Winter home

Well, here we are in our winter home – by the skin of our teeth as it happened.  We’d been told by a number of other cruisers we met in the summer that the recently built marina here was a good over-wintering spot and that there was loads of space.  Consequently we didn’t actually enquire about a berth until late September, to be told by the office “sorry, we have no space”.  Having friends who were already here we got them to make enquiries and then put a bit of a spurt on and arrived ourselves on Sunday 12^th October.  We kept our heads down on Sunday night and decided to check into the marina office on Monday morning.  The place is pretty full and that night we got depressed by stories of other cruisers who were already here and having to hassle for a winter berth and pay more than the marina’s published prices.  Next day we went to the office prepared for a non-committal answer “we are very full ... maybe there will be a cancellation ... perhaps in a few days” ... etc, etc.  Instead we were treated as if we had always been expected and were booked straight into a berth for the next six months with a 10% discount on the published rates.  So we have power, water and smart new toilet and shower blocks with washing machines for the princely sum of £30 per week.

Porto di Roma is actually a massive new marina development with berths for around 800 yachts sandwiched between the mouth of the River Tiber and the outskirts of Ostia, Rome’s seaside suburb about fifteen miles from the City centre.  The marina is about a mile long with a pedestrian walkway next to the yacht berths which is the width and length of a small aircraft runway.  This is quite appropriate as Rome’s main airport is only about three miles away and occasionally the flight path is routed right overhead, so the place reverberates to jumbo jets only a couple of hundred feet above us as they scream skywards.  On the other side of the walkway is a more less continuous strip of low rise buildings containing car parks, toilet and shower blocks every couple of hundred metres and fronted by shop units and cafes.  We arrived on a hot and sunny Sunday afternoon and were amazed at the hustle and bustle.  The walkway was almost shoulder-to-shoulder with Romans strolling up and down and mooching in the shops on their Sunday passagiata.  It was like nowhere else we have been this season, new concrete buildings, designer shops, city folk in their suits and designer casuals and roller bladers and kids on bikes and scooters weaving their way in and out of the throng.  Subsequently, we found that this was only at weekends, during the week the place is virtually empty and some of the shops don’t even bother to open.

The surrounding area is interesting if you like flat semi-urban wasteland.  Up by the mouth of the Tiber and along its banks is a shantytown with poverty like nowhere else we’ve yet seen in Italy.  At the rivers edge is a row of shacks which have large umbrella-like fishing nets outside.  These are attached to small cranes which raise and lower the nets into the grey waters of the Tiber.  The roads in the shanty are all unmade and the place is as quiet as the grave, apart from the many unkempt and surly looking mongrels that loiter suspiciously.  On the Ostia side of the marina are rows of 1960s and 70s apartment blocks in varying stages of decay which have the reek of local government corruption.  There is graffiti and waste everywhere and the social projects that go with depressed urban communities – a theatre here and a youth centre there.  It’s like a bit of Hackney has decided to go for a Mediterranean beach holiday.  Further towards its centre Ostia morphs into a more respectable suburb, more like Sidcup-on-sea.  A few days ago we made our first trip into Rome itself.  This takes about an hour and costs only about £1 return.  The trip is very like that into central London from one of the outer suburbs, finishing with an underground ride.  En route we had parties of school kids, bored straphanging commuters, buskers and drunks stinking of booze.  Yup, we really feel at home here. 

Like all big cities Rome is on a first visit quite bewildering.  We wandered around fairly aimlessly, suddenly coming across famous monuments like Trajan’s Column and the Spanish steps.  My over-riding first impression was of the sheer age of the City and its historical continuity all the way back to the Roman Republic.  Unlike London, where the ancient City is buried under layers of successive development and only tiny fragments of the Roman City are visible, in Rome ancient buildings survive cheek by jowl with the medieval, renaissance, counter-reformation and modern cities.  Round one corner we found the remains of the Emperor Augustus’ mausoleum, a huge brick ruin that looks more like a bombed out bunker than a Roman relic.  In Rome two thousand years no longer seems such a long time and the influence of Roman culture on modern society is much more palpable.  This brings me back to a feeling I’ve had often in Italy – that unlike Britain the Romans never left this country, they are not foreigners whose galleys disappeared over the horizon, they are still here and one can see it in the sharp eyed hook-nosed faces all around one in the cafes and on the underground.

The End of the Sailing Season

Next day, Sue’s hunting instinct overcame her finer feelings and she was back fishing, although I’m not entirely sorry to say without success.  It was another wonderfully mild and sunny day and with all our sails set we glided up to the fleet of Roman yachts sailing off Porto di Roma and the mouths of the Tiber and the Fiumicino canal.  It’s been such a great season that neither of us wanted it to end and we were tempted to just keep on going.  But we have things to do this winter and all good things must come to an end, so we headed on in to the marina.

This winter is going to be very different from the last.  Apart from the fact that we have all the facilities we need within a few hundred metres and the joy of slowly exploring Rome, there are at least thirty English-speaking cruising boats in here for the winter and a very active social life developing.  We have a morning VHF radio net mainly used for organising social activities.  Two American cruisers have negotiated a “happy hour” at the nearby Gran Cafe which offers us drinks at half price from five to eight pm.  Others are organising yoga, musical evenings, cooking lessons and bridge nights.  There may even be guided tours of the major Roman sites led by a local professor who one of the cruisers who was here last year got to know.

All in all we are well placed to carry out our most pressing winter project, provisionally entitled “SO WHAT EXACTLY THE **** DO WE  DO NOW?”  As I’m sure you all realise our progress on this issue so far has been about zero.  Our basic choices are fairly stark, carry on as we are for the next five or ten years and run out of money (tempting) or develop a lifestyle which is economically sustainable.  Anyway we’ve started to take the first steps, we’ve made a list (well that’s OK then!) and Sue is applying for Teaching English as a Foreign Language courses.  It’s been a great summer, but now reality (whatever that is) begins to bite.

Nettuno

Next day we headed for Nettuno harbour, next to Anzio back on the mainland, again in fine weather.  Since leaving Maiori Sue had been trailing a fishing line and experimenting with different methods and lures (imitation fish) and was showing a scary aptitude.  First she hooked a large Tuna, then we think a Dorado, but both these slipped off the hook as we tried to land them.  On the way to Nettuno she got another big brute which I reeled in and managed to flip into the cockpit.  There was this beautiful blue, grey and silver beast, about two feet long.  Sadly, Sue’s fishing expertise does not yet extend to delivering the coup de grace.  With the fish flapping wildly on the cockpit floor with me holding it down we tried pouring gin into its gills, which we had been told was a relatively humane method of killing.  Half a bottle later the poor thing was still very much alive so I started hitting it over the head with an adjustable wrench.  Ten minutes later the boat looked like a scene from Psycho, with blood everywhere and me hysterically screaming “die you bastard” while still hitting it with the wrench.  After about twenty minutes it was quiet, although still making the occasional accusatory twitch.  By this time Sue and I were grey, emotionally exhausted and feeling like the murderers that we were.  That night with the help of the marina officials in Nettuno we identified our prey as a Lampuga, a mullet-like fish good for eating, so we did the decent thing and gutted, scaled and pan fried it.  I have to say it made us feel more like real cruisers, catching, killing and eating our first fish.  

Ponza

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I find the weather in the Med bewilderingly changeable and when we left Ischia it was with a flat clam sea and bright sunshine. During the day the temperature climbed to 35c as we motored past the island of Ventotene and on to Ponza, the most populous of the Pontine Islands. We had expected Ponza harbour to be surrounded with lots of small marinas, but in another sign of the lateness of the season all the pontoons had been removed and stacked on the beach. Ponza is a spectacular island rising sheer out of the Tyrrhenian Sea in a symphony of cliffs, caves and bizarre rock formations. We anchored in the harbour with a couple of other cruising yachts, including one brave elderly Swiss couple who had a skinny dip before rowing ashore. That night I watched the Ponza car ferry arrive with increasing trepidation. From about a mile out I could hear the thrumming of its engines and see its navigation lights heading for us in a straight line. Within a hundred metres and looming increasingly large it still seemed to be going full ahead, before turning hard to starboard, dropping its anchors with a very loud clanging and backing onto the town quay whilst sounding its hooter to announce its arrival. It disgorged a motley cargo of passengers, lorries and beaten up Apes (the small three-wheeled vans that are Italy’s replacement for the donkey).

Ischia

Having said goodbye to Sue’s Mum and Dad at Naples Airport we stayed in Maiori for a couple more days before heading out on 7th October. We had stayed twelve days in the end and frankly we were pushing our luck in the little port, which is really suitable only for settled weather. It was a grey and threatening day when we left and we encountered increasingly lumpy seas as we passed by Capri and headed into the bay of Naples. We crossed the bay and called in at Casamicciola, a pleasant little port on the island of Ischia, where we spent three days waiting for a storm to blow out.

 We toured this green and almost tropical island on the crowded local buses and paid a visit to the charming villa and gardens created by Sir William Walton the composer and his wife Susana, who still lives there. The storm caused not a little excitement and marked the end of the season for many harbour and beachside cafes, which were pounded by the great white breakers which rolled in along the coast. The morning after the worst of it we saw a couple of bedraggled blokes salvaging the chest fridge and what other bits they could from the wreckage of “Gino’s Bar”, where the day before we’d seen holidaymakers relaxing and drinking. All this was no great tragedy I think, some beach cafe owners dismantle their shacks earlier in the season while others push their luck for a few extra euros until the first of the big autumn storms forces them to shut up shop.

Pompeii

Last time I wrote we were in the little port of Maiori on the Amalfi coast waiting for a visit from Sue’s Mum and Dad. On the Saturday they arrived we hired a small car and headed off up the steep hills of Amalfi to Naples airport. Cresting these hills we got our first quite staggering view of Vesuvius and the Bay of Naples. The cone of Vesuvius itself is a National Park, but the plain that spreads below it contains a great urban sprawl interlaced with motorways. Vesuvius has the potential to blow its top big time and the effects on this vast metropolis don’t bear thinking about.

Maiori was a perfect spot for us to stay while Sue’s Mum and Dad came to visit and we managed to find them a hotel which overlooked the little port. It was a very sociable time with two other British boats in the harbour, “Chin Chin II” and “Gwen L” who we’d been cruising with on and off since Calabria. One evening we ended up taking a table for ten at one of the local restaurants. During their stay Sue’s Dad gave her a couple of fishing lessons, which she put to good use later.

While we had the car we drove over to Pompeii and spent a day there. For those who haven’t been it is one of those places that more than lives up to its reputation. The site is vast and the buildings complete enough to give one a very real idea of what a prosperous Roman town actually looked like, including the often sumptuous internal mosaics and wall paintings. While we were there a large military helicopter flew low over the site. A little later we found it had landed next to the Coliseum and was surrounded by ambulances and carabinieri. Some expensive suits were also hanging around sipping wine and talking on their mobile ‘phones. Then a forklift truck appeared and moved up to the helicopter before slowly and carefully removing a large and ornate chair from inside the helicopter. There was much debate between the suits as this was going on and the carabinieri told us to put our cameras away. Suddenly we made a link to a newspaper report we’d seen a couple of days previously – the Pope (“il Papa”) was due to pay a visit to Pompeii on 7th October and this was obviously a rehearsal.

We spent an enjoyable week exploring the Amalfi coast, including the beautiful hill town of Ravello, which is several hundred feet above Maiori and a discrete watering hole for the rich and famous. A car is not however, the best way to explore this area. The roads are narrow and very winding, the traffic is horrendous and there are few places to park.