6th of March, 2011 York, England

Julia and I have just spent nearly a month in Italy. We were favoured with generally fine, mild, weather and towns and cities, which were not overrun with tourists. Geographically we started near the spur in Italy’s boot at a World Heritage site castle built in 13 century by Frederic II, one of the Swabian kings, who also ruled Sicily after the Normans. This part of Italy had previously been ruled by one of William the Conqueror’s cousins who later died on Cephalonia in Greece (small world). Photos don’t do justice to the eighty-mile views from the Castle. On our way to the heel of Italy were numerous towns with torturous medieval cobble-stoned streets and gorgeous palazzos but the Truli region was perhaps the most fairy tale-like. The Truli houses are small round structures with conical stone roofs. Walking around a neighborhood with a thousand or so of these together feels like you’re on a movie set for a film about hobbits or elves. We stopped at several beaches across the instep of the boot and crossed into Calabria which forms the toe of the Italian boot. The mountains there were much more breath taking and fear inspiring when driving, than the Alps. Although they may not be as high as the Alps, the sheer precipitous roads with their very high bridges and long tunnels makes you feel its more like Switzerland than south Italy. We next ferried to Sicily for a ten day cook’s tour of it east coast.

You can’t spend a month driving in Italy without commenting on our numerous near death experiences on Italian roads. Described in one guide as a cross between Formula 1 and bumper cars, we were genuinely surprised when we left Italy after a month without a ding or a bump. Several Italians advised us that around Naples traffic lights should only be considered a suggestions and expect other drivers to pay them little mind. Road lines were in my estimation a rather futile waste of good paint and the mobile phone appeared to be a driving accessory. Being passed on blind curves driving the Amalfi coast leaves you with the urge to have a few glasses of wine to get your courage up before driving. In fact one rather unusual aspect of Italian road life is that many of the fuel stations don’t only have a snack area but have a full out cocktail bar. I’ll end this little tirade with our experience of sitting at a small working man’s café in Catania, Sicily having lunch. We decided to count the number of cars with visible dents or dings on the sides: we could see as they drove by, in about 20 minutes, approximately 80% of the cars were dinged, banged, mangled or badly scraped. Driving is just one more anomalous aspect of the Dolce Vita.

We really fell in love with Sicily. Many of the towns could be made into movies sets for medieval period films by merely moving the cars. The wine is cheap and the food divine. We must have been to five world heritage sites in ten days. The Greek ruins were far better than anything in Greece we’ve seen. We kept saying to each other: “when we’re too old to sail, let move here.” It’s no wonder that no less than about dozen different countries invaded and ruled Sicily over the centuries. We felt somewhat cheated having only ten days to see this lovely island.

No trip north from Sicily would be complete without a stop in Pompeii. Julia kept asking me about it and thought I was losing it when I couldn’t describe its splendour in much detail, the way one might the Coliseum or the Parthenon. I realized on this return visit that it’s the 36 acres of buried ruins (of which only twelve acres are open.) that’s what is really astounding. It is the fact you can literally get lost without a map and then stumble upon a group of plaster-cast bodies which is so stirring about the site. Herculaneum was new for both of us and though smaller was remarkable for its many intact murals and even surviving wooden doors. Much of the early excavation ruined things which today might have been saved but these two sites literally jump started the whole field of archeology and may have arrested the prime use of old Roman sites prior to the late 18th century as mere stone quarries for new building projects.

We stopped in Rome for Julia to see the Vatican Museums, which on our prior Christmas holiday trip was closed. To not see the Borghese Museum on a trip to Rome would probably have led to my mother and her two art-obsessed sisters haunting me from their graves. Florence was, as always, a sumptuous feast of Renaissance art only this time without the horribly long lines of spring and summer.

We’ve since spent a day in Innsbruck and a few days in Munich, which has some very remarkable museums. We ended our trek across Europe with a stop off in Maastricht for the first big night of Carnival, Europe’s second largest after Venice. We arrived in York today and start the final preparations for selling our property here. We expect to be back to Mary Ann and the boatie life by April. Murphy seems to enjoy traveling as much as Ruby once did and seems to love our mobile den, known to us as Ruby’s camper van.

Fair Winds,

John, Julia and Murphy