Race around Italy

  We had a little more than a week left in Italy when we left Venice and still so much ground to cover. We wanted to eventually end up on the Amalfi coast to see Pompei and the Isle of Capri but didn't want to spend any one single entire day on a train, so we planned three single day stops on the way south. First we would spend a night in Assissi. Both our Mothers had always liked and talked about St. Francis of Assissi, so as long as we were passing by we thought we should stop for one night. Next would be Spoletto. We had read about some very well maintained Roman ruins including one of the largest aqueducts built in Roman times, and we wanted our last stop to be Tivoli so we could see the hanging gardens of Tivoli. Assissi went smoothly and considering this was a place that people make religious pilgrimages to, we saw some of the coolest fortifications of our entire trip. A covered corridor

that felt like an underground tunnel,

went from the Rocca Maggiore Castle

to an outer fortified tower

 some 30 feet and was extremely Cool.

 Spoletto, on the other hand was not quite as smooth. As I said previously, we had booked all of our hotels in advance from the comfort of our living room in Ajax. We asked for a hotel in close proximity to the train station. The hotel we found was more than 1 kilometer from the station, which again thinking of our marathon training we thought..." shouldn't really be a problem". Two things we hadn't accounted for was; #1) The weight of our backpacks! By this time we were carrying three bottles of souvenir wine as well as books and souvenirs from Rome,  Florence, Venice and any other trinkets that had caught our eye on the way. Our backpacks had got considerately heavier! #2) The town of Spoleto was on a hill, with the train station at the bottom of the hill and our hotel at the top. We might have considered flagging a taxi, but the tour guides we had read told us that tourists quite often get scammed by taxi  drivers if they don't speak fluent Italian and ours was a mixture of a few words and sign language, so we left the train station with backpacks that felt like small cars, on a hot day, walking up a steep hill! Oh what fun.
10 to 15 minutes into our hike we stopped someone on the street and in our bad Italian/English  asked how far we had to go? When we showed this helpful person the map that showed our hotel, all they could say in English was, "Up, Up".  Undaunted we set off for another 10 to 15 minutes and again flagged down one of the locals to show them our map. " Up, Up " we were told again. We repeated the process a third time with the same answer , when  it seemed like an hour had passed and we still had no idea how close we were, we popped into a small store to get a drink and again ask our question. The old man who was working the store counter, upon seeing the Canadian flags stitched to our backpacks said, " Canadians, hearty!, Up, Up" I'm really unsure how long it took us to climb up that hill/mountain to our hotel, I might have been feeling a little heatstroke. Good thing Joani is tougher than me. Anyway the thing is, when we finally arrived at the driveway to the hotel, a bus pulled up beside us with the words "train station" in the destination window. Apparently we could have rode up for the price of transit fare. We both laughed at the irony of our faster (?) method. Still, the Roman ruins were great as promised,

 and the Aqueduct was wild

After Spoletto, we headed for what we thought would be Tivoli, but what hotels.com our booking company called a suburb.  This  Suburb was named  Bagni Di Tivoli, which if you know Italian translates to "Bathroom of Tivoli". This was similar to what happened when we booked our hotel for San Gimignano and ended up in Certaldo. Bagni Di Tivoli ended up being a completely different town and "Bathroom of Tivoli" was an accurate description. We got off the train armed with our street map looking for our hotel and were stunned.  Every second building had windows smashed in. There was graffiti scrawled everywhere, and any shops we saw on our way to our hotel, had bars on the windows. We had booked our hotel in what seemed like the worst slums of the region, if not all of Italy. If you have ever driven through some of the deserted parts of  Detroit Michigan, or some of the depressed areas of Chicago, you have some inkling of what we were seeing.  The most ironic part of this walk was the hotel was one of the nicest hotels that we stayed at, the entire time we were in Italy, which was fine because there was absolutely no thought of heading out sightseeing for the afternoon. We stopped at one of the stores to get some snacks, ate supper at the hotel restaurant and stayed indoors for the rest of the evening, waiting to catch our train the next morning. The hanging gardens of Tivoli could wait until another time.
 While at the time, it seemed like one of the worst parts of our three weeks in Italy, in hindsight we laugh as hard about that day as any other day we had on that vacation. "Bathroom of Tivoli, indeed!!" Be careful if you book your hotels in advance as we did without knowing the areas. Didn't attach any Photos of Bagni Di Tivvoli as I'm sure you aren't the slightest bit interested in the interior of our hotel room. Next stop Pompei!