This morning instead of hurrying out of Portogruaro we take advantage of our 11AM checkout and have a look around. Our first stop is at St. Andrew’s Mill in a pretty park known for its nutria. Nutrias are horrible looking rat things with orange teeth that swim. It is hard to understand why they would have statues of it.
After enjoying the water rat we move on to the fish market. Much of the day’s offering looks like Sarah’s lunch yesterday.
We also view the leaning tower of Portogruaro.
After this we head to the Museo Archeologico. The ticket that we bought in Concordia Sagittaria also gets us in here. We are immediately greeted by a 14th century Madonna and Child.
There are many interesting Roman fragments and also a small piece of pornography.
Now we travel to Aquileia, a town that once had 100,000 in habitants and was the fourth largest city in Romana Italia and the ninth largest in the entire Roman Empire. We arrive around 1 PM and pull into the Information station where we get lots of maps, recommendations of eateries and hotels, and information about the sights to see. We decide to have lunch at a nearby restaurant where we order way too much pizza. For 4E we figure that the pizza will be small but no, it is quite large. There are four pages of pizza types including one called Pizza Americana. It has French fries on top.
Although we have ordered three giant pizzas we notice the people around us are eating way more. No wonder they need a siesta after lunch.
And speaking of siestas that is what we do next. We check into the very nice Casa Del Neri and have a little lie down until 4PM before heading out to the Basilica. (I will write more about the Basilica tomorrow when we go through it again doing a thorough job with the audio tour that we were too late to rent through the Information station.
We are much too full from our enormous lunch for dinner so we just meet on the patio and have a glass of wine and meet the hotel’s orange cat who takes a liking to Sarah much to her delight.
