Time Difference: -8 hours (from Brisbane)
Soundtrack: Just random.
Currently Inspired by: The beauty of Venice
Words written: 89,502. Still too busy.
Where am I up to? My
head spins when I try to remember everything that has been done over the last
week. As I’ve been so busy treating
sightseeing like a career and totally forgetting that I’m actually on holidays,
it was nice to have someone here with me to make me do holiday-type stuff,
like, oh I don’t know, staying still for thirty seconds together?
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| Fiuggi (not my photo) |
I can’t imagine a better place to stay still than the Heaven
Spa in the tiny little town of Fiuggi, renowned for the therapeutic properties
of its mineral water. It was heaven,
indeed. The drive there was surprisingly
relaxing, considering that our bus driver took the high speed (and high altitude)
mountain turns on two wheels and with about a finger and a half on the steering
wheel. You can’t be nervous when you are
looking at the green and hilly Italian countryside spreading out below you like
a model farm village with tiny little perfect animals, and neat rows of crops. The various terracotta towns in the full
force of the summer sun set the tops of their mountains afire with their burnt
orange roofs and walls, and the profusion of springtime blooms filled the bus
to the brim with the heady scent of greenery, jasmine and wildflowers. The lack of suspension in the bus actually
caused it to act in a similar fashion to a massage chair, so by leaning back
and closing your eyes you could almost imagine you were already in the spa,
receiving some kind of spinal adjustment and aromatherapy treatment!
The spa itself contains a huge therapy pool with a whole
variety of different massage jets, a hot and cold mineral water treatment, a
sauna, a Turkish bath, and “emotional showers” which are four showers at
varying temperatures and colours. There
are also relaxation rooms with light displays and waterbeds. It’s ridiculous, really. And the town of Fiuggi is really small and
absolutely gorgeous. I highly recommend
a visit there to anyone who is around the Rome area.
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| In the Pizzeria |
On Tuesday Mum and I caught a seemingly endless series of
public transport connections to the Amalfi Coast, stopping in for a couple of
hours at Naples on the way. We had to
change trains there anyway, but I really wanted to check out the Pizzeria Da
Michele, made “famous” by the book ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ by Elizabeth Gilbert, which
is parodied in the title of my travel blog.
Apparently this place serves the “best pizza in Italy”, and so despite
the merciless, baking heat, heavy bags on shoulders, homicidally insane Napolitean
drivers and strident air of “get me the hell out of this place” that Nasty Naples
somehow manages to give off, we set off in search of this doughy Holy Grail and
were rewarded a mere fifteen minutes later by its understated signage leaping
out from the carnage of haphazardly parked cars and heavily shuttered shops
like a cool green oasis in a shimmering black desert.
In the Pizzeria Da Michele, you sit, at a table with
strangers if necessary, order one of the three drink options (water, beer or
Coke – and none of this fancy shmancy sugar free crap either) with one waiter,
and then the second waiter comes to take your pizza order. There are no menus. You can simply order a Marinara pizza (pizza
with red sauce only – not seafood as some people may think) or Margherita (red
sauce and mozzarella), and for the sake of variety you can order this one with
extra cheese if you wish for one euro more.
You can then sit and watch as the always-burning wood fired oven is filled
with pizza after pizza and yours finally comes bubbling along to your
table. Were they delicious? Yes.
Were they more-ish?
Absolutely. Was their “secret
recipe base” really all it cracked up to be?
You betcha. But something about
them made me go “Best pizza in Italy?
Errrrm”. I wonder how much of
that feeling related to too much hype. I
mean really, how could any item live up to that tag? Still, I’m glad we made the effort to
go. It was very, very, very good pizza. Click here to see all the pics from Fiuggi and Naples.
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| View from the top |
Minori is the tiny little town we chose to stay in on the
Amalfi Coast. As neither my mother nor I
are party animals (any more) we were happy to simply stay in a cute and quiet
little village rather than one of the bigger tourist places, check out the
views, maybe go for a bit of a walk and spend a day on the beach. All of this was achieved, and with much
contentment. Feeling the need for a walk
one afternoon, I spied a flight of stairs and decided I would see where they
went. At the top of those there was
another set so I decided to see where they led, and so on and so forth for
about 35 minutes until I finally popped out surprised, pleased and puce in the
face, on the top of the little mountain that belonged to the town. The view was, of course, spectacular, and I
met quite a character while on the climb, an old man who must have been seventy
if he was a day, hanging something out over his fence which was about three
quarters of the way up this mountain and cheerfully babbling away to me in
Italian. So he would have to be one of
the fittest old farts I’ve ever encountered in my life, because there is absolutely
no way to access his house apart from on foot. Click here to see the pics from Minori.
We had decided to visit Pompeii on the way back to Rome,
however a full day’s sun and inadequate sunscreen had left us both with livid
and shivery sunburn, and the thought of trudging around a large archaeological
site for several hours in 35 degree heat with our heavy bags rubbing our raw
skin off did not really appeal, and so, much to my dismay and extreme
disappointment (with myself and my utter stupidity) we had to skip it. Fortunately, this then meant that we arrived
in Rome at 3pm instead of 7.30pm as originally planned, and I say fortunately
because my friend Laura was arriving in Termini and needed to be collected at
6pm. I had, the entire time, thought she
was arriving the day after. So, that was
quite lucky for her really!
This also meant that Laura was able to spend a full day in
Rome on the Friday before we headed to Venice, so this was also good... or it
would have been if she was travelling in any country but Italy. There was a strike, and not only were the
metro and some buses down, the Colosseum and some of the major sites were
closed. Talk about luck, huh? She must have used all of hers up on the
arrival times working out. This
place! I do love it, but sometimes I don’t
like it very much. It makes liking it
hard work. Poor Laura.
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| Our first view in Venice |
Venice. How beautiful
is Venice? My god. I want to marry it and have its babies. Yes it’s expensive, yes it is difficult and
confusing to navigate, yes it is full of tourists but it’s just so damn beautiful
I just don’t care about the rest! A very
inspiring place to be. We have taken a
couple of long walks here, several water bus rides, tried on millions of masks,
seen some incredible old paintings, gaped at ornate buildings, laughed at the
Boy With Frog, sighed over watery sunsets, eaten sixteen litres of gelato, seen
San Marco square and the outside only of the Basilica (line was hours long) and
as a result I have about ten thousand photographs. Unfortunately I do not have any photographs
of us on a gondola, because we were sadly not prepared to pay 100 euros for a
half an hour trip. Outrageous,
really. You can click here to see the
photos of lovely Venice.
Tomorrow, the last part of my Italian adventure begins with
several trains to Cinque Terre (specifically, Riomaggiore) where we shall be
staying until Thursday.
Til Next We Speak
*LOVE*
N
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