Recently started Italian tradition.Suitors pledging their undying love for their special someone add their own lock.
Italy or Bust (Part II)
Last month I left off as we were on our way to our second house exchange. This was actually the family apartment (located in the mountains near Cosenza, famed for it's mushrooms) of the same people we had exchanged with in our first 10 days. While they were wonderful and their homes are quite nice, it is still Italy. Both times we killed ourselves to get precise and exact directions to the homes, with street addresses, phone numbers, emergency contacts and a physical map with the homes clearly shown on it. Great theory.
In practice, the streets that the homes are on are not actually on any map. The homes do have legal addresses but they were not on the homes to be seen. We got a lot of “it’s right near to” and “it’s right around the corner from”…. type of directions. Not to worry because they gave us phone numbers of family located nearby to call in case of problems. Perfect, except for the fact that they did not speak a single word of English. My total Italian linguistic repertoire consists of “Mama Mia” so that was of limited use. My idea of speaking Italian is using the same English words I always use but add some weird ending to them and throw in what I think the Italian accent would sound like.
Our
'street'
in
medieval
Viterbo
Language issues aside, we always find where we are going by using what we have dubbed “The 100 meter rule”. The Italians were very gracious and always tried very hard to help. Still we found it best when we pulled over to ask directions for anything and they began to blabber, not to listen to a word. Listening to what we won’t understand would only distract us from what we really needed to do, which was to watch their hands. By watching their hands we had a shot at seeing if we should go straight, turn left or even turn around. With enough practice you can even get the first few turns correct before getting hopelessly loss again. That’s where “The 100 meter rule” comes in. If necessary, we go 100 meters (100 yards), usually a turn or two and ask again. You would be surprised how by getting the first few rights and lefts correct, a hundred meters at a time can soon get you back on your way to a sign you can read. Meanwhile, these poor people think that my understanding of Italian will improve if they explain it again or my favorite –LOUDER- as if I am deaf.
Medieval “street” in front of our home exchange. Left up to her own devices, Janice would move here in a minute. Good thing one of us is sensible and has a little more self-control, huh?
The other thing we found was that unlike in America where cities are largely laid out in a grid pattern, or in France where many cities are laid out like a wheel with spokes emanating from a central hub, in Italy many of the cities are laid out like a maze. On purpose, no less. This, we were told was to give the maneuvering advantage to the home team when attacked by outsiders which history tells us, happened frequently.
This is great, but as a visitor you can walk just a few blocks and never find your car again. Janice came up with a brilliant solution. We now carry fluorescent pink chalk and mark our way subtly at street corners like Hansel and Gretel with their breadcrumbs. We have not lost our way since.
After leaving the house in Santa Maria Al Bagno, we drove to Cozensa in the mountains (above Sicily) to the second home exchange. Upon our arrival we meet a young couple our age (plus or minus 28 years) that were neighbors (he a criminal lawyer, she a journalist). They invited us out for dinner and we had a great time discussing his mafia clients. He told us he was going out of town for a few days to a court hearing that was to be held in an underground bunker. Puzzled, I asked why it was underground. He said that the risk was too high for an assassin or bomber to attempt to silence his client. Life in the fast lane, Italian style. They were an absolute kick and we enjoyed each other’s company immensely. It seemed odd in a way to be making adult friends that are younger than our older kids.
We spent the next 3 days touring the area before driving North to our third home exchange in the heart of the medieval walled city of Viterbo, just above Rome. Along the way we drove along the Amalfi coast, classified as a World Heritage Site (WHS # 74), http://www.ecostieramalfitana.it/costieraamalfitanatour/amalfinf.htm
and the Archaeological ruins of Pompei (WHS #75) http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/829
In Amalfi we found ourselves stopped at a traffic light when a young woman standing on the other side of the street with her friend looked at me and named some village up the road. Thinking that it would be odd for her to ask, I said “yes”, that was where we were going. Before I could blink, I had two buxom 25 year olds in the back seat and a scowling, fuming wife. I felt like I had just kicked a hornet’s nest and stood on top of it to see what would happen. Apparently, I had inadvertently and quite innocently offered a couple of babes a ride. (As much as a guy can claim picking up two chicks as an innocent act). As a result, I am no longer authorized to step out with the car keys to so much as get a quart of milk.
Later, I had a chance to redeem myself when we were out in the middle of nowhere. An old woman stood by the roadside in front of her farmhouse and flagged us down. The custom in this outlying area was that she would flag anyone down who came by and ask for a ride to the local village. I pulled out a map of Italy and assured her I would drive her to anyplace in the country she wanted to go. At least I could then claim that I was not profiling 25-year-olds.
In one of the little villages we stopped at, we walked around the streets that are as wide as a sidewalk. A woman stopped to greet us as we were obviously not locals. Unable to communicate, she invited us nevertheless to come in for coffee. We spent the next 45 minutes visiting with us explaining that we were “Americanos di Californiato”. She looked puzzled, so I figured adding “New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles” would clear things up. She had never heard of either of them but pulled out a map of south America and asked that we point to the country we were from.
Ironically, when arriving in tiny remote villages of Italy, they would see us drive up with French license plates and naturally, assume we were French. Go figure! It was a little complicated explaining what Californians were doing driving a French car in Italy but we only got warm friendly receptions everywhere we went.
Part of the reason we chose to spend 10 days in Viterbo was its proximity to several other World Heritage sites. Over the next week, my co-pilot and California babe (J) directed us to a couple of Papal summer homes and a whole slew of Etruscan tombs, including the ones at Tarquina (WHS #76)
http://oncampus.richmond.edu/academics/classics/students/belanger/tarquinia.html.
We thought that these bad boys were more impressive than the Anastassi cliff dwellings we visited in New Mexico. For one thing, they are a tad older, as in 400 BC. For another, they have beautiful Frescos painted in them. For a third, there were 6000 of them.
Some of the tombs I crawled into on hands and knees, past overgrowth covering the entrances. Some were as much as 30 meters deep, 10 meters wide and not quite tall enough to stand in. They were dug out of solid rock into the Cliffside but being seriously prepared, I brought a large searchlight to explore the interiors and saw many-opened sarcophagus. (Up to 50 per tomb) It made ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’ look like an amateur.
Hanging out around Rome for several days, we visited the WWII invasion site and the American cemetery at Anzio, Hadrian’s villa (WHS # 77) of Scotland’s Hadrian’s Wall fame http://sights.seindal.dk/sight/901_Hadrians_Villa.html , Villa d’Estes and the Tivoli gardens (WHS #78) http://www.gardenvisit.com/ge/dest.htm , San Gimignano (WHS #79) http://www.castellitoscani.com/sgimignano.htm and spent a day at the Vatican (WHS). Whew, we need a vacation! It had been 4 decades (Yikes!) since I had last been so I was seriously due to return. It was fantastic to see the Sistine chapel again since it underwent a 3-year restoration.
Villa Estes and the Tivoli gardens
It was time to call it a wrap and head back to the crib. North to Bologna, crossing back into France through the massifs near Lyon, on to Bourge and home.
We pulled in after 5 weeks on the road.
Whine, whine, whine.
You would think that with all my whining last month on the subject of Italian driving skills, I would have gotten it out of my system. But noooooooo, there is much more whining to do. Having driven 9,500 kilometers during the past 5 weeks (the equivalent of driving from Los Angeles to New York and back!), most of it in Italy, I feel that I am in a position to offer an opinion. It turns out that it is one of the daily experiences that separates this trip from others in a significant way. You might detect a tad more diplomacy in my comments as we now have Italian friends who are new readers and well, as you already know, I am a sensitive millennium kind of guy.
During the past month, we have observed many drivers who have displayed their skills by:
- Riding in the front passenger seat with an infant in their lap. (An Italian airbag?)
- Pass other cars in two-way tunnels (over the double lines). 1/3 of the long and winding tunnels don’t have lights, making the experience extra exciting.
- Cut in line in front of 20 cars at a toll both. Cutting other drivers off is so prevalent here it is like a national pastime.
- Pass a dozen cars and trucks by driving down the center double line with half of their vehicle in each lane, flashing their headlights to the oncoming dozen cars and trucks to force them to ‘make way’ or get ready for a head on collision. I kid you not.
- And my personal favorite; having gotten half way across and deciding they did not want to proceed, 2 cars decided to back up….on a &#%*@ …bridge!
Parking in tow away zones is so common that we do it all the time ourselves without giving it a thought. There is a completely different mindset in Europe about parking. Rarely enforced parking regulations means that it is every man for himself (sidewalks, median strips, double and triple parking, crosswalks, etc, it’s all good!)
Morgan Mag
A couple of months ago we got a call from the editor of local magazine called ‘Morgan Mag’. It is a bilingual quarterly publication about life in France as experienced by the English who move here from the UK. Well we have been around the block about this whole ‘English’ thing before, so I was quick to point out the obvious, which is that it is a language, not a nationality. The French here mistakenly say that we speak ‘American’, as though that was a language as opposed to a nationality. Anyways, I digress. The editor asked if she could drive up (she came from 2 hours away) to interview us regarding our experiences as Americans in Brittany and in France in general. It turned out to be a puff piece (one of those warm and fuzzy pieces as opposed to an ambush: “Go on, admit it!!! Bush lied, kids died” types of interviews) so it was a lot of fun. I was a little surprised that politics never entered the conversation, but it does not seem that it is that kind of publication.
Speaking of politics, I have been told that the majority of the French do not have a positive view of Americans. I don’t doubt that there are strong feelings about America’s more recent foreign policy forays and I surely know that the general feeling in America is mutual toward France. We however, have never had an unpleasant encounter with any of the French (or Italians) that we have met.
Initially, because of my French Canadian accent, they assume that we are Canadians. I always correct them and tell them we are Americans from California. We have invited them to our home and they have invited us to theirs. I have to believe that this goes beyond simply being polite and not wanting to talk about the elephant in the room.
Admittedly, we don’t talk politics much to our French friends and when we do, they are usually complaining about their government. Of course if things got rough and it were needed, I always have the ace in the hole. I could always remind them that if it were not for America they would all be speaking German today…
We have visitors
Correction
