Italian countryside

People have been living in Italy (and all of Europe) for a long time. When you drive through Italy you don’t see very much wilderness, a bit in the mountains. In central Italy, where we were driving the countryside is low, rolling hills with some higher hills and mountains. Everywhere you look it is green fields with houses dotting the countryside. It is still”natural” but a man-made version of natural.

I guess you call that rural, but it is more like America was rural a long time ago because most of the farms are small and the rural areas don’t seem to be dying like they are in the US. Large-scale agriculture makes food prices go down but there is such a large cost in other areas that it doesn’t seem like it is worth it.

Driving in Italy

We were worried that the driving might be hard having heard of the aggressive Italian drivers. They are aggressive but overall the driving has not been bad, you just have to get used to their style. On the freeway, more correctly “payway” since they are toll roads (but no toll house cookies — the toll houses are all automated), people follow pretty close when they don’t think you are driving fast enough.

I read once about someone who got a ticket on a French freeway for driving too long in the left lane, which they reserve just for passing. I don’t think that is true here since I have seen people linger in the left lane, but more often they move up close behind you, pass, and quickly move back into the right lane. When I passed in a slower American style once I had a BMW right on my bumper flashing his lights.

They drive pretty fast in these little hill towns and walled towns even though the streets are narrow. There are no sidewalks and so the  pedestrians have to watch out. But there seems to be a compact between the pedestrians and the drivers, the cars are aggressive but they give way if you assert you right.

I was talking to a friend who lived in New York once who said that NY drivers look for a certain rhythm and look in pedestrians. If they see it they know the pedestrian is a New Yorker and knows the rules of walking and they will be able to predict accurately what they will do. It seems like something similar is going on in the Italian towns.

Castles and Forts

Every walled town is essentially a fort. For higher security or a smaller investment they would build a castle, or castelina (small castle I think). The larger ones seem to be called roccas. We have seen a lot of all of these.

Many of these castles have large, cavernous rooms. I was reading the sign on one of these and they said the room was divided into two floors using wood structures. One huge room was divided into two living floors and each “floor” room itself was divided three rooms, which made them of reasonable size.

I had never heard that before but it makes a lot of sense. You build the big rooms in stone which is strong and good for defense but then you build the smaller rooms out of wood which is easier to work with and easier to change. And the wood structure is protected from the elements. Very sensible and it makes the large rooms more logical.

Lucca has a wall all around but was never attacked, maybe because it had walls. The only time the walls were used was to prevent a flood from flooding the city. And now, they use it to bicycle on.

More photos

Food:

More food:

Gone!

Easter cake

Snow on the drive through the mountains from Urbino to Siena:

We wear our best clothes to the laundromat because all the other clothes are dirty.

Electric candles in Lucca Duomo:

Hill Town Fatigue

There is a something very appealing about walled hill towns. There is nothing like your first hill town, for us it was Orvieto (on a previous trip). I have seen several hill towns described in travel books as the perfect hill town. You need to have walls, of course, complete if possible but few are. They have the twisty, little streets, churches, beautiful views. We stayed in a near-perfect hill town in Croatia.

We started this trip with five days in Spoleto which is a very nice hill town. Later we spent three days in Urbino which is the only hill town in Italy (they say) which doesn’t have urban development around it, although there seemed to be a little.

But there is a sameness about the hill towns and the streets are awfully steep when you walk around, and space is always at a premium. And there are usually lots of tourists at hill towns because everyone likes them. Anyway we decided to skip Siena. It just seemed like it would be too crowded and too much the same.

We enjoyed the Adriatic beach towns that we stayed in, especially Senigallia, so we decided to drop off the car in Siena and immediately take the train to Lucca.

Hill town pix:  the steep alley up to our hotel in  Urbino:

Urbino:

Urbino:

The hill town of Castelina in Chiati, near Siena:

Lucca Brava

Charlie: We decided we didn’t want to go to Siena as originally planned (see previous post). We had heard good things about Lucca as an under-appreciated city to visit and there was a NY Times travel article about it. It turned out to be a good choice.

Lucca is fairly large, about 80,000, but the Old City is small enough to walk around it. Since it is not one of those damn hill towns, all the streets are flat and people ride bicycles a lot. We see bicycles parked all over, usually old ones, since they are just used to get around the city. This means there are fewer cars. The whole feel of the city is calm and we love to just walk around. Despite not being a hill town they do have a wall, but, since they are not a hill town, they have more space so the wall is a standard 20-foot wall on the outside but on the inside is a large berm the height of the wall and 40 feet wide. There is a biking and walking path all around the wall, which is 2.5 miles around, and there is a large green space area all around the outside of the wall. It is quite pleasant to walk around the wall and see the city. We rented a tandem bicycle and biked around the wall this morning.

Lucca has some impressive churches and is filled with lovely piazzas. Here is the facade of the Duomo:

and an interesting circular piazza:

Market in Lucca:

Grass chair and table at the market:

And Lucca even has Old Charlie:

We have a nice little hotel (Albergo San Martino) which has eight rooms, six double and two suites, that was just remodeled, just remodeled, they finished last week. In fact, we checked into a room with no shutters and when we got back from lunch it did have shutters, newly installed. The Michelin guide said the staff is young and energetic and they are, and they speak English (and French and German) and are very nice. The rooms are in a yellow-orange theme and are quite pretty. The breakfast is quite good and visually appealing with the same orange theme in the dishes.

Entrance to Albergo San Martino

Bathroom of our first room

First room

Bathroom of our second room

***

I have always liked the Michelin green guides. One thing I like is they are not afraid to give an opinion. All sights are given 0, 1, 2 or 3 stars. Three stars is worth a journey to see and two stars is worth a side-trip to see. At least that is what it used to be, I just checked mine and now *** is highly recommended, ** in recommended, and * is interesting. They mention some sites with no stars at all but do not give an interpretation of that. I used to joke that it meant that if you were driving by, and your head was already turned in that direction, then you should look at it.

The * system is quirky It is common to have a * church with a ** alter, sometimes even a *** window although a two-star spread in a site in uncommon, except in whole cities. Rome, of course, is *** and so, of course, St.Peters, and so, of course, is Michelangelo’s Pieta inside it, but St. Peters also contains ** statues and * angels and the porch and facade have no stars. In an interesting turn, the dome is ***, but the summit of the dome has no stars but it does have a *** view.

I was touring France some years ago with my family and the two boys quickly learned the Michelin star system. We would stop at a church and if it was only one * then they would stay in the car and my wife and I would tour the church. They would get out to see a ** church.

I don’t like the Michelin guide as much as I used to though since my values have changed. I am not so interested in seeing particular things as just seeing what is there at a place. I sometimes say I haven’t seem everything but I have seen one of each type of thing. This is, of course, not literally true but it is close enough to being true that it is a good working guide.

Michelin only likes specific attractions, buildings, paintings, statues, views, etc. But if you go into a little housewares shop and get a souvenir vegetable peeler that you will use almost every day and you have a pleasant interaction with the shopkeeper and you try to explain what you want in Italian and she corrects you in a good-natured way, Michelin does not give that any stars but it is a *** experience for me.

Hotels, as we mentioned before, have one to five stars. It seems more common to have a five-level rating scale than the Michelin 3 (and a half maybe) level scale. As you know, especially if you saw Ratatouille, Michelin also rates restaurants with one, two or three stars.

Changing rooms

Charlie: in Urbino, the hotel had wifi but they said it only worked in the lobby and on the first floor. Being aesthetes and not in any way web junkies we opted for the third floor for the view, which was spectacular. It fired up the pc and it found the network at 58% (no password) and it worked flawlessly the whole time. We uploaded photos and never had a problem.

In Lucca they said they had wifi and we took a room on the second floor. the wifi reception was terrible, basically unusable, and the view was just of the building across the street.  Some sort of wifi karma I guess.

In a related story, the shower in Lucca had incredibly low water pressure. It was one of those spray things that you can take off. When we did that and turned it so the “spray” was pointing up, it did not go up at all and just dribbled off the spray head. In other words, less than gravity pressure.

Assuming these two issues were related we asked for a room on the first floor and got switched today. The wifi here is great and the water pressure looks much better.  And this room has cool floor-to-ceiling french windows in the bathroom.
Being shy people we were a little reluctant to ask. One issue was of the reason to give, is low shower pressure enough or do we admit we can’t live without wifi? We chose wifi and they seemed happy with that.

Husband/Wife Oops

Wynette: I told Charlie with dead certainty when we first got here that husband in Italian is figlio and wife is figlia (pronounced fill-yo and fill-ya). So, we’ve been calling each other figlio/figlia and referring to each other to others that way. Frequently. (E.g., “Mi figlio has the hotel key upstairs.”) Well, tonight, more than 2/3 into our trip, for some reason, I decided to double check this in a dictionary. Well, turns out, figlio means son and figlia means daughter. So, we’ve been referring to each other this whole trip as “son” and “daughter”! The correct words are marito (husband) and moglie (wife, pronounced mol-yay). Later, after we knew of our mistake, we were walking to the laundry and on the way saw a business named something like Buca e Figlii, which, of course, means Buca and Sons. That would have been a dead give away since, before, I would have thought that meant Buca and Spouses.

Villa Cristina

Wynette: We decided not to stay in Siena after all. We did need to return our rental car in Siena so, the night before, we stayed in a little hill town, Castellina in Chianti, 20 kilometers north, at a bed and breakfast named Villa Cristina that we read about in Osterie & Locande D’Italia book (“a guide to traditional places to eat and stay in Italy”). We had a large, pretty, comfortable room with a great bed. The front garden/patio was filled with blooming tulips and forsythia and other flowers. They have 5 guest rooms. I think we were the only guests. That didn’t stop them from providing an amazing breakfast, the best we’ve had so far. Perfect soft-boiled eggs, the first on this trip, and a delicious hard cheese and some good pears and warm croissant-type pastries filled with a soft cheese. Plus the usual good muesli and fruit juices and yoghurt and bread and jams and Nutella and ham and sausage and soft cheeses and capucini. The B&B is owned/run by a remarkably friendly and kind couple. We were lucky to find this place to stay.

Breakfast at Villa Cristina:

Checking out:

Carrying the bags through the garden:

Parking sign:

Lotion on a train

Wynette: We took the train today from Siena to Lucca (actually 3 trains). On the second leg of the trip, the train was crowded and we squeezed into 2 free seats in a set of 6 where 4 young people were already sitting — they were probably early college age, 3 young women and a young man, probably traveling together. They all were listening to ipods and didn’t seem to be in a good mood, a little sullen-seeming, not friendly. Maybe it was because they were so into their music. (I can relate to that.)  They spoke among themselves (minimally) and Charlie and I talked a bit, but our two groups did not interact. After about 20 minutes, one of the girls pulled out a tube of hand cream. She put some on her hands and then offered some to the boy sitting beside her (across from me). He took some. Then she passed it on to the girl sitting on the other side of the boy (across from Charlie). She also took some cream into her palm. Then she offered it to the girl across from her (and beside me) who took some. Then she  looked at me and smiled. I held out my hand and she put some in my palm. We all laughed. Of course, then she offered it to Charlie. He declined. But by then the ice was broken. The cream smelled good — like coconut. Charlie and I got off the train (in Pisa to change trains for Lucca) shortly after that.

More on church candles

Wynette:  Charlie wrote a while back about electric candles in churches.  First we saw electric candles you put into a socket.  Then we saw electric candles with little switches.  Now, I want to report we saw electric candles that require nothing but a donation of a coin (any coin I think) and a random candle will flash a bit (so you can tell which is yours) and then lights up.  That was back in Urbino.  Now we are in Lucca; visited two churches today.  They both had real candles, some were votive candles arranged on holders in nice spiral patterns.

More pictures

Truffles for sale in a store in Spoleto

5th century church near Spoleto, from the front

from the back

Grave markers

notice the playboy

Spoleto Duomo

Fixer-upper, on a sign outside a real-estate office

Charlie between the lions

slow food, fast food

proschuito for sale in Norcia

Castelluccia, a tiny town in the Piano Grande

view from our hotel room in Cupra Marittima

clean clothes! at the laudromat in Senigallia run by Bangladeshis

market in Senigallia

Dance lessons anyone?

Rotunda a Mare in Senegallia

Easter decorations

Wynette went to the 1 euro store

Duke Federica da Montefelco (more)

Wynette before Easter lunch

Urbino! Snow! Easter!

Wynette: It was mostly sunny when we drove into Urbino yesterday afternoon. It’s a beautiful place. Very green. Hills, low mountains. Got cold and cloudy and some rain shortly after we got here. We woke up to rain this morning. Still we had a great time touring the Ducal Palace (a Michelin 3 star attraction) and museum and then had a wonderful Easter lunch at “Taverne del Artistes”, a low key ristorante with simple but fantastic food. I had risotto with mushrooms (primo course) and lamb (secundo course). We had a special Easter appetizer. Deviled egg. And baked pear with good cheese melted on top. Then came back to hotel to dry out and rest. We are on the 4th floor (they call it 3rd here) and have a beautiful view over the town and into the green hillside. And, it turns out to be a good place to watch it snow! The rain turned to snow about an hour ago … 4:30 pm or so. It made us laugh. We were so surprised. Charlie decided he had to go outside and check it out. I’m staying here in the room, warm and dry. Well, as soon as I wrote that, Charlie returned. He said people on the street are giddy, too. He said people were laughing and though he couldn’t understand what they were saying he was pretty sure they were saying “can you believe this weather?!” And he brought me a canoli!

Charlie: When I went out I was going down the very steep, narrow street that leads up to our hotel. A car stopped in front of me and an older woman got out and there was some discussion between her and the people in the car. Then she turned and saw me coming down and said “a senore!”. She grabbed my arm and asked (I assume, it was Italian) whether I would assist her down the hill. I said yes and we went down to the bottom and down the still-steep street. She asked me where I was going and we communicated that I would take her to her house which was a five-minute walk. She tried to chat but all we got clear was that I was from America (I said Los Angeles, it is easier, people know it, and it is close to being true), that I was here at the Hotel Raffaello, that I was with my figlia, and the weather was crazy.

View from our hotel window before and after snow.

Coffee Branding

Charlie: Each coffee bar serves only one brand of coffee and the brand name is prominently displayed on the outside sign. Often the brand name is on the napkins and cups as well. We didn’t pay too much attention to coffee brands before since they all seemed equally good. Illy is one of the most common brands. They have expanded to the US. We went to an Illy coffee bar in DC. RomaCafe is another and there are many more.

In Spoleto we were talking to the woman who manages the hotel breakfast and she said she had used another brand and it was too strong and she switched, to “Due Mondi”  a reference to Spoleto’s big “Two Worlds” festival in the summer. After that we started noticing that some brands are much stronger. One the Adriatic coast it seems like most of the coffee brands are stronger. Wynette puts two sugars in the strong ones and doesn’t like them as well but I like the stronger coffee better.

Easter Morning

Charlie: we are in Urbino in Hotel Raffaello which has WiFi in the room so we can post more easily, and maybe get some more pictures up. We have a nice room on the top floor (the fourth, third in their terms) with amazing views of the city and countryside. The large church and bell tower is not far away. The bells ring the quarter hours.

It is Easter and at midnight the bells went crazy. It was enough to wake the dead. (A little Easter joke, or maybe a Jerry Garcia joke) but you go right back to sleep and it is actually kind of nice to hear the bells.

Language

Charlie: I studied some Italian before I went but I have little facility with languages so I am very poor at Italian. I was waiting in the lobby for Wynette to come down for breakfast and they wanted to get my order. I wanted to say I was waiting for my wife but could not remember the Italian word so I used the French word, ma femme, which I did remember. The woman said “Vous attendez (something) femme?” (something like that, as they say, pardon my French) Since the French was rapidly getting beyond my ability too I just said “si” (switching back to Italian). I guess I should stick to English and hope for the best but it seems like you should try.

Fashion

Charlie: Italians are quite fashionable and almost always look good when they are out, at least the younger ones. They have this concepts of “la bella figura”, projecting a good image or something like that, when they go out. They seem to take a lot of care when they dress. The younger women are almost uniformly thin, many model-thin. Jeans are worn tight, skin-tight in many cases.Eyeglasses seem to be in fashion. I see more people wearing glasses. The current glasses are quite flashy and have big bows (the side elements that attach to the ears), very wide and decorated.

When we were in Italy 3-4 years ago, shoes with long pointed toes were in fashion. Some were so long as to be cartoonish, 3-4 inches past where the toes would end. Now all the shoes have square toes. I guess they have to make big changes to get everyone to switch.

Three Star Hotels

Charlie: As you probably know, hotels are graded from one to five stars. We almost always stay in three-star hotels. When we were younger we were more tolerant of two-star hotels but now we expect certain things. There must be a check-list of things they must have, for example, they always have hair dryers whereas two-star hotels usually do not. The three-star hotels range from 80 to 120 euro, cheap back when the dollar and the euro were close in value, more now that the euro is at $1.50. But still not bad. I think prices might be higher to northern europe, a strange thing to me, why would a place with worse weather and worse food be more expensive?

I read in the New York Times that five-star hotels are not fancy enough and do not offer enough services for the new super-rich and there are starting to be six and seven star hotels.

Restaurants

Charlie: Everywhere I have been in Italy before this, the restaurants (or osterias or trattorias, I never got the differences straight) all had menus displayed out front. In Spoleto we went to one that had a menu out front but when you get inside, no menus, they just tell you what is available. Anyway, we get to the east coast of Italy, in San Bennedetto, and most restaurants do not have menus displayed. I was sure it was a law that they had to have menus. Now I don’t know what to think.We’ve had some great meals and a few not-so-good ones but we genernally have excellent food. But we always try to go to places that are recommended by someone. We have a “Slow Food” book that lists restaurants all over Italy that serve local food cooked in traditional ways. We had bad luck with one of them but maybe it was the jet lag, we had great luck with one in Senigallia.

Churches and “Candles”

Charlie: Italy had a lot of churches. I suppose you probably knew that. But when you walk through these little hill towns and find four big churches in an area two blocks square you start to think they might have overbuilt a tad in the church department. It must have been a big drain on their capital. But it is great for tourists, each one is a little different. The big Duomo in Spoleto had a monochrome rose window. I am used to multiolored ones so it seemed a bit disappointing. We stopped in the little mountain town of Norcia and it had a bunch of churches in a small area, as usual, and some nice rose windows.Most churches have a place where you can make an offering and light a candle. My Catholic boyhood fails me here since I don’t remember any more details about it. Anyway, the churches in Norcia had a similar place but the “candles” were electric, made to look like candles with a bulb on the top. There were plugs to put the electric candles. I guess each one had current. I was wondering about curious little fingers but I did not touch one to see if I would get a shock. In Senigallia they went one better, the electric candles were all put in the plugs and there was an array of toggle switches, one to control each candle. You dropped the coin and flipped the switch and you’re done. I suppose Siena might have flat screen with pictures of candles and you touch it with a mouse to “light” it, and, why not, I suppose you could use your credit card to make the offering if you didn’t have a coin. The modern Church.

Window Coverups Exposed

Charlie: I grew up in a white house with green “shutters”. I use the quotes because they did not shut. They were decorative and attached to the outside wall, vertigial design elements reminding us of an older time in the US. Everyplace we have been in Italy have functional shutters that shut out the light almost completely, as well as rain and wind.Some places, and it seems like mostly places near the ocean, have a more modern shutter design. It consists of horizontal slats attached together and running in a track on each side of the window. There us a 1-inch wide canvas strip inside with fittings on the top and bottom. You pull down to open the shade and pull out and release to let it drop down. The fitting on the bottom prevents slipping so you can leave it at any level of openness. The slats are attached loosely to each other so when they are hanging there is aboout an 0.25 inch opening between them. If you lower it just to the floor these slits remain and you get some light and a breeze coming through. If you lower it more the slits fill up from the bottom and when it is fully lowered it is basically solid. The room then is like a cave with no light entering. This is great for sleeping late in the morning. I had one on Capri which was nice for keeping out the sun but letting in a breeze.

I think this is a very nice design and way better than blinds or levelors. They are ineffective at keeping out the light and it seems like one or more is often not working. Also there is the issue of whether to use the little twister bar to angle them towards the room or towards the window, neither is very effective. This design seems fairly sturdy and inexpensive to put in and repair.

On one trip we had just arrived two days before and still were jet-lagged. We closed these blinds and slept until about 4 pm the next afternoon. Even with bright sun it seemed like the middle of the night since the blinds were so effective. Needless to say we missed breakfast and it set us back a little in the jet-lag recovery process.

Store fronts have shutters also, some the pull-down type and some door-like. Shops close from 12 to 4 (aka 16) and when they are closed you can handly tell there is a store there at all. They sometimes look as if they had been abandoned for years. These old cities are pretty run-down anyway so it is hard to tell.

Units (warning geeky)

Charlie:We rented a car in Spoleto, to drop off in Siena. We had a tiff with the rental agent who wanted to sell us insurance even thoough the insurance was included in the price we paid. The form said something like “collision damag waiver up to a deductible of ZERO (sic)” We interpreted this as no deductible need be paid in the event of an accident and he interpreted it the opposite way so we needed additonal insurance. He filled out the form with our declining the insurance but what can you do?But that is not what I want to talk about. My driver’s license expires on 12/3/2008. He observed that the license had expired (thinking it expired March 12) and we had this long discussion about how, in the US, we put the month first. He finally accepted this. I assumed the difference was widely known but maybe not. Wynette’s license expires on 9/16/2010 which sort of proves it I guess.

I have always thought the US system was illogical and for a long time would writes dates in the form 3 dec 2008 to avoid ambiguity. As I got older I dropped that. It seems more consistent to go from the smallest units to the largest. We do that with times but in the opposite order, for example 10:43.

Another difference is that, in Europe, the street number comes after the street name. This actually is an inconsistency similar to our putting the month first since the street name is more general than the number and the city comes next. Our GPS has an option to put the number first or last.

We bought some milk and were looking for low-fat which we did not know the Italian for. The nutritional information gives grams per 100 ml and so we picked the 1,6 rather than the 3,2 (another difference which we won’t go into here). My first reaction was to think how handy the metric system was and that this was 1,6% and 3,2% but then I realized that grams are units of mass and liters are units of volume. I think that 1 ml of water is 1 gram but I’m not sure and in any case 1 ml of water with suspended solids is different and it would required a complex calculation to figure out the percent fat accurately.

Which brings we to my pet peeve about the metric system. I have often been harangued about how superior the metric system is. Such claims are invariably suported by arguments about the advantages of standardization that are independent of the measurement system being discussed. The metric system had the advantage of using the same base as our counting system and this is a definite advantage. But 10 is a terrible base or counting or measurement, with only two divisors (2 and 5). 12 is much better with four divisors (2, 3, 4, and 6). The “English” system uses base 12 a fair amount and is superior in that respect. I once heard a metric system harangue from an astromomer who spent his whole professional life using number systems with base 60, a number rich with divisors. Go figure.

This gets us back to time which is bases on 12s and 60s. I can’t remember whether anyone has tried to move times and date to base 10.

Which, to conclude, gets us back to Italy where cartons of eggs have 10 eggs in them, a decimal dozen. Which is another advantage of the metric system because a decimal baker’s dozen in presumably 11 which is 10% extra rather than 13 which is only 8,3% extra

Weather

Charlie: We had great weather the first few days, warm and sunny. We thought we had brought too many warm clothes. It turned gray yesterday, we got some rain today and we have rain predicted off and on for the next week. We might change our plans because being in the mountains in the rain doesn’t seem fun. It s rainy at the beach also but that seems better. We’ll see tomorrow.

Staying in a town a few days

Charlie: It always takes a day or two to get used to a town, to learn how to get around, to learn where you like to have coffee, to learn the prominent landmarks. Once you do that you feel a lot more confortable and the town is more fun. The learning process itself is fun too, like a puzzle.