We are in Italy for two weeks with our friend Lina, and started our sojourn with a daytrip to Slovenia. We booked a day tour on the web a while back, and we were waiting for our tour bus to turn up outside our hotel in Trieste, when a guy in a black Mercedes pulls up. He has my name written on a piece of paper, but the only word in English he knows is “okay”, and the only word I know in Italian is “grazie”, so we are unable to communicate further. We shrug and hop inside the car, and off he zooms. We pass the border crossing between Italy and Slovenia, now only indicated by a few blue signs on the side of the road. Our driver speeds us down the deserted highway, and we end up at the Postojnska Jama caves by 9 AM.

The tour doesn’t start until 10, so we spend an hour walking past the river and poking through the souvenir stores. They have some beautiful crystals and fossils, but the ones that we like don’t look like they would be easy to fit into a suitcase. Soon it is time for the tour to begin. They load us onto the world’s first underground railway, and it zooms off like a roller-coaster. Suddenly we are inside enormous limestone caves, ducking our heads to avoid the stalactites that come whizzing past at 20 km/hour.

We end up in a grand cave, filled with sparking and dripping columns. Slender stalactites reach down from the ceiling, and squat stalagmites inch form thick turrets from the ground. The stalagmites grow faster than the stalactites, at a speedy rate of one centimetre every hundred years.  Out guide then takes on a guided walking tour for the next two kilometres, over the Russian ridge originally build by Russian prisoners of war, though the spaghetti room with a ceiling cascading with fine noodle-like appendages, the white room dominated by pure calcium carbonate structures, the red room tinted with iron oxide, and then we get to meet a curious proteus, the blind cave-swelling amphibian. Off again for another train trip through the caves, this time past black manganese-tinted towers, and then over the underground river that first carved out these caves eons ago.

We pick up some interesting looking blueberry honey, cinnamon honey, and honey liquor from a stall outside, and then find our driver who is waiting for us, smoking a cigar and reading the paper. In less than an hour, we are back in Trieste, ready for a delicious lunch of gnocchi and pizza.

We spent a few days in Milan after our Mediterranean cruise. The weather was crummy, and it seemed like we needed a vacation from our vacation. So, embarrassingly, we spent a lot of time reading books and watching movies, rather than exploring the city. However, we were able to brave the weather to wander out and see a few of its highlights.

The Duomo di Milano cathedral was beautiful, one of the most stunning churches that I have ever seen. The entire structure was carved out of pink marble, and the front façade had just been polished. It took over five hundred years to create this glowing patchwork of pink. The colours varied from block to block, yet they all blended together to create a harmony of warmth.

In the museum at the Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco, there is a very interesting Pieta by Michelangelo. Our guide told us that this might have been the one that he was carving for his own tomb, but he died before it was finished. He had originally planned a design of Mary facing to the side, but later decided that the composition worked better if she was facing forward. Here two faces are still visible in this unfinished masterpiece.

We were also lucky enough to spend 15 minutes admiring “The Last Supper”, originally painted by da Vinci. It deteriorated quickly after he finished it in 1498 onwards, and has since had to suffer through being restored, scratched off, restored, un-restored, stoned, removed, reattached, cleaned, stabilised, bombed, restored, stabilised, and then restored again. While what we saw might not have been remotely like what was painted by da Vinci, it was a spectacular painting. The centrepiece of what was once the dining hall in the Santa Maria delle Grazie convent, the perspective works perfectly. The figures looked down upon us, and the scene was full of movement and mystery.

Image from para communications.

This was a difficult day to plan. The ship was only docked in Civitavecchia for ten hours. In that time, we needed to get to the train station, take a 1.3 hour train into Rome, experience the wonders of this ancient region, and then catch the train back again, leaving enough time for any unexpected delays. I had everything planned out in advance, and we were going to attempt to visit three sovereign entities in one day – Italy, The Knights of Malta, and the Vatican City.

The ship let us off early so that we were able to catch the 8:57 train, getting us to the World Heritage listed Colosseum by 11:00 am. I had pre-purchased tickets on the web, so we were able to smugly walk past the long line of people waiting to buy tickets and get inside reasonably quickly. We had both pre-loaded Rick Steves’ audio guide onto our iPhones, and we listened to it as we walked through this immense structure. I enjoyed this particular commentary of Rick Steves’. Hearing the trumpets blare and his vivid descriptions, I could very easily look down into the centre ring and imagine the horrific theatrics that were played out in the second century CE. The underground passages that served as the backstage were also visible, giving an insight into the mechanics that were required for such a spectacle. To think that right on this spot, wild animals were brutally tortured, or that condemned men were placed in costumes and forced to act in a elaborate plays that would end in their death. This is the place where an estimated million animals and half a million people were put to death for entertainment. Although, having just seen the enormous bull ring in Malaga, I wondered how much has really changed in 1900 years.

I told Adrian that we had no time to stop and eat, so we grabbed a pizza and toasted sandwich to eat while on the metro. Our next stop was a visit to the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes, and of Malta. The order ruled over Jerusalem, then Rhodes, then Malta until it was ejected when Napoleon I captured the country in 1798. After the loss of Malta the Order settled permanently in Rome in 1834. The Magistral Villa is located on the Aventine hill, and hosts the Grand Priory of Rome, the Embassy of the Order to the Holy See and the Embassy of the Order to the Italian Republic. The Order still claims sovereignty, and thus the villa has extraterritorial status. I was able to peek through the keyhole and see St Peter’s basilica through the avenue of trees. That was our next destination.

After returning to Italy, it was time to cross another border into the Vatican City, and experience Adrian’s 100th World Heritage site (my count is around 50). The immense granite obelisk towers over the square. Originally carved by the Egyptians to honour the sky god Ra, then stolen by the Romans to venerate Jupiter, it now stands with a tiny cross at its peak to mark the transition from one superstition to another. There was a 100-foot tree nearby that was a gift from Belgium, and when the Pope received it he declared “May the Church in Belgium, and especially the Diocese of Liège, continue to be a land where the seed of the Kingdom, that Christ came to scatter on earth, generously germinates”.

Thanks to the terrible weather, the line into St Peter’s basilica was relatively short, and we were soon inside the church. Once inside, I was very impressed by the vast and ornate interior. The floor looked like a rich carpet, though it was really a pattern constructed in marble. Every surface was gilded or embellished in some way. We listened to Rick Steves’ audio guide, which irked me a little. I didn’t like hearing about his very statements about “Jesus’ message of love”, that “things are much more enjoyable here if you become a temporary Catholic”, and “your time here can be awe inspiring and beautiful if you accept and respect things on Catholic terms”.

However, he did touch upon the financing with indulgences, pillaging of the Pantheon, and torture during the Inquisition. He spoke of how the church betrayed Michelangelo, by promising they would be faithful to his plans and then altering them soon after his death. I learnt that the reason that the bronze statue of St Peter near the alter is wearing a toga is because it was probably originally of a Roman official, and later on the Catholics just replaced the head and placed some keys in his hand.

Suddenly it was 4pm, time to head back to the ship. We discovered that the metro station that google maps claimed was near the San Pietro train station did not actually exist, and thus decided it was best to catch the metro all the way back to the Roma Termini station and catch the train from there. By the time we finally got onto a train it was not going to arrive at Civitavecchia until 5:57pm, giving us only a half hour window for delays and getting back to the ship. Happily, the train moved towards the coast without delay, and we made it back onto the ship with ten minutes to spare.

Even though Brussels and Milan airports have been snowed in for the past several days, yesterday our flight managed to find the one brief window of blue sky get us to our destination. Then it was merely a late bus, an infrequent train, a confusing metro, and a one more delayed train to get to Genova. Our flight landed at 10:30 AM, and we arrived here at 5:00 PM, thankful to have arrived at all. Much to our dismay, most of the restaurants here don’t even think about opening until at least 7:00pm, but we managed to find a great little pizza place nearby for our first taste of Italian Italian.

Today, we explore Genova before boarding the cruise ship that will be our home for the next nine nights, as it takes us through the Mediterranean.