Nov 30 – Dec 1, 2009 – Paestum, Italy – Scenes from our stay

We stayed the Hotel Casale in Paestum and I think were its guests at the time of our visit.  The building in the following picture was where its owners, a couple with a 10 month old baby girl that was just about to start walking lived on the ground floor and the guest rooms were on the upper floor.  We had an excellent room, that retained old world charm with all the modern comforts.

In the summer it would be very nice to lounge at the tables under the big canopies out front.

Adjacent to the guest rooms was the restaurant that was part of the hotel which looked out over open fields and a set of local mountains.  We had dinner at this restaurant both nights and the food was excellent. 

A picture of the owner and his 10 year old daughter.   Both he and his wife were very warm and gracious people.  He spoke Italian and French and she spoke Italian and English but his French was better than her English.

A bonus of this accommodation was the availability of bicycles for use by the guests.  We went for bike rides to the nearby beach and explored the surrounding area both days of our stay.

Laura-Lyn said that in Canada jade plants like these are indoor plants yet we saw them all over Italy, sometimes in some very large bushes.

Between the beach and the housing of Paestum was a treed strip of  land that acted as a buffer between them.  We had never seen a denser growth of trees anywhere.  This photo is trying to show how dark it was in the tunnel through the forest to the beach.

 

Beaches in Italy aren’t like what we’re used to in Canada found in France or Germany.  It seemed as though beach property could be bought or leased because operators had put together sun-bathing concessions on this beach and others we’d seen in Italy.  These concessions included change rooms and other equipment such as sun umbrellas and chairs for sun-worshippers to rent.  They may also have included rights to parts of the beach and control over who used their part of the beach.

At this time of year, none of these concessions were operational so we had the beach to ourselves.  Except for this ultralight and its pilot that passed overhead.

 

On our next visit to the beach we spotted a large number of jellyfishes that had been washed up by the waves or tide.  Allister and Charlotte took it upon themselves to round them up and return them to the water.

I haven’t attempted many of these types of photographs but I was curious about how it might turn out.  This one was quite good.

Nov 30 – Dec 1, 2009 – Paestum, Italy – Greek ruins

Pronounced PAYST-oom, Paestum Italy was another stop on our Roman and Greek antiquities tour.  Believe it or not, Paestum was originally a Greek city founded in the 6th century BC.  The Romans took it over in the 3rd century BC and has one of the best collections of Greek temples in either Greece or Italy.

The site consists of a museum and the ruins site.  We started off with the museum.

 

It contains some well preserved antiquities of various types, all of which were discovered at the site.

The museum also shows this rare example of Greek painting taken from the side of a tomb that shows a diver possibly representing the dive from life to death.

 

After our museum visit and before visiting the site, we made our lunch.  We were befriended by a local dog that kept Laura-Lyn company while she made sandwiches in the back of Jean-Pierre Peugeot.

 

The highlights of the site are three, well-preserved temples Neptune, Hera, and Ceres.

This one, that Charlotte and Allister are bench-pressing, is the Temple of Ceres and it sits at one end of the archaeological site.

This is another view of the Temple of Ceres.

Allister feeling eloquent.

The Temples of Neptune and Hera.  I think Neptune is the closest one and was massive and this huge structure is apparently a classic example of the Doric style.  It was easy to see where Renaissance architects and artists got their inspiration.

Here is a close up picture of the columns of the Temple of Neptune.  One of our guide books claimed this temple is better preserved than the Parthenon in Athens.

 

We returned at night to get this photo of the Temple of Neptune.