Pisa and Cittavecchia

Pisa

We hooked up with a couple of other cruisers and they brought along a couple of others for a taxi drive into Pisa.  After looking at the bus and train amount and then being taken there straight away without waiting, we spent the 20 euro each to go to Pisa.  Luckily, we got a very young taxi driver who didn’t speak much English and when he asked when to pick us up after dropping us in Pisa, we went for 3 hours after we arrived.  He got in trouble with his boss because they only wanted him to spend an hour and a half and then take more people out, but we got 3 hours in Pisa for it and John and I needed every minute.  We got a ticket that got us into the tower, the baptistry, cathedral, 2 museums, camposanto and we hit every one except for one museum.  We climbed the leaning tower as the pictures show and I was amazed how much a spiral staircase in a leaning building will throw off your equilibrium.  I felt like I was going to fall over some of the time and when we got out on the lookout deck, I really felt that I might fall off.  Even with their fence…  Bill Frayer would not have liked this journey. 

I had the bright idea of getting ready for this trip on the ship by taking the stairs every day, every time we went somewhere.  We realized that two trips from our room to the lido deck was the same number of steps as the leaning tower and thought that this would be good training.  After going up the hill in Malaga, I thought that we woefully under estimated the task at hand.  The leaning tower was a breeze though, so the training worked.  We were up the tower so fast, that the friends that we left at the bottom to take our picture when we were on top were shocked at how quickly we were there.  The views were splendid, but this is a tower that still looks best from the buildings around it and from the ground because it defies all of your imagination.  The last time I was in Pisa, the tower was too unstable for people to climb and this was a good return to the city. 

The Cathedral and other buildings were great and John thought it was priceless when I got shushed by a guard for trying to whistle in the Baptistery to hear the acoustics.  My highlight in Pisa came in the Camposanto (the building that they used for “extra holy” burials because a crusader from Pisa brought back dirt from the holy land to be spread throughout the building.  There were gold reliquaries with bones and parts of saints with recent burials in the 20 century) with frescos that had been preserved but badly damaged through the bombing from World War II. 

These frescoes depicted the pain of hell if you transgress and earthly delights, etc., but were enough to put Bosch in the back of the line.  They were huge and the demon seemed to stare at you in a way that was disconcerting to say the least.  We hurried through so much there and I wish that we had a couple of more hours just in the main square, but a very fruitful and successful trip from the ship. 

We returned and were able to rest some before everyone got back from there long trips to Florence and all looked exhausted.  I’m glad that we stuck with just Pisa and just wish that these ports weren’t so huge with no Wi-Fi anywhere near them.  We have another port day tomorrow, but our tour doesn’t leave until 9:00am, so not too early a start except for the fact that I can’t sleep through the boat docking because of the noise from the engines, so I get sleep deprived on these port days. 

Citavecchia Port of Rome

We had some breakfast and got on the bus for the Orsini castle and Lake Bracciano about 30 miles inland.  We had a nice drive through the countryside of Italy with a tour guide that was very informative.  The bus could not enter the tiny town of Bracciano, so we walked to the castle and all stood in line for a long time to use the two bathrooms that were available to us.  After a long line, we entered the Medieval castle and toured the rooms that were cold (castles are of course) and dark (don’t know why they didn’t turn on the lights).  There were 8 rooms with various functions and no photos were allowed, but I got one of the gilt ceilings in the first room before being told this information. 

One of the rooms was the commode room with the usual chamber pots and various chairs with holes in them.  Which leads me to my first rant:  How could you live this close to Rome, be this wealthy, and not understand or desire the need for running water and a way to bathe, clean etc.  I understand that we went backwards in these times from the civilizations that had preceded, but to be this close to aqueducts, the baths that dot Rome and not want a hot bath in this freezing cold castle is beyond me.  Also, how could you think that having to pick up a chamber pot with filth in it and throw it out the window instead of having the plumbing that they had 1500 years before you built your castle is the better way to go.  It made it quite clear why the Pope had to leave Rome and take shelter in this castle for a while to escape the plague when you think about how the waste water management declined. 

The only exciting part about the castle was the room where the Medici wife apparently had sex with her lovers and then send them away through the sec ret door in her room where they fell into a pit and were chopped to pieces by blades and deposited in lime….Of course this is the story that her husband made about her to justify him strangling her to death in the same room in order to be rid of her…  ah, the good old days when the men could just kill their wives without any problems.  I bet that Oscar Pistorious wishes these days were back about now.  Moving on, this was the castle that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes got married in, but when asked about it, the tour guide knew nothing and there was nothing that we saw in this castle that made me think that anyone would get married in it, much less people who have the pick of the world to be married in.  This was a very discouraging excursion and John’s highlight of the trip was the café that we stopped in afterwards with yummy pastries and really nice wine and liquor section. (John has been reading the blog periodically to get things that I have forgotten our add his 2 cents in and he states that the Caesar room in the Orsini castle was his favorite thing on this excursion—this was their big ballroom where the frescoes and ceiling had been touched up and the lights were on because someone was working on one of the frescoes when we were there, so it was the most appealing room of the castle)

The lake was pretty and we did get to drive past it because our bus driver took a diversion that the other bus did not take, but it wasn’t impressive when you have been to Lake Michigan, Huron, Superior, Tahoe, and Crater Lake in Oregon.  So, our first attempt at a cruise line shore excursion was a serious bust and I wish that I had organized a private party excursion to Ostia to see the ancient port of Rome, but that will have to wait until the next time that Citavecchia is a port of call. 

We did return to the ship and get the laptop to return to Citavecchia to see Trajan’s Port and try to get an internet connection.  We were helped by the free shuttle service throughout the port (note this mom and dad) and the fact that a large section of downtown Citavecchia had made itself an entire zone of free wireless…awesome…  We sat ourselves down in a café whose name was Wine and Caffe.  I didn’t know that this town knew that John and I were coming, but there it was.  A café Americano for John and after some miscommunication with my accent, a Braccheto wine for me.  It was heaven and we sent some much needed emails, checked for where we would pass the wreck of the Costa Concordia, to find that we had passed it already in the middle of the night.  I did speculate that the long times in port at Livorno and Citavecchia was because of the cruise line wanting to make sure we didn’t see the wreckage and work being done to bring it up, but that’s just cynical of me.  

When we came back to the ship on the shore excursion, we noticed divers in the water at the gate to the port and after walking back along the shore several hours later, they had attracted quite a crowd, because they had found what they were looking for, which we assumed was a body.  The fishing fleet was trying to come in to port and people from town were arriving to buy their fresh fish for the evening, so there were a lot of people trying to get pictures and a look at what was happening.  We were able to spend some time on the ancient port that Trajan built for Rome that it still in use and thought about how busy this one emperor was.  He must have been the economic growth person of his time…

We stayed up late to watch the new comedians that they brought on board from England and found one was pretty good, but they had a hard act to follow with everything that our other comedians had done on all the sea days that we were out.