Southern Italy Part 2: Brindisi

Pictures: The tower we climbed; the Brindisi Appian Way column and the pedestal where the Lecce column used to stand; the outside of the cathedral, with its bell tower (campanile); the ancient gate into the city; and Audrey and Natalie in our hostel.

Hi guys,

Sorry it took me a few days longer than I had planned, but here is the second and last part of my trip to Southern Italy last weekend. When we got to Brindisi, we wanted to go straight to our hostel, but the problem was that none of us had written down the address of the place. Apparently we had all assumed that someone else had brought it along. Oops. After stopping and asking several people, who gave us conflicting advice, we finally stumbled into a tabaccheria, which is just a small shop that sells everything from candy to bus tickets. Luckily, the man working in there spoke pretty good English, so he was able to help us out by taking us next door to the travel agency there, where a very nice woman looked up the address of our hostel and gave us directions to get to the bus that would take us there. We had to wait about forty-five minutes for the bus, but it finally came and took us to our hostel. It was a bit of a scary ride, though, because we went through what seemed like some pretty sketchy parts of the city, including one place where we saw a fire burning in the middle of a parking lot, with no one around. We finally got to our hostel though.

For anyone who may not know, hostels are where people traveling around Europe on a budget stay. I think there are some hostels in America, but they are just not as popular. Of course, in the United States, you can get a hotel room pretty cheap, whereas hotels in Europe can be pretty pricy. So, the alternative is a hostel. They are usually pretty clean and nice, but you sleep in dorms instead of in a private room, except for some where you can pay extra for a private room, and it is much less formal than a hotel. For instance, in our hostel, there were three dogs that belonged to the owners running around, which of course would not be the case in a Holiday Inn or something. The people who worked there were all very nice, though. The next morning, they gave us tons of information about where to go in Brindisi and what was best to see and told us a great place to go for lunch. In our room, there were four sets of bunk beds and one of the beds was occupied by one of the ladies that worked there; she was actually, she told us, from Austria, she was just living in Italy for awhile and working at this hostel. Another girl who worked there was from New Zealand and had apparently dropped out of school to travel around Europe and was now working at the hostel as well. The dorms for boys and girls were separated, so Dane was in a different room than Natalie, Audrey, and I. He ended up sharing a dorm, though, with a guy we met named Brandon who goes to the University of Connecticut and is also studying in Italy, somewhere north of Venice. Overall, the hostel was pretty cool, but I think ultimately I’m still partial to American hotels.

The next day, armed with the information from the people who ran our hostel, we started by going to a tower not far from the hostel, which you can climb to have an amazing view over Brindisi, the port, and the Adriatic Sea. The weather was absolutely perfect, sunny, breezy, and warm. We stayed up on the tower for quite awhile, just looking around and enjoying the fact that we didn’t have to be in a hurry to be anywhere.

After the tower, we took a ferry over to the main part of Brindisi and climbed the steps towards where the other column that marked the end of the Appian Way stands, as well as the base of the column that is now in Lecce. For some reason, this column seemed much bigger than the Lecce column. It was really awesome, though, and again, we hung around there for awhile, just chatting and enjoying that we had time to just sit and enjoy the columns and the city around them, without having to be in a rush to get anywhere.

When we finally did start moving again, we made our way to the main church in Brindisi, La Cattedrale di Brindisi (the Cathedral of Brindisi), also known as the Basilica di San Giovanni Battista (which translates to the Basilica of St. John the Baptist). The church itself was quite beautiful on the inside. The neatest object in it, though, was the skeleton of San Teodoro, which was in a little chapel of its own, in a glass coffin, clearly visible. There are relics (bones, typically) of saints all across Europe, including in Venice, but this was the first full skeleton I have ever seen. That was definitely pretty cool. Apparently, San Teodoro, along with St. Lawrence, is the patron saint of Brindisi (all church information is thanks to www.brindisiweb.com).

After leaving the church, we went to get lunch at the restaurant recommended to us by the guy who ran our hostel. According to him, the owner of the restaurant used to work at one of the best restaurants in Brindisi, but decided to quit there and open his own restaurant instead. It was interesting inside, because it was set up kind of like a cafeteria: everyone got their tray, went through the line and said what they wanted, then paid at the end of the line. The food was delicious, some of the best lasagna I’ve ever had, plus really good spinach and these sausage things that were excellent.

After lunch, we still had about seven hours until our train left, so we wandered around the city a little more. We went to a bridge which used to be one of the old gates into the city. You can still see the crevices down the sides where they used to pour boiling oil on people trying to attack the city. The street that led to this gate was cool, also, because it was literally lined with orange trees. After the gate, we walked to the castle that is in Brindisi. It was really fantastic from the outside, it looked exactly like a medieval castle from a movie. Unfortunately, because it is now used as a naval base, we couldn’t go inside, in fact, Natalie got yelled at by a guard for trying to take a picture through the gate. So we just hung around outside it for awhile, then moved on.

We wandered down a few streets, with no particular purpose in mind and ended up stumbling upon a really great World War memorial, I’m not sure if it was from WWI or WWII. It was a beautiful fountain, very simple, but lovely, with a wide walkway in a tree-lined square that led up to it. On the other side of the memorial, across a small street, was a wall that looked out across the bay or port, where the sun was setting. We all sat on top of the wall and Natalie realized that we were actually sitting on top of a waterfall fountain, which was pretty cool. So we hung out there for awhile until it started to get dark. Then, we headed back to the center of town, grabbed dinner at a bar/restaurant place, and then made our way back to the train station.

We ended up sitting at the station for about two hours and then we had to stand on the platform for another hour or so because our train was an hour late. However, we finally did get on board and luckily there was only one other person in our compartment this time, so we had some extra room to stretch out on the ride back, which was nice. We actually had to change trains in Bologna at about 7:30 in the morning. The other three decided to stay in Bologna for a couple of hours, but I was pretty exhausted by that point, so I decided to just catch a 7:50 train back to Venice. It was actually kind-of cool, riding a train across part of Italy by myself, and the view out of the windows was gorgeous, the train passed through some really hilly countryside and quite a few small, very pretty towns. I got back to Venice in time to go to lunch on San Servolo, where I met up with Caylen, who had opted to stay in Venice for the weekend. After lunch, I had a good long nap and then did some homework, to try and get back into my routine for the week. Overall, it was a really awesome weekend. It was nice to get out of the city and go someplace else in Italy, but it was also nice to come back to Venice at the end of the weekend.

So, that was my weekend in Southern Italy. This weekend has been pretty cool, too, so I’ll have something up about it in the next day or two, hopefully. Until then, hope everyone is having a nice weekend! Keep leaving comments!

Ciao,
Maria