Adriatic Cruise 2023

 Another transit day really. After sleeping in we took some time to repack - this seems to be an endless task. Then we wenty downstairs for breakfast. Which was great, and allowed us to eat too much. Fantastic cold meats and cheeses, cakes and pastries. So of course we had to rest and recover from that too. Eventually we went out to explore and walked to the Trevi fountain. Which was lovely but crowded. It was so hot and humid that we couldn't manage much more. Though we still found the energy to go get gelati. From the same place as yesterday, and it was still good, but perhaps not quite as good. We got a taxi to the airport and were there before the check-in counter opened, but just hung around the food court until we could drop off our bags and retreat to the lounge.

 Still exhausted from yesterday we were up early to be at the Vatican for our tour. We took a taxi at 6.45 that got us to the meeting place with a bit of time to spare and we sat and had a coffee until the tour at 7.30. Even with the early start there was a fair queue to enter St Peters. Once inside we went up in a lift to the main roof where we could look down. Then I climbed to the top of the dome while Lynn had a break. Piazza San Pietro, Obelisk Stairs inside the dome walls Once I got back down we had time to walk around the cathedral. Next we went to the Vatican Museums, which meant walking around to the other side of the Vatican and re-entering. The museums is a huge complex of rooms and buildings with endless rows of statues, tapestries, maps, all in rooms that are as impressive as the collections. The crowds also got progressively denser, although we were able to keep moving. The last stage in the museum was the Sistine Chapel, in which you can't take photos. It was packed ...

 I thought that today would end up being just a transit day, but we've managed to make it fairly interesting as well. It started with us docking and disembarking in Civitacecchia. There were three or four other cruise ships there, and several super yachts - apparently when we had the rough seas a few days ago they came in to shelter. It was an hour or so drive to Rome, but a smooth drive through countryside, and we got a bit of a tour when we reached the city, going past several cathedrals and old Roman baths. Though it's now feeling like you can't go a hundred metres without passing a ruin or a church. Anyway, we reached our hotel, the Anantara Palazzo Naiadi. It certainly looks like a palace, a big curving building at the Piazza della Repubblica with the fountain of the Naiads in the centre. Unfortunately, it was only about 10.30 in the morning at this point and our room was not ready. So we sat around and read for a while, then went for a walk. Just across the piazza is ...

 Naples today, and our last full day on the ship. It was also a fairly busy day. Our first excursion, at about 9am, was to Pompeii. It turns out this is about 45 minutes south and essentially a suburb of Naples now. When we got there it was the usualy waiting around a series of touristb stalls selling junk, then filing through the turnstiles. The town itself was excellent. We've seen a number of Roman ruins but these were the best preserved and gave the closest sense of what the town might have looked and felt like. We wandered around fairly intact streets and looked in what were identifiable homes, bakeries and restaurants.  Street corner showing public water fountain and covered footpaths street lined by shops frescoes, Domus Vettiorum courtyard/peristyle, Domus Vettiorum The Vettiorum house in particular had been partly restored with partial frescoes in every room. It finished with thr plaster casts of a couple of bodies in the food market, which felt morbid. We got back to...

 We woke up today just as we entered the port of Messina. No other cruise ships here, but a large number of ferries, mostly just runing the few kilometers across the Strait of Messina to the mainland. Our original plan had been to go to the town of Taormina, south along the coast. But we were concerned that we'd be there in the heat for several hours and we didn't know where the bushfires are. So we decided to do just the local tour of Messina. As it turned out, it was only about 31 degrees, so the coolest since maybe Istanbul. It was also very overcast and quite gusty, which meant you could smell smoke coming from somewhere. So the included tour first drove us around Messina. There was a more attractive area in the northern tip where there are a couple of saltwater lagoons. Otherwise it's largely an unattractive town; it was damaged in 1908 by an earthquake and then bombed in the second world war, so largely rebuilt in the post-war period with rows of concrete apartments. ...

 We woke up this morning on Crotone, a town on the sole of Italy. It's not a particularly tourism-oriented place, which made a nice change, and we were the only cruise ship in a relatively quiet port. Once again we'd organised to go out almost straight after breakfast to beat the heat. The tour today consisted of a shuttle bus into town, a map and some highlights to visit, including a location by a church providing drinks and a couple of dressed up actors. We were dropped at Pythagoras Piazza, named as he lived here much of his later life. We walked past a few local shops and up a slight slope to the local archeological museum. It was small but of a fairly high standard, with pottery and carvings from a local temple. After that we walked down to a nearby church where they were giving out the frozen drinks and a man dressed as a Roman was explaining some Italian history, which was actually pretty good. That was the highlights. After that we wandered the old town a bit, but it wa...

 We woke up today in Bari, on the heel of Italy. We were here on the cruise we did in 2009 and on that occasion we took an excursion to a Trulli village of small houses with conical stone roofs. At that time we got the impression that Bari was un unattractive industrial town. I'm not sure whether that impression is entirely fair. It it certainly a decent sized town with a busy commercial port; it also seems to have some areas of historic interest.But it contributed to us taking another esxcursion outside the city. Our first stop was Polignano a Mare, a small way south east along the coast. We had to disembark the bus a short way from the centre and then walk, which takes a while with a group of thirty or so people of various ages in varying levels of health. This robbed it of some pleasure as it was again u nbearably hot today and by the time we reached the walls of the old town we were feeling pretty poor. We were set free to walk, and it was yet another charming old town of pale ...

 By the time we woke this morning we were already docked in Sibenik - only a short way up the coast from Split. There is a very narrow channel into the bay, but we had to wait for the evening to see this. It is a very pleasant, smallish town occupying a hillside and seemiong to stretch out on the plain to the south-east. There were a constant stream of ferries to the port in from of us. We got going soon after breakfast as it was forecast to be yet another hot day, and it was just short walk along the seafront and we were in the old town. According to the guidebooks there are a couple of things to see in the town centre. The Cathedral of St James is right by the water. It's not particularly big but historically significant in complicated ways. Although it was Sunday we were able to look inside briefly - there was a lot of scaffolding as they seem part way through some restorations. Then we worked our way up through the old town. All of which was beautiful, in a way similar to the o...

 Our last day in Venice. The day started out cloudy, and we though it might rain during our excursion - but again it held off, and we only got the blustery showers just after we got back to the ship, exactly like yesterday. We had signed up for an excursion to Piazza San Marco today, so they put us on a boat and ferried us there, and straight away we left the tour. We walked west the couple of blocks and looked around the square quickly, then went on into the narrow alleys. Basilica di San Marco And that was essentially ouir morning - we wandered the lanes and across the bridges and window shopped. Midmorning we stopped for a rest in a cafe and had a drink, then walked some more. Chiesa di San Giorgio dei Greci (with leaning tower) Coming up to midday we needed another break so stopped at a cafe to get a pizza for lunch. Because only one of us was ordering food we were banished to another set of tables slightly further along (but in no way inferior). It was a very good pizza. At 1p...

  We got up this morning a bit unsure what to do. It isn’t easy getting into Venice from our ship’s location and there was a strike on today so the valparetti weren’t running. In the end we did take the shuttle bus. This wound through the industrial area, across the bridge to Venice, and deposited us at the old cruise terminal on Marattima. From there we had to work out how to get to the next island. This involved wandering fenced areas and taking the main motor bridge to Santa Croce. Western end of the Grand Canal At least from there it felt like we were in Venice proper. We then crossed another bridge and had a rest in Giardini Papadopoli, which was cool and shaded. Having recovered we walked around for a while. Although a long way from Piazza S Marco it was crowded and there were souvenir shops everywhere. We went as far as the Basilica di Santa Maria, then had a cold drink in a café. Scuola Grande di San Rocco Then we circled back through islands and over bridges to Giard...

 We arrived in Venice about midday, so plenty of opportunity on the approach to see the lagoon. We'd been expecting to go to Choggia, at the very southern end of the lagoon - quite a long trip to Venice, but apparently quite a nice little fishing town in itself. We found out yesterday though that it had been changed to Fusina. This is the industrial shipping area on the mainland, a bit south-west of central Venice. Which is theoretically closer, but the trip takes almost as long and there's nothing at all close to the ship (as I look out now it's tarmac and rows of imported cars, completely flat until the distant mountains). Anyway, we came through the more southern Malamocco entrance into the lagoon, rather than the Lido inlet that ships used to take. The lagoon has various main channels which are dredged and very clearly delineated by close-set posts, so we took one west and then north to Fusina. Then it was such a hard turn into the berth that they used a tug to pull us ...

 Our plan to beat the heat today was that we cancelled the (included, free) walking tour of Split we had booked on the grounds that we could do it ourselves with less frustration, and set out at 7.30am before breakfast. It was only a short walk from the wharf to the centre of the old city. In Split, this means Diocletian's Palace, a walled district with a mix of Roman and medieval architecture that is now full of trendy restaurants and shops. We walked a little then I queued up for 20 minutes to get us tickets into St Domnius's cathedral - the oldest catholic cathedral anywhere. The wait was because the Croatians aren't very efficient and seemed in no hurry to open the ticket office. Our tickets also included entry to the Crypt, to the Temple of Jupiter (later a baptistery), the Treasury museum (which was good quality but I didn't take any photos and only read a bit as I'm not that interested in medieval church history). Peristyle Courtyard Cathedral Crypt of St Luc...