Twelve years after our road trip, I still haven’t published the photos taken during its last day. At a time like this, when travel is a somewhat distant memory for most, and draconian travel rules require you to jump through even more hoops in order to board a crowded cattle plane, perhaps these photos, taken during more relaxed times, will provide a bit of comfort to you. So, Day 6 ended with us crashing around 11:30 pm, exhausted, at our newly found hotel in Ladispoli, after having charged through most of downtown Rome earlier that day.

We woke up the next morning to find we were about 20 meters from an unusual beach. We hadn’t come to Ladispoli for its beach — we came because we wanted to find a reasonably-priced hotel outside Rome, on our way back to Pisa, but the next morning, we got to enjoy the beach nonetheless. I’ll let the photos show you what I mean.

You see, Ladispoli is know for its black (blackish) sand. It’s quitely a lovely texture too. Ligia and I actually went back to the hotel to tell the others about the beach, but they were too tired from traipsing through Rome to come down, so we had our breakfast and off we went toward Pisa.

We’re driving along on the highway and around lunchtime, we spot this lovely medieval village on a distant hill. We all agree that we’ll go there for lunch and a little visit. That little village was Capalbio. The lunch was delicious and we had a wonderful time walking through the fortress. Much like many other medieval villages, the entire settlement is surrounded by fortified walls and is set on a hill, with vineyards and fields spread out in the valley below. The houses and overall properties inside the fortress are small and right next to each other, in order to maximize the available space. The actual patrol routes along the walls have now become sidewalks that visitors and inhabitants alike use to get around the place.

By 4 pm or so, we could see the sea (pun intended), with the Gorgona Scalo barely visible in the distance in some of the photos. By 5:30 pm, we made our way seaside in Rosignano Marittimo and found a spot to stop and take photos. It was lovely. In the gallery below, you’ll see I edited the colors in some of photographs quite heavily. Sometimes I can’t help myself. In recent years I’ve begun to do fairly conservative edits but in my younger years, I sometimes ended up doing fairly heavy color manipulation, and these photos were edited years ago. I also snuck in a photo of Ligia and I on the shore of the Ligurian Sea, as it’s called down there. That’s how we looked 12 years ago. How time flies…

We then drove to a hotel in Pisa, where we spent a short night, because the next morning at 6:10 we were on a plane which fiddled around on the runways until 7:06, when it was wheels up and on its way back to Romania.

And that was my last, long overdue post on this road trip. You can wind your way through our days on the road in Italy from start to finish by following these links:

• The Italian road trip
• Day One – Pisa
• Day Two – Florence
• Day Three – Venice – Part 1 and Part 2
• Day Four – Ravenna, Rimini and Grottammare
• Day Five – Crossing Italy from Grottammare to Rome
• Day Six – Rome
• Day Seven – this was it

Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed the photographs!