Buon giorno amici miei
After a 16 hour flight from BA to Rome, via Madrid, my father and I finally arrived in Bella Italia, to be greeted at the airport by my cousin Marco, wife Pina, daughter Sabrina, and her rabbit Milo.
I haven't seen Marco for over 20 years and he looks just like his father, my father's brother. We head off that evening for Subiaco, where my cousin Silvio (his brother) and his family live. For those of you who haven't heard of Subiaco (I guess this will be pretty well everyone, except Peter and Robyn who live in Perth, and possibly some other Australians who may have heard of the football team), Subiaco is an ancient hill town about an hour inland from Rome - the other Subiaco is a suburb of Perth (the most remote capital city in the world), and could not be more different.
Subiaco was already settled by the time of the infamous Roman Emperor Nero (around 55AD), who had a luxurious villa there. Later St Benedict built a monastery nearby around 500AD, which has been enlarged enormously and is built on a cliff face above a deep forested valley. The town as it stands now is mainly comprised of buildings from the 14th century onwards, including la Rocca di Borgia, which was the scene of bloody battles between the many descendants of the Borgia family (the Borgia popes were not celibate).
We arrive at night, park the car (always difficult in Italy), and walk through the narrow winding alleys to the house where Silvio, his wife Maria, and their 2 daughters Simona and Michela live. Maria sits us down and I have my first meal on Italian soil for quite a while (2 years to be precise).
I can't tell you how delicious it was - prosciutto crudo with fresh buffalo milk mozarella (like barely solidified milk) and a couple of mature cheeses, braised artichoke hearts, fried potatoes (not chips or french fries), braised wild greens with home made olive oil, home made white wine, crusty chewy bread, and sweet little pears to cleanse the palate.
We all spend the next day (May Day) at Silvio's country house (it's about 3 minutes from town by car) and Maria makes pasta, a type of meat loaf, spicy sausages, roast potatoes and salad, washed down with home made Rose and Dolcetto d'Alba (a red wine), then cakes with homemade sparkling muscat and coffee.
After spending much of my time in South America sometimes only eating one meal a day, my poor stomach is groaning at all the food that is forced on me :)
That night Marco's family go back to Rome, where I will meet him tomorrow and he will take me to pick up the hire car for the trip to Sicily. I find out that we have artistic talent in the family - Michela, who is 18, entered a writing competition earlier this year for new writers. She won the competition and her book is to be published in the next month or 2 - it's a romantic novel set in France. Simona has done a painting course, and some of her pictures (copies of renaissance art works) are hanging in the house.
Marco is a rock music groupie and has a collection of around 2000 LPs at his house, ranging from the 1960's onwards. He is a font of information on music and has corresponded with many groups and even critiqued songs for some.
Next day we catch the 9.30 bus to Rome, and the trip is through a sea of green forested hills, many of them topped with towns. In Italy they generally build towns on top of hills or on cliffsides, not down in the valley like sensible people. Every little flat area is cultivated and there are towns every 5 to 10kms. We pass through a town called Mandela - I wonder how did Nelson Mandela come by his name.
So, we meet Marco and he delivers me to Hertz, where I pick up a new Fiat Punto diesel in a heavy rainstorm, and I try and find my way out of Rome, which turns out to be fairly easy as I follow him until he signals me to take a particular exit, and we're off south (many years ago I hired an Alfa Romeo and went around the giant ring road around Rome 2 or 3 times before I found the exit.
The drive to the tip of Italy is around 750kms. The first 200kms down to Naples the autostrada (freeway) is wide and fast and I cruise along at around 150-160kmh, with the occasional splurge up to 180/190 - I'm not sure what the speed limit is (maybe 130), but nobody seems to care, and others cars are passing me anyhow. My father, bless his heart, sits quietly in the passenger seat with obvious tension in his body, but saying nothing, except occasionally murmuring that I should watch out for the car ahead, etc.
After Salerno, about 50kms south of Naples, it becomes a mess of roadworks and lane closures, interspersed with finished autostrada, so I vary from doing 40kmh to 180kmh. Two years ago I drove this same road, and I thought much of it would have been finished, but if anything it seems worse than before. Instead of working on and finishing one section at a time they are working on many sections of the autostrada simultaneously, with the result that it seems as if 80% of it is roadworks.
The drive is actually very beautiful - it seems as if the road engineers don't like going over mountains or down into valleys so there are hundreds of tunnels burrowing through the rock and large sections of the autostrada suspended on pylons crossing steep valleys. It gives quite a shock when you round a bend at 180 in bright sunlight with dark sunglasses on then enter a dark tunnel and you have to quickly whip the sunglasses up and turn on the headlights, while navigating the traffic which is always reasonably heavy - and the lanes are very narrow by Australian standards so you have to be very precise. Do this for several hundred kilometres and you will understand the concentration required.
Anyhow we reach Villa San Giovanni, where you catch the ferry to Sicily, at dusk, having passed towns with evocative names like Scilla and Cariddi (Scylla and Charybdis of Homer's Odyssey - much, if not most of the Odyssey was set in Southern Italy and Sicily). I have seen the view across to Sicily a number of times, but it's always so beautiful, and you feel the anticipation of going to another 'land'.
Although Italy is now one country, it was only united in 1872 after much warfare and international negotiation, as parts of Italy were under the control of the Spanish, French, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Most people think of Italy as being all like Tuscany, but nothing could be further from the truth. The 20 or so regions each have their own language, food, traditions, music, etc and as I have travelled around Italy in the past it has felt like many different countries.
So we cross the famous Straight of Messina and immediately we arrive I feel and hear the difference. Messina is a major port, and in the 1950's and 60's ships were constantly shuttling back and forth between Messina and Australia carrying emigrants and I was one of these with my mother when I was a little over 2 years old in October, 1953.
We have no time to stop as it's still another 150kms to Floridia where we are going to stay, so we speed down the freeway past hilltop towns lit up in the dark, and there's a full moon over the Meditterannean, and the air is warm, so it's a lovely drive until we get past Catania, where there's giant chemical works, and we try and find the turnoff for Floridia. Eventually we make it and we drop in to my cousin Gaspare's to say hello and pick up the key to where I'm staying and get to the apartment of another cousin, Maria Grazia, where my father will be staying at nearly midnight.
Here at last. I can't wait until tomorrow to have a look around the old town and have my first almond granita for breakfast (the best summer breakfast in the world).
PS: Before I finish, for those who are interested I will let you know what I've been reading on this trip. As some of you know I am a voracious reader and the thought of spending significant time without a book had me worried, but I didn't want to take many books with me because of the weight, and I was already carrying too much.
So I left Australia with only one book, Stasiland, by an Australian author Anna Funder, in which she meets and interviews a number of Stasi functionaries to find out what they think now about what they did during the Cold War, and also she talks to their victims to see what has happened to their lives. I gave this book away to a Jewish girl in Ushuaia, and I can't remember where I got the next book, The Queen and I by Sue Townsend.
This is a satire and social commentary on England based on an anti-monarchy party being voted into office, dismantling the monarchy, and sending them to live on a housing estate. It is fairly light-hearted but nevertheless gives a feel of the hopelessness and difficulty of living in one of these estates.
I finished this in Ollantaytambo and was lucky to find a hard-back version of An Equal Music by Vikram Seth. I'm not normally into love stories but this was a beautiful book about an almost obsessive love set in the context of the chamber music world. My next couple of books were The Body and other short stories by Hanif Kureishi. The Body was quietly chilling and in the other stiries Kureishi somehow was able to put himself in the body of various types of English people and their sometimes unhappy and wretched lives.
The final book was Capricornia, written in 1938 by Xavier Herbert, an Australian author and forewarns of much of what has happened. Why didn't people in Government read this and take suitable action then to prevent the problems that have occurred. I thoroughly recommend these books to everyone.
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