lenora_rose (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lenora_rose) wrote2006-12-22 01:40 am
lenora_rose) wrote2006-12-22 01:40 am
Entry tags:
Once again, proof I need an editor, or Old News
It's like this: I started writing a letter to my grandmother in Alberta, to say what we'd done this eyar. Three pages. Maybe five as I'm talkative.
It's twelve and not - quite - finished.
I'm debating cutting it down to size after I'm done (It's fvery possible, as I went into huge amounts of detail i didn't need to and maybe grandma doesn't even care about -- or maybe she would, and nobody would know it becuase by traition Christmas "what i did last year" letters are short)., but then I considered; the bulk of it is my honeymoon trip, which I never did actually sum up here. So I also decided that, whether she only actually gets three pages or fifteen, I'd post the bit about Italy and Malta here, so that it would be preserved, and maybe those who wanted me to talk about it in the first place would finally get to see me do so.
So, this is unedited and rambling, and I haven't had a chance to check for typos (They likely increase as I go; my right hand is twinging oddly in an atypical manner), and good lord does it need links to flickr or photobucket, should I ever remember to put some of our pictures up for public view.
We spent the afternoon in Toronto, and ate at a very nice Thai place downtown, then flew "Overnight" to Rome. We arrived in their evening, just in time to find the subway and check in at our bed-and-breakfast, which is right off the Subway route and less than 10 minutes' trip from the middle of the tourist areas, but isn't in the middle of things. We had a late dinner at what felt like it should be morning to us, where I found out that our hostess was right. She'd said she was looking forward to being in Rome not for the history or the shopping or the other things Rome is known for, but for the cherry tomatoes. I've had more than a few home grown cherry tomatoes of more than a few kinds, and she's right'; these are the best I've ever had. Since neither of us had slept on the plane, we were in bed by 10:30 anyhow, and so we beat the jet lag and we were on Rome time right away.
We visited the Vatican first, around the museum before we went into St. Paul's. The medieval art gallery and the Greek and Roman staruaty both have the same effect on me; You look on it all, and after a while, it starts to feel all the same; them something especially *good*, something a little unusual, jumps out at you, even if it's a small painting in the corner of a room, or one carved head on a wall of such. Those little special things are the parts you remember better.
It changed as we got into the Renaissance, into the rooms Raphael painted, where suddenly everything is *that* good, and that unusual. Then you rend with the Sistine Chapel, and that is its own thing entirely. You get a neck-ache staring up and up, at that ceiling but you can't stop. Colin said he thought the Creation of Adam would be a much bigger part of it, since everyone sees that part over and over on everything, not just one panel among so many. But it's truly astonishing.
None of the photos we took, either, really give you the impression how very large is St. Paul's Cathedral. It's handsome, and yet it's easier to deal with looking into the side chapels, at the size of them, which would be big enough for any regular church, than to look at the whole thing.
We wandered out of there, and back into Rome by a side street, not the main exit from the square, and walked our way back downtown. Their river is small, and buried so far down a small canal that it feels forgotten. We found pizza at a small place well off the beaten track, but eventually got back to more usual areas for tourists, like the Pantheon and the Spanish Steps, and several squares filled with people and fountains. (And lucked into a grocery store where I could buy shoelaces, as my runner's lace had snapped, and cherry tomatoes and water for the next day's long ramble). Trevi fountain is as interesting for the constant crowd as for its own beauty, though the guys who walk up to you to sell things are so persistent you actually do have to be rude to them or else. I tried everything more polite then turning my back and nothing worked but doing that or shoving right past them as if you don't see them. The next day we visited all the oldest ruins, the most famous places in Rome outside Vatican City.
The things I remember most are smallish bustling streets with so much old carving on them it feels a wonder to someone from the New World, and a lot of graffiti on everything not absolutely sacred, including carved into the exterior of the Pantheon. Since nothing can be taller than St. Paul's, it has an odd feeling of modernity without skyscrapers or even ordinary multi-story towers. It's a weird feeling. The pigeons are so unafraid of people we actually started measuring how close they'd come to people, or cats, by whether you could kick them (We never actually did, it was just a weird way to measure it.)
Mostly, though, there were cats. Rome is full of semi-feral cats. Semi-feral because they're used to humans, and apparently there are people who go about and make sure they're healthy and have some shots, and other people who go off and feed them, and some you can even pet, but they don't and won't live in houses with people. They seem more common in the ruins, where they're less likely to be run over or stepped on. They show up in our pictures of the Argentine ruins (Which are in the middle of a city block, surrounded by modern, active things like the ubiquitous pizzerias), and Palatine hill, which is just above the forum and near the Colosseum, and yes, inside the Colosseum. (Palatine Hill also has, as well as the ruins of palaces, a beautiful rose garden.)
The next day we traveled south to Naples, where we never saw anything but the station, and then, by overnight train to Sicily. We went to sleep, if restlessly, and woke on the island, with its one great mountain and several smaller ones passing us by, and the ocean on the East, which seemed like the wrong side, but no less lovely for that.
We spent the day rambling Syracuse, especially their little island where half the interesting sights are. The church there is very cool, wonderful in the ehat, and very eclectic, with the main part of the building full of pieces built at different centuries, and side chapels with such different moods they were like different churches; one all gaudy victorian flowers, the next quite solemn.
We crossed through the side streets until we found the ocean on the other side, and looked voer the old protective walls to the water. On the way back, since we took random side streets so we could see the most interesting things, the regular stuff less touristy, we got what Colin was convinced was utterly lost in the teeny side streets, and by teeny I mean some you couldn't fit a car down (Maybe a motorbike, which we saw plenty of) but they still considered streets. Fortunately, it’s small as cities go, and the island even smaller, and I'd managed to keep track of where we were well enough to actually get us correctly back to the temple ruins, from which you can see the bridge back into the rest of town.
From there it was a train to Pozzallo, where the ferry to Malta stops, and a taxi to the port. We shared the taxi with a Maltese couple, originally English, who told us a great deal about the island, gave us some non-tourist bits of advice, and talked about the man's job helping to set odds for online companies involved in betting. At the time his big ones were dealing with the Eurovision Song Contest. We stayed with them on the ferry, and w e meant to take a taxi with them, but the ferry was late in, and we had a small delay in customs, and when we looked for them, we didn't see them, so we let another taxi take us to our guesthouse, or as near as they could, in Valletta city. I think I may have seen the couple as we left, in an area we hadn't thought to check, but I'm not sure, and we never got their number, so we don't know if they waited or left. I do wish them well, they were good company.
I was a little surprised that the taxi would seem to need to ask direction to get us through the city, until later, when I saw how many one-ways and pedestrian only streets their were, much less how many streets suddenly turned into staircases. Hills are one of the things Malta is not short on, along with cities, people (it's overcrowded as islands go) and the two types of stone of which the island is made, the most common one dun-yellow, so all their buildings are that colour, the less common one pinkish, and seen more often in the ruins.
Still, we arrived after midnight, but they let us in and gave us our room and let us do the rest of the check in stuff in the morning, so we went in. The room was small, and comfortable so long as the windows were open, with two tiny cot-beds, mine of which was sagging badly. The bathrooms of the building (well, the toilets, the real shower room was quite nice) were these tiny enclosed balconies between floors, one of which did look from the outside as if it was ready to fall off.
The patio restaurant right across the street from us proved a pleasant place to have lunch, and was actually owned by the brother of the woman running our guesthouse. It had three full grown cats living there, plus the kittens of one; Valetta, it seemed, as just like Rome in that respect.
Valetta is a walled city from the late Renaissance, jutting out on a peninsula into the harbour. The walls are as thick as some houses are wide, and larger than others, the town inside was designes specifically to both look beautiful and to make the most of the seawinds by funnelling them down the streets to keep cooler (It seemed to work, but it's hard to say, as it was 30 degrees or higher, and sunny, the whole time we were there, so while the streets were breezy and much shaded, even the shade was warm.) Straight forward, it looks out to sea, to the north it looks onto the harbourside, and two other cities (Includign the one with the bars and nightlife, which is apparently the "hot" place to be, but neither Colin nor I were interested in bars). To the west, right outside the city walls is the bus depot for the busses leading everywhere on the island, and beyond that, of course, another city. To the south, three smaller peninsulas jutting into the harbour, called, accurately, the Three Cities; two of which seemed to be the industrial areas. The urbanization runs on and on, but except for that stretch of industry, it's mostly handsome. There's one corner of Valetta, not too far from the Anglican Cathedral, where it's grown worn down, and some other parts of the other cities we bussed through that are peeled paint and such. But also several handsome sights we only got to zip past as we visited around the island.
We wandered a lot within the city, especially the archeological museum, which is small but has a lot in it, and the big cathedral, which proves that when people say Baroque they really mean "Everything that could possibly be decorated and some that couldn't is carved or painted within an inch of its life." The whole floor was made up of these long slabs each one with a different design on it, of coats of arms or skeletons or other war-like imagery, blacks and reds and yellows and bits of gold. I was told that there's one of the Knights of St. John underneath each one, from their losses in the Great Siege of 1565 and afterward; I don't kow if that's literally true, btu it is a memorial to each, and the slabs are each large enough. The effect is riotous colour and slightly morbid together, not things I associate, but it is true that prior centuries are a great deal more open about death and less inclined to regard it as something only to be whispered about.
The War Museum was only mildly interesting, which is unfortunate, as Malta was the place the Axis bombed the hardest through World War Two; and completely failed to eradicate, for all it had all of three war planes. We also looked at filigreed silver, and beautiful glassworks, and such touristy things. I came home with oen fo the pieces of glass; a bowl shaped as an upside-down cone, with swirls of colour throughout.
Outside the city we visited the Neolithic temple ruins, the oldest such ruins in Europe; a millennium or two before Stonehenge. I actually spend a while staring away from the ruins out at the actual agricultural fields surrounding the area. From the ruin nearer the shoreline we hiked a while along the rocks, overlooking the coast but pretty much impossible to safely get from where we were to down there, though it was never quite cliff-steep. There was an island in the distance that turned out to be a bird-refuge; it really was all steep cliff-walls, and nobody could live on it. Apparently, in the world wars, it was used by ships for target practice, as it's about the right size. The rocks are full of little lizards, but not as small or as numerous as the ones I remember from Fiji when I was young.
We also went to three different beaches; Paradise Bay first, with dark gold sands. It was a nice little place, a little overbuilt with restaurant and places to rent water equipment, but not crowded with people, and half the beach and everything else around it left natural. We actually took a plastic kayak with a "glass bottom" out around the Bay to look, but mostly we just saw little fish and seaweed and some spiky urchin-things (And in one corner, trash that apparently gets brought to that part of the bay in Winter storm surges and hadn't been fully cleaned up by May). There were jellyfish; we saw a couple from the boat, and I saw one in the first swim, and Colin got stung by another at the end of the day. The Mediterranean really is turquoise in many places, that being one of them and clear wherever we had the opportunity to see.
Someone also snuck by our stuff while we were away and emptied my purse, which amused me more than anything, as I lost a hairbrush I was going to need to replace anyhow as it was breaking, and a lip gloss. (I wasn't going to leave my money or cards in something I left in plain sight on a beach, even a harmless looking one!) I *Was* annoyed that I lost some of the seashells and polished glass I’d collected. I would have been upset to lose the purse itself as it's a pretty handmade one I bought at the folk fest.
The othetr two bays we saw the same day: first Għajn Tuffieħa, then Golden Bay. They're almost side by side about a ten or fifteen minute walk apart, part of the same larger bay but couldn't be more different; The first backs onto a wildlife preserve, and while it had a half built bar in one corner, and a guy sitting on the sand renting beach umbrellas, it didn't even have a bathroom. It was lovely, and it's the one place I got myself badly subnburned in the whole trip, walking around on the beach looking for seashells and forgetting to renew the sunscreen (Colin didn't burn as he napped under the umbrella while I was walking. We swam together before and after.)
The second has a resort hotel attached, two or three full out fancy bars with food... and a LOT more people, especially children. The only thing they really had alike was dark tan sand, so dark it was soaking up heat enough to be unbearable, even to someone used to walking on hot sand, and the water itself.
The one thing we most regret missing is that there's an underground complex that was excavated which used to be a prehistoric burial ground; they dug down into the stone in three "floors" to find places to lay their dead, more like the way we might place them in a mausoleum or into a cathedral than the usual graveyard. They limit the number of people that can go, and they insist on booking weeks in advance, so since we made the trip with a lot less planning ahead than that, we couldn't go. We saw a model of it, just a few feet across, and blown up photos, in the archeological museum, and that alone makes me really regret missing it.
Anyhow, we left Malta at 7:00 AM, and ended up stuck in Pozzallo for the late morning and early afternoon. It's a fairly small town so there wasn't a great deal to do; I walked through the waters on the beach there, too, but everything was packed in my bag, and I didn't feel like digging out my swimsuit, so I just splashed in the waves and soaked my skirt. We did have a bit of a panic at the train station when the machine to sell us tickets wouldn't work, and the town had gone into siesta so everything was closed and would be until after the train left.
Thankfully, it turned out the train itself could sell us a "Ticket", actually they just gave us a receipt to say we'd paid, but it would have been enough to escape the huge fine if anyone had asked (A funny thing about how they deal with their trains. Except for overnight trips, there's only an occasional check to see if everyone even has a ticket, but the fine for getting caught is steep. I think we had our tickets checked once.)
Anyhow, we got back to Syracuse in late afternoon, tried to see their Roman theatre and the other attractions off just north of town, and failed as it all closed early that particular day. We still got to see some decent sights, and I found the place that had been selling the ornaments I wanted for cheaper than elsewhere. These are little terracotta or mock-terracotta heads making funny faces.
We took another overnight sleeper train to Naples; I woke when they put the whole train on the ferry across to the mainland this time, because I swear the temperature in the cabin reached almost 40 degrees. So I stood around in the hallway a bit to "cool down" because it was less boiling out there.
We never really stayed in Naples or even looked around outside the train station. We took the advice of one of the tour guides and stayed in the smaller city of Sorrento, less than an hour's trip away instead. Colin had chosen our Guesthouse at random, almost, so we had no idea if it would be good or bad. It turned out to be the best place we stayed the whole time. It was down a path form one of the upper points of town; and I call it a path, but people drove small cars down it, even thought they had to pull waaay over and stop dead when they saw a pedestrian, so we could just squeeze past. Instead of being part of a building we shared with other guests, it was a little cabin on the property of the guesthouse owner, in the middle of a gorgeous garden of lemon trees, roses, fairy roses, and all kinds of odd and exotic to my eyes flowers. The view from the back of their property looked right over the harbour, and of course, we were the only guests at the time. Best of all, it turned out to be near a path to some Roman ruins that were *also* in the middle of some beautiful walking trails, and a hidden cove, and great masses of rocks to clamber upon.
Sorrento itself was probably the single most beautiful place we stayed. The downtown area has a deep natural cleft running through the middle. On one side of the main square, they've built a road down into it to take people to the lower parts of town near the shore. But up the road, you're walking past stores and cafes, and all of a sudden, the whole right side drops away behind a railing, and there's this deep canyon with the ruins of an old palace in it, and trees, and the sound of water falling; just this breathtaking view that's not at all city. There were plenty of other beautiful views over the water, over the lower town, into parks and green spaces, up and down cliffsides.
I just gorged my eyes the whole way, and the one time we ended up missing the bus and halving to walk back to the guesthouse at night proved that it was beautiful then, too. (And we found our way, almost miraculously, with only one mis-turn, in spite of only having taken the bus to and fro three times, and starting from a different road.)
From Sorrento, of course, we were also right on the train route to tour the trains of Pompeii, so we spent a whole day there. I'm running out of words for this place; a whole city, only ¾ excavated from under literal yards upon yards of earth. There are painted walls, and mosaics, and gardens whose plan you can still see, fountains gone still, bakeries, markets, huge temples whose statues are on display, little stone stalls which were the Roman equivalent of hot dog vendors. The villas and the brothels, with their beautiful paintings get most of the attention. There's an area where you climb a hill and see fields of grain, and suddenly realize it's growing on top of the unexcavated part.
They also have odd shapes, sheathed in plaster, here and there. These are places where, in the course of excavating, they found a hollow spot, where there had been a body, but the flesh was gone; so they poured in plaster to find out who and what they had. (And could x-ray further afterward to understand the details the plaster concealed) They deliberately left a few in glass cases in various corners, even places almost outside except for a bit of roof, and most of the time you don't realize it's more than plaster, but on one you could see through to the bone around the skull, and the teeth. It sounds horrible, I know, and grim, and yet more morbid, worse even than the cathedral of Valletta, but it was worth getting those reminders that what is for us a whole amazing Roman city, which has taught us so much, and all these paintings so well preserved (when all the Roman ruins exposed to air are peeled back to white marble, so we forget the statues *were* painted), is here as it is because two thousand years ago a volcano blew up and destroyed everything and everyone there, all these ordinary people.
I make it sound so grim, but it was great walking there, with the ashy grit of the air and all the nooks and corners, famous and otherwise.
We left Sorrento back to Rome soon after, and spent one more day walking the Roman downtown, picking up the souvenirs we'd considered the first time but didn't want to buy and carry with us all the way. It pretty much ended when we climbed a path to a square we hadn't been the first time, and I looked around, and told Colin to stop and turn. Behind us, right in the middle of the last of sunset, the dome of St. Paul's was glowing.
It's twelve and not - quite - finished.
I'm debating cutting it down to size after I'm done (It's fvery possible, as I went into huge amounts of detail i didn't need to and maybe grandma doesn't even care about -- or maybe she would, and nobody would know it becuase by traition Christmas "what i did last year" letters are short)., but then I considered; the bulk of it is my honeymoon trip, which I never did actually sum up here. So I also decided that, whether she only actually gets three pages or fifteen, I'd post the bit about Italy and Malta here, so that it would be preserved, and maybe those who wanted me to talk about it in the first place would finally get to see me do so.
So, this is unedited and rambling, and I haven't had a chance to check for typos (They likely increase as I go; my right hand is twinging oddly in an atypical manner), and good lord does it need links to flickr or photobucket, should I ever remember to put some of our pictures up for public view.
We spent the afternoon in Toronto, and ate at a very nice Thai place downtown, then flew "Overnight" to Rome. We arrived in their evening, just in time to find the subway and check in at our bed-and-breakfast, which is right off the Subway route and less than 10 minutes' trip from the middle of the tourist areas, but isn't in the middle of things. We had a late dinner at what felt like it should be morning to us, where I found out that our hostess was right. She'd said she was looking forward to being in Rome not for the history or the shopping or the other things Rome is known for, but for the cherry tomatoes. I've had more than a few home grown cherry tomatoes of more than a few kinds, and she's right'; these are the best I've ever had. Since neither of us had slept on the plane, we were in bed by 10:30 anyhow, and so we beat the jet lag and we were on Rome time right away.
We visited the Vatican first, around the museum before we went into St. Paul's. The medieval art gallery and the Greek and Roman staruaty both have the same effect on me; You look on it all, and after a while, it starts to feel all the same; them something especially *good*, something a little unusual, jumps out at you, even if it's a small painting in the corner of a room, or one carved head on a wall of such. Those little special things are the parts you remember better.
It changed as we got into the Renaissance, into the rooms Raphael painted, where suddenly everything is *that* good, and that unusual. Then you rend with the Sistine Chapel, and that is its own thing entirely. You get a neck-ache staring up and up, at that ceiling but you can't stop. Colin said he thought the Creation of Adam would be a much bigger part of it, since everyone sees that part over and over on everything, not just one panel among so many. But it's truly astonishing.
None of the photos we took, either, really give you the impression how very large is St. Paul's Cathedral. It's handsome, and yet it's easier to deal with looking into the side chapels, at the size of them, which would be big enough for any regular church, than to look at the whole thing.
We wandered out of there, and back into Rome by a side street, not the main exit from the square, and walked our way back downtown. Their river is small, and buried so far down a small canal that it feels forgotten. We found pizza at a small place well off the beaten track, but eventually got back to more usual areas for tourists, like the Pantheon and the Spanish Steps, and several squares filled with people and fountains. (And lucked into a grocery store where I could buy shoelaces, as my runner's lace had snapped, and cherry tomatoes and water for the next day's long ramble). Trevi fountain is as interesting for the constant crowd as for its own beauty, though the guys who walk up to you to sell things are so persistent you actually do have to be rude to them or else. I tried everything more polite then turning my back and nothing worked but doing that or shoving right past them as if you don't see them. The next day we visited all the oldest ruins, the most famous places in Rome outside Vatican City.
The things I remember most are smallish bustling streets with so much old carving on them it feels a wonder to someone from the New World, and a lot of graffiti on everything not absolutely sacred, including carved into the exterior of the Pantheon. Since nothing can be taller than St. Paul's, it has an odd feeling of modernity without skyscrapers or even ordinary multi-story towers. It's a weird feeling. The pigeons are so unafraid of people we actually started measuring how close they'd come to people, or cats, by whether you could kick them (We never actually did, it was just a weird way to measure it.)
Mostly, though, there were cats. Rome is full of semi-feral cats. Semi-feral because they're used to humans, and apparently there are people who go about and make sure they're healthy and have some shots, and other people who go off and feed them, and some you can even pet, but they don't and won't live in houses with people. They seem more common in the ruins, where they're less likely to be run over or stepped on. They show up in our pictures of the Argentine ruins (Which are in the middle of a city block, surrounded by modern, active things like the ubiquitous pizzerias), and Palatine hill, which is just above the forum and near the Colosseum, and yes, inside the Colosseum. (Palatine Hill also has, as well as the ruins of palaces, a beautiful rose garden.)
The next day we traveled south to Naples, where we never saw anything but the station, and then, by overnight train to Sicily. We went to sleep, if restlessly, and woke on the island, with its one great mountain and several smaller ones passing us by, and the ocean on the East, which seemed like the wrong side, but no less lovely for that.
We spent the day rambling Syracuse, especially their little island where half the interesting sights are. The church there is very cool, wonderful in the ehat, and very eclectic, with the main part of the building full of pieces built at different centuries, and side chapels with such different moods they were like different churches; one all gaudy victorian flowers, the next quite solemn.
We crossed through the side streets until we found the ocean on the other side, and looked voer the old protective walls to the water. On the way back, since we took random side streets so we could see the most interesting things, the regular stuff less touristy, we got what Colin was convinced was utterly lost in the teeny side streets, and by teeny I mean some you couldn't fit a car down (Maybe a motorbike, which we saw plenty of) but they still considered streets. Fortunately, it’s small as cities go, and the island even smaller, and I'd managed to keep track of where we were well enough to actually get us correctly back to the temple ruins, from which you can see the bridge back into the rest of town.
From there it was a train to Pozzallo, where the ferry to Malta stops, and a taxi to the port. We shared the taxi with a Maltese couple, originally English, who told us a great deal about the island, gave us some non-tourist bits of advice, and talked about the man's job helping to set odds for online companies involved in betting. At the time his big ones were dealing with the Eurovision Song Contest. We stayed with them on the ferry, and w e meant to take a taxi with them, but the ferry was late in, and we had a small delay in customs, and when we looked for them, we didn't see them, so we let another taxi take us to our guesthouse, or as near as they could, in Valletta city. I think I may have seen the couple as we left, in an area we hadn't thought to check, but I'm not sure, and we never got their number, so we don't know if they waited or left. I do wish them well, they were good company.
I was a little surprised that the taxi would seem to need to ask direction to get us through the city, until later, when I saw how many one-ways and pedestrian only streets their were, much less how many streets suddenly turned into staircases. Hills are one of the things Malta is not short on, along with cities, people (it's overcrowded as islands go) and the two types of stone of which the island is made, the most common one dun-yellow, so all their buildings are that colour, the less common one pinkish, and seen more often in the ruins.
Still, we arrived after midnight, but they let us in and gave us our room and let us do the rest of the check in stuff in the morning, so we went in. The room was small, and comfortable so long as the windows were open, with two tiny cot-beds, mine of which was sagging badly. The bathrooms of the building (well, the toilets, the real shower room was quite nice) were these tiny enclosed balconies between floors, one of which did look from the outside as if it was ready to fall off.
The patio restaurant right across the street from us proved a pleasant place to have lunch, and was actually owned by the brother of the woman running our guesthouse. It had three full grown cats living there, plus the kittens of one; Valetta, it seemed, as just like Rome in that respect.
Valetta is a walled city from the late Renaissance, jutting out on a peninsula into the harbour. The walls are as thick as some houses are wide, and larger than others, the town inside was designes specifically to both look beautiful and to make the most of the seawinds by funnelling them down the streets to keep cooler (It seemed to work, but it's hard to say, as it was 30 degrees or higher, and sunny, the whole time we were there, so while the streets were breezy and much shaded, even the shade was warm.) Straight forward, it looks out to sea, to the north it looks onto the harbourside, and two other cities (Includign the one with the bars and nightlife, which is apparently the "hot" place to be, but neither Colin nor I were interested in bars). To the west, right outside the city walls is the bus depot for the busses leading everywhere on the island, and beyond that, of course, another city. To the south, three smaller peninsulas jutting into the harbour, called, accurately, the Three Cities; two of which seemed to be the industrial areas. The urbanization runs on and on, but except for that stretch of industry, it's mostly handsome. There's one corner of Valetta, not too far from the Anglican Cathedral, where it's grown worn down, and some other parts of the other cities we bussed through that are peeled paint and such. But also several handsome sights we only got to zip past as we visited around the island.
We wandered a lot within the city, especially the archeological museum, which is small but has a lot in it, and the big cathedral, which proves that when people say Baroque they really mean "Everything that could possibly be decorated and some that couldn't is carved or painted within an inch of its life." The whole floor was made up of these long slabs each one with a different design on it, of coats of arms or skeletons or other war-like imagery, blacks and reds and yellows and bits of gold. I was told that there's one of the Knights of St. John underneath each one, from their losses in the Great Siege of 1565 and afterward; I don't kow if that's literally true, btu it is a memorial to each, and the slabs are each large enough. The effect is riotous colour and slightly morbid together, not things I associate, but it is true that prior centuries are a great deal more open about death and less inclined to regard it as something only to be whispered about.
The War Museum was only mildly interesting, which is unfortunate, as Malta was the place the Axis bombed the hardest through World War Two; and completely failed to eradicate, for all it had all of three war planes. We also looked at filigreed silver, and beautiful glassworks, and such touristy things. I came home with oen fo the pieces of glass; a bowl shaped as an upside-down cone, with swirls of colour throughout.
Outside the city we visited the Neolithic temple ruins, the oldest such ruins in Europe; a millennium or two before Stonehenge. I actually spend a while staring away from the ruins out at the actual agricultural fields surrounding the area. From the ruin nearer the shoreline we hiked a while along the rocks, overlooking the coast but pretty much impossible to safely get from where we were to down there, though it was never quite cliff-steep. There was an island in the distance that turned out to be a bird-refuge; it really was all steep cliff-walls, and nobody could live on it. Apparently, in the world wars, it was used by ships for target practice, as it's about the right size. The rocks are full of little lizards, but not as small or as numerous as the ones I remember from Fiji when I was young.
We also went to three different beaches; Paradise Bay first, with dark gold sands. It was a nice little place, a little overbuilt with restaurant and places to rent water equipment, but not crowded with people, and half the beach and everything else around it left natural. We actually took a plastic kayak with a "glass bottom" out around the Bay to look, but mostly we just saw little fish and seaweed and some spiky urchin-things (And in one corner, trash that apparently gets brought to that part of the bay in Winter storm surges and hadn't been fully cleaned up by May). There were jellyfish; we saw a couple from the boat, and I saw one in the first swim, and Colin got stung by another at the end of the day. The Mediterranean really is turquoise in many places, that being one of them and clear wherever we had the opportunity to see.
Someone also snuck by our stuff while we were away and emptied my purse, which amused me more than anything, as I lost a hairbrush I was going to need to replace anyhow as it was breaking, and a lip gloss. (I wasn't going to leave my money or cards in something I left in plain sight on a beach, even a harmless looking one!) I *Was* annoyed that I lost some of the seashells and polished glass I’d collected. I would have been upset to lose the purse itself as it's a pretty handmade one I bought at the folk fest.
The othetr two bays we saw the same day: first Għajn Tuffieħa, then Golden Bay. They're almost side by side about a ten or fifteen minute walk apart, part of the same larger bay but couldn't be more different; The first backs onto a wildlife preserve, and while it had a half built bar in one corner, and a guy sitting on the sand renting beach umbrellas, it didn't even have a bathroom. It was lovely, and it's the one place I got myself badly subnburned in the whole trip, walking around on the beach looking for seashells and forgetting to renew the sunscreen (Colin didn't burn as he napped under the umbrella while I was walking. We swam together before and after.)
The second has a resort hotel attached, two or three full out fancy bars with food... and a LOT more people, especially children. The only thing they really had alike was dark tan sand, so dark it was soaking up heat enough to be unbearable, even to someone used to walking on hot sand, and the water itself.
The one thing we most regret missing is that there's an underground complex that was excavated which used to be a prehistoric burial ground; they dug down into the stone in three "floors" to find places to lay their dead, more like the way we might place them in a mausoleum or into a cathedral than the usual graveyard. They limit the number of people that can go, and they insist on booking weeks in advance, so since we made the trip with a lot less planning ahead than that, we couldn't go. We saw a model of it, just a few feet across, and blown up photos, in the archeological museum, and that alone makes me really regret missing it.
Anyhow, we left Malta at 7:00 AM, and ended up stuck in Pozzallo for the late morning and early afternoon. It's a fairly small town so there wasn't a great deal to do; I walked through the waters on the beach there, too, but everything was packed in my bag, and I didn't feel like digging out my swimsuit, so I just splashed in the waves and soaked my skirt. We did have a bit of a panic at the train station when the machine to sell us tickets wouldn't work, and the town had gone into siesta so everything was closed and would be until after the train left.
Thankfully, it turned out the train itself could sell us a "Ticket", actually they just gave us a receipt to say we'd paid, but it would have been enough to escape the huge fine if anyone had asked (A funny thing about how they deal with their trains. Except for overnight trips, there's only an occasional check to see if everyone even has a ticket, but the fine for getting caught is steep. I think we had our tickets checked once.)
Anyhow, we got back to Syracuse in late afternoon, tried to see their Roman theatre and the other attractions off just north of town, and failed as it all closed early that particular day. We still got to see some decent sights, and I found the place that had been selling the ornaments I wanted for cheaper than elsewhere. These are little terracotta or mock-terracotta heads making funny faces.
We took another overnight sleeper train to Naples; I woke when they put the whole train on the ferry across to the mainland this time, because I swear the temperature in the cabin reached almost 40 degrees. So I stood around in the hallway a bit to "cool down" because it was less boiling out there.
We never really stayed in Naples or even looked around outside the train station. We took the advice of one of the tour guides and stayed in the smaller city of Sorrento, less than an hour's trip away instead. Colin had chosen our Guesthouse at random, almost, so we had no idea if it would be good or bad. It turned out to be the best place we stayed the whole time. It was down a path form one of the upper points of town; and I call it a path, but people drove small cars down it, even thought they had to pull waaay over and stop dead when they saw a pedestrian, so we could just squeeze past. Instead of being part of a building we shared with other guests, it was a little cabin on the property of the guesthouse owner, in the middle of a gorgeous garden of lemon trees, roses, fairy roses, and all kinds of odd and exotic to my eyes flowers. The view from the back of their property looked right over the harbour, and of course, we were the only guests at the time. Best of all, it turned out to be near a path to some Roman ruins that were *also* in the middle of some beautiful walking trails, and a hidden cove, and great masses of rocks to clamber upon.
Sorrento itself was probably the single most beautiful place we stayed. The downtown area has a deep natural cleft running through the middle. On one side of the main square, they've built a road down into it to take people to the lower parts of town near the shore. But up the road, you're walking past stores and cafes, and all of a sudden, the whole right side drops away behind a railing, and there's this deep canyon with the ruins of an old palace in it, and trees, and the sound of water falling; just this breathtaking view that's not at all city. There were plenty of other beautiful views over the water, over the lower town, into parks and green spaces, up and down cliffsides.
I just gorged my eyes the whole way, and the one time we ended up missing the bus and halving to walk back to the guesthouse at night proved that it was beautiful then, too. (And we found our way, almost miraculously, with only one mis-turn, in spite of only having taken the bus to and fro three times, and starting from a different road.)
From Sorrento, of course, we were also right on the train route to tour the trains of Pompeii, so we spent a whole day there. I'm running out of words for this place; a whole city, only ¾ excavated from under literal yards upon yards of earth. There are painted walls, and mosaics, and gardens whose plan you can still see, fountains gone still, bakeries, markets, huge temples whose statues are on display, little stone stalls which were the Roman equivalent of hot dog vendors. The villas and the brothels, with their beautiful paintings get most of the attention. There's an area where you climb a hill and see fields of grain, and suddenly realize it's growing on top of the unexcavated part.
They also have odd shapes, sheathed in plaster, here and there. These are places where, in the course of excavating, they found a hollow spot, where there had been a body, but the flesh was gone; so they poured in plaster to find out who and what they had. (And could x-ray further afterward to understand the details the plaster concealed) They deliberately left a few in glass cases in various corners, even places almost outside except for a bit of roof, and most of the time you don't realize it's more than plaster, but on one you could see through to the bone around the skull, and the teeth. It sounds horrible, I know, and grim, and yet more morbid, worse even than the cathedral of Valletta, but it was worth getting those reminders that what is for us a whole amazing Roman city, which has taught us so much, and all these paintings so well preserved (when all the Roman ruins exposed to air are peeled back to white marble, so we forget the statues *were* painted), is here as it is because two thousand years ago a volcano blew up and destroyed everything and everyone there, all these ordinary people.
I make it sound so grim, but it was great walking there, with the ashy grit of the air and all the nooks and corners, famous and otherwise.
We left Sorrento back to Rome soon after, and spent one more day walking the Roman downtown, picking up the souvenirs we'd considered the first time but didn't want to buy and carry with us all the way. It pretty much ended when we climbed a path to a square we hadn't been the first time, and I looked around, and told Colin to stop and turn. Behind us, right in the middle of the last of sunset, the dome of St. Paul's was glowing.