Venice to Barcelona

The airport for Puerto La Cruz in northeast on the Caribbean. Isla de Margarita is off the coast.

Ah, the French Riviera…is yours for the taking, for a few hours anyway, when you leave the town of Villefranche to tour Monaco, Monte Carlo,St.-Paul-de-Vence, Cannes, and the Grand Corniche.

Monaco is one of the smallest nation’s of the World and Monte Carlo is its city with the Palace place on top of a high rock overlooking the city, the quaint port and the Meditteranean Sea. The small town and Palace area are a must. Plan to spend at least half of a day exploring the many shops along the narrow streets and enjoy the views from the Palace grounds.

Monte-Carlo was founded in 1866 during the reign of Charles III,who gave it his name. This area includes the world famous Casino, great hotels and the recently completed recreational centers consisting of the Centenaire gardens, the Larvotto beach and the Monte-Carlo Sporting Club.

Rome wasn’t built in a day…but you can tour it in just over 10 hours. A teeming anthill of humanity and antiquity intermingled with awful traffic jams, Rome grew up on the Tiber (“Fiume Tevere”) among seven low hills that rise from the river’s soggy eastern banks. It’s a city of many peeling layers of history, of which the bottom layer–that of the earliest Roman centuries–is the most interesting and still astonishingly whole. The hub of this layer is the Palatine Hill, the Forum, the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus.

On the western bank is the Citta Vaticana, the independent papal city where the Pope blesses pilgrims from all over the world. Neighboring Trastevere (“Across the Tiber”) is a mix of Roman, Greek and Jewish subcultures, great for little restaurants and nightlife. Further north on the other bank is “vecchia Roma,” medieval Rome of the Pantheon and Piazza Navona; Renaissance Rome is centered south of the Corso Vittorio Emanuele. Commercial Rome is the city of the Via del Corso, the Piazza del Popolo, the controversial Victor Emmanuel monument and finally the Stazione Termini, the nexus for all trains and roads from Rome.

As always, it has been a challenge, a dramatic adventure. Now it’s finally over, the race against the clock right up to the last minute. Another guide, another region, with the same reasons for existence, the same desire to recount, to amaze and delight, and the increased awareness of discovering a country which is always different and always true to itself. Tuscany is no exception. The common denominator leads us page after page in the discovery of a reality which is already a myth, of a land which is already a dream. This is love at first sight, and the desire to live it to the full. It’s consuming nostalgia and genuine wonder, or else it’s indifference. There are no half measures, no clichés. It’s all here, concealed in stones which whisper their history: cities, towns, castles, and cathedrals, palazzi and bridges. Everything is art, everything is unique, vast genius. Maybe it’s a generic inheritance, or more simply a “modus vivendi”. You can perceive it, but not describe it. Just try, for example, to summarise in a few clear concepts Roberto Benigni’s extraordinary, awkward form of communication. This is Tuscanness. And so are the colours of Chianti, – whether we’re speaking of the wine or the countryside – the genius of Leonardo and the Florentine beefsteak. The rest is history. Rivers of ink have flowed – the Arno doesn’t need them – in attempts to say what has already been said, already written. The truth is that we didn’t discover Tuscany. But we have tried to re-perceive and interpret it, each bringing to the task his or her own cultural baggage and experience of life. We have all contributed to make it different and we would have liked to do more, but a guide by definition remains only a first step towards knowledge. We only hope that it will prove a useful companion along the way. To transmit what is perhaps most aptly encompassed by the term “Tuscanness” is frankly no easy task.