"Man has re-created Europe in his own image" Aldous Huxley

We went back to Rome to prepare for the nightmare flight home and were driven to the train station by an extremely taciturn bloke who was probably grim because he had to drive around Naples for a living! The traffic’s pretty insane and it seems to be a free-for-all so Net was slightly nervous.
I went to the toilet at Napoli Centrali and was worried that it might be some hellish scenario with Camorra-like figures lurking but it was all gleaming and shiny with staff everywhere and piped music; cost 1 Euro (a Euro to urinate!).
The train trip back to Rome was uneventful. At the Galileo hotel the staff remembered us and seemed happy to see us again. Our room was much smaller this time but it was only for one night.

We decided another walk was in order so set off and dropped in to Santa Maria Della Vittoria once again and then checked out the Santa Maria degli Angeli e dei Martiri church, which we’d walked past many times but never gone inside before. As we entered, one of the priests was shooing a Gypsy woman away from the front door. Maybe she’d been trying to beg inside the church; there’s usually at least one Gypsy outside every church door but I’ve never seen one inside before, even though they’re probably mainly Christians (most of the Gypsies in Italy are originally from Romania).

The church is amazing and Net was really captivated by its quietness and capaciousness. It was very calming after the chaos and disorder of Naples. The marble floors are fantastically elaborate and the dome is impressive. There’s also a roof that was designed by Michelangelo. The church had an impressive exhibition on Galileo seeking to prove that science and religion can coexist and stressing that Galileo was no atheist. However, it was very light of detail concerning the great man’s persecution by the church. There is a very interesting part of the church, a meridian line set into the marble floor, that was installed in 1702 to tell the time accurately. A small beam of light comes through the roof of the church and shines onto the line, at different times of the year it marks different events like equinoxes and solstices. Fascinating!

Net at Santa Maria degli Angel

There was a preparation for a funeral going on, with huge bouquets of flowers being brought in and a priest getting ready. They were laying out purple robes for him so it must have been a big deal.
We had a late lunch at the restaurant we’d dined at on our first day in Rome and the same one-clawed pigeon turned up again for scraps. We watched a gypsy girl set herself up for begging on the street corner: she got herself comfortable first, with plenty of back support and then she leaned forward with her head on the ground and arms raised up with cupped hands.

We walked back to the church to see if the funeral had happened and saw hearses drive away, laden with flowers. We found out later from the concierge that it was for a TV journalist who’d been killed in a motorbike crash.

Church interior - those green 'marble' columns are actually trompe-l'oeil paintings

I decided I wanted to check out the Rome Museum attached to the church, mainly to see the Baths of Diocletian, so I took Net back to the hotel and then rushed off to see as much as possible before the museum closed. I was slightly disappointed that the baths bit was much smaller than I’d imagined. The museum is very interesting though, with tons of Roman sculptures and some good exhibits inside.

Baths of Diocletian


Sculpture in the Baths of Diocletian


Hardly any Roman heads survived the Dark Ages!


Cat in the grounds of the museum

The next day we had breakfast and said goodbye to the nice waitress who gave us hugs and kisses. Then we went back to yesterday’s church to take some photos.

Sculpture of Galileo - gifted to the church by the Chinese government

Back to the hotel to prepare for trip home; the hotel manager guy was very nice: shaking our hands and being quite warm in his farewell to us. The shuttle driver was very curt and drove fast with radio blaring, never once attempting any conversation. We had one last look at the streets and a good look at Rome beyond the tourist spots as the airport is a long way out of the city.
Flying over Rome, we saw the Colosseum and all the other marvels, then over mountains with snow and before we knew it we’d reached the other side of Italy! Then Greek Islands, Serbia, Iran, Pakistan, India and finally Thailand and Bangkok. The 20 hour flight was gruelling and ghastly but we survived with no sleep for 32 hours.

Now we have to get back to reality after 6 weeks of exciting adventures!

Our Last Day Was in Pompeii!

The train for Naples was due to leave at 11am so I took a walk to Santa Maria Della Vittoria for another look at Santa Teresa’s ecstasy before we boarded. The trip had some great new scenery for us to ponder: more villages and even castles on hilltops and there were snow-covered mountains. A change had come through from the north yesterday so it was cooler and windy but still warm.

Naples from our hotel room

Naples didn’t look too promising as the train pulled into Napoli Centrale but the station itself is all gleaming modernity, the brightest and cleanest terminus we’d yet encountered in Italy; it’s when you go outside that the fun starts. We decided to walk to the Holiday Inn and set off with my scrawled notes from Google Maps as directions but soon we were lost amidst the broken, rubbish-filled streets. The wind was cold and biting and blew the rubbish in every direction; things kept getting worse as we got more lost. The main problem was the lack of street signs, either they’d fallen off or been obscured by scaffolding. The narrow sidewalks were like rubble and there was dog crap everywhere. It being a Sunday and the merciless wind only added to the sense of desolation and abandonment. We asked some locals for directions but eventually we had to give up and hail a cab and then it seemed to take ages to get to the hotel, again through broken streets covered in rubbish. The hotel was in an even more desolate part of town and I took a look outside once we’d settled into our 16th floor room with sweeping view over the city but with no views of the bay or Vesuvius. I stepped into an empty modern piazza and it was like one of those movies set after a nuclear war: empty buildings, eerie, whistling wind, rubbish blowing and forming drifts in corners, no people, a dog sleeping just outside the hotel’s automatic doors. For a moment I got worried that I wouldn’t be able to work out how to get back inside as I seemed to be lost in a maze of high-rise but I found a way back in. Our instinct was to hole up in the hotel rather than risk walking through these deserted streets to find somewhere to eat and this was the first hotel we’d stayed in that had a restaurant that served dinner so we dined there. There was a huge contingent of Japanese tourists who descended onto the breakfast buffet the next morning in a swarming mass. It took us quite a while to get anywhere near the muesli and scrambled eggs. Later we were crammed into one of the lifts with part of the Japanese convey and, when the lift got to our stop and more Japanese wanted to get in, the woman behind Annette started pushing her vigourously until Net screamed at her to stop.
We’d decided to catch a train to Pompeii station and walk to the ruins. We asked at Napoli Centrale about getting to Pompeii by train and the woman at customer service answered in a tone that suggested her dog had just died, another example of cheerful and helpful Italian customer service! Still, she did give us the info we needed and we were away from the rubbish of Naples to see the city that Vesuvius destroyed one thousand nine hundred and thirty two years ago.

Beautiful downtown Naples

We were the only tourists to get off at Pompeii station. The town around the station certainly looked more promising than Naples, though there was plenty of trash in the streets. Entry to the museum site is 11 Euro and there weren't many tourists around when we got there around 10am. The wind was still howling and blowing a lot of dust and for the first time in Italy we were cold but the lost city looked amazingly inviting.

Pompeii is a must-see if you’ve got any interest in history and you could easily spend all day walking around and still not explore it with any thoroughness. It’s a fantastic place - a whole city buried by ash and dug out again, with street after street and temples and squares and courtyards and villas and baths and laundries and statues and kitchen implements and roaming dogs and archeologists all over the place. The Forum and its environs in Rome is a knockout but Pompeii allows you to get the feel of what it was like to live in those days. It’s just staggering, what an experience! The wind abated and the tourists increased as the day went on but we still found ourselves alone in a street or a house or courtyard many times. We walked for about 5 hours, ending up at a stadium that was built in 200BC; you can stand in the middle where gladiators once fought; it’s like a mini-Colosseum! And Vesuvius towers over it all. It’s the only still-active volcano on the European mainland, last erupting in 1944 and it looks ominous even though it’s a fair distance from Pompeii. Herculaneum is closer and they copped the full effects of the pyroclastic surge. The Pompeii residents were mainly killed by blasts of heat - 250 degrees centigrade - and the site has some of the plaster casts of people killed, preserved in their death throes. The ash covered their bodies and hardened, then the bodies decomposed and left their shape in the ash. It’s a moving and grisly sight.

The Stadium






A windblown Net amongst the ruins




A suave Rick amongst the ruins


Rooms in baths




Inside a villa






Pompeiin brickwork


An archeologist at work


Another poor guy who didn't make it






Renaissance Pompeii viewed from ancient Pompeii

Finally we headed back to Pompeii station and I was just about to ask someone official-looking which platform we should wait on when an elderly gentleman sitting on a seat on the platform opposite called out “Are you going to Napoli Central?” We said yes and he said that the train would leave from Platform 2 where he was sitting and to get to it via the underground walkway. We came out on the other side and the seat he was sitting on was just at the top of the stairs so we sat next to him and he chatted with us for over half an hour. He spoke almost perfect English and, when we commented on his proficiency, he said he had been “top of the class” back in the sixties. He said he could speak French too. He told us exactly which train to catch so that we’d get to the central station and not the Metro line. I knew that the our train was due at 3.05 but it was comforting to have him confirm everything. As he talked he kept tapping me on the shoulder or arm. He had four daughters and ten grandchildren and he had wanted to be a tourist guide at Pompeii but ended up going into the family business, which was farming, and he’d made plenty of money and bought fourteen houses or flats! “I live well” he said “I eat well”. He gives his daughters everything they need but he said the younger generation “don’t want to work, they want everything to come easy to them, not like me, I always worked hard”. He told us his wife had died from breast cancer on June 15 1990. “She was a very good woman”, and he obviously still missed her. He said he would like to travel but he was almost blind, “My left eye is completely gone with glaucoma and my right eye is not so good”. He told us he lived a few towns away, towards Salerno: “Pompeii belongs to Napoli but my town belongs to Salerno. He pointed out the huge mountains opposite Vesuvius and said that behind them was the Amalfi Coast, which he said is beautiful and that we should go there and that Capri was great too! He said the ferry races they have from the mainland to Capri are a real great event.
Such a great guy. As it came time for the train to arrive I asked him if he was going to Naples and he said “No, I just sit here”. So, he sits on the station all day and helps people and talks to them! He was 68 but looked older, especially because it appeared he had no teeth except one sharp fang sticking out from his lower jaw! We shook hands when the train arrived and he said he’d love to come and see us in Sydney one day. We regretted later that we hadn’t got a photo of him with each of us to remember him by.
Thank goodness our Naples-sidetrack had proved worthwhile. Tomorrow it was back to Rome and then the gruelling flight back to Oz.

"A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority" - Samuel Johnson

We’ve developed a theory that Romans start cheering up on Fridays and stay that way until Sundays: on Fridays their mood brightens because the weekend is coming; by Sunday they're curt and moody again because the week is coming and they spend until the next Friday being irascible and so on. They do seem to have a big problem serving people, perhaps it’s a very long hangover from Imperial times.
The waiter the day before had been almost charming (though he may have been from Eastern Europe, as many of the waiters and waitresses are, for example,we were waited on by a nice Albanian girl on our last night in Rome and there was that Romanian guy the other day in the restaurant near the Colosseum) and an old-ish lady who we bought a wallet from noticed our picture of Moby and talked and lamented a lot about having a 37 year old son but still no grandchildren; and the young lady in the tour office when we confirmed our airport transfer was bubbly and helpful .. a pattern seemed to be developing!

Colonna Traiana

We walked down Via Nazionale all the way to Vittorio Emanuelle Monument which is near the Colonna Traiana and the Foro Traiano and the Mercati Traiano and the Foro di Augusto and all sorts of other impressive ruins leading to the Forum and the Colosseum.

The monument, which is a bit like the War Memorial in Canberra, is colossal, almost making the Colosseo non-colossal! It’s probably the biggest building we’ve seen yet on the whole European trip - a gigantic white marble folly with impossibly huge bronze statures on the top. There’s a very interesting war museum inside, with artifacts like Garibaldi’s blanket and saddle and it’s all very solemn and heroic. We had a good look around but opted not to take the lift to the top because of the cost and Net’s fear of heights!

As we walked on towards the Colosseum it started to rain heavily, with gusty winds - the first rain we’d seen since Barcelona! Rome needed a really good long soaking to cleanse itself of all the dust. It had been a stinking hot summer over all of Italy and still incredibly hot in mid-Autumn. This was the beginning of a change and it’s been cooler since, even in Naples (but more on Naples later!)

I set off to see Galleria Borghese that afternoon, walking all the way. Once again I’d traversed the Eternal City! The gallery is magnificent and so is its collection. Its decorative features reminded me of the Pitti Palace, they’re both Baroque masterpieces and there are so many sculptures by Bernini: David and Apollo and Daphne being the highlights. The latter is almost beyond belief in the way Bernini has described Daphne’s turning into a tree.

There is a great collection of Caravaggios and some fantastic Titians, notably the famous “Sacred and Profane Love” and also a large Raphael, “Descent from the Cross”.

Titian's Sacred and Profane Love

I walked back through the gardens and down Via Veneto, which is one of the loveliest and poshest streets in Rome, with wide sidewalks as you’d find in Paris or Melbourne.

The next day Net had nothing particular in mind and was happy to go wandering. I had a cunning plan to see the massive buildings we’d seen the day before from the Monument, I knew they were just across the Tiber and there are no Metros stations close by so we caught a train to Spagna (Spanish Steps) and went up a hill past the 2000 year old Roman walls and then I took Net for a tour of Via Veneta. We saw a shirt in one shop that cost 1,000 dollars Oz! We stopped at a swanky restaurant and had a coffee and tea - very posh. Via Veneta features a lot in the Fellini movies, La Dolce Vita and Nights of Cabiria.

We walked down a bit and then back again into the Borghese Gardens; I planned to continue toward the river but Net spied the bikes for hire and we agreed it would be fun to get a two-person one. I thought it would be very difficult going uphill like the ones in Centennial Park but these ones have some sort of motor thing that operates with your pedaling. The person on the left side controls everything and it’s amazing how you power uphill! It was great fun and we had a ball, going all around the gardens, past the gallery and past the lake. It took a while to get used to controlling the machine but I soon got the hang of it and we sped around everywhere.

After that thrill we walked through the lovely gardens and watched families picnicking under the shady trees until we got to the Piazza del Popolo where a big anti-privitisation demo was being planned. We headed down Via di Ripetta and Via Scrofa all the way to the Piazza Navone, which has a magnificent fountain and a huge church and art markets.

Borghese Gardens


Piazza Navone

Then we saw the huge building across the Tiber called the Castel Sant’ Angelo which is an enormous old Roman fort converted to a church and then we saw the dome of St Peters! We couldn’t believe we’d walked so far! We walked to St Peters Piazza and stood in the middle. It wasn’t as crowded as Tuesday and no where near as hot so we spent plenty of time there, soaking it all up.

Castel Sant’ Angelo


Ponte Sant' Angelo






Net filling up on holy water

To get the train home we walked across the oldest Roman bridge spanning the Tiber and past the VE Monument again and the Forum and all that amazing stuff and then the Colosseum. This city never ceases to amaze!

The Forum

We decided to have a sumptuous meal on our last night: antipasto of grilled eggplant, peppers, spinach, bruschetta, steak with tomato and garlic sauce, bread, salad, roast potatoes followed by two rich desserts: profiteroles and cheesecake - delicious!
And so onto Naples, which surprised us in a completely different way! But that's another story.