Tivoli

Yesterday I went to Tivoli, because I had to practice giving a tour there, and because it is a lovely little town high in the hills, and it was a good excuse to get out of Rome. I haven't been to Tivoli in about 2 years, and it was even more charming than I remembered.

I took the metro and then the bus out there, which took only an hour and a half (and only cost 2 euro!), and once we left the city, the drive was beautiful. At one point we even drove past a travertine quarry. Perhaps this is not as exciting to all of my readers as it is to me, but travertine is the main building stone of both the Romans and the Catholic Church (and hey, the Fascists used a lot of it too, but I am not overly fond of their architecture), and therefore figures quite heavily into most of my tours.

It was a pretty relaxing day, begun at Hadrian's Villa, which is full of mosquitos, and ended at the Villa d'Este, which is gorgeous. I don't mean to discount Hadrian's villa, it is a really remarkable example of how talented the Romans were with brick and mortar (even if they did cover it with marble), but we had to walk quite far in the hot sun to get there, and then the biting insects seemed to find me particularly tasty. The site itself was uncrowded and vast, which was a nice change from Rome, and the temperature was nearly perfect by the time we left in the late afternoon. We got into the Villa d'Este at the last entrance, which turned out to be wonderful, as we were there when the sun began to go down, and the Villa's panoramic views are all to the west.

Not overly exciting, but a beautiful and calm weekend trip.