Trips posted in
The Mediterranean
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Top Attractions in Nice: Food, Art, and Culture
This city bubbles over with a sprit of fun. I fell in love with Nice, and didn’t mean to. After a week in Provence, the last thing I was in the mood for was a city. But it was so relaxing, delightful, colorful, friendly, complex, cultured, relaxing, busy, that I extended a three day visit…
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Escape the cacophony of Rome for Ostia Antica: Once Rome’s mighty port, open, preserved and off the beaten track.
Ostia Antica. Rome is overwhelming in its magnificence but let’s admit it, it is just as overwhelming a city because of the tourist hordes. Everyone wants a piece of the magnificent beauty and history. Is there even an off-season? But imagine a place of intact frescoes, ornate mosaics, tall marble columns, buildings and avenues free…
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Knossos, the 3900 year-old labyrinth of ancient legend.(No Minotaur sightings.)
The Palace of Knossos, on the Mediterranean isle of Crete, presents a daunting task that broaches mere tourism: how does one really take it all in? As a site of such massive size and complexity, ruined earthquakes, tidal waves, toppled empires…clouding the eyes of history with the dust of legend of Midas and the Minotaur,…
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More of the magnificent Abruzzo, Italy: Days 4-6 of moments, images, observations.
Day 4: a long drive to one of Italy’s great caves, Grotto Di Stiffe; descending down from the foothills and farms and onto SP50 highway — not a long ride, but a bit hard to locate due to lack of signage and the fact that the cave is in the mountains, which is a bit…
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Isle of Rhodes and Temple of Lindos: a view worthy of 3,000 years of conquests and worship.
Humankind has always, throughout time, sought the high ground; this was always, and still is, considered a strategy for both war and peace. A most ancient example of this is on the Isle of Rhodes, in the cross section of the Aegean and Mediterranean seas. Atop a natural bluff and rocky outcropping, sits the wide…
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Abruzzo, Italy: Melodies born of the eye. Days 1-3 of momentary visual observations.
Day 1: the drive from Rome to Abruzzo takes around 5 hours, (great highways); pass through the majestic Gran Sasso mountains; maneuver the confusing outskirts of Civiello Casanova outskirts; hills smoothing to tumbled flatland fields, the Google GPS going bonkers, being so off the beaten track, but the paper map, cumbersome and incredibly accurate; The…
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The magic of Egnazia: the lost town and the museum of the ancients outside of Monopli, Puglia.
In Puglia, on the southeastern coast of Italy, near the vacation town of Monopoli, was the oddest, almost ignored and yet gem of a museum and ancient archaeological town site called Engazia, dating back to pre-Roman Bronze Age period when the Greeks colonized the Eastern coast of Italy. We love ancient places; they teach so…
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Truli of Puglia, Italy: Humankind’s creativity of lodging unleashed.
Puglia, on the West Coast of Southern Italy, is a dry region, a terrain of low hills with massive wild fields of fruit trees growing everywhere. Equally dominant are the presence of these ancient homes with its unique, and seemingly crude yet subtly complex, architecture and form. We actually rented one…it was a converted tiny…
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Rocca Calascio: Where many movies were made…and the armies march across the plains
When it comes to driving, the Gran Sasso mountains are not for the faint-of-heart. Even the GPS couldn’t handle the remote roads leading in and out of tiny villages clinging like lichen to steep cliffs. Nonetheless, we maneuvered tiny roads the GPS could not find, through villages where you wondered how they survived, to the…
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San Stefano di Sessanio: truly medieval, once deserted now reclaimed. (And not too far from Rome).
A view from the bulwarks.
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Forget the cities! Two weeks in Abruzzo and Puglia, Italy.
In this post, we will cover the start of a June journey to Italy. Not Florence, or Venice or the lake region, or other famous areas. But some lesser, and perhaps completely unknown to most, even the most experienced traveler. A week in Abruzzo.A week in Puglia. Drove back and two days in Rome.Over 2400…
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UNESCO site: the magnificent ruins of Castel Del Monte, Grand Sasso mountains, Italy.
Another UNESCO site — magnificent, haunting and mighty in its ruin On of our travel goals is to see as many UNESCO sites as possible. Why? Simply because they are a guaranteed unique and magnificent experience — whether Angkor Watt in Cambodia, or Glendalough, Ireland, these sites are all so different, and all a tribute…
Outspoken Traveler 