On this, the last full day of an ambitious, exhausting and exhilarating vacation, the carefully-wrought plan finally started to come undone. I'm happy that it held together as long as it had, but with less than 36 hours to go, there was unfinished business to attend to.

We all wanted to see St Peter's Basilica, I for my third time, Lorna for her second, and Melissa for her first. IMO it is simply the single most beautiful public work of many human hands in the world. 

Melissa also wanted to see the Sistine Chapel, and so Lorna wanted to see it again, with her. I had no trouble resisting that interminable shuffle and buffeting by pushy tour groups with experienced and ruthless leaders.   

We got a late start, so the intended early arrival at the Vatican was lost, and there's no point arriving in the thick of the morning tour-bus crowd, so we headed north instead, to catch the afternoon's planned sites and any other targets of opportunity that might present themselves, including a Guess store where one of them had her eye on something that I don't recall.

We started the day late, Thursday having been a long exhausting day after an unrestful night on the Palermo-Naples ferry. As we got all our cylinders firing, I sorted through my accumulated books and other souvenirs and despaired of carrying them home, so I boxed up a lot of things I no longer needed (including laundry!) to ship home.

By the time we got started, it was late morning and we all needed to shop for some mundane essentials and ship that box before turning our attention to explorations. Those chores done, we force-marched to the Jewish ghetto neighborhood to start the day's peregrinations in the Eternal City.

We had lunch at Piperno, a celebrated Jewish-Italian restaurant. Jewish-Italian food has developed for thousands of years, and Jewish food in Rome is nothing like Jewish food in New York City!

This was a busy day!

The overnight ferry from Palermo to Naples arrived on time, but it took so long to get off the boat (we had to wait for the cars to get off first) that we missed our scheduled, ticketed train. On a tip from a fellow traveller, I went to the Trenitalia ticket desk. The woman there explained that they have an agreement with GNV Ferries and she honored our tickets for a later train at no charge!

We took another sexy Frecciarossa (red arrow) high-speed train. What would have been a two-and-a-half hour drive from one city center to another and through the unpretty urban sprawl of both became a comfortable 70-minute ride, with a snack. In 2015 we had taken high-speed trains in Italy, Switzerland, and France, and the Italian train through the Alps from Milan to Zurich was the best of the three. And the Roma Termini train station is just a few blocks from our hotel! 

The very early morning ferry brought us back to Pozzallo at 08:15 so we had an early start for a busy day.

Much of southern Sicily has glorious oleander growing along the roadsides, and wild cactus. There are extensive groves of olive, pistachio, almond, and citrus trees, and of course the vineyards. This is also the home of Magna Graeca, as the later Romans referred to the "greater Greece" of antiquity, and its concentration of ancient Greek settlements and ruins.

There's also a lot of weedy overgrowth and occasional debris. At one point we passed a dead dog on the side of the road; southern Sicily is simply not as tourist-visited and thus not as nicely maintained as the rest of Italy that we had seen.

Except for the magnificent temples at Agrigento, today was really about getting from Malta to Naples. We had no foodie goodness and much of the scenery was like driving through eastern Colorado or New Mexico. If we had another day we'd have explored Marsala and the western point of Sicily, but we had consciously traded that for the quick and exciting side-trip to Malta.

The ferry brought us to Valletta Harbour at about 11:00pm. After disembarking, finding the car from the hotel, and experiencing the pastoral serenity (sarcasm) of driving in urban Malta, we arrived at the Grand Hotel Excelsior in Floriana around midnight. Nevertheless we woke up bright and early to tour Malta with Amy Pace, our hired guide for the day, starting on time at 08:30 AM. 

Over the winter, I had worked with Amy to set up an ambitious itinerary of Maltese sites: the Hypogeum (a neolithic necropolis)  and the neolithic temple at Haggar Qim, Lunch at La Reggia in the picturesque Marsaxlokk fishing village (pictured above), then the mostly intact medieval town of Mdina, and back to Valletta for the magnificent Co-Cathedral of St John and the National Archaeology Museum. Amy's services made our day the great success that it was and I recommend her highly to anyone planning a trip to Malta.

We started the day with a visit to the spectacular Mercato Ortygia, the large local farmers' and fishermans' market just a few blocks from where we stayed.

What an experience! We saw such fish! Here's a swordfish seller's counter. He'd cut the fish here, either to order or to restock the ice-covered counter in the front of the stall.

There were also two kinds of shrimp, several varieties of clams, octopus and squid, and many fin-fish including a very long silvery monster called a spatula. 

There were flies, of course, but the fish was clearly fresh and well-kept. There's plenty of competition at the market.  

And the produce was beautiful, with figs as big as my fist. Here is a basket of bright yellow-orange zucchini blossoms. We saw zucchini blossoms on many menus, sometimes stuffed and usually deep-fried as large fritters.

Considering how many zucchini we see in New England in the late summertime, I'm surprised that we so seldom see the blossoms. 

In the morning we took the ferry across the Strait of Messina to Sicily. It was a Sunday, the first of July. The ferry ride was quick and uneventful. Buying tickets and boarding was not so hard to figure out, and the whole thing unfolded as expected. The ferry cost €38 for the car and three passengers.

A note that I cannot resist: Long-time readers know that I am a fan of train travel. The island of Sicily has train service to and from the mainland. This works via a very long, skinny train-ferry. I'm not making this up. Google it and be amazed. I wish we could have taken that or at least seen it, but the car ferry schedule is far from the train ferry schedule, so there was nothing to see of that ferry from our ferry. 

Then we drove a little over two hours down the east coast of Sicily from the chaos of Messina past Taormina and Catania (and Mount Etna on our right) and all the way down to the ancient city of Siracusa.

We escaped Sorrento early enough for a leisurely drive through Basilicata and Calabria along the shin of the Italian boot to Scilla and Reggio de Calabria. It was a cloudy day with rain off and on, hard to get good photos of the gorgeous, rugged scenery. I had originally planned to drive along the coast, but I read that it is marred by lots of tacky new-construction hotels and condos for summering Italians, so we opted to stay on the highway and spend the time in Scilla. It was a good choice. 

Scilla (pronounced SHILL-a) is an ancient fishing village dominated by the great castle-crowned promontory of Scylla, one half of the twin terrors faced by brave Ulysses as he passed through the Strait of Messina: Scylla and Charybdis. These days it is economically dominated by the swordfish fishery. Chianalea, the fishing port at the base of the hill, is where the local fishermen set out in custom-made boats for swordfish and tuna (the great sea-predators) at the mouth of the Strait of Messina and return with impeccably fresh fish each day! 

The Hotel Soleluna is a lovely place out of the busy throughfare in Piano di Sorrento but with easy access to its more famous sister Sorrento. More important, it has easy access to an excellent restaurant and it had a really good breakfast in the morning. But it didn't take us long to head into Sorrento! I think until you have been to Sorrento, you can't understand why the song Torna a Surriento has meaning to so many people. 

We were staying at the swanky Grand Hotel de la Ville, one of the finest hotels in Sorrento. Two nights for three of us cost over $1000! It has valet parking and a laundry service, and it's a short walk through a lemon grove (owned by a limoncello maker) to the downtown shopping district - three practical benefits that we required. It also has creature comforts: a rooftop pool with an unparalleled view, a fancy restaurant and a garden restaurant, and a whole separate vegetarian menu. But they botched our fine dinner. What might have been a sublime experience was another exercise in mediocrity. We'll get to that at the end of the first day's adventures.

We left Orvieto as early as we could, with help from our host to retrieve Giulia from the parcheggio on the side of the hill. Thus began an eventful and mundane odyssey through the agricultural countryside of Umbria, Tuscany, and Lazio. 

The farm country of central Italy is not so different from our own, except we saw no pickup trucks. The tractors and outbuildings are similar; the livestock is similar; the fields look more like New England and upstate New York farm country than like the Irish frms that we saw in 2016. 

We proceeded westward to the thermal baths at Saturnia, where Jupiter once hurled his thunderbolts at Saturn, and missed, creating a geological marvel. The water is about body temperature, which is a somewhat unsettling experience out in nature.

There's an expensive spa and golf club near here, but you can visit the Cascati for free. Parking is pretty random, but everyone was good-natured and it worked out without damage or bloodshed. There's a snack bar with frozen ice cream novelties and a 3-minute pizza machine that we did not bother to explore. The public rest rooms were busy but clean.

We had left Tuscany for the charming and ancient central hill-towns of Italy, in our case Orvieto, which had utterly captured our hearts in 2015.

It was luck that brought us there that first time. Having had too much fun in Tuscany, we were not going to get to the Tivoli Gardens in time. As we approached Orvieto, I recalled reading about it, and I remembered its wine. That was a good enough excuse to make the turn into an unexpected wonderland. We changed our later plans to return en route to Genoa instead of taking the coastal route, so this was our third visit to Orvieto. 

After that extraordinary dinner at Tar-Tufo in Siena, we arrived pretty late in Orvieto. We wound our way up the hill until we were near the grand piazza near the imposing Duomo. That's where we were stopped by two carabinieri (like State Police, but friendlier and more heavily armed) at the dreaded ZTL.

We had tried to visit Siena on our last visit in 2015, but it was too complicated. On this visit we made it a priority, and I am so glad we did!  We had many foodie discoveries and discoveries of a purely sublime "you'll never see this again" tourist nature, but it also answered a deep foodie question that I desperately wanted to get to the bottom of.

All of the many marvels notwithstanding, for Siena my foodie high point was the nonpareil dinner at Tar-Tufo, where I finally sampled an authentic, local, expensive Bistecca alla Fiorentina. But let's get to Siena and explore those other marvels first. If you ever expect to rent a car in Italy, this is where you can benefit from my experience.

Today was even more eventful than yesterday, for two reasons: I learned certain invaluable information about the legendary bistecca al fiorentino, and I discovered a rare Florentine peasant food that I may have read about once and forgotten, and stumbled upon by sheer fortune!

Lorna and Melissa went to the Galleria dell'Accademia to see Michelangelo's famous David, and then they shopped for hours  and hours in that true shoppers paradise. That gave me the freedom to pursue my own long-awaited foodie adventures.

But before that, we have to get out of Venice, sample more train travel, and arrive in a strange space in Florence (where, honestly, all spaces are strange), and finally deal with a European car rental.

We took a water taxi from the Hotel Colombina to the train station. I've never arrived at a train station by boat before!