Corniglia and Cinque Terre

We took the train from Rome to Corniglia which was the village where we were booked to stay for three nights whilst in Cinque Terre. Corniglia is the middle of the five villages. A lady who does relief teaching at one of the schools I work at in Brisbane gave me the name of an apartment to stay at called La Terrezza which was owned and operated by her two friends Marie-Angela and her sister Nadia. La Terrezza is right in the centre of the village and our apartment was on the first floor with three bedrooms, kitchen, lounge and bathroom. It was beautifully decorated with all sorts of knick knacks and had paintings on the doors, it was just so welcoming and nice. Our apartment had shutters on the windows and two balconies, from one we could look down to the rugged coast and the sea, the gardens below and terraced hills with grape vines growing on them. From the other we could look down over the shops and the street. It was just so nice to wake up in the morning and open the shutters and smell the fresh coffee waft up from the cafe below and listen to the locals chatting away in Italian, even if we couldnt understand what they were saying! Corniglia is the highest of the five villages and it was 365 steps up to the village from the train station!! The village was tiny, the main street was onlz a few feet wide, cobbled paths, it had a little town square (where David and Joll sat and watched the world go by with the other old local blokes, just like Birchip really!!), it had two churches, a few cafes/restaurants, a tiny little deli that sold a few groceries and above all, magnificent view.

Marie-Angela and Nadia were very welcoming and delivered beautiful breakfasts to our apartment. After breakfast on our first day we did the dishes and they were most upset as it was "their job". They also took all our washing and it reappeared the next day, washed, dried and ironed back in our apartment!! In the days before we had arrived they had had lots of rain so most of the walking tracks between the towns were closed, we did do the "del Amore" track which was lovely. David and I walked down to the Corniglia Marina one morning, which was really just a tiny concrete pier and we counted the steps back up, there were almost 600!! You have got to be prepared to do lots of walking of hills and steps if you come to Cinque Terre! We visited the five villages, all were very nice, we caught the ferry from the the first village Monterosso back to the fifth village Riomaggorie, a 40 minute trip that gave us great views of the coastline and villages from the sea. We all agreed it was a wonderful, relaxing place to stay, a pleasant change after a few busy weeks of sightseeing and we would all love to go back and do the walks one day.

The Sistine Chapel

These photos are of some of the rooms and artefacts on the walk through the museum rooms to the Sistine Chapel

We had to walk about a km back out of St Peter's and around the back to get in to see the Sistine Chapel. When we first entered the building before you get to the Chapel it is like a museum, there was a big room full of busts and statues that have been recovered throughout the years, restored if need be and put on display, we couldnt believe how many there were. We thought that was it but found out that the rooms just went on forever, room after room filled with all sorts of artefacts, massive woven rugs that were hundred of years old, paintings, statues, scuptures, religious bits and pieces, it must have taken us two hours or more to actual get through all the rooms. I thought that we were in the Sistine Chapel at one stage as the room we were in was just amazing, the ceiling was painted with all these pictures and it was just beautiful, but I found out it was just another one of the museum rooms!! It was funny because we thought we had somehow missed the chapel as we had walked for ages and we thought we were going out the exit when the next door we came to was full of people all looking up, so we knew we hadnt missed it after all!! It certainly is a great sight, heaps of different pictures painted on all the ceiling and walls, and to see the "creation of man" finger touching painting was just great too!! Even the walls of the whole chapel were painted as if they had curtains hanging on them, really fine detail on the curtains and all the folds etc. It was well worth the long walk to see the famous Chapel and we all agreed that it was great to have had to walk through all the museum rooms on the way as we may have thought we'd give them a miss as we were getting a bit weary by this stage.

Vatican City

We were all looking forward to visiting St Peter's Basilica and the Vatican City. We decided after this one we would have seen enough Churches for a while!! There was a queue to get through security as all visitors have to pass through the same sort of security as at an airport where they scan the bags and the people, but it didnt take long to get through. We were surprised (pleasantly) that it was free to visit St. Peter's. It was huge and really impressive, it has so many different sections to it and is all just so beautiful inside. They even have a couple of dead Popes in glass boxes on display!! There were a lot of people inside having tours and looking around but it was so big it wasnt squashy! I was surprised that it seemed to have hardly any seats in it.

Gaudi's Sagrada Familia

Well I think it is fair to say Barcelona loves Gaudi!! It seemed like every second building in Barcelona was designed by Gaudi! Gaudi designed some fairly weird looking buildings, given he died in 1926! He actual died because he got hit by a tram!! I could just imagine that he was dreaming up some weird construction and not looking where he was going!! Anyway his piece de resistance is the Sagrada Familia Cathedral. It is amazing, weird looking, but amazing. The Familia is still under construction, it had working cranes and scaffolding when we were there. Building work began in the late 19th century and is now funded by donations from Church goers and through visitor ticket sales. It was apparently Gaudi's dream to which he devoted much of his life and only tower was built when he got hit by the tram!! It was hard to tell which was the front of the Cathedral as it was so ornate all the way around and was an unusual, irregular shape. It had heaps of carvings on the exterior, like Mary and Joseph and Jesus when Jesus was born and other stages of Jesus' life. It had many tall and fancy towers. We had seen a lot of impressive Churches, Cathedrals and Basilica's on this trip but this one certainly won the vote for the "most creative", just amazing!

Rome

Luckily the Barcelona Airport was open again the next morning and our flight to Rome left on time as as luck would have it Jenny and Jolls flight from Paris arrived at the same time and our bags all came out on the same caroselle, so we were all able to travel into Rome on the train together. Our hotels were only a very short walk from the Rome "Termini" Railway Station and after checking in we were back out on the street in search of the On/Off bus. It was amazing to see in real life the Collosseum (it was in much better shape than I imagined!) and the Vatican City, the Trevi Fountain and all the other sights of Rome that we hadnt even heard of, like their massive war memorial. The second day we got off the bus and walked around the Collosseum, there were quite a few men dressed up as Roman Soldiers with swords and all the gear. As we were walking past a couple of them, they coerced us into having our photo taken with them, before we could even say yes or no David had a Roman Soldiers hat on and Jenny and I were standing between them smiling as Joll took the photo. Then when we went to walk away they said 10 euros please!! We thought they were only joking but no thez wanted 10 euros, David gave them whatever coins he had in his pocket and we kept walking!! We didnt fall for that trick again!! We were really impressed with Rome's War Memorial it was white and massive. It had a huge statue of a man on a horse in the centre, the statue meausured 10 metres x 12 metres!! There is a war museum inside as well and a man blowing his whistle at anyone who dared to sit down on the steps!! In Rome as we had seen in Barcelona and Jenny and Joll had seen in Paris there were heaps of groups of men on the streets, mainly African or Indian selling their wares like sunglasses, Louis Vuitton Bags (authentic I am sure!!!) and rosary beads and holy stuff in Rome. They were very opportunistic though one minute in Rome they were selling their Rosary Beads then three spots of rain came down and they were all selling Umbrellas!!

Barcelona

Jenny and Joll went off by train to Paris and David and I also took the train but went to Barcelona, a three hour train ride, south, along the coast for a lot of the way with the last 10/15 minutes all underground to arrive at the Sante Railway Station. Our hotel was good and right near the railway station. The weather was great 24 degrees and sunny, as we have done in all the other big cities, we bought a two day ticket on the on/off bus and sat upstairs in the open air and enjoyed the ride. Barcelona is a beautiful city, very big, right on the Meditteranean sea with high hills on its outskirts. In readiness for the 1992 Olympics the city had a big revamp and lots of its areas beautified and modernised to accommodate all the tourists for the games. We saw the Olympic Stadium, the port (which has become the busiest in the world for cruise ships), lots of examples of Gaudi's architecture (he certainly had a good imagination!), we stopped at the Museum d`art which had beautiful views down over the city and of course we saw Gaudi`s Sagrada Familia. The traffic is mad in Barcelona, there were heaps of people riding motor bikes and scooters, going in and out between the cars and buses. One of the roundabouts had 9 lanes in it, we were glad we were on a bus and not driving!!! We had lunch aboard a boat moored at the port, the sun was shining, it was warm, the food (garlic prawns) was good and we just sat and watched the world go by, enjoying being in such a beautiful city. On the first night we were there we went out to dinner at a restaurant close to our hotel recommended by the Conciege, we sat inside and were surprised to find that the other people were smoking, they didnt ask us if we wanted to sit in a smoking area, anyway the man sitting opposite us, had had 7, yes 7 cigarettes before our main course had arrived! And as the menu was all in Spanish I ordered a dish which sounded ok but when it turned up it was like potato salad absolutely smothered in white creamy aoli, so that wasnt the best meal we had had. But the next night we found a really nice place to eat so that was good!! We actually had an extra night in Barcelona as we went out to the airport to catch our plane to Rome and discovered that the airport had only just closed due to the volcanic ash, we had been lucky up to date and had avoided it. Anyway there was nothing we could do, I lined up to rebook and thought they would say we would have to wait for days, but they got us on an early flight the next morning, so we rang the hotel back, booked in again and went back into Barcelona for another night, so it didnt really matter to us.

The Walled City of Carcassonne

Someone had told us that a visit to Carcassonne was a must if we were in the South of France, so the day after the bad weather we drove the hour and a half back towards Toulousse to visit the Medieval city, a world heritage listed site, a walled city protected by two fortified walls (making a total of 3km of walls) with 52 towers and a 2600 year old history!! The city is right on the banks of the river Aude is and still home today to 120 people. The walls had been around the city for 100 years and after the people living outside the walls continually and unsuccessfully tried to invade the walled city, they gave up and built their own city on the other side of the river, apparently they had been fighting for 700 years!

From the minute we walked through the wide entrance gate which once opened over a moat, we knew we had come somewhere special. As Jenny and Joll were standing in the gateway, (waiting for us to come through, I was taking photos, surprise, surprise!) a cat ran out in front of them, and grabbed and killed a pigeon!!). All the streets were really narrow (maybe 10 ft wide), all cobble stoned, mostly curved, as the city walls were in a ring, the buildings along the streets were two or more storeys high, cute little shops selling everything from souvenirs, fresh biscuits, glace fruit, chocolates, toys and clothes to name a few. There were lots of restaurants and cafes and we saw at least two hotels where you could stay. Inside the city walls there was a fort which had its own walls as it was the first part built, later on as the city grew the outside walls were added. We walked around the fort walls and the different rooms inside, many of which now house museum pieces such as early 15th century Alabaster objects and a collection of sculptures from Carcassonne and outlying areas. I really liked the big carved marble trough looking thing, it looked like a big bath, but it was actually a sacrcophagus (probably not spelt right) belonging to a man and his wife, it had a carving of them together with the tree of life on one end, something else on the other end and along the sides were carved impressions of all the people in the funeral procession!! The city walls had the usual "arrow loops" which are vertical slits to shoot arrows through, a "portcullis" which is an iron grid that slides down to close off a passageway and of course the good old trap doors to drop things like rocks on unwanted visitors!! And then when we thought we had seen it all, we came across SS Nazarius and Celsus Catholic Basilica! There had been a church in the city since the 6th century with the current "new one" being built in 12th century, with further additions throughout later centuries. It was magnificent inside, the stain glass windows were huge and beautiful. The organ, one of the oldest in existence dates from 1522 (it was huge too). It had been remodelled during different eras with the upper keyboard being extended in 1722 which now means that is can apparently only have classical pieces played on it (no idea why!) There were also a few tombs in the walls and floors and a board cataloguing all the priests at the church since 569!! We spent a few hours wandering around the walled City of Carcassonne, it was excellent and we all loved it.