BOX 148: Southern Italy to Meteora.

Meteora is one of the most unworldly places I've ever been to: the rock formations are unusual enough in themselves, but the medieval monasteries built on top of them make them truly fantastical. Max and I stopped there as we traveled through parts of Greece in 1983.

To get you to this point in our itinerary I need to backtrack several days to the morning of our leaving Sicily. As I mentioned in my previous post, I had stayed behind in Messina to see a possible cousin while Max and Janet took the ferry to Reggio di Calabria to explore the town and see their art museum. When I caught up with them, early in the afternoon, they were excited about having seen the Riace Bronzes: two heroic statues of Greek men, cast around 450 BC, that had recently been found in a harbor near Reggio in amazingly good condition, and after restoration put on display at the Reggio museum. My friends urged me to see them, but the museum was just closing for the afternoon or maybe the day. As I remember it, we talked to a guard at the front entrance who said to come around to the service entrance. We did so and hung around for a while, not sure what to expect. Finally the guard came to the door and invited us to enter the museum, a fairly small building, and follow him to the room occupied by the bronzes, which are each 6 and a half feet tall. I took these photos:

I certainly appreciated the guard's allowing me to see the statues, and Max and Janet were happy to revisit them. I gladly tipped the guard (though he didn't ask for anything), while feeling slightly uncomfortable at the thought that we were doing something illegal. (But the guard was being sensible as well as kindly, I reasoned: we obviously were not museum thieves. Still, I couldn't imagine this happening in a bigger town.)

Our plan for the rest of our time in Italy was to drive around the instep of the "boot" of Italy to the heel (i.e., through Basilicata to Puglia) and then up the Adriatic Coast to Bari, where Janet would catch a train back to Rome and Max and I would turn in the car and catch a ferry to Greece. I don't remember where we stayed that evening, though I took a picture of the sunset:

The next morning we visited the ruins of yet another Greek temple, this one at Metaponto, where Janet took a picture of Max and me (in which I'm holding the camera bag I lugged everywhere):

Our next stop that day was in Taranto, which has a historic center that drew us to two churches: the San Cataldo Cathedral with its inlaid marble panels and the San Domenico Maggiore Church with its rose window and beautiful stairway up to the main entrance:

We were unfortunately delayed in Taranto because our car was broken into while we were visiting the centro storico. Nothing valuable was taken, fortunately, but we had to report the incident to the police, which involved my filling out a report at the station (another opportunity to practice my weak Italian). If I remember correctly, the car rental agency taped over the small side/back window that had been broken, rather than transferring us to a new car; I don't remember visiting the agency, however--just relaxing afterwards at a nearby beach.

My only other photos of the last part of our stay in Italy were taken in Lecce, another city with great Renaissance and Baroque architecture. Here is a view of part of the Cathedral and of the Seminary Palace on the Cathedral Square:

The Church of San Giovanni Bautista had a particularly spectacular facade:

A plainer but still beautiful sight was this courtyard, which I can't identify: it could be a cloister or just a secular courtyard:

And finally, as we were walking down a street in Lecce's centro storico, looking at various shops along the way, a butcher called to us and invited me to take a picture of him and his friend or co-worker--I was glad to oblige:

As usual, I'm disappointed that I don't have many more photos of Lecce and maybe other places on these last days of our Italian stay. We did make stops along the coast, and I remember spending time at a broad, sandy Adriatic beach along the way to Bari that was the best of all the beaches in Italy that we discovered on that trip. (It must be obvious by now that we were all big beach fans.) We had to hang out for some hours in Bari (which seemed a more nondescript place than the other Italian towns we'd visited) before our ferry sailed. It was an overnight trip, and I think we rented a stateroom; in any case, at dawn we could see the mountains of Albania--then a 'forbidden land' to Westerners--looming over us as we sailed into the harbor of the town of Corfu on the island of the same name. My first photos of Greece are of our first glimpses of Corfu:

After we landed and found a hotel (or rather, a landlady found us at the dock and took us to her lodging--a seemingly common practice), I took these photos with Albania in the distance; that must be Max sitting on the wall in the first one:

Corfu is a large island, but we managed to see a few parts of it, traveling by bus. I can't name the locales in the next two photos, but the third is Paleokastritsa Beach, where I remember having lunch at an outdoor cafe. (Nearly all our meals were outdoors in Greece as I remember them, and typically featured swordfish and a salad.)

Our long-range travel plan, as I mentioned several posts ago, was to meet our friend Dede in Crete; we planned to get there by taking a ferry from Corfu to mainland Greece, then travel by bus to Meteora, Delphi and Athens, and take a boat from Athens to Heraklion, the capital of Crete. So our first step was the ferry from Corfu to Igoumenitsa.

From there we found the bus transportation that would take us to Meteora. The weather was cool and sometimes rainy as we wound our way eastward through rugged mountains. The second of the three photos below shows a goat that I saw from a rest stop:

I had seen somewhere a photograph of Meteora, which led to our deciding to make a stop there, in north-central Greece above the plains of Thessaly. As I mentioned above, the rock formations themselves were pretty stunning when we got off the bus and looked up at them:

In the 1200s over a dozen monasteries were built on the tops of these rocks, most of them accessible only by nets drawn up with pulleys. (How the original builders climbed up there in the first place I can barely imagine.) Four or five were still operating when we visited (having found a hotel in what was then a very non-touristy town). I don't remember if we walked or took a local or tourist bus up the hillside where we had better views of the monasteries, such as this one:

The views looking down at the town below were pretty stunning too:

Here's another of the monasteries:

And another one, with another view of the valley below:

And one more:

Here is my only photo showing other tourists. We were able to visit the interiors of one or two of the monasteries, including their churches, though I didn't take any interior photos.

This one is especially incredible:

Finally, Max took this photo of me at an overlook:

In my next post I'll report on our visits to Delphi and Athens.