Italy 2011, An Unexpected Bus Trip

On the third and final morning I woke up with a sore foot and an upset stomach so was less inclined than ever to partake of the meagre breakfast. Feeling sorry for myself I washed down some imodian capsules with a couple of cups of tea and the others picked about at the dry biscuits and pre-packed long life croissants and cakes.

We had a late afternoon flight so had all of the morning and the early afternoon for more sightseeing and the plan today was to use the local bus and take a trip to the shoreline of the lake that we had seen several times now from the windows of the train. From what we could make out from the badly faded timetable half stuck with peeling sellotape to the window at the terminus the buses seemed to run every hour and we had missed one by a matter of only seconds so there was a forty minute wait for the next one to come along. I purchasedthe tickets for Marino and we waited in the sunshine.

The bus arrived and the driver went off for a break and a cup of coffee and we took our seats as it started to fill up with passengers and at the appointed time the driver returned and we set off. It drove through Castel Gandolfo and then we expected it to drop down to the lake to the marina that we could see below us but instead of going down it started to climb and stopped at the town of Marino. With hindsight we should have got off there but we still expected the driver to drop us down to the lake but after a couple of stops the truth dawned on us that it was never going anywhere near a marina at all and we had wrongly supposed that Marino was a marina when in fact it was a town situated high above the lake.

The bus lurched about and threw us from side to side to such an extent that we had to cling on grimly to the handrails but this was to be expected I suppose because, after all, we were in Italy! Traffic regulations currently in force in Italy were approved by the Legislative Decree number 285 of 30th April 1992 and are contained in the Italian Highway Code called the Codice Della Strada. Anyone visiting a busy Italian city or town however may well dispute that there is such a thing as a highway code in Italy because despite the best intentions of the rule book the country has some different driving rules to the rest of Europe and the traffic was hectic on this Monday morning.

Traffic lights are a good example of these different rules because each junction resembles the starting grid of a formula one Grand Prix. At an Italian traffic intersection there is an intolerant commotion with cars all impatiently throbbing, engines growling, exhaust pipes fuming and clutch plates sizzling whilst behind the wheel the driver’s blood pressure reaches several degrees above boiling point.

A regard for the normal habits of road safety is curiously absent in Italy so although the traffic light colours are the same as elsewhere they mean completely different things. Red means slow down, amber means go and green means that no rules applyat all! At a junction an Italian driver simply points his car at the exit he is aiming for and shortly before the lights go green, he shuts his eyes, presses the accelerator to the floor then races forward and may God have mercy on anything or anyone in his way. Zebra crossings are a meaningless waste of white paint and if a pedestrian steps out onto one then they are immediately considered a target. Even worse – if caught on a crossing controlled by lights and they turn green for the traffic then he or she will have to take swift and evasive action because I believe it is considered permissible to run them down without any sort of penalty or punishment!

We didn’t know what to do now as the bus continued driving east and I began to worry that we had sufficient credit on the tickets as the bus kept going and going towards its ultimate destination, the town of Frascati where it discharged all of its passengers and the driver went off for another rest. It was due to return to Albano in forty minutes so we found a nearby bar for an unexpected drink in a town that we had not planned to visit.

Italy 2011, Rome, Emperors and Gladiators

On the second morning there was no improvement in the breakfast so we didn’t dawdle long in the dining room, just long enough for a stodgy croissant and a couple of cups of tea and then we left the hotel and made for the station for a second time.

As it was Monday morning the train was busier today as we joined commuters going to work in the city but we found some seats and it left exactly on time again. It seemed to be an even slower journey today but once again it arrived exactly on time at Roma Termini and we were soon outside in the bright sunshine and planning a route towards the Colosseum.

There are lots of things that I would like to see and I imagine the thrill of seeing the Pyramids, The Kremlin or the Great Wall of China for example would be heart stopping moments but when viewed for the first time the Colosseum ranks with these and others as a genuine draw dropping, knee buckling event. I can remember that experience in 1976 but even now, on my fourth visit to Rome, it still produced a moment of wonderment and awe as we emerged from the narrow streets into the Piazza del Colosseo.

Two thousand years previously this had been the largest amphitheatre ever built in the Roman Empire and was capable of seating sixty-thousand spectators (some estimates say eighty thousand but most agree that this is unlikely) at gladiatorial combat events. I am always stunned by the size and magnificence of the place and even though there are substantial parts of it now missing I find the scale of the place simply breathtaking. We were going to make this our first place to visit and we were disappointed to see a long slow moving queue but we were quickly picked out as potential easy pickings by a girl selling guided tours which promised a speedy entrance and the services of an expert guide so we agreed to this and paid up. Suckers!

We had to wait now to be assigned a tour leader and it was just our luck to get a head-case! Silvio was a theatrical extrovert with a dramatic style and with arms flailing and occasionally getting over excited and spitting into his beard he gave us an extravagant introduction to the construction of the magnificent building and the gladiatorial combats and the shows that were staged inside. This was all really helpful background information but it did seem to drag on longer than expected and all around people began to get fidgety as individual patience tanks one by one began to run dry.

Finally it was time to push through the lines of waiting people and within just a few minutes we were inside the underground passages below the auditorium where we followed the designated route up a flight of steps where it was interesting to imagine that these had been used previously by thousands of Romans attending the games and we now were following in their footsteps. We emerged into the interior of the amphitheatre where once there were seats, now long since pillaged and removed for recycling in medieval building projects, and into the bright sunshine where we circumnavigated the arena stopping frequently to admire the views and to imagine what it might have been like to be at this very place two-thousand years ago or so in a noisy and unruly crowd being entertained by bloodthirsty and barbaric games.

Inside the Colosseum it is huge but there isn’t really a lot to see, no statues, no paintings, no exhibits, just an elliptical arena surrounded by ancient brick and concrete, so once a full circuit has been completed, although it feels as though you should stay longer, there is not a lot to hang around for. This doesn’t mean that the visit experience is in any way disappointing or less wonderful just that it seems to me that there are two types of sightseeing, the first is where we go to admire the statues, the paintings and the exhibits and the second where the experience is simply about being there, in a place that has played such a pivotal role in world history and the development of civilisation and for me the Colosseum is one of the latter.

The day was getting hotter now and it was easy to understand why inside the arena the Roman crowds were protected by giant shades made of Egyptian cotton or why even today the most expensive seats at a bullfight are those in the shade and protected from the sun. We left the amphitheatre and bought some expensive food from a street stall and competed with everyone else to find some shade while we waited for Silvio to return at two o’clock to take us on the second part of the tour up to the Palatine Hill and into the Roman Forum.

More Posts abount Ancient Greece and Rome



Italy 2011, Not One Of The World’s Great Great Train Journeys

In the morning there was further evidence for why this hotel was so cheap – the breakfast was truly dreadful, probably the worst hotel breakfast that I have ever had with no buffet to speak of, no fresh bread just some dry toast biscuits and no butter to make it remotely edible and some pre-packaged croissants. On the positive side there was plenty of hot water so we could drink as many cups of tea that we wanted.

When we had finished we made final personal preparations for the planned trip to Rome and we set out for the train station. It was very warm already and even after a short walk we were rather hot and bothered so sat in the shade waiting for our transport to arrive.

What a shock that was as a Trenitalia train, at least forty years old and liberally covered in graffiti, creaked into the station and pulled up at the platform. The hiss of the doors opening could well have been mistaken for a sigh of relief at the end of a heavy chore. Inside the carriage it was clean but uncomfortable with utilitarian plastic seats that made your bum sweat and a worn out air conditioning system that rattled and groaned with old age.

It was punctual however and the train left Albano precisely on time on a journey that was scheduled for fifty minutes which seemed unlikely to me as it travelled ponderously along the single track making regular stops at towns along the way. An examination of the map revealed that the track didn’t go the most direct route towards Rome but first of all followed the shoreline of the lake and then made an extravagant loop as it passed through more towns on the way. The reason it had to go slowly was because the track looked to me to be some way past its sell by date with decaying wooden sleepers and old fashioned rails which made a reminiscent and satisfying tch tch, tch tch, tch tch, tch tch noise in the way that I remember that trains used to in England before all of the track improvements were made.

After half an hour the train pulled into Ciampino and I estimated that in distance we were about half way there and surely behind the clock but here the line joined the modern high speed track and out of the station the train gathered speed and the tch tch, tch tch was replaced by a whoooosh as it speeded up on the modern streamlined steel track that now followed the same route as a two thousand year old Roman aqueduct that told us that we were getting close to the city.

It was about now that I realised that although we had bought the train tickets I had forgotten to stamp them in the machine that validates them for travel and with hefty fines for travelling without a date stamped ticket I fretted about this all the way into Roma Termini where despite my doubts we arrived dead on time. No one checked the tickets so we had made a saving there because we would now be able to use them again tomorrow.

Roma Termini was heaving with people and activity and mindful of the advice to be on the lookout for thieves and pickpockets we clutched our bags and wallets tightly and made our way through the concourse and into the busy streets where people tried to sell us bus tour tickets and others offered us taxis but we didn’t need either because it was our plan to walk to the main attractions and unlike the day before this time I had a map and a plan.



Italy 2011, Albano Laziale and a Bandit Hold-Up

Located in the Castelli Romani region of Lazio, Albano is a busy commercial centre, a virtual suburb of Rome and one of the most important municipalities of the area. For a Saturday afternoon however the town was curiously quiet as we wandered along the main shopping street looking for somewhere to eat and then drifting into the side streets full of ancient buildings that betrayed the town’s almost secret Roman heritage.

Because of its close proximity to Rome it inevitably has a history that is closely linked to the famous city and everywhere there was evidence of a varied and interesting past. Albano is located in the area in which, according to the legend, the son of Aeneas, Ascanius, founded the city of Alba Longa, which was one of the main cities of the Latin tribes and, again according to the legend, the birthplace of Romulus and Remus, the mythical founders of Rome. As we wandered through we could fully appreciate that the town has its fair share of ancient buildings with the remains of an amphitheatre, Roman baths, catacombs, tombs, towers and villas.

Pompey the Great had a villa here, the Albanum Pompeii, and a villa belonging to the writer Seneca was discovered within ancient ruins found on the south ridge of Lake Albano, bordering the town of Ariccia. All of these residences, at the time of Domitian, were appropriated and owned by the Emperor’s within which they erected a monumental imperial residence, with the ruins today mostly contained in the Villa Barberini at Castel Gandolfo and is now a part of the Papal Palace as we have seen previously. Around 202 the Emperor Septimius Severus had installed in place of the old town huge camps for Roman Legions that remained in operation until the end of third century. Albano developed from this settlement and the streets still follow the ancient infrastructure and design and remains of the large baths built by Septimus’ son, Caracalla, are still visible at one of the road intersections.

Micky and I identified a place to eat, the extravagantly named Pizzeria La Bufalina di Cristiano Erminia, but it was ruled out by the girls because behind the bar it had a microwave to heat up the self-service food selections which was considered unsuitable (Micky pointed out that if the microwave wasn’t in full view in the bar it would be in the kitchen anyway!) so then we continued on a fruitless trek around the streets to find something they might approve of. On the positive side we found the train station and I established where to buy tickets so on the way back we purchased some from a supermarket for only €1.80 each return for tomorrow’s intended train journey to Rome.

And so after a circuitous route we found ourselves back at the place Micky and I had found earlier and despite the microwave issue everyone reluctantly agreed to eat here. I’m not sure exactly what the problem was because the food turned out to be very good indeed, the place served large glasses of foaming cold beer and we had a nice seat in the garden outside with a canopy of trees to shade us from the seering hot sun.

Following the late lunch we went back to the hotel and I started to identify all of the things that were wrong with it. The rooms weren’t actually in the hotel, the air conditioning in our room didn’t work and it was stiflingly hot, we had been allocated the wrong rooms which upset the financial arrangements and Micky’s TV remote control didn’t work. I complained but was stonewalled by the man at the desk who explained that the hotel was full (it clearly wasn’t) and that he thought it was best for us to be in the annex because a party of students were staying in the hotel (they weren’t it turned out) and this irritated me because I like to make my own assessment of what is best for me or not. We eventually agreed a reduction on the room rate where Sue and Christine were staying, he promised to have the air conditioning promptly repaired and he found a TV remote controller that worked for Micky.

After we had sorted all of this out we went back out againand looked for a restaurant for later and having found somewhere promising off the main square and quite close to the hotel we returned to the Pizzeria La Bufalina di Cristiano Erminia and sat and enjoyed the warm late afternoon sunshine and the pleasant atmosphere of the little town.

Back at the hotel we found an outside table to sit and chat and play cards and then curiously a door opened and a man emerged and gave us a cold and unwelcoming glance as he walked past us and towards the hotel. It turned out that he lived in the annex, which seemed a rather odd arrangement to us (a bit like the major in Fawlty Towers) and this was his personal outside table and that we weren’t really supposed to be using it. We worked this out while he was away and when he returned we apologised for our mistake and he explained several times that this particular spot was ‘privado’.

Having upset our unexpected neighbour we returned to the town which was much busier now, the square and the town gardens were full of pedestrians, the roads were throbbing with impatient traffic and all the bars and cafés were open so we joined the local people on a Saturday evening stroll along the streets to work up an appetite.

The trattoria that we had selected was called World Pizza, which didn’t sound very thrilling but it turned out to be a splendid choice. It was a traditional sort of place that reminded me of the restaurant where Michael Corleone assassinated the gangster Salazo and the Chief of Police in the Godfather film. It had two rows of tables, simple furniture, white tablecloths and pictures of old Albano on the walls. The food and the house wine was excellent and the highlight of the meal was the arrival of the town half-wit who came through the doors in cowboy outfit and mask and staged a theatrical hold-up with a toy pistol. Later he played harmonica in return for a couple or Euro payment and he stayed with us for a while because we gave him a glass of wine and indulged him in his fantasy game.

Christine however, didn’t find him all that amusing!

Italy 2011, Lake Albano and Castel Gandolfo

The small café was opposite the entrance to the Papal Palace which is where the Pope spends his summers on the shore of the lake ostensibly to avoid the oppressive heat of Rome. I’m sure that this probably isn’t strictly necessary anymore because I imagine that the Vatican will have more than adequate air-conditioning facilities these days but nevertheless it still remains a nice place to spend the summer. The Catholic Church owns this splendid Palace thanks to the Lateran Treaty of 1929 when Italy recognized the full ownership by the Holy See of the Pontifical Palace of Castel Gandolfo.

The villas and the grounds in which they stand comprise about fifty-five hectares, which makes it eleven hectares bigger than Europe’s third smallest sovereign state, that’s the Vatican itself. Just over half of the grounds comprise a garden and they rest are used for orchards, vinyards and for farming. The entire papal residence enjoys all the privileges of extraterritoriality and the properties which make up the villas comprise the Papal Palace itself, which includes the Vatican Observatory, the Barberini Palace, housing for twenty-one employees, an electrical plant, offices, farm buildings and stables. The villas possess their own pumping station providing water from the lake for plumbing and irrigation, as well as an aqueduct that carries drinking water from the nearby springs of Palazzolo, which are also on property belonging to the Holy See.

As we enjoyed a Peroni beer it started to dawn on us that we hadn’t planned terribly well for this little walk, we weren’t really sure where we were going, we didn’t know with any degree of certainty how far it was, we didn’t have a map, it was thirty five degrees centigrade and we hadn’t used or brought with us any sun protection cream. Regardless of this we walked a little further and began to catch sight of Lake Albano sitting in a sort of volcanic bowl or natural amphitheatre with steep densely wooded slopes on all sides and marine blue water throwing back the reflections of the highest of the hills on the other side and the Papal Palace and the observatory close to where we were standing.

Because of the steep slopes this meant that there was a long walk down to the water’s edge which involved negotiating a winding road with a succession of tight hairpin bends as it made its way down to the shoreline below. We gamely set off but after a hundred metres or so it became obvious that without protection from the sun and with Sue starting to turn an alarming shellfish pink across her shoulders that this was rather reckless so after a short debate common sense asserted itself over midday madness and we returned to the road and found a second bar for more Peroni, which was a far more sensible option.

We knew that there was supposed to be a bus service around the towns surrounding the lake but we couldn’t see any bus stops and we had no idea of the frequency or the schedule. The lady serving in the bar told us that this spot was the bus stop and if we wanted to catch it we had simply to flag the driver down as it approached. She couldn’t help with the timetable however so we ordered more drinks and put Kim on look-out duty to keep an eye on the road.

There seemed to be a worrying absence of public transport and it began to look as though we may have to walk back but eventually a blue and white bus appeared so we leapt into the road and the driver swiftly applied the brakes and brought the thing to a shuddering standstill and with a hiss of hydraulics opened the door. We climbed on board and it was only then that we realised that we didn’t have any tickets. They cannot be bought from the driver and travelling without one can involve a hefty fine but we were only going a couple of stops so we would have been unlucky to have been caught and we made it back to Albano without incident.

At the hotel our rooms were now ready but they weren’t quite what we were expecting because instead of accommodation in the hotel with the splendid views over the countryside which it boasted on its website we were allocated rooms in an unusual little annex about thirty metres away that had the look and feel of being seldom used. More of this later but we accepted them at this point and quickly reassembled in the courtyard to go out again and explore the town of Albano.

Italy 2011, All Roads Lead To Rome

Ryanair flights out of Stansted airport start at six o’clock in the morning and our flight to Rome Ciampino was one of the first with a scheduled departure time of twenty past. This meant a very early start and once we had found seats on board and put our bags in the overhead lockers I was asleep in my chair even before the end of the flight attendants safety on board lecture.

Italy was in the grip of a burning heat wave and after landing at Ciampino and on opening the aircraft doors there was a blast of heat from the smouldering tarmac baking in temperatures that, coming from Northern Europe, we were unfamiliar with, which was rather like opening a pizza oven door. Ciampino was once the principal airport for Rome but it has now been superseded by a modern facility north of the city so it quite small for a capital city airport and we were processed through immigration control and customs nice and quickly.

In the arrivals hall we looked around for clues for how to get to the nearby town of Albano Laziale where we were staying and we must have had that gormless confused traveller look about us that made us potential victims of a taxi scam and sure enough we were immediately pestered by a man touting for mini coach customers who made us an offer and told us how difficult it was to make our own alternative way there. I had foolishly assumed that there was a train station at the airport but my enquiries revealed that although there was a station at Ciampino this was in fact at the nearby town of the same name and getting there by the most direct route would involve crossing the runway which we were certain would be frowned upon by airport security and so was four or five kilometres away by road instead. Being hot and disorientated we eventually gave in to the persistence of the taxi tout and agreed to pay what turned out to be way over the odds for the short journey to Albano.

Once out of the airport we were on a long straight road which pointed south and it was long and it was straight because this was the Appian Way which was one of the earliest and strategically most important Roman roads of the ancient city. It connected Rome to Brindisi in southeast Italy and is named after Appius Claudius Caecus, the man who began and completed the first section as a military road to the south in 312 BC.

The Roman army depended for its success on the use of bases in which to prepare to advance or retreat swiftly and these bases allowed the Romans to keep a large number of soldiers in the field waiting for the opportunity to strike. The bases needed to be connected by good roads for easy access and supply from Rome. The Appian Way was the first long road built specifically to transport troops outside the smaller region of greater Rome but as the Romans expanded over most of Italy they constructed a network of highways. Their roads all began at Rome and extended to the borders of their domain – hence the expression, “All roads lead to Rome.”

To the right of us we could see a large flat agricultural plain that stretched all the way to the coast and beyond that the blue water of the Tyrrhenian Sea shimmering in the sunlight. In front and to our left there was green woodland because as we got closer to Albano we started to enter the foothills of the Alban Hills and eventually the outskirts of our destination. Albano is part of what is called the Castelli Romani, the ‘Castles of Rome’ which is a group of communes in the province of Rome and about twenty-five kilometres south of the capital.

The taxi driver was unfamiliar with our hotel, the Villa Altieri, but eventually found it after a couple of phone calls, dropped us outside and gratefully accepted the inflated fare and we went inside to register. The hotel was a eighteenth century mansion opposite the back gates of the Papal Palace and with good views over the countryside stretching out to the coast to the west and to Rome in the north. We were too early to book in so we left our bags and agreed that it was time for a first drink, possibly a Peroni!

We were going to go first to nearby Castel Gandolfo and when we asked the man at reception for instructions he told us it was not so far, but not so near either so he wasn’t sure whether to advise us for or against the walking option. We decided to walk and we quickly came across a roadside bar which looked perfect but was rejected by Kim in that way that she always overrules any first choice that Micky and I make and suggested that we walk a little further where she was sure that there would soon be a better alternative. This reasoning is totally illogical but it is female so we have learned not to argue against it so in blistering heat and in desperate need of refreshment we walked on.

And we walked on and we walked on because it turned out that Castel Gandolfo was a bit further than we had estimated, there were no more bars and it was a walk of a couple of kilometres or so along a road with no pavement full of screaming Italian traffic and danger lurking around every corner. It was hot and humid and it took us almost forty-five minutes to reach the next café and this time we were not prepared to enter into debate about suitability and although it perhaps wasn’t we promptly sat down and ordered drinks.