Advertisement
Published: June 12th 2008
Edit Blog Post
Hey everyone, we have now taken a bit out of our Italian tour.
From Nice we kept heading east, through rather challenging coastal roads which were pretty hard to make any distance on. Just across the border we got stuck behind a guy moving a house at 11am..... This was pretty frustrating travelling so we bit the bullet and took on the pay motorways for the first time, letting us soar above each of the bays on the way on m, We still had a fair few hills around, which seem to attract rain for us so we did a quick walking tour of the center here. Genoa provided us with views of our first "stripey" church (see photos) as well as an interesting walk through some pretty narrow streets in the old center which have been in use for donkeys years.
Rather impressed with the motorway system we headed north again for Verona, and ultimately Venice. However, just short of Verona once we came off the motorway (thankfully) we hit a spot of bad luck. We took a stone to the radiator, and the firs thing we new of this was by the presence of smoke in the
cab as Bert burnt through the last of his engine oil :-/ Backtracking to the last gas station (in a rainstorm) we came across the most helpful of locals in the form of the service station owner. At 6pm on Friday night he saw us roll in spraying water everywhere and got on his phone to contact his mate at a truck repair shop as we asked for help in pseudo Italian ("repare-i radiator-o" sounding something like a Harry Potter movie) with sign language augmentation. This guy really came through, jumping in his car and guiding us to the mechanic who got us back on the road with some solder and a can of Radiator leak repair/stopper :-)
Onwards a little further we took in Verona, which is pretty good for the Shapespear and Romeo and Juliette fans. It was a pretty nice way to spend the afternoon with a gelatto in hand to beat the summer heat. We did get a bit lost trying to find the respective lovers houses, of which Juliette's was the most popular with the tourists. They have a sign up asking people not to write on the walls, but it is probably a
bit late for that.
Venice was next up for us, and we spend our time there wandering the narrow streets looking for bridges while dodging past the streams of tourists drawn to the place. St Mark's square was impressive (photos attached) although the pigeons seemed to be out-numbered by the tourists :-/ We avoided the queues here and had a nice wander around, finishing up with a water bus ride down the length of the grand canal floating under the major bridges along the way.
By this stage it was time for a bit of a break, so we headed south looking for a nice beach to stop off at on the Aegean coast. Man were we in for a bit of a surprise! Although they had nice sand, the water was flat as a pan-cake and also a bit stagnant in some places, with the first spot we stopped at having water visibility of about 30cm... A lot further south we did find somewhere with clean water, asking tactfully at the camping ground on the first stop where we could find "waves". The basic answer was that waves (and clean water) appeared to the south.
Eventually
we did find a nice stopping point at Lido De Dante, stopping for a bit before we headed over the hills into Florence. We found a camping ground right in the center of the city, allowing us to walk into the main square in 10 minutes :-) Florence really impressed with it's compact walkable old city which oozes renaissance artistic treasures. Like most females, Sandra was moved by Michelangelo's David, but the city has much more to offer as well with the Uffizi gallery as well as a really cool sculpture park right in the main square. We also took a climb up to the top of the dome of the Domo (cathedral), squeezing through some small overcrowded access passages, walking under the inside of the dome painted with larger than life demons using red hot pokers, to emerge on the roof with Florence laid out before us.
Just a bit further down the road was Pisa, which we ended up at after a short lunch stop at Lucca (which is kind of like a mini Florence but without the artwork. It did however have a rather interesting town very much in need of a gardener (photo attached). Pisa
provided the expected photo-opportunity, but it does seem rather surprising that the locals kept building the tower even when then could see it was leaning after only 3 stories were finished....
We have now moved on from northern Italy, with our last stop being a quick drop into Siena to check out the street which the locals run the Palio horse race on each year (not the right time of year for us to check this out). The layout of things doesn't look much like a race track at all, with steep narrow cobbled streets and a start/finish line in a rather compact inclined square).
That's it from us for a bit - next post Rome and beyond!
S&S
Advertisement
Tot: 0.082s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 8; qc: 24; dbt: 0.0598s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb