If you can ride mouseback, and we are sure that you can, you will be able to visit forteen places in Italy on this web site.

 

We have traveled within Italy (Web site) which has a list of tourist offices throughout Italy) twice, once by car, and once in our motorhome.  The car trip took us to Italy through the Swiss Alps, with stops in  Reggio Emilia, Siena, Florence, and Rome, and Pisa.  And there was a side trip through the Chianti wine region.  The RV trip was longer.  We drove from Munich in southern Germany to Innsbruck, Austria, and then across the Brenner Pass to Vipeteno in the Italian Alps.  From there we visited Verona, Venice, Bologna, Florence, Siena, Rome and Pompeii.  Our stay in Pompeii allowed side trips to the Amalfi Coast, Herculaneum,and Naples.  Our route back to France was along the west coast with stops at Sarzana and Ventimiglia on the Italian Riviera.                  .  

 

Some of our stops in Italy were to explore only one or two smaller areas of interest within larger towns.  For example, we visited Naples on a day trip by train from Pompeii to visit the National Archeology Museum.  Similarly, we visited the Amalfi Coast by bus from Sorrento, and only spent a couple of hours in Amalfi, and less time in Positano.  Our visit to Sarzana consisted only in an overnight stop at an Agritourism camp site and farm.  All these short stops were memorable to us. Our purpose here is to try to convey why we enjoyed them, and to arm you with more information about these places than we had when we were there.

 

This country has many things of interest to us and to anyone interested in history and/or archeology.  Ancient civilizations have lived there--the Etruscans, Greeks, and  Romans, most recently.  And each has left physical evidence for more modern civilizations to examine and wonder about.  Etruscan leftovers can be seen up through the west coast, there are Greek ruins south of Sorrento and in Sicily, and Roman ruins are pretty much everywhere.  There is a large area in Rome, where you can walk among the ruins of the Forum in the center of old Roman Rome.  There you can see the  the platform from which Roman leaders speechified.  And there is the special uniqueness of the visible ruins of two Roman towns, Pompeii and Herculaneum, in which visitors can see those Roman civilizations almost as they once were.

 

And let us not forget Italy's cultural heritage that can be traced back to ancient Rome, and which flourished during the Renaissance, and spread from there to the rest of Europe.  The Italian artists whose works we still love and admire include painters and sculptors, writers, scientists, music composers and performers.  If we were to list the stars in these various fields, we would have little room for anything else.  In any case such a list would be unnecessary because their names are so familiar.  But you can see the works of the many fine Italian artists in Italy's many museums.  Most of these charge admission fees.  And their sculptures can be seen in the public squares of the cities.. (Continued.............) 

 

 

 

 

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