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| This itinerary is
about 130 kilometers (80 miles) and takes about 8 hours. Tivoli is
our target, Zagarolo and Palestrina are attractive cities as well,
but will be just rest stops for us, 50 kilometers could be too much
in one drag. |
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Leg |
Distance |
Time |
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Segni - Palestrina |
25 km (16 Miles) |
35 min. |
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Highlight of the day: Tivoli. |
Palestrina - Tivoli |
28 km (17,5 Miles) |
40 min. |
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Total range: 130 km (80 miles). |
Tivoli - Zagarolo |
25 km (16 Miles) |
30 min. |
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Total time: 8 hours. |
Zagarolo - Segni |
30 km (19 Miles) |
40 min. |
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| We leave
Segni around 9:00 am,
or
earlier, heading for
Tivoli. On the way there, we'll stop in
Palestrina, a lovely little town half way between Segni and
Tivoli. We'll stay just long enough to stretch our legs and drink a
"Cappuccino"
or a soda, even if this town deserves more time for its importance,
but our target today is Tivoli. Of the small towns in
Lazio,
(Latium, the region Rome is in), maybe the most famous.
Another one of the many town that were actually before Rome and
certainly very interesting from the tourists point of view. The most
famous places in Tivoli are the
Villa D'Este (UNESCO
world heritage site) and
Hadrian's
Villa. The
first of these two is a villa that was built, converting an older
monastery, for the cardinal
Ippolito
II D'Este, son of Alfonso I D'Este and |
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Lucrezia Borgia, in 1550, when he became the governor of the
town. He hired for the job the architect
Pirro Ligorio, ex student of
Michelangelo, Taking advantage of the fact that the villa was on
top of a very steep slope and that Tivoli was so reach with water
spring to be often flooded, a "garden of fountains" was
created as a decoration to the villa. and so the place became,
already then, famous for its
giochi d'acqua, "water games". Arriving in Tivoli this will be
the first place we'll visit and it will take one hour and a half to
do. By the time we'll come out of the place we'll all be hungry and
so we'll go and walk the town's typical medieval streets to look for
a
trattoria
before we continue to
Hadrian's
Villa. This was the Villa of the
Emperor Hadrian who had it built as a remote retreat |
| for he disliked to live in Rome. The villa
occupied one square kilometer (250 acres), consisted of more than
thirty main buildings, and needed the attentions of 15,000 people
between craftsmen, attendants, fireman etc. It seems that the
Emperor, who spent most of his time traveling throughout the Empire
and had any building he saw anywhere during his trips replicated in
his villa, only lived the last two years of his life in Tivoli. The
visit will take about one hour during which we'll see what's left of
the villa after it was used for centuries as a marble quarry, which
is what happened after all to all the ancient Roman building all
over Europe. The worst came when the Cardinal Ippolito II D'Este was
building his villa in the city of Tivoli, this is where most of the
marble needed came from. |
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We'll finally leave Hadrian's Villa and head back toward Segni
stopping in Zagarolo. Once again a charming little medieval town
known for its wine and for its name which in Italian sounds kind of
funny and the Romans have always being making fun of people from
Zagarolo. In Rome, to be from Zagarolo has always meant to be
uneducated and uncivilized and the inhabitants of this town always
hesitated before saying where they where from wishing they could say
another name! Now it isn't so anymore, because after the prices of
the real estate in Rome became unaffordable for most people, many
from Rome moved to the little towns in the surroundings and Zagarolo
is one of the places they moved to. We'll stop there to stretch our
legs and eventually to enjoy some of the local wine before getting
back on the road home. |
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| Here below is a map with the itinerary. |
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