Rome and the Colosseum

This was our first ever visit to Rome, a city often dubbed the eternal city though luckily it didn't spend an eternity on our 'we must go there one day' list. It was great to finally see some of it for ourselves. My main interest in visiting the city was the historical - mainly the pre-Christian world but I was also intrigued by the modern - the sights and sounds of what this famous city has to offer today.

The morning we arrived on the ship into the port of Civitavecchia we took a short walk along it's small seafront from a coastal fortress by the harbour called Michelangelos Fort which looked pretty impressive, then past a very large sculpture of a sailor kissing a nurse (a replica of the one in San Diego, USA which is based on the famous photograph taken in New York after WWII).

I'd have liked to have spent a bit of time in Civitavecchia but we only had two days and that wasn't even going to cover all we wanted to see in Rome itself.

A few hundred meters later we arrived at the train station. The train station has a shop and a coffee bar. The weather was fine and so we sat outside enjoying the morning sun (we don’t get much back home!) waiting for the Rome bound train.

It was a nice ride along the coast and though some country side (it's about a 40 mile journey). There are two handy stops in Rome, one is Roma San Pietro railway station located near to the Vatican City, the other is Roma Termini – Romes most central station in relation to a lot of the tourist sites. We opted to get off at the end of the line at Roma Termini. I can only describe the station as long. The walk from where the Civitavecchia train stops to the main entrance of the station is approx 600 meters. My advice would be to go down from the platform to the underpass bit and use the moving walkways if you're heading that way. It's not so bad on arrival but after a long day of sightseeing hurrying to get to your train with sore feet it felt like a lot further.

The layout of the city of Rome was nothing that I'd really been able to imagine from reading books or watching TV shows or looking at maps. The topography was more varied (it was a bit hillier) and the modern streets, which for some reason I imagined it to be more like Paris, turned out to be more like London. I knew it was the city of the 7 hills but I obviously wasn't listening closely enough before as I had always imagined them to surround the city. The city sightseeing bus tour soon put me right as I found out the city was built on them. Evidence for my dear wife that it’s not just her I don’t listen properly :-p!

The 1st day we were in Rome there was an anti-austerity protest and workers union strike which was funny when our tour bus got stuck in the traffic chaos that followed. I totally sympathise with what the protesters were striking for so I didn't mind being stuck on the tour bus, in fact I was just sad we weren't a little closer as an open top bus is a good vantage point for taking photos!

Several drivers in Rome were, to put it nicely, 'a little bit insane'. During our time in Rome we saw many instances of erratic driving but three instances stood out.

The first was a moped driver who wasn't paying close attention to the traffic cop who was directing traffic and missed hitting the police man (albeit at low speed) by about the length of his shoe. Even more worryingly this didn't seem to be an unusual occurrence to the policeman who with a gesture of displeasure synonymous to 'ah now, catch yourself on' didn't even have a word with the driver.

The second was a driver who sped across a junction only to swerve at the last minute to miss the back end of a fast moving moped by a distance so close it's a mystery how one didn't become a part of the other. It was a real heart in mouth moment, stunt drivers would have been proud of pulling off such a close miss. Any contact and it was broken bones or corpse time.

The third incident was probably the most stupid but also the funniest, this one happened so slowly that all the tourists on the bus had time to laugh and take photos. And here it is, someone trying to push ahead in a traffic jam by joining the trams on the tram tracks - the Tram driver was NOT amused.

We got off the bus soon after to make better use of our limited time in the city than drivers with death wishes.

Where the bus had to turn around was very close to the Colosseum and the Roman Forum so they were are first sights.

Before getting up close and personal to both, we took some time to admire the Arch of Constantine.
Norngirl is a Byzantine nerd so like me seeing Vesuvius the day before, this was her moment of seeing something for herself that she'd only seen in books and film.

The arch admired we set off in what turned out to be the wrong way for our search of toilets. After giving up and turning round to go back towards the Colosseum knowing they’d likely have some somewhere, we got in line to buy tickets. Thankfully inside the bowels of the Colosseum on the ground floor near the entrance are some toilets.

Relieved, we then set about exploring the Colosseum and the cavernous concourses we'd passed through.

The Colosseum is probably the worlds most well known amphitheater that apparently dates back to 72AD (when its construction is said to have started).

The Colosseum is an impressive monument to it’s time, very imperial looking and imposing even in it's current state.

In it's heyday it was apparently able to hold 50,000 spectators. What it was like in it's prime must have been pretty spectacular especially given how unique it was in it's scale.

Reading about some of the entertainment on show I think I'm happy to stick with football and ice hockey -occasions where the only things to be murdered are our hopes. I wouldn't have liked to be walking among these submerged passages back then!

Much like our visit to Pompeii, the strangest thing was how familiar walking around it for the first time felt. How similar to modern stadia it appeared - especially when walking around the inner concourses then stepping out through it’s arches into the seating areas.

So much in the concept of a stadium has been kept and so little it has evolved since the Romans had this leviathan built. Thankfully most of humanity’s ideas of what constitutes entertainment have become a little less cruel and imperialistic - on and off.

It also seems to be well looked after which is good news.

I’d personally have liked to have spent a little longer looking around but as with the entire trip it was a little more rushed than our usual sightseeing trips largely due to our hotel floating off at assigned times. So we got a move on and left the kitty to catch all those barbarian mice.

Our next historical sight of Rome was just over the brow of the hill - The Roman Forum.

Messin about in Messina

Ah Messina... what to say about Messina. From the ship it very much looked the part, a city flowing down from the hills into a busy port but before we had even set off from Belfast on this trip we'd struggled to find anything to do in Messina.

We had just one thing on the list. Watching the astronomical mechanical clock move. The rest of the things to do, if they existed, we'd hope would reveal themselves when we got there. They didn't.

I suppose I should give Messina the benefit of the doubt. To be fair we didn't see much of it, just a square mile or so. Saying that, our lack of exploring was more a symptom of having trouble finding anything interesting or fun to do. If you are fanatical about churches or boats you might be OK but other than that...

Sooooo... here is what we did.

Getting off the ship and dodging the horde of scarf sellers, it was a nice surprise to find a 13th Century Church just a stones throw from where the ship docked. Here is the Church of Santissima Annunziata dei Catalani.

We stopped for a look before making it over to the Cathedral of Messina.

And here is the Fontana di Orione outside the Cathedral in front of the clock tower.

Inside the Cathedral it was suitably cavernous, donned in the usual garnishing of symbolism and wealth but impressive never the less.

Back outside the Cathedral it was a bear pit of tour touts and swarming pushy trinket sellers. Going by a seller/tourist ratio it was probably worse than the big tourist locations like outside the Colosseum in Rome. I really didn't like the atmosphere.

It was a captive audience as everyone who wasn't selling was there to watch the mechanical parts of the clock tower move.

Move they did... a Cockerel here, a Lion there and some bell ringing. It was slow going but all the gold coloured things got where they were going in the end.

So we wandered a little out of the way to find a fridge magnet. It was something like being in a more built up Italian version of Lurgan on a Sunday morning but this was a Monday... in a city. Maybe we were just in the wrong area?

Norngirl still wasn't very mobile and a lot of Messina is up hill, plus it was raining so we then negotiated a price to go on an historical road train tour to see the other few (pretty much all religious buildings) sights in town. Yeeeeeeaaah... it never set off, they couldn't get enough people to fill it so we ended up getting our money back.

With loads of time and nothing to do we wandered back towards the boat in search of a cafe or wine bar. Down by the port we found both and also a lot of the other tourists who had been watching the clock too. First we had some local Messina beer in a cafe, it was alright like, nothing to write home about but nicely refreshing.

We then found a gelato shop almost next door that had been mentioned to us on the ship. The guy serving here was the politest and friendliest person I came in contact with in Messina. He didn't even mock my attempt to order in Italian and made me feel like it actually worked without the comfort blanket hand gesture.

Last but not least we settled down in a coffee/wine bar. Ordered Red wine, got steadily tipsy and put the world to rights whilst in view of the Church of Santissima Annunziata dei Catalani again.

And that was that, our entire trip to Messina. As days go it was nicely relaxing once we'd found the bar.

We headed back on board the cruise ship and continued our relaxing day of drinking with a sail away cocktail. From the top of the ship Messina still looked like an interesting place even if it flattered to deceive.

To see us off on our safe travels having maybe helped convert the water into wine for us was HeyZeus himself - well the Madonna della Lettera anyway.

As for ever going back. I'd still like to see Mount Etna so having to travel through that part of the world again might not be out of the realms of possibility, however, if I did, I probably wouldn't hang around in Messina. At most it would be a comfort stop for the all the healthy things like ice cream and local wine.

Making the most of our day in Malta

Valletta in Malta was our second port day. I'd been to Malta before and apart from the buses now being Arriva instead of the old Bedford buses painted yellow, orange and white, not much of what we saw had changed from what I remembered. So I'll not go into huge detail, especially since again it was a flying visit and we were unable to spend very much time in any one place. The main part of our Malta trip revolved around another hop-on-hop-off City Sightseeing bus tour which I have to say was a bargain given it covered almost half the island for about 15 Euros (about a 2 hour round trip not including stops). It was also packed though and there were long waits to get back on the buses due to this in popular spots like Mdina.

Getting ashore from the ship was simple, just a short walk to where the tourist buses leave from (really the opposite of the sort of location in Palma) though walking into Valletta involved a 15 minute walk up hill. After buying some tickets we waited on the bus, we had to wait quite a while due to the queue.

After heading out of town on the lower deck of the bus we were happy to get off as early as we felt we could. It wasn't the first stop but the first place we did hop-off was at Mdina, an historic city and former capital of Malta. In Mdina we went for a short walk to the tourist information building before finding the tourist road train tour.

It was a nice way to see the area around Mdina and gave views of the city like this.

Once we'd arrived back at the road train stop, we walked back inside the walls of the old city and had a look around the Typical narrow medieval streets, this one being one of the more open streets.

Deceptively large and a looming sight in Mdina is St. Paul's Cathedral

Eventually there was a bus that had room for us and we got back on track, we stayed on the bus for the rest of the tour. Next up after seeing the national stadium and a forest park was Mosta. There was the impressive Rotunda of Mosta which is apparently the 3rd largest unsupported dome in the world according to wikipedia.

This area was very fond of flying the flag of Malta.

After Mosta the bus reached the coast then began to make the journey down the north east coast back to Valletta. The landscape was very heavily agricultural in this part of Malta.

We passed by a few coastal resorts and then one of the many coastal fortifications.

As well as the tourist areas with lots of medium sized hotels, there were a couple of pretty bays as well as the odd churches, towers and even now a very high rise building.

We were slightly running out of time to do much in Valletta and that was made even harder by the fact the bus didn't drop off up the hill by where the big fountain is... what used to be the bus station the last time I was there. Now there is a big Arriva bus station that looks like it'd been picked up from the North of England. So yeah, Norngirl with her injury braved it and we walked back up the hill from the Valletta Waterfront. Along the way we passed through Victoria Gate.

We stopped for a beer, we had some food and a couple of cans of Cisk (pronounced 'Chisk' - the waitress was very adamant about that) which is basically just a generic cheap lager but was nicely refreshing after the up hill walk and the fact that even though it was November - it was almost 25°C. Once refreshed we took a small walk to see some of the cities main buildings, such as the Parliament Building.

And St Johns Co-Cathedral which if you notice the size of the people at the bottom of this picture - is much bigger than it seems at first!

I really like Valletta and it's on my bucket list to one day really visit the city for more than just a day (like the 1st time I was in Malta) or a couple of hours like this time. The streets are very pretty.

We found an interestingly named tourist shop called WooHoo which is where we bought our fridge magnet.

Alas, time was getting away from us and so we even got a small electric golf buggy like taxi back down to the Valletta Waterfront to speed things up. We were soon back at the dock and taking a last few pictures before boarding the ship.

The light soon faded on our day in Malta and the city began to light up.

It was a nice view as we headed out to sea once more. Looking back were the lights of the Maltese coast.

Our next stop was Messina in Sicily.