Villa Romana del Casale

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4 May 2008

After a peaceful night we to a beautiful bright morning. We had to wait for the Villa Romana del Casale to open but Wendy passed the time talking to a French couple who had recently bought a campervan.

The visit to the villa was both amazing and enthralling. It was a privilege to be able to see a huge building from Roman times richly decorated with so many beautiful floor mosaics. Sadly a mojor restoration programme is underway and we were only able to see about 50% of the areas and those that were available were rather spoilt by the building works. From the pictures in our guide book we guessed we missed some of the best mosaics.

We headed south east through hill towns and rolling countryside back to the coast. The inland landscape was not as mountainous as we expected.

Unable to find the camp stop we had selected we finished up on a closed restaurant car park and sited the van 3 yards from the beach. As we were eating our dinner we were startled by a tap on the window. Our initial reaction was that we were going to be turned off, but instead were greeted by an elderly Sicilian who was very insistent that we should buy some of his tomatoes and courgettes.

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