Pescara, Italia by Kev and Mel

Hello everyone,
We are in Pescara, on the east coat of Italy on the Adriatic sea.
The town has been going on since pre Roman conquest, from small fishing village to port to trade with the orient. The town was conquered by a number of different kingdoms through the centuries. Heavily bombed during WW2, it was massively reconstructed and is now the biggest city of the region where it seems a lot of Italian come for their holiday.
We decided to have a very quiet stop. We have been incredibly busy those last couple of months, so a bit of rest was needed. This blog will, therefore be pretty boring!
We took a bus from Roma, which took 2 and half hour to arrive here. We have a stay 15 minutes walking from the bus station, which is great. Our stay is nice, but for some reason, when I booked it, I didn’t realised that it had no kitchen, which means spending money on eating out! But it has breakfast included, so that is a plus!
The day we arrived, we settled, finished our blog about Roma and did not much.
For dinner, we found a sandwich place which does sandwich on 18*18cm bread. Those are massive sandwiches. It will do for dinner!
The next day, the kids caught up on schoolwork as it has been pretty thin lately. So math, English and science were studied with more or less happiness!
Kev and I did some booking for South America, looked around for information on what to do.
We spent the afternoon at the beach. This is not my favourite thing but kids love it! They splashed in the water and built a sand castle while Kev and I rested and I read my book (as I said, nothing exciting!).
Friday was more schoolwork, some work for me and more booking and research.
In the afternoon, we visited Imago: this is a modern art museum. After all the renaissance painting we saw over the last few weeks, a bit of modern was nice! One part of the museum is dedicated to Mario Schifano, an Italian artist from the 20th century, who used mixed media that included enamel paint, wax crayons, gouache, collage, photographs, among others. I liked his work on pictures.
There is one room dedicated to one piece of art from Salvador Dali (a Spanish artist) and his wife Gala: “Couple with their heads full of clouds” I really liked this piece. It depicts the outlines of 2 heads with a landscape in it with open sky and almost empty desert scene. It looked like dreams to me. A very fascinating piece (no pictures allowed unfortunately).
The rest of the museum is divided between Scandinavian impressionist and Contemporary figurative artists. There was a really interesting video about the restoration of one of paintings of Mario Schifano: I like that the kids get exposed to a lot of different crafts and jobs that we wouldn’t necessary think of in our daily lives!
The next day was a repeat of 2 days before: Computer day in the morning and beach in the afternoon. Kev, Andrew and I got our haircut, lovingly done by Kev. Pretty easy as it is bold for him and Andrew and number 11 on the clippers for me. Emma want to keep her hair growing. Slight variation on the evening, we had dinner in a nicer place (no sandwich!) with massive pizza!
On our last full day in Pescara, we visited the CLAP museum dedicated to Italian comics: one part was about Andrea Pazienza, a comic artist and painter for the second part of the 20th century (he died in 1988 at the age of 33 years old). The second part is about the Rainbow Group, an Italian animation studio who created Winx club and Huntik. What I loved was the different storyboards and explanation of the different stages of creating an anime, and the drawing were beautiful.
After that, back to our room for some drawing for the kids (they got inspired), and some blogging for me (the kids won’t blog about Pescara, as they did a lot of schoolwork those last few days).
In the afternoon, we visited one more modern art gallery and had dinner, taking on the last walk in the friendly streets of Pescara.
Packing and movie night and bedtime.
On the 4th of August (7 months on the road) we are taking a couple of trains to our last stop in Italia, Venezia!!!
See you there.
Mel

30.7.2025. Covered most of the day in my Roma blog. In the afternoon, the kids and I walked around to a small supermarket and got some supplies. We had planned on cooking a lot of dinners again, but the apartment doesn't have a kitchenette. It does however have breakfast included. New plan, gorge ourselves at breakfast, then eat somewhere cheaper if we can for dinner. Possibly with a snack somewhere in the middle. We went for a walk along the beachfront in the evening. Not sure if we can get to the beach, there's restaurants and umbrellas everywhere. Eventually we found somewhere we could walk down to the beach, and had a walk along it. The kids ran around like lunatics. We headed along the beach, “towards” a sandwich place I found earlier on GMaps. We had to walk up past a butt load of umbrellas and through part of a restaurant, but we got back to the street. We had a nice walk through this part of Pescara, lots of places to shop, I mean Lots. I can only imagine the amount of money that passes through this place. There are thousands of umbrellas on the beach, and hundreds of expensive looking shops here. Not to mention some of the restaurants I looked into, we'd have to get a second mortgage to eat and shop here. Yet there's still homeless people here, begging. How can that be when there is so much money here? Oh yeah that's right, the rich only look after themselves, I keep forgetting. Anyway, sandwich time. We weren't sure how dinner was gonna go, who has sandwiches for dinner? They were huge! Pretty bloody tasty too. It says on the menu, 18cm X 18cm bread. The toppings were really nice, I got eggplant parmigiana. Was not disappointed. Andrew got something with bacon and egg on it, it disappeared into his mouth. Mel got a vegetarian one and was a little disappointed, and Emma only got through half of hers. Lucky I was there to help, Emma's may have been better than mine. We walked back, shower and teeth. Then bed.
31.7.2025. We had a blog day. Kids loved it. We instituted a new regime. 20mins of work, then 5mins of free time. It has since become 30mins of work, followed by 10mins of free time. It seems to be working as they seem slightly more productive, and a teensy but less grumpy. After the blog got done, we took them to the beach. The kids built a sand castle, which looked pretty good. Andrew became very protective of it after a little kid ran through a bit of it. I can tell when the boy is pissed off, and he was. After that, a guard patrol was implemented. They didn't even go into the water together until way later, as one always had to stand guard. They make me laugh. Before we realised it, we'd spent 4hrs there, and it was getting late. We found a little family restaurant and had dinner.
1.8.2025. Another day of schoolwork. We are using Pescara as a catch-up and relax stay. Planning some more of our trip and just unwinding a bit. We headed out again, this time we're headed to a museum. Yep, a museum. This one, however, is a more modern art museum, and was a nice change from all the biblical paintings and sculptures I have seen lately. After that we had planned on walking a bit on the beach again, but Emma was looking stuffed. So we headed back to the sandwich place again. This time only Mel and I finished our meals. The leftovers went into the fridge for tomorrow, then we played some boardgames before bed.
2.8.2025. Slow days. Get up and have breakfast. Kids did more schoolwork. They have been excused from blogging in Pescara since we're not doing much. Mel and I are still blogging though, sorta. Later, in the early afternoon, we went to the beach again. Mel and the kids went for a swim, I watched from the shore. 3 hours went by, and when I said to the kids it's time to go, all I got was, “no” and “not yet”. Apparently they were enjoying themselves, building sandcastles. I have to admit, the “finished” product was pretty impressive. I say finished, but it really wasn't. I'm not sure how long they would have kept building. We went back to the apartment and showered, everyone was covered in sand. After that we found a place for dinner. I'm nearly over eating pizza, will be by the time we leave Italy. Brush teeth, watched TV and went to bed.
3.8.2025. Did bugger all this morning again. Kids did some more assessments on study ladder. At 10:30 we wandered over to another museum, yep another one. This one was about comics, or more specifically, Italian comics. We learnt of The Winx Club and Huntik, or something like that. After the museum we walked back to our room. The kids, inspired by the museum, and a game we've all been playing, started to draw. While the kids created and we planned a bit more, it started pissing down. This lasted for a few hours, but thankfully it slowed before we headed out again. This time to another museum, that's right, two in one day. A modern/contemporary art museum this time. Better yet, it was free! We found a place for dinner. I got a chicken, vege and rice “poke” bowl. Lots of sriracha, I've missed the heat, India was good for that. We walked back, showered up, made sure our backpacks were done and watched some tv.
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