Having been resistant to living in an English-speaking cultural bubble, that is exactly what we have been doing for the past three months. However, our Italian is progressing thanks to our lessons twice a week and to the three Italians in the port who also live on boats. However, Sue is progressing faster than me, especially with the dreaded Italian verbs. We don’t get into Rome as often as we hoped to, but we still manage it about once per week. We still haven’t made it to the Vatican Museum (which includes the Sistine Chapel), preferring just to wander around and soak up the atmosphere. In doing so the sheer scale of the ancient Roman city slowly begins to dawn on one. During the four centuries after the birth of Christ Rome had a population of one to one and half million inhabitants, making it by a multiple the largest city of the ancient world – no other city even came near this size until the industrial revolution. We’ve also been doing more reading about Italian culture...

A couple of weeks ago we hired a car and drove down to Puglia (the heel of the Italian boot) with Claude and Jane, a couple that we have become goods friends with. Jane has worked in Taranto helping to project manage the development of a big new Container Port there and so has good contacts and is interested in buying a house in the area. Puglia is the market garden of Italy, being its largest producer of wine and olive oil, as well as having a big fishing industry. It is also the home of the Trullo – little round stone houses with pointed roofs which are built in clusters and are becoming very fashionable with holidaymakers and foreign investors. They are cute little buildings which often verge on the impossibly quaint – the town of Alberobello has thousands of them and frankly looks like nothing more nor less than Hobbiton. Our time was spent in an exhausting blur of house viewing and sightseeing, followed by leisurely debriefings over dinner in local restaurants. Parts of...

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 f...

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.   T...

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 wre...

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...

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...