On the Ferry

21st Oct, 2007
I’m writing this on the Ferry from Civitavecchia (pronounced, roughly, Chiv-ee-ta-veck-ee-ah) to Barcelona. We left over an hour late last night, so it doesn’t look as though we’re going to get into Barcelona (which apparently is spelt, Barcellona, in Spain) until at least an hour late, and maybe longer.
We got to the ferry terminal much too early, being a bit concerned in case we missed the thing. As it was, we sat around from two to six waiting. And reading - more of Ian Rankin. Stood out in the cold waiting to go on board because Celia was concerned that the machine we had to go past might notice that she had knives in her pack - and so we were trying to avoid it! In fact, we didn’t put our luggage through there at all in the end. Maybe they don’t use it anymore.
When we finally got on board we found that the cabin is more than adequate for anyone’s needs: a shower and a toilet included, and bunks and a little couch, and a small desk with a chair. Only about seven foot across, but surprisingly well-designed. We opted for the buffet meal because the ‘proper’ restaurant was expensive. Perhaps we should have gone with the expense: the buffet food was lukewarm, and the beef stew was full of gristle. Very disappointing, and not that cheap for what it was. Breakfast this morning wasn’t much better: very little choice - the only cereal was cornflakes. Never mind, it’s fun being on the boat with hundreds of Italians all doing their usual shouting at each other, and with East Europeans who’ve been shopping in Italy and are bringing all their goodies home.
I didn’t find it easy to sleep, though Celia dropped off while listening to one of her audio books around nine and didn’t get out of bed again until eight this morning. The boat rocks, of course, but that’s no big deal. But when you’re lying in bed you’re much more aware of noises and movement. It shudders continually, but like it’s breathing; so there’s a space and then a shudder, a space and shudder and so on. And every so often it hits a solid rock of a wave, and it sounds like one of the articulated lorries in the hold has come loose and gone for a wander. After this crashing down below had gone on for quite a while this morning, I went and talked to the Purser, and an Italian-speaking guy came round to explain, not long after, that it was the ‘machina’ that was making the noise. It still sounds as though it’s trying to drive a hole in the side of the hold, however!

Some notes about Rome

Rome has been interesting, but because our hotel has been so far away from the tourist areas, we’ve had to do a lot of travelling. It’s cheap enough to do so, because the three day tickets are very reasonable and you can go on the Metro too, but the buses leave something to be desired. They have very few seats (so more people can cram onto them) and with everyone hanging on - and sometimes almost falling over - it’s quite an experience in human contact! The trams seem to have gone from the Roman streets - Celia says it was trams we used last time. The streets aren’t really built for vehicles: rattling over the cobblestones in a bus is bone-wrenching and this morning I couldn’t get words out to Celia because my teeth rattling around in my mouth.
Italian is a language I think I’d get tired of soonish: the way the words are overloaded with vowel sounds gets a bit tedious. German, by comparison, was actually a lot more varied on the ear. And the Italians, some of them, race through the words at a speed that’s quite phenomenal - again it must be something to do with the excess of vowels. It produces a kind of sing-song effect after a while. Furthermore, they all talk at full bore - there’s no kind of quietness about their conversation. Everything has to be done as though the whole world wanted to hear.
ATM machines in Germany are called Geldautomats. In Italy they’re Bancomats. Geld of course is the word for money in German - and has links with our ‘gold.’ Banco is the Italian ‘bank.’ Occasionally you come across a Postomat in Italy; the Post Office has its own system, seemingly.

When in Rome - do the laundry!

Yesterday [now three days ago] was another laundrette day. Don’t know why we’d run out of clothes so quickly again, but it was very necessary. Maybe we’ve left some behind somewhere. Anyway, we also supermarketed, which gave Celia a bit of a rush. In the afternoon we headed into the old part of town again, specifically to the Colosseum. Got ourselves conned into having our pictures taken with a couple of ‘Roman guards’ who then demanded ten euros for the privilege. Celia gave them two euros and they said she was stingy. The Colosseum, like much of the area in the old Roman forum, is being restored. Some of it looks quite new, in fact. Many of the old columns in the forum have been put back together, jigsaw fashion, and there’s a huge amount of restoration going on. I don’t know that we walked through this area last time we were in Rome, but it’s certainly getting a lot of attention.
As we came out of the forum we discovered the Paul Gauguin exhibition that we’d read about. It was being held in the back of a building which we’d passed several times and hadn’t been able to name. Turns out it’s the main Art Gallery - at least as far as I understand.
The Gauguin, interestingly enough, didn’t have many of his South Sea Islands paintings, which are mostly what I’ve known him for. But it did have a wide range of his pictures overall, including a lot of his early work, which is wonderfully coloured, and a delight to the eye. To the end he remained a superb colourist, and seeing these early works as well has confirmed he’s an artist I really enjoy. His life, like so many of the artists of his time, was a muddle, and the political statements that the write-ups on him in the exhibition claim he was making are not that obvious - to my eye, anyway.
And talking of painting: we made our way to the Piazza del Popolo towards evening (after having had an excellent and economic meal at the Railway Station). Celia wanted to go there because it was close to the place we stayed at last time we were here. But neither of us could remember exactly where we had stayed, unfortunately. Anyway, the Piazza, when we got there, didn’t look at all familiar (!) and neither did the surrounding streets. But halfway along the Corso we came across this boy, who couldn’t have been more than 15 or 16, and he was painting with spray cans. He’d flip each can out of the box, give it a twist and a shake (rather like those guys in bars who throw cocktails around to mix them - and show off), and then set to with complete understanding of what he was doing to produce a painting. The whole thing was performance art, really, because it was done at great speed, with utter confidence, using the cans, the hands, pieces of cardboard torn on the spot, an old pie dish (for part of a circle), mixes of colour done with ease, and a total concentration that was a bit scary for someone of his age. At the end of it he sold the painting on the spot to someone for ten euros (!) He was working by the light of the shop next door, and at one point someone came out and said he needed to move along because the crowd watching him was blocking the shop doorway. So he just upped his equipment and moved a metre further, and then got back onto the job. There was another painter doing something similar further along the road - actually working almost in the dark - but he none of the panache of the boy.

Tripping around Roma on the bus

Turns out that the 881 goes from outside the door of the hotel to St Peter's and Vatican City. Suddenly we turned a corner and there was the famous dome and colonnade. Still as extraordinary as ever, even though it's a place we've been to before. We followed the crowd in one of the queues and discovered that the bag Celia was carrying - with her Swiss army knife and another knife - had to go through a metal detector. For some reason it went through without the guards paying the slightest attention, and so we were able to park it in 'left luggage' and go inside without carrying it.

It turned out that we were in the queue that was heading for the crypt area, where Popes are buried. Well, we hadn't been there before, so we thought we'd give it a turn and catch up on the Basilica itself later. It wasn't the most inspiring place - except for those Catholics wanting to pray in front of the tomb of Pope John Paul II - and we trundled along with the crowd, climbed some stairs at the end, not quite knowing where we were going, and suddenly: we were inside the Basilica itself, with that awe-inspiring altar of four spiralling columns made of black marble.

Celia says we didn't get inside the Basilica when we were here in 1974 because there was a Mass being celebrated. I can't particularly remember. I know we saw the then Pope from a distance at one point on that occasion; he was being carried around on his throne high above the crowd. Anyway, the Basilica is fantastic, as you'd expect. This is one of the treasure houses of Catholicism after all. It's full of wonderful statuary and paintings and design. And then there is an actual treasure museum which we visited. Seemingly these particular treasures have been ransacked more than once and have had to be re-found again. Strangely enough, one of the most impressive items in the collection is very new: Pope John Paul II's vestments. They are so richly brocaded and designed that you just stop and wonder with delight.

We spent quite a long time at St Peter's all in all, and didn't actually get round to having lunch till five o'clock! (We'd stoked up on breakfast in the morning, anyway.) Found a restaurant near one of the bridges over the Tiber where the food was at our sort of price. Celia had a very nice spaghetti cabonera and I had a beef dish. Plus we shared a salad. Very tasty meal, slightly offset by the fact that what they then charged for the bottle of water and the bread was exorbitant.

Celia's idea of fun is to jump on a bus and see where it goes. She's full of confidence because we have a bus route map. So we got on a 64 and it took us through some of the touristy areas to the main station, where we discovered a bookshop with a whole area devoted to English novels, and yet another McDonald's. The latter have infested Europe like flies - but their milkshakes are rather refreshing, even though in Italy they only seem to have to flavours available: strawberry and chocolate. And their milkshakes are smaller than the ones McDonald's provide in Germany, where you get a choice of large or small.

Sleeping in Rome

Neither of us slept well last night, so we finished up having breakfast in the hotel this morning (part of the package, for once) and going back to bed for a snooze. It had been increasingly humid during the day, and stuffy during the night. Celia even got up at one point and leaned out the window to get some cool air. We may just have to get used to it: Barcelona, our next stop, probably won’t be any cooler. Seems there’s been very little rain in Italy generally over the last while, although it rained during the night a little. The riverbeds throughout Italy - the ones we’ve seen - are very dry.
After we’d booked this hotel, which, for a change, was supposed to be an improvement over some of the places we’ve stayed, we realised that it was quite some distance from the centre of things. So the night before last we’d sat down with a Roma timetable and map and worked out how we would get here. Mumma mia! what a trip!
We would get on the Metro at the Roma Termini (where our train would come into), travel some eight or nine stops to Cornelia, hop on the bus to Villa Cartegna, get off, get on an 881 bus and come to the hotel. The actuality was somewhat different: we got the Metro part right, sweating all the way, got onto the bus (the 791) to Villa Cartegna, with the help of some non-English speaking people (!), got off at the right stop, and then proceeded to go in the wrong direction on the 881. Saw the street number of the hotel as we passed by, got off, had a conversation with a woman who only spoke Italian as to where we should be going - lontano (a long way) - had another conversation with a rather blunt woman in a street front office who told me it was Pisana, not Pasana, as I was saying it, but who at least told me that if we went the way we were going we would land back up in San Pietro (a Metro station we’d already been through). Went back to the bus stop, smiled at the old lady who’d told us lontano, and discovered that it really was a long way to Via Pisana. But another older woman on the bus knew the hotel, and helped us arrive at it - in due course.
When the Italians are smiling and friendly, they’re lovely. When they don’t want to know, they seem very cold. Fortunately there are plenty of friendly ones!
Getting a meal last night proved to be a bit of a mission too, as there are no restaurants around our area - in fact, it’s a bit of a semi-industrial area mixed with residential. (Which isn’t uncommon in Europe.) We got on the 881 one again, went back to Villa Carpegna, because it had seemed that there was more life up there, and found that while there were some restaurants, they weren’t the most economic. In the end settled for a ‘first course’ of pasta each, which was plenty. The restaurant was very busy, the food was fine, we had a quattro litre of red wine between us (which is also plenty) and came home on the famous 881 (in the right direction) and tried to sleep.

Travelling to Rome

17 October 2007
Travelling to Rome, after a quick detour to Pisa, to see the famous leaning thingee. We had to get a bus to it, and it does lean fairly dramatically (the thingee, not the bus - though that was pretty rough as well). I wouldn’t trust getting on it, though people were climbing to the top quite happily. The cathedral it’s alongside is also leaning a bit, I think, though Celia wasn’t convinced.
Pisa was very hot, and it’s got hotter since. We’re travelling down the coast some of the time, though at present we’ve lost sight of it. It’s nice to be near some sea again.
My post about yesterday’s sightseeing was a bit short, and during the early hours I was thinking what else I should say, but, as though things do, they’ve now dissipated. I meant to explain what a double recorder was: seemingly it’s something you can blow two notes on at once, as it not only has two mouthpieces (very close together) but also the note holes are separated into two halves. Be interesting to have a go on. There were richly endowed early keyboards, one with some thousand jewels embedded into its surface. The serpent I spoke of yesterday is a serpent-shaped horn, seldom used in orchestras or bands these days, but reasonably popular in its brief heyday. There were some other pseudo-serpents: instruments that looked playable but were probably just for use in a theatre performance. One violin had an absolute encrustation of carving on its underside; would have been quite uncomfortable to hold, I think. It was sitting alongside a Stradivarius, that doyen of violins. There was an upright piano - literally. The keyboard was still in the same position as usual, but the strings were vertical, as they are in modern uprights. However, the difference was that these strings were arranged in the way a grand’s strings are.
The Palazzo Vecchio, apart from what I said about it yesterday, has room after room upstairs with decorated ceilings. I don’t mean a pattern painted on, but umpteen paintings, some mythic, some religious. The artists must have worked years on the place. It also has many wonderful craft works on display: items that are for practical use but have been adorned by men (perhaps women) with an artistic nature, and the results are just wonderful. Superbly fine carving in bone with details so minute you wonder how they managed to avoid damaging the work. It was the same with Michaelangelo’s David: one misstep in the making, and this enormous work would have had to have been abandoned. The actual statue is twice human size, I’d gauge, and it stands on a plinth that’s about human size again. So it towers above you. You can’t see some of the detail, but we were looking at a book after we’d viewed the statue, and the eyes are done in such a way that they appear to be looking at something. They’re not just blank, in other words. The strap of his sling is pitted, as though it was some material. The details of the limbs are extraordinary (though of course Michaelangelo wasn’t the only master of such details); but there is a sense of human flesh under the skin, and there are even veins showing in places.
We also saw statues by Benvenuto Cellini yesterday - he was virtually Michaelangelo’s equal in his ability to work with stone, and various other wonderful artists whose names didn’t mean so much to me.

Just a quick note

As I'm running out of time in the Internet shop. By the way, Italian keyboards have the ' up the top, the @ as a third option on a key in the middle row, and various other quirks. Makes typing interesting.
We spent the day visiting galleries. Missed out on the Uffizi, unfortunately, because there was a huge queue and we weren't sure how long the other galleries were open. But managed to get into the Palazzo Vecchio, the Galleria Academia (where the 'real' David statue is - and what a wonderful piece of work it is) and the Bargello, which also has some Michaelangelo work.
David is outstanding. We stood and looked at it for ages, and nothing else in the gallery comes near to it. Though there was an intriguing and quite unrelated exhibition of old and odd musical instruments there too - double recorders, for instance. And a serpent (you'll have to look it up!)
The cinquecentro gallery (not the quatrocentro, as I originally had here!) in the Palazzo Vecchio is wonderful, but there was a conference going on in half of it, so we couldn't get up close to some of the statues. Nevertheless (in spite of Celia counting all the steps we climbed) it was well worth a visit.
Left the hotel at 8.50, walked to the Uffizi, where we decided that spending an hour in a queue wasn't the best option at that point, and then spent nearly an hour trying to get in to see David. Very tiring day, but mentally and aestethically very stimulating. Though of course we had to visit a supermarket on the way back to make it complete! (And that was around four o'clock, which gives you an idea of how long we spent out gallery-visiting.) Rest day tomorrow, I suspect, when we go to Rome.

Meanwhile

Meanwhile, the computer’s mobile connect continues to play up, so that we can’t use it to go online. This had become quite an issue, as we hadn’t booked places in Florence or Rome, and we are due to go to the first of those tomorrow. The reason for delaying on this had been that the YHA had advertised a special deal in both cities in hostels, and we were waiting for a response from them. For some reason they’ve been very slack, and still haven’t replied - and we couldn’t get them on the phone either.
We finally found a Vodafone shop here in Milan today, and got a definite No from them in terms of help. They’re a different company, and don’t help UK customers. Finalmente! We found an Internet shop where we could use the computer for an hour for one euro. Very cheap! Found that my daughter had managed to cancel both the NZ cards, and had also found the address for sorting out my NZ driver’s licence. Later in the day we found a second Internet place where we surprisingly quickly booked hotels in Florence, Rome and Barcelona. Think they go from the sublime to the ridiculous, but at least they’re booked.

Going abroad - or not

We haven’t made much progress on doing any planning for going on the Continent as yet. I suspect in part we’ve been a bit put off by trying to figure out whether it’s cheaper to fly to a place and back again, or to go somewhere and try and fly from there to a second destination. Doing it online ought to be the way to go but it never seems quite as easy as we’d like. And it was a disappointing, I think, to find that even Ryanair, which was so cheap in terms of the flight proceeded to add a pile of extra charges on once we’d actually booked. They don’t always do that, but you have to catch their super-duper-specials before you can get out of the extra costs.
We don’t want to take the car on the Continent: for one thing neither of us fancies driving on the wrong side of the road, and we’d have to hike the insurance up even further.
Anyway, we are going to Luxembourg early in September, to see a man who was only 12 or 13 when we left London in 1974. I was a kind of big brother (as they call it in NZ) to him for a while, and we used to get on very well. Hopefully after an absence of thirty-plus years we still will!
We’ve thought of going to Switzerland, because there’s a young fellow who used to be at our church in Dunedin now living there with his wife, and we’d like to go back to Rome, because we have such good memories of it. We were thinking about Venice too, but my niece has rather put us off the place: she felt it was overpriced, crowded, and that they tended to rip off the visitors. Florence is another possibility, and of course the Continent is so full of choices it’s hard to know where to start.
We haven’t even considered places further afield like Bahrain or Dubai, and I’ve just come across Egypt package holidays - I don’t know that either of us are keen on the heat or the type of atmosphere in those places. I think I stopped off in Bahrain briefly when I first came to England; my memory of it is that the airport had a toilet I couldn’t figure out how to use and oppressive muggy heat. I was happy to get back on the plane!
The company that does the package holidays, however, does have a lot of info on Continental holidays, so it's probably time Celia and I sat down and tried to work something out.