Rome – Day 34 – Wednesday
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| Fountain in Piazza del Popolo |
Today was an easy day and I couldn’t have done more. I got up a little later and hung out in my room until 11:00. I had a reservation at the Borghese Gallery at 1:00 and didn’t want to be late, so I took the metro to the Piazza del Popolo (this means populace, not pope) and took my time strolling towards the gallery. I visited one of the churches on the square and then climbed up the hill to the grounds of the Villa Borghese, which is now the Central Park of Rome. I stopped at an overlook to admire the skyline of Rome and snap a few photos.
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| Rome Panorama |
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| Spanish Steps |
Today’s wealthy travelers stay in the luxury hotels above
the Spanish Steps. This peaceful, yet
conveniently located neighborhood is definitely the place to stay in Rome if
you can afford the tariff. Eventually I
passed through the wall surrounding the garden and strolled up the tree lined
boulevard to the Villa Borghese.
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| The Villa Borghese |
The Borghese Gallery requires advance reservations, so it
was a much more orderly scene than the Vatican Museum. I got there a bit early, picked up my ticket
and checked my bag. At 1:00 they let us
in. The art in the Borghese Gallery is
amazing, but so is the building.
Cardinal Scipione Borghese built the Villa in the early 17th
century to showcase art and collected or commissioned most of the art displayed
there. His aim was to prove that the
glories of the classical world were matched by those of the Renaissance. He outdid himself. There is no doubt in my mind that the baroque
sculptures in his collection make the classical ones look lifeless and old
fashioned.
The ground floor is dedicated to sculpture and the upper
floor to painting. The Villa is a riot
of pink and gold marble with mosaic floors transplanted from Roman houses. Any walls not actually faced with marble are
painted to look as if they were. The
ceilings are lofty and painted so cleverly that I often had to look carefully
to determine that the “statues” I saw there were really only two dimensional. Upon entering the grand hall, one is greeted
by a Greek sculpture of a falling horse, high upon the wall, with a rider added
by Pietro Bernini.
The elder Bernini was hired by Cardinal Borghese to restore
and in some cases augment the classical statuary in his collection. His son, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, assisted him
and his work so impressed Cardinal Borghese that he commissions several
works. The result is that the Borghese
Gallery is a magnificent showcase for Bernini’s early works. Bernini may have been in his early twenties
when he carved these statues, but they are sheer genius. There is none of the
heaviness usually found in marble sculpture.
They are light and graceful, full of waving leaves, blowing hair and
flowing drapery. You can see every
muscle, tendon, vein and hair. Where Pluto
grasps Proserpina, her flesh is dimpled.
The hair on the chest of Pluto’s three-headed dog Cerberus parts
realistically. Really, who ever thought
about how the hair would grow on a three-headed dog? Apollo and Psyche are so light and youthful
that you expect them to scamper past you.
Sturdy Aeneas carries Anchises out of burning Troy with his son dogging
his heels and a fierce and determined David (a self-portrait of Bernini) aims
an ugly rock at an unseen Goliath. The
murmuring in the room verified that I was not the only one to think that
Bernini’s David was a lot more interesting than Michelangelo’s. Can they burn me at the stake for that
heresy? No art has moved me so since
Gaudi in Barcelona. I have developed a
passion for Bernini. Too bad I couldn't take any photos in there.
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| Borghese Gardens |
I had brought some leftover cheese and crackers, so I bought
a soda and had a picnic in the park. Any
money I saved by bringing my own food was negated by the four Euros I paid for
a lousy 33 cl soda. Soda is not too
expensive at the grocery store, but everywhere else it costs as much as buying
a coke at the movie theater. Wine is
generally cheaper. Beer is also
expensive, generally running about five Euros for a bottle and sometimes as
much as 12 Euros for fancy imported beer in large bottles. Wine by the bottle is priced comparably with
wine at home, although it’s harder to find cheap stuff unless you know where to
take your jug to get it filled straight from the winery.
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| Lake at Borghese Gardens |
I lounged about the park for an hour or two and then made my
way back past an idyllic lake where people sunned themselves in rented rowboats
to Piazza del Popolo. I popped into the
Church of Santa Maria del Popolo to see the Raphael designed and decorated
chapel featuring a couple of Bernini statues, but it was in the process of
repair or restoration and the entire chapel was screened from view. Darn!
Guess I’ll just have to come back next year. Despite not having done much all day, I was
tired. I hopped on the subway and rode
back to the subway station just past my hotel and made a side trip to a famous
and crowded palace of gelato where I splurged on a chocolate and banana cone. (I did tell them to hold the whipped cream.)
I went back to my room and rested for a couple of hours
before going out for Indian food. Tuscan
food may be heavenly, but Palak Paneer is still my favorite food. I popped over to the train station to go to
the bank so I wouldn’t have to do it while toting my luggage, went back to the
hotel, packed and went to sleep far later than I had hoped.
Rome to Sorrento – Day 35 – Thursday
Got up early and trundled my luggage over to the train
station to catch a 9:00 train for Naples.
It was a nice fast train and I had a first class ticket. I sat with two older Italian business men and
we talked a bit on the way. One of them
was very quiet until the subject of Vino Nobile came up. We
traveled south through a valley between increasingly rugged mountains and
finally came to the coast at Naples. It
was good to see the sea after having been inland for over a month.
At the Naples train station, I transferred to the
Circumvesuviano line, which is a light rail system serving the Naples
area. I rode about another hour on that
train to Sorrento. It was very crowded
and I had to stand most of the way.
There were a lot of Senegalese on the train. Apparently, many of them were working in
Libya and somehow ended up in Italy as refugees. Vesuvius dominates the horizon in this
area. We passed Pompeii on the way to
Sorrento.
When I was looking for a hotel in Sorrento, I could not find
an affordable one in the central area. I
settled for one a few kilometers outside of the city, thinking a cab ride would
be reasonable. Fortunately, I read some
of the hotel reviews the night before I left and learned that it is a 40 Euro
cab ride from Sorrento to this hotel.
While it is less than two miles as the crow flies or as I could walk
downhill, it is about a 1,500 feet up an extremely steep hill and the main road
takes 8 kilometers of narrow, winding road to get here. Fortunately, there is a bus and a bus stop in
front of the hotel. Unfortunately, I
couldn’t get the bus driver to stop there.
I had to get off at the next town of Sant’ Agata and get a cab back down
the hill. That cab ride was 12 Euros,
but the driver only charged me 10. He
was a friendly old guy. I wave to him
when I see him in town.
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| My Room at Villa Fiorita |
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| Extra Beds - This is a Single? |
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| View from Villa Fiorita in Sorrento |
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| Chasm Through Sorrento |
I was exhausted when I got here, but didn’t have time in my
schedule to spend an afternoon sleeping.
I took a couple of hours to do some laundry and get organized and then
caught a bus back down to Sorrento about 2:00.
I checked out Sorrento’s main square and then got some lunch. Tasso square is actually a wide bridge that
spans the chasm that splits Sorrento in two.
This chasm is hundreds of feet deep and the walls are pretty much
vertical. The people who live in this part
of Italy are basically cliff dwellers.
The steps that descend this cliff date back to the 5th
century B.C. when the Greeks lived here.
Before the 19th century, the whole town was on the western
side of the ravine.
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| Giant Lemons (Oranges are Normal) |
Lemons are the main business in Sorrento. They are grown everywhere. The hillsides are terraced and planted with
lemon and orange trees. The lemons and
grown in wooden enclosures covered with netting that creates a greenhouse
effect. This is supposed to enhance the
flavor of the lemons. It also protects
them from hail and birds that might damage the peels from which limoncello is
made. Limoncello is wonderful, but too
heavy to schlep home. I have a lemon
tree and a recipe. I’ll try to make some
when I get home. They grow a number of
different varieties of lemon here. One
of them grows bigger than a grapefruit … a lot bigger. I saw one today that dwarfed a cantaloupe.
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| Four Euro Macchiato |
I had a very pleasant lunch in an outdoor café in the old
section of Sorrento. I had a pizza that
approached what Americans call pizza and a glass of wine. Spoiled by the 1 Euro coffees in
Montepulciano, I ordered a macchiato after lunch. It was the most beautiful macchiato I have
ever seen and came with a tasty cookie, but cost more than my glass of
wine. No one ounce cup of coffee could
ever be worth 4 Euros! I won’t do that
again.
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| Old Sorrento Harbor |
After lunch, I hit all the interesting spots in
Sorrento. Sorrento is really not a very
interesting place. It is pretty,
centrally located, cheaper than other places on the coast and has lovely
weather. It does not have a whole lot to
recommend it, otherwise. Still, I
enjoyed walking down to the old port and being warm for a change.
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| Lounge Chair Anyone? |
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| New Sorrento Harbor |
Not much goes on at the old port. There isn’t much beach, but you can rent a
lounge chair on the breakwater if you are so inclined. For some reason, there are very few sailboats
around. The ferries and excursions to
Capri all leave from the new port which is located at the bottom of the
ravine. I tried to walk there, but
failed to figure out how to get down there until after I had run out of time
and energy. I walked around the new part
of the town a bit, bought a bottle of wine and failed to find anything that
looked worth buying for dinner. The
pizza I had for lunch was very filling and I wasn’t very hungry. Eventually, I made my way back to the bus
station and located a bus to my hotel.
This time, I managed to get off at the right stop.
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