Ciao!

Welcome to my first post after my recent trip to Italy. What a fantastic adventure it was! As I mentioned a few posts back, My husband traveled for his career and really isn’t interested in doing so in retirement. I however have loved to take groups of quilters on tours and, even though I’ve reached the point where I’d rather not have the responsibility for leading the tours any longer, I still love to travel. Mike and I agreed a nice compromise would be that I’d take a grandchild on an adventure their senior year and he’d stay home with the dog 😊. This year was Will’s turn and it couldn’t have been more wonderful. We flew into Rome the day after Christmas, checked into our hotel, and walked over 38,000 steps in 1 1/2 days!

He was fascinated by the architecture and the food – and this was true for the entire trip. The afternoon of the second day we boarded a cruise ship and set sail for Naples. We only had a day there and decided that our choice of shore excursions would be the ruins of Pompeii. It was amazing. To think that these walls and roads were completely covered with 23 feet of ash, debris and earth that needed to be painstakingly removed.

One of the things I found most interesting was the condition of the frescos in some of the buildings. Fresco is a type of mural painting done on wet plaster, and our guide said that the term comes from a combination of the words “fresh” and “stucco”. I’m not sure how true that is, but it sounded good. Just look at the examples that survived, after being buried for centuries.

The fresco that really grabbed my attention was this one depicting cherubs working with fabric… yes… fabric! And isn’t the intensity of the colors mind blowing?

That night we set sail again. This time for Messina, Sicily. It was difficult to choose what to do with our limited time in each port, but this time we both agreed on a bus tour that took us to the village of Taormina located on the top of a mountain. The landscapes were spectacular as we traveled up and up, and the village was even more fascinating. At the top of the main street (another goodly walk) we came to a theater that was centuries old and had been built and occupied at different times by both the Greeks and the Romans. What a view!!! And please don’t miss Mt. Etna in the background. It began to “let off steam” just a few days before we arrived there.

We had free time after seeing the theater and decided to try some local pasta on our walk back to the bus. It was delicious! And almost pretty enough to be the inspiration for an art quilt 😋.

We definitely didn’t have enough time there. Our next day was at sea as we made our way around the boot of Italy, through the Ionian Sea, and up the Adriatic to the port of Dubrovnik (this map is not of our exact cruise, but it gives perspective).

Our time in Dubrovnik proved to be the most interesting for me as a quilter, as I learned about local fibers and small scale silk production (it deserves a post of it’s own and will get one next week). So I’ll conclude this week’s post with our next port of call: Zadar, Croatia. Because our ship was smaller than many cruise ships, we were able to dock close to the best points of interest, and this was especially true in Zadar. The old walled city sits on a small peninsula protected by islands along the Adriatic. We docked along the end of the peninsula next to the Sea Organ (our ship was where I’ve drawn the thick red line in the lower left and the Sea Organ is just to the right by the musical notes).

What, you may ask, is a Sea Organ? Well, it’s a natural musical instrument, seventy meters long with thirty-five organ pipes built under concrete. It was created by a Croatian architect in 2005 as part of a reconstruction of the Zadar shoreline. The waves flow into the organ pipes and create a haunting melody that increases and decreases with the intensity of the weather. Click here for a video that captures the sound and feel (please watch to at least the 11 second mark so you can see/hear the “music” and the waves). I thoroughly enjoyed listening to it, and wandered off the ship a number of times to sit on the curved benches along the organ that look like a piano keyboard, and just listen.

As the sun was beginning to set I made my way back to the ship, only to find a small group of young people swimming off the stone steps! This was all the more surprising because the temperature of the air was about 42 degrees! When I got back to our cabin I found Will on the phone with his girlfriend. When I told him about the crazy swimmers he responded (you’ve probably already guessed this) – “can I?” I held his towel and took the photos. Crazy kid! I did join him in the hot tub afterwards 😊.

As the sun was setting the other part of this lovely shoreline became the star attraction. The same architect who designed the Sea Organ also came up with the “Greeting to the Sun”, a solar installation that collects the sun’s energy during the day and than creates a light show at night that dances with the sound of the organ. It was truly amazing – and the best place to view it was from the top deck of our ship. What a blessing! Please click here to watch the video I took (it was quite windy, so you won’t hear the sea organ, but the light show is pretty nontheless).

This brings my first trip post to an end. I can’t wait to share more with you next week. but I do want to share one more thing…

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I was invited to teach a class at the AQS show in Paducah this year and registration for members has opened. Registration for non-members begins January 20th. The class is entitled “Quilt, Slash, Create” and you can read about it in a post from November by clicking here!

Click here to register for my class – or to see what other instructors are offering. Don’t miss my friend Lori Dickman’s classes too!