My childhood friend Giovanni rewards his petit bourgeois lifestyle, a fashion conscious existence predicated on name brands and premium labeled merchandise with frequent updates to his stable of vehicles. He is a BMW man, driving a large diesel powered sedan built by that company and riding an R1200RT, a touring motorcycle that gets rave reviews every time a magazine checks out the machine. All this means that when I show up to spend a few days riding with my buddy, the BMW dealer in Terni falls over backwards to find me a ride. And this is great country to be riding in.
I am rather less into labels than Giovanni, and less fashion conscious and generally rather less cool than I would have to be had i stayed in Italy. Therefore when we drop by the dealer to pick up my rental which is a favor to Giovanni, I get what I am given. Last year it was a single cylinder 650, this year it was a screaming 1200. "It goes from zero to 100 kilometres per hour (60mph) in about 2.4 seconds" Gianluca told me, rubbing his hands in glee. "You're going to enjoy this one," he said almost smacking his lips with envy. I wasn't the least bit sure. This seemed a little bit overpowered for a middle aged man like me.
163 horsepower is almost three times the power of my modest air cooled Bonneville twin at home, a motorcycle that will cruise happily at 80 miles per hour on the freeway and pull from 40 miles per hour in top gear, a motorcycle devoid of visible electronics. The BMW by contrast is a machine dedicated to being fast and smooth as only a wealthy mid life crisis machine can be.
Riding around town was a bit of trick what with the low handlebars which forced me into a hunched crouch, useful on the freeway but rather awkward to look over one's middle aged shoulder. I hunkered down behind the big hump of a tank and struggled to make sense of the famous clunky BMW gearbox. Once I got into second gear the street was mine- a quick twist of the gas and I was past any obstruction rolling along in front of me. this being Italy I was expected to flash past cars, squeeze through the narrowest of openings and pull past cars waiting at a light. the head of the line is the motorcycle's place in Italian traffic and the K1200R made short work of lines.
On the open road things worked a little better as the riding position eased the flow of wind and the handlebars gave me a firm grip to hang onto as the BMW accelerated like the hounds of hell were after us. It was astonishing.My second day in Terni I took off up the freeway to Deruta, a small town near the regional capital of Perugia where I had to order some pottery to be sent to my wife back home. She has become a fan of one particular family business in this town famous for its medieval pottery and I decided to get the stuff ordered first thing before time ran out. Giovanni was still at work so I loaded my back pack on the passenger seat under a luggage net I had thought to bring from Florida and it was me, a wallet full of Euros and the open road, baby!
After the pottery interlude I set off across open country towards the low lying hills west of Perugia and lo and behold I had my first problem! A yellow triangle lit up on the computerized dashboard. I slowed down and wondered what the hell it meant. Then "Low Fuel" appeared on the screen in English and a calculated 64 kilometers (43 miles) till empty. That pushed me to find a gas station immediately. At $9 a gallon (1.56 Euros a liter) Italian gas is about twice the cost of US gas and the tank swallowed a 20 Euro bill for 13 liters. The tank on this sport bike is no bigger than my Bonneville's despite its bulbous look.
It took me a few miles to get used to the immediate power response but I manged to ride through a couple of small towns without killing humans or cats and I started to feel I was getting the hang of the thing. The day was perfect, cool and crisp around 70 degrees (20C) with bright spring sunshine and big puffy clouds in the sky. Threats of rain seemed greatly exaggerated as I took corner after corner riding into the pine forests on Monte Peglia, on the road to the famous hill town of Orvieto some 40 miles away.
I found the BMW easy to ride on the open road, the position was perfect to control the beast on the turns, and when i caught up to the slow moving cages on the road it took but a second to evaluate the road and wind open the gas and flip past the offending obstruction. At home it happens that a slow moving car (any car when its a matter of the BMW!) appears as an obstruction, but in Italy motorcycles routinely ignore the lines in the road and car drivers often pull over to the shoulder to help faster moving motorbikes get ahead. Its very civilized though it can be nerve wracking splitting heavy traffic down the middle of those coming and those going. On Monte Peglia mid week slow vehicles were a pleasure to pass on the smoothly asphalted, winding mountain road:
The scenery was pleasant enough I had to keep stopping to pull out the camera and enjoy the simple fact of finding myself here with nothing to do but ride and admire my surroundings:
After the pottery interlude I set off across open country towards the low lying hills west of Perugia and lo and behold I had my first problem! A yellow triangle lit up on the computerized dashboard. I slowed down and wondered what the hell it meant. Then "Low Fuel" appeared on the screen in English and a calculated 64 kilometers (43 miles) till empty. That pushed me to find a gas station immediately. At $9 a gallon (1.56 Euros a liter) Italian gas is about twice the cost of US gas and the tank swallowed a 20 Euro bill for 13 liters. The tank on this sport bike is no bigger than my Bonneville's despite its bulbous look.It took me a few miles to get used to the immediate power response but I manged to ride through a couple of small towns without killing humans or cats and I started to feel I was getting the hang of the thing. The day was perfect, cool and crisp around 70 degrees (20C) with bright spring sunshine and big puffy clouds in the sky. Threats of rain seemed greatly exaggerated as I took corner after corner riding into the pine forests on Monte Peglia, on the road to the famous hill town of Orvieto some 40 miles away.I found the BMW easy to ride on the open road, the position was perfect to control the beast on the turns, and when i caught up to the slow moving cages on the road it took but a second to evaluate the road and wind open the gas and flip past the offending obstruction. At home it happens that a slow moving car (any car when its a matter of the BMW!) appears as an obstruction, but in Italy motorcycles routinely ignore the lines in the road and car drivers often pull over to the shoulder to help faster moving motorbikes get ahead. Its very civilized though it can be nerve wracking splitting heavy traffic down the middle of those coming and those going. On Monte Peglia mid week slow vehicles were a pleasure to pass on the smoothly asphalted, winding mountain road:The scenery was pleasant enough I had to keep stopping to pull out the camera and enjoy the simple fact of finding myself here with nothing to do but ride and admire my surroundings: I took a self portrait, made possible only because I could set the self timer to thirty seconds in the custom mode. I set the camera up, took off my gloves to make the job easier and after I pressed the shutter ran like hell back to the motorcycle and tried not to overshoot the blinking camera on my approach. It took a few goes and I think a couple of passing motorists thought I had lost my marbles. I liked the result.
Eventually I reached the top of the mountain, Monte Peglia, home to a whole nest of television antennas and other mysterious electronic stuff:
The other side of the hill is less populated and I had lots of open road to enjoy on my way down. Orvieto came into view across the valley, with its characteristic white and black striped cathedral set on the flat hilltop unusual among Umbrian hill towns:
I stopped short of the city and took a side road back towards my destination. It was another pastoral scene, green fields trees and narrow bridges over a winding brook.
I had trouble passing a couple of cars because the rearmost vehicle kept pulling over on the straights to block me passing. I think my horsepower went to my head and finally I brushed past after hanging back for a while and catching the asshole by surprise after he lost sight of me in his mirrors. He caught up with me again when I stopped for a picture underneath the Corbara Dam built when i was a very small child to dam the Tiber river for electricity generation.
The other side of the hill is less populated and I had lots of open road to enjoy on my way down. Orvieto came into view across the valley, with its characteristic white and black striped cathedral set on the flat hilltop unusual among Umbrian hill towns:I stopped short of the city and took a side road back towards my destination. It was another pastoral scene, green fields trees and narrow bridges over a winding brook.I had trouble passing a couple of cars because the rearmost vehicle kept pulling over on the straights to block me passing. I think my horsepower went to my head and finally I brushed past after hanging back for a while and catching the asshole by surprise after he lost sight of me in his mirrors. He caught up with me again when I stopped for a picture underneath the Corbara Dam built when i was a very small child to dam the Tiber river for electricity generation.I made it up to my sister's farmhouse for lunch. She had pasta, roast chicken ( from her own yard of course) and cherries in season off her trees:
We sat at her dining room table and reminisced about this and that and I looked out the window at the gathering rain clouds:
Her husband Vincenzo called it as a shitty year, though he used more colorful language to describe his disgust at the rainy June which was threatening his wheat and his hay:
For my sister Elizabeth who has raised two strapping boys on the farm, and whose English has become a slightly strained second language all the trials of farm life are all the world she needs. My escape across the ocean has always had a rather unreal air to it, for her:
After lunch I rode on another couple of miles to Elizabeth's twin Patricia who lives with her husband on a neighboring hill top. Before dinner we went for a ride as she still clings to the label of less conventional of the two:
For some reason I was reminded of my many escapades in these same mountains, decades ago before Umbria was discovered when my mother used to fulminate that we counted for less than Sicily or Sardinia (horros!) because our roads were paved last of all. Those were the days I rode Italy's answer to the Triumph Bonneville, a fearsome for those days, 50 horsepower Benelli Tornado, a machine that rattled and vibrated and tore apart wiring looms with deadly efficiency. But boy was it fast!
And as Sam Goldwyn was reputed to have said, "we have passed a lot of water since then." I like to think things are getting better in ways small enough to be almost unnoticed among the waves of ruinous economic and environmental predictions that swamp us daily. That small up beat note may be a benefit of visiting the past from time to time.
Giovanni doesn't much like Southern Italy saying that if he wants to go on vacation he wants cleanliness and order. However we were having a rainy June so instead of heading north we went south for our short motorcycling break. Naples is currently in the middle of a garbage foul-up, with trash mouldering in the streets, but there were no heaping, reeking piles of trash where we went. Things were a bit Keys-ish, laid back might be a polite way to put it. Service was not particularly friendly, streets weren't particularly clean and public parks were run down. Yet we had a good time, our hotelier was funny and accommodating, the servers at the pizza restaurant were cheerful and Giovanni, despite his disdain enjoyed driving like a maniac (with me in tow on my rented BMW) and chatting up the locals as we went. He's that kind of hail-fellow-well-met guy that makes me crazy. I like strangers to stay strange. Giovanni even got chatting with the toll takers on the autostrada:
The plan was to have no plan. We rode the freeway south, ducking the electronic speed traps and enjoying the increasing temperatures as we rode. The speed limit on Italian autostrade is 130kph (80mph) which you'd think would be fast enough but Giovanni's idea of getting a move on is closer to the mythical 100mph and luckily we were riding machines that could hold that sort of speed easily. We arrived in the early afternoon to find ourselves on a slow winding road, clinging to the rockface over the water. It was like riding a very slow roller coaster:
Which on my K1200R was like trying to rein in a bucking bronco. The road was narrow enough to keep people sane but the locals were nuts especially on scooters. They'd see me crouched over the handlebars of this senior citizen's crotch rocket and they'd feel compelled to take me on, passing wildly and pushing through the traffic like it wasn't there. But it was, lots of it and sometimes too wide for conditions:
There were acouple of occassions we had to dismount and wheel the motorcycles backwards as tour buses shouldered their way through:
At other times we found stretches or roadway blessedly free of impediments and we'd wind our beasts up and spurt forward, only to find another apparent dead end, a wall with blue sky behind it, a hairpin bend turning in on itself and a descent with grinding first gear to avoid getting killed by oncoming traffic. It was exciting stuff. "I got third gear for a short burst,"I'd tell Giovanni as we stopped for a smoke break (him not me), and my four cylinder 170 horsepower beast would take a snorting breather:
A ridiculous machine for a stretch of roadway that allowed a 30mph (50km/h) average as we piled the gas on and took it off alternating with the curves. The view was tremendous, everywhere we went, much like California's Highway One through Big Sur, at least superficially:
Lemons are the big deal here, with terraces sprouting up and down the hillsides in the most unlikely places. In between the grapes there are not olive trees like the rest of Italy, but lemons, with languid salespeople parked beside the roadway:
We took a modest hotel room in the village of Minori for a modest 80 euros a night ($125), a bed each and a shower that struggled to supply an American style spray of water. We went around the corner at night to eat real Neopolitan pizza, as Giovanni put it. We sat on the waterfront and reminisced, our motorcycles illegally parked in the gutter, protected from traffic by a jutting pine tree sticking out into the street.
After a dinner of a Bismark pizza (ham fried egg and cheese...no really) and the local delicious delizia al limone, lemon delights made of sponge cake and cream in their particular shape:
We walked the waterfront as we always do and talk of the past and the present and the future. Giovanni asks about life in the Americas and tells me about life in the mess that he calls home. Italy is moving to two party elections and he is learning to find himself in the same pickle the rest of us have become used to- the lack of choice. " I won't vote for the Communists," he says even though he likes their leader Walter Veltroni. He won't vote for them because he doesn't trust the party apparatchiks. "I can't stand to vote for the clown Berlusconi" he groans with his next breath. "I'd vote for him if he were anyone other than himself." Better to ride a motorcycle.
We take off for the mountains and climb up to the tiny village of Ravello, the place where Greta Garbo stayed, in the English gardens created around 1904 by Lord Grimthorpe who fled England after his young wife died, and consoled himself building a splendid garden overlooking the Mediterranean:
Ravello, like the rest of coast was waiting for the tourist crunch of July and August so we had the mountain roads largely to ourselves, though locals were scooting all over the place:
I snapped this one local sitting on the church steps reading the paper. This is Italy's dolce vita in action. Don't tell Giovanni; he snorts in derision when anyone mentions the stereotype of Italians lounging around languidly seducing tourists. "I wish!" is his comment. "I don't have time to read the paper, unlike this guy" he protests.
Ravello is beautiful enough, with trees and arches and happy people meandering:
But we have places to go, things to see, so we cruise back down the mountain towards something approaching sea level, Giovanni in front me blipping the throttle to keep close behind. Naturally there is a stretch of road that is measured to be especially narrow and is controlled by traffic lights. We cruise this section with our usual insouciance and our nerves are shattered once again when two scooters zoom round a corner in total defiance of the traffic lights. Not only that but they are going at full speed. We judder to a halt and let them by. At our next smoke break Giovanni tells a story about the time he was in Naples for a medical conference (he may be a chain smoker but he is also by trade a cardiologist). He took a cab to see the sights and to his consternation the cab driver regularly ran stop signs and crossed red lights. "They're just advisory in Naples" the cabbie told Giovanni who was gripping his seat, white knuckled. Then they plunged into an urban one way tunnel against the red light."Hey,"Giovanni shouted. "What about the traffic coming towards us on the green light?" he asked the languid cab driver. "No problem," he reassured Giovanni. "They know I've got the red light. They'll be expecting me." And so it is, chaotic Mediterranean style Keys disease. Nothing works quite as it should.
Giovanni had half a mind to take a swim but the pressure to make miles kept us moving, lunch in Sorrento, the subject of a well know Neopolitan song was next and Sorrento (Surriento in the local dialect) was just a big city with thousands of crazed scooters and cars. We ate, we sipped coffee and Giovanni took a nap propped on his elbow at the cafe table much to the amusement of passersby. We rode home in the sunset to our hotel and our pizzeria where we had pasta and wine and the waitresses asked me about Obama and the next elections in the US and Giovanni about the condition of their heart muscles. Italians tend to be hypochondriacs, even the young ones.
I must have gone to Amalfi as a kid because my mother took us kids to the island of Capri when it was a hot spot in the '60's. I remember coming down with a fever in a Naples hotel and my mother hustling my sisters off to see Dr Zhivago at the movies, while the real doctor paid me a house call. In the early 21st century the bloom is off this short chunk of coast, the locals are tired of high priced real estate (sounds familiar!) and a lack of services(!) and opportunities(!!). And yet it retains the magic of those special places that mark themselves in our minds. I loved the fact that I saw more Vespas here, old and new, than anywhere else in Italy:
Like the Keys, the only road sucks, the beaches are non existent, the tourists overwhelming and life is a series of compromises. It had its magic all the same:
I saw it best when I got up and dawn and tip toed out of the room, leaving Giovanni snoring in his pillow (the next day he had the temerity to complain about my rumblings!) and I took to the empty highway all by myself. The air was cool and crisp, the road smooth and dry and the BMW as always was in perfect form. All vacations should be this good. 
I happened to pick a particularly wet and cold June to visit central Italy, with downpours every afternoon and temperatures in the evening dropping to around fifty degrees which made for some rather teeth chattering riding for this tropical motorcyclist. Giovanni suggested we ride south to seek the sun, a proposal I enthusiastically seconded. We rode like hell on the appropriately named 
...and a coffee of the espresso variety of course. On those stretches where we weren't stopping for lunch we took to ducking onto the emergency shoulder to pass the cameras as Giovanni had heard they couldn't photograph your passage and measure your speed along the shoulders...It is the Italian way, just as I had to relearn to lane split wildly and get used to cars that actually pulled over to allow us to pass on narrow winding roads. I love riding in Italy.
Giovanni the cardiologist is an inveterate smoker so we frequently get to stop and talk when we take our rides. He carried the luggage on his fully equipped R1200RT BMW while I tailed along on my minimalist, rented K1200R, wild machine of a reputed 170 horsepower and the ability to hit 60 miles per hour (100km/h) in less than three seconds from a standing start. It was quite a startling ride, let me tell you, smooth as anything but ready to leap forward with just the slightest twist of the wrist. We flew down the freeway at speeds I'd rather not mention, slowing dramatically to ride the shoulder past the overhead cameras. What a weird way to travel, a knight in armor afraid of ray guns...
You'd think I'm old enough to know better, gray beard and all. Like hell, I'm on vacation. Then we had to lane split an accident and watching Giovanni maneuver his massive saddlebags past lines of inching trucks gave me palpitations. Almost as much as my own efforts to crawl past the rows of tightly packed vehicles. jostling to get to the head of the five mile line. All this work got us to the sunshine of the Bay of Naples and we enjoyed every second of it. More of that later.
We saw household artifacts, including a mirror, still on the wall which in turn still shows its original decorations:
And crisp clean frescoes decorating the walls, as fresh as the day they were buried:
The state of chaos at 
Giovanni shrugged saying Italy has too many monuments to be able to take care of them all. Nevertheless he was as stunned by the living past as I was, and he had been here once before in his dim and distant past:
Romans kept dogs in their homes as well, as evidenced by a famous mosaic in an entrance way to a house in the city. This mosaic seems at risk to me, considering the rain puddle obliterating the words printed across it's base: cave 
There was so much in 
I find it rather odd, to imagine the customer locked in the embrace of a prostitute, forced by failure of memory to hop off the (short) bed to duck out into the corridor to check one of the little scenes to help remind him what he's there to do. The Romans were humans too I guess, though forgetting how to ride a bicycle, as it were, seems excessive . They liked to eat out apparently as evidenced by the cafeterias lining the main shopping street:
I left 
