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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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Tour from Segni to Tivoli |
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Leg |
Distance |
Time |
| Segni - Palestrina |
25 km (16 Miles) |
35 min. |
| Palestrina - Tivoli |
28 km (17,5 Miles) |
40 min. |
| Tivoli - Zagarolo |
25 km (16 Miles) |
30 min. |
| Zagarolo - Segni |
30 km (19 Miles) |
40 min. |
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Highlight of the day: Tivoli. |
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Total range: 130 km (80 miles). |
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Total time: 8 hours. |
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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. |
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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
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 the
tour will take |
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| one hour and a half. 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 |
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replicated in his villa, only lived the last two years ofhis 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. 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. |
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In Rome, to be from Zagarolo has
always meant to be uneducated and uncivilized and the inhabitants of
this town when asked where they were from, always hesitated before
replying they where from Zagarolo wishing they could mention another
place! Now it isn't so anymore, after the prices of the real estate
in Rome became unaffordable for many 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 to
eventually enjoy some of the local wine before getting back on the
road home. |
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6
