A Walk With Giovanni

It was my second to last evening in Terni, I has food shopping to do, I had bags to pack and weigh, I had decisions to make about which riding clothes to leave behind for my next visit, hopefully next July. All that could wait, we had an evening together to do nothing more serious than talk.

 

Italians love to talk and I find it draining. With Giovanni its in a good way as we talk about our families, our lives, our common history, the economy, politics and traveling. Giovanni (the cardiologist) isn't allowed to smoke in the house but he has a rather nice balcony cultivated by his wife for the purpose. His home is quite lovely though from the outside it is rather austere compared to the older buildings across the street. I caught this one near sunrise:

Giovanni's home in the heart of Terni, the second province of Umbria is on the second floor and his kitchen is hidden behind the balcony with the plants. His wife loves to grow things.

Giovanni has been working as a cardiologist for thirty years in the local hospital but he isn't every political and thus not very ambitious so he hasn't risen in the administration which is okay by him. He likes his work and does a lot of private practice to earn a good living. His work in the hospital gains him a public pension and pays off his education funded by the state, the private practice buys him motorcycles, German cars, an RV and vacations. At home he sweeps the kitchen floor like any dogs body.

His mother in law lives up the street and at age 92 she is still driving, and is sufficiently alert to beat her son in law and his daughter at cards. Signora Giuseppina startled me by winking and twisting her mouth using "secret" signs to tell me what cards she was holding. We were using traditional Italian cards, a pack of forty in four suits reminiscent I am told of the Tarot pack. My hand was terribly weak, no high cards, no face cards, no aces. We paid the price.

Giovanni was into it trying to get his daughter to meet his expectations. We beat her back thanks to my partner's high cards. Tre sette is an ancient game I learned as a child and we passed many summer afternoons throwing down cards and shouting ourselves hoarse in the village square waiting for the heat of the day to pass. Its a game that requires players to follow suit and the three is the top card, then the two and then the ace. Scoring is a little complicated but if you can remember cards you can do well. Giovanni thinks he can keep count of the discards.

 

It was a pleasant way to pass an hour as Eleonora took a break from driving lessons and Giovanni and I waited to take an evening walk.

We ended up thrashing our opponents as was right and proper. I had a much better hand later with lots of faces, colors and a big fat ace in the form of a plump bird with a crown on its head.

Waiting for Giovanni to get his myriad things together to go out I stopped in his study to read a motorcycle magazine which was where I noticed once again the picture of him getting married some thirty odd years ago:

And Rossana his wife trying on his beret which he wore during his year long national service (now abolished in Italy). Time has passed.

My suitcase was a reminder of the present as I struggled to get my wife's food requirements into my bag, flavored pasta, jars of truffles, particular Italian candies and my favorite toothpaste, The Captain's paste. Eventually I got the bag to 48.7 pounds, just under the fifty pound limit, using the digital scale my wife had thoughtfully provided. No overweight charges for Mrs Beattie's little boy!

Shopping was actually quite easy in this vast spacious ipercoop (hyper-co-op) as they call the enormous Costco-sized supermarket complete with underground parking and every single product you might want, including three dollar coconuts and equally expensive limes

Finally we got out walking and cruised Corso Tacito, Tacitus Street if you can imagine such a classical name for a thoroughfare. My hotel where I stay when in town is on Pliny The Younger Street! The first casualty I noticed of Italy's deepening recession was Mickey D, a former Internet site which I found useful. A friend of mine told me cold pasta at MacDonald's is one his favorite fast foods. I never got to try it but he is a gourmand and highly recommended it.

This elderly Vespa 50 is the spitting image of my first ride bought by my mother in 1970, except mine was orange. "You wanna buy it?" a voice boomed out as we (I - Giovanni is no Vespa fan) admired it.

"It spent thirty years in my garage. I pulled it out last year to save gas, gave it a new paint job and I ride it to work every day, and I really like it," the pizza parlor owner told us with some satisfaction. I told him I hope to do the same with my 1979 P200 if I ever get it back from Pennsylvania where it will be restored, soon I hope.

There was market stall selling hunting gear for the newly opened Fall hunting season. Italians love to go out and shoot small birds with large shotguns and they roast the starlings and sparrows over an open fire for dinner. If you have never been presented with a roasted feather-free small bird as prized treat and been required to bite the brains out of the little bald cooked round head and express deep appreciation you haven't lived. I hate hunting and won't do it.

We next stopped at Vitali Amleto, the Honda dealer on Via Roma where Giovanni bought his Benelli moped forty y4ears ago. The new-ish CB1100 was on display and we admired it for a while. I don't see where it is better than the Bonneville actually but it is a nice bike.

And this 350cc survivor with 1500 whole miles on the clock carries the original Vitali sticker from when it was brand new. I nearly bought one of these in 1976 but I went with a Moto Morini 350 Sport instead and never really missed electric start and turn signals.

That was all the nostalgia we needed to walk and talk about the past and how much better motorcycles are now but how much more fun it was to be less regimented back then... the usual. "Hey Giovanni!" a bum hailed us from his seat on a nearby wall. It turned out he was waiting for his wife and we exchanged pleasantries. Giovanni always has trouble introducing me as American or something. I call myself emigrato which all Italians understand as people have been going abroad for work forever. When Giovanni insists I am American I re mind him that my family has lived in Umbria for three hundred years after moving there from Viterbo before that. My ancestors were Etruscans, not from the Mayflower.

Terni is a modern city built on a grid pattern, bombed flat in World War Two to discourage production of steel and guns but there are parts of this non-tourist town that have a certain aged beauty.

Of course we got flagged down again, this time it was Antonio, Giovanni's younger brother and the living breathing stereotype of a spiffy fashionable successful lawyer. These two professionals would give my late Jewish mother-in-law palpitations. Antonio rides to his office in the pedestrian zone on an electric bicycle and he took off after wondering vaguely about a possible dinner date as silently as a witch on a broom. I remember him as a twelve year old boy bugging us, his elders, to come out and play. Time passes.

Giovanni doesn't make time to go to the movies and I am not fond of the dubbing used in Italian films. The voices are strained and as weird as it is to see Italian voices coming out of Hollywood actors the artificial quality of the dubbing voices bugs me much more. Normal delivery is apparently frowned upon. Oddly enough I n Italian movies made these days normal voices are the norm. Fancy a Saturday late show starting at quarter to one in the morning?

A bit of excitement to remind me how glad I was to be away from work. Firefighters were busy being admired by a small crowd as they removed a loose piece of guttering battered by winds and rain that fell on the city while we were riding around the Alps in blazing sunshine.

We meandered home with some fried rice balls to supplement a dinner of left overs, all talked out and ready to think about bed. A game show on television did nothing for me, though there are a couple of original detective shows on Italian TV I'd like to watch. Don Matteo about a sleuthing priest in Gubbio is a huge success and Commissario Montalbano is about an eccentric and willful policeman dealing with crime in Sicily. To watch the videos at home I'd have to get a converter and blah blah blah. Better not to get attached! One day all electronics will be universal I'm hoping.

And so to bed. Tomorrow another day a last ride and then back on the plane home.

I was glad to get back filled with memories to carry me through the winter, a photo album on Picasa with several hundred pictures and lots more things to talk about next year.

 

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Broken BMW

We were just over a hundred miles from Terni and home and so far our 300 mile ride from the Alps and Cortina d'Ampezzo had been a mixture of overcast and sunny but always dry and we were starting to think we might make it home without getting wet. That would be a first, as every trip since 2007 Giovanni and I have got drenched whether we went south to Naples and Pompeii or north to Tuscany and the Alpe Apuane.

We filled up with gas, Giovanni made a call, and we set off once again to take a high speed blast down the road known as the E45 running from Cesena to Terni, once part of the old Roman Road known as the Via Flaminia and now a useful short cut with no electronic speed traps but filled with pot holes and nasty tar patches and horrible tar ridges. We bounced like broncos as we sped down the highway home.

All went well for ten minutes and that was when my left knee started to feel wet. I looked down and my left knee was soaked. I felt the patch and my gloved finger smelled of gasoline. I looked further and fluid was pouring out from under the plastic shroud on the BMW. I was doing about a hundred miles an hour and faced the very real prospect of turning into a human torch which would have been spectacular if uncomfortable. Happily the K1200S has superb brakes and I slowed to a walking pace very rapidly.

Giovanni stopped alongside me and I motioned him away as white steam poured off the bike. I tore my saddlebags off and stepped back. So far so good. I stank like a petrol bowser and the bike trailed a wet streak down the road as far as the eye could see. I had just dropped five gallons of ten dollar gas all over the road and myself.

a car passed by and sounded its horn. It was Giuseppe with whom we had dinner one night up in the mountains! He was delighted to join in the fun while his wife sat in the car and left the boys to be boys with the broken bike that was at last no longer steaming.

Giovanni called BMW assistance and we had forty minutes to shoot the breeze. The boys talked cars.
Giovanni: "There goes a Nissan Juke. I rented one of those in Holland last Spring. Nice car."
Giuseppe: "Your wife's car has the same engine."
Giovanni: "Never its a Mercedes."
Giuseppe: " Yes it is. The diesel version is made by Renault."

This was not a quite what the doctor wanted to hear but diesel engines get a slight tax break in Italy so they are quite popular. You'd be surprised how many of your favorite cars can come with diesel engines. They run just like gasoline engines with much better mileage. Too sensible for US consumption.

Here came the help after we spent twenty silly minutes staring up the road as though wishing would make it arrive faster.

The general conviction among the boys was that the fuel hose had come undone and if we had the correct Torx wrench we could remove the acres of plastic paneling and fix the machine ourselves. I wasn't convinced this was a brilliant idea, being as how I still smelled of gasoline and was still grateful I had not had to give a demonstration of a human torch riding a motorcycle. A second opportunity to do same did not seem my optimal option so I wanted a pro to do the delving into the cause. Everyone conferred.

The tow truck driver was adamant, we towed or he left. We towed. Giovanni got astride the stricken beast.

"Sorry about the flat bed," he said," its a bit slippery. I towed a burned out car yesterday and there's oil everywhere." Well, its just a friend's $20,000 bike....

It was a delicate operation. I made good use of my camera.

"No one is allowed to ride on the flat bed."

I was quite surprised Gabriel Byrne was moonlighting as a tow truck driver, but there he was large as life in the cab with me.

If he wasn't the Irish actor they were clearly separated at birth.

 

Back in the real world we paid 60 Euro ($90) for the tow to the Perugia BMW dealer where, as it was Sunday the shop was closed.

So we pushed the stricken bike out of sight into the back, wrote a note and dropped the note and the ignition key in the drop box. Giuseppe had loaded my bags into his car and he dropped them off at Giovanni's home for me. It only remained for me to get on the back of Giovanni's bike and off we went...we got rained on an hour from home but that was par for the course.

My wife sent me a picture of my dog waiting for me to come home. She looked quite happy without me.

My life seemed for the moment like a country western song, no bike no dog...And the repair, completed the next day showed a broken fuel line attachment replaced at a cost of seventy Euro- $105.

BMWs don't come cheap, but it turns out they DO break.

 

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Flying The Friendly Skies

I am resuming a series of essays from recent trip to Italy that were interrupted by a shortage of Internet in my traveling life. Let me start by stating clearly that I got home Thursday September 19th in the middle of the night and very glad I was to get home after two weeks away. It was an excellent trip but home is home and I needed to get my dog over her irritation at my sudden disappearance.

 

I am not a fan of flying, as may have become apparent recently. I dislike the loss of control over one's life when airlines dictate one's every move. Cabin crew used to be glamorous people reeking of sex in the sky and hot hotel dates with pilots and rich businessmen far from home. Nowadays they more closely resembled harried hotel staff serving second rate food and minuscule drinks to passengers crammed like sardines. I flew home on American and frankly it was a let down compared to the rather more upscale accommodations previously recorded on the much maligned Air Berlin flight I took the other way. The American Airways flight had manky little video screens in the middle of the cabin, and two movies run at the pilot's convenience, the cabin crew were not as glad to see us as the introductory video seemed to imply and unlike Air Berlin we never got warm towels to wash with nor bottles of water to drink at will, and on and on and on.I just focused on the fact that my tickets were free thanks to my wife's judicious use to the American Airlines credit card, free to Rome and back. Cool.

 

 

I had some Italian reading matter with me so when electronics were ordered switched off I could happily read the newspaper and my favorite magazine, Classic (d'Epoca) Motociclismo. They had a comparison of World War Two sidecars, a water cooled Zundapp 125 from the 1970s and a Swiss 350 from Motosacoche. A preponderance of Germanic stuff but nevertheless...

 

 

"Are you into vintage bikes then?" my next seat neighbor leaned over and asked me. Jeremy is from San Antonio and rides, wasn't I surprised, a Norton a Moto Guzzi and a vintage Triumph. We nattered on for a while, me trying to hide my envy. I mean, yeah I do have a1979 Vespa which is a vintage machine, but really compared to a Moto Guzzi T850/1000 that doesn't really count. What are the chances? "I've seen prettier heads on zits," he remarked when he saw my iPad rendering of him.

Get this he also was known to me from an article he wrote about riding vintage bikes in Corsica, an article I read avidly in my copy of Motorcycle Classics magazine. He got a chance to ride an Ariel 1000, known as a Squariel because of Turner's odd choice of four cylinder configuration. He really liked it and was surprised by the quality of the ride. Read about it here:

Classic Motorcycle Touring Classic Motorcycle Touring on the Island of Corsica - Classic Motorcycle Touring - Motorcycle Classics And here is a picture from the article to entice you further:

I was entranced trying to figure how to convince my wife this would be worth trying: http://www.cbesprit.com/ Do you think this cheerful hopeful smile might work?

I managed to pay Jeremy back by letting him read a book off my mini iPad (an electronic device I have come to love more than the full sized iPad!) http://www.amazon.com/Motorcycle-Adventurer-Stearns-Motorcyclist-1912-1913/dp/1450221416 He was into it.

We read for a while and we talked and I let him know about the joys of modern Bonneville, which he has been wavering about buying. I convinced him it is a an easy to live with modern machine that he agrees looks good. 76,000 trouble free miles is quite an endorsement.

Then we got to Chicago and my most interesting travel companion was gone. I hope to keep in touch. Great fun and thus a much better trip than I expected or deserved. And I don't blame hi m for the horrid head cold and cough American Airlines gave me.

 

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