Giovanni Drogo

On Wed, 24 Dec 2003, B Vaughan wrote:

    > Etruscan sites, including Tarquinia and Cerveteri. (At that time I

    > available on the google archive.) We made this trip by car, but I did
    > a quick check of public transport options.

I did both places with an organized tour (actually a "viaggio incontro"
by the Italian Touring Club, so this is not a "commercial" option) so I
cannot offer advice about doing it with public transport. May be the
Tourist Office in Rome can.

    > stop and didn't see one. There is a fairly good museum in the town,

Yes, I believe it's called Palazzo Vitelli, also the setting of the
museum is nice, there are several funerary monuments, and a
reconstruction of a painted tomb (actually with the "stripping" of the
original frescoes).

    > but at the archeological site, you can only look in to the tombs from
    > the outside through a plate glass wall. There are a limited number of
    > tombs that can even be observed this way.

I believe the tombs open vary during the year according to some shifts.

Just to make clear what they are, there is a flat hilltop with little
mounds (this is the burial site, the actual ancient city was on another
hill on the other side of a valley). The bulk of the tomb is
underground, so you have to climb a (straight) staircase down. The tomb
itself is sealed by glass windows to preserve the paintings. They are
lighted quite well, so this is a good compromise between visiting
opportunity and preservation.

    > Ceveteri is much more extensive and evocative, and you could easily
    > spend hours wandering around the site and entering tombs. There is
    > plenty of shade and a very peaceful air about the place. Most of the
    > tombs have no remaining art work to see,

Here instead the site is in flat woodland, and there are two main
varieties of tombs, mounds and "cube". The mounds are very big, and
mostly overground. Sometimes you have to climb up and then down, and
sometimes that's not very easy. There is at least one tomb underground
with a complex curved path. Except for this one and the only painted
one, usually there is natural light only. The setting of the place is
more "romantic" (Piranesi-style) but the tombs are bare (except for what
can be sculpted on the walls).


    > >Why not also Villa Adriana in Tivoli ? Here one can definitely make a

    > Yes, this would be another very nice trip. I thought of mentioning it
    > before, but I thought it might be a little complicated for a
    > non-Italian speaker to manage by public transport.

Given the closeness to Rome and Tivoli, that would be definitely easier
than other places. You should be able to get directions about bus lines
at the Rome Tourist Office (I got very detailed instructions when I got
there the first time, some 22 years ago) ... and they surely speak
English too.

    > spent the night in a little inn (called the Villa Adriana, I believe)
    > just outside the gate of the Villa Adriana. The inn had a very
    > nice-looking restaurant, but we had already eaten when we arrived, so
    > we didn't try it.

I was there one evening some 8 years ago (when we were participating to
the flight calibrations at the BeppoSAX operation centre), and it was
good, but definitely expensive at the time (we were on mission though).
I imagine even more expensive now.


    > >In my opinion Venice can't be done in a day unless using a night train.
    > >Florence can be reached easily
    > Actually, my husband and I have several times made day trips to Venice
    > from a similar distance (Le Marche) just to see specific art shows,

The distance is a bit less than from Rome ... but maybe you have to
change train and that "compensates". I agree that a day trip with a
specific goal can be done to visit an exhibition or a friend (from Milan
it's 3 hours, and I've sometimes done it to do both things). We have
also arranged sometimes day trips (when we had business meetings with
Russian astronomers) but from closer places.

I personally consider that spending 3 hours to get to one place, and 3
hours to come back it's a bit of a border case to consider a day trip
valid.