Cashed up and in Barcelona, time for SHOPPING!...... later
Spain has 40 million people with over 3 million in its capital, Madrid. Barcelona. the second largest city of 1.6 million is the home of Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Joan Miro. The Dali and Picasso Museums had to be paid homage to. Picasso’s 14th Century former Aguilar Palace, in the Gothic Quarter, houses his largest life collection and should be on everyone’s bucket list.
Did you know that Salvador Dali once sent a comedy script he had written to the Marx Brothers, in the USA, for their consideration? They rejected the script so Dali responded by sending a gift of a harp to Harpo Marx with barbed wire for strings, temper, temper!
Ok, OK, one more church. I dragged myself to the Antonio Gaudi’s La Sagrada Familia, known for its art nouveau modernismo façade. I was pleasantly impressed with the lack of gargoyles, demons, skeletons, tombs or other gothic/greek/roman influences despite it being commenced in 1883. The natural organic lines lean more towards the style of the early Minoans from Santorini but what do I know about these things?
All of the above is made easy as it all sits around the famed Las Ramblas shopping district. Flowers, street theatre and the July sales all made for an entertaining afternoon.
Las Ramblas is a very long mall sitting between two streets and is the centre of the social scene in Barcelona. Many of the recommended restaurants are in this area. There is the most amazing street theatre every few metres, animated characters, soccer skills demonstrations, gambling on guessing which cone hides the pea, really good singers fighting to be heard. This is truly a unique area where anything artistic is accepted and applauded.
What to say? Still deeply affected by Stendhal’s I decided that some therapy of the retail variety was urgently required to balance the cultural overload. Cannes (pronounced Can) is a small French town, in France, sitting on the French Riviera. It was a Greek Trading Post conquered by the Romans and then by the British. It is infamous for its nearness to the sovereign state of Monaco, Nice, Saint Tropez and Saint Raphael.
Having been ejected from the Burj Hotel in Dubai for being under-dressed (Target was not one of their accepted labels) I donned smart casual French linen pants and shirt and headed for the Casino of Monaco. It is true that the cars around the casino are the very best of the best parked as casually as if in a Kmart parking lot. The lower end of the betting limits on baccarat tables would pay for a meal at Rockpool in Sydney. I bought in at the lower end for two hundred Euro and left two hours later with seven hundred Euro. Don’t say it, I am not a gambler and Lady Luck was with me, I met her in the catacombs in Rome.
I wasn’t the only high roller in town either. When I got back to the ship, Frank Lowy dropped in and had anchored the fifth largest super yacht in the world, Ilona, alongside. Not one church or temple or Roman edifice was to be seen; my Stendhal’s symptoms are beginning to fade.
This was an easy itinerary to manage after Rome. With GPS locked and loaded, we drove out of Livorno to Florence, picked the best to see and then left for Tuscany. Breads, and Chianti, were taken in the Monterinaldi winery. We headed out of Tuscany down to Lucca to have a look at the Field of Dreams, Tower of Pisa, and Tintoretto’s Last Supper. The Tower leans far more than photo’s portray. A slow roll back to the ship, day done !
Livorno is Italy’s third largest seaport and is all about access to Florence, Pisa and Tuscany winery area. This is the home of the Renaissance and the Medici family with Florence as the jewel of that Renaissance. Piazzale Michelangelo, the Palazzo Vecchio, and Brunelleschi’s Cathedral Dome are complete examples of the period. Florence is also the home of the statue of David at the Academia of Fine Arts. There are finer, more accessible, examples of Michelangelo’s marble work at the Museo dell’ Opera del Duomo, just around the corner.
Lucca is an intact walled Roman City. The walls were to defend against the evil citizens of Livorno up the road. The rivalry still exists today. We walked the city, popped in for a look at “The Last Supper”, tasted the local Rose’ and headed for Pisa.
The Tower of Pisa is one of three buildings and the only one unstable despite the others being much larger. Three architects were hired and fired in its construction. The first level leans and the second and third levels are straight to compensate.
This pilgrimage through the roots of culture and civilisation has left me suffering from Stendhal Syndrome, dizzy and overwhelmed by the magnitude, volume and genius of our heritage. A form of cultural indigestion………..
Italy has a population of 58 million with 2.5 million living in Rome. Rome came into being because geographically it had seven high hilltops that were easily defended with swampland between to ambush unpleasant visitors. Over time the swamp was reclaimed and became the meeting places between hilltops and the city of Rome.
From the 3rd century Rome has had multiple owners starting with the Estruscans. Around 500 BC the Romans overthrew the Estruscans and declared a Roman republic. The Romans, the best engineers of the time, set about building some lasting engineering feats;
·the now 3000 year old roman sewer system still in use;
·the Circus Maximus for chariot racing and 250,000 spectators (Ben Hur was filmed here);
·the Colosseum for 50,000 spectators, some lions and a few very stressed Christians. The Colosseum could be flooded to have mock sea battles;
·the Pantheon law library where the painter Raphael is buried
·St Peters Basilica, designed by Michelangelo, to mark the grave of the Apostle Peter executed by Emperor Nero
·The Vatican, from 1377, where the Pope still resides. In 1400 the Pope Sixtus engaged Michelangelo to decorate his new chapel and then to paint the famous “Last Judgement”.
·Countless other treasures from the byzantine and renaissance periods
Today was going to be faster than an episode of the Amazing Race. The day began at 0530. There were eight ships in Civitavecchia Harbour with an unhealthy number of symbiotic buses lurking ashore. I had arranged for our driver to meet us early to try to stay in front of the coach convey as we moved around Rome.
First stop was the Piazza Navona and the la Fontana dei Fiumi which is the fountain used to try to drown a Cardinal in the Tom Hanks movie “Angels and Demons”. All the fountains in Rome are fed from the Roman Aqueducts and natural springs in the mountains so everyone DRINKS the directly water from the fountains. The water is blue/green and crystal clear. This took a lot of getting used to.
Next was the Trevi Fountain and, humorously, it was empty as it was being cleaned. The sculptures were amazing though. A quick jog and we standing at the top of the Spanish steps looking down on to a beautiful marble Obelisk that originated in Luxor, Egypt. Shelley and Keats lived in this Bohemian corner of Rome. The steps are so named as they were once part of the 16th century Spanish Embassy. The Via Dei Condotti, the Rome version of Rodeo Drive, leads off from this area and did distract us for a while.
Off to the Colosseum (Flavian Amphitheatre), built in 80 AD, and we were still in front of the coaches. Wow, this is worth seeing. In its day it could be flooded for mock sea battles with real boats and cannon. Gladiatorial fighting and feeding Christians to lions was abolished in 438 AD.
We found some very unusual practices by the Monks in the Capuccina Vieneto Dominican Church. It seems that when a Monk dies the body is buried until all the flesh is decomposed, the skeleton is then dug up and placed on display in the church. The skeletons of every deceased Monk of the Church is either displayed in robes or used to make light fittings, wall decorations and other religious focused displays. The chandelier is gross! No cameras were allowed in this area so I will only mount one of the photos I took.
Keeping with the theme, we headed underground to the catacombs of St Callisto. The catacombs are the ancient underground cemeteries, used by the Christian and the Jewish communities. The Christian catacombs began in the second century and continued until the first half of the fifth.
In the beginning they were only burial places and later became real shrines of the martyrs, centres of devotion and of pilgrimage for Christians from every part of the empire.
Imagine thousands of burial niches, fifty metres underground, through 17 kilometres of winding narrow tunnels woven into four ever-deeper underground levels. The tunnels are black, cold and airless. There are scarce low-wattage light bulbs at tunnel turns in place of original oil lamps. Many of the niches are still sealed. Double creepy....
All of this before lunch. The afternoon saw us queuing for access to the Vatican City, Museum and Sistine Chapel. A few words cannot conjure an adequate description of the Rome midday heat, combined with the length of the queue, let alone the visual treasures waiting once we got inside the Vatican City. I will leave this part of our Rome tour to post-holiday repartee.
Beneath the frowning limestone mass of Mount Sergio, the brilliant white marble of the city’s walls contrast remarkably against the sapphire blue waters of the Adriatic Sea. The walled city is made entirely of marble and is a breath taking visual and architectural sight. I liken it, architecturally, to a version of Venice without the canals. The streets are narrow and the houses very tall to ward off the heat of the sun. The strong Venetian, Gothic and Renaissance influence is evident on every building.
Croatia has a population of 4.5 million with 200,000 living in Dubrovnik. The Slavic name Dubrovnik means “well wooded” referring to the bountiful hardwood forests that provided the timbers for most ships of the time. A story typical of many coastal towns is that Dubrovnik came about as refugees and survivors of the pillaging Roman Empire fled to a small rocky offshore island where they could defend themselves better. Yes, Dubrovnik was an island. As time passed, several centuries, and the mainland Slavic people calmed down a bit it was agreed to build a Stradone (meeting place) from the island to the shore, which was obviously not very far away. This happened in the 12th century. The marble battlements were extended to include the new neighbours and Dubrovnik was now a mainland thriving port city, not just a small rocky island.
The population is split between living inside the walled section and a growing number spreading along the coast outside the walls. The main attraction of Dubrovnik is inside the walls.
The ship was portside here so every coach in town was waiting, all three of them. There are also only a few taxis so they were charging ridiculous prices to get to town. We decided to wait for a local bus on the street and after a long hot queue we got onto the bus to be told that they did not accept Euro’s. This caught out everyone on the ship as the currency exchanger is in the city and you can’t get to the city without local currency etc, etc, etc. Dubrovnik uses the Croatian Kuna.
A short, but expensive, taxi ride (he took our 10 Euros happily) to the city had us at the walls of the old city. A sad part of this day was that we noticed five cruise ships in the port as we drove in. This meant thousands of tourists in this small port and it was hard to move about. After a meaningful attempt at seeing all the attractions such at the Franciscan Monastery, the Maritime Museum and the Rectors Palace we jumped a ferry to nearby Lokrum Island for a dip in that sapphire blue water.
After a relaxing afternoon away from the now seven cruise ships we ferried back to the Port for lunch at one of the best eating places so far on this world cruise, Restaurant Dubravka. We tried the obligatory local draught beer coupled delicately with swordfish capaccio, Salata ad hobotnice and Pivo toceno. It worked for me!
Cashed up and in Barcelona, time for SHOPPING!...... later 
