Driving Lazio

We have plans!  Big winter break plans!  We are leaving Florence on Christmas Day, staying overnight in Pisa, and flying out early the morning of the 26th to PALERMO!!!!

This is the beginning of four weeks that we will be spending on Sicily and in the mezzogiorno, specifically Italy's southernmost provinces of Calabria, Basilicata, and Puglia.

What does this mean for the blog?  Well, it means that over the next few days we're going to be pretty well reduced to putting up pictures without too much backstory, in order to get the most important parts of our backlog up before Monday... this could be good news or bad news, depending on how you feel about our writing.

We hope to be able to do some updating on the road, but we don't know what the Internet situation will be where we're going, so please be patient.

Anyway, the second-to-last post about our trip to Lazio!

Admittedly, our visit to the American Cemetery at Nettuno followed by the Beachhead Museum made for a pretty heavy morning.  So, we drove on down the coast of Lazio without a particular destination in mind, just watching the waves.

We stopped a few times when vistas presented themselves for inspection.  There were a lot of fishing boats and fishermen around, and not too many other cars.

We were getting a little hungry, it certainly being time for lunch, so we started keeping our eyes open for restaurants.  Almost everything we passed was closed - after all, it was November in a succession of beach towns.  We eventually found an open pizzeria serving Neapolitan food called the Imperatore, or Emperor.  Promising.

Unfortunately, no pizza... but we did have lots of seafood!

This giant assortment cost only 7 euros... the wonders of getting off of the tourist path!  It was very salty, but the shellfish themselves were quite good.

We got some enormous oily pasta that each of us proceeded to get all over ourselves.  This is my spaghetti alle vongole, though all three pastas were approximately this oily.  Apparently we just all need bibs.

Completely and utterly stuffed, we piled back into the car and began making our way towards a tiny town that looked promising in our atlas - Sonnino, with only one road in or out due to the configuration of the hills.

We passed a small water buffalo farm - presumably these guys were being kept for their milk, because it certainly wasn't for their looks.  Or their smell.

Most of the roads we were on were pretty empty, so we did a lot of pulling over to take closer looks at interesting places.  Or to try to figure out the atlas, which, though thorough, doesn't include road numbers!  Argh!

The terrain was starting to get hillier and hillier, the further we got from the water.

As we turned on the road which would eventually take us to Sonnino, we were confronted with a very strange sight... a sea of goats!  Not every day you turn a corner to see this coming at you...

We piled out of the car and took lots of pictures... unfortunately, we were laughing too hard to get many in focus.

Soon, our car was completely engulfed.

With the goats out of our way, we continued down the road, missing an important turn and thus finding ourselves in the small medieval center of Priverno.  If only all missed turns could end you up in a town as pretty as this...

The town had a really pretty central piazza, anchored by the church but with a few restaurants and even a B & B, all in beautiful rustic buildings. 

All of them had been painted red at some point, it looked like, and the paint stuck around better on some buildings than others.

As you can see, we were beginning to lose the light (that happens so early here in the winter!  Incidentally, happy solstice yesterday, and cheers to the days starting to lengthen again).  We all got back in the car and found our way back to the road to Sonnino.

Sonnino is sited spectacularly atop a hill just inland from the coast.

It has a stunning view out over the valley below - I'm sure that the location was very strategic, back when that mattered.  Now, instead of a view of approaching armies, there's a view of a cheerily lit soccer field.

Once we finally figured our way up the hill to Sonnino's main drag, we got the car parked in the central piazza and got out to do a little looking around.  Down the street we could see the evening passeggiata beginning.

Turning around we saw a tunnel leading further up into town.  Husbear and I were unable to resist its song, but Auntie stayed in the piazza looking at the war memorials and watching the kids flirt.

Sonnino has a very small, very old area at the highest point of the hill.  We took about fifteen minutes or so, wandering the narrow streets.  Nobody else was out.

We walked back to the car to find Auntie frantically waving her arms.  "Didn't you hear me!? The cops were here and they say we have to move the car!!"  So we did, getting right back on the road towards Anzio.

Once back in Anzio (more complicated than it sounds - with several detours we blame on extra-confusing road signs, as well as a frantic search for our compass) we settled on a pizza restaurant that looked inviting and was, more importantly, open.  It was called "Ferro di Cavallo", or Horseshoe.

No, they didn't have horse pizza.  What do you think this is, Switzerland?

Hungry hungry hungry, we started off with an order of olive ascolane (fried olives stuffed with meat) and a fried stuffed zucchino blossom.  Along with their love of offal, the "fifth quarter", Romans and the people living near Rome are renowned for their love of fried.  These were good, though they did prompt another discussion of if the zucchini blossoms are really necessary - I mean, by the time you stuff them with a bunch of mozzarella cheese and an anchovy, you don't taste them anyway.

We moved on to pizzas, which were pretty good - tough not as good as the amazing ones we had here in Florence last week at Antica Porta... which we will blog someday. 

I wasn't all that hungry, so I went for a margarita... Auntie got a capricciosa, for some reason the pizza that appeals to everyone we bring to a pizzeria (it's a big mix of ingredients - here's Mama Bear and Pegs' slightly crazier version), and Husbear stuck with a funghi, just mushrooms.

Much fuller and happier, we walked back to Anzio's town square to see what a rebuilt piazza actually looks like.  I mean, I think we can safely assume this has been rebuilt since the war.

It's a well-done job.  There's a large fountain in the center that it's actually possible to sit on, and with many nicely designed benches/planters around the periphery.

For today, good night from Anzio.  Tomorrow's trip was to Ostia Antica, the ancient port of Rome, and then back to Florence.

girlie

Comments

[auntie]

Just for the sake of historical accuracy.... the "little walk up the hill" in Sunnino was more than 45 minutes, and the police blew their whistles within about 10 minutes of the bear's leaving for their "brief" walk. My nodding and shrugging and pointing upwards to the police seemed to buy time, and they watched to make sure I yelled up the tower for the bears, and then listened to hear a response. Each time, I looked at the police, shrugged and shook my head, like "those crazy kids can't hear me." The police walked the full length of the little main road rousting teens, and were on their way back when finally the bears appeared.

The same thing actually happened outside Ostia Antica when we were eating at IL Monumento..... there was actually a tow truck there... while husbear was ambling around the medeval town shootin' pics. When he emerged, I did my best to look really really angry, put my hand on my hips and pointed very dramatically to the tow truck. Husbear actually broke in to a full on run...until he saw that there was no one in the tow truck. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA . I am a sick sick person. HAH AHA AHAH.

[girlie]

Achem... just because the can of worms has been opened, and I am nothing if not a stickler for accuracy...

A review of the timestamps on the Sonnino pictures shows that between the last picture taken by the car and the last taken in the medieval center is a spread of...

11 minutes.

Those cops must have been moving very quickly!

Totally with you on the Ostia Antica thing, though.

girlie the vindictive

[auntie]

And whose to say that those pictures 11 minutes apart were not taken BEFORE you went up the tower, and before i was yelling "Coopers?" up the well of the tower to appease the police? eh? who says? As I recall, there were no pix taken upon your descent to the semi-frantic ellen-by-the-car.

Yet, now that I have had this (what I think should be ) last-say, shall we agree that it was a scary and silly series of moments atop a hill in Lazio, and let the rest be?

Hi,

I was doing a Google search and came across your post. I love that you stumbled upon Sonnino. Both of my great-grandparents are from there. You may have seen one of the 3 butcher shops that my family own! I try to go back as often as possable. I also have a blog about Sonnino if you're interested. The address is www.sonnino.blogspot.com.
Ciao,
Angelo

[girlie]

Angelo, thank you for commenting! Sonnino was a beautiful town - we felt very lucky to have stumbled on it, even if only for a little while. It's so beautifully situated! I will certainly check your blog out!