Days 14-15 Pompeii and Italian Food

Days 14-15

Pompeii and Italian Food

We had fond memories of the place we stayed in 2008, so we thought we’d try it again.  The hotel is called La Tonnarella, and it not only has great rooms and spectacular sea views, but it has probably the best hotel breakfast.  All their fresh fruits are in season and locally grown, they have fresh Italian bread, eggs to order, great coffee, fresh juice, and a great view of the coastline from each table.

This is a month long vacation, and being in Sorrento has a special place in my heart for my first and only Italian haircut.  During our last visit in 2008, we visited Figaro’s barbershop where I was treated with great enthusiasm since I was an American.  I find it amazing they can cut as little hair that I have with scissors.  Their hands are so quick that I think they would make really good pickleball players.  Antonio is pictured, and he gave me my 2016 Italian haircut.  His father, Giuseppe, cut my hair in 2008.  The haircut was an early fathers day gift from Shari.

Sorrento is only 30 minutes by train from Pompeii, and it is an amazing place to see as it has an incredible story.  Almost 2000 years ago, Mt. Vesuvius did like Mt. St. Helens did in the state of Washington in 1980.  Behind Shari is Vesuvius with a cloud covering most of one of it’s two peaks.

When Vesuvius erupted, the inhabitants died from the ash and gases. The city was partially destroyed and then buried under many feet of ash and pumice.  The lack of air preserved what was left as it was in 79 A.D. when Vesuvius wiped it off the map.  So what we see is an amazing view of the remnants of an ancient Roman city.  Some examples are this patio with a painted tile picture concerning a conquest . . . 

The men’s public bath . . .

And even some of the victims . . .

It you look at this temple, you’ll even see the head of Jupiter nearest the second tallest pillar.

The only negative about the visit was we got a guide service that misrepresented its service.  You get to monuments like this and know that you want to get started before the big crowds arrive.  We typically get to attractions early to beat the larger crowds.   Pompeii has lots of interesting stories to tell, so a really good guide can help immensely.

Do you remember ancient history and how the ancient Romans helped civilize their empire by engineering incredible water systems and roads?  Check out this two lane road (for chariots) and the elevated crosswalk.

One thing we learned was that the roads were also the sewer system, so the slope of the roads had purpose.   I bet they hoped for rains for more reasons than watering the crops. 

It’s no secret we love Italian food, and it is one of our reasons to visit Italy.  We weren’t in Sorrento all that long in 2008, so we are discovering something we probably missed when our focus before was on boat rides to the Amalfi Coast and the Isle of Capri.

This simple Caprese is made with Bufalo cheese, the best mozzarella cheese, and tomatoes that taste like they used to 40 years ago.  I’d pack my suitcase for the way home with these two great ingredients if I’d pass customs.  Not all restaurants are equal, and we were lucky enough to get a tip from people we met on the Amalfi coast bus.  Besides the caprese, the Italian bread at the Bufalito restaurant is the best I’ve ever had, and I grew up on it.  I attribute my Mediterranean skin shade to eating lots of it.  This became a recurrent lunch place

We also got a good tip on an agriturismo farm/restaurant that was a short drive from our hotel.  I think expectations were a farm house and very simple foods.  Instead, the place was a unique multi-level exotic greenhouse. A driver picked us up at our hotel and drove us home when we were ready. 

The German Shepard was part of the welcoming we got when we arrived.

Edy, one of the head waiters, was also a very friendly host.

I don’t know that we had any simple food.  Edy wouldn’t allow it.  I took the following picture prematurely as there were still a couple of antipasto plates missing from this photo.

Many of the dishes pictured involve various types of seafood.  

We were pretty satisfied with just the antipasto, but we still had main courses to enjoy.  

For us the food in the Sorrento area is the best Italian food we’ve ever had.  It is probably due in part to all the great ingredients that grow so well in this area.  Just look at these lemons used in limoncello.  The biggest ones by Shari are huge when compared to her hand.

Italian pizza is one of our favorite foods.  Shari had identified her favorite pizza place from our 2008 trip.  After having the pictured pizza two times, she now has a new favorite pizzeria.

Days 11-13, Au Revoir Paris, Buon Giorno Italia

Days 13-15

Au Revoir Paris, Buon Giorno Italia

All our days in Paris were good, but the sights were especially good this last day.  It started with an early tour of the Notre Dame (French for Our Lady).  Most tourists sleep in, so an early start means short lines or no lines.  

We have been in many churches (every time we come to Europe) and don’t personally see anything spectacular about the inside of Notre Dame.  The outside is another story, and there can be a long line for climbing to the top of the tower, but you have to be willing to climb 422 steps. The views were incredible!

One thing Notre Dame has is gargoyles.  They’d been around long before Notre Dame, but they weren’t always as grotesque. Some are considered unique.  There purpose is to move the rain water from the roof away from the building so that it isn’t eroding the mortar in the masonry.  In other words, it helps preserve the building for a long time.  While the church was completed in 1345 A.D., construction started almost 200 years earlier.  It was hard to find fast builders at that time.

For those having read The Hunchback of Notre Dame, he’s the guy in the second picture, not the first.

It took a long time to find him - bottom half and climbing the joint of the walls.  Click on the photo for a close-up, then click on 'X' at upper right of the photo to return to the story.

We had gotten so good at moving around by subway, we headed miles away to the NE section of Paris.  We’re guessing the big draw is this unique church, Sacre Coeur (Sacred Heart), with it’s unique exterior. 

What was more interesting was the narrow street lined with artists painting and displaying there works.

Our last act as tourists in Paris was to visit Napoleon’s Tomb.  His body is beneath the golden dome.  More interesting was the War Museum that is located on several floors behind the door.  I could have spent several hours in the museum seeing the old movie clips, photo displays, and artifacts of WWI and WWII.  It’s amazing what the world went through in the first half of the 20th Century.

Friday was a travel day.  We took a one hour cab ride to get to the airport, then waited as our plane was late.  When we did arrive in Rome, we rented a car to drive to Sorrento, Italy, which is located very close to the Amalfi Coast.  The drive that was to take 3 hours took almost 6, and we arrived in Sorrento as the sun was setting.  We got very few directions, but did study signs very carefully.  Our little Fiat Panda was the right car to drive the narrow roads as well as to park.  My biggest concern is parking, not driving.  I’m half Italian, so driving in Italy (or Europe) comes naturally to me :o)

We were in Sorrento 8 years ago with Jan and Dan Studer, our friends from Bonners Ferry, Idaho.  On this trip, we planned to have a little more time as the Amalfi Coast is so beautiful.  We even booked into our Hotel from years ago.  Just about everything about this place is memorable including the entry way.

The weather was good on our first full day in Italy, so we decided to visit the small town of Ravello, which we also visited 8 years ago.  From Sorrento, we took a bus about 15 miles.  The roads are the curviest, narrowest, steepest, ‘baddest’ roads we have ever been on, and 15 miles takes about an hour and a half to drive.  But the views can make it worth it. 

I don’t know what possessed us eight years ago to get on a bus and ride up to Ravello, but it is a more relaxed town than some of the other Amalfi towns.

We like the little town squares . . . 

and we like the ambiance created from the ancient ruins to make restaurants.

In the next post, I’ll talk about the food.  We have been treated to great food so far.  Just to remind you that we are at the sea coast, here’s my pasta dish from a restaurant close to our hotel.  I thought the dish would be about the clams and muscles, but the pasta was great while also being different than any I’ve had.  

                                                                        Buon Appetito!

Days 9-10 Ooh La La

Days 9-10

Ooh-La-La

I don’t think I’ve mentioned the old church that we look out at from our hotel room window.  The church is St. Severin, and it has a big pipe organ we’ve heard.

Also, for you new readers, if you click on the photo one time, it expands and fills your screen - but do so only if you want to see a full screen version.  After viewing, just click on the 'x' to close the full screen version.

We are getting good weather in Paris! It hasn’t rained once since we’ve been here, and the past few days have been warm and sunny!  I haven’t used ‘ooh la la’ since taking French in my sophomore year in high school, but it kind of fits now.  Things that were closed due to flooding will be opening soon but not today.  Hundreds of thousands of pieces of art work are headed back to museums adjacent to the Seine.

With the museums closed, we took the subway and a suburban train to Versailles, the palace of the Kings Louis XIV - XVI (14th - 16th), a period of about 100 years, most of it before our American Revolutionary War and about a dozen years after it.

The Palace is so enormous - almost a million square feet of floor space.  The line to get into the Palace was too long for our taste, so we headed to the ‘garden’ which has a separate entrance and is one of the largest and finest gardens we have ever seen.  The only disappointment was the lack of edible vegetables.

The garden has a whole host of things to entertain and relax a visitor including lakes, ponds, fountains, statues, a variety of sculpted plants, trails, etc.

Everything in the picture, and much more, is part of the estate.  This was the party palace for all the nobility of France.

Back when it was being built, the estimated cost was half of the yearly generated wealth of France.  Fed up with being poor, and most of its citizens starving, those on the downside of the income gap rose up and revolted.  Louis the 16th and his wife Marie Antoinette both literally lost their heads at the guillotine.  The wonderful palace was then abandoned for decades.

We did try later in the afternoon, around 4:00, to get into the Palace, but the line was still at least an hour wait, so we returned to Paris without seeing it. 

Our hotel concierge offered ideas for dinner places, and we tried another place.  I’ll show only one of the items: steak, roasted potatoes, and mushrooms which was very tasty and was presented like something out of Cook’s Illustrated.

On Day 10, we finally had a chance to visit the artwork inside the Louvre and Orsay.  I think you all know that the Mona Lisa is kept in Paris at the Louvre.  It sure drew the attention of a lot of people, some of whom pushed to get to the front of the viewing area.  

They say when you move around in a room, the eyes of the painted subject look like they are moving.  While I’m sure it is a fine painting, it made me think of Maxwell Smart, Agent 86, on the Get Smart TV show in the 1960’s.  In classic Mel Brooks fashion, the eye movement was obvious and complete.  I wish I had a gif file showing the eyes move.

Forty feet away from the Mona Lisa, and facing the opposite direction, is a painting 50 times bigger, and Shari could costar in the photo/painting with no pushy crowd.

The Louvre is the largest Art Museum in the World and probably the most visited.  But our taste in paintings leans towards impressionist art. All of this art was moved years ago from the Louvre to the Orsay Museum.  For those of you who know this art, we saw Monet, van Gogh, Manet, Cezanne, Gauguin, and Renoir to name a few.  The Orsay was salvaged from an old train station that was to be torn down, and the French fused a museum with a train station quite nicely.

In case you are unfamiliar with Impressionist art, I’ve turned one of the photos (Days 7-8) I’ve taken into something close to what we like.

We visited two art museums in one day but still decided we needed to catch one more feature of Paris.   One of the special places Rick Steves advises to see is the St. Chapelle Chapel.  It’s been around for almost 1000 years, so we expected something very gothic.  Lots of cathedrals and churches have stained glass windows, but we’ve never seen anything like this.

We’d been noticing the garbage was not getting picked up.  It turns out that in our end of the city, the sanitation workers are on strike.  The street cleaners are working but not the garbage technicians.  We are in day 5 of this strike. 

We cannot conclude these days at the small and relatively insignificant garbage strike.  Back at the Orsay, there is more than art to enjoy.  Here is the woman who has impressed me the most in the last 46 years.

Days 7-8 GRAY Par-EE

Days 7-8

GRAY Par-EE

You get the sense that this place, Paris, must be special as there are so many people here to see it.  Everywhere you go after 10 am seems crowded, and by noon it is definitely crowded.  That said, some places are immediately exciting.  Notre Dame, even with gray skies and high water, is amazing.  The Eiffel Tower, even in the fog, is so much bigger than any picture (but that is all I have to show you).

it was amazing hearing the story of Gustav Eiffel and his tower.  There was to be a World Fair in Paris on the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution (1889).  The French government had a competition to determine who would get the right to build a commemorative monument, and he won.  His plans had the French building being the tallest building in the world at that time (300 feet), and being a reliable bridge builder, they figured he could build a tower of steel.  The only problem was the cost.  The monument commission informed him they could provide 18% of the cost, but he would have to bear the rest.  Being a shrewd business person, as well as a great engineer, he required 20 years of charging the public for entry.  As you might guess, he made all his expenses back plus millions more. Our only regret is that we didn’t visit on a better day.  At the top, we only saw the inner view of the clouds.  It was still amazing getting to know some of the history of the tower from over the years.

The amazing thing about our gray days in Paris is that we have not deployed our umbrellas so far.  We were headed to parts of Paris not closed by the flooding when we noticed the grounds to the Louvre were open.  This is the largest art museum in the world, and we were glad to know the grounds were open.

While checking things out, we noticed a long line of photographers waiting their turn for a picture.  I decided to be clever and go to a spot 6 feet to the left of the front of the line and take the same picture.  You need to know that the front of the ‘glass’ pyramid at the Louvre, looks like the front face matches part of the building immediately behind it.

My picture from 6 feet away is almost as good as any of theirs, don’t you think?

We did find our way to the Champs Elysee for our first visit.  We know little of Paris so most everything is a discovery.   First, a good part of it is not paved and it’s not motorized.  It’s a very wide walkway with lots of statues, benches and portable chairs, small gardens, occasional ponds, and lots of people strolling.

Then we came to the 8 lane paved part, and being the first Sunday in the month, it was closed to all traffic except walkers and bikers.  This too we did not know about.  This picture makes it look like there might be the makings of at least a small riot of people, but in reality, there’s lots of space to move about.

While we probably walk at least 5 miles a day, we do use the subways extensively.  We are becoming experts at knowing how to get around.  That is no small task considering the flooding has closed some of the most convenient subway lines.  Oh . . . did I say subways?!  They are Metros as not all parts of the lines are underground.  We might create a special class called the ‘Art of Subway Travel’.

While here, we have not been starving.  Our challenge here is picking the right restaurant.  On the recommendation of our hotel staff person, we went nearby and selected a beef fondue.  We think of fondue as a melted cheese-dipping meal.  With meat, you dip the meat in hot boiling oil.   What a surprise!

We did have something that was not a surprise - a good French onion soup.

These two days were fun and an adventure even with the gray skies.  Finally, toward the end of these days, 4 hours after our Eiffel Tower trek, the sun came out.  The Notre Dame was much more pleasing to look at.

And the Seine River, even though still above flood stage, has a special charm.