GREECE Cyclades and Rhodes and one travel in a students'group in 1967

In 1967 I started my first trip abroad which was offered to me by my school because I was a good student and I had also placed very well in the national shorthand championship held in Montecatini (23rd out of around 700). I had to go by train to Brindisi where there was a meeting waiting for the ferry which took us with a night's sailing to Patras and from there we began the bus tour of classical Greece: Corinth with its canal, Mycenae, Delphi, Nauplia, Epidaurus, Athens and Cape Sunion where we admired a beautiful sunset. We were students from all over Italy, but about 50% were Romans, who knows why. 57 years have passed since then and yet I remember that first trip with pleasure. From Brindisi to return to Trieste I stopped to visit Rome, Florence, Rimini, the Rep. of S. Marino and Verona where I had relatives. In the years when my daughter was little, for at least ten years I didn't make trips to distant countries but I preferred to travel around Italy and some Mediterranean places including the very beautiful Cyclades and Rhodes islands. We visited the Cyclades two years in a row, seeing them almost all while Rhodes arrived several years later Instead, around 1993, with my partner and then very young daughter, we went two years in a row to visit the beautiful Cyclades islands, hopping on the ferry from one island to another. The two most famous and visited islands and also the most expensive are MYKONOS (I remember two beautiful beaches, one of which is naturist and then the city is delightful) SANTORINI (it does not have a beautiful sea, I remember a beach with red stones, but at the top there are those two unparalleled locations especially for the view and the sunsets) but also NAXOS, PAROS, ANTIPAROS, MILOS, FOLEGANDROS, IOS, AAMORGOS, KITHNOS, SERIFNOS make a good impression, they are less touristy and expensive. What sticks in my mind are the white houses with blue doors and windows, the trattorias by the sea with simple tables and chairs where they ate the typical dishes of Greek cuisine, mousaka, tsatsiki, Greek salad, suvlaki, drinking wine white retsina and then ouzo as a digestive, Turkish coffee, woe betide calling it that, they get offended because they hate the Turks but in fact it is Turkish coffee because they were occupied by the Turks for four centuries and they left signs like coffee, I think also honey-based desserts, perhaps yogurt which is delicious and creamy with honey. In those days they ate more meat than fish and this is strange because Greece is in the sea but perhaps the Greeks preferred to raise sheep rather than fish! As people they didn't seem very social to me, actually a little abrupt, perhaps annoyed at always having to respond to so many tourists, but they live off of that! Same face, same race, this is also a stereotype because they seem different from us, darker and darker, perhaps closer to our southerners with whom they have had various entanglements throughout history. RHODES has a beautiful capital, a real city with a notable historical center and then at the end the sunny and white Lindos and the Antony Quinn beach who filmed a film here while the other coast is usually windy and noisy because it hosts the airport. One day we went on an excursion to the beautiful island of SYMI which is a little gem between the houses in the port and those on the hills I have no photos of the trips from those years but many slides that I managed to download onto the computer only in small part because the process is long and laborious, so I resorted to photos found online.