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 Roman Forum and Italian Unification

The tour began from outside the Colosseum and went first past the Arch of Constantine where Silvio explained that this was the only Roman monument that still had its marble reliefs intact because successive Christian regimes in Rome after the fall of the Empire were reluctant to destroy a monument commemorating the first Christian Emperor. And then we made our way into the Forum and began to climb towards the top of the Palatine Hill stopping frequently to listen to and absorb more information from Silvio. After a while he became quite tedious and increasingly annoying with stories about himself and the exposition of his own personal theories so after the aqueduct, the stadium, the palace of Augustus and the Domus Flavia we had a quick discussion and the consensus view was that we should slip away from the group and explore the ruins by ourselves without the irritating narrative.

High on this hill overlooking the Forum was apparently a pleasant place to live because the site intercepted the welcome breezes coming in from the west and it was relatively free from the dust and diseases of the Forum below. According to legend Romulus and Remus were brought up here by a wolf in a cave. Later, the orator Cicero had a house here, Augustus was born here and lived with his wife Livia and the Emperors Tiberius, Caligula and Diocletian all built extravagant palaces on this site.

There was a path that took us to the bottom of the Palatine and into the Forum which for the Romans was the centre of political, commercial and judicial life. According to the playwright Plautus the area ‘teemed with lawyers and litigants, bankers and brokers, shopkeepers and strumpets’. As the city grew successive Emperors increasingly extended the Forum and in turn built bigger temples, larger basilicas, higher triumphal columns and more lavish commemorative arches. We started at one of these, the arch of Titus, and followed the original Roman street down into the heart of the Forum past the Temple of Romulus and the house of the Vestal Virgins and then the Temple of Julius Caesar erected on the very spot that he was cremated following his assassination in 44 BC.

It was very hot now and we were becoming weary as we walked along the uneven streets and through dusty excavations. We visited a small museum which provided some temporary relief from the sun but we were soon back outside walking past the Temples of Saturn and Vespasian and finally leaving through another arch, this one erected to the memory of the Emperor Septimius Severus after which we climbed some steps and found some welcome shade and took a quick break from the schedule.

Although there was still lots of Rome to see and we couldn’t possibly hope to achieve it all in just two days in the middle of an exceptional heat wave we had one last area to visit before walking back to the train station.

The Capitol, the southern summit of the Capitoline Hill was the centre of the Roman world and the Temple of Jupiter was the scene of the most important religious and political ceremonies. We approached the top via a zig-zag path up from the Forum into the Michelangelo designed Piazza Campidoglio with a statue of Marcus Aurelius dominating the centre of the geometric paving and the Renaissance façades of the surrounding buildings. We descended by the Cordonata staircase and passed the adjacent Aracoeli staircase where according to popular belief if you climb the one hundred and twenty-four steps on your knees then you significantly improve your chances of winning the Italian lottery. No one was attempting it today either because it simply isn’t true or on account of the searing heat!

After the unification of Italy in 1861 the Italian State planned a massive memorial, the Victor Emmanuel Monument, to commemorate the achievement and at the northern end of the Capitol constructed a huge white marble edifice which although impressive is far too big and sadly out of place amongst the mellow ochre stones of the surrounding buildings and it is unloved and savagely mocked by modern Romans who call it the wedding cake or the typewriter amongst other unflattering names. Today the National Monument looked especially immaculate as part of the hundred and fifty year celebrations to mark unification and the twelve metre long equestrian statue of the first King of Italy was flanked appropriately on either side by Italian tricolour flags dancing delicately in the occasional breeze.

After two days and several kilometres of walking around Rome we were exhausted now so set off in the general direction of the station. Christine almost bought the souvenirs she needed but unwanted intervention from Kim stopped the transaction at the very last moment necessitating more souvenir shop visits as we walked along Via Cavour (the first prime minister of Italy) stopping about half way along for a much needed rest and a drink, which we were glad of despite the excessive price.

I think it is fair to say that by the time we reached the Termini and walked the final four hundred metres to the platform we were all completely done-in as we boarded the cream and blue train, found seats and enjoyed the ride back through nine stations and stops to Albano Laziale thankful for a seat and a carriage air-conditioning unit.

On the way back to the hotel we had a stop at what had become our favourite bar and this being our fourth visit we were treated to complimentary tapas like bar snacks while we sat in the shade and reviewed the two days of visiting Rome. Later we returned to the same trattoria that we liked and as this was our last night ordered more food than we really needed, paid a little more than we had expected and, too embarrassed to leave it, wastefully threw some away on the short walk back to the hotel.

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, 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.



Italy 2011, Rome, Piazzas and Pizzas

Our plan was to spend two days in Rome and today we would visit the northern classical part of the city and the areas that are predominantly Renaissance and Baroque in architectural character and we would leave Ancient Rome of the Emperors and the Gladiators until the following day.

It was approaching midday as we set off towards the Piazza della Republica and then down the long straight Via Nazionale towards the centre of the city. We could see the huge Victor Emmanuel monument now but before we reached it we took a turning right that took us past the Quirinale Palace built by the Popes on one of the original seven hills of Rome, previously the home of the Italian Monarchy and now the official residence of the President of Italy and to our first sightseeing destination, the famous Trevi Fountain.

There was no need for a map to find it, we just followed the swarm of people, because this has to be one of the busiest places in Rome with the huge fountain almost completely filling the tiny Piazza with people crammed in and shuffling through as they squeeze slowly past the crowds. Thirty-five years ago, on my first visit, people were still allowed to sit on the monument and cool their feet off in the water but that has been stopped now. There is a tradition of throwing three coins in the fountain guarantees that you will return one day to Rome. These days’ tourists with a desire to return to the Eternal City deposit an average of €3,000 a day in the fountain and this is collected up every night and is used to fund social projects for the poor of the city. That is probably why people aren’t allowed to paddle in it anymore and there were plenty of police on duty to make sure that we didn’t.

It was time for a refreshment break and true to form Kim rejected the first perfectly suitable place that we came across so we walked a little way further and found a pavement café where we stopped for a while. It was pleasant but the cost was a shock when the waiter presented a bill for €25 for three small beers, a Coca-Cola and a bottle of water, which was expensive by any standards and much more than we really like to pay.

Rested and refreshed we made our way now to the most famous and most crowded of all Rome squares, the Piazza di Spagna, shaped like a bow tie and surrounded by tall, elegant shuttered houses painted in pastel shades of ochre, cream and russet red and in the centre a fountain shaped as a leaking, sunken boat at the foot of the famous Spanish Steps that were crammed with people making their way to the top and back under the shade of cheap parasols sold on the streets by the illegal traders.

To the right we saw the house, now a museum, where the English poet John Keats lived and died and to the left the Babington Tea Rooms which was opened in 1896 by two Englishwomen who spotted a market for homesick British tourists with a yearning for a traditional afternoon pot of Earl Grey and a plate of cream scones. We turned our back on this and walked along Via Condotti, which is Rome’s most exclusive and most expensive shopping street where the major designers have their shops and where prices were way beyond our budget!

At the Via del Corso we turned left and walked back towards the Victor Emmanuel Monument at it southern end but turned off half way down and in a matter of minutes passed through hundreds of years of history, first through Piazza Colona and the column of Marcus Aurelius, then skirting past the Italian Parliament building, the Palazzo di Montecitorio, and after that the Temple of Hadrian with its huge columns which is now the façade of the Italian stock exchange.

It was lunchtime now but after the earlier scare we weren’t prepared to risk Rome restaurant prices so in the narrow and shady Via del Seminario leading to the Pantheon we found a fast food take away and ordered a slice of pizza each and ate it in the street before continuing with our itinerary.

We visited the Pantheon, which is one of the best preserved ancient Roman buildings, originally built as a pagan temple but later converted into a Christian Church and is the burial place of the ex kings of Italy and other important Italians such as the artist Raphael. Next it was the Baroque Piazza Navona in the blistering heat of the afternoon as the temperature reached well into the thirties.

I liked all of these sights but I was intrigued by something much more mundane. All of the manhole covers displayed the Roman symbol SPQR which, I learned later, is the motto of the city and appears in the city’s coat of arms, as well as on many of the civic buildings. SPQR comes from the Latin phrase, Senātus Populusque Rōmānus (The Senate and the People of Rome), referring to the government of the ancient Republic. It appeared on coins, at the end of public documents, in dedications of monuments and public works, and was the symbol on the standards of the Roman legions.

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, 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.

The Grand Tour of Europe

People have always travelled to other parts of the world to see great buildings and works of art, to learn new languages, to experience new cultures and to enjoy different food and drink. As long ago as the time of the Roman Empire, there were popular coastal resorts such as Sorrento and Capri for the rich. In 1936 the League of Nations defined a foreign tourist as someone travelling abroad for at least twenty-four hours and its successor, the United Nations amended this definition in 1945 by including a maximum stay of six months. In early 2010 the European Commissioner for industry and entrepreneurship, Antonio Tajani, unveiled a plan declaring tourism a human right and introduced it with the statement that “travelling for tourism today is a right. The way we spend our holidays is a formidable indicator of our quality of life.”

Young English elites of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Rahs really) often spent two to four years travelling around Europe in an effort to broaden their horizons and learn about language, architecture, geography and culture in an experience known as the Grand Tour.



In fact the word tourist has its origins in what used to be more correctly called the Grand Tour of Europe, which was a term first used by Richard Lassels in his 1670 book ‘Voyage or a Complete Journey through Italy and after that it came into general usage to describe the travels in Europe of wealthy young men and women in the years of the Enlightenment where it was quite normal to take a gap year (or four) in the quest for a broader education. Lassels was a Roman Catholic priest and a tutor to several of the English nobility and travelled through Italy five times. In his book, he claims that any truly serious student of architecture, antiquity, and the arts must travel through France and Italy, and suggested that all “young lords” make the Grand Tour in order to understand the political, social, and economic realities of the world.

The primary purpose of the Grand Tour lay in the exposure both to the cultural legacy of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, and to the aristocratic and fashionably polite society of the European continent. In addition, before museum collections went on tour themselves, it provided the only opportunity to view specific works of art, and possibly the only chance to hear certain music and it was commonly undertaken in the company of a Cicerone, a knowledgeable guide or tutor. The Grand Tour had more than superficial cultural importance as the historian E.P. Thompson observed, “ruling-class control in the 18th century was located primarily in a cultural hegemony, and only secondarily in an expression of economic or physical (military) power.”



While the general objective of the Grand Tour was essentially educational (and this probably what mum and dad thought that they were forking out for) they were also notorious for more frivolous pursuits such as getting hammered, partying heavily and sleeping with as many continental lovelies as possible and so began a tradition that thousands of holiday Brits continue to this day in the party hotspots of Europe.

When young men on the Grand Tour weren’t misbehaving like people on a stag weekend to Amsterdam they were mostly interested in visiting those cities that were considered the major centres of culture at the time, primarily Paris, Rome, Venice, Florence and Naples were popular destinations. The Grand Tourist would travel from city to city and usually spend some time in smaller towns and up to several months in the three main cities on the itinerary. Paris was considered the grandest and most cultured city and was usually first en route and tourists would rent apartments for several weeks at a time and would make occasional visits to the countryside and adjacent towns.

From Paris, they travelled south either across the Alps or by a ship on the Mediterranean Sea to Italy and then they would pass on to Rome or Venice. To begin with Rome was initially the southernmost point they would travel to but when excavations began at Herculaneum and Pompeii in 1738 the two sites also became additional major destinations on the Grand Tour.



Other locations sometimes included as part of some Grand Tour included Spain and Portugal, Germany, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and the Baltic States. However, these other spots lacked the cultural and historical appeal of Paris and Italy and the substandard roads made travel much more difficult so they were not always the most popular. Some of them didn’t have vineyards either so I suppose that might have reduced their appeal somewhat.

The British it seems have always been rather keen on travelling abroad and we have left our mark all over Europe (and not just through football violence either) in Nice one of the first and most established holiday resorts on the French Riviera, the long esplanade along the seafront is known to this day as the Promenade des Anglais and in many other historic resorts in continental Europe, old well-established palace hotels have names like the Hotel Bristol, the Hotel Carlton or the Hotel Majestic, reflecting the predominance of English customers.



In fact there are nearly 300 hotels around the world called Bristol. They take their name from Frederick Augustus Hervey (1730-1803), the 4th Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry, who spent most of his life travelling around Europe enjoying the best hospitality money could buy.

This sort of thing really appeals to me; both the finding out about things and having a really good knees up at the same time and I have become determined to travel as much in Europe as I possibly can. The problem with that is that I have full time job and I certainly cannot afford to take a four year sabbatical break so I have developed an alternative Grand Tour method and that is to take absolutely full advantage of the low cost airlines.

There are forty-six countries in Europe and I have only so far been to twenty-five so I am just over half way towards my objective of visiting them all.

Ryanair was Europe’s original low fares airline and is my favourite which is lucky for me because the airline has over eleven hundred low fare routes to one hundred and sixty-one destinations in Europe and North Africa. In the last three years I have flown thirty times at a very reasonable average cost of £40 return all inclusive. Not all of these flights were with Ryanair of course and I have been forced to use others but I generally find that these work out more expensive. A return flight to Athens with Easyjet for example costs £120 and my biggest bargain so far was with Ryanair to Santander in Cantabria, Spain at just £10.02 return. To put things into some sort of perspective it costs over £80 to go to London on the train from Peterborough with National Express and for that you are not even guaranteed a seat. That is about .90p a mile and on that basis it would cost approximately £1,800 to go to Santander and back by train!

In 2008 the most visited country in Europe was France, followed by Spain, Italy, United Kingdom and Germany. Spain made the most money out or tourist revenues and on average the Germans spent most while away from home. The most visited city was London (although as usual France disputes the official figures) and the most visited place was Trafalgar Square, followed by the Eiffel Tower and then the Vatican. The United Nations World Tourism Organisation, which has its headquarters in Madrid, produces the World Tourism Rankings and is a United Nations agency dealing with questions relating to tourism. For the record I visited Trafalgar Square in 2008, the Eiffel Tower in 2005 and the Vatican in 2003.