Buffet breakfast at the hotel. It is an overcast, windy day. As mentioned, we have booked a tour of the Vatican for the afternoon. Our reasoning, after research on the subject, is that the tour will get us past the lines and will guide us through what sounds like a very difficult trajectory. It turns out to be a sound decision, as we shall see. In the interim, we have the morning free. We decide to return to the nearby Piazza Della Republica and visit at least part of the Museo Nazionale Romana, Rome's largest museum outside of the Vatican itself. The museum is another institution that utilizes the space and some of the walls and foundations of the ancient Diocletian Bath. We buy a two-day pass, realizing that we can only see some of the ... read more

Mediterranean Day 16 Oct 9 We have arrived at the port of Naples overnight. It's raining this morning, but it's the very first rain on the entire trip, so it's hard to complain. The showers are mostly over with by the time we disembark, but the roads and cobblestones are slippery. We meet our guide Victorio on the peer. On the bus and on the way to Pompeii. Mount Vesuvius stands ominously on our left throughout the drive from Naples to Pompeii. It has rings of clouds around it which look like smoke. I imagine that any reader of this missive knows something of the story of Pompeii. In 79 A.D., Vesuvius erupted catastrophically, first asphyxiating most of the living beings in the city by hot, poisonous gases and then burying the city in volcanic ash. ... read more

Another perfect day, another Greek island. Today it's Santorini! I suspect many readers have been to Santorini or at least know something about the island. It is truly unique in the world, and that uniqueness stems from its geological history. Very briefly, in 1450 B.C. Santorini was a typical Greek island with a bronze-age civilization dominated by fishermen—except that the island had been gradually formed over millennia by a volcano. In that year, the volcano blew up. It was the largest explosion in recorded history, bigger than any nuclear blast so far. Everyone and everything within a few hundred miles was vaporized. The island itself was shattered into a broken semi-circular ring of islands outlining the original circumference of the island, with a huge caldera in the middle, that was filled by the sea. An enormous ... read more

Today the parade of islands continues with Mykonos, a place I have to admit I knew nothing about before this trip. Mykonos is a relatively small Greek Island. It is very rugged and hilly with an extremely dry Mediterranean climate. Outside of the city, only small shrubs and grasses populate the hilly terrain in places where soil is able to cling to the rocks. A constant north wind provides a nice cooling complement to the daily sunny skies. Blessed with several gorgeous sandy beaches, Mykonos is becoming a major tourist destination and has already been discovered by Hollywood royalty. Our tour guide today is a lovely lady named Amaryllis, a native of Mykonos. Her British mother came to Mykonos and fell in love with both the place and with a local man and never left. It ... read more

This morning we are in Nafplion, Greece, basically a port town. But it is the gateway to some ancient ruins with a fascinating story: Corinth and Mycenae. Our tour guide is Lalia, a no-nonsense woman with a deep knowledge of the history of the area. We board our coach and head out of town. The landscape is Greek as I remember it: dry, rolling hills, dotted with low plants, trees and shrubs, above which rocky mountain outcrops punctuate the sky. It's remarkable that, if you look carefully, virtually every mountain has some ancient ruins perched precariously on its summit. Our first stop is the Corinth Canal. It cuts across the 6.5 km isthmus that connects the Peloponnesian Peninsula from the Greek mainland. Constructed with the help of Hungarian engineers, it was completed in 1893. But it ... read more