Last Friday with Jamie in town (she had been working in Italy and Spain for her job with GoPro), we decided to rent a car and drive to Otranto on the Adriatic coast.  It turned out to be the worst weather day we have had since we arrived in Italy a month ago.  As the Italians said, it was “brutto” (ugly).

One of the places we wanted to go was the Laghetto Cave di Bauxite (picture below).  It is a small lake ringed in red bauxite ore that turns into a sticky gooey mess when it gets wet.  It had rained a little before we got there but once we got out to walk around, it started to pour.  You can imagine what our shoes looked like.  We had to take extra special care not to completely ruin the carpet in the rental car.  When we told the rental place where we had been, they suddenly wanted to reinspect the car to make sure we had not done any damage.

With the bad weather and it being a Friday we many of the places to ourselves, but we didn’t want to spend too much time out of the car.  We drove completely around the lower Salentine peninsula from Otranto on the Adriatic to Gallipoli on the Ionian and had lunch in Santa Maria di Leuca, the very tip of the peninsula.  It sits n the dividing line between the two seas.  It seems like the end of the earth.

The grotto just outside of Castro is supposed to be spectacular and there are tours available.  We will save that for a not-so-rainy day.

But this picture tells the story

With our daughter, Jamie, here last week and starting Italian lessons this week, we have obviously not gotten around to posting anything to our blog.  I will try  to make up for that today and tomorrow.

Attending a concert of flutes and a harp in the park, we noticed that the cemetery that we had passed several times that as always closed , was open.  We had to go inside to have a look around.  What a stunning contrast to any cemetery I had ever been in.  Some of the family crypts seemed to be as big as small churches.  I think the pictures speak for themselves and I will just say I found the whole place fascinating.

Getting close

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Last Friday (the 13th, how appropriate to be in Templar territory), Holly and I decided to take a 3 and 1/2 hour train ride north to a small town up the Adriatic coast called Termoli (just above the spur of the boot).  It is a place that was recommended by one of Holly’s Italian teachers in Seattle.  If you have ever wanted to visit a small Italian beach town where the sea seems to peek out at the end of every narrow street and passageway, Termoli would be a good choice.  It was still early for actually sun bathing and swimming and the beach was being prepared for what will surely be a busy summer season. I am sure that later in the year, it becomes somewhat of a madhouse of visitors, but we had much of it to ourselves. It has a fairly large fishing fleet and moorage for pleasure boats with several large yachts tied up to the piers.

Castle tower

The old man by the sea

Narrow streets

Narrow streets

View to the sea

Doors

Doors

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Il Duomo

The sea

First swimmer of the year

Getting the beach ready

The tower

The Tower

The walls

The walls

All I did was go to the directory where the pictures from the Nikon live and changed my view from a list to large icons and when I went to try the upload again, it worked.  Sometimes the mysteries of computers are beyond me, but I got it to work so I won’t question the method.

Friday, Holly and I wandered out of the Porta Napoli (old gate in the city walls that leads to the road to Naples) and found this wonderful old monastery that is now part of the local university.  I thought it was worth a look.

The first thing we did was leave one of our bags at the Rome airport, Fiumicino.  Talk about panic.  We had a great cab driver (perhaps if he were better we would not have left one bag on the curb), but he was a great help finding it before the bomb squad blew it up.  Called all of his friends to help find it and walked her through retrieving it from security.  They take this kind of stuff seriously here (in an Italian sort of way).

Rome is a great city.  The Italians have perfected the art of benign neglect.  Let it deteriorate just enough to be interesting. but not enough to disappear.

Tomorrow, Lecce.