April 6: Easter Monday in the Po River Estuary

This will be a short placeholder blod, as we rented a car in Verona this morning -- and my camera is still inside!  Black camera, black interior, and lots of stuff to lug.  Ian has solemnly promsed to fix it!

Today we rented our car at teh Verona airport, and drove to Cammachia, near the coast.  The holiday traffic was dreadful, and it took us over an hour to drive the final kilometre to where our road ended and we had to merge into the coastal route.  We couldn`t find a place to park at Lido di Garibaldi, but found an illegal spot at the Abbazia di Paloma.

This monastery was once on an island, like Torcello, near Venice, and it also had an amazing marble floor.  However, instead of mosaics, every surface was decorated with 10th Century frescos -- and the island was now part of the Camacchia Valley.  My favourite fresco shows a creature looking a lot like the Tasmanian Devil eating people in hell, althought the life of Christ stuff was good too.  Because it was a holiday today, the museum and cloisters were open too.  I was a bit distressed that the lid from a Roman sarcophagus had been reused as a door mat -- seemed a bit disrespectful -- but I guess there was just a lot of the stuff around!

We drove to the Bosca di Mesola, which was once a hunting lodge for the Dukes of Ferrara, and I expected venerable old trees and a hunting lodge, especially since the guidebooks say that it is only open on certain days, but it was really a managed forest completely surrounded by a fence.

We arrived here in Ravenna about 7, grabbed a quick dinner, and are really excited about seeing some Byzantine mosaics in the morning.

Just a post script on driving to our hotel in Ravenna, which is in the old part of the city.  I drove into Siracusa a few years ago and the traffic was horrible.  I was afraid I was going to face the same thing driving into Ravenna, but the traffic was fine and the driving pretty straight forward by North American standards.  There were some pretty narrow streets getting to the hotel, but I already knew where to park, so it was fairly easy.  I also had a good GPS!