A day trip to Ostia Antica from Rome – highly recommended

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Ostia is spectacular, the picturesque remains of a working port town cover an enormous area of red-brick and marble ruins on the banks of the (now scarcely visible) river Tiber. It gives much more of a feel for life in the Roman empire than yet another nutty emperor’s palace. (Not that some of those aren’t pretty spectacular too.)

Wandering along the deserted streets with weeds growing through the flagstones, sand blowing over the mosaics, and long grasses and wild flowers in the ruins, often shaded by umbrella pines, one also gets a sense of the “Romantic” that drew the 18th and 19th century travellers to Italy to write bad poetry about the fall of empires etc etc.

To get there from Rome you take the train (or is it a metro – it doesn’t spend much time underground?) from the railway station variously described as Pyramide (on the outside of the station building), Porta Ostiense (on the map), or Porta San Paolo (within the trains themselves). We found it easy and clean, takes about 20 minutes and the regular €1 metro (ATAC) ticket or Rome pass seems to work.

(Note that Ostia is covered in both the new Blue Guide Central Italy as well as in Blue Guide Rome.  More extensively it appears in the former.)

Comments on Blue Guide Southwest France

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e_swfrance

Mountains, rivers, rolling hills, pine forests and the Atlantic coast provide a spectacular range of food and drink, while its cultural inheritance is equally wide-ranging; prehistoric caves, Romanesque pilgrimage churches, 18th-century chateaux and cityscapes, eclectic seaside architecture and rich art collections.

View the book’s contents, index and some sample pages, and buy securely from blueguides.com here »

Comments on Blue Guide Southern Italy

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p_southernitaly

The author, supported by the classicists and art historians on the Blue Guides editorial board, has updated this new edition with a wealth of detail. Now with useful Blue Guide Recommended advice on hotels and restaurants. The whole region is covered from the Bay of Naples, with some of the most famous remains of antiquity in the world, to fashionable Puglia in the heel of Italy.

View the book’s contents, index and some sample pages, and buy securely from blueguides.com here »

A day trip from Venice up the Brenta Canal

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The Brenta Canal was built to facilitate navigation between Venice and the city of Padua. Wealthy Venetians built magnificent villas along the banks of the canal – the “Riviera del Brenta” – to escape the heat of the lagoon in high summer. Being in Venice in July we too decided to escape the heat and crowds of Venice and took a boat up the Brenta. It makes a great day trip.The Burchiello moored outside Palladio’s Villa
Foscari

The Burchiello moored outside Palladio’s Villa

We left our hotel on the Lido early in the day to get to the departure point, one of the piers on the Schiavoni, just down from St Mark’s, by 9am. The boat that runs most days up or down the Brenta canal between Venice and Padua is called the Burchiello, named after the boat that made the same trip in the eighteenth century. From the Blue Guide: “Those who, for one reason or another, chose not to make the trip up the canal in the family gondola took the burchiello, a large riverboat rowed by slaves or pulled by horses–a ‘marvellous and comfortable craft’, as Goldoni recalls, ‘in which one glides along the Brenta sheletered from winter’s cold and summer’s ardour’.” (According to the guide the trip can also be made by bicycle along a marked cycle route.) The time table is on their website (somedays it goes up from Venice to Padua, some days back the other way): www.ilburchiello.com and tickets should be bought in advance, we got them from a travel agent on the Lido (they add EUR 20 to the cost) but you can also do it from the website or hotel concierge.

Foscari

There is more information in the Blue Guide  (NB Blue Guide Northern Italy, not the Venice guide), we can recommend it as a peaceful day out with plenty to see but not too much hassle. We didn’t take the pre-arranged lunch (you pay less) but found agood restaurant in Oriago where the boat moors for lunch. I’d be interested to know what the lunch they offer was like if anyone has done that.