HORIZON - Part 2
Tuesday 29th May 2012
Today’s port is Civitavecchia, in Italy, and again it was hot and a fascinating city to visit.
QUEEN ELIZABETH was also in port, so I wore my Hard Rock Café, Hamburg, T-shirt which I bought in January as a memento of my visit there whilst on the QE.
My diary note tells me that we enjoyed ice-cream, seeing other ships, and hearing about an overseas friend’s recent holiday trip to Japan, sailing on various ships there with several friends. In port also was the AMERIGO VESPUCCI and I was interested to see this well-known 3 masted ship for the first time.
A friend suggested I visit a particular statue that was worth seeing, and I imagined the sort of thing often found in the UK, with stone plinth and man on a horse or similar, and that was what I was looking out for. I wasn’t quite prepared for what I found along one promenade – it was a tall statue of a uniformed sailor kissing a female nurse in white dress and shoes, in quite an abandoned pose.
It was called ‘Unconditional Surrender’ by Seward Johnson. The original 25 feet high sculptures were done in 2005, and said by Mr Johnson to represent a lesser-known photograph by Victor Jorgensen of the same scene as Eisenstaedt’s ‘V-J Day in Times Square, New York’. Copies were first exhibited in the United States, but I would be interested to know why this fibreglass statue is here – other than to attract visitors of course, and it certainly intrigued me.
Dinner that evening was better organised in the Restaurant, and several of us enjoyed Beef Cheek as the main course – a dish that was new to me and really delicious.
Ships seen: Aida Vita, Queen Elizabeth, Raffaele Rubattino, Adventure of the Seas, Saremar’s Dimonios, Amerigo Vespucci (the Italian naval training ship, launched in February 1931, full rigged, steel masted, at 4,146 tons, with 26 sails, and still sailing), Cruise Roma, Grimaldi's Eurocar
To be continued....
