hardly think of anything stupider. Well, I had to like enough for all of us. The Royal Place of Caserta is supposedly the largest palace in Europe, by volume, which really means there’s at least one with more square footage. At a minimum, it’s educational to see something preposterously large and grand, in a “let them eat cake”* way. All ceilings, walls, and floors were extravagant, and it had some basic furniture, like a blue velvet throne. I liked the reading rooms and libraries of course, but it’s all designed for display, not for privacy or regular living. Not one of us wanted to live there.
Oops, a little mortal damage, courtesy of WWII.
And even Dwayne didn’t really want the, ahem, back yard. It was also ridiculously large and grand, and I’m not sure a single royal dandy had shoes that would take them the entire length. The stretch of fountains and pools that eventually took you to the waterfall and main fountains at the opposite end from the palace was 1.8 miles (3km) long. And, um, back again. And the statues were freaky. Preposterous, indeed!
Kyla and I are near the end waterfall, with the big block in the back the “Largest Palace, by volumn, in Europe”.
Um, pretty sure that’s not a natural waterfall.
An odd artistic choice, said no one on the committee. Apparently.
*Historically, Marie Antoinette probably never made her infamous remark, but it does capture a certain essence of a royal family that has, in addition to a regular palace, both a summer and winter one.
Everyone, even St. Rick Steves, says go to Sorrento, stay in Sorrento, Sorrento is lovely, Sorrento is peaceful, Sorrento, Sorrento…and then they tell you to do all your day trips to other places. Sorrento’s adorable Old Town sells China tchotchkes identical to all the other southern Italy tchotchkes (lemon-scented everything and magnets, as far as I can tell) and goes from crowded to over-crowded when the cruise ships come in. However, it is a lovely spot along the Mediterranean where Dwayne and I walked well past blisters and ate tasty food. And, of course, did day trips, the first to one of Europe’s largest palaces (we’ve graduated from castles, it seems) and then another to the lauded Island of Capri. Looks like we now know what my next posts will be!
One of our yummiest nights–I love finding little hole-in-the-wall restaurants that, once you get through the hole, turn out to be spacious, open, beautiful oases of delight.
Needopedia 