Civitavecchia

Early morning in the harbor and other ships are returning to port. The ship with the black hull is a Holland America vessel.

There were some sailing cruise ships in port too. The 5 masts in the distance belonged to the Windsurf that we had seen sailing into Venice a week ago.

We had arranged an 8 hour tour of Rome with a company called Rome in Limo and we were to meet our driver at 8 a.m

We disembarked the ship at 7.30 thinking it might take a while to get through customs after picking up our luggage. As it was a small ship and many of the passengers were staying on for another week there wasn't much luggage in the luggage hall and so we had it in our possession within two minutes!

There was one customs officer at the exit but he was talking to a young girl and he waved us through without asking any questions. Brilliant!

We were outside now in the morning sun of Italy. We had 30 minutes to spare. As there was no seating outside Carol went back into the building and sat on a bench to make notes on her phone while I stood outside with our luggage, smoking a cigarette, so that I would see the driver if he pulled up.

I was expecting him at 8 but he arrived at 7.45: a man in a suit got out of a big Mercedes minibus and stood on the side of the road opposite the building. He held up a sign and I could read my name so I went over and introduced myself in Italian. His name was Franco and he insisted in getting all of our luggage across the street while I went inside to get Carol.

This is the Mercedes we would be touring in.

All of our luggage now loaded,we were free to begin our tour. Rome was about an hour away.
The video that follows is not our tour-it's just Franco pointing out historical buildings to us as we were driving to our hotel, near the Pantheon, as he thought it best not to leave our luggage in the car all day, in case of theft.

Franco spoke good English and was very friendly and witty so it was a pleasant and informative drive... (video) At the beginning he is talking about the speed of lava flowing from Vesuvius (300mph) as we had mentioned we had been there the day before...