1.5. – 8.5.13
Beside the wonderful coastline we especially enjoyed the cute little villages and beautiful castles in the eastern part of Italy.
And of course the helpfulness of the people we met, which was so wonderful in situations, where we couldn’t find a solution.
Alberobello is a small village in Apulia, which is remarkable because of its unique architecture: the Trulli houses. The white houses are covered with a stone made round roof, which are sitting like jelly bag caps on the walls. Just looks so cute. This very special kind of architecture you can only find here in this area. There doesn’t seem to be a specific reason behind, the people at the time just seemed to like it like this.
Termoli stands out because of its location and the lovingely restored old part of the village: the former fisher town is situated pictorially on a land tongue, followed by an endless white sandy beach. The entire historic centre is a car-free zone and all the houses are painted in warm teracotta or mustard yellow tones. Walking through Termoli it’s easy to imagine how the people have lived centuries ago. And by the way, the nice restaurants and delicatess shops are also worth a visit.
To complete the “best-of-trio” we would like to mention Chioggio, near by Venice. Its historic centre is a little island – connected with the mainland just with two bridges. The main road allows no cars during the daytime, so you can find a lot of coffee shops and a market in the morning. And both the locals and tourists stroll along the street and have a cup of coffee or doing their shopping. Parallel to the main road there is a little water canal and little bridges (like in Venice) allow you to cross it to get the other streets. It’s small, vivid but not hectic, so a great place to soothe your soul.
Definitely Italy can be proud of all their famous places, which they have millions of thanks to their long and manyfold history. But there are also a lot of less known little pearls. Le Castella for example, an Aragon castle in Isola di Capo, which they have restored perfectly. It’s great fun to visit such castles as it gives you in great detail a good idea how it looked like in acient times. What we recognised so is that the Italiens seem to integrate the knowledge about the history into the school lessons by visiting these places. So often we met like 3-6 school classes at the same time in such places. Think it’s great to teach the youngsters about the glorious history, but as simple tourist it’s not always easy to bear with the huge amounts of very active little children *smile*
Another two castles are worth to mention: there is the one from the Thurn und Taxis family in Duino, who built their home on a single big rock emerging from the see, which allow stonishing views from every room of course. Similar to the Palace Miramare in Triest, which sits on a mini land tounge and is therefore surounded by the sea from 3 sides. And nobody can ever build in front of you! How nice is that. Certainly the kings and emperors at that time knew the good areas for construction and I assume they had kind of the right of first choice…
Certainly Italy has also its famous seaside resorts, such as Ancona for example where we stayed over night. A nice little town, but for us it was really valuable because there is a BMW garage – for those of you who don’t know, we drive both BMW bikes – and my bike needed the 10’000 km check-up. The receptionist of the hotel was extremly nice helping us to make a reservation for the check-up. Originally we planned to do that in Triest, so he phoned the headquater there to find out that the next available date would be at the end of May!!! Really not feasable for us, as we can only do such things when we stay 2 nights somewhere. So we started discussing, what else we could do, when, where it would be possible. We included the receptionist in our discussion, he perfectly understood our situation and said that in Ancona there is a BMW garage and that he would try to convince them to do it first thing the next morning. We said, not possible as we needed to travel on the next day, but he was confident, that they can do the check-up fast enough. So he phoned them, explained everything and we couldn’t believe it: they promised to make it happen. The other day we could continue our journey around lunch time, with brandnew tires on my bike and a full check-up made. Whow! We really have to thank the guys from the garage who did it in record time and the lovely receptionist from our hotel, who didn’t give up to find a solution for us.
