Washington City

I reached Washington from Pennsylvania, passing through Maryland. The District of Columbia is practically Washington, while Washington is not only the District of Columbia; in fact the capital of the United States of America has grown so much that it also occupies the neighbouring Virginia, where important national institutions are located such as the Pentagon and the Arlington military cemetery. Separating the District of Columbia from Virginia is the Potomac river, crossed by great, ultra-modern five-lane motorways that, as almost everywhere in the U.S.A., are free. The monumental part of the capital naturally developed in the original core, the one created from nothing on the instructions of the first President George Washington in the aftermath of the anti-British revolution that allowed the birth of the States.

I arrived here with three travel companions and a car hired in New York as a stop on a long journey in the U.S.A. Arriving in the early afternoon we refreshed ourselves at a "Donut" on the outskirts of the city, then tried in vain to reach Mount Vernon in Virginia; the traffic was easy but our satellite navigator went haywire, so we gave up and returned to the city. We arrived a day earlier than the hotel booking made in Italy, so we would need to find other accommodation, but in the meantime we are in the centre; we park and begin our visit. On our way to the centre we saw from the road the mighty bulk of the Pentagon, brushed past the fence of Arlington cemetery, and passed near the Jefferson Memorial. On foot we head towards the Capitol and take a few photos in front of the great staircase, our backs to the enormous dome.

Before us opens a wide, long avenue divided in two by a lawn, faced by the most significant buildings of the capital. We walk the avenue as far as the Washington Monument, the tall obelisk visible from many parts of the city, passing in front of the museums we promise ourselves to visit tomorrow. We nonetheless peek through the windows of the Air and Space Museum, which looks truly promising. From the Washington Monument we observe the Lincoln Memorial, a neoclassical shrine with a colonnade, but we are too tired to reach it; we prefer to turn off towards the White House to take a few photos in front of the most famous home in the world. As we try to get there we see a long line of blue cars with sirens blaring pass by; it is probably the President leaving home. We take the ritual photos on the main sides of the building, the one with the Oval Office and the one with the entrance.

We observe how the place where the most powerful man in the world lives is in reality a neoclassical house, not even that big — there are plenty like it, much smaller and less ambitious than other stately homes. Among other things you can stand calmly in front of the entrance gate, which apparently doesn't even seem heavily guarded. We return by taxi to our car, observing how Washington is a sober, orderly, clean, systematic city — all of which is understandable given that it was created from nothing on land ceded by Maryland and Virginia. Unfortunately this bureaucratic, administrative city is not a lively city; at least from what we saw, it seems in an eternal hibernation, in strong contrast with many nerve centres of the United States like New York or Las Vegas.

I realise that there isn't just one country but many, yet that is inevitable in a nation as big as a continent, where distances are enormous, where centres are sometimes separated by wide uninhabited areas, whether an arid desert, a prairie or a flourishing countryside. The only common denominator of this great country is the patriotic feeling that every American keeps inside, and expresses by displaying the Stars and Stripes on their home, and this patriotism Washington identifies well through its monuments. We take our car again and cross back over one of the many bridges over the Potomac, returning to Virginia, where around Alexandria we first dine at a McDonald's and then sleep in a motel. We return to the District of Columbia only in the late morning; we take possession of the hotel booked from Italy, truly beautiful and central.

After eating at a fast-food place we return to the long monumental avenue to see the two museums that in our view are the most interesting. The famous Air and Space Museum, the most important of its kind in the world, displays space shuttles, orbiting stations, satellites, lunar modules, astronaut suits and helmets. These are exhibits that are part of the history of astronautics, such as the Apollo 11 module or the craft that carried the first man into space. The other part of the museum is dedicated to aviation, from Icarus to Leonardo's drawings, from the Wright brothers' experimental flights to modern aircraft. During the visit you can climb aboard some vehicles, both aircraft and spacecraft, and observe historic planes such as those of the Second World War and the "Spirit of St. Louis" with which Lindbergh first crossed the Atlantic.

Leaving here and crossing the wide avenue, we reach the Natural History Museum to visit the section dedicated to dinosaurs. Here you can see the skeletons of numerous prehistoric animals, both land, sea and air, often gigantic bone structures that give a sense of how enormous these beasts must have been. In some display cases are fossils of shells, insects and footprints found in various parts of the United States, while through a glass you can watch an archaeologist busy cleaning dinosaur bones. We don't visit the rest of the museum, although before leaving we pay attention to a few petrified tree trunks and one of the famous statues from Easter Island. We would also like to go to the Museum of American History, but it is closed for reorganisation, and so, since we have accumulated a great deal of tiredness over these days, we take a taxi to the hotel to rest.

In the evening we go out for dinner not far from our accommodation, eat a pizza and return to sleep. We wake after a few hours because early in the morning we must leave Washington and the District of Columbia for Virginia; at Dulles airport we will take the American Airlines plane bound for Los Angeles.