I.

We departed from our much-loved Agroturismo today, leaving behind our generous hosts Chiara and Paolo, the big gentle dog Mischa and her companion, little deaf Dodo, a yard full of half-feral housecats, three hectares of grapes and hazelnut trees, two-hour breakfasts and three-hour dinners. Here are a few photos:

II.

After the driving the autostrata, paying $9/gallon for gas, and ordering hastily-consumed but excellent cappuccino at roadside rest stops, the next authentic Italian travel experience is trying to purchase train reservations. We found the ticket office in Milano Centrale, pulled a number and with a sinking feeling realized that it would be more an an hour (likely two) before our number would come up. The vast ticket office was like a snowed-in airport at Christmas – a refugee camp for travelers, the whole room governed by a stern and unforgiving letter board declaring the next ticket/service window. Except, this was a normal thursday afternoon. Isn’t there a kiosk, a website, any automated way to do this? (The answer is no). The American Me cried, “This system is unacceptible. Find someone to complain to and they will fix this!” but Traveler Me pointed out that 1) it’s not my country/system to fix, 2) I’m in Milano which is the efficient Italian city and still no one thinks this should be any other way, and 3) resistence is futile. However, we are both problem-solvers by nature and by training, AND, more importantly, B can be super charming. (Seriously, I can attest to the fact that ther
e’s no resisting his powers when he focuses them on you.) So while I held our place in the line, he wandered to far-flung customer service counters, smiling and wielding that Midwestern charm…and in the end, his tactics produced our train reservations faster than all my rule-abiding patience.

III.

We rounded out the evening in Milano with a visit with an old college friend. We walked to see the Duomo, then dined at a fancy hotel bar amongst the Milanese Glitterati. It couldn’t have been more different from where we woke up, amongst the vineyards and barn cats.

Cinque Terra: nearly seven hours of driving for a round trip, and another eight spent exploring the villages made for a long, exhausting day. But the villages really are beautiful and like no place I’ve ever been before. We hiked, swam in the Ligurian Sea, ate local specialties (all seafood, of course), climbed 1000 1000 stairs up and down the steep hillsides, rode the train between villages where the hiking path was closed, and generally gawked at the spectacular cliffs sloping down to the sun-sparkled water.

We thought we’d experienced the Autostrata after driving from Malpensa airport to our tiny village of Sinio. But it turns out that that is no more difficult than picking up a car at O’hare and driving to Iowa city. The real driving experience? The Autostrata along the Italian Riviera. Piloting (not driving, as we know it, but piloting) that stretch of road in our little Fiat 500 was much like kayaking my first class four rapid. Terrifying, exhilarating, and leaving me proud I’d done it and ready for a stiff drink at the end.

This morning’s breakfast guest:

And the view from the front yard, overlooking the valley:

We drove to Torino for the afternoon; to be honest it was hot and kind of boring. We went to the Duomo where the Shroud of Turin is housed, which I suppose earns us a gold star for being good tourists. Ben gets more gold stars for driving through rush hour downtown Torino. Nerves of steel, that one.

More pleasant was the evening: eating cheese and bread and wine while the sun set over the valley, followed by a simple supper made in our apartment’s kitchen and eaten on the patio in twilight.

A weirdly contagious bout of jetlag insomia meant that we were both awake till nearly dawn last night and slept past 10 this morning (is it gluttonous to set an alarm only to get up in time for breakfast?).

So, up at 10 for breakfast, which is actually two hours of nibbling on bread, local cheeses and espresso on the patio while talking European politics with our host. Then a run – more on that later. Then a light lunch of pasta, red sauce in our apartment around 3pm, followed by some napping and reading on the porch. Then we drove in to the nearest village, ostensibly in search of postcards for our grandmothers, but found that we are most definitely outside of postcard country. So we settled for a 5pm gelato break. (My travel Italian is terrible but I have managed to get all necessary words for ordering gelato and espesso down.) There was a small stray dog who visited the gelateria and the girl working there fed it scraps of proccuito. Even stray animals eat well here.

Then on to a 9pm dinner reservation at a neighboring agroturismo. It appears that most small wineries (and that’s all there is here, small family-run wineries) suplement their income by hosting a few tourists, but the tourists are mainly Italian or European and few places are set up to accommodate the english-speaking hoards. Luckily everyone charmed, or at least patient with our sorry attempts to speak Italian rather than switching over to perfect English as soon as one of us flounders and declares a dish to be “purple!” instead of “delicious!” or something. Ordering dinner is an adventure because there is no written menu — the server simply reads a couple of options for each course to aloud – no time to compare the written menu to a list of food vocabulary (eg, I heard zucchini, so ordered that, what arrived was two deep-fried fish, garnished with a bit of zucchini. Luckily I managed to dodge the veal course.)

The hyper-local wine, bottled in a cellar not 200m from where we sat drinking it.

Anyway, running:

I try to run in every new place (city/state/country) I visit. It’s a way of staying vaguely in shape while on vacation but making exercise an adventure rather than a chore. Treadmill in the hotel? a chore. Running a historic route in downtown Topeka/Toronto/Tokyo? adventure.

This is the only way we work off all this food, because, much like the US, walking is a city activity; out here people drive to get to places. However walking, in the British sense, ie, hiking, is popular and while our host looked doubtful when we proposed going for a midday run (its VERY hilly country, and hot), she did direct us to an excellent 10k route that ran out a ridge with beautiful views of the Lange Valley. Public walking paths traipse across private land in a manner that is both refreshing and alien to Americans with our barbed wired fences and shotguns and private property signs; our running route took us down country roads and driveways, through orchards and vineyards, past wheat fields and tangled bits of forest. While we’ve only seen one other runner here in the past 3 days, we weren’t enough of an oddity to cause a spectacle*, which is the best I can usually hope for.

*Unlike the time Chris and Teresa and I decided to swim out to Shell Island in the middle of Payette Lake in McCall, a lake where the recreation is almost exclusively of the motorized kind. People kept pulling over to ask if our boat had sank.

If Tuscany is Italy’s Napa Valley, that makes Piemonte into Sonoma County. Like Sonoma, Toscano’s lesser-know cousin is cheaper, a little rougher around the edges, but still still serious about wines and local food production. In fact, the Slow Food movement was born here — not Alice Water’s kitchen in Berkeley, as California locavores would have you believe — and just about every scrap of every hillside is devoted to grapes, hazelnuts, or other food production, and all are seemingly operated by individual owners – I saw no sign of large-scale commercial ag here at all.

Our intention to bicycle everywhere was cut short by the impossibly steep hills and narrow roads of the region – it’s a little like riding your bike around on hwy 1, to continue the California analogy – but we spent the day touring local villages in our adorable Fiat 500, which we’ve named Humberto Cinque.*

*The British lady in the car’s GPS we’ve named M, as she sounds like a stern Judy Dench when we’ve made a wrong turn and forced her to recalculate directions.

The day started on a plane; overnight I watched Cloud Atlas, and while the film couldn’t compare to the beauty of the book, it stayed with me all of the following day.

Morning arrived and I got my first glimpse of the Alps:

Sleepless, stumbling and plane grimy, we survived the process of picking up a rental car, navigating the Italian Autostrata, and with the aid of a GSP and three different sets of directions found our way to Cascina Sant’Eufemia with only one minor wrong turn.

The countryside is beautiful here – sharply rising hills carved into orderly rows of grapevines, and hazelnut trees, everything is still green, wildflowers are abundant in fallow fields.

Dinnner tonight, at a neighboring village, was 8 courses, and only 8 and not 10 because we began refusing dishes, strategically, in order to save room for dessert. Possibly the most important thing we learned on our first day in Italy: if you throw up your hands and say, “non capisco”, they will bring you a sampling of all three desserts.

Today is Chicago-Newark-Milan, and with 7 hours lost to the time change, travel is about all we’ll do.

I finished reading the beautiful and terribly sad “The Book Thief” on the flight to Newark. Wept openly over the last 25 pages, to the puzzlement of the Italian man in our row and the curiosity of the fully-habited crucifix-wearing nun across the aisle and the probable embarrassment of my husband next to me.

Now we are using our last minutes of US wireless data access to learn as many nuances of ordering coffee in Italy as possible. The internets tell me NO CAPPUCCINO ORDERING after 11am, you Starbucks-swilling American boor! Is this true, oh wizened travelers?

Day one of our vacation/belated honeymoon: I went for a run & B slept in. Made waffles for breakfast, then procrastinated packing a whike longer by making a peach cobbler. Went to the Keenan’s BBQ where we devoured said cobbler. And also some seitan dogs (or lamb sliders, depending on one’s meat eating preferences). Ended the night in Winnemac Park, which is the site of the most impressive (and totally unsafe) amateur fireworks display in town or possibly the world. Tomorrow we leave for Italy!

one year ago today we decided to move back to chicago. that year contained:

1 wedding (ours)
1 new job
1 cross country move
1 chicago marathon
11 shows (7 mine, 4 ben’s)

no wonder why we’re tired-what a busy year!