Italy 2011, An Unexpected Bus Trip

On the third and final morning I woke up with a sore foot and an upset stomach so was less inclined than ever to partake of the meagre breakfast.  Feeling sorry for myself I washed down some imodium capsules with a couple of cups of tea and the others picked about at the dry biscuits and pre-packed long life croissants and cakes.

We had a late afternoon flight so had all of the morning and the early afternoon for more sightseeing and the plan today was to use the local bus and take a trip to the shoreline of the lake that we had seen several times now from the windows of the train.  From what we could make out from the badly faded timetable half stuck with peeling  sellotape to the window at the terminus the buses seemed to run every hour and we had missed one by a matter of only seconds so there was a forty minute wait for the next one to come along.  I purchased the  tickets for Marino and we waited in the sunshine.

The bus arrived and the driver went off for a break and a cup of coffee and we took our seats as it started to fill up with passengers and at the appointed time the driver returned and we set off.  It drove through Castel Gandolfo and then we expected it to drop down to the lake to the marina that we could see below us but instead of going down it started to climb and stopped at the town of Marino.  With hindsight we should have got off there but we still expected the driver to drop us down to the lake but after a couple of stops the truth dawned on us that it was never going anywhere near a marina at all and we had wrongly supposed that Marino was a marina when in fact it was a town situated high above the lake.

The bus lurched about and threw us from side to side to such an extent that we had to cling on grimly to the handrails but this was to be expected I suppose because, after all, we were in Italy!  Traffic regulations currently in force in Italy were approved by the Legislative Decree number 285 of 30^th April 1992 and are contained in the Italian Highway Code called the Codice Della Strada.  Anyone visiting a busy Italian city or town however may well dispute that there is such a thing as a highway code in Italy because despite the best intentions of the rule book the country has some different driving rules to the rest of Europe and the traffic was hectic on this Monday morning.

Traffic lights are a good example of these different rules because each junction resembles the starting grid of a formula one Grand Prix.  At an Italian traffic intersection there is an intolerant commotion with cars all impatiently throbbing, engines growling, exhaust pipes fuming and clutch plates sizzling whilst behind the wheel the driver’s blood pressure reaches several degrees above boiling point.

A regard for the normal habits of road safety is curiously absent in Italy so although the traffic light colours are the same as elsewhere they mean completely different things.  Red means slow down, amber means go and green means that no rules applyat all!  At a junction an Italian driver simply points his car at the exit he is aiming for and shortly before the lights go green, he shuts his eyes, presses the accelerator to the floor then races forward and may God have mercy on anything or anyone in his way.  Zebra crossings are a meaningless waste of white paint and if a pedestrian steps out onto one then they are immediately considered a target.  Even worse – if caught on a crossing controlled by lights and they turn green for the traffic then he or she will have to take swift and evasive action because I believe it is considered permissible to run them down without any sort of penalty or punishment!

We didn’t know what to do now as the bus continued driving east and I began to worry that we had sufficient credit on the tickets as the bus kept going and going towards its ultimate destination, the town of Frascati where it discharged all of its passengers and the driver went off for another rest.  It was due to return to Albano in forty minutes so we found a nearby bar for an unexpected drink in a town that we had not planned to visit.

Italy 2011, Lake Albano and Castel Gandolfo

The small café was opposite the entrance to the Papal Palace which is where the Pope spends his summers on the shore of the lake ostensibly to avoid the oppressive heat of Rome.  I’m sure that this probably isn’t strictly necessary anymore because I imagine that the Vatican will have more than adequate air-conditioning facilities these days but nevertheless it still remains a nice place to spend the summer.  The Catholic Church owns this splendid Palace thanks to the Lateran Treaty of 1929 when Italy recognized the full ownership by the Holy See of the Pontifical Palace of Castel Gandolfo.

The villas and the grounds in which they stand comprise about fifty-five hectares, which makes it eleven hectares bigger than Europe’s third smallest sovereign state, that’s the Vatican itself.  Just over half of the grounds comprise a garden and they rest are used for orchards, vinyards and for farming.  The entire papal residence enjoys all the privileges of extraterritoriality and the properties which make up the villas comprise the Papal Palace itself, which includes the Vatican Observatory, the Barberini Palace, housing for twenty-one employees, an electrical plant, offices, farm buildings and stables.   The villas possess their own pumping station providing water from the lake for plumbing and irrigation, as well as an aqueduct that carries drinking water from the nearby springs of Palazzolo, which are also on property belonging to the Holy See.

The Catholic Church owns property valued in billions of Euro but in Italy because they are considered religious buildings the Vatican avoids property tax on about a hundred thousand properties which are classed as non-commercial and include schools, ecclesiastical structures, hospitals and clinics.  This is a concession worth having and estimates of its annual saving from avoiding the levy range widely from €600m to €2.2bn.  This happy status is the result of a State/Church deal of 2005 but now as the Italian economic crisis gathers pace critics of the arrangement want it reversed and the Pope to be sent a bill for years of arrears and here he is working out just how much he owes.

As we enjoyed a Peroni beer it started to dawn on us that we hadn’t planned terribly well for this little walk, we weren’t really sure where we were going, we didn’t know with any degree of certainty how far it was, we didn’t have a map, it was thirty five degrees centigrade and we hadn’t used or brought with us any sun protection cream.  Regardless of this we walked a little further and began to catch sight of Lake Albano sitting in a sort of volcanic bowl or natural amphitheatre with steep densely wooded slopes on all sides and marine blue water throwing back the reflections of the highest of the hills on the other side and the Papal Palace and the observatory close to where we were standing.

Because of the steep slopes this meant that there was a long walk down to the water’s edge which involved negotiating a winding road with a succession of tight hairpin bends as it made its way down to the shoreline below.  We gamely set off but after a hundred metres or so it became obvious that without protection from the sun and with Sue starting to turn an alarming shellfish pink across her shoulders that this was rather reckless so after a short debate common sense asserted itself over midday madness and we returned to the road and found a second bar for more Peroni, which was a far more sensible option.

We knew that there was supposed to be a bus service around the towns surrounding the lake but we couldn’t see any bus stops and we had no idea of the frequency or the schedule.  The lady serving in the bar told us that this spot was the bus stop and if we wanted to catch it we had simply to flag the driver down as it approached.  She couldn’t help with the timetable however so we ordered more drinks and put Kim on look-out duty to keep an eye on the road.

There seemed to be a worrying absence of public transport and it began to look as though we may have to walk back but eventually a blue and white bus appeared so we leapt into the road and the driver swiftly applied the brakes and brought the thing to a shuddering standstill and with a hiss of hydraulics opened the door.  We climbed on board and it was only then that we realised that we didn’t have any tickets.  They cannot be bought from the driver and travelling without one can involve a hefty fine but we were only going a couple of stops so we would have been unlucky to have been caught and we made it back to Albano without incident.

At the hotel our rooms were now ready but they weren’t quite what we were expecting because instead of accommodation in the hotel with the splendid views over the countryside which it boasted on its website we were allocated rooms in an unusual little annex about thirty metres away that had the look and feel of being seldom used.  More of this later but we accepted them at this point and quickly reassembled in the courtyard to go out again and explore the town of Albano.