Weekly Photo Challenge: Colour

The Washing Lines of Marino, Italy

The streets between the houses are like deep gullies made brilliant by vibrant washing lines strung outside windows like bunting as though in anticipation of a parade or a carnival, stretching across the streets dripping indiscriminately and swaying gently backwards and forwards above the secret doorways and back alleys.

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A Life in Ruins – Roman Amphitheatre at Pula, Croatia

The flights to Pula in Croatia were an irresistible bargain at only £16 return, which effectively meant that they were being subsidised by Ryanair because we didn’t even have to pay the full Government flight taxes.  Sitting next to us was a couple from Kenilworth who had an impressive capacity for drinks from the sky-bar.  They loaded up with beers and whiskey on its first pass down the aisle and they restocked when it returned back the other way.  I like a gin and tonic to help pass the flight but I couldn’t possibly compete with these two heavyweight boozers.

It was a good flight and we enjoyed clear views of the snow capped Alps that ended dramatically as the land levelled out into the flat plains of Northern Italy and Trieste with colourful patchwork fields all waiting for the crops that would soon be growing there.  It was picture-book stuff with high fluffy white clouds and a vivid turquoise Adriatic Sea punctuated liberally by vivid green islands each with a vivid halo of sparkling white beach.  It is an interesting fact that that there are approximately one thousand two hundred and fifty Croatian islands in the Adriatic, which compares to about one thousand four hundred Greek Islands.  Only seventy-nine are inhabited however compared with nearly three times as many (two hundred and twenty seven) in Greece.  The plane flew in over the nature reserve of the Brijuni National Park where the Yugoslavian war hero and President Tito had created a wildlife safari park and built his holiday home.

It was only a small airport but the passport control officers were unusually officious and made a thorough inspection of our passports which they reconciled to our faces and then completed the process with a theatrical application of a customs stamp on one of the document’s blank pages.  I liked that, you don’t see this very often these days and it made me feel like a serious traveller.

The sun was shining when we left the airport and we quickly found a taxi that took us the short journey into the city and to the Hotel Galija.  This was a pleasantly refurbished accommodation with a nautical theme in the public areas including an impressive model ship in a glass case in the dining room (Galija means Galley) and with bright and spacious rooms that overlooked the terracotta tiled roofs of the surrounding buildings and after we had settled in we went out to visit the city.

The most important and most impressive building in Pula is the first century Roman Amphitheatre that is the sixth largest in the world and one of the best-preserved examples of its kind.  The Coliseum in Rome was the biggest Roman Amphitheatre and could seat a massive fifty-thousand spectators (Some estimates suggest eighty thousand but generally about fifty thousand is the agreed capacity of the stadium), the second largest was Capua, also in Italy but now sadly in ruin, which had only a slightly smaller capacity, and the third was in El Djem in Tunisia with a capacity of thirty-five thousand.  The Amphitheatre in Pula was designed for about twenty-five thousand and there were similar sized stadiums in Verona in Italy and at Nimes and Arles in Southern France so this was more of a Championship rather than a Premiership Ground.

We walked around the external walls and I was immediately struck by the grandeur and magnificence of the building.  I have been to Rome and seen the Coliseum and in my opinion nothing can compare with that but this building made that assessment a close run thing.  It towered mightily above us reaching up into the clear blue sky and looking proud and strong.  The area around it is open and accessible and that makes viewing it in many ways easier than looking at the Coliseum surrounded as that is by a busy main road and a constant throng of tourists jostling for photographic opportunities.  As it was about lunchtime we decided to postpone the visit to the inside until the afternoon and we walked back towards the city centre to look for somewhere to eat.

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Related Articles:

Spartacus the Gladiator

Rome

The Roman City of Pompeii

The Roman City of Herculaneum

The Roman Amphitheatre at Pula

The Aqueduct of Segovia

The Roman Buildings at Mérida

The Roman Ruins at Segóbriga

Diocletian’s Palace at Split

The Roman Buildings at Arles

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Roman Holiday

Covering 2,000 years of history in two days in sun drenched Rome the holiday club visit the Eternal City during the 150 year celebrations of the unification of Italy.

In the grip of an unexpected heat wave while the Romans seek out shade Andrew, Kim, Micky, Sue and Christine do what the English do best and go out in the midday sun to see ancient, medieval and modern Rome.

Italy 2011, Frascati and Marino

Frascati, another of the Castelli Romani, is a busy dormitory town for nearby Rome and being the location of several international scientific laboratories is closely associated with science and technology.  In 1943 it was heavily bombed and approximately half of its buildings, including many monuments, villas and houses, were destroyed.  Many people died in an air raid on 22^nd January 1944, the day of the battle of Anzio. Towards the end of the war the city was finally liberated from the Nazi German occupation on 4^th June 1944 by the advancing American infantry.

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Italy 2011, An Unexpected Bus Trip

We had a late afternoon flight so had all of the morning and the early afternoon for more sightseeing and the plan today was to use the local bus and take a trip to the shoreline of the lake that we had seen several times now from the windows of the train.  From what we could make out from the badly faded timetable half stuck with peeling  sellotape to the window at the terminus the buses seemed to run every hour and we had missed one by a matter of only seconds so there was a forty minute wait for the next one to come along.  I purchasedthe  tickets for Marino and we waited in the sunshine.

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Italy 2011, Rome, The Roman Forum and Italian Unification

The tour began from outside the Colosseum and went first past the Arch of Constantine where Silvio explained that this was the only Roman monument that still had its marble reliefs intact because successive Christian regimes in Rome after the fall of the Empire were reluctant to destroy a monument commemorating the first Christian Emperor.  And then we made our way into the Forum and began to climb towards the top of the Palatine Hill stopping frequently to listen to and absorb more information from Silvio.

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Italy 2011, Rome, The Vatican and St Peter’s Basilica

By mid afternoon when we crossed the River Tiber over the Ponte Sant’ Angelo like time travellers we had completed the ancient, the medieval, and the modern and now it was time for the religious.  Rome is the most important holy city in Christendom and St Peter’s Basilica at the heart of the Vatican City is the headquarters of the Catholic Church and is a place where some of the most important decisions in the history of Europe and the World have been made over the centuries.  (A Basilica by the way is a sort of double Cathedral because it has two naves).

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Italy 2011, Lake Albano and Castel Gandolfo

The small café was opposite the entrance to the Papal Palace which is where the Pope spends his summers on the shore of the lake ostensibly to avoid the oppressive heat of Rome.  I’m sure that this probably isn’t strictly necessary anymore because I imagine that the Vatican will have more than adequate air-conditioning facilities these days but nevertheless it still remains a nice place to spend the summer.  The Catholic Church owns this splendid Palace thanks to the Lateran Treaty of 1929 when Italy recognized the full ownership by the Holy See of the Pontifical Palace of Castel Gandolfo.

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Italy 2011, All Roads Lead To Rome

Italy was in the grip of a burning heat wave and after landing at Ciampino and on opening the aircraft doors there was a blast of heat from the smouldering tarmac baking in temperatures that, coming from Northern Europe, we were unfamiliar with, which was rather like opening a pizza oven door.  Ciampino was once the principal airport for Rome but it has now been superseded by a modern facility north of the city so it quite small for a capital city airport and we were processed through immigration control and customs nice and quickly.

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Venice, An Expensive Gondola Ride

“The Venetian gondola is as free and graceful, in its gliding movement, as a serpent. It is twenty or thirty feet long and is narrow and deep like a canoe; its sharp bow and stern sweep upward from the water like the horns of a crescent…. The bow is ornamented with a battle axe attachment that threatens to cut passing boats in two.”                                                                                                 Mark Twain – ‘The Innocents Abroad’

In 2003 I visited Venice for the second time and  took a ride through the canals in a gondola.  At €80 for fifty minutes it was horrifically expensive of course but it was something that had to be done.  To be fair to the gondoliers, they invest a great deal in their boats, about €20,000 for a traditional hand-built wooden gondola with a life expectancy of about twenty years. They need to earn the bulk of their annual income in a few short tourist months and the cost of living is high in Venice because it is an expensive city in one of Italy’s wealthiest provinces.

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