East Coast Italy

Venice and Rome were the two big ticket visits for me on this trip so as we were getting close to Venice I started to get a bit excited more than anywhere else so far. As Gen mentioned, we stayed in Punta Sabbioni which is on the tip of a peninsula that surrounds part of the Venice lagoon. Part of the drive there was on a dyke that had the ocean on one side and houses and fields a good 2 metres below sea level on the other. It was a perfect preview on the mentality it takes to have a city like Venice, mental.

We were a short ferry ride from the city that was part of the public transit system and €25 got us 2 days cruising to Venice, around the perimeter, over to Lido and of course up and down the Grand Canal. I knew to expect hoards of tourists, but it didn't phase me there like other places because it was just such a surreal place. It doesn't make any sense to have a city like that, and in reality it looks every bit the way you'd picture it. An accident waiting to happen, but a beautiful one. Some buildings are visibly tilting as they sink, and many walkways and doorways are below water level. There's even a massive construction project in place to build retractable flaps to block sea water if necessary. If I describe Venice at all like I snapped pictures I'd never end. I'll just say It was pretty cool. Check it out.

After Venice we drove down the east coast of Italy. It was cool to see Venice outside of Venice, the lagoon is actually really big with industrial areas as well as small fishing towns with cool hut/net things built all over the canals I didn't get a picture of. As soon as we were out of Venice it became pretty clear not many tourists came this way.

We drove as far as Ancona as we read about Frasassi Caves, which sounded unreal, and we wanted to camp near there. When we got close we went to a beach town called Senigallia with a bunch of camp sites listed, but it ended up being a complete ghost town and everything was closed.

This part of Italy seems to only operate during the really hot high season, I guess since there's so many other parts to see there's just not enough tourism to go around. We ended up driving into the hills near the caves and pulling off the road and sleeping in the car. Wild camping (as we read its called) is illegal in Italy so we weren't sure how it would go over, and a few people did see us, but we were discrete and it was actually not too bad a sleep in the little Micra.

I should mention that I'm falling more in love with this car every day. Even though every noise and smell scares me half to death it's still going and I couldn't be happier.

So the next day we followed signs to the caves in circles for a while until we started losing it and almost gave up. Once we ignored the retarded signs we finally found it. Thank god we did, Frasassi Caves is well worth a google search at the least and a visit if ever possible. It's easily the most incredible natural sight I've ever seen, there's a series of rooms, the largest big enough to fit the Milan Cathedral, a reference that luckily makes sense to me now. It was so expansive and other worldly it took my breath away many times. We lucked out with an English guide to ourselves who was meant to be there for a group that never showed, but there were no photos allowed and she was always close. Snuck a couple with my phone though.

We are now camping on the beach at the tip of the spur of the boot in Vieste. A beauty spot that closes tomorrow. Then we keep following the sun and camping south.

-Justin