The Vatican Museums

This morning we were slow to get going. We were out the door at 1000. We decided to walk to the train station, about 2 miles northeast. It was a beautiful, sunny, crisp, cool autumn day, and we wanted to check out the suburb we were in. The neighborhood we are in is endless rows of brick apartment complexes, most of them 5 stories tall. Most of the streets are lined with trees and graffiti. The leaves on the trees are starting to die. We found a pasticcheria (sweets bakery) along the way and stopped for a snack. We caught the train into the heart of Rome, approximately 23 kilometers away. From there we had to catch two more connecting subways to the Vatican. This is what trains look like in Rome. Actually, graffiti is a big problem in Italy. It is everywhere.

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Vatican City is the smallest sovereign country in the world, less than 1 square kilometer in size. The Pope also has sovereignty over three more churches in Rome that are outside the Vatican borders. Vatican City has its own Continue reading

Welcome to Porto De Turistico in the Suburbs of Rome

By 0100, the wind had picked up to about 7 knots real, but the seas were still smooth and nice. At 0800, we pulled into the marina. We were greeted by two crew to help us tie up. Christi found the new ropes to be heavy and unwieldy, and the initial tie up was especially clumsy. This marina only has a single mooring line, and we found getting the mooring line situated properly to be quite tricky. The workers needed to come and help us. Tomorrow there is supposed to be high winds, so after the workers left, Eric re-did all the lines to make sure that Kosmos was perfectly situated for the wind. All in all, it took well over an hour between initially pulling into the spot and Eric finally deciding we were situated well enough.

Eric put out the passarelle. The passarelle has been nice to have in all the other places we have been, but it certainly wasn’t a necessity. We could have managed with jumping on and off, which would have been inconvenient, but doable. But not here. The concrete quay is Continue reading

History of Italy

Human settlements dating back to 700,000 BC have been found around the Italian Peninsula. Several distinct people groups emerged over time, including the Latins. One of the cities the Latins formed was Rome, named after the legendary founder of the city, Romulus, a descendant of the goddess Venus, and founded in 753 BC.

Another people group was called the Continue reading

Passage from Lipari to Rome

Yesterday we woke up to mostly blue skies with some scattered clouds. We had checked the weather the night before and knew yesterday was the only good day to leave Lipari. We wish we could have stayed one more day. Not everything was 100% dry and there were still a couple more loads of laundry to do. But another storm was coming, and if we didn’t leave yesterday, we would have been stuck in Lipari for several more days before another weather window opened.

We went through our normal get ready to go routine, which took longer than usual because Continue reading