If you want to milk every possible hour from a 4-day weekend, flying Ryanair from Frankfurt-Hahn to Rome Ciampino is a good way to start and it’s a starting plan that can happily be repeated many times. Two reasons for this: (1) The destination is a good one. Rome itself is worth at least one 4-day weekend.* Plus there are at least a dozen other towns and/or destinations within a 3 hour drive of Rome that are worth seeing. (2) The flight schedule itself is ideal. Ryanair has a flight that leaves Frankfurt-Hahn at 6:30AM on Friday morning and returns at 11:45PM Monday evening. Now to appreciate the importance of those times, you have to understand how a 4-day weekend works in the military. “Four day weekend” means just exactly that. It starts at midnight on the first day and ends at midnight on the fourth day. If it starts on a Friday, you can’t leave after work on Thursday – unless you refrain from going more than 150 km from home and don’t cross any international boundaries. Frankfurt-Hahn airport just happens to be exactly 150 km from Heidelberg, so you can go there the night before (and sleep in the back of your van, if you’re really hardcore), be at the check-in counter at 5:00AM, be on the plane at 6:30AM, watch the sun rise over the Swiss Alps,
catch a glimpse of the Coloseum & St. Peter’s Basilica as you land in Rome
and be in a rent car driving away from Rome by 9:30AM.
If you buy your tickets a month or so ahead and pick an “off weekend” and don’t check any bags and take the trouble to play Ryanair’s little game for getting your airport check-in fee refunded and if you pick a time when the dollar isn’t having too hard a time against the Euro, you can do this for less than $50/person round trip. If you’re not that hard core, Ryanair also has several other flights from Frankfurt-Hahn to Rome Ciampino on any given day which leave later in the day and return earlier, leaving you with fewer sightseeing hours but allowing you to start and end your weekend a little more rested. And you can skip any or all of the money saving options listed above. You can guess which game plan Mike and Nancy typically follow. I wasn’t raised by someone who grew up during the depression for nothing! Ryanair also has a couple of other destinations that are typically cheap and are conducive to an all-out, full-bore-ahead type weekend – London and Barcelona are examples – but Rome is the best in my opinion. Barcelona is probably worth one 4-day weekend (as opposed to the 4 hours we spent there recently!) and the Pyrenees are definitely worth another one, but then you run out of things to do on that route. We’ve done the London route a couple of times and there are countless things to do there, but the dollar to pound ratio is NEVER good, so that’s an expensive option. Plus England is NOT the place to go in the winter. Rome isn’t exactly pleasant in the winter, but it’s reasonable.So . . . one dreary weekend in February, we headed for Rome in the fashion described above and checked 4 interesting Italian town off our “To See” list (Pompeii, Assisi, Siena, and Civita di Bagnoregio), ending the weekend with a brief impromptu visit to Anzio. Except for the day in Siena, and a couple of other short “sun breaks” it was pretty much overcast the whole weekend, but it did refrain from raining in any significant way and the temps were pretty mild, so we can’t complain too much on that note.
Upon leaving Rome Ciampiano, we headed for Pompeii. Pompeii is south of Rome, near Naples. As we left Rome, the weather was being somewhat cooperative, so we decided to drive up Mt. Vesuvius in hopes of seeing Pompeii from Mt. Vesuvius. We were not successful on that note, but Vesuvius was interesting. Vesuvius is an active volcano although it has been sleeping restless for the last half century of so. “It is best known for its eruption in AD 79 that led to the destruction of the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum. It has erupted many times since and is today regarded as one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world because of the population of 3,000,000 people now living close to it and its tendency towards explosive eruptions. It is the most densely populated volcanic region in the world.” (Wording stolen from Wikipedia!).
The road up Mt. Vesuvius doesn’t quite get to the rim and depending on Vesuvius’ mood it may or may not even be open. Vesuvius was in a good mood the day we were there and we took the time to walk from the end of the road to the rim and around the crater as far as permitted. The rim and the landscape were not quite as spectacular or as desolate as a volcano we once hunted down in the wilderness of Sonora, Mexico and the lava fields weren’t nearly as extensive as the ones on the Big Island in Hawaii, and I have seen steam coming out of the ground before in Yellowstone. BUT . . . I believe this was a "first" in terms of the combination of actual steam coming out of vent holes and a rim to walk around and the knowledge that this was an active volcano.
Vesuvius was interesting but probably we could have better spend our time in Pompeii itself. There is a lot to see there. In fact we ended up going back to Pompeii for a few hours in April with Mike’s chaplain boss and his wife, Jerry and Cynthia Jones, on our way to Sicily. The overlap between the two trips in terms of what we saw was almost zero. And I think we still left without getting to a couple of parts of the city.Apparently after Pompeii was buried in 79AD, no one made any attempt to dig it out again until 1748 and the operation didn’t really gain momentum until the 1860’s. A lot of what know today about daily life in Rome comes from Pompeii. Pompeii strikes me as a great place to go with kids. You can roam around to your heart’s content, peek in the windows of homes and other buildings, go in some of those buildings, and almost get lost -- all under the watchful eye of Mt. Vesuvius.
In Colorado we have these things called “ghost towns.” They are typically a half dozen buildings at most in a picturesque setting. By comparison, Pompeii is a HUGE ghost town. And, unlike Colorado ghost towns, where dilapidated is equated with picturesque, everything in Pompeii is well preserved. You almost except to find someone’s lunch still setting on the kitchen table waiting to be eaten.Apparently when they dug out Pompeii they would occasionally become aware of hollows underfoot and realized that these were cavities left by decomposed bodies. So . . they started filling these cavities with liquid plaster and then digging up the casts when they dried out. It gave them an idea what people were doing when the hot mud caught them. I hope this isn’t too gruesome, but here are a couple of those casts.
Obviously there is a ton that could be said about Pompeii. I’ll refrain from going on and on too long. Here are a few generic pictures and then I’ll just mention a couple of things that I found particularly fascinating. 
You can see actual chariot ruts in the streets of Pompeii.
Apparently when it rained the water ran right down the streets. To cross the street you stepped on these stones. The stones are spaced in such a way as to accommodate the wheelbase of a chariot. 
Here are some of those lead pipes that supposedly contributed to the downfall of Rome (or so I was taught in elementary school). 
Pompeii is chalk full of mosaics. If I was going to pay someone to do something with this amount of detail, I think I’d put it somewhere besides on the floor where it would be walked on. I guess even two thousand years ago there were people with more money than sense. Regardless, the mosaics were pretty impressive and well preserved. 
Here’s some pretty spectacular mosaic on the outside of a building.
The frescoes in Pompeii were also plentiful but not as well preserved. And the subject matter tended to be a bit more “iffy.” In an effort to keep this travelogue in the PG category, I’ll have to be selective. Pornography is clearly not a 21st century phenomenon! This fresco could have been the inspiration for Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus,” except for the fact that it would have been buried twenty feet deep and totally out of sight when Botticelli was looking for inspiration.
This is a fast food restaurant. Each of the holes is intended to hold a pot of something. And, yes, apparently not going home for lunch was an option even in the 1st century. 
Small rectangular white stones seem to have been a popular feature in floor design. The stone groove in the top part of this picture is a place for a door to slide open and closed.
The “HAVE” here is Latin for “welcome.” 
The towns I listed earlier all climbed onto our “To See” list compliments of Rick Steves. However, Assisi had a little extra help from a friend of mine named Jocelyn Carey. Jocelyn is young and single and works with Club Beyond (a chapel youth program) and has way more energy than any one person should be allowed to have. She now lives and works in Vicenza Italy, but when she was living in Heidelberg she attended one of my PWOC Bible Studies and we got acquainted a little. We are on each other’s e-mail lists, so we’ve kept up with each other a little. In fact, when Mike and I were in Venice (almost two years ago now), we ran into Jocelyn and a guest from the States, standing on a street corner in a crowd of people, eating gelato – as I recall – or maybe Mike and I were the ones eating gelato. Anyway, sometime after moving to Vicenza, Jocelyn went to Assisi and wrote about it in a blog. About every other sentence in the blog was some variation of “Assisi is an absolutely awesome city.” After about the 6th iteration of that, it occurred to me that we should check out Assisi. Good job Jocelyn! I’m glad you got us there. If you are half as persuasive with the kids you work with (and I suspect you are!) there will be a bunch of cheering when you arrive in heaven one day.
Assisi is the hometown of St. Francis, patron saint of Italy and namesake of San Francisco, California. It is also the hometown of St. Clare (or Santa Chiara as she is called in Italian), Francis’s partner in poverty (his girlfriend, according to Mike), and the namesake of Santa Clara, California. Assisi is situated on a hill, with a ruined castle on the top
and houses spilling downhill to the Basilica of St. Francis
The Basilica of St. Francis is still considerably higher than the valley floor. The view of the town as you approach it is pretty impressive. Unfortunately it was foggy the day we were in Assisi. None of my pictures do it justice and I don’t really like any of the postcards I bought either, so I’m going to leave the setting to your imagination rather than take the risk of leaving you unimpressed because I showed you an inadequate representation (hummm . . . isn’t that also the rationale for not having images of God?)One of the things I really like about Rick Steve’s books is his walking tours. I know that Mike and I often drive our traveling companions crazy on this note, but we really enjoy doing the walks exactly as Rick has them laid out. He does a good job of interspersing the big sites with quirky little things you would never find on your own and he gives you all the information you need to fully appreciate what you are looking at. The walk-a-little-read-a-little approach seems to sort of fit my learning style and physical stamina. Sometimes the “as you exit turn left onto Via Dono Doni” instructions don’t quite fit reality and that can be a bit frustrating but it’s usually small potatoes in the grand scheme of things. In Assisi, Rick has you start at the top of the hill (though not at the ruined castle) and work your way down to the Basilica of St. Francis. The Basilica of St. Francis is a World Heritage Site and is truly an incredible place, but if you went to Assisi and saw only the Basilica you would miss a lot. There are a bunch of other neat churches in Assisi,
and a former Roman arena (now a residential area),
and a Temple of Minerva (with a 9th century Christian church squished right up against it),
and lots of pink limestone walkways,
and picturesque arches and gates,
and even an occasional monk or nun wandering the streets. How's that for authenticity?
It’s a neat place to explore.
Notice the tau on this lamppost. The Greek letter "t" is a symbol that’s commonly associated with St. Francis. He saw it as a symbol of the resurrection and of the cross. It is ironic that Catholicism’s purest example of simplicity is now glorified in an extravagantly beautiful church. Somehow I’m not sure that St. Francis would be happy with what has been done to honor him. It is also ironic that St. Francis actually lived and worked down on the valley floor in the urban part of Assisi rather than in the old town, where the tourists spend all their time. A number of places in the old town afford sweeping views of the Umbrian countryside (again the weather snookered me out of any good pictures) and you can look down on the church where St. Francis lived and worked, St. Mary of the Angels.
St. Mary of the Angels is the first “Los Angeles.” When later Franciscans settled in California, they named the Los Angeles there after this church. Construction of the Basilica of St. Francis began in 1238 immediately upon St. Francis’s canonization and within a couple of years of his death.Our lodging for this trip was a hostel in Perugia. Perugia is central to all the places we wanted to see so it made a good base camp for day trips. Perugia itself probably would have been an interesting place to explore, but even Mike and Nancy can only do so much in 4 days and we resisted the temptation to deviate from our established priorities. We did however flirt with the idea of going back to Assisi on Sunday in hopes that the weather would be better and I could get a good picture of the town from the valley floor. We actually set out in the direction of Assisi and it was only with difficulty that I was able to get Mike to abandon that rabbit trail when it became obvious that the weather wasn’t going to be any better than the day before. Mike REALLY liked Assisi and would have happily gone back for a second day, rain or no rain. He was grumpy all day after that and never did really “warm up” to Siena even though it turned out to be a beautiful day there. Even the next day as we headed to Civita di Bagnoregio, he was still talking about what a neat place Assisi was and trying to entice me into going back.
Siena is a much bigger town than Assisi, although not as big as it’s neighbor and archrival Florence (We “did” Florence – sort of – on a previous trip. See “Some Roads Lead to Rome" in September 2006) Like Assisi, Siena sits on the top of a hill and spills down the side. However, in the case of Siena, the Cathedral sits on the very top of the hill and that hill is surrounded by more hills, so the city not only spills down the side of a hill but up the next hill as well. We parked at the top of that next hill and wandered down some steep narrow pedestrian-only streets to the bottom and then up the hill to the Cathedral and the town square, which is called “Il Campo.” Lots of interesting sights along the way.
Apparently back in the 13th century, when Siena was in it’s heyday, there were plans to enlarge the Cathedral and make it bigger than that of archrival Florence. This wall was going to be the entryway.
I took this next picture standing on the top of that wall. Had the proposed cathedral been completed I would be looking down into the nave of the new cathedral.
The existing cathedral would have become the transept. 
Unfortunately, construction was halted by the Black Death and never resumed. There’s some interesting stuff inside the cathedral including statues by Michelangelo and Donatello, some floor mosaics, a elaborately carved pulpit by Pisano, and a room called the Piccolomini Library that is full of interesting frescos and illuminated music scores. I think the story goes that Michelangelo was working on the statues here when he got word that he was wanted in Florence to do “David.” He left Piccolomini’s job unfinished and just sort of never got back to it.Here’s a sample of the frescoes in Piccolomini’s library.
And here’s an example of an illuminated music score.
As you can see this isn’t just a tool for communicating information to the performer. It’s a work of art in it’s own right. And, no, I wasn’t taught to read this kind of music in college or anywhere else. I wouldn’t have a clue what to do with this, although it does look like the lines are grouped in 5’s just as they are today.Here’s a small section of a mosaic (again it's on the floor!) called “The Slaughter of the Innocents." The “innocents” are all those baby boys that Herod slaughtered at the birth of Christ. Notice that this mosaic is quite different from the ones in Pompeii – different style, different artist, waaaaay different era (like . . . 1500 years later!).
And finally here is the front of the Duomo (cathedral). Like the cathedral in Florence it could appropriately be called “the cathedral in pajamas.” BTW, cranes and scaffording are an expected part of life in Europe, tourists or no tourists. Some of each is usually par for the course.
Here’s Il Campo, the town square, viewed from the top of that unfinished entry to the cathedral.
Rick Steves comments that it’s like a beach without sand or water -- the point being that it’s a good place to sit and watch people and soak in the sun, especially on a winter day. It was certainly a popular place the day we were there and the sun was wonderful.
On Monday, the fourth day of our weekend, we headed for Civita di Bagnoregio. It’s worth noting that to get to any one of the destinations I’ve described in this travelogue you have to drive by things that just beg to be explored. It’s a real challenge to stay on course. I guess that’s a consequence of the towns all being on the tops of hills. They are so visible and enticing. Here’s a neat town we drove by on the way to Civita.
Civita di Bagnoregio is not just built on a hilltop. It is literally perched on a pinnacle in the middle of a grand canyon. 
It is so named because it is a “civita” or small city attached to a larger town named Bagnoregio. It used to be attached by a saddle but the saddle eventually eroded away and now it is attached by a long pedestrian bridge. Civita is traffic-free. You get to it by walking across that long bridge or possibly, if you’re a resident, by driving one of these golf cart type things. This guy is a little nervous because he’s not sure I’m going to get out of his way in time to avoid getting hit. You know how it is with little old ladies with cameras. 
OK, so what’s the deal with Europeans building their towns on the very tops of hills. To my knowledge, we don’t do that anywhere in the US. I’d be hard pressed to think of any town in the US that has a setting even remotely similar to Civita’s. I’ve been contemplating this phenomenon for a while now and trying to make sense of it and here’s what I’ve come up with: in the US, towns are almost always built along rivers or streams. It seems that water supply consistently trumps defense. I’m thinking that’s because defense truly hasn’t been a big deal for us. Yes, there were the Indians, but that’s pretty much been it as far as enemies. And I’m thinking the Indians were really just a minor short-term irritation in comparison with all the defensive issues Europe has faced over the centuries. In contrast, water (or the lack thereof) has often been a BIG issue in the US. Or maybe that’s just my Western perspective.Civita is terminally ill. Currently it has only 15 residents. Rich big-city Italians looking for an escape have bought up the rest of the town. It was off-season the day we were there (remember, this is February) so it was pretty dead. We didn’t spend a lot of time there, but it was well worth the stop.
The landscape around the town was as spectacular as the town was quaint. 
Since Civita didn’t really warrant a full day and we didn’t have to be back at Rome Ciampino until 9:00ish, Mike got the notion that we should check out the Sicily-Rome American Cemetery at Anzio. Anzio is on the coast and slightly south of Rome. Between Civita and the coast we came across a stretch of Roman aqueduct that was quite well intact. 
It was rainy in Civita, but once we got out to the coast it was really gorgeous. We stopped at a MacDonald’s in Fiumicino for lunch and took some time enjoying the sunshine and the harbor. We piddled a little too long actually. By the time we got to Anzio and located the cemetery it was closed for the day. Mike was determined and, as luck would have it, he happened onto the caretaker’s gate and re-discovered again the value of a military ID. Here he is pressing the call button at the gate.
The voice that answered was clearly American and the guy was happy to let us drive through the cemetery. I seem to recall that I have a distant relative who died in the invasion of Italy during WWII. I wonder where he is buried?
So that wraps up a very full 4 day weekend. Before I close, there are a couple of unrelated pictures I’d like to tack on because . . . . well . . . just because. The first is a town in Belgium named Dinant. We heard about Dinant from some chaplain friends of ours who were stationed in Belgium. One weekend last winter we decided to check out it along with a market in Liege. The market turned out not NOT to be a antique market as we had hoped, but a buy-everything-you-need-for-life-in-one-convenient-location market, i.e. the European version of a super Walmart, except outdoors. Interesting, but I have no need to go back. Dinant, however, was spectacular.
And here are a couple of US pictures. Over Columbus Day weekend, we went to Cape Hatteras, NC. We were actually in this area about 17 years ago when we were stationed at Ft. Knox, KY. We have a favorite story about Alan from that trip, but this travelogue is getting way too long so I'll refrain from pursuing that rabbit trail. The Outer Banks were pretty much as we remembered them, although one of the lighthouses had actually been moved to a new location! No kidding! The other difference we noticed had to do with water sports. When we were there 17 years ago, sailboards were the “in” thing. There are still a few of those around, but mostly the “in” thing now is kitesurfing. They were a lot of fun to watch.
We also got some first hand exposure to Cyprus trees
and cotton fields
and peanut harvesting.
And lastly, any guesses as to the location of this edifice?
Believe it or not – Washington DC. It’s the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, the largest Catholic Church in North America and one of the 10 largest in the world. It is part of, or at least next to, the American Catholic University. Another chaplain wife I know likes to say, “Washington DC is a good half-way house when coming home from Europe.” PTL the Army didn’t send us to Ft. Polk, Louisiana!There's not much in the way of family news since the last travelogue so I'm going to wrap this up rather quickly. Those of you who typically skip to the end looking for news are out of luck this time! Sorry.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Nancy
