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Hello again, welcome to the second part of our second trip to Italy. Today we will visit some parts of Calabria and we will end in Rome, the eternal city and one of our favorite hang outs. If you have not been to Rome, it is definitely worth seeing
although every time we go we get more and more upset at the garbage, graffiti and obnoxious tourists - and they seem to be related. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Let's start back in Calabria where one cloudy day we decided to undertake the 130 mile trip to Reggio Calabria, at the very tip of the toe, to go see the Bronzes of Riace. The Bronzes are two life-size greek bronze sculptures of warriors. They were found near Riace, hence the name. They are pretty amazing and they are two of a handful of complete bronze statues from that period in the world. Worth seeing but you could not take pictures, so you will have to go check them out on the web somewhere. Next we moved on to Scilla, a small seaside town northeast of Reggio. Most seaside towns on the northern coast are very picturesque, so we hope you enjoy the pictures below.
Next we moved on to Tropea, reknown for its onions. Tropea is also a small seaside town, although as far as fame goes it is definitely more famous than where we were staying. It's a very old town and, again, it is located on top of a cliff overlooking the sea. They really knew how to pick primo spots back then. Then again, if you didn't, the "baddies" would get you ... we talked about them in our other web page.
After a few more miles we were back at our hotel and our Calabrian vacation was almost over. We must say that the south is very different from the north and we were surprised and pleased with the trip. One last thing, coming back from our Reggio trip we were greeted by two full rainbows, both of them almost complete. As were were barreling along the highway we could not stop to take a picture but we managed to take the shot below. It was a fitting ending to a good vacation.
Roma, citta eterna Well, we couldn't go to Italy without stopping by Rome. The place just amazes us, no matter how many times you go there always seems to be something new that we had never seen before. And the diversity of things to see is really amazing. Take the two pictures below, there are buildings and ruins in there from the Roman Empire all they way to Mussolini's time. That's about 1900 years of architecture. You can't beat that.
We were really all over the place this time and we felt like we walked ten miles a day. We did do a little bit of shopping: 5 pairs of shoes (between the two of us), one purse, one jacket and other miscellaneous stuff. But in our defense we did do the "touristy" thing and visit all the sites. We have included some pictures below. No commnentary needed, they really speak for themselves.
We took some night shots too, and they came out somewhat good ... so we will close this trip with a whole bunch of them.
By the way, we risked life and limb to get the picture of the Colosseum. Roman traffic is not forgiving. So, who wants to come to Rome? Final Thoughts When we were down in Calabria we came very close to Sicily (see picture below). About 3 km to be exact (2 miles or so). We stared at it across the strait of Messina and we decided that we should go there soon. We have been trying to go there for the past 3 years, but we just never managed. The good thing is that we seem to get closer every year. We'll see ....
Hope you enjoyed these pictures. See you on our next trip! | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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