Ravenna the First

"Tom-Tom" è cattivo.

- Marco

Today was all fun and games until we drove through the pedestrian-only area.

The day started without incident. We left Campotosto early in the morning and drove down (another) windy mountain road to Porto San'Elpidio where Marco's cousin Ilaria lives. Ilaria has a beautiful house that is only steps from the Adriatic sea, which is warm and perfectly blue. She told us she thought the beach looked like Greece. I haven't been there but I tend to agree.


The rest of the day was eventful, spent driving in the general direction of Ravenna. Ravenna is today a sleepy town with memories of a great past (it reached its peak during the Byzantine empire between the 6th and 8th centuries.)

Trouble struck in the form of Tom-Tom AKA Magellan AKA the-piece-of-shit-navigational-device we rented from the car rental company. Up until now Tom-Tom and I have been on relatively friendly terms. We weren't shopping for engagement rings but I also wasn't contemplating hacking it to death with a pick-axe. The high point of our relationship was when I realized it knew the way to Campotosto. I admit: I was impressed.

Today our relationship soured. (We're on the rocks now.)

Today, Tom-Tom decided it would be a great larf if it directed us to our hotel via this street:

Do you notice the absence of cars? And the veritable parade going down the centre of the street? We certainly did. It turns out that Tom-Tom led us astray and took us into a pedestrian-only area. At a certain point we hit (not literally) a concrete barrier, I abandoned the car and found the hotel on foot, where we got a proper map, backed out of the pedestrian zone (another laugh riot, I assure you), got back on "roads" for "cars" and then proceeded to the hotel. We then managed to get a free parking spot directly beside the hotel, no thanks to Tom-Tom.

We are staying at a nice hotel in the city centre. We miss everyone from Campotosto and will surely not be looked after here the way we were by Candida, who took better care of us than we take of ourselves. However, it is nice to be out of the bad mountain weather. It is glorious to be connected to the interweb machine again (Emma may feel the same way as she has been posting our blog for us the past couple of days!) and to not type out the blog the Blackberry!

With the trauma of the pedestrian-zone incident behind us, we decided to walk around Ravenna. It's lovely.


During our travels, we seem to have been guided by the Unseen Hand of Celestino because we stumbled upon this:

Although Dante Alighieri was a Florentine, he died, in exile, in Ravenna on September 14, 1321. This is Marco in front of his tomb (tomba di Dante):

To the right of this temple is a small mound of earth in which Dante's urn went "underground", literally, from March 1944 to December 1945 because it was feared that it might be destroyed during the bombings of the WWII. Yes, it is just a pile of leaf-covered dirt but it is a historic, pile of leaf-covered dirt and so worthy of some attention.

Tomorrow, we are going to tour Ravenna in earnest. In particular, we want to see the mosaics for which Ravenna is so famoso. We may also create our own monument, the tomba di Tom-Tom, if only we can figure out the Italian word for "shovel".