Day Six -- November 2, 2012

We got a late start (my fault -- I think I have trouble using an alarm clock on vacation) but somehow managed to walk to Piazza Barberini and catch the Metro Line B, transfer to the Metro Line A at Termini Station, get off at the Piramide Metro Stop and walk through the maze of tunnels to the train station Roma-Ostiense to catch the 10:22 train to Bracciano.  It was nice to see the bright green rolling hills dotted with small towns, olive groves and lots of sheep for the one hour trip.  I had read the Bracciano was a summer resort and somehow expected it to be small and quaint, but it was actually very commercial and crowded on a steep hillside.  We walked into town toward the castle (where Tom Cruise and Katie Holms were married) looking for a place to eat a quick lunch, but everything was so hectic we decided to go back toward the train station and look for a place to get a sandwich.  We found a nice Bar (named The American Bar) and each had a ham and cheese toast with wine while we watched an episode of "CSI Miami" with Italian subtitles on TV!  We went back to the station to look for a taxi stand, but it was empty when we found it.  The girl at the Bar spoke pretty good English so we went back to ask her if she could call a taxi for us to take us the short distance to the Italian Air Force Museum.  She said her phone was almost out of minutes and when we told her we had a cell phone but weren't sure how to use it to call Italy (we had only used it to call home) she looked at us like we were nuts!  She took our phone and expertly called a taxi which came in about fifteen minutes.

The Italian Air Force Museum was opened to the public in 1977 and is located on the shores of Lake Bracciano (a large volcanic lake) at the historical airport of Vigna di Valle where the first airship construction yards in Italy, the first Italian seaplane base and the first air-sea rescue base were established.  The museum consists of four big hangars and has over 60 airplanes, an extensive engine collection and hundreds of historical objects recounting the history of Italian aviation. 

There were lots of airplanes and engines in the museum that we had never seen before (and quite a few that Mike had never heard of either), but the most beautiful and fascinating were Macchi experimental seaplanes to compete for the Schneider Trophy.  Our favorite was the Macchi M.C.72 (closest airplane on the right) which was built in 1931 and was powered by a Fiat 24 cylinder engine reaching a maximum speed of 440.681 mph (even with those big floats as drag) -- a record that still stands today!

We decided to try and take the bus back to Bracciano when we found out the bus stop was right in front of the guard house at the entrance to the airport.  As we were waiting for the bus, two men walked up to wait for the bus.  Mike somehow had a nice conversation with the men who did not speak any English and found out they were policemen, one from Milan and one from Sicily.  They were very impressed that Mike was a pilot since it is very expensive to fly in Europe.  The bus was pretty late and one of the men called the central bus station only to find out the original bus had engine problems and they were trying to get another bus out our way!  We had the business card from our taxi driver and asked one of the men to call him for us and were soon on our way back to town and the train station (we offered to share the taxi with our new friends, but they said they wanted to wait for the bus).  We were just able to catch the 5:07 train and made it back to Roma-Ostiense Station by 6:30.

Since it was Friday night and rush hour, we were not looking forward to getting on the crowded Metro and were thinking of walking over to Testaccio for dinner (the Roma-Ostiense train station is connected to the Piramide Metro stop by tunnels) when I remembered reading about a new branch of Eataly which had just opened in June and was supposed to be across from the Roma-Ostiense train station.  We had been to the original Eataly in Turin in 2009 and were overwhelmed by it at that time so did not know what to think about this branch which was supposed to be even larger! 

This branch of Eataly is located in a 17,000 square foot building that was built in 1990 as the Air Terminal Ostiense to handle traffic from the 1990 World Cup but fell on bad times from the beginning.  While the powerful exterior of the Air Terminal remains, the enormous open halls of the original have been filled in and three floors added with 23 eating places, 40 areas devoted to teaching about food, 8 spaces where they make mozzarella, fresh pasta and bread, a coffee roaster, a brewery, 14,000 products for sale, hundreds of employees and an anticipated 6 million visitors per year (think IKEA for foodies).

The carts are small plastic double carts and you move yourself and your cart from floor to floor by way of long flat escalators.

After gawking at the housewares, vegetables and fruit, bakery and chocolate counter downstairs, we made our way to the second floor and marveled at the number of different pastas for sale before making our way to the Ristorante "Della Pizza".  We found a table and Mike took that table number to the cash register where he ordered our pizza, wine and beer.  He had barely made it back to the table before our drinks were delivered and shortly after that our delicious wood-fired pizza was delivered by the young energetic servers.  We enjoyed watching the continuous parade of shoppers and lookers walking by as we ate.  We walked around some more after dinner and Mike noticed that the Ristorante "Il Pesce" on the third floor had raw oysters -- so for desert he had three raw oysters (which he said were some of the best he had ever had) and we each had a glass of Proscesso wine!

After working our way out of this huge "spectacle of food" we had to work out way through the tunnels under the train station to come out at the Piramide Metro stop and make our way back to our apartment.  It was my dad's birthday so I was able to figure out how to use our cell phone and call him for a nice talk.  He wondered if we had heard about Hurrican Sandy which hit the East Coast after we left and I told him we had four English speaking television channels so that is pretty much all we had been seeing.