Author: Lynne

We travel well, Rob and I! We do unusual things sometimes.  In October 2017 we hired a car so we could drive from Vicenza to Bassano del Grappa, a town at the foothills of the Venetian pre-alps, to see the locksmith and coincidentally try some grappa.

Most of us have tried grappa in some form and Bassano del Grappa is the home of some very refined grappa which makes it even more attractive! It’s about 45 minutes by car from Vicenza and just over an hour from Venice – easily reached by train and bus. The intricate timber bridge was designed by the architect Andrea Palladio in 1569 – when he was busy designing most of Vicenza and many of the buildings in the region. The Ponte degli Alpini, is named after the Alpini, an elite mountain infantry who defended the alps in both world wars and who are based in Bassano.

Surprisingly though, we weren’t going for the grappa tasting this time. We were going to see a local artisan locksmith – Le Maniglie di Stefano – who had had our broken lock since we were there in May, 5 months before. Rob had tried two other places in town where he thought he may have been able to get a replacement lock for our balcony door, but the owners said perhaps 20 years ago, but not now.

We left it with Stefano when he was in Vicenza for the large antiques market held every month, except in summer when it’s too hot.  He said he would fix the lock and bring it back in October. We weren’t around the day he came back to town, hence our trip.  We were anxious that he didn’t lose the key as it’s irreplaceable now.

Even though Italy, like most places, is changing, there is strong evidence that many people still maintain traditional values and live their lives unchanged in many ways. Stefano took the broken lock, and with only a photo of the other door, fixed it; he remembered who we were when we texted and then rang, and when we went to collect it, he left it with his charming and generous father.  He charged us €5 – which is another thing – he didn’t see this as an opportunity to make some money from the unsuspecting Australians, but rather an opportunity to use his skills as a locksmith, learned from his father, to do a precise job.

We left with a repaired lock and laden with strawberry grapes from his vines which covered the pergola and a new insight about freezing basil.  I hadn’t thought of freezing the leaves when they are so plentiful.   We also departed with his hand-drawn map directing us to the Capovilla distillery in nearby Rosà, also worth a visit.

Rome – the first trip

Few destinations seem as romantic and enticing as Rome. Rome is the city of echoes, the city of illusions, and the city of yearning, according to the 13th century painter Giotto. We were anticipating everything while expecting nothing as we landed in Rome at the end of December 1997.
We always arrived in Rome at an ungodly hour – usually 6 am on a Sunday. And often after a gruelling journey of up to 40 hours including one or two long, tedious stopovers in airports at odd hours of the night. Airport land is like hospital land, or government department land – timeless with harsh lighting. Rome was the destination of most flights from Perth to Italy before Emirates starting offering flights through Dubai. Even after the long flight which stopped at Phuket, Bangkok and Frankfurt before flying into Rome, we were still thrilled finally to walk out of Rome airport to find the train into the eternal city.
The train from Fiumicino airport in Rome is now called the Leonardo Express but we called it the Kimbo train as it bore a huge advertisement for a brand of coffee on both ends. It had a big fat green engine with a friendly face but very unwelcoming steps – narrow and high. Everyone struggled with suitcases and we, even now, question why they either don’t raise the platform or lower the train. It seems a simple solution. Even when the train carriages were changed for the Giubileo in 2000 the design didn’t change. In 1997 we were travelling light: our cases weighed about 13 kg each so it wasn’t very difficult to get onto the train. As it was winter in Italy we were wearing most of the heavy items – big coats and heavy boots.

Coming out of Termini was a different experience before it was renovated and remodelled for The Great Jubilee in 2000. A Jubilee is a year during which forgiveness and mercy are offered to pilgrims from all over the world – and as a bonus, is a great boon to tourism. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Year-of-Jubilee. McDonald’s is still opposite and is still the first thing you see but there used to be a ragged collection of gypsies outside the shabby and rundown station. They swooped on tourists offering all kinds of services – and possibly hoping to ‘acquire’ something while you weren’t looking. They employed several tactics to distract tourists. A popular and fairly successful one was to walk right towards someone and thrust a “baby” (a bundle of rags) at them and while they were distracted, deftly slip a hand into a coat or bag and take whatever was on top. They did the same with a newspaper or cardboard and slipped a hand underneath into a coat or bag. They were quick. Being forewarned, we avoided them.

Even though we arrived tired and out of sync with local time we were keen to converse with our newly polished language skills. We’d been to Beginners’ Italian at TAFE for a term. It didn’t take long to realise that I could phrase grammatically correct questions but couldn’t understand Italians speaking. A small problem, sure. Rob, on the other hand, has a good ear – as they say in the classics – for languages and can recognise random and useful words. I conjugated verbs and selected vocabulary and delivered my question to a man waiting near us to cross the road in Rome – but was too dazed to shift brain gears to understand the answer. The crucial words were the key to the directions to the hotel Donatello – ‘semafori’ and ‘sinistra’ – traffic lights and left. We found the Donatello with the help of those directions and because we had memorised the small map in the Qantas Hotel catalogue. It’s a bit different today! We outsource that part of our brain now to our phones or the GPS.

We travelled on a budget because we always wanted to stay as long as we could on the money we had saved. It used to be a challenge and sometimes a necessity. In 1997 we travelled on $100 (Aus) or 100,000 lire per day. We had selected the Donatello in Rome with the help of Kirsty, our friend and travel agent at the time. It was featured in the Qantas brochure as a Hot Deal at $45 per night with two stars. Breakfast included! We had vouchers. We had prepaid. We expected them to be waiting for us. When I think back I wonder what I was expecting – perhaps a reception like Singapore or Bali, the only places we’d stayed in a hotel outside Australia. Greeted as welcome and special guests – hi, it’s Lynne and Rob from Australia at last. Wait no more!
We hauled our luggage up a narrow fight of stairs to see a man enclosed in a small reception window. He didn’t speak English. He didn’t have our vouchers. There was no room booked for us. Not only was he not anticipating our arrival, he was not expecting us. I managed to tell him that we had booked – and paid – and wanted our room. In retrospect, check in wouldn’t have been until the afternoon but that was foreign to us at the time – we were naïve travellers.
He called for his assistant – a short (shortened further by her stooping), grey-haired woman with a grim look and dark beady eyes who may, or may not, have been his mother. She shuffled about our room muttering her grievances about the owner. We gathered it was his fault that we had to sleep in what was quite evidently the storeroom. She gathered piles of linen and shoved them into one of the cupboards in a kind of anteroom, making a space for us in the poorly lit room. It was light enough, though, to see the stains on the bed cover and it upset her more when we asked for a clean one. I remembered the phrase – non e´pulita – it’s not clean. She ripped it off, shouted more abuse – not in our specific direction. Suddenly her face was transformed by a sly and apologetic smile. I’m not sure whether it was before or after we gave her 1000 lire (the equivalent of $1) for her trouble. We had made a friend! It was his fault and not ours.

This tiny, gloomy, noisy and not-very-clean room has become the benchmark for rooms to follow. We remember it with affection. Time blurs memories, often leaving a more mellow image – and now we remember the poky winding stairs from the street right past our bedroom with amusement, an almost affectionate nostalgia. To enter the hotel, guests rang a buzzer which sounded like an out of tune foghorn. People came home late –as they do in Italy – and often it was 3 am before everyone was settled in. That’s a good time to get some sleep – before the garbage trucks trundle and scrape, and Vespas are revved up. Silence is a rare thing in Italy: people talk loudly or shout. Drivers use their horns to hurry things up. Vespas needed to be revved loudly to get up the hill.

Since then rooms have been bigger, sometimes smaller. Some cleaner, a few dirtier. Many noisier. The Hotel Donatello is still on the Qantas website – http://www.Qantas.com – and rooms start at $85. It features terraces and rooms with balconies and seems charming. We might revisit.

It is almost 20 years ago that we returned to Perth after our first trip to Italy together. Since then we have visited Italy 17 times, bought the apartment we dreamed of, and have met dozens of interesting and friendly people on our travels to 19 of the twenty regions in Italy. We have yet to visit Aosta Valley – but we have plans!

Hence the title of our blog – Just2Italy. When people ask where we are going for our holiday, we reply “Just To Italy” almost apologetically as we’re sure that they think we would want to go somewhere else. However, our curiosity was stirred by what we had seen and experienced, the impulse to return so strong that we went again in September 1999. Initially we wanted to see famous sights but moved gradually from a position of observing to one of experiencing the culture and daily life through the people we met. When you travel to a place more than once, you see differently: on subsequent trips you notice details previously missed because you are feeling more relaxed and familiar. By visiting and revisiting, we’ve acquired a sense of continuity and belonging.

This space is for us to share some information about out-of-the-ordinary and intriguing places we’ve visited – intentionally and sometimes accidently – to inspire you to visit them too. We’re rarely disappointed in an Italian town – except perhaps Legnano near Milan and that was an interesting and unforgettable experience.

We’ve had many interesting experiences in Italy and interesting can mean many things. It’s interesting to learn about Hannibal and his elephants travelling from Spain to invade Italy from the north – it’s also interesting trying to find a hotel in Florence on New Year’s Eve. Not for New Year’s Eve but on New Year’s Eve. It’s interesting to visit a hairdresser who doesn’t speak English and walk away with the style and colour you intended. It’s interesting trying to select a dish that isn’t horse in a horse restaurant in Venice.

During our first trip to Italy at the end of 1997, we were constantly captivated and intrigued. We were there for nearly 6 weeks with only two nights’ accommodation booked. The trip was a succession of impulses. We left the routine and safety of home and ventured into the unknown.

We had both separately been passionate about all things Italian for years and this was the second trip for each of us. I’d been on a Contiki tour and Rob travelled with uni friends in the late 70s. I remembered most of the destinations I visited on the Contiki tour by the type of liqueur we drank – Sorrento was Tia Maria and milk, Vienna the fruit flavoured schnapps, generally something sweet – or by the particular physical discomfort experienced – trying to get warm in the tents at 7 Hills Camping in Rome in July, or trying to get barbequed ribs from the plate to my mouth without eating the mosquitoes in camping Venice!

My interest had been stirred in my Italian class in Year 8 when the magic of the language promised me that an exciting and different world existed in Italy. It was the idea of something separate and diverse which appealed. I also went to school with quite a few Italians and was intrigued by their otherness, their sometimes curious families and food, and the way they spoke that beautiful and bewildering language which excluded but still beckoned me.

Rob’s passion started with the Fiat his father owned when he was young. We won’t talk about how many Fiats he has owned since then and some of them didn’t even need pushing to get going. A few did though and it was a family activity to push the car down the drive so that it could roll down Lennard Street towards West Coast Highway and hopefully start before it had to be pushed back up the hill.

Twenty years ago in Perth there weren’t many Fiats on the roads, as they weren’t sold in Australia between 1989 and 2006, so it was only an occasional time that Rob exclaimed “Fiat!” And that was fine. Occasionally it was interesting. However, when we walked around Rome, he was on repeat. Fiat. Fiat. Fiat. Our daughter Becka made a rule one holiday – that he could only do Fiat spotting when he saw a different model which did pare it back and almost made it worth looking, although it’s better to tell me to look at a red car, or a yellow car, than to yell Fiat! Otherwise my head is spinning like Linda Blair in The Exorcist trying to locate one. Rob saying ‘128, Panda, Tipo or cinquecento’ was more of a hindrance.

The first train rides in Italy took us to places that we’d never heard of. The train from Lucca (near Florence, in Tuscany) to Turin hugged the Ligurian coastline from Viareggio to Genoa. Every now and then we glimpsed the sparkling blue and gasped with excitement. We were alternately in darkness as the train slid into a tunnel or being blinded by the splash of light as it exited. The expanse of turquoise and sapphire was startling. We weren’t children but we felt like it. We were in love with each other and in love with life. This life. The one we were having on this trip – sitting in a 6 person second class compartment trying our first conversations in Italian with people who shared food and stories and being jolted around very exciting bends on our way to Turin and, for Rob, car heaven.

There were many ruined buildings along the way. In fields. On the outskirts of towns. Deserted and often only a pile of stones. But the seed of the idea of buying a house in Italy was planted after Rob pointed out the first renovator’s dream somewhere between Turin and Modena. It was never a goal but rather a fantasy. A romantic dream. It wasn’t until 2006 that we visited a real estate agent for the first time in Barga. And again on the same trip, we looked at properties in Vasto. This was always a sign that we had connected with a place and never wanted to leave! It’s hard to remember the crystalising moment that we realized that we could buy a property in Italy but it was probably 5 years after the first visit to a real estate agent – Agenzia di Immobiliare.

We don’t have a bucket list. Having been so many times, we have lost that desperate need to see a particular place and in the process have discovered many out-of-the-way places where only locals visit. We either don’t plan, which has resulted in some crazy itineraries, zig-zagging back and forth across, or up and down the country; or we plan a week ahead which allows us to stay longer when we want to, or very rarely, to move on a day earlier – or if it rains. We want to share the magic of a train ride in Italy, the magic of making new friends and speaking Italian to them, the magic of discovering a new view or new food.

 

Welcome to Just2Italy.

Lynne and Rob