Italy 20th January 2010.
On board The good ship Barcelona – Grimaldi Ferries.
We arrived in Civitavecchia at about 6.30 and it was pitch dark – in Spain at 6.30 it wasn’t even thinking about being dark. So we had to unpack everything and find our bike lights before we could get off the boat. We still managed to get off ahead of the lorries but our advantage was short lived as we didn’t have a map and soon had to stop and ask for directions. It is the major port for Rome where all the cruise ships come in to and the port area is huge. Amazingly we both suddenly became almost fluent in Spanish which was not much help, but the victim we’d selected fortunately spoke very good English, knew where we wanted to go so we were soon on our way.
But before we got off we met an English man who was delivering a car load of children’s clothes to an orphanage in Bulgaria. There is a lesson to be learned when engaging strangers on ferries, buses, trains etc in conversation and that is there is a danger that your idle curiosity may be confused with a request to be told this stranger’s life story. And that is what happened. Turns out (and I’ll paraphrase as much as poss) he had been married, a welder who had started with £29 in his pocket, made lots of money (possibly dubiously) working all the hours etc moved to Majorca at about 50 owes the Inland Rev £20k, his daughter owns the house he lives in and doesn’t speak to him, he has three more houses in Bulgaria, his Bulgarian solicitor has just stolen £53k off him and he’s sold the debt to some Serbs who he didn’t think would have much trouble getting the money back – we were glad to get away!
Later we found a pizzeria for supper where the host spoke beautiful English and was a manic football supporter. He could practically name the whole of the Arsenal team and was over the moon that Man City beat Man U last night as the new City manager is an Italian. He also said that England should win the world cup because they have an Italian coach (didn’t know that!) who has never been known to fail. So that’s two good tips we’ve been given, 2009 Bordeaux and England for the World Cup. It was very refreshing to only have 1 TV channel on the various tellys in the restaurant, no other music blasting out and it was all far less intrusive. The bars in Spain usually had at least 2 wide screen TVs all tuned to different channels and a radio doing something else.
Annoyingly our hotel doesn’t do breakfast so at about 10 we wondered into town to see what we could find. Spurning last night’s pizzeria and ‘Subway’ we found what looked like a wine shop but was in fact a wine and coffee bar. It was run by two women one of whom did nothing but talk to the customers and shriek, the other worked harder and faster than anyone I’ve ever seen. What a treat to be back in the land of the fresh warm light buttery croissant.
Afterwards we decided we needed a day to collect ourselves so booked a second night in the hotel and first stop was the bike shop for some new brakes, maps and light batteries. Success, only when Vivi pulled up at the first set of lights after leaving the shop she almost went over the handlebars – such is the effectiveness of fresh brake pads.
Civitavecchia has a wonderful daily market so we set ourselves up with a good array of prosciutto, local fruit,veg and a one litre (one euro) carton of rosso to last a few days, which wasn’t as bad as we’d feared. We sat on a wall in front of the old city walls designed by Bernini and watched the world go by, very pleased to be in Italy. Just as we were packing up were accosted by a tall man in a black anorak and a dog collar which at first we hadn’t spotted. He invited us into the church right beside us which we hadn’t even noticed. The doorway was no more than a ‘hole’ in this old Roman wall – built around 0 AD/BC but inside was a tiny ancient chapel. Not as ornate as some of the smaller Spanish ones but they’d made a pretty good job of it. He and some builders were busy delving into the cellars underneath and we were longing to see what was down there but didn’t get the opportunity.
We had a very speedy supper as we found ourselves in the midst of a karaoke bar/restaurant. I am not sure why they let us in to sit down but they plonked us in the middle of the room and then put the music on full blast and sang lustily all around us. We are used to feeling much older than most of those we see, but we felt truly ancient and rather left out! We couldn’t even try to join in had we wished to as the songs were all Italian ones we had never heard before. I suppose in the land of Opera, it is not surprising that everyone wants to sing. What made it worse was the Oxtail we were trying to chew quickly needed about another 2 hours in the oven. We retired deafened and feeling rather hungry!