More Tivoli and Bologna, Italy

 

Picking up where I left off in Tivoli.... After spending a few hours in Villa D'Este and its garden, we walked to Rocca Pia, a 15th century castle in town. It is only open to visitors on weekends, and we were there on Wednesday, so the best I could do was an outside picture.

walking around the Tivoli castle, Rocca Pia

Our third stop in Tivoli was the most breathtaking, the Villa Gregoriana. It was a park and waterfall, with ancient Roman ruins. The Park was founded in 1832 when Pope Gregory XVI wanted to contain the continuous flooding of the Aniene river. Its waters were channeled into a double tunnel dug into Mount Catillo, giving life to the Cascata Grande (the waterfall). The latter, with its 120 meters of jump, is second largest waterfall in Italy. Once the water diversion into a gorge was completed, Pope Gregory created the park, which today bears his name.

The remains of a Romas villa

We could walk into the ruins

The waterfall from near the ruins, looking across the gorge

Near a grotto, about 1/3 the way to bottom of the gorge

We walked behind these windows when we went up
on that side of the gorge

The waterfall close to the bottom of the gorge

At the bottom of the gorge

It was easy to get to the bottom of the gorge, but every step we took down meant we had a step back up to street level. Fortunately, park benches were available at each switchback on the climb out.  We loved seeing the waterfall from many different heights.

And, my reward was to visit a wine store! We passed this store on our first evening in town, but we didn't stop. Today, we stopped. In Italy, it is very common to buy "house wine," local good stuff, but not in bottles. It is in these stainless steel vats with measuring spigots and is sold by the liter. 

The store owner fills up a plastic bottle. I bought my liter of red wine from her, after tasting a few. 2.60 euros, under $3 for a liter (wine bottles are usually only 3/4 liter) of tasty wine! 

my liter of house wine, cup of it at my left foot

After Tivoli, we rode the train for two nights in Bologna, Italy. Bologna wasn't on my "must-see" list, but it was 1/2 way between Tivoli and Trieste, and it did have a UNESCO World Heritage site. Unfortunately, our hotel will be memorable for us because the bathroom had some kind of sewer leak or drain issue. We told the front desk after our first night, but it was never fixed and the smell only got worse. Shutting the bathroom door did keep it localized in the bathroom, but we did have to go in there during our stay. Bad reviews for them, which is a shame because the rest of the room was quite nice. 

Somewhere.... a sewer smell from in here.

We only had one full day to see Bologna, but that was actually plenty of time. Famous statue (Neptune), leaning towers (actually more common in Italy than you'd think), and the UNESCO-designated porticos.

Naked Neptune on one of the plazas

the leaning Asinelli and Garisenda towers on the Plaza of Porta Ravegnana

Bologna has 38 kms of porticos (covered porches/walkways) in the city center and 60 km in the town. It has the world's longest portico, over 4 km (2.4 miles), which we began to walk, but had to walk over 2 miles to get to the beginning of the 4 km measure, so we probably only did about 1/2 mile of this famous portico before we decided that seeing a fancy long porch wasn't worth it to us. We stopped and turned around right before the route would have involved a great many portico-covered stairs ending at a church. 

most porticos looked like this

some porticos were more ornate

We left Bologna this morning and took the train to our final Italian city, Trieste. It is near the Slovenian and Croatian borders. Three nights here in a hotel with no sewer smells emanating from our bathroom. I'm happy about that. Nice hotel with one English-language channel. That's one channel more than we've had since we left the cruise ship. Phillip is happy about that.