When in Rome, eat tapas

One of the many things I find fascinating about Spain is that while we think of it as a distinct country for the Romans it was just part of the home counties. The city of Italica predates Seville and was founded by Scipio Africanus in 206 AD. Two Roman Emperors – Trajan and Hadrian – were born in Italica and they showered it with enormous building projects including on the largest ampitheatres in the Roman world.

The ruins of Italica are only 10 minutes away from the centre of Seville and completely worth a visit. There are some lovely mosaics and, of course the ampitheatre. My group of 30-60-year-old colleagues from school were accompanied by a group of 20-year-old students from the University of Southern Georgia. They showed little interest in the Roman ruins until they were told the amphitheatre featured in Game of Thrones – at which point the selfies started firing.

My absolute favourite part of the visit, though, was that at one point you can see a bit of genuine Roman plumbing in the road. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a stretch of the infamous Roman lead piping in-site before.

There are a small group of us who are at about the same level and more roughly the same age who have gravitated together. This evening I went for a tapas-crawl with Lucian and Kathleen which turned into a bit of an adventure.

Last night Lucian had got some recommendations form a local waiter. So with the names scribbled on a bit of paper we started out at Casa Morena. This turned out to be a local store just round the corner from my apartment; but hidden behind the shelves of the store was a tiny bar with its walls decorated with the head of a bull and numerous little scraps of paper bearing words of, more or less, wisdom. We let the bar owner hit us with the specialities which were almost all brilliant – honestly the sausage-like lengths of mackerel roe are not something I’ll repeat.

It was all going swimmingly until Lucian declared he was not feeling well, rolled his eyes to the ceiling, and fainted. Kathleen and I caught him before he hit anything and lowered him to the ground where two emergency nurses fought over giving him care. (The observant reader might remember that the first time I went out in Playa del Carmen one of my classmates fainted – there’s a disturbing pattern here.) Lucian came back up and everyone was wonderfully kind. After a while we carefully extracted him and took him back to his hotel in a taxi (he messaged a few minutes ago to say he was fine).

Kathleen and I walked back the centre of town and went to Bar Morales for another tapa. It wasn’t quite as atmospheric but was good. As we came out we found ourself in the midst of the procession returning the Virgen de Rocio to Sevilla. The Virgen sits on a huge two-wheeled cart pulled along by garlanded oxen and accompanied by caballeros on horses and thousands of well-dressed people. It was a very cool thing to see and a great end to what proved to be a very full day.