Summer Trips: Features Of Life In Rome

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Summer Trips Another feature of life in Rome was the summer trip. Each of us could travel for a month during summer vacation, but if a member of one’s family came over, we could travel longer, six weeks or even two months. There were also some established itineraries. One was the “shrine run” and another was the “beer run.” My first summer, the summer of 1957, I traveled with Victor Galeone and Ralph Platz on the “shrine run.” We flew to Barcelona on an inexpensive student flight, did some sightseeing there which included a one-day pilgrimage to the Benedictine monastery at Monserrat which is associated with St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits). From Barcelona we flew to Madrid near which there …show more content…

After a long trip back to Madrid we went to San Sabastian in the Basque country where we had a friend from the Greg. He showed us the town which was extremely beautiful. (Franco spent his summers there, and his yacht was in the harbor.) Our friend told us that one of the vices of the Basques was gluttony, and the bishop had had to put limits on post-ordination banquets lest they scandalize the laity. Next came Lourdes which I found much more moving than Fatima. Especially inspiring at Lourdes was the nighttime candle procession with everyone singing familiar hymns. Next stop was the home of St. Jean Vianney, known as the Cure d’Ars, whose below average IQ made Latin, philosophy, and theology too difficult for him, but the bishop ordained him anyway, and he because famous through France as a confessor and …show more content…

Hence the second summer (1958) my sister Carol came to Rome. (Also some friends from home visited me at the same time: Donna Dwyer, Russ Weingartner, and his sister Irene.) Carol and I set out on what now looks like an epic journey from Italy to North Ireland and Scotland. I will give our itinerary, leaving out detailed descriptions. After showing Carol the sights of Rome (St. Peter’s, catacombs, Forum, Circus Maximus, etc.) our first stop was Viareggio where one of Victor Galeone’s cousins showed us the town. We traveled through Switzerland, visited Munich (and the Hofbrau House), took a boat ride on the Rhine from Koblenz to Cologne whence we made out way to Brussels for the World’s Fair (Expo ‘58), our first major goal. At the World’s Fair we stayed in youth hostels, which as I recall, were tents with cots in them. Elsewhere we stayed in inexpensive “pensioni” although again I am not sure how I, at least, financed this trip. Carol had been teaching and earning a good salary; no doubt she paid some of my expenses, but relatives used to send me money too. From Brussels we stopped in Paris for a few days, and then went to London before arriving at our second important goal, Ireland. We found Dingle where according to family traditions my Mother’s family, the O’Connors, had lived before emigrating to the U.S. We spent several hours

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