September 19 20 flying 21 22 Evening takeoff BARCELONA BARCELONA morning Walking tour arrival free afternoon Merce Festival 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 BARCELONA BARCELONA CARCASSONNE Carcassonne- AVIGNON AVIGNON AVIGNON train: Avignon to ARLES Morning visit to Morning ride Barcelona- Full day TGV to several Gaudi to Carcassonne train to Tour to Marseille Walking tour then sites. visit Parc Guel TGV Avignon. PONT DU return to Avignon Walking tour, GARD, then continue Late afternoon free afternoon Visit Sagrada afternoon walk free time. ST. REMY and to AIX en Merce Festival Familia LES BAUX PROVENCE 30 NICE 1 NICE 2 NICE 3 NICE 4 SANTA 5 SANTA 6 ROME Train to Bus to MARGHERITA MARGHERITA Rapallo-Rome Afternoon CANNES MONACO Bus to train ride 9:23am-2:16pm walking tour of And ST. PAUL Nice to All day visit to Afternoon walk in Old Town and Villefranche And Vence. Santa CINQUE Rome’s center ANTIBES Margherita TERRE Afternoon in PORTOFINO 7 ROME 8 ROME 9 fly home Morning walking tour in Visit Rome Colosseum and Vatican. Visit Colosseum and Vatican. INTRODUCTION Table of Contents Our tour of the Mediterranean visits Spain, France and Italy, starting in Barcelona and ending up in Rome, including major cul- tural centers, tranquil small villages and lush natural landscapes. Introduction This in-depth look at the journey provides a detailed description of the many exciting activitties we will enjoy. Barcelona BARCELONA: We start out with four nights in one of the world’s most-beloved destinations, famous for the architecture of Gaudi Carcassonne and so much more. We will be in Barcelona during the Merce Festival, featuring dozens of free music, dance and cultural per- Avignon formances throughout town. CARCASSONNE: With its medieval castle up on the hill, this Marseille amazing fortified town is completely preserved. Our hotel is located within the walls of the village, which is just one-quarter Aix-en-Provence mile long with two main lanes and several side lanes, so you can easily wander, looking at the shops and going to the museum. Arles AVIGNON: With many ancient and medieval sights to see, this 2,000-year-old city is a good home base for touring the Provençal Pont du Gard region. Avignon is a treasure house of palaces, museums and meandering lanes, surrounded by a fortified wall. While the Old Saint-Rémy Town has many ancient buildings you will enjoy, it also has lots of modern shops in a comfortable pedestrian zone where you don’t Les Baux get bothered by any automobile traffic or any trucks, buses or scooters. Nice Daytrips: We stay four nights and take day-trips to nearby towns of Arles, Aix, St-Remy and Marseille, including a visit to Pont du Cannes Gard, the ancient Roman aqueduct bridge. NICE: the queen of the French Riviera, Nice makes an excep- Antibes tionally rich place to make our home base for four nights, with a charming Old Town, vibrant downtown and the world-famous Monaco palm-lined promenade along the beach. You will love strolling along little pedestrian lanes in the heart of town past art galleries, Villefranche shops, small restaurants, and quiet neighborhoods. Daytips: visiting beautiful, nearby towns on day-trips by train and Vence bus, including Cannes, Antibes, St-Paul, Vence, Villefranche and the tiny nation of Monaco. Saint-Paul ITALIAN RIVIERA: From the French Riviera we continue by train along the beautiful coastline to the Italian Riviera, where we visit Santa Margherita Portofino and the little villages of the Cinque Terre. Our home base for three days will be the pretty coastal town of Santa Mar- Portofino gherita, which has a strategic location in the midst of this region. We shall travel by train and boat to visit the quaint towns along Cinque Terre the coastline. For those who enjoy walking there are some per- fect paths along the scenic shores with views in all directions, or Rome you can just sit at a café and relax. ROME: Finally, we travel by train a few hours further south to the capital of Italy, the great city of Rome, where we stay for three nights taking in the many sights, including the Colosseum, Vati- can, Pantheon, pedestrian lanes of historic center, Spanish Steps and Trevi Fountain. Starting in Barcelona 3 TOC BARCELONA Along the Mediterranean shore of eastern Spain lies Barcelona, one of the great cities of Europe to put high on your list of places to see. Although its sprawling metropolitan area is home to 4.2 million residents, you can eas- ily see the main attractions of this country’s second-largest city in just a few days by walking through its square- mile historic center. And be sure to see Barcelona’s most famous building, Sagrada Familia, the fantasy church designed by that eccentric architectural genius, Gaudi. We planned this itinerary specifically to be in Barcelona during the Mercè Festival, which is a major cultural ex- travaganza featuring dozens of music and dance performances throughout the center of town for the four days we are here. These events are all free and lots of fun. The festival, held in honor of Mare de Deu de La Mercè, the Patron Saint of Barcelona, officially first took place in 1902, bids goodbye to the summer with a bang and welcomes in the cooler months of autumn. There are hundreds of activities that will be occurring in the Merce Festival happening all over town. The streets will be filled with events, parades, fire runs and people! The Mercé Festival is one of the biggest outdoor entertainment events in Europe. Take your pick of music, dance, acrobatics, food kiosks, street musicians, art exhibits, and so much more. We will have the chance to catch many performances, along with seeing the main sights of Barcelona as de- scribed here. It would be smart to spend most of your time in and around the old section of town, called the Barri Gotic, or Gothic Quarter, a giant pedestrian zone surviv- ing from ancient days. Barcelona has a large number of historic sites, muse- ums, shops and tourist destinations, but the best attraction for many visitors will simply be this large pedestrian district. It is perhaps the most extensive auto- mobile-free district in Europe (except for Venice, which has no roads at all). Of course, Barcelona has plenty of cars, trucks and buses on the busy main streets, but it is easy to get away from them. Indeed, one of the most enjoyable activities in Barcelona is simply taking a walk through the many narrow lanes, away from the traffic. They wander, bend and curve like the maze of a trav- el mystery that leads to the overwhelm- ing question: what’s coming up next? Remember to look left and right as you pass the smaller alleys intersecting with the main lanes. You don’t need to walk down every one, but they are worth a glance, and some might tempt you to probe their depths. It really is a lot of fun. This pattern of narrow streets has sur- vived for 2,000 years, ever since the city was established by the Romans, who built a wall around what would later become the Gothic Quarter. Some of the street pattern we see today was actually established way back then by those clever Romans. Their clustered town surrounded by the wall became what is the heart of today’s Goth- ic Quarter. Earlier, around 500 B.C., the Phoenicians and Carthaginians created a harbor for merchants in the area. During the Middle Ages the basic urban design was preserved and somehow, in the modern period, this Gothic Quarter was ignored and neglected while the rest of the city developed around it, preserving the center 4 TOC by default. In recent decades the city realized what a treasure they had with this intact medieval core and have done a great job renewing it to create the city’s main attraction. Many of Barcelona’s 35,000 stores are packed into this pedestrian zone -- small, independent boutiques in the traditional European manner, much different from the American system of identical shops in every mall. Barcelona’s retail zone continues north from the Gothic Quarter along what is called the 5KM Shopping Line, a 3-mile corridor extending along trendy boulevards, especially Passeig Gracia. This more modern zone was de- veloped from the late 19th century in the Modernista style. Also called “modernis- ma,” it is a richly-decorated version of Art Nouveau architecture that developed in Barcelona as a means of expressing the Catalan identity. Barcelona is a bicultural city, with influences of Spain and Catalunya mixed together freely, adding to the allure of this exotic place. Catalan culture rose here in the 9th century and thrived during the next eight centuries in the independent kingdom of Catalunya. Its native language is surprisingly not a pure Spanish, but Catalan, a mixture of French and Spanish which follows its own rules. Barcelona has always had close ties with the rest of Europe -- for example, while most of Spain was occupied by Moslems during the Middle Ages, this region was not, but was allied with the Franks. These historic differences are flourishing today in Barcelona’s exotic mix of cultures and styles, after being repressed by Franco’s dictatorship which outlawed the local language and many customs. It’s not too much of a stretch to say the residents consider themselves Catalan first and Spanish second, al- though hardly anyone is pushing for independence anymore. Four TV stations broadcast exclusively in Catalan and most street signs are also in the native language.