The Maritime Republic

Carol and Roger finally made it to a town that was founded after the Roman Empire.  The town is Amalfi…in the heart of the Amalfi Coast.  It took Gail and Morris Rosenberg to drag us this far south.

The Amalfi Coast, that famous tourist destination, lies on the south side of the Sorrento peninsula, mid-way between Napoli and Salerno.

The day Gail, Morris, Carol and Roger set out to explore the 25 miles of coastline along SS163, it was foggy, rainy and wet.  Even then, the scenery was breathtaking.

The first recorded mention of the Amalfi Coast comes from Homer’s Odyssey.  Legend has it that these two islands were the place that Odysseus was tempted by the sirens and had to put wax in his ears to keep their singing from luring his ship onto the rocks.

Ancestors of boatmen like these have plied the rocky waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea for millennia.  

About the time of the fall of the Roman Empire, towns started to spring up along the rocky coast.  Some became thriving fishing villages.  By the year 839, the town of Amalfi became a duchy, extended its rule to the villages surrounding it, and then one of three Maritime Republics on the Italian peninsula…the other two being Genoa and Venice.

Up until the end of the first millennium, the Maritime Republic of Amalafi was the Italian center of trade with the Eastern Mediterranean.  As a prosperous trade center, it was the target of a series of invasions.  

The Turks were first in 848. This watch tower to the right was one of several built along the Amalfi Coast to keep an eye out for a repeat Turkish performance.  

However, it was not the Turks, but the Normans who invaded next…in 1073.  

After Pisa invaded in 1133, the Maritime Republic disintegrated and was overtaken by Venice are the hub of Italian trade.  The once-prosperous trade center reverted to a series of sleepy fishing villages.  The population moved away and is now one-quarter what it once was.

The terrain along the cost is so steep, agriculture was almost impossible.  Where they could farm, farmers grew lemons, and this area became the home of the aperitif Lemoncello.

The locals made their living from the sea and thought of this rock looked like Garabaldi and would protect them from the hazards of fishing and sea trade.

Starting in 1282, the King of Aragon established himself as the King of Naples.  For the next 600 years, Spain would contest the French and various local nobility for dominion over Sicily and southern Italy.  The Spanish influence is reflected in much of the local architecture.

The Amalfi Coast remained a picturesque secret until the early 20th century when the British well-to-do started to vacation here.  In 1953, John Steinbeck published story in Harper’s Bazaar praising the beauty of the coastline.  Things have never been the same since.

The Amalfi Coast has become a UNESCO World Heritage Site.  Now, hundreds of tourist busses  clog the narrow roads between Amalfi and Revello daily.







 Celebrities, some even more famous than the Bergsons or Rosenbergs, flock here to vacation.

The coast has become home to Italy’s most rich and famous…like this villa where Sophia Loren comes to enjoy the sea.

Before the Romans…

Greetings from Tarquinia, a small city 40 miles north of Rome.  It’s founding predates the founding of Rome by two centuries.  Legend has it that Tarchon, a Greek, founded the city shortly after the end of the Trojan War.  While Rome was a small village struggling to survive, Tarquinia was the capital of the Etruscan League…the largest of 12 Etruscan cities on the Italian peninsula.

Tarquinia is a UNESCO World Heritage site because of the rich Etruscan archeological relics found in the 6-thousand tombs in the area.  Initially, the Etruscans were identified as Greek by the foot ware in their paintings.  But more recently, DNA evidence from some of the tombs confirms their lineage.  

Most of the 6-thousand tombs belonged to commoners.  These tombs were nothing more than holes cut into the rock to accommodate an urn holding the deceased’s ashes…and then capped with a large lid.

However, there are dozens of tombs from aristocrats that provide ample clues into life during pre-Roman times.  Many of those were pillaged by tomb robbers and private "archeologists" who sold their contents to overseas museums or private collectors.

Listening to audio guide

Today, the tombs that remain are hermetically sealed to preserve them.  Their contents have been moved to the Etruscan National Museum here in town.

Access to each of the tombs is down a dark flight of stairs.  At the bottom of the stairs is a window into life two and a half millennia ago.

The tombs were large rooms that held a sarcophagus of the deceased, some of his most cherished possessions, and paintings on the plaster walls.  The paintings in the earliest of the tombs often showed fierce animals…like the lions in this mural…designed to scare tomb raiders away.  

The Etruscans believed the soul stayed in the tomb for eternity.  Later tomb scenes showed activities the deceased enjoyed, like dancing or athletic events…to help pass eternity pleasurably.

Later still, Greek theology evolved.  The concept of the afterlife became incorporated in their religion, and this wall painting shows the deceased bidding his family farewell and about to pass through the doors of this life into the Netherworld.

The quality of the funerary art is surprisingly good for small, isolated communities hundreds of miles removed from the centers of Greek culture.

The urns found in the tombs show the Etruscans have mastered the art of painting the human figure realistically.

Each of the urns tells a story, usually from Greek mythology... 

...sort of a graphic novel of its time.









Tombs for males often contained momentos of their achievements in life.

This bronze coin found in one tomb belies the cliche, “You can't take it with you,"...at least as far as the Etruscans were concerned.

The same applied for the tombs of women.  Necklaces and gold rings were part of what they tried to take into the afterlife.

Roger’s favorite of all the artifacts in the Etruscan Museum, however, was this bronze trumpet…found the the tomb of an apparent music lover.  This was one of but many indications that music played a significant role in the daily lives of the aristocratic class.

The piece de resistance, however, was the recreation of a sculpture of two winged horses, excavated from the ruins of an Etruscan temple in 1938.  The original was too badly damaged to restore.

The irony of all this is, Tarquinia remains off most tourists’ radar.  DH Lawrence came here to view the archeological excavations in the 1920’s and wrote about them.  But, the consensus among early travel writers was that this part of Italy was a malarial swamp beset by highwaymen and best avoided by a sensible tourist.  Contemporary travel writers, it seems, have stuck with the conventional wisdom...even though neither highwaymen nor malaria has not been an issue for at least four decades.

The Mystique of Marco Pantani

As Carol and Roger cycled south from Pienza toward Napoli, we stopped for a rest day in the town of Saturnia.

Saturnia is a lovely little hilltop town settled by the Romans…because of the thermal baths.

The hot spring still attract Italians today.  Tourists go to the nearby spa and golf resort.  The locals come here.  What really intrigued us though was not the baths but the road named after this man:

Marco Pantani was one of the great professional cyclists of the 1990’s.  He was disgraced by doping and died of a drug overdose.  But that’s getting ahead of our story.

Pantani was the best climber of his generation.  He stood 5’ 8” and weighed only126 pounds.  He was a very charismatic athlete and in his prime was one of the most popular athletes in Italy.

1998 was a very good year for Marco Pantani.  He started it by winning the Giro d’Italia.  He followed that victory by winning the Tour de France.  Only one other racer in the modern era...Eddie Merckyx...has won both grand tours in the same year.  

His Tour de France victory was the first by an Italian in almost 30 years. During the 1998  Tour, he set the record for climbing Alpe d’Huez, the most famous and challenging hill in all bike racing.  That record still stands today.

The next year, his career began to unravel.  He failed a drug test during the Giro d’Italia and was disqualified from the race.  He spent the rest of that season on the sidelines.

He returned to professional racing in 2000.  In that year’s Tour, Lance Armstrong beat him on two critical stages in the Alps, eliminating any chance Pantani had of repeating as winner.  On Mt. Ventoux…another legendary Tour De France climb…Armstrong let Pantani eke out a win…”out of respect for the man,” Armstrong said.

Pantani took the victory very badly, saying Armstrong had “insulted” him by letting him win.  After that day, Pantani was never a factor in bike racing again.

Two years later, Pantani was admitted to a psychiatric clinic for treatment of alcoholism and cocaine addiction.  A year-and-a-half after that, Pantani locked himself in a Rimini hotel for two weeks and eventually died of a cocaine overdose.  Friends said he could no longer handle the pressure of not living up to expectations.

Twenty-thousand fans attended his funeral.  

So why is Marco Pantani still idolized by thousands?  In 1998, he had one extraordinarily good season, but only one.  He was a drug cheat, a petulant winner, and an addictive recluse.  

His supporters would say Pantani did nothing his professional colleagues didn’t also do.  They may have a point.  From 1996 through 2010, every single winner of the Tour de France…6 different people including Lance Armstrong…admitted to or were convicted of doping during their racing careers.

Lance Armstrong, Floyd Landis, Jan Ullrich…all have been disgraced.  

Why does Marco Pantani have a statue erected in his honor…and a street named after him, Strada Marco Pantani, in Saturnia?

Roger set out to find out.

It turns out after his great year in 1998, Pantani built himself a villa on the hills overlooking this pretty valley.

And it turns out, the Strada Marco Pantani is not some lovely broad boulevard.  It’s a one-lane concrete track, cracked and rutted by time.  There's no street sign at either end identifying its name-sake.

It leads to a small village at the top of the hill, where Pantani had his home.  The road itself was perfectly suited to Pantani’s skills as a climber.  In the 2 km from the highway to the village, the road had sections with an 11% grade, a 13% grade, a 17% grade, and…near the top…a leg-breaking 19% grade.