Travel Review: The Vatican

In my whirlwind visit to Rome, my friend Carol and I took a bus tour that went to the Vatican Museums and Sistine Chapel in the morning and the catacombs in the afternoon.

Trying to see the Vatican Museums in one morning is an utter joke. Merely trying to get a good look at the bits you're whisked past on the way to the Sistine Chapel is equally impossible. The word "huge" doesn't begin to describe the museums' dimensions. There's amazing work in there collected from every continent and era; there's a masterpiece hidden in every corner. It would take a lifetime to truly absorb it all. And I really wonder what they keep behind closed doors, things too terrible or precious to give over to public viewing.

Unfortunately, the tour didn't allow for any restroom time between leaving the Chapel and getting back on the buses. And I desperately had to use the facilities. Carol wanted to mail some postcards there so they'd have the Vatican stamp, so I told her where I was going, and sprinted down the 3 or 4 levels to try to find a restroom.

The Vatican restroom was probably the cleanest public facility I've ever seen. Spotless. But there was an odd severity to it, from the polished marble walls down to the chilly, seatless toilets.

Travel Review: Santa Maria Maggiore

The Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore (St. Mary Major) was the first church dedicated to The Virgin Mary and is one of Rome's four great basilicas.

It is 1,600 years old and was first built after the Council of Ephesus; a legend states that the church was founded on its site because a miraculous snowfall appeared there one August. Pope Liberius began the construction in A.D. 358 and it was rebuilt by Pope Sixtus III from 432 to 440. It underwent a lot of renovation and decorative additions in the 18th Century and has been undergoing restoration very recently.

Many people who visit St. Mary Major's believe the church is second in beauty only to St. Peter's Basilica. A casual observer passing by the outside of the church would have no idea of the sheer opulence of the interior and the priceless treasures it contains.

St. Mary Major's sacred relic is the remains of the Baby Jesus' crib, which is kept in a jewelled golden container that somewhat resembles a Faberge egg. The crib is taken out for viewing each Christmas.

The ceiling alone is a wonder; it contains 3 tons of gold in elaborate meter-wide rosettes in gilt frames. Our tour guide told us that the gold in the ceiling was from the New World and was given by the King of Spain as a gift to the Pope.

That little tidbit of information really set my mental wheels in motion:

1. How much gold must the King of Spain had if he gave 3 tons of it to the Pope? How much of a "gift" was it, really, and how much of it amounted to spiritual "protection" money?
   
   
2. The churches of Rome are full of tributes to Jesus and the Christian martyrs -- what about the millions of South American natives who were martyred by the Spaniards who took their gold? How many holy native relics were melted down for Spanish ingots that then became Christian shrines?
   
   
3. Given that he used three tons of gold for a ceiling, how much gold did the Pope spend to feed and clothe the poor of the city?
   
   

If you stop to think about it, St. Mary Major is a beautiful living example of why the Protestant Reformation happened.

If you are in Rome and want to visit St. Mary Major, look for public transportation that heads to Piazza di Santa Maria Maggiore. Admission is free, and the church is open every day from 7 am to 7 pm.

Travel review: Sorrento

Sorrento is a small seaside city on the southwestern coast of Italy in the province of Campania. It has a population of about 15,000 people and is built on a long cliff that overlooks the Bay of Naples.

The town is old (people have lived there for over 2,000 years), scenic, and very touristy. It has long been a favorite destination of artists and writers seeking an inspirational resort. Henrik Ibsen wrote The Ghosts here, and Lord Byron, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Albert Dumas, Giuseppe Verdi, Oscar Wilde and Friedric Nietzsche also spent lots of quality time in this lovely city.

It was also the birthplace of famed 16th century poet Torquato Tasso. The main square in the city is named after him.

For those who like to shop, you'll find plenty of stores catering to nearly every taste and budget imaginable. For those who like to sight-see, the town is filled with very old churches and buildings full of history.

Sorrento is an ideal place to stay to tour other parts of the western Italian coast, since the hotels here are less expensive than in larger urban areas. Naples is just an hour to the north, Rome is 2.5 hours to the north, and Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the Isle of Capri are very close by. It's also very easy to catch any of several tours of the historic and beautiful Amalfi Coast from here.

To get to Sorrento, you'll probably want to fly into Rome or Naples and take the Circumvesuviana train down to the town.

You can also rent a car and drive down, but if you aren't a seasoned veteran of Italian-style driving, I wouldn't recommend it. To the American eye, Italians drive their little Fiats and Volkswagens like mad people; traffic signs and red lights are taken as mere suggestions. They'll tear into one of the many mountainous hairpin curves outside Sorrento at full speed, honking twice to let whoever's on the other side of the blind curve know that they're coming. If you sit near a busy intersection, over the course of an hour you'll see at least twenty near-collisions that the drivers miraculously avoid at the last minute. But if you're not used to this kind of driving, you won't be able to avoid the collision, so it's best to use trains, buses, and your own two feet to get around.

Sorrento is located in the heart of Italy's citrus country; you'll see lemon and orange trees all over the place, along with tall evergreens, palm trees, and even cactus.

While you're there, if you're a drinker, you'll have to try the local limoncello, a sweet lemon liquer that is yummy by itself, as part of a hot toddy, or even over vanilla ice cream.

Travel review: Hotel Il Nido

The Il Nido (Italian for "The Nest") is a pretty little family-run hotel about 5 kilometers outside Sorrento, Italy. It was established in 1964. The hotel is set terrace-style in the hillside, so all the rooms have a great view of the ocean and Mt. Vesuvius. However, they are well away from the beach.

If you're planning to tour the southwestern parts of Italy (Naples, Pompeii, Herculaneum, the Amalfi Coast, Isle of Capri, etc.) I cannot recommend this hotel highly enough. It's very inexpensive, and the service is great.

Two brothers, Orlandino (Dino) and Giovanni (Gianni or Johnny), run the place, and their mother supervises all the cooking for the hotel's small restaurant. And their mama's cooking is absolutely wonderful. The first night, we came in late due to a train breakdown outside Naples. The kitchen had been closed for hours, but upon seeing our weary, hungry group, their mama went into the kitchen and fixed us all a light dinner of brushetta and ravioli. I haven't had bruschetta that tasty anywhere since. Definitely try the flank steak with mushrooms or the four-cheese crepes. We had full dinners the five nights we were there -- appetizers, drinks, main courses, dessert, the works -- and at the end of it all, my restaurant tab only came to $42US.

You get a continental breakfast with the price of your room; while the Il Nido's breakfast isn't as varied as you'd find at places like Hotel Corot, it's filling and tasty. You get strong coffee, tea, orange juice, and a variety of pastries like big, flaky, buttery croissants.

The hotel has two PCs in their lobby and offers Internet access for a very reasonable fee (6.000 lira per hour). The only slight problem is you have to contend with Italian keyboards.

You really can't walk to Sorrento from the hotel, because the roads are narrow and steep and you'd get hit by a car trying the hike. But Gianni drives a courtesy van to drop you off and pick you up near the city's center; pickups and drop-offs run every hour from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m. Other travelers have apparently made arrangements for Gianni to pick them up and drop them off at other locations as far away as Naples.

The rooms at the Il Nido are small, but immaculately clean and comfortable. Very tall/heavy people may have trouble with the beds, though. The rooms we all had came with two very small single beds, a wardrobe, small table, chairs, and a dresser. Each room has a very nice balcony, and a bathroom with a shower stall and a bidet-type pedestal tub that came in extremely handy for soaking sore, blistered feet after tromping around Pompeii all day.

In short, this is a great little hotel. Dino and Gianni are warm and friendly, and if they think you're a good sort, they'll go the extra mile to help you out and ensure that your stay in Sorrento is a pleasant one.

For detailed graphical directions on finding the hotel, visit their site at http://www.ilnido.com/.

Travel review: The Isle of Capri

This Italian island's name is pronounced CAP-ree, rather than ca-PREE. Capri was not named for goats (as one might guess from the name, since "capreae" is Latin for "goats") but for a colony of wild boars that the first ancient settlers found there ("kapros" is Greek for "boar").

Our tour group went to Capri in March (during the off-season) via a large ferry boat from Naples. Everyone else in our footsore group opted for a bus tour, but my friend Carol and I decided to hike around on our own. Those who went on the bus tour said it was rather unsatisfactory, and was geared more for people who wanted to shop at the many expensive boutiques scattered across the island.

Capri is very, very expensive if you plan to stay there; expect to pay upwards of $300US a night for a hotel room. A much better tactic is to stay someplace on the coast (like in Sorrento) and make a day trip out to the island.

Capri is one of the most beautiful places I've ever been. I think Carol and I spent a solid five or six minutes just wandering around going "Wow!" after we got there. The scenery is just stunningly gorgeous.

We took a funicular up from the dock to the main town. After exploring the lovely Augustus Garden, we went to the 14th century Carthusian monastery of San Giacomo. We wandered into the municipal public library that's housed in the monastery, and the young man there let us into the museum, which was closed for the day. The museum is pretty small, but still has its share of treasures.

We also went up to see the Villa Jovis, the Roman ruins at the top of Capri. The Villa Jovis was the palace of the Roman emperor Tiberius; he ruled the empire from the island for about 12 years until his death (if you've seen the movie Caligula, much of it takes place in the palace at Capri).

The ruins are very much worth seeing, but, unless you're in much better physical condition than the average U.S. tourist, don't believe travel expert Rick Steves when he says one can make it from the town to Villa Jovis in a mere 45 minutes. The hike up the mountainous island will take you closer to an hour or an hour and a half. I'm pretty sure the hike would have been too much for at least half our tour group. Wear good shoes, and bring water, because you'll need it.

The path up to Villa Jovis is not as well-marked as one would hope, and it's easy to take a wrong turn and end up at the Natural Arch instead. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, because the natural arch -- a huge arch formed naturally by the action of wind and water -- is quite beautiful.

The trek to Villa Jovis also lets you see some very nice houses and landscape. Chances are, though, you won't be in a mood to notice them until you're on your way back down to the town.

We did not go see The Blue Grotto, which is a partially submerged cave you can visit in which the water seems to glow a brilliant blue. Other people we met there said that while the grotto's pretty, you don't get to spend much time there considering how much the boat trips cost, and all in all it's a bit of a tourist trap.

Travel review: Pompeii

If you're visiting southwestern Italy and have the chance to visit the ruins at Pompeii, I strongly suggest you do so. The place is amazing, and much larger than I expected it to be. Travel expert Rick Steves claims that you can tour Pompeii in three hours; I say that's far, far too short a time to see the place. We toured the ruins over two days; I'm guessing we spent at least 12 hours there total, and there was still stuff there that we didn't get to see.

If you're planning to see both Pompeii and Herculaneum, see Pompeii first if you can. Pompeii was much larger, having a population of about 20,000 people versus about 5,000 in Herculaneum. But, because looters first rediscovered Pompeii in the 16th and 17th centuries, it's suffered more from both erosion and plundering. The first planned excavations at Pompeii began in 1748, but it wasn't properly excavated until an Italian archaeologist named Guiseppe Fiorelli undertook the task in the mid-to-late 1800s. Archaeologists are still uncovering Pompeii's secrets today, but you'll appreciate both sites more if you see Pompeii first.

When I saw Pompeii, I was impressed by the architecture, artistry, and artisanship of the buildings. These people, in 79 AD, had indoor plumbing. It really hit me what kind of technology was lost and had to be re-learned as a result of the fall of the Roman Empire.

Some of the houses have carved phalluses on their doorways; it's my understanding that these were protective/good luck symbols. You'll see out-and-out pornographic frescoes in places like the brothel. In the brothel, you'll see various sex acts depicted; these might have been as much for illiterate customers to order services as for decoration.

The House of the Vetti and the House of Mysteries have some really wonderful frescoes and statuary still intact; you'll see what kind of influence ancient Roman artwork had on Renaissance artists such as Michaelangelo. If you want to see more of the statuary and frescoes, however, most of the better pieces have been removed and are kept in the museum at Naples.

You will see are casts of the bodies of some of the people who died at Pompeii on display in cases in the ruins. When the first archaeologists were digging through the ash, they'd come upon odd cavities in the ash. They hit upon the idea of filling the cavity with plaster and, once it had set, brushing the ash from around it. They then had a cast of the space people's corpses took up as they were incinerated by the ash flow from Vesuvius. Most of these casts have skeletons inside them; some of the cast's feet had been chipped, and I could see toe bones inside.

The casts are eerie and some terribly sad to see. You'll see children huddled near their mothers. One cast was of a small person, perhaps a child or young woman, who had slumped beside a wall, covering her face with her hands. Some find the casts morbid, but I found they provided an important reminder of the enormity of the human tragedy that happened in this place.

The ruins are often filled with roaming packs of dogs. Most of the dogs are fairly tame, but it's best to not get too close to them, since many of them are mangy or otherwise diseased. If you eat at the cafeteria (the food is decent, so there's no reason not to) expect to see a small dog or two inside begging for scraps.

And if you visit the ruins, be sure to bring your sunscreen and wear a decent pair of walking shoes; hiking boots wouldn't be out of the question. You'll do a whole lot of tromping around, and it would be very easy to turn your ankle on one of the cobblestones of the ruins' streets.

Travel review: Herculaneum

The Italian ruins at Herculaneum are about 6 miles from the shore of the Bay of Naples. Visiting them was quite an interesting experience. If you have the chance to see them, I highly recommend it, but you should probably see Pompeii first because the ruins at Pompeii will give you better perspective on what you'll see at Herculaneum.

To get there, you'll want to leave from Sorrento or Naples on a bus or train headed for Ercolano Scavi (Scavi di Ercolano). The ruins are open from 8:30 to 5 p.m. with final admissions at 3:30 from November through March, and they're open from 8.30 a.m. to 7.30 p.m. (final admissions at 6) from April through October. You should plan to spend at least two hours exploring the ruins, and you should enlist the help of one of the knowledgeable guides who approaches you near the entrance. They'll expect a tip, of course, but it will be worth it, because the mazelike ruins are poorly marked and are very hard to tour on your own.

As Jaz states, Herculaneum was a much smaller city -- 5,000 inhabitants versus Pompeii's 20,000. But because Herculaneum wasn't extensively excavated until the mid-1900s, the ruins are overall in much better condition because they haven't suffered as much from looting and erosion (the latter may become a problem, though, since the excavations to me seemed under-funded and proper preservation seemed lacking in places).

Some of the houses in Herculaneum have original wood beams and furniture still intact, though of course they're charcoaled. Thus, you're much better able to see how the houses were built, and other architectural details are much more apparent. And while the tilework at Pompeii is quite wonderful, in Herculaneum you'll see better tile examples where colors have stayed intact over the millennia.

As with Pompeii, the best treasures from these ruins are kept at the museum in Naples, though you will see some fine frescoes and statuary here. Probably the most impressive art you'll see here is a vibrant mosaic wall in the House of Neptune, which is toward the back of the ruins.

On the whole, visiting Herculaneum is a much quieter, more scholarly experience than seeing Pompeii. You'll see many more school groups than tourist groups, and the bookshop at the ruins is much more geared to selling actual books than tourist trinkets. So, if seeing Pompeii inspires you to read up on Roman history, you might wait to see what kind of books you can find in the Herculaneum store, because you'll see a better selection overall.

The ruins don't have a cafeteria or snack bar, but you can bring food in with you as long as you dispose of your trash properly. There are several snack shops just across the street from the ruins' entrance that will sell you sandwiches and drinks to go for a reasonable price (many of the sit-down restaurants in the area are a bit spendy).