To Abruzzo and places unknown....

So with sadness and anticipation, we headed south - to the great unknown!

Never having been south of Spoleto before, we were unsure of what we would encounter. We drove down the autostrada and had a TERRIBLE experience at a stop on the way. Yuck - we won't dwell on it, but it did make us realize that we should never eat on the autostrada again.

So on to Abruzzo - a part of Italy that truly seems as though it is fading away into the past. It was spotted with small towns on the tops of small hills. The color of the towns were the same as the hills they sat on, and you had to look hard to notice them in some light. The smaller more remote towns are only about half full of people, but some younger entrepeneurs are buying up large parts of villages and turning them into remote hotels. I hope it works to preserve them. They almost remind me of the cave dwellings of the anasazi in the southwest. Fading into the hills and full of history but deserted.

There were beautiful towns - Scanno in particular. No way you could drive through it, and in fact there were long (and I mean LONG) stairs leading up up up to the tops of the town. The people seemed from another world - women still wear the black dresses and scarves.

We also had to adjust to the way of life. It was much more of the "typical" Italian way of the world once we escaped the German-influenced north. I remember as a child during our visits that nothing was open in the afternoon - from noon to 4:30. It is still that way anywhere we visited south of Verona, other than the very large cities. We did manage to avoid most cities, and certainly didn't see any in Abruzzo.

The weather was also remarkable in Abruzzo - like a desert. It was a good 20 degrees (f) cooler at night. You could actually cool down in the shade too - unlike the humid north.

But only 2 days here and then on to meet Lidia, Phillip and our house in Laureano Cilento in Campania.

On the way south, we stopped along the road at a archealogical site that was only marked with the triangular circles on the map. It was a great surprise to pull into a small parking lot with one person in a hut taking 1 euro for parking. We walked up a driveway not knowing what to expect. Soon we saw the remains of a large Roman settlement (Saepinum) that was home to about 3000 people. The arches of one great gate still stood with the names of Augustus Ceasar on the top. Parts of the theatre, forum, temple and houses were there connected by the straight roman roads running in the 4 directions. Cows grazed along the edges of the ruins. We only saw a few people there - one family, and some locals in their yards that abutted the ruins. A magical place really.

So - pictures are here:

http://picasaweb.google.com/seterzio/Abruzzo#
http://picasaweb.google.com/seterzio/Saepinum#