Monthly Archives: December 2019

Bari, Italy — October 27-28, 2019

On Oct. 27 we departed Matera with the intention of taking two leisurely days to get to Rome. Our first stop was at the port city of Bari, where in addition to walking along the waterfront, we visited two sites of interest. From Wikipedia:

The Basilica di San Nicola (Saint Nicholas) was founded in 1087 to receive the relics of this saint, which were brought from Myra in Lycia, and now lie beneath the altar in the crypt.

The Norman-Hohenstaufen Castle, widely known as the Castello Svevo (Swabian Castle), was built by Roger II of Sicily around 1131. Destroyed in 1156, it was rebuilt by Frederick II of Hohenstaufen. The castle now serves as a gallery for a variety of temporary exhibitions in the city.

We spent the night further up the road at a rural AirBnB. The next morning I got up early to catch the sunrise colors.

Matera, Italy — October 25-27, 2019

After Pompeii we went to Matera, where we spent three nights and two days.

Matera is a city in the region of Basilicata, in Southern Italy. The town lies in a small canyon carved out by the Gravina River.

Known as la città sotterranea (“the underground city”), its historical centre “Sassi” contains ancient cave dwellings. The exact date when these were first occupied, and the continuity of subsequent occupation, are questions that scholars still debate. Sassi, along with the park of the Rupestrian Churches, was awarded World Heritage Site status by UNESCO in 1993.

Matera has gained international fame for its ancient town, the “Sassi di Matera”. The Sassi originated in a prehistoric troglodyte settlement, and these dwellings are thought to be among the first ever human settlements in what is now Italy. The Sassi are habitations dug into the calcareous rock itself. Many of them are really little more than small caverns, and in some parts of the Sassi a street lies on top of another group of dwellings. The ancient town grew up on one slope of the rocky ravine created by a river that is now a small stream, and this ravine is known locally as “la Gravina”. In the 1950s, as part of a policy to clear the extreme poverty of the Sassi, the government of Italy used force to relocate most of the population of the Sassi to new public housing in the developing modern city.

Until the late 1980s the Sassi was still considered an area of poverty, since its dwellings were, and in most cases still are, uninhabitable and dangerous. The present local administration, however, has become more tourism-orientated, and it has promoted the regeneration of the Sassi as a picturesque touristic attraction with the aid of the Italian government, UNESCO, and Hollywood. Today there are many thriving businesses, pubs and hotels there, and the city is amongst the fastest growing in southern Italy.

Matera was built above a deep ravine called Gravina of Matera that divides the territory into two areas. Matera was built such that it is hidden, but made it difficult to provide a water supply to its inhabitants. Early dwellers invested tremendous energy in building cisterns and systems of water channels.

Because of the ancient primeval-looking scenery in and around the Sassi, it has been used by filmmakers as the setting for ancient Jerusalem. Numerous famous biblical period motion pictures were filmed in Matera, as well as an impressive number of other films..

[Wikipedia]

 

Pompeii — October 24, 2019

On October 24, we visited Pompeii.

Pompeii was an ancient Roman city located in the modern comune of Pompei near Naples in the Campania region of Italy. Pompeii, along with Herculaneum and many villas in the surrounding area, was buried under 4 to 6 m (13 to 20 ft) of volcanic ash and pumice in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.

Largely preserved under the ash, the excavated city offers a unique snapshot of Roman life, frozen at the moment it was buried and providing an extraordinarily detailed insight into the everyday life of its inhabitants. It was a wealthy town, enjoying many fine public buildings and luxurious private houses with lavish decorations, furnishings and works of art which were the main attractions for the early excavators. Organic remains, including wooden objects and human bodies, were entombed in the ash and decayed leaving voids which archaeologists found could be used as moulds to make plaster casts of unique and often gruesome figures in their final moments of life. The numerous graffiti carved on the walls and inside rooms provide a wealth of examples of the largely lost Vulgar Latin spoken colloquially at the time, contrasting with the formal language of the classical writers.

Pompeii is a UNESCO World Heritage Site status and is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Italy, with approximately 2.5 million visitors annually.

After many excavations prior to 1960 that had uncovered most of the city but left it in decay, further major excavations were banned and instead they were limited to targeted, prioritised areas. In 2018, these led to new discoveries in some previously unexplored areas of the city.

[Wikipedia]

Siena, Tarquinia and Herculaneum — October 22 – 23, 2019

On October 22 we departed Florence and headed southward. We stopped at a cemetery along the way that is dedicated to fallen USA soldiers from WW2. Later we stopped for a time in Siena.

The historic centre of Siena has been declared by UNESCO a World Heritage Site. It is one of the nation’s most visited tourist attractions, with over 163,000 international arrivals in 2008. Siena is famous for its cuisine, art, museums, medieval cityscape and the Palio, a horse race held twice a year in the Piazza del Campo, the shell-shaped town square which unfurls before the Palazzo Pubblico. [Wikipedia]

From Siena we continued on to the village of Tarquinia, where we spent the night at an AirBnB. On the morning of October 23, before leaving Tarquinia, we spent some time walking through the village.

Late in the morning of October 23, after walking through Tarquinia, we proceeded to the ruins of Herculaneum.

In the shadow of Mount Vesuvius, Herculaneum was an ancient Roman town destroyed by volcanic pyroclastic flows in 79 AD. Its ruins are located in the comune of Ercolano, Campania, Italy. Herculaneum is one of the few ancient cities to be preserved more or less intact, with no later accretions or modifications. Like its sister city, Pompeii, Herculaneum is famous for having been buried in ash, along with Stabiae, Oplontis and Boscoreale, during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79.  Unlike Pompeii, the pyroclastic material that covered Herculaneum carbonized and thereby preserved wood in objects such as roofs, beds and doors as well as other organic-based materials such as food. Although most of the residents had evacuated the city in advance of the eruption, the first well-preserved skeletons of some 400 people who perished near the seawall were discovered in 1980. Although it was smaller than Pompeii, Herculaneum was a wealthier town, possessing an extraordinary density of fine houses with, for example, far more lavish use of coloured marble cladding. After the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, the town of Herculaneum was buried under approximately 20 metres (50–60 feet) of ash. It lay hidden and largely intact until discoveries from wells and tunnels became gradually more widely known, and notably following the Prince d’Elbeuf’s explorations in the early 18th century. Excavations continued sporadically up to the present and today many streets and buildings are visible, although over 75% of the town remains buried.
[Wikipedia]

Alberobello — October 26, 2019

On October 26 we maintained our AirBnB residence in Matera, but took a side trip to see Alberobello. As we drove through the area on the way to Alberobello, we were struck by the number of stone walls that surrounded the farm fields. The reason for their existence was obvious; the rich fields were studded with rocks. And then as we got closer to the village another use of the abundant stones became apparent: roofing material.

From Wikipedia:
A trullo (plural, trulli) is a traditional Apulian dry stone hut with a conical roof. Trulli generally were constructed as temporary field shelters and storehouses or, as permanent dwellings by small proprietors or agricultural labourers. In the town of Alberobello, in the province of Bari, whole districts contain dense concentrations of trulli. The golden age of trulli was the nineteenth century, especially its final decades, which were marked by the development of wine growing.

The history of the trulli is linked to an edict of the 15th-century Kingdom of Naples that subjected every new settlement to a tribute. In 1481 the Counts of Conversano D’Acquaviva D’Aragona imposed on the residents that they build their dwellings dry, without using mortars, so that they could be configured as precarious buildings and easily demolished. Having to use only stones, the peasants found in the round form with self-supporting domed roof the simplest configuration. The roofs were embellished with decorative pinnacles representing the signature of the architect.
[Wikipedia]

When we left Alberobello we briefly stopped at one of the nearby “White Villages”, a visit that afforded a dramatic overview of the surrounding countryside, with its rich fields and many stone walls.

Florence — October 15-22, 2019

We spent Tuesday, Oct. 15,  getting to Florence, Italy. First drove to Madrid from Itrabo Monday, and then Tuesday caught a flight to Rome. From there, another flight to Florence. Arrived in a driving rainstorm. We stayed in an Airbnb very near Ponte Vecchio, a medieval stone closed-spandrel segmental arch bridge over the Arno River, noted for still having shops built along it, as was once common.

One of our first activities on Wednesday was for Barb and I to go see Michelangelo’s David in the Galleria dell’Accademia.

We spent most of Thursday, Oct. 17, in the Palazzo Pitti, a vast, mainly Renaissance, palace in Florence, Italy. It is situated on the south side of the River Arno, a short distance from the Ponte Vecchio.

The palace was bought by the Medici family in 1549 and became the chief residence of the ruling families of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. It grew as a great treasure house as later generations amassed paintings, plates, jewelry and luxurious possessions.

In the late 18th century, the palazzo was used as a power base by Napoleon and later served for a brief period as the principal royal palace of the newly united Italy. The palace and its contents were donated to the Italian people by King Victor Emmanuel III in 1919.

The palazzo is now the largest museum complex in Florence. The principal palazzo block is 32,000 square metres. It is divided into several principal galleries or museums.

In a separate “Gallery of Modern Art”, spread over 30 rooms, is a large collection that includes works by artists of the Macchiaioli movement and other modern Italian schools of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The pictures by the Macchiaioli artists are of particular note, as this school of 19th-century Tuscan painters led by Giovanni Fattori were early pioneers and the founders of the impressionist movement. The title “gallery of modern art” to some may sound incorrect, as the art in the gallery covers the period from the 18th to the early 20th century. No examples of later art are included in the collection since In Italy, “modern art” refers to the period before World War II. [Wikipedia]

The Uffizi Gallery is a prominent art museum located adjacent to the Piazza della Signoria in the Historic Centre of Florence in the region of Tuscany, Italy. One of the most important Italian museums and the most visited, it is also one of the largest and best known in the world and holds a collection of priceless works, particularly from the period of the Italian Renaissance.

After the ruling house of Medici died out, their art collections were gifted to the city of Florence under the famous Patto di famiglia negotiated by Anna Maria Luisa, the last Medici heiress. The Uffizi is one of the first modern museums. The gallery had been open to visitors by request since the sixteenth century, and in 1765 it was officially opened to the public, formally becoming a museum in 1865.

Today, the Uffizi is one of the most popular tourist attractions of Florence and one of the most visited art museums in the world. [Wikipedia]

Saturday, Oct. 19, we visited two impressive museums. First, the Leonardo da Vinci Museum. (Careful, there is also a lesser, private one in the same neighborhood.) And then a massive overwhelming Galileo Museum. Bold signs in each forbidding photography. But a member of our party, a very close relative of mine, snuck a few pics. (As did many other tourists around me.)

We climbed 414 steps up to the top of the Bell Tower for the Duomo one day. I was disappointed to find that the protective safely screen on the balcony was a severe impediment to photography. (Barb did much better with her iPhone.) On the next day we climbed 463 steps to the top of the Duomo itself on the Cathedral of Santa Maria. What a view! Afterwards we went for a walk-about that took us SE to high ground in the vicinity of Plazzale Michelangelo.