A Day in Sperlonga: Beaches, Caves, and Crazy Statues

One of my favorite things about living in Rome is the ability to hop on a train, spend only an hour or so of your time (and only about ten bucks), and wind up somewhere completely different from where you started. As you may have noticed, Tom and I are trying to do this as often as possible before our time here is up, and so today we headed down to Sperlonga with a couple of our friends from the Academy.

Sperlonga

Sperlonga is a small coastal town about halfway between Rome and Naples.  The beautiful (and clean!) sandy beach stretches for miles, and at the height of summer hundreds of people flock daily to its umbrella covered lounge chairs to relax and sip on fruity drinks.  However, perhaps the area hasn't quite caught on with tourists that way that Amalfi or Cinque Terre has yet because, even on a warm Saturday in May, it was still fairly quiet.  

Like all of the Italian coast that I've seen, the landscape is absolutely stunning.  The old (often white washed) buildings are charming, and the surrounding land is brilliantly green and blue, hilly and rocky, and there are all kinds of interesting plants and flowers everywhere you look (including cactuses (or is it cacti?) and trees producing little pods that looked like beans).  It's really no surprise, then, that Sperlonga was a resort town even in ancient times.

Wildflowers

Villa Ruins

In fact, one of the main attractions in town are the ruins of an enormous seaside villa (which many claim belonged to the Roman emperor Tiberius). The highlight of the villa is the huge cave/grotto, which served as a dining room. Inside, diners would have enjoyed sweeping views through the cave's opening out to the ocean.  They also would have been surrounded by pools of water and beautiful statues, many of which are now housed in a nearby museum.  Not too shabby, huh?

The most prominent statue (which would have sat in the center pool) depicted a scene from the Odyssey where the monster Skylla attacked the ship.  This crazy looking statue is a bit difficult to figure out (especially since only some of it survives today), but it makes a bit more sense if you know that Skylla was a beautiful woman from the waist up and a pack of barking dogs from the waist down (if you can imagine that).  Still, I swear that one of the figures actually looks MUCH more like an embarrassed pig (who's holding his hand over his face like "how did I get myself into this mess?!")

Statue in Museum (Don't even try to tell me the figure highlighted in purple isn't an embarrassed pig!!)

Tom "Dining" in the Cave/Dining Room (and fish in the pool)

View From Inside the Cave (The ship statue would have been in this pool).

Our (Failed?) Attempt at Traditional Roman Portraiture (on built-in stone seats!)

Looking Back Toward the Villa

In any case, we spent most of the morning wandering around the museum and villa, and then headed out to the beach.  Unfortunately, though, the wind picked up and the sun was being a bit fickle, so Tom was the only one daring enough to actually swim.  Despite figuring that his body temperature dropped about ten degrees in the water, he claims that he had a good time.  And the rest of us at least enjoyed watching him from our warm towels.

Beach!

Back in town

Afterward, we had a late pizza lunch, caught the bus back to the train station, the train back to Rome, a cab back to the Academy, and made it back in time to do some grocery shopping before dinner.  It was a quick trip, but a fantastic one (how can anything involving sun, caves, and beaches not be?), and the four of us are already on to planning our next exciting day-trip adventure.

Alla Prossima,
Erin

------
Sun. May 12:  The mild spring weather continues with highs in the 70s and a mix of sun and clouds.