Frasassi Caves

This post is short because I believe others have done a better job than I can of explaining a local attraction. Please click on the hyperlinks for excellent photography and explanation.

The attraction is a relatively newly discovered, post WWII, cave system a little north of us called the Frasassi. Since the web site for the caves has better explanations than I can provide I have not posted any photos. Don't forget to click on the little British flag on the right side of the web site for English language and make sure you look at the galleria fotografica. Also, a good YouTube entry is available. Searching Wikipedia will also produce a few photos.

The outdoor panaromic view shown on the YouTube entry looks like most of driving around the mountains of the Abruzzo, especially on the way to Gran Sasso or Norcia. More on those in the near future.

Fuel Prices and Total Cost

I frequently get asked how we live with the high European gas prices. Here's some thoughts on that: With the recent rise in crude oil prices, diesel in Italy today is $7.10/gallon. Prices here are adjusted daily very much like in the US. Just like in the US increases are passed on immediately but decreases have to wait for the oil to pass through the pipeline.

We have an automatic Ford Focus with a 136 HP 2.0 liter turbo-diesel that is about the equivalent of a 170 HP gasoline engine. The automatic transmission is actually a computerized robotic double clutch transmission that is totally unlike prior automatics and similar to the VW DSG transmission. This type of Ford Focus body is supposed to be available in the US next year though I don't think the particular engine will be. Being a fairly powerful engine in a relatively small car, it delivers good performance and still averages, city/highway, 42 MPG. A diesel being at its best on long distance highway cruising, I have gotten in excess of 55 MPG on long trips. Ford Focus's have a reputation for having a good ride, handling very well and excellent reliability. The German equivalent of Consumer Reports found that the Focus is the most reliable car sold in Germany. We have had the car almost a year with no problems of any kind and had similar experience with a prior Focus.

Despite taking three long trips this past year, the closeness of everyday things and more walking has limited our annual mileage to 11,000 miles. In the US we drove cars about 18,000 miles per year.

Taking those facts into consideration and assuming a US premium gas price of $3.25/gallon, I did the following calculations:
In the US we drove 18,000 miles per year at 20 MPG and used 900 gallons at $3.25/gallon for a total cost of $2,925/year.
In Italy we drive 11,000 miles per year at 42 MPG and used 262 gallons at $7.10/ gallon for a total cost of $1,860 per year.

I was a surprised when I saw the results as I thought our costs in Italy would be a little, but not much, higher. I decided to plug in the best I experienced in the US and that would be 18,000 miles per year at 21 MPG and $2.75 per gallon, which gives a cost of $2,357. At worst, when we lived in Las Vegas I was getting 18 MPG and paying $3.50+/gallon which would push the annual cost to $3,500.

I am still a bit surprised that we can meet our transportation needs without curbing them in any way and with a car that has good performance, rides well, handles well and is very reliable for less annual fuel cost than in the US despite such high fuel prices. One factor I did not take into account is that a turbo-diesel engine adds about €2,000 to the cost of a car. To be fair, used cars hold their value much better in Italy than in the US and the added cost of the turbo-diesel can be almost fully recovered at the time of sale as they are much more desirable as used cars than gasoline engined cars.

A favorite car here seems to be the BMW 320d, a 2 liter turbo-diesel with 184 hp, equivalent to about 230 hp gasoline and averages 45 mpg. BMW makes a special fuel efficient diesel (BMW 320d Efficient Dynamics) that has 163 hp, equivalent to about 205 hp gasoline, goes 0-60 in about 7.5 seconds and averages 58 mpg. Amazing statistics for a car of its size and questions why engineers should bother with electrics that handle poorly. The high fuel prices here motivate most people to seek out high mileage cars.

Bikes Part 1, Entertainment

While I was out riding my bike along the seaside bike path yesterday (Sunday) morning, I noticed what appeared to be race wardens taking up positions at various intersections and also encountered groups of racing bikes coming at me and passing me. I guessed this meant there was a bike race scheduled for the morning and I was correct.
We usually go out for coffee about 10:30 as, it seems, does most of Italy. It seems to be the unofficial coffee break time and the caffes are always crowded from about 10:15 to 10:45. Come at 11:15 and you may only find one or two people in a caffe. Sunday is a slight exception as the hour seems to move to 11:00. Our guess is that this is due to the fact that many Italians like to stay up late on Saturday nights and, aided by the siesta, late means 3 or 4 in the morning. So about 11:00 we were walking to our favorite caffe, technically a pasticceria because of its pastry business and lack of alcohol, when at an intersection a race warden raised his stop sign. In a moment the breakaway of about 6 riders shot past us and about 200 meters behind them the dense pack of maybe 200 bikes arrived also at high speed.
Seeing so many bikes, so close together and traveling so fast, is always exciting and more than a little scary. While helmets offer a little protection, the bikers essentially have no protection against falls other than trying to slide. Almost all the riders are age 20 to 30 and I think they probably have to be that young to do something so dangerous for no reason other than to win. Sometimes the pack is talking as it passes but not this day; the only noise was the slight mechanical noise that well adjusted racing bikes make and the rush of wind caused by the pack.
If you have never seen a bicycle road race I highly recommend that you see one once. If possible one run on a circuit course so that you have an opportunity to see several passes. Bike races in our town are usually on a 2 to 3.5 mile (actually 3 to 6 km) course with 15 to 20 laps. In Italy you can stand very close (within a foot) to the passing bikes, making it feel like something more than sitting in a stadium watching a game. You can see the intensity in the riders faces and, at least for me, it is always amazing to feel the strength of the wind of the pack.
We walked on, had coffee and on the way back got to see one of the last passes. Italy never fails to entertain. This morning is market day, a diversion of a different sort.
I plan to write more on bikes, to explain where and what I ride daily and about the night race held in the sometimes dimly lit street of our city last August.

Civitella del Tronto

Civitella del Tronto (hereafter Civitella; yes, there are other Civitella's in Italy) is a town near us and a favorite place of mine. The changing photographs on the city's website give an idea of its excellent military position which was the reason for the location of most Italian hill towns. Imagine the photographs with Civitella with only cultivated fields near it. One of the photographs is a view to the ocean, for most of the life of Civitella nothing existed between it and the ocean except similar walled hill towns.
Civitella was also a Papal colony and part of the Papal states. Civitella was the last city to surrender during the war for the unification of Italy. That surrender is sometimes recorded as March 20, 1861 but is usually celebrated on March 17.
As an aside, most of Italy is celebrating the 150th anniversary of unification this year though Luis Durnwalder, the president of the ruling council of Bolzano province of the Sud Tirole region has said it is not an event to celebrate for his area. This is something akin to one of the US states opting out of celebrating the fourth of July. Here everyone is so used to this semi-autonomous region expressing its love of all things Germanic that it was hardly noticed. If you've connected on the hyperlink you can see that Mr. Durnwalder is not the most Italian looking politician you've ever seen.
But back to Civitella, it always reminds me of San Gimignano, a small tourist attraction a short distance from Sienna. I had the opportunity to see San Gimignano many times during the early 1970's. When we were bored or had nothing else to do we would drive to Florence, Sienna or San Gimignano to while away a Saturday afternoon. At that time I thought it was very crowded but apparently today it receives many times the visitors. Civitella attracts a fair number of European visitors in the summer and very, very few Americans. I have been there many times and have never seen another American though a review of the sign in book at the fortress museum reveals a few American visitors.
Other than June, July and August, Civitella has few visitors. A trip there during the off season lets you wander around very narrow old cobblestone streets where you will meet only a few locals and no vehicles as all but small emergency vehicles are stopped at the city gate. The crooked, narrow streets, more properly alleys, with relatively high buildings make it usually a shadowy dark walk. It reminds me of walking in the residential areas of Venice before the tourist explosion. Tourist restaurants and local restaurants remain open but have few patrons and lots of atmosphere. It doesn't take much imagination to understand that what you are seeing is how things were hundreds of years ago. We have gone there on several occasions and seen no other tourists or only a handful at the fortress museum. As you can probably tell, I highly recommend it if you come to Italy and have time for a detour or want to see something without the usual set of tourists. One of my great fears is that we see it in a television tour guide's list of undiscovered sights.
Other than to wander the old streets of town, the main site is the museum of the fortress. I strongly urge you to use the hyperlink to look at the site and to have Google translate activated. It is a very well preserved fortress and in recent years the Italian government has modernized the museum to make it worth a trip. Admittedly, almost all of the museum relates to military history but the reason for the existence of all of the Italian hill towns was to provide security from successive waves of invading armies after the fall of Rome. Civitella is interesting because you can see where sentries of the fort could see along all of the valleys approaching the town and, if necessary, alert the people working the crops to get within the walls of the city. The extremely good strategic location is much more obvious on top of the fort than when you approach it.
Another curious matter is the very good view of the ocean. Probably, until recent times, very few of the people of Civitella ever visited the ocean but they have a great view of it. In a straight line, Civitella is about 13 or 14 miles from the ocean; a distance that made travel difficult and dangerous. With the arrival of the Fiat 500 in 1957 that all was about to change. I have met many people from similar hill towns who never walked on a beach or put the foot in the ocean until the 1960's.
If you travel to Civitella there are several restaurants available. One is a stand out, good enough to rate two spoons and forks in the Michelin Red Guide for Italy, Zunica. We have eaten there several times and found the food to be consistently excellent. While other food is available, the restaurant serves a changing menu of local, fresh specialties that won't be found other places. It also has a few rooms to let if you want to spend the night in a medieval hill town, we have not stayed there but I looked at a room once and thought it seemed very clean.
Civitella has been a favorite of mine for more than 30 years for its well preserved character and lack of tourists. I highly recommend it.

Abano Terme

It had been a while since we had gone anywhere and we decided to do something special on super bowl weekend. After a little thinking, that something developed into a long weekend at a spa. After first trying to book reservations at a spa we had previously visited, Galzignano Terme, we settled on a the Abano Grand Hotel at Abano Terme.

Abano Terme is a city in northeastern Italy, about 6 miles south of Padova, located in an area known as the Euganean Hills. It is famous for hot springs and mud baths and has been a thermal spa since the time of the Romans. The Euganean Hills are the remains of very old volcanoes, they are low, rounded and covered with green foliage. They are unusual projections in an area that is otherwise flat.
Before this trip, we had stayed at spa hotels at Galzignano Terme, another thermal spa city in the same area and deriving its waters from the same volcanic activity. Despite their proximity, the two cities are only about 9 miles apart, the waters differ greatly. We found the water at Abano Terme much less irritating to our noses than that at Galzignano Terme.

At Abano Terme, we stayed at the Abano Grand Hotel. While a relatively new building, being about 11 years old, it was built to look like and have the feel of an extremely well maintained grand old European hotel. It has the nicest and largest hotel bar I have seen in Italy as well as a very nice smoking room and a beautiful card room with about 10 green felted bridge tables. The dining room is what one would expect. The well decorated rooms are very large, we stayed in the smallest which was about 500 square feet. I was reminded of the Bellagio in Las Vegas. One of the reasons we chose the Grand Hotel Abano was the food reviews I found posted online. I could not find one person who thought the food at the hotel was anything other than extraordinary. General reviews of the hotel were about 98% positive, itself an unusually positive number. Even the couple of bad reviews could not find fault with the food in the restaurant. Our experience confirmed these reviews and I personally found the food and the service to be as good as any I have had in Italy.

The pools of the spa begin indoors, where they are quite large, and go outdoors, where they are even larger, through plastic curtains that resemble vertical blinds. The water comes from the volcanic springs at about 200 degrees. The spa cools the water to 97 degrees in one pool and 91 degrees in another. When we there the early morning outside air was a little above freezing causing large clouds of steam arise from the hot waters in the pools.

The pools and the spa have a large number of whirlpool jets and different types of settings, shallow, walking, hot tub style and of course the ever present, masochistic, very cold tub (the only thing we didn't try). Compared to other spa we have experienced the assortment was larger and more varied. The most impressive is an array of three stainless steel tubes about 10 feet high located near the pool that shoot out three streams of hot water similar to what you would expect from fire hydrants and landing about 20 feet into the pool. They are painful to have hit you directly but a short distance away in the water they provide a good massage. They are activated by pressing a button and are only on for about 10 minutes at a time.

Abano Terme (pop. 19,000) exists for tourists and it has made its city core off limits to vehicles and designed it for pedestrian traffic. Additionally, it has a new area that sequences buildings throughout a large grassy mall area that was different than anything I have previously seen but I am sure exists else where. Both areas have a variety of shops, caffes and restaurants mostly aimed at tourists though we observed a substantial number of locals on the streets and shopping.

For other things to do near Abano Terme, Padova is a short distance away with some very significant art including what many believe to be one of the seminal works of the Renaissance, Giotto's Scrovegni Chapel. While it looks mild today, it was one of the first times in 500 years that an artist had dared to depict emotion, motion and depth of field; thereby defying the religious ban on anything seen as glorifying man. Venice is near, with all that it is. Both Venice and Padova are easily reached by car or train. When I have stayed in Padova in the past and traveled to Venice, I never checked a train scheduled because the trains run so frequently, about every 5 minutes.

We had a great weekend at the spa and I would recommend it to anyone thinking of traveling to Padova or Venice as an alternative to staying in one of the cities.

Urban Living

We live a little off the center of a small coastal city, about three blocks from the sea. While the city itself is relatively small in population, it is part of a string of contiguous coastal cities that, taken together, have a population of about 300,000. Most of the buildings in our town are four to five stories tall with the ground floor being retail, office or commercial.

This creates a living pattern that encourages walking to shops and stores rather than driving. I decided to make a list of stores and shops within three blocks of us, though I think six blocks is a reasonable walking area. While my list is far from complete, I think it makes clear the large selection of merchants near us: Caffe's (too numerous to count), pizzerias, restaurants, one large supermarket and several smaller ones, bakeries, several butchers and a poultry shop, banks, pharmacy, clothing stores, fruit stores, a florist, gas station and car wash, card shop, office supply store, lawyers, medical doctors, dentists, hardware, pet supply, the beach itself and numerous related shops, police, air conditioning sales and service, travel agencies, leather stores and a leather processor, tobacco shop, pastry shop, herb store (like a health food store but only dealing in herbs), beauty parlors, barbers, bicycle shops, plumber, specialty hardware, fire extinguisher and alarm store, drape and curtain shops, white goods store, specialty cleaning goods (more on this in a later post) , motorcycle store, motorcycle equipment store, mattress store, kitchen supply stores (2), home furnishing stores (2), betting parlors and slot rooms.

If you widen the walking area to six blocks it incorporates every thing you need to live and would include the post office and train station. Add another three blocks and you would include BMW and Volvo dealerships, Avis car rental and several body shops, not to speak of duplicating many times over the previously listed shops and restaurants. On Monday mornings, the market starts one block from us and stretches three blocks north to a one block square piazza where the main market is located.

Unless it is inclement weather, we find it takes longer to drive somewhere and find a place to park than to walk directly to it. Fortunately our area has four mild seasons and we have had a particularly warm and mostly dry winter.

Because of the convenience of the stores, there are always many pedestrians on the street. Additionally, as street crime is virtually non-existent here, people are not afraid to walk places. With a bakery, butcher shop, supermarket and the best pizzeria in town, all within one block of us, we never lack for food, not necessarily a good thing.

Other things within one block: veterinarian, beauty parlors, herb shop, fruit stand, caffes, fresh pasta shop, leather store, florist, moped dealer, driver school, clothing store, jewelry store and a slot room.