Two Year Report on the Road to 500

Two years after deciding to keep track of the World Heritage Sites, here I am trying to catch up… I should have done regular updates but never got to it. The previous blogpost has been at the top of this site, promising new posts but looking abandoned. How am I supposed to fix this? I should never let this happen again… How to summarize the extraordinary places we’ve seen or the things we learned? 

Stranded on Lord Howe Island, a remote and barely accessible world heritage site in May 2023

Italy in Haiku

Italy; haikus.

(I need to write about it,

And prose behaved not.)

Wrote this post before.

Did not work at all. Into

The breach once again.

Milano's Duomo. 

Building since one three six four.

Samsung ads on walls.

Goofed around on rails.

Took photographs one and all.

Laughed till stomachs hurt.

(On the train whooshing

Past the countryside, playing

On electronics)

In Torino, met

with penpals— Federica,

A nice friendly girl

Her mom, Maria

Rosa, guided us around

This superb city.

(Eyelash in my eye

Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow!

Couldn't get it out.)

Florence next, full of 

RAIN. Walked around in raincoats,

All day every day.

(Michelangelo:

Statues, paintings, ceilings, WOW.

They all come alive.)

Then Venice, full of…

Pigeons! Eat out of your hand,

Cooing and preening.

Canals, with people

Pushing gondolas past us,

Frosty winter air.

Next, near Napoli,

Greek ruins; superstitious

Romans preserved them.

(Stayed up late to write

NaNoWriMo [LINK HERE] has arrived!

Sore fingers; HAPPY)

Pompeii, destroyed by

Mt. Vesuvius— walls still

Here, mosaics too.

Herculaneum:

Same story as Pompeii— but

Rich people lived here.

Capri: amazing

Coastline, scenery, and caves

Blue Grotto was closed.

Napoli: Dirty.

Like India but with tons

Of dead umbrellas.

Napoli pizza.

Not the best, not the worst— good.

Pizza boxes pile.

Vatican City:

Long, long line, wrote postcards near

St. Paul's Cathedral.

Sistine Chapel, a

3-D experience not-to-

Be-missed. Like, ever.

Rome's Colosseum

Cruel, needless torture… ugh.

Skulls of innocents.

Many other things

But my rhyming's broken… oops!

Other posts are here:

Thank you for reading!

Haikus are hard, but I tried.

(It's better than prose!)

Agony and Ecstasy

We board the flight to Milano. People are talking, the stewardesses are nowhere to be seen, while a voice says in Italian “to click the seat belt as it is shown”. It makes me laugh out loud, causing some heads to turn around like, “What’s so funny?” By the time they repeat the message in English (with a heavy Italian accent), the stewardesses are there to do their duty. After we take off, I think we have five minutes at the cruising height and then we start the descent, with a searing pain in my ears and hysterical cries from small children (why do they have to go down so quickly, not giving us time to equalize?)

And then, buon giorno Ee-tahl-eeah! Good day, Italy!

We have three weeks in Italy, and the plan is to visit Milano (only because the airplane takes us there), then we go to Turin, to see our pen pals Federica and Maria Rosa. From there to Florence for four nights, Venice one night, Napoli and surrounding area for six nights, finishing in Rome with five nights.

This is a touring marathon, a masochistic demonstration of how much one can absorb without getting sick of it.

The Boxer

And There Was Italy

Fast, too fast, Italy passed from the list of future and present destinations to the one of the past's. We spent 19 full days and nights, changing beds seven times, Milan, Torino, Florence, Venice, Vietri sur Mare, Napoli, and Roma. We stayed in five apartments rented on airbnb.com and two hotels (for one night each).

Colloseum in the distance

We went on and on visiting a lot. Greek and Roman ruins, churches and museums, occasionally some amazing landscapes. We travelled by plane between Venice and Napoli, we rented a car in Catania for three days, we travelled the rest by train, boat and bus. We saw some of the most phenomenal creations in the history of the human race.

Middle Italy

We didn't like Napoli. We wanted to, we really wanted, but the place left me puzzled. We wanted to like it because we liked Marcello, Mihaela's boyfriend, he is from Napoli, in love with his city, he wanted us to stay here longer and he gave us advice of how to enjoy it. Antonio, the owner of our rented apartment, welcomed us to the "la città più bella del mondo!!" I think he and many other locals believe it, but raising the expectations like that is a sure recipe for disappointment. The city has some attractions and many significant problems that nobody can deny. It is dirty, crowded, noisy and dangerous. Probably the most unsafe destination so far, it didn't hold us back too much, but we kept the cameras inside, watched our bags and backs all the time, avoided most of the back alleys, crossed the street with extreme caution. At times it reminded us of the bad parts of India, maybe we forgot some things, but Napoli seemed worse. And lucky us we didn't even have a garbage collectors strike. The four huge containers across from our apartment were emptied Sunday afternoon and in a few hours were overflowing again. These people are able to produce unlimited quantities of rubbish and they don't even realize.

The gulf of Salerno

First Week In Italy

We had a fantastic month in Greece, better than we could expect, we didn't want to move on, we had to. A few days before, we made our schedule. For a split second we questioned going to Venice, but we said it out loud and Maria ended the debate before it started: "Of course we go to Venice, I want to see it!" The other factor was transport from North to South, how to get to Napoli. The cheapest and fastest way was to fly on a particular day. We were left with eight nights in the North, to cover Milan, Torino, Florence and Venice.

I considered skipping Milano, but my mother said we really have to see the dome, the children, hearing its story, expressed some interest, and I was happy. I heard about it maybe forty years ago. I started to collect postcards as a child and all I had from Italy were with the Milan Dome. It seemed then to be the center of the world, the one and only site that I must see. Quite wrong, but I was a child.

The Dome in Milan, postcard type picture