May 13/14, 2013

My weather magic is still working. While it did rain on and off in Barcelona, so far since we boarded the ship, we have had good weather other than some strong winds the first night. There was not a whole lot of motion, but yesterday several of our group complained of being seasick. Most of them have cabins with balconies pretty high up where the motion of the ship is greater. Our cabin is in the steadiest part, low and  midships, although location wouldn't affect me too much.

Today, May 13, we are docked at Livorno, Italy. The skies are cloudless. Most folks are off to Florence which is a two hour bus ride from here. I went to Florence many years ago, and while I liked it, I feel no compulsion to go see it again. This afternoon I have a tour to Pisa to see the Cathedral's campanile (bell tower) lean.

(Later) It was a nice half day tour to Pisa, although Italian tour buses are past snug to very tight on knee room. by the way, the tower really does lean. In fact the Baptistry of the Cathedral (the red dome ion the left in this picture) also leans somewhat as do two other towers in the city, St. Nicholas and St. Michael. Our guide was most informative about the history of Pisa and their celebrations, for  example why Pisa celebrates New Year's on March 25 making this 2014 for them.

It's only 16 miles from Livorno, and before the Arno River delta silted up, it was the main port in this part of Italy. The silting was partly natural, and partly man-made because the merchants in Florence objected to using Pisa as their port (politics, of course) and preferred Livorno. Since Florence and the Borgias had the upper hand in the area ... well, Livorno is now the port, and Pisa is a university town with an architectural tourist attraction much like Charlottesville except that Pisa has three universities to our one.

On to May 14. Now we are docked at Civitavecchia which is the port for Rome. I was in Rome fairly recently, and am sure that the tourist sights haven't changed in the meantime. The vast majority of the passengers have headed off to Rome which means the ship is quiet except for many, many announcements about "crew only" emergency drills. One of them included automatically closing all watertight and fire doors with a grand round of slamming. Interestingly, while they can close the doors by remote control, they have to be opened by people.