July 5, 1999, Monday – Genova, Italy

We left the ship at 1400 with the First Mate of Cielo del Canada. He needed to go to the German Embassy and the hotel that the ship’s agent had booked us at, was nearby. The drive to Genoa from the ship took about 30 minutes on a modern freeway but like Mexican freeways it was a toll road. Genova is a large modern city and our hotel is one of the grand old hotels (the Hotel Moderno Verdi) right across the street from the train station. It is four-star hotel and the agent got us a good rate at this super location. After checking in, we walked around the local area getting our bearings, finding Italian liras at a cash machine and then purchasing a phone card. We ate dinner outside at a small pizzeria near the hotel and received exactly what we thought we ordered. This is our first country where we do not know the language, but many of the proprietors here know at least some English.

July 6, 1999

After a rather late breakfast at the hotel, included with the night’s stay, we headed into the old city. We spent many hours just walking the narrow twisty streets of the old city and admiring the old architecture. We stopped by the medieval gate to the city and visited the parts of town reported to have been the boyhood haunts of Christopher Columbus. We then visited the old harbor area and stopped at a few churches along the way. Much of the town is under repair and many of the older buildings are covered in tarps as the work progresses. It looks to me that the false fronts of the last decades’ modernization are being removed from the old stone buildings restoring them to their original beauty. On other buildings, years of black coal soot are being cleaned off and repairs made.

We ate lunch at a sidewalk café and enjoyed sitting for a time, resting our already tired legs. We took the time then to return to the hotel for a short rest before more evening wanders and another great dinner at the nearby Pizzaria.

Wednesday July 7, 1999 -- Pisa

After a 9AM breakfast in the hotel we were off to the train station. Bill spent some time figuring out the schedule while I stood with our luggage and then he got the EuRail passes validated and we were off on our journeys. We first took the train to Pisa and went to see its leaning tower as well as the associated impressive marble churches. The church buildings had great statuettes carved into the window, door and roof cornices. We walked the distance between the train station and the tower along the lovely old twisting narrow streets and crossed the river with its old brickwork banks. It was then back to the train station and a short hop to Lucca. Lucca is a city that still has its medieval walls intact. Bill and I walked back from dinner on the top of a section of the wall and the path continues for entire 2½ miles circumference of the wall. There is much to explore in this smaller city.

Thursday July 8, 1999 -- Lucca

We spent all morning tracking down two empty boxes and the right protocol so we could ship off our extra baggage to Ginger and Chris’s in Germany. By 12:30 we had the boxes (one from a wine store and one from an office supply store) filled and safely stowed in the Post Office on their way to Germany, we hope.

We then headed across the wall, or should I say we passed through it. The path is an old pedestrian passageway that leads into and up onto the wall. From there we climbed down stairs into the old city. We found a Café where we purchased two sandwiches and two pops that we carried back onto the wall and enjoyed a leisurely lunch under the trees there. After lunch we headed out across the town looking for Plazza Anfiteatro Romano that is a large oval shaped Plaza surrounded completely by tall homes of varying heights. It has only four entrances, which are tunnels under the homes. It was the site of the Roman Amphitheater and in the Middle ages the homes were built over the destroyed original elliptical structure of the theatre leaving the elliptical plaza in their center. Getting there was a challenge as the street layout in this part of town is a maze. We had a map but it did not list all of the tiny narrow twisting streets. We finally managed to stumble upon one of the tunnels leading in. Inside we enjoyed milkshakes at an outdoor café while the afternoon rain dumped on the umbrella that was protecting us.

Dinner was at a restaurant recommended in our guidebook and the food was great but the atmosphere was even better. It was a family type restaurant and a crowd of local music students was eating there giving the place a very informal pleasant air.

Friday July 9, 1999

We were up relatively early to catch the train into Florence for the day, but that did not pan out. We got to the train station and it was quiet and mostly closed up, as there was a one-day labor strike today. We put off going to Florence until Saturday and visited the Regional museum here instead. The museum contained historical artifacts from this area: everything from Roman Columns to church altar fronts. My favorite pieces were the inlayed wood pieces that, from a distance, were wonderful pictures. We then purchased a few pizza slices and drinks to take to the park on the wall for a picnic lunch and a long sit, reading and resting.

Today we had ice cream twice, once for a mid-afternoon snack and again after dinner. The ice cream here is so good that it is hard to pass it up.

In Genoa the most notable thing about the people was the cell phones and mopeds; here in Lucca it is bicycles. Everyone seems to ride bicycles here. Today we even watched a priest in black robes ride by and women in dresses seem to be traveling everywhere on bicycles.

We made it to Florence today. The trains started running late last night as promised, so we were off on the 8AM train to Florence. We arrived at the Santa Maria Novella station in the old city at 9:30 with an entire day to explore. Our first stop was the Santa Maria Novella church. It was closed for renovations so we continued on to Basilica of San Lorenzo. It is a church with a wonderful interior and a side garden in the cloisters that we also visited. The exterior of the front seemed to be missing its marble façade, as it was unadorned natural brown stone

From there we went to the Palazzo Medici for a quick peak on the way to the Duomo Cathedral . This cathedral was huge occupying several city blocks. We climbed the 414 steps to the top of its Campanile, bell tower, 82 meters high for a superb view over the city. We were standing up there, under the bells, when one of the bells rang many times marking 11:30. It was quite loud and very impressive. The lines to get into the other parts of this cathedral were very long so we decided to move on and never entered its nave.

We continued on to plazza della Repubblica where it was too early for lunch so we wandered through it and continued on. We ended up at plazza della Signoria. This plaza is right near to the art gallery, Uffizi, and contained many sculptures. Currently it contains a showing of wonderful modern "fat’’ sculptures and also many permanent renaissance pieces.

We visited another church, Basilica Santa Croce. It’s interior held the tombs of many famous people. We actually saw the tombs of Michelangelo, Dante (empty), Rossini, Machiavelli, Marconi, Fermi, D’Vinci and Rossinni. The tomb of Galileo is also in this church but we missed it. This church is well decorated with frescos around its altars and large paintings above them. The walls in the nave were plain but the floor was decorated with the many large square tombstones in its surface; many are quite old and skillfully carved. The center of the church had large scaffolding and it appeared that work was being done on the wood ceiling.

We then spent a little more time wandering the streets taking some time out to rest on convenient steps. We finally ended up at a bridge crossing the river so we crossed. Looking up the river we could see that the next bridge contained stores hanging off its sides. We found our way to this bridge and crossed the river again. Following the road brought us again to plazza della Signoria where we found a café shop for a bite to eat. No sooner had we started eating than the rains came. It rained for the entire hour that we sat and ate, sometimes quite hard, and was still lightly dripping when we walked back to the train station to catch the train back to Lucca.

Sunday July 11, 1999

A long, pleasant train ride today brought us through Roma and into Napoli. Bill quickly found us a hotel, again near to the train station. The rest of the afternoon was spent reading and resting. Come evening we took a walk to the port area and back to the hotel through town.

Monday July 12, 1999 -- Napoli

Today was museum day. We spent most of the day in the archeological museum, until we were too tired to view anymore. This museum contains some of the frescos, mosaics and statues recovered from Pompeii as well as Roman artifacts from other sites. The museum also has a section on Egyptian artifacts recovered from tombs and another section of artifacts from pre-historical times. We spent four hours and saw the entire museum except the pre-history area. We were just beginning the pre-history when that section was closed down for siesta time. Both of our backs were complaining so we decided not to wait around until it reopened at 4PM.

We found a nice café with tables in a plaza where we enjoyed a long late lunch. Then refreshed we tackled the town. We took a cable rail car up a hill to Castle Saint Elmo. The castle was closed for the day but the view over the city to Mt Vesuvius was great. We walked down the many steps back into town and to the water’s edge. We followed along the water passing two small boat marinas, and Castle dell’Ovo, and Castle Nuovo on our return to the hotel.

Tuesday July 13, 1999 -- Pompeii

We are back in the hotel resting up from our marathon trip through Pompeii today. The excavations there are fabulous and are a good example of what a Roman city was like. We walked many streets with stores and homes along them, visited a few incredible villas, a few temples, two theaters, the forum and the oldest surviving amphitheater. Some of the walls were still decorated with painted plaster and some of the floors were still covered in tile mosaics or a type of terrazzo. The streets are paved with large blocks of stone that still bear the ruts of the many cartwheels that passed over them centuries before. The raised sidewalks along the street sides are mostly packed soil now. The walls of most of the buildings have at least 6 feet of their walls intact and some have much more. All of the ancient roofs seem to be missing, but modern roofs have been added to some of the buildings to protect the architectural artwork that has been uncovered. In the early years of the discovery of Pompeii most of the statues, some of the mosaic floors and many wall paintings were removed and are now in various museums and collections in Europe and the US. (Some of which we saw yesterday.) As we looked at the painted walls in some of the buildings we could see missing square areas where pictures had been removed from the plainer painted background. Bill and I spent 8 hours wandering the old streets and although we had not yet seen it all we had visited much of the city. We felt that we had seen enough and were too tired to enjoy more so we headed back to the train station for the ride back to Naples. A large section of the Pompeii still remains buried under ash so there is still much for the archeologists to discover.

Wednesday July 14, 1999

A 9-hour train ride and we are now on the island of Sicily and the city of Siracusa. The train trip was most interesting as we passed through varied scenery. The train followed the coast through most of the trip with sand beaches and sheer cliffs. We also passed through some mountainous areas and lots of fertile farms. The train crossed to Sicily on a train-carrying ferry. At that point the train was also broken into three parts each heading out in different directions. It took slightly over two hours for the entire process including the 30-minute ferry ride. Traveling first class made for a very comfortable and restful day that we sorely needed after the active last two days.

Thursday July 15, 1999 -- Siracusa, Italy

This morning we explored in the old city and port area. The old city contains many beautiful baroque buildings, some Greek temple ruins and a very interesting waterfront. The most interesting site was the Cathedral. It had originally been a Greek temple built in the 5^th Century BC but in the 7^th Century AD was converted to a Christian church. The exterior Doric columns were filled in to form exterior walls of the new church and archways were cut into the old temple walls to form a central nave with two side isles. The columns are still a visible part of the walls and were massive. We lunched along the waterfront where visiting boats tie up stern to the quay.

After siesta we walked north in the city to visit the Greek/Roman Theater carved into the hillside there. There were also numerous home niches carved into the cliff left over from earlier times.

Saturday July 17, 1999

Yesterday was a day of travel. We left Siracusa on a morning train for the port of Messina. We arrived there shortly afternoon and walked the half block from the train Terminal Central to the Terminal Marina at the northern end of the same building. There, after much confusion, we boarded, as walk on passengers, a train ferry bound for the mainland. It crossed the very narrow strait that separates Sicily from the mainland with a parade of ferries making the crossing. The train ferries carried trains on their lower deck, cars on the second and people on the upper deck and ran very frequently, about four per hour, transporting train cars across. Our ferry had no cars on the car deck and only a few walk-on passengers. Back on the mainland we walked up the ramp to the train station and boarded the next train going south. We traveled around the tip of Italy, never far from the beach and up the eastern side to Taranto. Taranto is a port city, on two peninsulas with a small island in between that gives it nice protected harbors. It appears to have very little tourist traffic. The train station is on one of the peninsulas and we found a hotel on the island. Having arrived at 9PM we walked in toward the town center and stopped at the first hotel that we found. It was an interesting old hotel with very large rooms and the bathroom down the hall, also very inexpensive for Italy.

Today we boarded a train for Brindisi, which is the main jump off point to Greece for north American students. The town had an interesting port and the pillars marking the end of the Apean Way but not much else of note. We continued on to Bari. There we caught another train to Barletta where we are now in a hotel for the night. The scenery that we passed thorough today was rich farming with large vineyards and olive orchards. This was the largest expanse of farming that we have seen in Italy. After Brindisi the railroad followed the coastline with sea on one side and farms on the other. As we got close to Barletta many new apartment houses filled the area between the tracks and the sea.

Monday July 19, 1999

We enjoyed a quiet day in Barletta yesterday with only a little sight-seeing and lots of sitting in a plaza. We did visit the fort and it is no longer used by the military so it is open to the public. The fort is well restored and now contains an art museum and a marionette museum as well as much other nice future museum space.

Today we were up early and off to Padova. We arrived with enough time to have a late afternoon ice cream in the nearby park. Tomorrow we are off to Venice for a day of wandering the narrow streets and canals of that city.

Tuesday July 21, 1999

Today we left Italy by crossing into Austria and then to Germany. The train passed through some lovely country on the trip as it traveled through the Alps. We got off in Garmish and were met at the station by our daughter Ginger and her husband Chris.

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