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, 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.