Civitavecchia

Their plan was to sail from Dublin to Chester, and then to proceed to London from via London to one of the southeast ports before embarking for the continent.

This was an alternative to sailing to one of the Spanish ports with trading links to Ireland, from where it would be possible to sail to an Italian port near Rome, Livorno or Civitavecchia.

Part of the attraction of the English route was that the pair could visit Dreicourt's father.

Traveling through England, however, posed particular difficulties.

Though Gallus did not continue the empire-wide persecution of Christians, he did support the restoration of pagan Roman religious practices.

Within a year of becoming emperor, he had Pope Cornelius exiled to Centumcellae, modern-day Civitavecchia, a city just outside Rome on the Mediterranean coast.

A year later, due to harsh conditions, Pope Cornelius died in exile and is considered a martyr.

In two fifty-three, Emperor Gallus died in battle and Valerian became Roman emperor.

What part of Italy are you in?

I'm, uh, near Rome, in Civitavecchia, actually.

Okay.

But it's very near to Rome.

Returning across the Mediterranean on the leisurely homeward leg, we were at Genoa when Prince Napoleon arrived from Marseilles on the steam yacht Reina Hortensa to conclude his marriage contract.

From Genoa we went to Civitavecchia, where we saluted the pontifical flag, which was soon to cease to be recognized as an emblem of the Pope's temporal power by other nations.

We were in the harbors of Italy, enjoying the privilege of onlooking neutrals, when the war between France and Italy and Austria was in progress.

Here it was, watching keenly for the news from day to day, that we heard of the victory of Solferino, which was a crushing blow to the Austrian power which the skillful machinations of Metternich had built.

After the publication of Le Rouge et le Noir, Stendhal was forced by his financial embarrassment to leave Paris and take up the post of consul at Trieste.

Driven from this position by the intrigues of a vindictive church, he was transferred to Civitavecchia, where he remained till eighteen thirty-five, solacing his ennui by the compilation of his autobiography and thinking seriously of marriage with a rich and highly respectable daughter of his laundress.

He then returned to Paris, where he remained till eighteen forty-two, where he died suddenly at the age of fifty-nine in the full swing of all his mental and physical activities.

His later works include La Chartreuse de Parme, Lucien, Luquin, and Lamiel, of which The Chartreuse is the most celebrated, but Lamiel certainly the most sprightly.

And so my son got to meet like these, these dogs that he really got a kick out of meeting.

And we, you know, talk to the locals and then we didn't have a hard and fast plan for Civitavecchia the next week.

And so we were like, what do you have that day going on? I know you're probably booked up, but like whatever you're doing, we want part of it.

And we ended up going to, this is called Saturnia.

Italian police officers arrested a Chinese woman at Rome's International Airport on Friday morning after more than five kilograms of cocaine concealed in Chinese fortune cookie packages was were found in her luggage.

The discovery, Italian State Police detailed in an official statement, is the result of a broader joint operation between Rome's police, the Italian Air Border Police Office, and public prosecutors from the city of Civitavecchia.

The operation resulted in the arrest of an unidentified 40-year-old Chinese woman at Rome's Fluminco Leonardo da Vinci International Airport.

The woman was intercepted near a boarding gate as she attempted to board a flight to Taipei, Taiwan.

In this episode, we're continuing our Mediterranean tour with our next port call, Palermo, Italy, the energetic capital of Sicily, where grand churches, narrow streets, lively traffic, Arab Norman heritage, and Mediterranean city life all come together in a way that feels intense, historic, and full of character.

Today we are staying in Italy, but the feeling is quite different from our previous stop in Civitavecchia.

Civitavecchia had been a quieter and somewhat improvised day, shaped by a cancelled excursion, rain, and a more relaxed look at a port city that many travelers mainly know as the gateway to Rome.

Palermo, on the other hand, immediately feels louder, warmer, denser, and more alive.

This was not our first visit to Palermo, we had already stopped here during the World Cruise 2025, and back then we joined an organized excursion.