Last Days In Italy

Internet connections have been a bit awkward lately but I plan to be home Thursday to post the last few dozen pictures and stories on reliable American wifi from what has been overall a very succesful trip. The BMW broke down a hundred kilometers from home and we got it towed to the dealership in Perugia where they fixed a  broken fuel hose on Monday. Now I have a final round of shopping for trinkets, good byes and one last pasta blow out befor eGiovanni drives me to the airport for a bittersweet goodbye in Rome Wednesday morning. As always I am ready to go home but the trip seems to have been too short.

Ciao until then...

Vacation Day 12

Living in Paradise takes work. Just like anywhere else, really. I'll be back at it soon, too soon.

 

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Vacation Day 11

Southern law; hanging out on the porch. Really? Probably not.

 

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Last Day In The Dolomites

I like to travel light, so much so I forgot my razor, my toothpaste and my hair brush for this trip. Doctor Bronner's multipurpose soap makes for quite a foamy toothpaste...and a four Euro plastic gas station comb works okay, while an unshaven look canbe quite fashionable in Italy. I shall be glad to get back to my suitcase in Terni on Monday. For Giovanni getting ready to leave or a day's ride is quite the business, stuffing paper handkerchiefs, coins keys and cigarettes in assorted pockets, reading glasses sunglasses and cellphone...

Eventually we get outside and I put my wam vest in one saddlebag and my waterproofs in the other, cellphone and wallet in my pockets and I'm ready to ride.

We head to Passo Giau (pronounced like Ciao with a soft G)

 

 

 

 

It is 7300 feet up, 2230 meters roughly, and it was freezing cold at the top with a howling wind making everyone feel cold, not just the guy from Key West.

There was a group of open car enthusiasts gathered there and Giovanni was going gaga over the Alfa Romeos and Mercedes classics.

But we had places to go and peop,e to see and it was even too old to take coffee so we zipped down 27 hairpins to the bottom. There were hundreds of motorcycles out on a sunny Saturday and hundreds more cyclists panting their way to the top. I wanted to yell out "only 23 more to go" to the folks near the bottom but I hadn't the heart. They we're all spandex'ed out so I suspect they were quite serious about their weekend riding.

The views in the Dolomites are quite spectacular.

I don't know if it was my bad influence or what but Giovanni took more time to stop and take pictures yesterday. Of me. Happily the pass was open, geöffnet, aperto.

Our plan was to visit the lower slopes of the Marmolada Mountain, which is 11,000 feet tall, th highest spot in the Dolomites and has the only glacier. The mountain was named by the Romans and was first climbed in 1864.

We stopped at the hotel at the base and came across an old motorcycle parked out front. Giovanni had never heard of the Sertum brand which went bust in 1952. Sertum 1943 500cc SV

The note pinned to the bike read: I am old and tired! Please don't climb on or make me carry back packs. I find it disgraceful strangers would do such things to this venerable side valve survivor.

I knew of the brand because my great uncle Pasqualino who worked as an accounting clerk at the Terni steelworks told me of his Sertum 175 which he used to ride in Fascist Party led motorcycle gatherings before World War Two. He was very proud of his Sertum.

The same way Giovanni drools over old cars, so do I drool over old bikes.

I think this is a 1943 500cc side valve.

I went to the loo and found the only old fashioned style toilet of the trip. Luckily, a) I only needed to pee, and b) I had my wits about me. Flushing these bastards produces a tidal wave of water that sloshes all over the china "footprints." I have no idea why these ghastly things used to be at all popular as they seem no cheaper to build than proper toilets. And call me prejudiced but in my opinion proper toilets have a seat incorporated into their design. I remember traveling 35 years ago with an old school chum from England who, when faced with the prospect of squatting to shit in one of these disasters got the habit of never traveling without a length of twine he would anchor to the door handle and to which he would hang on like grim death whilem he squatted over the deadly hole. Giovanni had a few comments of his own when he discovered this thing was the only public toilet for miles around.

Mind you in one of the passes I went to take a piss and found the waiting area for the toilets was co-Ed. I guess I am Italian enough I carried on an inconsequential conversation with a middle aged Italian woman while I stood and peed as she waited for a woman's stall to open up. I find I pee a lot in cold weather when I don't sweat. TMI, perhaps? Anyway...

I liked the alpine feel of the hotel with pictures of old climbers on the wall and so forth.

We sat outside and looked at the Marmolada (above) as we ate (below).

Giovanni had a local specialty a roast pig's leg while I started with alley soup, flavored with smoked bacon:

And then I had an indifferent tough grilled steak that needed salt, and we finished with a classic apple Strudel in this case flavored, deliciously, with pine nuts.

We were stuffed and I desperately needed a nap. Giovanni had a headache making us a less than stellar motorcycle expedition.

We abandoned the warm sunny spot and pressed on.

We stopped for another tourist spot called Lago Carezza, of a peculiar yet natural shade of green.

Cars had to pay a Euro ($1:35) to park and people flocked to see this place I'd never heard of.

It was starting o get dark and we had to home by six as we had a dinner date and miles to ride. We made it home by three minutes after six but it was a hell of a ride up the Pusteria Valley from Bressanone to Dobbiaco. We passed thousands of cars it felt like, weekend drivers, some on dotted lines some on solid lines. We roared past campers and fast cars driven slowly and a few fast cars driven fast. It was the sort of riding that in the US would have got us thrown in jail. One single car Giovanni noted pulled aside to let us by. It was exhilarating.

And tiring so I was glad when Giuseppe, an old friend of Giovanni's with a timeshare nearby came in the car to pick us up. I was a grateful passenger for once, traveling sedately.

Giuseppe and his wife Carla (below) are quite the gourmands it turns out and they have been coming to Alto Adige for decades in their condo. This place, a classic wood mountain hotel was recently renovated and is offering a new menu Giuseppe and Carla wanted to try. I had Spätzel, a German gnocchi dish made of potatoes and smoked ham and it was delicious, followed by grilled sausage, polenta and mushrooms, washed down with a local delicate white wine. Carla finished with crême brûlée,

Giovanni had fruit and ice cream, which he thought was "healthy."

While Giuseppe passed on dessert altogether, I failed to photograph him at table so I append a picture of him taken Friday in front of his time share condo. A nice cheerful man and a good listener to Giovanni's stories:

My pudding was best, chocolate semifreddo which was a kind of nutty ice cream with chocolate sauce in a crisp sweet shell.

We talked of this and that, mutual friends, funny stories, my life in America, and he iniquities of the US health care system compared to the excessive liberality of the Italian system which they think is unsustainably generous. They are all fans of Alto Adige, the German speaking province whose boundary started just fifty yards up the road from where we ate. They admire the order and discipline of the Gemanic culture and want more of it in Italy. I say if the German speakers love Austria so much let them vote to rejoin Austria. Oh no my Italian friends said, they'll never do that, they get too many tax breaks in Italy where they are special. Which makes Alto Adige typically perversely Italian in my opinion.

They dropped us off back in Cortina d'Ampezzo where we went for a last walk "to digest dinner" Giovanni said as my cardiologist friend smoked another cigarette.

Then he called his wife and finally turned out the light. "What the hell are you writing?" he asked plaintively as he saw the glow of my mini iPad as I wrote this essay.

None of your business I said. Learn English then you can read it. Va fa un culo he said.

Then he started snoring.

Sunday we ride 400 miles home, hopefully avoiding the predicted rain.

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Vacation Day 10

They say it's haunted and that's why hobos don't camp under the entrance awning. Anything's possible I suppose. If I wanted people to keep out of my abandoned place I'd put a ghost story about.

 

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Family Hike

Before I took off on my ride to the Dolomites I spent my third day with my sister Liz hiking up a very steep hill with her husband of forty or more years. Photography tends to flatten gradients but this picture gives I think a reasonable view of the forty five degree hill.

The track through the woods is used by woodcutters who bring tractors and winches up here to lower their loads to the main road where trucks haul the stuff away. The bad news is the mountain gets denuded from time tot time but of course it all slowly grows back. Wood cutting is a winter activity when the fields are fallow and waiting for spring. They pick and press olives at that time of year too but that's another story.

It was hot work.

But the views were worth it. My brother in law isn't sure why they tagged his bushes but he suspects either hunters marking their way or some sort of aerial survey marks. In Italy there are no private property anti- trespassing rights as you understand them in the US. In winter hunters come up from the cities and are permitted to trample our fields and woods with shotguns in pursuit of whatever they can kill. Second Amendment rights carried to exasperation! You will often hear anti gumming types talk about unarmedEuropeans being oppressed but they aren't really unarmed at all, and they do a lot of shooting at live moving targets around here too. Vincenzo is not one of them. He hates guns and hunters.

My sister, ten years older than I came on this hike to keep me company, as her husband points out she rarely even leaves the house unless its to drive the car.

However the views from 3000 feet up,even in cutting wind, are worth it.

My family settled here around 1700 when the Paparini family moved north from Viterbo, near Rome. However most of the truly local history is lost to us, as the family archives are collected as scraps of parchment filled with spidery lists of numbers. When I was born some 200 families share cropped this land and gave forty percent of their crops to my mother who in turn was ripped off by her managers who took advantage of their absentee owner as generally happens in these cases. It was a very tough life too. Vincenzo could name the family that lived on the hill photographed below, people who ploughed land with oxen, shit in an outhouse and had neither electricity nor running water. Those commodities doesn't arrive till the 1960s, and paved roads only appeared well after my mother died in 1973 of a brain tumor that wet untreated for years as her erratic behavior was put down to anxiety over her hard fought divorce. This is not a country for soft living, even today.

I have read books about rural life in these parts, Under the Tuscan Sun and A Villa in Umbria, and they make pleasant reading but the objects of the stories are people who live far from idyllic lives. There are lots of outsiders moving into these isolated tumble down farmhouses too isolated for elderly peas ate to be able to face the prospect of increasing infirmity far from their children. Outsiders bring money and thus ll modern conveniences to these places and they fell close to the land, but the land demands hard work and commitment for those born here. I was glad to escape, frankly and I have no regrets. And I was and owner not a share cropper.

Every step of the way there is a story to tellin these hills for Vincenzo. He tells of crazy Romanian tractor drivers earning a pittance on steep sided mountains drag logs across ravines to make money to send home to their families. He admires them for their work ethic, in a way that most Americans cannot bring themselves too when talking of Mexicans in the US. "Italians don't want that kind of work," he says in an argument familiar to me in America. "Let them come here to earn a living." Watching Vincenzo's dogs wading the mud of the cows' watering hole puts me in mind of Cheyenne who I am told is doing fine without me. I hope not because I miss her terribly.

My passion for documenting my life annoys most people but my sister thinks I am funny as she always has. She is a woman who has traveled much of Europe and even came to visit me in California for one disastrous visit but who knows exactly where she is meant to be: right here. When her entire family was opposed to her marrying a humble share cropper's son she went right ahead and did what she wanted. Looking back I have no idea why I opposed a marriage across class lines and I have apologized repeatedly to them both, with no relief to me for my youthful stupidity. Perhaps that's why I am completely indifferent to the fears expressed by so may people about "letting" gays get married. On which subject, which I dare not bring up to her I am curtains he would be opposed. As usual, just because you have been the object of discrimination doesn't mean you are therefore any less inclined to discriminate yourself against others...

My brother-in-law says boars roll in mud not just to keep cool but also to make it easier to knock ticks off his back by letting the mud dry and then scraping it off on the bark of a tree, as seen above. We tried to take a short cut as Vincenzo wanted to get home to feed his animals before we went out to a family dinner but the trail was hopelessly overgrown. The dogs loved it, we didn't, fighting off brambles up to our chests.

It's an odd thing growing up in a bilingual family. My sisters never speak Italian to me if we are alone. Liz's English is stilted though entirely grammatical and the inflection in her voice is that of an Italian speaker, as she alone in her family speaks the language fluently. But when she speaks to me she uses English throwing in the occasional Italian word for which she has no translation. When we were kids when our parents were fighting we spoke English to our Father ("tell your mother...") and Italian to our Mother. They fought frequently but among ourselves we children spoke English, always. Why? I have no idea. When others are present we speak the majority language. As usual I have no clue what these red fruits are but they will soon be edible Vincenzo says, when they turn dark red. For the time being they are bitter and hard.

Back on the paved Vincenzo and I sacrificed our belts temporarily to keep the dogs put of traffic and he left for work clutching his pants to his waist. Liz and I meandered with Lola and Pluto, known to some as Biscotto.

I showed my sister the front operation of my phone camera. Much amusement all round.

And then we were home.

Later we went to the Rosa dei Venti restaurant a dozen miles away for a slap up dinner. My sister below, sitting next to her eldest boy, Daniele, 38 years old and full of entrepreneurial plans for the family farm he now leads. His young daughter is the new generation barely getting their ears wet in the world.

I had spinach gnocchi with Gorgonzola and pine nut sauce. Every bit as good as it sounds. Below Vincenzo with his oldest grandson Flavio (Flavius in English just sounds weird) and his mother Roberta who went to Scotland this summer to see the English side of the family and discovered she likes to travel. Key West is in her plans.

Dario, the younger son, single and in the happy position I never enjoyed of not bring the son and heir.

 

It is not my life but I wonder what it might have been had I had a family like this.

My wife notes with some justification had I not been miserable I'd never have emigrated and we'd never have met. Such are the imponderables.

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