PALERMO AND NAPLES AND POMPEI

PALERMO AND NAPLES We had a very nice day in Palermo. The city was quiet because it was Monday after Easter and many people were out of town for vacation. The city is surrounded by the Mountains Pelegrino.. There are about 700,000 people in the city. The patron saint is St. Rosalie. She didn’t want to marry the man her father chose for her, she wanted to be a nun. So she ran away to the mountains and found a grotto where she lived her life praying. She died and at some point another girl found her bones and a hunter took them into Palermo where they were having a plague. The plague was stopped by the bones of St. Rosalie. So there you have it. We passed by a monument to the victims of the Maffioso ???? Are there still Mafia? Don’t know. They killed a priest in the 1990’s so who knows. We went into the cathedral and saw a couple of other churches. BUT the best part of the tour was being able to go inside a palazzo and have a noble man, Conte Federico, and his wife give us a tour of this house which is 800 years old and built on the walls of the old town. There is a tower which is the only one left in the city. A lot of the city of Palermo is newer because, if you remember, this is the place that General Patton wanted to get to before Montgomery. The palace has been lived in continuously by this family. A branch of King Federico that lived because they were not legitimate. The house was beautifully preserved and our hosts were very gracious. We had a glass of wine with them. The city was not as clean as the northern cities but that may have been because of the holidays. It became quite warm but nice. NAPLES AND POMPEI Today was a little overcast in Naples. We notice that this city is a lot dirtier and trashy and there are shack areas with mounds of trash around. We gather from this that there are hard times and a lot of unemployed poor people. Pompei is awesome to say the least. I guess I never expected it to be soooo large. 75% of the city has been excavated but the last 25% remains because people built on top of the ruins. Enough is there to show the way of life, the roads which have the grooves in the stones from the wagons so many years ago. We saw the bakery, the red light district where the men choose what they wanted by pointing to frescos on the walls. The frescos are still there and leave very little to the imagination. There are theaters where the gladiators practiced and a smaller one which had water running beneath the marble floor creating excellent acoustics for concerts. Market places, and of course, the casts of the dead showing how they tried to cover their faces from the gases. There are what seems like thousands of household items and large vessels. You just have to see it. It’s way old. Tomorrow back to Rome to disembark a group and then continue on to Greece and Turkey.