Italy - Part 2 - Castle life

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Tivoli & Bagnoregio 

Benvenuti in Italia! Let's start our trip and talk about it in more details. First day: Villa d'Este and Castle in the sky. Enjoy!


 Our first day in Italy (not counting Thursday as we arrived quite late) started a bit hectically. The traffic was fine, our schedule was ok, however, Italian parking was a bit (I am being kind) tricky. Yes, there are some parking lots but as tourists having the tickets for 10:30am with the time being 10:15am, you try finding the closest spot possible. So you go and look around and crane your neck and do everything humanly possible to find the spot. You had been a hundred meters from your destinations and then (not being able to park) it got farther and farther, the stress came crawling, we had tears in our eyes, .... no, not really, however, the only space we found (at 10:25am) was about 15 minutes from Villa d'Este. Here comes a little morning cardio, why not, right? Anyway, if you were in Italy, you know that time, schedules and punctuality aren't that important. So, not a problem at all that we arrived some 15 min later than we were supposed to. We got in! 




  


If you know something about Tivoli and Villa d'Este - good for you - if not, you can read all about it here but basically with this villa, Cardinal Ippolito was trying to beat the beauty of Hadrian's villa - oh, men and their egos :D yes, it's super beautiful and you feel like you went 500 years back in time. 
Useful tip: google where to park in advance, you'll save time and energy! 









Aaaand on to the next one we went. More precisely Civita di Bagnoregio with its famous Castle in the Sky. 


If you're asking why "in the sky" - it's simple - when there's fog in the valley you can't see that the castle is on the top of the hill, you just see the castle "flying" among the clouds (yop, must be amazing, it was more or less sunny when we were there though). This was the first place where I got the "crowded with tourists" feeling (we left Tivoli at around noon and arrived in Bagnoregio at 2pm so there were "few" tourist buses there. We had decided not to go to the castle as we went on to Orvieto that day and we felt like it did not get any better from up close. 
Btw shoutout to a random guy who coordinated our selfie-photoshoot when my head was out of the frame! This is what humanity is about!




Btw 2: I wasn't really expecting so many people there. I don't know why, maybe I thought that these are only small 'no-name' villages. However, it seems that I am not the only Pinterest member (surprise, surprise :D). 
Next week we'll continue road-tripping across Italy - you will see (and read) a little bit about Orvieto, Montepulciano and maybe Siena. CU there!