An Extended Summer

[photopress:VIEW_TOWARD_FORMIA.JPG,full,pp_image]

Gaeta is terrific. It’s a promontory into the Mediterranean Sea with a deepwater port on one side and a sandy beach on the other. I slogged on down the A1 to collect the two Americane and then we zipped on down toward Formia and then Gaeta. I shall not reveal how lost I became and how we passed our building in the dark, because the number was teensy and in an unobtrusive, not to say invisible place until you got out and walked the street and figured, “It can’t be the butcher shop or the store full of antlers.”

It was good to get in finally, marginally less good to climb more than 80 feet straight up with all the luggage, groceries, pillows and magazines we’d carted. Third floor in Italy is fourth floor in the US, and the ceilings are really high. Three of us cleaned up enough to go out for a pizza and one stayed home, tired.

[photopress:Erin__s_morning_aspect.JPG,full,pp_image]

Things hadn’t altered much for that one the next morning.

[photopress:PIAZZA_AT_CAFE.JPG,full,pp_image]

A capuccino helped some. The beautiful town helped, too. Everybody had combed their hair, at least.

Then it rained one day, so we of course headed for a beach town to get money from an ATM or Bancomat. Where do you go on a rainy day? Is that right? We go to the beach.

[photopress:BEACH_TOWARD_SPERLONGA.JPG,full,pp_image]

And then we go to a Roman ruin, because I am the driver and I am obsessed with Roman ruins. This one is the seaside villa of the Emperor Tiberius. [photopress:TIBERIO__S_VILLA_2.JPG,full,pp_image]

I would not like to clean that house without a vacuum cleaner. Or with one. There’s a nice museum, too, but they don’t allow pictures, which is too bad, because there were some stunning sculptures in there found during excavation. Maybe I’ll find some online illustrations later.

The really unusual feature of this home is the party room, otherwise known as Tiberio’s Grotto.

[photopress:JANE_3_GROTTO.JPG,full,pp_image] How nice it is when your houseguests do evocative things in romantic places you are photographing. What is she thinking? Maybe about mozzarella di bufala, which is the number one top special food of the area? Or is she imagining what she could cook up for us with these denisens of the grotto?

[photopress:Fish_2.JPG,full,pp_image]

http://www.sullacrestadellonda.it/archeo/mustiber.htm is a site about the museum. You cannot, unfortunately, see the enormous scale of the boat or the blinding of the Cyclops. They have one leg of the original marble that stayed entire and it was bigger than my car!