Tuscany: Entire File Available

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Tuscany: 4-30 At Home, Random Notes

Well, I’m back in Portland now, having all the standard post-trip experiences. You probably know what I mean: the conversations where people ask about the trip but there’s really only about two minutes available to answer. Or they want to know your favorite thing, which in my case is either the Duomo in Siena or what I call the Tuscan State of Mind, which can’t be summarized well in the same two minutes. Or they just ask if it was great, and of course it was, and there were also frustrations, but nobody really wants to hear about all that. All of this is one reason I keep a journal of these trips: because if I don’t, the whole thing gets lost in the ether of experience. There’s also the ego thing, of course; I like to have an audience, even if it’s only theoretical.

So the time in Memphis was well spent, with friends and family. Played a round of golf with my buddy T, at the old course which is now much prettier and tougher than it used to be, and T even got a hole in one! It was amazing and also somewhat funny, since neither one of us realized it had happened, because the way the green sits we couldn’t see where his ball wound up. We were looking for it behind the green, when I idly glanced over at the hole and saw a ball sitting in it.

I got back to Portland Wednesday night, spent all day Thursday running around town to the barber shop, the bank, the post office, etc. Spent Friday at home sorting through stuff. Went for a hike Friday night to watch the sunset over the Columbia River and share a potluck with 18 other people from our hiking club, then on Saturday took another group from the same club to an old-growth forest and beautiful creek with lots of waterfalls.

Today I am chilling and writing the very last thing from the trip blog: the random notes. These are the little things that didn’t make it into a particular day’s writeup, or serve as some kind of wrap-up item. Anyway, in no particular order at all, here goes:

 Italian people are just plain attractive. In part this is because they’re all dark-skinned, dark-haired, and stylish; I also think it’s because they live in a place that tends to be sunny, so they tend to dress lighter, and it’s important to look good. I don’t really know, and I don’t really care. All I know is the average is very, very high, and in comparison, most Americans look overweight and completely devoid of clothing style.

 I remember a scene in a street cafe, where a teenage boy was working behind the counter, and an old man came in, and they greeted with exchanged cheek-kisses, and the old man took the back of the boy’s head in his hand, and patted his cheek, and the boy was absolutely glowing.

 One afternoon in the hotel in Siena I got locked out on my parents’ porch for a minute. It was this tiny seating area (pictures are in my gallery), and I went out there to read while Mom took a nap and Dad relaxed in the room. Then Dad forgot I was out there, or thought I had left, and he closed the door and went into the bathroom. Trouble is, the door can’t be opened from the outside, and Mom is such a sound sleeper a marching band wouldn’t wake her up, and I didn’t realize Dad was just in the bathroom. So after several loud knocks, I considered hopping on the roof and trying to figure out which little seating area was mine. Fortunately Dad heard me and came to the rescue, but it was an interesting moment.

 The hotel staff in Siena was just incredibly pleasant and helpful – and also extremely cute all around. Always a nice experience going to the desk.

 My advice for travelers (never followed by me, by the way): learn the language, read about the place ahead of time, prepare some routes and places, and be prepared to not follow them. Look into making reservations for galleries when possible, be sure you know when things are open, don’t trust everything in rour guidebook, and if have any connection to anybody who lives there, work it.

 Back on the subject of Italian style, I made note of a few things that appear to be in fashion: long necklaces with big beads or balls, skirts with black boots and black fishnet stockings (of which I approve), men’s leather shoes with no laces, wraparound sunglasses. Old men lean to checkered sport coats, younger guys to scraggly hair, only the teenage crowd looks anything like Americans.

 We saw very few cell phones and, at least in public spaces, almost no indication that television exists.

 Speaking of TV, it is tons of fun, for a couple of minutes anyway, to watch movies like Braveheart and O Brother dubbed in Italian. The morning shows, along with sports highlight shows and talk-show formats, always have a couple of lovelies on the set for no apparent reason, other than loveliness. And the late-night 900-number things are even more absurd in other languages. And the women are completely naked.

 There was a weather guy in military uniform. Not sure what was up with that.

 You think our elections are nuts? Their Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is an obvious crook who already controlled the biggest media empire in Italy, then got elected which put him in charge of the state media – and he didn’t give up his private stuff. So basically he runs all the media in the country and consistently ran vicious attacks against all political opponents. Well, they had an election, and he got beat, then he refused to accept the results. Then, when it became apparent he would actually lose, he “offered” to join the new PM in a government. When that didn’t work, he decided to run for president, which is a less-powerful position. Everybody I talked to said he’s obviously a crook and needs to go away, then typically they would complain that the new guy (also a former PM and a crook) doesn’t have any style at all. I am certain, though I can’t prove it, that these folks would have loved Bill Clinton.

 Since I wrote about the whole Logan Young thing back in Memphis (wealthy guy found dead in a pool of blood, whole city convinced his son had something to do with it) … it turns out it was an accident. He fell down the stairs, smashed his face up, stumbled around the house, then bled to death because he was taking some medication that kept his blood from clotting. Amazing and terrible.

 One of the goofier things we encountered was how often various guidebooks would quote DH Lawrence, an American writer who, I suppose, traveled in Italy. He liked Florence, didn’t like Volterra, and was regularly quoted as some kind of expert on the Etrsucans. He called them lively and cultured, for example. What nobody ever explained was who the hell he is and why anybody should care what he said. It’s like this company I went on a couple trips with a long time ago, now called Geographic Expeditions. For every place in their catalog, they dragged out some old explorer dude that nobody’s ever heard of, but he had a quote saying that this place “possesses the most sublime beauty and peace it has ever been my pleasure to behold,” or some such crap.

 There was a funny vibe in the trip about money. My dad had some complicated system of credit cards set up, and for reasons I never quite figured out, at some point we started spending cash from my bank account, with the promise that he’d pay me back with a check in Memphis. So we’d go through this little thing where I’d take money out and make all these remarks about all the interest I’d be charging, and maybe we should cut back on expenses because he’s draining me, and so on. It’s the only time in our lives when we even acted like I was paying for stuff.

 Time and again, I would speak Italian to people and they would respond in English. Occasionally, they would respond in Italian, and on a few of those occasions I would understand them, leading to some wonderful exhanges in which I, for example, ordered snacks for everybody and had the delivered to our table, all in Italian. Other times, of course, I’d speak Italian and be greeted with a barrage of words that I would catch maybe 10 percent of. And yet other times, I would walk into a place and before I’d even open my mouth, they’d start speaking English to me.

 A small mystery: Why does a plane traveling from Europe to Memphis pass over Greenland? Does this make any sense at all? The globe can’t be that steep. I mean, we flew into western Tennessee over Illinois!

 Another mystery: Does anybody know anything that happened in Europe between, say, 300 AD and 1000 AD? Did anything happen? All the history in Italy seems to end with the Romans and start again around 1000, and nobody mentions anything about the seven or eight centuries in between. I’d love to find out about this.

 Among the good ideas we could learn from Italy: foot controls for sink faucets; snack bars with stand-up counters in just about every block; gelato; drinking one shot of strong espresso after dessert; taking a nap after lunch; toilet seats which, after you get off them, automatically pop back up and release a shot of air freshener; highway rest areas with gas stations, snack bars and restaurants; everybody going for a walk after dinner; not mixing balsamic vinegar with olive oil on bread.

 What passes for CNN over there is so lame as to be borderline entertaining. For several days in a row, the only two stories they were covering was the US trade deficit with China and the protests in Nepal.

 There aren’t many moments in life when I wish I was loaded with money, and none of them have anything to do with cars … well, other than looking at those 1960s Ferraris. Nice restaurants make it happen occasionally. Fancy hotels don’t. I think all the money spent on hotels over about $100 a night is utterly wasted, and most $100 rooms ought to be $50 rooms. But one thing that absolutely, without fail, makes me wish I was rich is flying first class on an airplane. You check in fast, board and de-board first, have all the leg room in the world, all the food you want, and nice wide chairs. Best version of luxury there is in the world, for my money.

Tuscany: 4-23 Headed Home

I don’t care where you are; 4 a.m. is early. That’s what time my wakeup call came in, and I immediately stumbled into the shower. I was packed the night before, but I needed water running over my body for a while to be remotely awake. The taxi showed up at 4:30, and for some reason drove like a bat out of hell; the one car we encountered he quickly passed in a highly aggressive traffic-circle maneuver.

The airport was surprisingly happening, and we got cappuccini and pastries, complicated first by my lack of understanding of the process (pay for the pastries and coffee, then present your receipt to the coffee section) and then by the fact that once I figured it out, they put out two drinks, and somebody else at the counter took one of them.

There was more complication at the check-in desk. For some reason this always takes a LOT longer overseas than in the States, leading me to eternally wonder what on Earth they’re looking at and doing with their computer screens. In this case, one thing they were doing was stewing; apparently there had been some kind of labor strife, and there all kinds of handmade signs up saying things like “What happened to our rights” and “We are sad” and “I am checking you, but we are already fired.” Of course, I have no idea what this was about, but I can tell you that there was a massive line to check in, and I was highly thankful (and also briefly forgot) that we got to check in via the short, business-class line.

I napped on and off during the plane ride, but I made sure I was awake when we flew back over the alps. I MUST GO to the Alps: Glaciers, valleys, trails, villages, roads, lakes, peaks, the whole thing. Amazing.

We landed in Amsterdam, and I dropped Mom and Dad off at the VIP lounge, then headed into town on the train. No way was I gonna sit around the airport for five hours, when Amsterdam was a 20-minute, seven-Euro ride away. I was flooded with old train-riding memories as I bought my ticket, ran around looking for the right platform, just missed a train, and was reminded of how much stuff you can get done in, say, 11 minutes before the train leaves. Might not seem like that much time, but if you know the train is leaving in 11 minutes, then you know getting onboard in 10½ minutes is okay, so you can get food, drinks, souvenirs, and go to the bathroom and still make it. I spent two months kicking around Europe on the trains one time, and departures become an art form after a while.

We traveled through very modern surroundings – a stale, pristine urban environment – before we saw anything remotely Dutch-charming. There were canals everywhere, though, and many of the apartments I saw had canoe/kayak docks. Clearly, some of the canals could serve as transportation routes, but others just petered out into marshes. The station (Amsterdam Centraal) was the same nuthouse I remembered it being. It’s the hub of Amsterdam transit, and therefore Dutch transit, with trolleys and pedestrians and trains leaving for everything from tiny villages to Paris or Frankfurt. Even saw one of the super-fast ones that was headed for someplace in Germany.

Outside, the different between Holland Italy was immediately apparent. Here it was gray, overcast and chilly – basically “Sunny” to Dutch people and Oregonians – and the people weren’t nearly as stylish or attractive. Then again, I was in the middle of the biggest city in the country, so maybe it’s not the best place to judge. I headed outside with no particular destination in mind, just figured I’d spend my hour walking a loop, get a souvenir, and eat some of those french fries with peanut butter sauce that I remember so well. (Of course, as someone was nice enough to point out, my previous visit here, and consumption of said fries, was before I sobered up.)

The main street from the station is a madhouse, even on a Sunday: tourists, hustlers, shops, locals, freaks, panhandlers, musicians, bikes, trolleys, the whole panorama. In the main square, The Dam (where there actually is a dam on the Amstel River) there was a carnival going on. The main theme was Orange, the color of the national soccer team, which starts play in the World Cup in a few weeks. I looped vaguely to the left, recalling that I stayed over there once, and soon found myself on one of countless tourist-slum small streets in Amsterdam. It’s a beautiful and interesting city, but not so much right around the station. The little streets have overpriced clothing stores, cheap food shops, and the particular oddities of Amsterdam: sex museums, dope stores, hash-bar coffee shops, and souvenir shops filled with little windmills and naked ladies and pot leaves and Dutch houses. Worth a walk-through and not much else. Pretty soon I was over in the red-light district (which I once wrote a column about), where women rent little booths with glass doors and, depending on the scene and the woman, either stand there nonchalantly, tap on the window to get your attention, or just bullshit with the woman in the next window. It’s a strange combination of businesslike, sleazy, alluring and creepy. Same thing with the hash bars, which pretty much look like normal coffee shops (and are) except for the air coming out of them and the zoned-out people sitting around in them. I found one that I lost part of a day in back in 1990, when I came over to follow the Grateful Dead around. I flew in on the overnight plane from New York, chose a hostel because they gave me a free pint of Heineken when I checked in (at 10), then followed a couple of hungover, just-waking up Australians to their favorite place, Rick’s American Cafe. There, I proceeded to so stoned that for a while, sitting there eating a hamburger, listening to the Eagles, and speaking English with the Aussies, I absolutely, completely forgot I was in another country.

So it was funny to turn around a corner, feel a strange sense of déjà vu, and realize I was standing in front of Rick’s, with a bunch of zonked-out dudes sitting at the same tables where I had once zonked myself. (I wrote a column about the drug scene in Amsterdam, too.)

The seedy parts of town quickly lose my interest these days, and there wasn’t much going on there at noon on Sunday, anyway. So I kept going and stopped by canals, churches, souvenir shops (in one of which I got some tulip bulbs for a friend back home) and, of course, a frites stand, where I got a pile of fries with the peanut-butter sauce – and if that sounds gross, well, I guess it’s just an acquired taste. Then again, when they were gone, I was okay with that, and willing to wait until my next trip to Holland to get more.

Back at the station I encountered what can only be called a bicycle parking garage. Seriously: It was multi-level, winding, and completely packed with bikes. Never seen anything like it – and unfortunately wasn’t into photo mode while in town. At a glance, I’d say there were close to 5,000 bikes in that garage. Holland is completely flat, so there’s like three bikes for every four people.

In the station, I saw a group of guys coming at me with red shirts on, with little seals, and goofy hats, and a few days’ worth of beards, and one really big dufus in the crowd who was carrying a rugby ball. Off to a match, I guess – and just as I walked by them, one guy blew a whistle, and they all froze. They were sipping coffee, putting money in a vending machine, picking up a paper, talking to each other – and not moving, for about a minute, after which he blew his whistle again, and they all moved on.

While waiting for the train, which was late, I admired the Sunday traffic on the Amstel, which is right outside the station. There were ferries and barges and old-time schooners covered with tourists, some of whom were dancing.

I made it back to the airport in plenty of time – at least, by any definition other than Mom’s; she was convinced I was going to miss the plane, even though I took my seat some 35 minutes before they shut the door. I actually had to go through a security interview to get on the plane. The only trouble I had with it was that her English wasn’t very good; I resisted the temptation to say, “Sorry, can’t hear you over the ticking in my bag.”

On the plane, the guy next to me was a construction worker in Iraq. I asked how it was going, and he said pretty slow. He said, “It’s pretty safe where we are – I mean, you get the occasional mortar or rocket, but nothing that big – but the problem is getting the contractors to show up for work, since they’re always getting threats for working with us, telling them they’ll get blown up if they help.” He also said a lot of what they were doing was rebuilding schools and infrastructure that the Army and Marines blew up; I offer this to remind everyone why we invaded Iraq.

Our in-flight movie options were Dick and Jane, Syriana, and the Jennifer Anniston movie about her family being the Robinsons. We took off over the lush green fields and arrow-straight canals of Holland, and before I had my second orange juice, we had said farewell to Europe. Nine hours later we’d go through the blood-curdlingly-slow customs in Memphis – and the Agriculture Department would take away my tulip bulbs – then be met by my brother and his son Jack, the star of the family, and taken home for a dinner of barbecued chicken and slaw and cold lime soda.

I was ready. I love traveling, and I love getting home. I also love my parents, and I miss my friends. I see travel as basically being somewhere else for a while, which is not at all meant to minimize it. Being somewhere else is a profound experience. So is the fact that you are always with yourself, and you’re always a human being, and you rarely experience long times of bliss and comfort. So while I’ll miss being on the road, I also get to sleep in my own bed and go hiking in the Columbia River Gorge. While I miss my family, I also have a date with a real cutiepie Thursday night. And while I’ll miss the feel of Italy’s streets, it’s also Last Thursday on Alberta Street back in Portland, which means the Clown House will be hosting bike-jousting in the yard, bluegrass bands will wander the streets, drum circles will rumble, art will be all over the place, and the people-watching will be at an all-time high. So it’s always good to be home.

Tuscany: All Photos Now Posted

Dig 'em right here.

Tuscany: 4-22 Bologna

Our activities of April 22nd grew out of a conversation on April 21st that went something like this:

Dad: I found something that I’d really like to do tomorrow.
Me and Mom: Great! What is it?
Dad: A trip to the Ferrari museum and factory
Me: Cool!
Mom: I’ll stay in the hotel, thanks.

After some family-style negotiation, with attendant anxiety and backtracking, it was finally settled that Mom would have a hotel/chill/rest/pack day, and Dad and I would have a Man Day.

I woke up at seven, did some more writing and blog-posting, than ate the lame-o hotel breakfast, and Dad and I headed out. We were bound for the town of Modena, hometown of Enzo Ferrari and the birthplace of the Ferrari car company. First we bought gas for our own rental car – and got some perspective on life in Europe. We put 50something litres in it (about 12 gallons) and at $1.21 Euro per litre, it came out to 67 Euros, which is just over 80 BUCKS to fill the tank. Unreal. Then we headed out towards the Dread Highway that had almost broken our collective will to live less than 48 hours before. But this time we possessed the magic code: the word tangenziale. This is the round-town highway, the beltway with all the exits, as opposed to the Dreaded and Feared A1, or SuperStrada, which has no exits and from which there is no escape. Being men, we had only a vague notion of where we were going: Modena, west of Bologna, where we assumed we’d see signs for the Ferrari museum. Good enough. Let’s go.

We moved in style all the way to Modena: the right highways and exits, the right tolls, the right ways out of the right roundabouts. We were rockin’. As we approached Modena, we looked for the Ferrari signs. Nothing. We headed for the center of town. Nothing. We did, however, see more car dealerships for this size town than any place I’ve ever seen. For you Oregon readers, imagine coming into Silverton and seeing 25 dealerships. I’m serious! There were three BMW places (one for motorcycles), two Mercedes Benz places, and every other car company you can think of that it’s American or Japanese. Renault, Lexus, Jaguar, Ferrari, Fiat, Maserati, Volvo, everybody. We even saw a big Maserati plant.

We approached the medieval core, where somehow I had the feeling we weren’t going to find famous racecars. So we bailed – and, being men, didn’t ask for directions or even check the map. We simply turned north and headed out of town. No signs. No Ferrari. Then we started to actually leave town, and I experienced a moment of man weakness: I decided to ask directions. I even saw a sign for tourist information in 150 meters and headed that way – but the European Road Rules came into play. Those rules dictate that if you’re looking for something, there will be a sign saying that it’s in some measurable distance: say, 150 meters. The rules further state that when you have traveled said distance you will reach a turn, an intersection, another group of signs, or something in which, in the States, there would be another sign – but there will be no sign. Time and again, across Europe, this happens. You come to a traffic circle and it says “this way to So-n-So.” So you follow it, then come to another traffic circle with no reference whatsoever to So-n-So. And so it happened this time: Tourist Information, 150 meters. Travel 150 meters. Encounter major intersection and numerous signs. None of them say tourist information. European Rules strike again! Man Rules say “keep going.”

And so we did. And, after a brief map check, we realized that while Modena was the birthplace of Enzo Ferrari, the home of the Ferrari Car Company is, according to the guidebook, “in nearby Maranello, south of Modena.” This is in accordance with The European Rules (Guidebook Section), which state that guidebooks will give no specific directions for how to find such a thing as Maranello, and will do all they can to hide any reference to even their general location. Undaunted, we moved on, with new purpose: Find Maranello, south of Modena. Needless to say, we were now north of Modena, but a glance at the map showed me a highway going west and then south, so we headed for it – not by asking directions or checking the road number, mind you, but by figuring out which town the road leads to and then looking for signs to this town on roundabouts and/or signs. This is the essence of European driving. Have faith and keep going.

So we find a sign saying Parma, the next town west, and I assume there will be a road going south, around Modena, and that on said road we will eventually encounter signs for Maranello. I inform Dad of my plans, and he’s dubious, especially when I explain to him that I know we’re headed west because it’s a summer morning and the sun is behind us – and that my theory will be proved true as the sun gradually moves along the left side of the car and into our eyes, at which point we will be south of town, driving east, and see signs for Maranello. Man directions! Dad was skeptical, but I was driving.

Sure enough, it started to happen. We passed the turnoff for a big road headed for Parma, which means we were on the west side of Modena, and the sun was now over my left shoulder. Dad grew some faith. We kept looping around, tending left, and soon had to put the visors down. Then we saw signs for Maranello! After a high-five, we followed the signs – and drove like hell, because our guidebook said the museum was closed between noon and 3, and it was now 11:30, and of course we had no idea, between the map and the guidebook, how far it was to Maranello. AND there were still no signs for Maranello. In the States, if there’s only one reason to visit a place (such as Ruby Falls in Chattanooga, Tennessee) you will start to see Ruby Falls signs about 135 miles away from Chattanooga. But in Italy, they just assume that if you’re headed for a place, you know what’s there, so you get all the way into the very center of Maranello before you see one sign for La Galleria Ferrari – and then, of course, at the next intersection, you see nothing about it at all.

We were stressing about this Noon closing thing, because it’s common in Italy, but it turns out we had forgotten another Guidebook Rule: all information regarding hours is out of date at all times. I mean, this is 2006; they don’t close the Ferrari Museum for three hours so the staff can take a nap! So we find the place, at 11:50, and of course it’s wide open for business.

There’s no better destination on a Man Day than the Ferrari Museum. You don’t get to tour the factory, because guys’ heads would probably explode. But you pay about 15 bucks each to walk around in a few rooms filled with cars and engine parts. And you stand shoulder-to-shoulder among other men with cameras, waiting to take pictures of your fellow men standing in front of various cars. Some of the men pose with shades on – inside. There are a few women around, but they are mainly with men, and their biggest form of entertainment (and purpose) seems to be taking pictures of men with cars.

Still – what cars! They have the Formula 1 racecars, which I don’t care about, but which Europeans are nuts over. I was into the 1960s models, mainly: sleek, sexy machines with long curves and subtle features that drip style. For the life of me I don’t understand why they don’t make cars that look like that anymore, or why ever quit in the first place. Camaros, Corvettes, Mustangs, Ferraris, everybody – they should have quit designing new cars in about 1968. I’ll post pictures, and you can make up your own mind.

Having drooled and lusted and shook our heads in awe, and taken many pictures, we then shopped. Dad and I are very much men in the way we shop: precision strikes, planned out ahead of time, but only executed when the time is right. The purpose is not to shop; the purpose is to buy. And we figured that in the gift shop at the Ferrari Museum, we could take care of a gift for every male member of the entire clan in one fell swoop; this, in fact, was part of our selling of the idea to Mom the day before, since Mom seems to think that a major reason for any trip is to purchase gifts for everyone in the family. And so we shopped: we got shirts and caps and stuffed animals and one or two other things that I won’t mention because somebody receiving them might be reading this. I got a Ferrari coffee mug for myself, and I would have bought some little Ferrari model cars, but they were Hot Wheels models (an American company) and they were made in China. Hell, I’m sure everything in the place was made in China – globalization in the Ferrari gift shop. Anyway, we went to town, and covered everybody we could think, and then rolled back towards Bologna – even successfully taking the Dreaded and Feared A1 – like hunters returning with several kills, knowing that the matriarch would be pleased and the clan would be fed. And we did the whole thing the Man Way!

We scooped up Mom, who was sick of the overheated hotel; turns out than in trying to turn on the AC (which wasn’t activated by the hotel yet) she had somehow managed to turn on the head instead. I tell you, everything about that hotel was a pain. We thought we’d go get some groceries and have our last dinner in the hotel room; apparently this is a family tradition, having the last dinner on a European vacation in the hotel room. There’s only been two or three such vacations, but if Mom says it’s a tradition, it’s a tradition! Trouble was, none of us could remember seeing a grocery store anywhere. And none of us wanted to go back in Bologna. And none of us thought the hotel was in Grocery Habitat. So, not being much of a tradition in the first place, we bailed on that idea quickly and figured we’d eat in the hotel again.

So now what? A whole afternoon with a car and no plans. We got out the guidebook and a two-minute scan produced two options: the church on the hill with the famous two-mile colonnade approach, or the ruins of the Etruscan village in some park. Mom was still in search of Etruscan gifts, so naturally that idea won out. We headed towards the park, and soon found ourselves in completely new territory: open, uninhabited spaces! At least, by Italian standards. No towns, no farms, just a few scattered buildings here and there. Turns out the park is a national park, mainly famous because in 1944, as they were being chased out by the Americans and Brits, the Nazis took 1,800 local people out there and slaughtered them all; their faces are on a wall in the main square downtown. But we were in it for the Etruscans; well, honestly, we were in it for the Etruscan Gift Shop. But it turned out to be a beautiful place, and it even had ruins. Of course, there was no sign to the museum and we were lucky to see it, and when we got there it was closed, but the snack shop was open around back, and there was a nutty lady there who talked to herself and enthusiastically gave us directions to the local sights with about eight words of English and an endless assortment of hand gestures and signs. AND the snack bar had a gift shop! It was only about four shelves, and not impressive at all, but it had what Mom wanted, and there was much satisfaction. I had a cappuccino with the nutty lady while Mom was settling on the perfect combination of gifts for various people, then we went for a walk among the ruins, which were beautiful, and the sun was shining, and the birds were singing, and the flowers were blooming, and the tree-covered hills were sublime, and as far as I was concerned, our trip to Italy ended right there. Our fist and last sights, it turns out, were Etruscan.

Of course, the trip didn’t really end at that point – unfortunately. There was still the matter of getting home, beginning with an abbreviated evening at the hotel. We had a 6:15 flight the next day, which meant a 4 a.m. wakeup call, so we went back to the rooms to relax and pack and get an early dinner. I chilled out by watching some wonderful soccer-highlights shows. Saturday is the weekly day of Italian League games, so there were a lot of games, and the two shows I watched were great. One just had highlights running, with four guys talking constantly, and all these goofy sound effects to go with the game, like when a player would mis-kick a ball it would make a goofy vaudeville-type screw-up sound, and if two guys ran into each other it would make a car-crash sound, and if a guy was upset they’d play a madman-scream song. This would go on for quite a while, then it would switch to another game – without, as near as I could tell, even saying who won. I guess we’re supposed to know that. The other show I watched fir the classic Italian TV show formula: one guy talking all the time; two or three old guys sitting in chairs looking totally bored, waiting their turn; each of them completely going off when called on, with outrageous gestures and loud screaming; a crowd that never responds to any of this; and a smokin’-hot woman wearing a small amount of tight-fitting clothing and doing nothing. It’s pure entertainment!

Dinner was mediocre again, an unfortunate end to a great eating journey, and the restaurant was crowded and loud, including an insane kid completely out of control and running around like a madman. I did my usual chaotic, sit-on-the-duffle-bag packing job and forced myself to bed around 10. Four in the morning comes awful damn early.

Tuscany: 4-21 Bologna

I think I ended the description of April 20 with some mild complaining about our hotel in Bologna. Allow me to expound.

Green Park Hotel conjures ... well, a green park, for one thing. Maybe something classy like Park Avenue. What it doesn’t say is “businessman’s hotel in the suburbs, conveniently located to the airport and various industries.” Apparently, Bologna hosts a lot of conventions, and we arrived at the tail end of a leather-good tradeshow. And the Green Park hotel wasn’t just on the outskirts of Bologna; it was on the outskirts of the tradeshow. I have this image of the Leather Movers and Shakers sitting at the historic hotels downtown, eating in five-star restaurants, making important deals with important people. The crowd at the Green Park was strictly overflow: the nervous dudes in cheap suits drinking with each other at the small bar in the mainly-empty lobby, making last-minute changes on their PowerPoint shows, with their laptops on glass coffee tables next to fake palm trees, munching on salty-crunchies from the bar and occasionally going outside to smoke. They were clustered in small groups, listening to Arab music on jam boxes, talking on cell phones and going to meetings in drab rooms with green tablecloths and erasable-marker easals.

We were in the hotel, presumably, because the rest of the city was booked, and because it was close to the airport, and we had a 6:15 a.m. flight on Sunday. But nothing about the hotel was smooth or elegant – and yes, we were spolied by our earlier, luxurious, right-in-the-middle-of-town digs. With this place, it seemed everything was a hassle. Our rooms were in the motel annex out back. The keys confounded us constantly. The stairs within our rooms were dangerous semi-spirals. It was half a mile, it seemed, from our rooms to the restaurant, where the food was mediocre and the staff, while sincere and pleasant, was slow and possessed little English. I could get my computer online wirelessly to do emails – but not to surf the Web. The rooms were warm, but they didn’t have the AC turned on yet. It was just this kind of thing, over and over. The bartender was nice, though, and told us a funny story about 300 Englishmen staying in the hotel during a tug-of-war convention(!) and, he swears, emptying the bar of everything but water.

Anyway, it wasn’t the same Romantic Italy we had gotten used to; it’s also true that by the time we arrived Thursday night, after all the driving hassles, we didn’t care one bit. Friday we decided to head into Bologna, which by all accounts is a charming university town with the usual medieval core – and yes, that was another jaded remark. I think what happens is we see a few medieval cores and we are charmed. Then we see some more and think, right, medieval core, piazza, 14th-Century church, got it. I think there’s another stage, the one where you calm your mind down enough to relax into the lifestyle and see, all over again, the charm and unique qualities of each town, and remember the gift that an hour at a cafe in a medieval square actually is. I do believe that such a transformation exists, and I know that we didn’t make it in Bologna.

We drove into town and parked in a garage that sat next to a very crowded street market – though it’s not the market you’re probably thinking of. It’s a little more bargain-hunting flea-market type thing than anything charming. We headed for the main square – the usual plan – and found ourselves in a dizzying parade of pedestrians, many of them young and energetic, all of them shopping, and few of them appearing to be tourists. Bologna is a happening place, with lots of students from a 1,000-year-old univeristy which, I think, is the oldest in Europe. The town is known for its covered sidewalks, or arcades, of which there’s something like 30 miles in town. They are long and wide and covered with high arches, and they go back hundreds of years. It makes for a pleasant walking experience, and there were lots of people out taking advantage. It had a completely different feel from the other places we were in: more cell phones, far fewer tourists, and more modern shopping with a complete dearth of souvenir shops.

Ultimately, there wasn’t much that we wanted to see, really. We were also tired, part of the ebb-and-flow of travel energies, so we wouldn’t have been too “into” any place. But there was a lot of walking, which wears us out, and the church we were headed for was closed when we got there, and the two towers that the city is known for weren’t terribly interesting, and they were in the middle of a very busy intersection, and the stateue of Neptune was neat but also crowded. We had sandwiches in a nice square, then discovered some nice shopping in little side streets that date back to Roman times, then we checked out some recommended restaurants from the book and found out they were booked. So we made our way back towards the main square, where the cathedral was closed for renovations, and about this time I started thinking, “It’s 1:30, and nobody serves dinner until 7:30, and this town is kind of dull and crowded – what are we gonna do here for six hours?” I was wondering exactly how to say this when Dad piped up and said, basically, “Let’s go back to the hotel and relax,” and Mom said cool, and that was that. We were all thinking the same thing, and we all decided at once to bail.

First, of course, we had to get gelato. Then we briefly sampled the market, since I was still looking for a gift or two, but it became unpleasant fast. And then we were just gone, back to the hotel. Mom napped, Dad rested and read, and I did some writing and blogging, then we had the hotel book us a table for dinner at a place in business since 1903, and we headed back into town, feeling refreshed and hungry. The place was called Donatello’s, and there was an old guy going around greeting people and helping serve who was, in fact, Signore Donatello. He was, we gathered, a nephew of the founder, or a grand-nephew, or something. The place was very old-school and classy, except for more celebrity pictures on the wall – again including Pavarotti, who appears to be a well-traveled eater in Italy.

This restaurant had the first major signs of pasta with meat sauce we had seen on menu
s – not that it wasn’t around before, but Bolgnese Sauce is very close to what we all think of as “meat sauce” on spaghetti, for example. I had pasta with ham, cheese and white sauce, which was a lighter, thinner version of alfredo sauce – and was very, very good. Best pasta of the trip, I’d say; it was yellowish, rich, tasty, and the sauce and ham were just right. It also would have been a whole meal at home, but here it was just the pasta course, after a shared appetizer of sliced mushrooms and parmesan cheese on a bed of arugula. Bologna is just down the road from Parma, by the way – home of Parmesan cheese and Parma ham. Another interesting note: Dad and I both had a pasta course, and it was served with no spoon. I always wonder about the different methods of eating pasta, and the spoon-and-fork combo seems like the most reasonable, as well as the most Italian, but in Bologna there was no spoon.

My main dish was Vitello Donatello, their signature veal dish, and it was, again, much closer than anything we’d had to what we think of in America as Italian food. It was thinly sliced, paired with a slice of ham and another of parmesan cheese, lightly breaded and fried, then covered with the same white sauce and mushrooms and served with mashed potatoes. The potatoes weren’t good, but the veal rocked. For dessert I had panna cotta, which the poor waiter had a hard time explaining to us, since all the menu said was “creme,” and there was also on the menu a “creme caramel,” and something else (a parfait) that was translated as simply “creme.” So we just ordered one of each to see what we’d get. Dad’s was a selection of gelato, and Mom’s and mine were two very similar dishes, each of which was somewhere between a flan and a creme caramel without the top crusty. They were all just fine, and the dinner was enjoyable – and when we walked outside feeling warm and satisfied, I saw a condom vending machine on the wall of the restaurant. Not something you’d see in the states.

I completely nailed the driving on this evening, by the way. I had reached a point where the signs made sense to me, and I was confident enough to drop off my folks at the restaurant then go find a parking space in the same garage from earlier in the day, then improvise mildly to get us back out to the hotel. After the trial-by-fire the previous day on the highways, I felt like I had figured out Italian driving, and become somewhat Italian in the process. I realized that the essence of Italian driving is not rules, or lanes, or who has the right-of-way, or anything. It’s all timing and position, and if you can pass somebody without causing trouble, you do it. Otherwise it’s a matter of learning that brown signs are tourist places or business, blue ones are towns, green ones are roads, and off you go!

When we got back to the hotel, by the way, it was deserted. The leather crowd had vanished, and we had the place to ourselves.

Tuscany: 4-20 to Bologna

Thursday the 20th was another Get Out of Town Day (leaving Florence for Bologna), and to start things off, there was another Duomo to be done. Just like in Siena a couple days before, I felt that I needed to experience the local cathedral before I could say I had “done” Florence, so I bounded up early and headed over.

In this case, doing the Duomo meant climbing the dome. It’s among the more famous domes in the world, because at the time it was the biggest one ever built (it may still be, I don’t know). In fact, when it was commissioned, the man who designed it, Brunelleschi, wouldn’t tell the city fathers how he intended to make it stand up. According to legend, when they asked, his response was “If I tell you how I’m going to do it, you’ll just do it yourselves.” And while I can’t really explain how he did it, I do know it’s still there, and for six Euros you can walk up about 500 steps to the top of it.

First, though, you have to participate in a couple of overlapping travel traditions: the incorrect guidebook and the unsigned door. My book said the entrance to the dome is on the south side of the cathedral, so I went there and found a door with only Italian on it – as well as people occasionally coming out, a few going in, and lots of other people like me, holding cameras, looking at the sign with some confusion and frustration on their faces. Then I saw a church employee-type person give a hand signal to someone which translated as “Go around to the other side,” so I decided to try that – and found a line of people under a sign which said, in perfect English, “Entrance to climb the dome.” All very simple, all very common.

The thing about the dome is that, despite all the extra weight I’m carrying these days, the workout wasn’t the problem. What gets me is two things: vertigo from hundreds of steps in a small spiral staircase, and claustrophobia from having to wait in very small spaces. When I can, I’ll put some pictures online, but it can suffice to say that at several points I was in a hallway that was 1.1 Pauls wide, 0.9 Pauls tall, waiting in a long line for something ahead of me to happen which I couldn’t control. There were several moments where I could feel the cold sweats and racing thoughts coming – have to get out, have to get out – and I needed to close my eyes, breathe a few times, and tell myself that nothing bad is going to happen and I’ll get through it soon. In the upper sections, the fun increases when the ceiling becomes sloped, so you can’t quite stand up straight, and then it gets so steep and narrow you have to basically go up a ladder. It’s a party!

On the way up, you get a close-up view of the frescoes inside the dome, and let me tell you, it is some grim stuff. Very few angels or saints up there, but plenty of demons and devils and skeletons and monsters and all kinds of mean, nasty things – people being tortured, getting their heads cut off, the whole thing. Jesus made a couple appearances, as I recall, and some of the portal windows in the dome were painted like they were being held up by angels, but all in all it was a tough scene – and lots of it, like 2,000 square meters, I heard somewhere. Again, it made me think of Lord of the Rings, and my basic belief that Middle Earth means the Middle Ages, and the symbolism of the elves and dwarves and orcs leaving the world to the humans basically means people no longer believing in that stuff and living in a world with less danger and less magic. It was quite clear, looking at these frescoes and many others on the trip, that people in the 13th to 15th Centuries still believed in this stuff. And then some.

Of course, the view at the top of the Dome is out of this world: a sea of red roofs, the hills in the distance, the squares filled with people, and the high comedy of people emerging from this hole in the floor and saying some version of “holy shit” in their native tongue. You work your way around the (fairly small) platform, take all the same pictures everyone else is taking, then climb back into the hole and back into the downward cave. It’s cooler than that, but there is an aspect to it that is “Okay, I’ve done to Duomo, now let’s move on.” And when I came out at the bottom, thanking God for fresh air, I was emerging from the same door where I had started, and the same people (not literally) were standing there with the same looks on their faces, wondering if this is the door to climb the dome.

On the way back to the room, I stopped in a little cafe and got three mini pizzas, a croissant and a bottle of sparking water for three Euro, which is about three and a half bucks, all ordered in Italian: that would be, roughly, Due pizze con proscuitto, uno con solo formaggio, uno croissant, e una botiglia di acqu frizzante. And when I got done with that, something very common happened, something that is sometimes frustrating but often comforting and helpful: The woman responded in English. I guess they figure it’s easier that way, when faced with someone who, to them, sounds like “Jess, I like please doo wit hom, zee one wit only sheeze, and un wott-air wit goss.” A vast majority of the time I bust out my Italian, they respond in English. Sometimes they just look at you and start speaking English!

We had reservations at the Galleria delle Uffizi, which as near as I can tell means “Gallery of the Offices,” because Ufficio means office, and our book said the building was originally made for offices – which raises something else that’s interesting about Italian culture back during the Renaissance: they did nothing small or cheap. They built civic office buildings that are so big and beautiful and filled with art that they become tourist destinations, even though in many cases they’re still the city office building, or library, or what have you.

In the case of the Uffizi, the massive building long ago became one of the world’s great art galleries, on par with the Louvre, the kind of place that your guidebook says requires two days, at least, for the serious art lover. Well, we Geralds aren’t that. We take the opposite tack: Sit down with a guide, run through a description of what’s in each room, make a list of what you want to see, then head out. You almost have to skip the stuff you’re not interested in, so you can survive long enough to see what you want to see. It’s a very male approach – skip the Middle Ages and the Greek shit, I want to see the famous stuff and anything by Raphael – but it does limit a uniquely miserable state called Museum Fatigue: the yawning, the back pain, the sore legs, the headache, all from standing around on hard floors trying to maintain a level of rapture.

So we did the Uffizi. We saw paintings which are so famous that when we saw them we said, “Oh, right, that one!” This would apply to the Venus on a clam shell, the Venus lying down, the Venus in the forest with several other characters, the Venus statue – lots of Veni in the Uffizi – as well some cardinal by Raphael and some self-portraits by Rembrandt. It’s massive and impressive on such a scale that it destroys my will to live. Well, it’s not that powerful, but close, and when you throw in the crowds, we didn’t make it too long. Pretty soon – after some sandwiches and pastries and fizzy water and capuccinni – we were back outside, trying to get a cab to the hotel.

The cab thing is interesting, too. Sometimes they just ... drive by. Sometimes they wave you off, sometimes they don’t. We got one this time by a time-tested method: figure out a common place for people to get out of cabs, then hover, and beat other hoverers to the door. Worked like a charm, and we were soon back at the hotel, ready to face the Dread Road to Bologna.

You might remember from an earlier post – if anybody’s still reading this – that our initial drive from Bologna to Florence was a low point, not only of this trip but of our travel careers in general, and possibly our lives. It took four and a half hours to go 60 miles on a four-lane highway, and at no point did we even know what was going on, other than us sitting still or occasionally driving 10 mph. We had considered a mountain route this time, to avoid the big road, and in retrospect I wish we had done so. We were optimistic, since it was no longer Easter Weekend, it wasn’t rush hour in either city, and it wasn’t night. So we took off, and all was going well until we stopped. This happens occasionally, and nobody seems to think too much of it. In fact, when we tell Italians of our plight on this particular road, their general response is, “Yes, that’s a bad road.” This time we stopped cold for 20 minutes. Just sitting there. And I could see, off on the left, a charming-looking village on a hillside which I knew, from the map, was on the untaken mountain route. It’s bad enough when you’re stuck, but when you can see the other option, it’s that much worse.

And then we started again, and took off at 80 mph, and there was never one single indication of what had caused the stoppage: no construction, no accident, no rockslide, nothing. Just like always. It’s a bad road.

Then the travel gods really got us. One of their favorite tricks to play on foreign drivers is to change the signs ever so subtly, or make them small, or – this is my favorite – have one intersection with your town on a sign, and the next one doesn’t have your town on it. That happens all the time! In this case, it was our written directions saying, basically, go to Bologna, take this exit, get on the tangenziale, which is like a round-the-city highway, take exit 8 (or maybe 9, we weren’t sure about the handwriting) towards Granarolo, and you will find the hotel. I knew that last part was bullshit, but what are ya gonna do? You drive as far as the directions will take you, then ask for more directions.

So we see the first exit, and all seems good. Then we see Exit 2. Then we see Exit 5, but I notice we can’t get to it because there’s a barrier between us and this other highway, the one with the exits and the horrible traffic. Our highway is screaming along, but we can’t get to Exit 2 or 5. No worries, what we need is Exit 8. Maybe 9. Then we see Exit 8, and it says Granarolo – and still there’s the barrier. What’s happening?!?!? Then we see Exit 11, and the barrier. Then Exit 14. Barrier. Then a sign that says “next exit 24 km,” which is like 15 miles! What’s HAPPENING?!?!?!? Then we were clearly leaving Bolgona. Apparently, the key word was tangenziale, a word which (with Poggibonsi) will live in Gerald Family Infamy. And the key moment was when we failed (twice) to get on the tangenziale. We wound up on the Dreaded and Feared A1, which is like the no-exit-forever road to Milan. And we had to 15 miles to an exit – but it turned out to be one of these little rest area/truck stop deals where you can’t turn around. Curse you, travel gods! So we bought some horrible Frito imitations (we’re better at bad food than the Italians), went to the next exit, paid a toll to leave the Dreaded and Feared A1, then pulled a U-turn and got back on the Dreaded and Feared A1, heading back towards Bologna. This time, of course, we saw Exit 9 saying Granarolo, right where it was before, on the other freaking side of the concrete barrier, and this time, of course, we left Bolgona going the other way! Ah, but this time, when I saw an exit that said tangenziale, I pounced, and even though I didn’t know where we were going, we were off the Dreaded and Feared A1 (paid another toll), and eventually on the right road, the one with the exits – and the completely stopped traffic. It was somewhere in here that we started saying things like “Why in hell did our travel agent do this to us,” and “I’m never driving in Europe again,” and “From now on, I’m sticking to cruises.” After possibly a half-hour spent crawling a couple miles, we finally found, and took, Exit 8, Granarolo, and actually saw a sign with the name of our hotel on it. And by the time we got here, we barely cared that the hotel is low-class, isolated, not very friendly, and generally a pain in the ass – all of which I will discuss in my next post. We got some dinner in the restaurant and crashed. Hard.

Tuscany: 4-19 Florence

Wednesday the 19th was our Big Day in Florence. It’s a wonderful place to be a tourist, because you can apply any of the Three Basic Styles of Travel, and they all work fine. You can, in other words, sit around, wander around, or work a list. Or you can switch back and forth constantly. For example, you can start your day with a list of things to do – art galleries, churches, cool neighborhoods, historic piazzas, scenic parks, shopping districts, whatever you’re into – and set out to visit them all. Or you can just start walking and see what you see. Or you can chill in one place and watch the world go by. All of these offer boundless entertainment in a place like Florence, which is small and large, compact and diverse,

Wednesday, for us, was kind of a List Day, though with a Gerald Variation. That is, as a group we are only capable of about 10 blocks of movement at once before we need to rest – fewer blocks if any challenges like hills exist (my back’s been bothering me, and my folks are over 70). Fortunately, Italy is magnificent terrain for the Gerald Variation. You walk until you’re tired, and you are always within 100 feet of a cafe, bar, gelateria or ristorante, so you get an outdoor table and sit down to take in the scene and re-energize. It’s wonderful!

Our day started with reservations at the La Galleria della Acadamie, home of Michelangelo’s David – and not much else. The reservations cost three Euro; and as a linguistic note, Euro is never made plural. So it’s uno Euro, due Euro – not Euri, as it would be with cappuccini. Anyway, the lines to get into some of these places are in the hundreds of people and hours of time, but if you make a reservation several days in advance you can basically walk right in. We would never have known this, much less had a reservation, had it not been for good ol’ Silvio, whose acquaintance we all agree has been a major highlight of the trip. We arrived, via taxi, at the Acadamie at 9:15 and were inside at 9:20. And, like most people, we were gone within a half-hour.

I think humanity has largely lost its sense of wonder, and Michelangelo’s David is a perfect example. Five hundred years ago, when it was carved, nobody had seen anything like it, and other than word of mouth and some sketches, nobody had seen it – until they saw it in person, which was a much tougher proposition back then, anyway. Now, by the time we see it after a plane trip and taxi ride, we’ve seen pictures of it a thousand times, we’ve seen dozens of other (maybe bigger) statues, and when we see it our brain tends to say, “Right, yep, that’s the David.” Maybe I’m just cynical. On the other hand, the more you look at it, even with the throngs moving around you, the more amazing you realize it is. For one thing, and most people don’t realize this, it’s about 50 feet tall. And it shines. And no matter how long you look at it, you find some facet that’s astonishing, or some view that causes you to somehow see it for the first time, all over again. And he’s pretty much the ultimate male figure, which we can all dig looking at.

Having done our time in front of David, and given token visitation to the other stuff in the gallery (whatever it was), we were now faced with 10 a.m. on an unscheduled day. So we switched to the Walk Around Day. Piazzas and shops and quaint streets and views of various torre and palazzi. After a while, I got out the book and realized we were close to the Medici Chapels, where the main folks from Florence’s main family were buried. And I mean Main Family. Two of them became popes, for example. And they built themselves a church, humble lot that they were, and filled it with Michelangelo statues and over-the-top artwork and creepy relics like (alleged) bone fragments of various saints, in one case a whole femur, each of them set in a gilded display with angles holding it or something. Creeee-py.

We continued wandering and wound up at an outdoor cafe, where we had panini con proscuitto e fromaggio, which sounds pretty cool and is ham and cheese sandwiches. It’s the Italian version of a hamburger. You sit in the sun and eat these things with acqua frizzante (sparkling water) and cappuccini and you watch Florence walk by. In the afternoon we had a Shopping Bonanza. We took a taxi to the Ponte Vecchio, which Mom at first insisted wasn’t the Ponte Vecchio because it didn’t look like she remembered it looking in the pictures. But we convinced her it was, aided by a big plaque on the wall, and then she embarked on a ritual of all Gerald trips: the search for the right bracelet charm. The Ponte Vecchio (old bridge) was once the home of the various artisans in town, but now it’s all jewelry. And tourists. It’s quite literally 100 yards long and 10 yards wide, with jewelry stores on both sides and, at any given moment, probably 2,000 people on it, shopping and taking pictures. It is a freaking scene. After visiting several stores and considering many options, Mom found her charm, and I am so highly male that I can’t for the life of me remember what she got. I just know she got it, and we were then free to leave the Ponte Vecchio. (One funny note: a man and a woman are talking on the bridge. They’re not looking at each other, because she is looking from shop to shop, and he is looking from woman to woman, and he says to her, “Honey, you can get all this stuff on EBay,” and she says, with an ocean of disdain in her voice, “Honey, you just don’t get it.”)

We crossed over to a leather shop recommended by one of Mom’s neighbors who used to live here, and before I could say “time for an espresso” Mom had bought herself a fancy leather coat. Then we and headed back over the bridge, and before I could say “time for some gelato” Mom had changed her mind and gone back for a different coat. Then we went to a place that sold a particular purse that the same neighbor wanted, and that was taken care of, then on the way down the street Mom saw some art that she liked and we bought two pieces of that. It was like watching Michael Jordan in the Finals. I even got into it! After we got some gelato, I decided I wanted a leather bag for my computer, so we went into a street market and I saw several I liked; on one of them the price dropped from $120 to $90 without me even making an offer – which means, of course, that it’s way overpriced at $90. On a subsequent visit it went down to $80, and then I found another one I liked better that said $185 on the tag, and after some more walking around and more visits, I got it for $100. And it’s a darn nice bag, too. We then rubbed the nose of a wild boar statue, dropped a coin from its mouth for good luck – apparently this is a well-known tradition – and headed back for the hotel, our day complete.

I found an “internet point,” which doubles as a place to make international phone calls, and managed to hook up my laptop to post a blog and send some emails. I was sitting in a small booth in a long row of young Italians, almost all of whom were simultaneously chatting online and talking on their cell phones. At one point the guy next to me picked up the microphone attached to his computer and gave it a big, loud kiss, then another and another. All very strange.

Dinner that night was at a place recommended by Silvio, and in fact he told us to ask for Cristina when we got there. A friend of his, apparently. She was there and seated us, then sat down to explain the menu. This place doesn’t have a written menu, so your waiter simply sits down with you and explains all the options, largely from memory. It’s the same way I will one day run my restaurant. She took our orders, and then began a procession of food that we didn’t order: a little pate, a little tripe (cow’s stomach), some fava beans with pecorino cheese, a little herbed ricotta cheese – you know, just some little treats. Then came the first course, and I had their signature dish, the yellow pepper soup with little pools of olive oil on the surface. Motto yummio. Sorry, but I can’t remember what anybody else had. My second course was a roasted pigeon stuffed with dried fruit and served with a spicy apple sauce, after which they brought me a warm towel to wipe off my hands. Silly me, I hadn’t even used my hands, since it seemed the place was too fancy for that. They also brought out some asparagus and some spinach and some other side dishes we didn’t order. For dessert I had a coffee-flavored moose with chocolate sauce, dad had the vanilla, we both had the usual expresso, and they tossed in a piece of the flowerless chocolate cake, since we had agonized over whether to order it or not.

And then I did something embarrassing. I went to the restroom, and on the wall next to the toilet there was a little string hanging. I had seen the same thing in our hotel in Siena, and pulled it – I’m like Curious George, I can’t help myself – but nothing ever happened. Who knows what they’re for? So I pull this one, but this time I hear a buzzer go off out in the lobby of the restaurant, for a long ... several ... seconds. Apparently it’s some kind of an alarm! (Incredibly, I did the same thing once while temping at a BANK. Nothing happened that I was aware of, but it did set off the alarm, start the cameras rolling, call the police, the whole deal. Apparently I haven’t learned a thing). So I’m standing there in this bathroom, and I know several of the staff are outside, and I just set off this bathroom alarm out of curiosity, and they know I’m okay, so they know I just went in and pulled the alarm like a goofball. So now what do I do? Walk out and apologize? Make a joke?

Well, I must be out of shape, or getting in touch with my inner Italian, because I just went with it. Walked right out there, smiled at everyone, went back to the table. I’m just glad I didn’t pee in the bedee!

Tuscany: 4-18 Florence

We woke up Tuesday morning (that’s April 18) in Siena, and before we left town I needed to do the Duomo. “Do” might seem an odd choice of words, but when one is traveling, especially in Europe, there is a list of sights in each town considered critical (or “don’t-miss”) and which need to be seen, eaten, photographed, heard, or otherwise experienced: in a word, “done.” And I had yet to do the Duomo in Siena. Duomo is their word for Cathedral, and each one of these towns has one big central church called by that name. And in front of each on is La Piazza del Duomo, or basically “Cathedral Square.” There are lots of other churches in every city, named for one of the trillion saints, and every gathering of seven or more buildings anywhere in Italy also has a church – kind of like Texas – but each town has but one Duomo. And thou shalt do the Duomo.

So I hustled over there, since we needed to split town that day. But you must understand some things about these Duomos, or Duomi, I suppose. First, they are very, very large. Motto, motto grande. Second, they were the headquarters of everything in the 15th century, and before, but it was in the 15th Century that this part of Italy basically exploded with art and philosophy and culture, all supported by commerce, and each town showed off its stuff in the Duomo. The Siena Duomo is one of the finest around, known especially for the masive carvings in the marble floor, the frescoes in the library, several bronze statues, the marble pulpit, the high ceiling ... it’s a mind-blower. The Duomo in Florence is bigger and has a much bigger, more famous dome, but the Siena cathedral whoops it bad for decoration (that’s my art critic voice kicking in there!)

I tried taking pictures, but the light is low, and they are real ticky about flashes in there; the light damages the paint, especially. Our guidebook implied that nobody really knows when the thing we built, but somewhere around the 13th Century. They put a new facade on it at the end of that century, then considered expanding it in a big way during the 14th, but after working on it for 20 years or so, two things happened: they realized the foundation wasn’t big enough, and a plague killed three-fourths of the city. To this day, there’s a big square beside the cathedral where you can see the inside of one, very large, unfinished wall.

Inside it’s all about the artwork. The floors are one gigantic, incredibly detail marble carving – in some places etched like a woodcarving and in others an actual mosaic of marble. They include scenes from the Bible and from the lives of various saints. The immense columns have bands of white and black marble (echoing the town’s coat of arms). Marble statues, some by Michelangelo and Donatello, fill every nook. Many of the original paintings went off to various museums in the 16th Century, or were lost, but in a library off to the side, there are frescoes that boggle the mind. The colors are fresh, and the room is well-lit, so it’s totally refreshing and inspiring to walk in there. The scenes – 50 feet tall or more – are painted in three dimensions, each one as if you’re looking into a great hallway, and they show a series of events in the life of a local man whose family commissioned the library, and who eventually became Pope Pius II. There are dramatic scenes of nature and far-away places, and the whole thing invites you to look at it so long that your neck and back start to hurt.

Having now done the Duomo, I hustled back to the hotel, amid a revelation. For two or three days I had complained about the crowds around here; well, this was Tuesday, the day after “Little Easter,” and Siena was back at work. The number of people in the street had been cut by 80%, all the shops were open again, cars buzzed through the streets, and it all felt perfectly normal and entirely inviting. It was wonderful! Of course, we were leaving, bound for that nuthouse known as Florence, but it, like the Duomo, had to be done.

Our first stop was Silvio’s home for lunch. We found our way out of town and met him at the appointed place: an exit off the main highway. We followed him up a hill and then along its top for several miles, then turned into a gravel driveway leading to a small cluster of stone houses surround by gardens and vineyards and olive trees – a scene so typical in Tuscany that one scarcely notices it after a while. He told us that back in the day – from the 16th Century until the 1960s – this was part of a feudal land system, in which the landlord (in a really big house somewhere nearby) owned all the land and hired people to live on it and work it, for a share of the crop: hence the term sharecropping. In the 60s the Italian government decided that this wouldn’t work anymore, so they broke up the land ownership and just tossed out a thousand-year-old system. Chaos broke out, and when the dust settled in the 70s, a lot of these old houses started getting snatched up, in some cases with help from the government, by people like Silvio. You get an old house, some land with grapes and/or olive trees, and about 437 rules saying what you can and can’t do with it. As always, I am not at all sure I have all this information correct, but you get the big picture.

Silvio and his wife Anne (who’s American) showed us around the place, which they have done a lot of work on. The old barn is now an apartment for rent, the old stalls are now a living room, and the old kitchen is now a dining room (though the original fireplace still exists and is used. The outside looks much the same, but the inside is very comfortable and clean, and they have TV and internet and everything. We sat at a big wooden table and had a wonderful, and hyper-typical, Tuscan lunch: A couple kinds of bread. A few slices of pizza. Olive oil (from their olives). A couple kinds of sheep’s cheese, one a month old and the other two or three months old and a little harder and more intensely flavored. A bottle of Chianti. It is all so simple, so elegant, so easy, so charming, so relaxed – so Tuscan. The dessert was something really special. Apparently “the shepherd down the road” made some cheese the day before, and what’s left over is riccota cheese. This is the light, airy, fat-free cheese that winds up in ravioli, sometimes lasagna, very often (after sweetening) canole. And we had a big mold of this stuff with either local honey or Anne’s homemade orange marmalade. And the cheese was from yesterday!. From the shepherd down the road!

Alas, we had to say our farewells to Silvio and Anne, which in Italy takes a while. I remember asking my Italian teacher whether people say goodbye with “ciao” or “arrivederci” or “ci vediamo,” and her response was “all of them, over and over.” And it’s true. So after all of this heartfelt farewelling, we were off for Florence. I have already described the driving experience of getting to the hotel, and the mild funkiness of the hotel itself. What I haven’t talked about is Florence itself. Compared to Silvio’s place and the Tuscan countryside, it feels like New York City. Compared with Siena, it’s like Seattle compared to Portland: bigger, more crowded, more impressive, more intense, more visited, more sites, more traffic, more of everything, except peaceful. And sitting in the front seat of a taxi is a pleasure beyond words. These cats are experts, and you have to actually drive as if you’re a person, sneaking between people and putting your nose into small places – or else you’ll never move. It is entirely common to be driving down a one-lane street with a sidewalk on your right filled with people, a line of parked scooters on your left, a bike between you and them, and you have to make a right turn through a little piazza with people in all four crosswalks, and not a light anywhere. It’s a party when I’m driving – truly entertaining – but sitting next to a cabbie is sublime. I can compare it only to an Alaskan bush pilot, a master of whitewater paddling, or an expert ballroom dancer; in fact, it includes aspects of all three: movement in a crowd, a feel for flow, and an intimate relationship with a machine.

The first thing that hit me was the amount of English being spoken, both by the locals and the visitors. I recall very few Americans in Siena, but there seemed to be a lot in Florence. Many of them looked like college students doing a semester overseas – and what a place to do it! It’s such a young, sophisticated, hip city, AND an old elegant city that practically drips history, culture and attitude. The central part of it is fast becoming a tourist zone, largely abandoned by the locals, and may turn into a theme park on itself. Yet it’s very, very Italian at the same time. Once you get the hang of it, I could see staying here for quite a while, exploring all the little nooks and crannies and neighborhoods. There is, for example, a Central Park-type place across the river; we drove through that neighborhood on the way into town, and it was all about massive tree-lined boulevards, elegeant homes, a big wooded park, and spectacular views of the city across the way. Really beautiful.

So I’m gonna quit for today and see if I can get this thing posted. We are now (on Friday evening) in a pain-in-the-butt hotel on the outskirts of Bologna, and among the many oddities and pains is the fact that I can get and send email via a wireless connection in my room, but I can’t surf the net. Apparently no Macs have ever pulled it off here. But there seems to be a computer in the lobby, and if I can email this text to myself, then go there and get it into Explorer ... well, something might work out. Ah, the eternal quest for internet access!

Tuscany: 4-18 Photo Updates

Added some captions to the photos, will add more soon. I have discovered an easy place to get the laptop online, so look out!

Photos are right here.

Tuscany: 4-17 Florence

Well, it’s a fine travel tradition, and I’ve done it again. I sit here on a Tuesday night, having written nothing since Sunday. Haven’t taken any notes, either. There’s a rhythm to these things, and it usually takes about three to five days for the whole journaling process to shut down. Generally I get it back, but not like in the beginning. And now I’m in a hotel where there’s no wireless internet, and no place to plug in my laptop, so who knows when I’ll get to post this. In fact, the desktop available here, like the one in Siena, won’t dial up Mac.com, so I might be cut off from the world in general. Sad fact: I’m in one of the most artistically and historically rich cities in the world, and I’m wondering how to get online.

Greetings from Florence

Anyway, I guess I’ll start where I am: sitting on my bed in a funky hotel called the Monna Lisa in Florence. I say Funky because it has a multi-building layout, and it’s fancy and nice, but also ... well, one of the seven or eight rooms and/or courtyards you have to walk through to reach the lobby has numerous pictures like the Mona Lisa, several of which show her with either a hookah or a gigantic spliff, or showing some tit, or as a witch or vampire, or an alien. Like most old buildings, it was once a family villa, and there’s a garden out back that’s very nice, and the prices are outrageous, but I mean, the Mona Lisa getting stoned? Funky hotel, like I said.

We got here via some of the finest driving directions I’ve ever experienced. We were at Silvio’s place for lunch today, and he sat me down and basically said this: This would be confusing even for an Italian. So do this: Get on the highway to Florence, and keep going, no matter what, straight into town, past five or six lights. You’ll pass a big road with some pine trees, and then you’ll turn right, and then you’ll see Piazza di Michaelangelo on the left, and you’ll go down a hill, and cross the Arno River, then go up a hill, then see the English Cemetery on the left, then wrap around that, turn right at the first light, and then start following these written directions. Now, you might be reading that and thinking that it wouldn’t work, but let me tell, that was pure gold. I am skilled at being lost in foreign cities, and Silvio is skilled at directions, and at Tuscany, so we worked it out. And he had written directions from the hotel starting at the English Cemetery, and we followed those into ever-smaller streets, past ever-tighter turns, and finally into the back parking lot of the hotel. It was might fine.

Miracle in Siena

In terms of sheer driving pleasure, however, it was a different animal from yesterday, when I drove us back from south of Siena to the hotel. It matters that we were south because we had only approached the hotel from the north, and only left town going south. That’s because to leave Siena, we would always go the same way, following signs that said toute le direzione, or “all directions,” and then picking the towns we needed from a roundabout. No way in hell could I tell you what roads we were taking, or show it to you on a map, but I did it every day without trouble. Now, because we were coming in from the south, I had to do it backwards.

No worries, says I. You follow signs for Piazza il Campo, because that is close to the hotel, and when you get close to it and realize that you’re on the wrong side of it, you turn around and try something else. That’s because driving across the medieval part of Siena, or any other of these cities, is somewhere between terrifying and impossible. So you back out, back to the highway, and head north. And along the way you see signs for the stadium, which sounds familiar because you see those signs coming into town from the north. So you act like you’re driving to the stadium, and then follow signs for a gate, because you know you drive past a gate to get to the hotel, then you see the old fort walls and remember driving around those, so you drive around them until a road looks familiar, then you take that, and you see some tents that you recall seeing the day before in a piazza near the hotel, and you go straight for them, and before you know it Dad is singing your praises and Mom is waking up from a nap in the back seat saying, “Oh, we’re here!” Man, I love finding my way around these cities!

Dinner in Florence

So tonight (Tuesday) in Florence we went to dinner at a place which, for the first time on this trip, had no English on the menu. It was also, of course, the first time I didn’t have my restaurant cheat sheet with me. So we, and the German-speaking Swiss at the table next to us, had lots of fun trying to figure out, between my small knowlege of Italian and their daughter’s small knowlege of English, whether the ravioli had butter or what else, which one was the veal, what was in the salad, how the chicken was done, and so on. The staff spoke English but was mildyy rushed, but we figured it all out. My first was crostini (basically pieces of bread) with liver pate, Dad’s was pears and hard cheese called, I think, pecorini. Mom skipped the first. My second was the ravioli, which turned out to have ricotta and an herb in the middle, and butter and sage on the outside. It may have been pan-friend for a moment, because there was just the slightest crispness on the outside, which did a little dance with the butter and the soft cheese, and the pasta was rich and strong, and as you might imagine, it was f---ing good. Mom’s second was a thicker pasta called, um, we’ll say, bataglanetta – something like that – with meat sauce and butter. Also tasty. Dad had the ravioli, and I ate most of it. Our main courses were Dad’s chicken/rabbit/zucchini (all lightly breaded and fried, all good) and me and Mom’s veal chops, easily and by far the best meat we’ve had the whole trip. Cooked just right, tender and juicy, with nothing on it but a big slice of lemon. It is SO refreshing to ask the server how the veal is done and have her look at you with her big brown Italian eyes and say “Just veal.” Sorry, perhaps the eyes were irrelevant ... but not to me.

That restaurant, by the way, was called Buca Dell'Orafo. Over by the Ponte Vecchio. Highly recommended.

We got a gelato afterwards; this country is whacked-out crazy about gelato. It’s like a legal drug. Everybody is just walking around with gelatos, all the time. A scoop in a cone is like 2 Euro, about $2.50, and they completely pile it on. There’s at least as many gelaterie as coffee shops in Portland, and as many coffee shops here, too. Basically the whole of Italian cities, at least these medieval ones, are made for eating, having coffee and gelato, shopping, and walking around. It is an absolutely magnificent lifestyle.

The Big Game

Tonight, though, we got a cab back to the hotel, and the driver had the Milan-Barcelona game on the radio. I realize that not one single person reading this had any idea such a thing was happening, but trust me: the sports pages in Europe had nothing else in them this week. During the various seasons (each country has a league) there are other leagues, or sometimes cups, that happen throughout the year. So Milan might be late in the Italian League season, and maybe on Saturday they are playing a team from Rome or Naples or something, but they are also in the semifinals of the Champions League, which matches clubs from all different countries, and tonight they were playing Barcelona in that. I think it’s something like, if during the baseball season all the team from the Washington/Baltimore/New York/Philly/Boston area had their own little sub-tournament. And then there’s the UEFA Cup, which I think brings together all the league champions to play each other. And there’s cups within each country, and various city championships, and so on. These are annual things, unlike the every-four-years World Cup. And, for the record, I’m sure I’m not explaining this right. All I know is that Milan playing Barcelona is like UCLA playing Duke in college basketball, or the Steelers and Cowboys in the NFL, or the Yankees and Red Sox in baseball if they didn’t already play 27 times a year. Two absolute giants going at it, and I knew because every night I watch an English-language soccer show. So I get in the cab, and I hear the announcer calling out names I have become mildly familiar with, has he says who has the ball (without getting into much other detail): Donelli ... Umbrini ... Ronaldinho ... and as something would start to build towards a shot, his voice would rise as well, and the roar of the immense crowd would build, and then suddenly it would all drop off and he would say simply the name of the goalkeeper, or “troppo lunga,” which means too long. Or somebody would hit the post or something, and he would just explode with words for like three straight minutes. I didn’t get to hear a goal, but I actually managed to ask the driver the score, and he said (I’m writing this phonetically) “Bah-cha-LO-na uno, Mee-LAH-no zeh-do.” And that was the final. Barcelona 1-nil, on a goal by Giuly from Ronaldhino, their Brazillian stud, in the 57th minute. I saw it later on TV, and it was a magnificent thing. Ronaldhino (you’ll hear about him in the World Cup this summer) flicked it over three guys to Giuly, who let it bounce once and then leapt into the air and whipped it with his left foot from the right side of the goal, over the goalie, and bent it into the net. And as ESPN like to say, there was much running and jumping and hugging.

But Back to the Trip ...

Anyway, yes, I am on a trip to Italy, and we have been traveling around, but I tell you, that stuff blurs together after a while. You drive to a town, you walk around and see the sights, you move on. And we also realized that we hit possibly the busiest weekend of the entire year, because Easter is a four-day national holiday for Italians, and they all appear to take the time to drive around and see the sights. It’s like Memorial Day times 100, and everywhere we went, we encountered withering crowds. Still, there were highlights, and I’ll try to hit them here, as I can remember.

After resting like just-fed lions on Sunday, we got up Monday and embarked on a driving tour recommended by our tour book. We headed south from Siena through an area called le crete, which was described as badlands – but not quite like the ones in South Dakota, if you’ve ever seen those. Imagine those covered with lush grass, grazing sheep, and rustic farmhouses made of stone and terra cotta. In other words, imagine them in Tuscany. We drove along a ridge for a while, with particularly fine scenery all around us, and numerous places to pull off – each of them filled with cars, with people and cameras spilling out. And also, since this was the holiday known as “little Easter,” we kept seeing people picnicking. And I mean old-school picnicking: find a nice place, toss out a blanket, get out some wine and cheese and bread, and chill. The prettiest spot we cam across had tons of yellow wildflowers among olive trees on one side of the road and, on the other, a few dozen grazing sheep being watched over by a white dog. He was just lounging on the hillside above the sheep, keeping an eye on them and the dozen or so people by the road, and there was a house in the background, and it was almost too much. I put the photos on my Club Photo site, which is linked from the left side of the this blog. Too much! After a while the dog moved up and posed even closer to the photographers.

Our next stop was a monastery, known mainly for frescoes in its old section. Apparently Renaissance Italians considered a wall without a fresco to be a waste, and a church wall with them to be a sin. And so they frescoed mightily. The monastery, however, was closed for siesta by the time we got there – out in the country, especially, everything pretty much shuts down for a few hours after lunch, another thing the world could learn from Italy. So I missed these frescoes. But the gift shop was open, and I got a little clay jar filled with the monks’ honey.

We were going to stop at a town called Montalcino, which is in the middle of a well-known wine area called Brunello and said to have a great enoteca (basically a wine bar and shop with tastings) in its old castle, as well as “an untouched belle-epoque cafe on it main square. It also had so many cars, buses, and people that we couldn’t find a place to park within walking distance, so we bailed – and unfortunate trend. Do not come here on Easter weekend. From all I’ve heard, the very best time to come is in late October, when the grapes and olives are being harvested, the weather is cool, the foliage is happening, and there’s nobody here. Summer, by all counts, is hot and crowded.

Next we went to a Romanesque church from the 11th Century – which I mention mainly because I have no idea what Romanesque means, and I have a strong suspicion that 90% of the people visiting the church that day didn’t, either. It doesn’t matter, of course, but I like pointing these things out. This church is nice, though not terribly well decorated anymore; the dark interior pictures I posted the other day are from there. It’s called Sant’Antimo. To me, it was most interesting because it was a well-known stop on the pilgrimage route to Rome, in like the 9th and 10th Centuries. I mention this because I am eternally enchanted by the notion of a pilgrimage, an epic walk, for purely spiritual reasons, through different countries and unknown adventures, relying on the help of others along the way. We need more of that. This particular church is interesting because they apparently spent all their money on a nice new church (in like 1090 AD), went broke, and fairly soon ceased to even be a church any more.

After this, we went to a town called Bagno Vignoni, which instead of a square has a spring-fed pond, with the water actually bubbling up at one end. You can’t bathe in it, but you can sure enough sort through some gelato options while you’re admiring the water.

It was after this drive that I pulled off my Siena Driving Miracle, landing us at the hotel after yet another exciting trip the last two or three blocks of old Siena. Imagine driving through the crowd walking out of a football game, except that they’re all milling around and stopping to look in shop windows, and you’ve pretty much got it – except that Italians seem to accept cars as just another person on the street. They glance over their shoulders, see you coming, and move just far enough out of the way. Your job, as driver, is to move through the crowd as you would if you were a person, looking for gaps, being polite, but also moving just fast enough to create your own space. I have done it several times now, and ridden in two cabs that did the same thing at four times the speed, and I have neither seen nor heard a moment of despair or frustration, except some mumbling from the cabbie, who might have just been pulling for Milan.

Monday night’s dinner was at a place called Da Guido, and I actually took notes at this one, I’m proud to say. The place was a combination old-school local joint, with whole families sitting together, and somewhat touristy place, where all the staff spoke English very well – even to the point that when I told our waiter I wasn’t having wine (my nightly ritual) he said, “Ah, you forgot your ID?” Anyway, my point is it a very Italian, very friendly place, and the walls were plastered with pictures of famous Italians who have eaten there, 99% of whom we, of course, didn’t recognize. I picked out Luciano Pavarotti, Dad found Sophia Loren, Mom found Anna Maria Albergetti, but otherwise there were soccer players, poets, actors, singers, race car divers, bikers, random beautiful women – the whole Italian Pantheon.

For firsts, I had a traditional easter tart, which was kind of a dry spinach souffle in a crust, with a hard-boiled egg in the middle, if that makes sense. The thing about Tuscan food is they don’t screw around, and they don’t try to impress you. They just get goof ingredients and let them speak for themselves. I can’t remember even seeing more than two or three sauces the whole trip, and not one garnish. It is wonderfully simple, and in that way quite elegant and comforting at the same time. Anyway, Dad had goat cheese in a pastry shell, and Mom had a sald with hard-boiled quail eggs, asparagus and some mixed greens that included watercress, a very nice touch. There was also the standard bread basket and the ubiquitous olive oil, which is like chips at a Mexican place. An Italian table that doesn’t have bread and olive oil on it is a dresser.

For seconds that night, Mom had taglatelli with porcini mushrooms, a local delight; Dad had pica (another pasta) with meat sauce and porcini; and I had spaghetti with lobster, which I expected to be chunks of lobster but which turned out to be half a freaking lobster, with a cracker/scissors tool that I had never seen before—and had no idea how to use, meaning I had to call in the waiter for help. It was tasty, and a mountain of food. And there was still the main course to come! Dad had a veal chop, and I had roasted lamb with potatoes, both of which were a little over-cooked to our tastes, leading to several jokes about how Italians cook meat; we had been awed by how rare the massive bifsteak fiorentina was a few nights ago, and now this meat was overdone. They seem a little shake on meat, but everything else rocks – and, like I said, Tuesday night in Florence I had a veal chop that will the measure off all others in the future, and served with big brown Italian eyes, no less. Mom’s osso bucco was, she was happy to report, both good and inferior to hers.

So I think that’s all I can write for now; I’ve done 3,300 words in less than two hours, and my head hurts. We’re going to see Michealangelo’s David tomorrow: Did you know it’s 50 feet high and spent its first few hundred years outside? Well, now you do. And sometime after tomorrow I’ll tell you what it’s like to look at it.

Ciao!

Tuscany: 4-16 More Pictures

Click the link on the left!

Tuscany: 4-15 Driving

Okay, so first a little about the food, since I’m getting requests for details on that. There seems to be a very clearly-defined Tuscan Style, and I’d describe it as “peasant rich.” You start with some basic ingredients: bread, olive oil, olives, tomatoes, cheese (often hard), carrots, peas, rabbit, duck, beef, red wine. It seems like most of what we eat is some combination of those things.

For example, Sunday night in Siena, we ate in a cool restaurant called Da Divo, near the Duomo (cathedral), in a room that felt like an old catacomb: brick walls, arched roofs, old wooden beams, uneven floors. There was a lower room, as well, and the waitress told us it had originally been an Etruscan tomb. She said the room we were in had been used for animals. Then she made a classic Italian statement: “This room is medieval, but that room is old.”

Anyway, tonight I had, for my first course, roasted quail with berries and fennel. Dad had the same. For the second course, Mom had a risotto with broccoli and cauliflower, which was served from a sheep’s-cheese bowl. She loved it. I had a classic ribolleta, which is a tomato-based stew with bread and other vegetables and white beans. For our main course, I had breast of duck with more fennel, and Dad had rabbit stuffed with spinach. We ordered dessert, and while we were waiting for that they brought little pieces of lemon cake with a light sauce, and we watched the wine guy decant and aerate a bottle of chianti classico reserve for another table, pouring it from one glass to another, swirling it around, and then pouring it into a decanter for the table. My dessert was a little dish of pistacchio ice cream (the dish being a caramelized “bowl”) and a section of spongy cake with berries and sauce. Dad had a selection of cheeses and grapes.

Lunch Sunday was much more “on the street.” Mom was still sleeping – Sunday was a major rest day for us – and Dad and I ventured out into the insanely-crowded street. There are many levels of eateries here, and we stopped in to try a bar, which isn’t a place to drink as much as a place to eat on the go, possibly even at a counter. The thing is, the coffee and drinks are in one section of the counter, the sandwiches another, and the pastries another, so if you don’t know Italian and you need to point to something, you might be in trouble. This place was also very crowded, and not touristy, which was appealing, except that fighting your way to the front of a crowd has never been my specialty, and I don’t feel like fighting the language barrier all the time, and after a few minutes we bailed for an easier place, where you can point to a sandwich (panini) or a slice of pizza, and the crowds weren’t as intense. The sandwiches (tomato, lettuce and cheese) were crappy, but sometimes when you’re on the road you just need to get fed and keep going.

So, to catch up on the description, on Saturday we headed out on our own, without our guide, and basically went to two cities, Volterra and San Gimignano. They must be two of the most-visited places in Tuscany, and if they aren’t, I don’t wish to see the more popular places. I have decided that what I don’t like about traveling in Tuscany is fighting crowds. I’m a little claustrophobic as it is, so combining that with other hassles of travel, and the isolating language barrier, can be tough. And it seems particularly tough in very crowded places like the medieval cities.

Basically, in medieval times (like 1000-1500 AD) the cities and towns existed within walls at the top of hills, and many of them are in the same shape today. These are indescribably charming, with winding pathways and near tunnels and dramatic staircases and countless nooks and crannies filled with flowers, windows, statues, paintings, and so on. And the bigger ones, like Volterra, Siena, and San Gimignano, are on everybody’s destination list. So you have to work pretty hard to get away from the crowds, and the main sights and thoroughfares in these places are well beyond my comfort level. I have to work at enjoying the bigger cities, because I can get hung up on the crowds and discomfort.

Volterra sits on the top of a very high hill, which we drove up in a vain search for parking – among hundreds of other vehicles doing the same thing. I dropped Mom and Dad off at the entrance gate to the old city, with instructions to meet at the Etruscan Museum which was highly recommended. I have a certain faith in the travel gods that things like this will work out: everybody figure out on your own how to find one of the more famous sights in a much-visited place, and we’ll find each other there. I had to find a parking place first, though, and this involved driving around outside the walls, finding parking lots, and soon blundering into a spot being vacated. I was just outside the walls with no idea where I was, but I saw steps headed towards the wall and figured (faith again) that this lot, and those steps, must be for people going into the old city. Sure enough, I followed a woman with grocery bags through a tunnel in the wall and emerged in a little square with a couple trees, a statue, a cobbled street and a smattering of people taking pictures – the perfect Italian scene.

I followed signs to the museum and found my folks, but the museum was very old school – cases upon cases of vases upon vases – so we didn’t spend much time there. In fact, we didn’t spend much time in Volterra, and after I said a small prayer to the gods, I found the car again by doing what I always do: remember the basic direction, which in this case was west but within the walls, remember a few landmarks (a big tower and a building covered with scaffolding) and have faith. Worked perfectly, and my folks were quite impressed.

We decided to take a more country route to San Gimignano (pronounced “ji-min-yano”), partly because we like the countryside and have fond memories of finding cool things while lost in France a few years ago, and partly because Silvio had told us to go nowhere near San G, as we were calling it, before 5:30 p.m., when the dreaded buses start to clear out. The road we took wound up getting darn small, like gravel, but didn’t go anywhere. That particular mojo of finding little out-of-the-way places didn’t come through for us, and we hit San G at 4 – a scene of utter chaos. This time, though, we had a plan. I’ll drop them off and find a spot, and Mom can shop, then we’ll meet at the Duomo. One good thing about these medieval Italian towns is they all have a Duomo, and there are always signs directing the river of tourists to it. I blundered into a paid lot outside the walls once again, and found them on the steps of the Duomo about an hour after I left them at the main gate into the city.

San Gimignano is famous because some group of people (I wish I remember who) took it over around 1000 AD and built gigantic towers. Originally there were 72 of them, and now 14 remain. They are magnificent today, and I can’t imagine what they must have been like back then, especially to the mind of medieval man, who couldn’t look up pictures of the world’s marvels in books or on TV, and the vast majority of people probably never traveled more than 100 miles from home. When I think about these walled cities a thousand years ago, and the hardships of travel, and the power that the church and mythology had over people, and then something like a city with 72 towers, it’s real magical, Lord of the Rings stuff. Too bad the whole town now is filled with pizzerias, souvenir shops and tourists.

But I digress into cynicism. We visited the Duomo, which was built in the 12th Century has amazing frescoes on the walls – Old Testament on one side, New Testament on the other – and the general tone of the art portrays Christianity as a fearful, violent world. Every scene involves death and mutilation, which I guess is because life was hard back then, and because the whole religion is based on one man who overcame death and many others who struggled to follow him. Still, there’s enough arrows and beheadings and swords on these walls to last a lifetime. Amazing art work, though, and also amazing to think that the construction of these cathedrals, from planning to decorating, covered generations of workers. Some people would probably spend their lives and only see the foundations laid and a few walls go up. Like Dad observed, this was a classic example of society coming together to drive the economy for a single purpose. Another observation we’ve come up with is that the Italians were much more into the fresco than stained glass, like the French.

We took a break with panini and cappuccini on la Piazza del Duomo, then I took in one of my favorite traditions: attain the local high spot. In this case, that meant climbing one of the towers, a 150-footer that involved lots of steps and a small ladder at the top. It reminded me of getting on and off the boat in Alaska, but it wasn’t raining and I wasn’t drunk. The view from the top was amazing, and I posted some of them in my photo gallery (click the link to the left or in a blog entry called “Pictures.”) When I came down I wandered some of the side streets and took some wonderful, and utterly typical photos: the flower pots around a door, the charming alley, the old men in the piazza. See them for yourself, and know that more are on the way.

I was also intrigued by some personal interactions at the Duomo. You have to buy a ticket to go in, and you have to feed our ticket into a turnstile, with the bar code facing the right way. I, like everyone else, put it in the wrong way, then pushed on the turnstile too early – and a woman standing nearby said “other way” and then “first ticket, then push.” And I thought to myself, this woman probably says that every 20 seconds all day long. God only knows how many languages she knows it in, nor how she figures out which one to use. And inside the Duomo, where no photography is allowed (even without flashes), there was a man whose job was to walk around and occasionally say “No Photo.” He would also, when he judged that the noise level was getting too high, “shh” the entire cathedral at once, an awesome display of sound carrying well. After one “shh,” I think I overheard him say to himself, “E una chiesa,” or “This is a church!”

Silvio had recommended a dinner place called Bel Soggiorno, or “good rest,” and we got there early enough to score a killer table – right in the corner, with an unbelievable view of the surrounding countryside. Again, there are pictures in my gallery. And again, I wish I could remember what I ate, except that my first course was duck (barely cooked and not so good). I promise I’ll try to make better notes about dinner, but I tend to be tired at the end of the day, and eating dinner is more fun than writing about it. I do remember that on Friday night in Siena had a leek cake with a creamy sauce that I loved, and a steak (they seem to eat only the T-bone) which was large, thick and quite rare. Tasty, but not much else to it, and no side dishes at all. Everything is ala carte here.

After dinner in San G, we engaged in a fine tradition – getting lost and silly. We somehow drove through a town called Poggibonsi about three times, each time suffering the same fate: See a sign for Siena, follow it, then come to an intersection with no sign for Siena. Amazing. We got back to the hotel around 11, and I stayed up writing until after 1. At 1:15 I opened the door to my little courtyard outside and could still hear people out walking around. Saturday night of Easter Weekend, and Siena was still hopping.

I’ve been told that going for an evening walk is an Italian tradition, and you can totally see it. For one thing, it’s good for you – and this is a theme I’ve run into constantly here. Italians do a lot of things just because they are obviously the right thing to do. Spend public money on art, eat well, go for walks, spend time with family and friends, relax, be affectionate with one another, be polite, have feeling, and dress well. The walking around has a great social and community feel to it, much better than watching TV like Americans do, and of course these old medieval cities were built for walking. So it makes perfect sense, and it’s wonderful.

Today (Sunday) was, like I said, a rest day. I slept until 9:30, Dad slept until 9, and Mom slept past noon. I think the combination of it being Sunday and being our third day of our trip just spelled Rest Day. I walked with Dad down to the Piazza del Campo, which is an amazing medieval square immortalized in the movie Under the Tuscan Sun as the site of the flag-tossing scene. It’s also the scene of a biannual horse race between riders of the various “cantrade” or neighborhoods of Siena, a race that’s been happening for hundreds of years. Today it was all about post-Easter-service lounging and the usual tourist crush, so there were well-dressed children chasing pigeons, families lounging in the sun, tourists (including me, for the record) waiting for their turn to take a picture from just the right spot, couples walking hand-in-hand, old people dressed to the nines, and old men hanging around the edges of scene alternating between talking to each other with great sweeps of their arms and just sitting back to watch the scene unfold.

We tried to get into the museum but they weren’t giving out change and we didn’t have the right amount of money. You’ll note that I didn’t say they were out of change. She said “No cambio,” which means no change, but admission is four Eruo per person, so it seems to me they have a ton of one- and two-Euro coins in there, and I think she just didn’t want to deal with it. So we wandered off, instead, to another museum that had an exhibit of Renaissance artwork, which after many times of trying to appreciate, I think I will give up on. It’s impressive, and it’s important, and I find it excruciatingly dull.

I took a two-and-a-half-hour nap this afternoon and woke up to the sound of a marching band making its way down the street, but by the time I got down there, they were gone. The churches were closed to the camera-toting public, today being Easter, so it really was just kind of a day off. But throughout the day, occasionally bells would ring all over town, and there was a very festive air about the place. Tomorrow, in fact, is another holiday, whose name translates as “Little Easter.” We’ve decided to go for a driving tour tomorrow, following a route laid out in our guidebook, and we’re shooting for the crazy-early departure time of 10 a.m. We’ll see if we can make.

I was thinking about those bells, though. It’s little moments like that – bells ringing, or admiring art, or walking the streets in the evening, or coming out of a restaurant after a meal, or looking in a shop window, when you really do stop and think that we’re in a place that’s been inhabited for hundreds and hundreds of years, and throughout that time, when those bells have rung, people have heard them in these streets and worshipped in these churches. Every now and then, through the haze of crowds and fatigue and the other travel-induced bleariness, the reality of the journey shines through. Moments like that rejuvenate me, and I once again look forward to tomorrow.