Italy 2011, Frascati and Marino

Frascati, another of the Castelli Romani, is a busy dormitory town for nearby Rome and being the location of several international scientific laboratories is closely associated with science and technology. In 1943 it was heavily bombed and approximately half of its buildings, including many monuments, villas and houses, were destroyed. Many people died in an air raid on 22nd January 1944, the day of the battle of Anzio. Towards the end of the war the city was finally liberated from the Nazi German occupation on 4th June 1944 by the advancing American infantry.

What Frascati is best known for is its famous white wine, also called Frascati, which enjoys a Denominazione di Origine Controllata status. The vineyards where the vines are grown are volcanic and well drained with a micro climate influenced by the Alban Hills. The Romans referred to it as the Golden Wine both for its colour and its value and it has become embedded in the cultural and economic traditions of the town. In the fifteenth century there were over a thousand taverns in Rome and producers of Frascati owned almost all of them. It is said that Frascati is the most often mentioned wine in Italian literature.

The bus suddenly reappeared so we quickly finished our drinks and walked back to the bus stop just in front of one of the most impressive buildings in the town, the Villa Aldobrandini and known also as Belvedere because of its charming location and excellent view overlooking the whole valley up to Rome, twenty kilometres away. The bus left on time and as we still had a couple of hours or so before we needed to leave for the airport we felt confident enough to get off at Marino and have a look around there as well.

The bus dropped us off in a square with a curious fountain depicting slavery and a monument to celebrate the naval battle of Lepanto that took place on 7th October 1571 when a fleet of the Holy League, a coalition of Catholic maritime states, decisively defeated the main fleet of the Ottoman Empire. I’m not sure what it was doing here in this provincial town? We were still looking for Christine’s souvenirs so we left the square and walked along a main street which looked promising but proved fruitless.

Marino was clearly not a tourist place but instead a traditional Italian living and working town with shabby narrow streets, care worn but brightly colour- washed buildings with washing lines strung outside windows and across the streets dripping and flapping above little shops and small bars. In the heat the atmosphere was slow and lazy and no one appeared to be rushing to do anything very much at all. The greatest activity was at the bottom of the hill where there was a small market with a few stalls selling fruit and vegetables where there was a bit of trade but a lot more conversation.

We returned to the square on the main road where, although we couldn’t be certain, because there was no timetable, we estimated that if buses ran every hour from Frascati then one would be due in twenty minutes or so from now so we found a bar with a clear view of the road where we could keep look out and ordered some drinks from a waitress who seemed surprised to see English visitors in town on this Tuesday morning.

A couple of blue and white buses came and went but these were not ours and twenty minutes came and went and we began to wonder if we had guessed correctly as a further ten minutes passed by and we started looking around for a taxi rank. The waitress had no idea of bus times so we waited a few minutes longer and then finally a bus for Albano came along the main road and we hailed it to stop and jumped on board back to the town.

After we had collected our bags we needed another bus, this time to the airport. Micky and I were all for getting a taxi but at €50 but Kim considered this excessive and I have to say that she was correct because a ticket to Ciampino was only €1 each and a bus arrived and took us the twenty minute journey to the entrance to the airport and, if we hadn’t worked it out before, we knew then that we had been ripped off by the taxi driver when we arrived on Saturday morning.

Ciampino turned out not to be the best airport in the world but the flight was almost on time and we didn’t have long to sit and reflect on four excellent days in Italy and the wonderful city of Rome. It had been busy, it had been rushed and it had been hot but we had enjoyed every single minute of it.



Italy 2011, Rome, The Vatican and St Peter’s Basilica

By mid afternoon when we crossed the River Tiber over the Ponte Sant’ Angelo like time travellers we had completed the ancient, the medieval, and the modern and now it was time for the religious. Rome is the most important holy city in Christendom and St Peter’s Basilica at the heart of the Vatican City is the headquarters of the Catholic Church and is a place where some of the most important decisions in the history of Europe and the World have been made over the centuries. (A Basilica by the way is a sort of double Cathedral because it has two naves).

The route took us past the Castel Sant’ Angelo, which was the Pope’s ‘safe house’ in times of danger and into the busy square outside the Basilica where a long queue of people seemed to snake forever around the perimeter waiting for their turn to go inside. We joined the back of it and were pleased to find that it shuffled quite quickly towards the main doors and soon we were inside the biggest and the tallest church in the world that has room for sixty-thousand worshippers at one sitting and even Micky overcame his usual reluctance to visit the inside of a religious building and joined us. It was busy inside but not uncomfortable and we soaked up the atmosphere as we passed by chapels with precious holy relics, the tombs of dead Popes and rooms with glass cases full of religious artefacts.

Outside we saw the Swiss Guards in their medieval uniforms of blue, red and yellow and the Vatican post office doing a brisk trade in post marking letters and postcards. The Vatican is the third smallest state in Europe after Monaco and San Marino and its status is guaranteed by the Lateran Treaty of 1929 when Church and State, who had been squabbling since Italian unification, finally thrashed out a compromise deal that was marked by the building of a new road the Via della Conciliazione which, I have to say, to me seems rather sterile and lacking any real character. It is expensive however and from a street side stall we bought the dearest water I have ever had at €4 for a small bottle. We weren’t going to fall for that again so later on Kim refilled it from a public fountain by the side of the road.

The Ponte Vittorio Emanuele II took us back over the River Tiber and not unsurprisingly onto the Corso Vittorio Emanuele II which leads inevitably to the Vittorio Emanuele monument at the other end. As it stretched out in front of us there was about a kilometre and a half to walk and all of a sudden my itinerary looked for the first time to be overly ambitious. We had seen everything that we had planned to see but now there was a long walk back to the train station and everyone was hot and tired.

This long road is flanked with Palaces and Churches and Piazzas but our muscles were aching and it was desperately hot so all we wanted was a bar and a cold drink even if it did cost another eye-watering €25 for five drinks. We found a place about half way along the road and stopped for half an hour to rest and recover in the comfort of an air-conditioned bar and yes, sure enough it cost us €25.

No one complained but none of us were looking forward to the last stage of the walk when we had finished and paid up and returned to the street. We walked down to the busy Piazza Venezia overlooked by the monument commemorating Italian unification exactly one hundred and fifty years ago and then threaded our way past Trajan’s column, around the back of his market and onto the Via Nazionale with a long final energy sapping incline up the Esquiline which is the longest and highest of the seven hills. It had been easy this morning when we came down but going back was an altogether different matter. I took up the pole position and set the pace and Micky and Sue, who was suffering the most of all of us, followed shortly behind but Kim and Christine lagged behind, not from tiredness or fatigue it has to be said but because they were constantly distracted by souvenir shops looking for the presents that Christine had promised to take back home.

Eventually we arrived back at Roma Termini and having established the return train time we looked forward to sitting down for an hour and the journey back to Albano. Unfortunately the train didn’t leave from one of the main platforms that were reserved for the glossy high speed inter-city trains and the Eurostar so we had to walk a final four hundred metres to ours where the graffiti decorated transport was waiting for us.

It was still oppressively hot when we arrived back in Albano where the dusty streets baked in a lazy Sunday afternoon stupor and after we had negotiated the hill leading from the station to the town we stopped for a drink at the place we had enjoyed lunch the previous day where we sat in the garden, drank large glasses of beer and didn’t complain about the prices which were much more to our liking.

At the hotel the resident neighbour was sitting outside at his ‘privado’ table, presumably making some sort of statement of ownership but it didn’t matter to us because our plan was to go out as soon as we had showered and changed and return to World Pizza where we had enjoyed last night’s meal. We were more adventurous tonight and moved on from pizza to pasta dishes and other local specialities and we washed it all down with house wine and even though, much to Christine’s relief, the local character didn’t make an appearance tonight we had a second excellent meal and a thoroughly enjoyable evening.