Interchangeable,
Uniform, but still lovely:
Italian sea towns...
Instead of riding some distance and then stopping to stretch, this morning we quickly put all our things away and threw on our swimsuits once more. A quick dip in the sea (we swam out to a nearby cliff and back) warmed us up sufficiently for a stretch. Good heavens, we are terrible swimmers these days. It's hard to stay afloat when your arms are useless and you have a lot of muscle density.
The coastal road leads through several towns along the sea. They're all lined up between cliffs with stretches of perfect beach, and they all have older areas with churches and lovely Italian architecture. Everyone wears bright colours and sits under lines of beach umbrellas to protect himself from sun. It's sort of... boring.
Between the towns is where the really neat things are, like the rock we stayed on. There are spots full of fisherman and sea caves that you can see from the road. Without flippers, though, I'd be hesitant to explore them..
Eventually, we reached Genova, the home of Cristoforo Colombo! We knew virtually nothing about the town except that on our map it appears to be really, really long (>20km). Oh well! We headed in, stopping at a supermarket to pick up things for lunch. We stopped a little thereafter in a park to cook under a bridge (we started with antipasto that included Genoa salami and Roma tomatoes and divino cheese, then we had our carrot and squash mini farfalles with squash/tomato cream sauce. Yum!) and fill our water bottles and wash our dishes.
Then it was really time to head into Genova. The signs for the centre led us down by the harbour, but we turned off down a random road that turned out to be a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Also, there was a palace along the road that was another UNESCO site. Part of Genova's university was situated there, too, and we poked around to see what a properly old university building looked like. The answer? It was supremely nice. There were busts of old university presidents arranged around a courtyard with a giant chandelier and some lion sculptures, and although all the real rooms were locked, we can only assume they were ornate, too.
More random riding found us at one of the churches and at the Duke's Palace, which is now the site of a large antique market and some government offices--nothing more. Slightly disappointed by that, we again chose some random streets to ride down, and we happened across the house where Christopher Columbus was born! It's rather unremarked, actually; we didn't see any signs pointing to it from any place in the city, and there's barely a plaque in the front. It's as though Genova doesn't desire to claim the lostest man in history as their own. ;) In the same area as that house stand the old gates to the city, and the last remaining part of the old city wall. A sign nearby informed us that all the other parts of the city wall, as well as a slew of old buildings, were torn down as late as the 1960s to make room for new office buildings. I was disheartened.
We found our way back down to the harbour again, where we arrived in time to see a tattoo convention going on as well as the actors for a movie about pirates dismounting from an awesomely-outfitted pirate ship parked in the bay. It was clearly the place to be; some kind of festival choked the docks and people were milling about everywhere buying trinkets and fried food. Nearby at the aquarium, we stopped to admire a biosphere containing a tropical ecosystem.
Lots of people in Genova (and in Italy in General) were curious about our bike trip. We've decided it's best not to let the bikes out of our site at least during our time here, so we walk around with them wherever we go. We've had a few funny conversations, especially with people who don't speak English. There were a couple old women earlier today who talked to us at the fountain where we were washing, and we didn't understand everything that they were saying, but the gist of the conversation was this:
Where are you from? America and Canada
Where do you bike? Italy, Spain, France, ... everywhere!
Where do you sleep? By the sea!
Lovely! The stars are beautiful. (This was a big change from the French attitude of, "ew, you dirty cyclists.")
The sun started setting, and we got on our bikes to ride out. It was a long ride to this campsite, and a lot of it was uphill. This campsite isn't even very good (it's a terrace along the side of the road that has a few square metres of grass and a couple trees that hide it from the streetlight nearby), but it was already so late when we stopped that we really had no choice. We finished our leftover squash pasta, and now it's time for bed. yawn