Small town Italy

October 11, 2022

Tuesday Oct 11- 4th day of tour

We woke up today having to be flexible. We were supposed to take a boat cruise to some grotto’s this morning, but the seas were too rough. So instead, we spent the morning exploring the town. It is a very Italian beach town in that the shops were open from about 9-1, then closed for siesta, then open back up at 5pm-9pm. It had beaches, cliffs, cool alleyways and fun pastry places. In Rome, most people spoke English, but here, hardly anyone does. I had to use a lot of gestures to get my point across.

It is a good thing that I had Google translate, because I was going to go into an old castle and as I was going past the gate, I decided to translate the sign. It basically said, armed military installation, no trespassing. So…. I didn’t go in.

At lunch time, we went to a pasta making demonstration, and got to sample the wares.

Luckily, by mid afternoon, the sea died down so we could go see the grottos. On our 2 hour boat ride we saw absolutely beautiful grottos, stunning coastline and a still very choppy sea. It always amazes me what the power of water can do, you can check it out in the video below. The picture at the top of this post is taken of Vieste (where we stayed) from the boat. Because the seas were still super rough, we all got soaked, but it was well worth it.

Happy hour and dinner will round out the night! Tomorrow it is on to wine tasting, more quaint towns, Matera and sleeping in a cave.

Ps you will notice from the pictures that I had to change a few times during the day The weather changed a bit.

Early morning walk down to the beach

Early morning walk through very wet town streets

Later in the morning I did more town exploring

And more exploring. This cool rock in the background had broken away from the cliff face at some point.

There were many cats in the city and some appeared friendly. But when I stopped to look at these 2 feral cats, they sat up quickly and gave me a pretty mean eye- I moved on fairly fast.