Day 11 - Mar 15, 2013 Last updated: 4/6/13 4:00pm PT
Today we went to Villa d’Este in Tivoli. It’s about an hour by train from Rome, but much closer than Orvieto (we had a faster train to Orvieto). The villa was constructed in the late 1500s with a terraced garden and many water features, all using gravity to build water pressure for the fountains.
Villa d’Este is in the town of Tivoli. I had used Google maps to plot out the walking directions from the train station to the villa. We followed the directions, then must have taken a wrong turn somewhere, the street names didn’t match where I thought we were on the map. So I enabled the GPS. Oops, we were not where I thought we were, so we adjusted course and continued. The streets were not very straight. We get to the destination according to the GPS, but that’s not the entrance, it’s just a fence at the back of the villa. So we turned around and kept going. I don’t know how many times we doubled back, but we eventually found the entrance. It took an hour and a half to get from the train station to the villa. When we left the villa at the end of our tour, it only took 15 minutes to make it back to the train station. We wanted to wander through the town anyway, and probably wouldn’t have seen so much of it if we hadn’t gotten lost. So it’s all good in the end. And, we stopped in some little shop for a sandwich for lunch and got a very tasty small pizza, about 6 or 7 inches in diameter, folded in half like a sandwich. Not near the tourist area by the villa, so instead of paying €5 each, we paid €2 total.
This was a nice side trip from Rome.
One of the many streets of Tivoli that we experienced while lost.
