Ireland: 2nd trip to Italy

In the winter of 2002 I took my family on an academic exchange to the west coast of Ireland. We traded jobs, houses, and cars with a family in Galway. This letter is part of that story . . .

On May 31st we landed in Bergamo, Italy, and stepped out of the airport to find a cab or bus to take us to the hotel I had booked. It was about ten o’clock at night and it had been a long and tiring day. As we stood waiting for the cab, I suddenly realized that not only was I tired, I felt strange. My body was covered in a film of salty water; I had an urge to take off my jacket and roll up my shirtsleeves; I was panting. Great, I thought, I’m getting sick. Here we are on our last European adventure and I’ve got a fever. But then it struck me: I wasn’t feverish, I was warm. No, I was HOT. And I was outside. For the first time in five months I was hot standing outside. I had forgotten that it was possible to be outside and be warm, that humans could survive outside without Irish sweaters and parkas. I had forgotten that in most of the world, there is more than one season. Some countries actually have something called "summer."
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so I just took off my jacket.

We caught a bus downtown and straight to our hotel. We were in the business area of Bergamo. The interesting part of this town is on the hill, but it was too late to get there. Instead we went to the restaurant beside the hotel and had a great dinner before we crashed.

The next morning we had breakfast in the hotel and crossed the street to the train station. Now, the Italian train service is amazing: clean, punctual, efficient, and cheap. It’s so good that I took the time to figure out how to book tickets for it on the web. It takes a bit of doing, but once you have the hang of it, you can simply type in your location and destination, the approximate time you’d like to leave, and then the computer will give you a series of options. You reserve and pay for your seats on-line and you get emailed a code. When you show up at your departure station, you go to one of the computerized ticket machines, punch in the code, and the tickets are printed out. Brilliant. So I had pre-booked our tickets from Bergamo to Cortona. This involved three trains: Bergamo to Milan, Milan to Florence (ah, Florence…), and Florence to Camucia-Cortona. The computerized ticket machine spat out three tickets and we climbed into the first train. The train was, however, a bit late getting out of the station. Not much, mind you, nothing by Canadian rail standards; it was, like, ten minutes late. But as we rode towards Milan I noticed that the computer had allowed us only ten minutes before our next train left Milan station. Crap on a stick! So as we chugged towards Milan, I found myself staring at my watch and rocking forward in my seat in attempt to get the train to move faster. The Italians sitting near me moved to another car. We finally pulled into Milan station with one minute to spare. Crap! Where’s our next train?!

To find a train in a big Italian station you have to go to the Treni in Partenze board. This lists all the trains leaving in the next few hours and which platform (binario) they’re leaving from. But here’s the trick: the trains are listed under their final destinations. If you’re going to be getting off before that station, you have to figure out which train is yours some other way. The easiest way is by departure TIME, not destination. If you’re train leaves at 14:09 you just look for the 14:09 train and you can bet it’s yours. Sounds simple, right? Well picture us jumping off the train as it pulls into Milan, and running down the enormously long platform, suitcase and backpacks flying, shoving through crowds, to get to the Parenze board only to see TWO trains leaving at 14:09, which is in, like, 30 seconds. So I have to run to each of these trains (conveniently stopped at tracks on opposite sides of the huge station) to try to find out which is ours. I finally buttonhole an engineer and find out that I’m (of course) at the wrong track, so I have to run back, grab the family, and tear across the station to jump on a train just as it’s preparing to pull out. I spend the first half-hour of the trip sweating and panting.

We arrived in Camucia-Cortona at about 3. Camucia is actually the name of the town in the valley, where the train station is, and Cortona is the old, walled town on the hill above it. We caught a bus to Cortona and were soon deposited in a city that looks like a set for a Chef-Boy-R-Dee commercial: a wall surrounds the city, the streets are flagstone, everywhere you turn you are struck by a spectacular view of the Tuscan country side. We made our way across town (a fifteen-minute walk) to find the apartment we had rented. This was in the oldest quarter of the town. Our building was 500 years old and had three-foot thick walls. It had, luckily, been totally renovated inside by a guy called Igor (good Italian name) and his mother. Igor met us and showed us around. It was perfect: red tile floors, stone walls, shuttered windows, antiques. It had two bedrooms upstairs and two bathrooms. Ah, the bathrooms: tiled, modern, one of those butt fountain things, and showers.

Real showers.

In fact, one of the primary joys of the vacation was the showers. Damn they were good. Now let’s think about this: how is it that in a 500-year-old building, on the top of a rocky hill, in dry, sun-drenched Tuscany, that the Italians can build a shower with unlimited hot water and enough pressure to strip paint from a car, while in a 10-year-old house in water-soaked Galway the Irish can’t create a shower that will make you warm and moist at the same time? Are the Italians that brilliant? Are the Irish that hapless? Well, yes. But the real difference is that the Italians understand that pleasure is good, and so they spend time on things like food, showers, and nice clothing. The Irish, for reasons that no one has been able to explain to me, are wary of pleasure. And so they eat crap, stay dirty and cold, and dress like schlubs. Then they brag about being Irish. Go figure.

We had booked this apartment, just as we had booked the flights, hotel, and train tickets, on the web. We got the apartment through an American company called Rentvillas.com. Check it out. No one is better at customer service than the Americans and this site made the process brilliantly easy. As soon as I win the lottery I’m going to spend my days booking apartments all over Europe with Rentvillas.

Our neighborhood was a small street down from the cathedral. It was perfect because it was close to everything but off the main tourist strip and therefore quiet. Our immediate neighbor was an old woman who kept a cat named Corleone (seriously) on a leash. She would sit in the doorway with the cat on her lap and talk to it, sometimes quite loudly, for hours on end. The cat was just as nuts as she was. Once Karen tried to pet it and it almost took her hand off.

Now, the weather was hot, though our apartment was nice and cool. But the outside heat produced a sumptuary crisis. What to wear? See, when I packed for Italy I said to myself, "Hmm, it’s going to be a bit warmer than Ireland (not hard), so I don’t need a jacket or sweater. On the other hand, it won’t be hot (I had forgotten that heat was possible), so I’ll need something warmer, but it’s got to look good. Italians dress well. In fact you can always tell the Italians from the non-Italians by their clothes. The tourists wear shorts, running shoes, t-shirts and baseball caps and still sweat like pigs, while the Italians wear beautiful suits and ties and stay perfectly cool. What to do? I know! I’ll wear my navy blazer. Even with jeans it looks snazzy!" But when the temperature hit the high 20s, I started sweating like a pig and was soon reduced to shorts and a t-shirt. It was the transition more than the heat. The temperature was perfect, but having come from a place where heat is something you only learn about in physics class, my body almost went super-nova.

If Cortona has a fault, it is that it is overrun with tourists. I mean really overrun. Luckily it is possible to get away from them quickly. All you have to do is walk up or down the hill. You see, most of the tourists are of a certain age and don’t have the stamina for serious hill climbing. So, while one of the main historical attractions of the city is the Medici fortress on the top of its hill, when Max, Christian and I visited it one day, there was only ONE other tourist in the whole building. The guy taking tickets at the door was bored out of his tree. Another day the whole family walked down a small road into the farmland surrounding the hill. We walked through olive groves, past wild fig trees and rosemary bushes, for two hours and never saw another person. Brilliant.

But the main streets of the town are overrun by tourists. The reason for this is two fold. First, Cortona is perfect and so will, like any perfect place, attract tourists. But more importantly, Cortona’s charms have been broadcast to the world by an evil woman named Frances Mayle. This American lady never accomplished anything in her life except convincing her incredibly rich husband to buy a place in Cortona. She then wrote a book about life in the town, called "Under A Tuscan Sun." It is an unreadable piece of crap in which she spends hundreds of pages twittering about how she buys wine, cheese, and linen in quaint little shops all over Tuscany. It contains no history, no insight into Italian culture, and no literary style whatsoever. It became a best seller. The type of people who bought it (and its sequels) are Frances Mayles wannabes: middle-aged or older rich women and their pliant husbands who like the idea of a vacation that combines sunshine, cheap wine, and boutique shopping in a place that has a mildly exotic but safe culture. Morons.

I was able to distinguish three subgroups of moronic tourists in Cortona: ugly Germans, ugly English, and ugly Americans.

The ugly Germans are in their sixties, overweight, and travel in packs led by efficient tour guides. Their ugliness manifests itself in their complete condescension towards Italian culture and, especially, Catholicism. German tourists will barge into a cathedral during a mass and make loud jokes about the superstition and stupidity of Roman Catholicism WHILE Catholics are praying. That any people would follow the dictates of the Pope and revere the priesthood is totally beyond the German mind. These are the same people who worshipped Hitler.

The ugly English range in age from late-thirties to sixties. They are in good shape and they are wealthy. These are the Brits who came out of the Thatcher years happily in the black and they have made a habit of travelling to the continent every year for a vacation in the sun. Their ugliness manifests itself in pushiness and rudeness. Now, that came as a bit of a shock to me. I had always thought of the Brits as the most painfully polite of the Europeans, but it’s not true any more. These nouveau rich and old money Limeys are brusque and vulgar. They stroll around town, braying to each other about how much better this year’s rental is to last year, take over the restaurants while complaining about the food, and condescend to anyone who is not a) British, or b) as wealthy as they are. They spend most of their days sitting at outdoor cafes getting stinko on red wine. By 2pm their faces are as red as the Chianti.

The ugly Americans are the most diverse group of tourists. They range from impoverished 20-something backpackers to fabulously wealthy octogenarians. Their ugliness manifests itself in their absolute refusal to make the smallest concession to the Italian language. Dig this: on a train from Milan to Florence, Max and I went back to the club car to buy some snacks and water. Max, who is ten, was polite enough to ask the clerk for a bottle of water this way: "Aqua, per favore." And he was careful to say "grazie" when he got the bottle. The clerk, like the various waiters we met on our trip, melted when this little guy made the brave attempt at his language. Fair enough.

The next guy in line was a thirty-something American who barked "Water. And a coupla coffees. No. Make that two waters." The clerk asked, in Italian, if the man wanted sparkling or still water. The American, confused, got angry: "I SAID two waters." Max, who, let me repeat, is TEN, was shocked.

You think I’m exaggerating? Check this out: there was a nice store in Cortona that sold replicas of Etruscan artwork and jewelry, along with watercolors and other high-end tourist stuff. It was run by a charming older Italian woman who kept a pet Mynah bird, named Caruso, in a cage just outside the store. The boys made a habit of saying hello to Caruso every day. Anyway, Karen went in this store a couple of times to poke around and buy knick-knacks. She always, of course, used as much Italian as she could. The second time she was in the store buying some earrings, a bevy of Americans stormed in and began shouting questions in English at the storekeeper. She could speak some English and she tried to answer their questions. They pawed through the merchandise (something you do NOT do in an Italian store), made some derogatory remarks about the paintings ("Inna that funny lookin’?"), then stormed out. Pause. The lady asked Karen if she is American. "No," Karen replied, "Sono Canadese." Big smile from the shopkeeper. For the next half-hour she extolled the beauties of Canada, the politeness of Canadians, and gave Karen an impromptu Italian lesson. When Karen left, the shopkeeper gave her a watercolor of the Tuscan countryside as a present. Why? Because unlike the Americans, Karen had tried.

There is one place, however, that the Americans must wrestle with the Italian tongue: in restaurants. The result is often very funny. One night Karen and I left the boys in the apartment with a pizza the size of pool table and went out for a romantic evening. The Brits had most of the restaurants booked so we waited until a wine bar opened and got one of the first seats in the place. Good call: brilliant food, cool wine-cellar room, and pretty happening vino. Most of the other clientele were Italian. But halfway through the meal an American couple came in and took the table beside us. The man was in his forties, a big awkward guy who might have been Texan. His companion was a woman in her late twenties. She wore ridiculously frilly clothes that emphasized her elephantine silicone breasts. These things were so big they disrupted local weather patterns. Cumulous clouds backed up against them and caused rainstorms. She had a son, who was maybe eight. It quickly became clear that the guy was not the boy’s father. She was a single mom working as hard as possible to get his poor schmuck to marry her. Hence the breasts and the Italian holiday, the latter inspired, no doubt, by Frances Mayle. Anyway, she gave the boy some money and told him to go buy and ice cream and head back to the hotel, by himself. Nice mom. As soon as junior was gone, she turned to the schmuck and started saying, in the most flat, nasal voice I have ever heard, "You’re so handsome. I wanna have a baby with you. It would be so handsome. Because you’re really handsome, so the baby would be too, so we should have a baby cause it would be handsome cause you are."

This incredibly embarrassing screed went on until the waiter came to take their order. The woman, bent on demonstrating her continental sophistication to her target, ordered first: "I want the gnocchi with basil and parmesan." Now, gnocchi, as we all know, is pronounced "nyah-key." Our American friend, however, said this: "I want the guh-nah-chee with bay-zel and par-mee-zan." The waiter had no idea what she said. And he could speak English. She eventually had to point at the item on the menu. Then she asked, "What’s pan-ee?" The waiter looked confused. "You know," she screeched, "Pan-ee!" He looked at the menu. "Ah, pane [pronounced pan-eh]. That is bread." "Oh!," she squealed, "Well we’ll have some pan-ee too!"

They were served much slower than we were.

We have, by the way, decided that we’re going to take some Italian lessons when we get home.
One day we took a trip to Siena to see the body parts of St. Caterina. The cathedral in that beautiful city contains the head and one of the fingers of this 14th-century lunatic. They’re on public display in pretty glass cases. The rest of her is somewhere in the Vatican. Caterina was born in Siena in 1347. She was the 24th child in the family. It seems to me that sainthood should have been bestowed on her mother. Anyway, by age six Caterina had seen a vision of Christ. Soon after that she took to mortifying her flesh, disfiguring her looks (she was ever thankful when smallpox ravaged her features), and having regular conversations with angels, Christ, and the Virgin Mary. One day Christ even knocked on her door in the disguise of a beggar. Caterina recognized Him and gave Him some of her father’s used clothes. I believe it was an "I’m with stupid" T-shirt and some tiger-skin bikini briefs. She later got caught up in the Great Schism, that wonderful period in Catholic history when there were up to three divinely infallible Popes simultaneously claiming, well, divine infallibility. She died at age 33 and was carefully chopped up three years later. The head and finger were sent from Rome to Siena. The "Sacred Head" was paraded through the street. Four hundred small girls, dressed in white, sang hymns and strew flowers while four Domincans carried the saintly coconut in an elaborate reliquary. Caterina’s aged mother walked proudly beside her daughter’s putrefying skull.

The finger did not get a parade.

Now, what are we to make of her life? Clearly, Caterina was a fucking nutbar, a masochistic schizophrenic who, if she were alive today, would be sedated and institutionalized for the rest of her life. But Caterina was doubly lucky. She was lucky that her insanity took a religious bent, and that she lived in the 14th century. The combination of those factors ensured her sainthood and a place of honor for her head and finger. The finger, by the way, is held in the upright position by a little stand so that it seems to be making a rude gesture, as if to say screw you, my head’s in a glass box and you’re just some goober tourist.

We got to see some more hard-core Catholicism at work in Cortona itself. The day after we arrived there was a parade for the Corpus Domine festival. We went to watch. It began around 11 am. It was led by a man carrying a huge flagpole with a white and red flag on it. He was followed by a priest, who acted as grand marshal. Behind him was a double line of priests, nuns, worshippers, and incredibly embarrassed children dressed in white gowns. In the middle of this section was a priest carrying a microphone that was plugged into a speaker being held aloft on a stick by another guy. That priest chanted and sang into the microphone and the whole parade joined in on the choruses. At the very end of the parade the best-dressed priest carried the Host in a snazzy gold reliquary while walking under a canopy of gold cloth that was held up at the corners by poles carried by four other guys. Now, as soon as all these people were lined up, the head priest gave the nod, the singing priest started belting out the Vatican’s greatest hits, and the parade started to move forward through the town. It got about ten feet when the top of the flagpole caught on a clothesline and almost came tumbling down. Great consternation followed as people struggled to free the flagpole while maintaining a quiet dignity. It was kinda funny.

Now, there is not a lot of other stuff to tell you about our trip, because it was a purposely mellow week. We walked, ate well, drank wine, played games with the kids, and slept a lot. Heaven. I did, however, have one minor revelation during my stay. Now, all of you who have known me for some years know that I have no interest in team sports, in sports in general, with the possible exception of boxing, which is the only REAL sport. I’d rather stick pins in my eyes than sit and watch a baseball game or, god help us, a golf tournament on TV. But one day we decided to go out and grab a bite for lunch. Instead of going to a restaurant, we decided to check out a bar that we had seen off the main drag. It looked interesting because it seemed entirely devoid of tourists. Now, in Italy there are lots of different kinds of eateries: restaurants, trattorias, osterias, and bars. Bars are not, as they are in Ireland, places to get hammered and shout fuck. No. You got into an Italian bar and stand at the bar itself or grab a table. Then you order some mineral water, a half-liter of the house wine (Vino della casa, per favore. Rosso. Uno mezzo.) and snacks. Bars will serve sandwiches, platters of cheese and cold cuts, sometimes pizza and calzone. You sip your wine, nibble on your sandwich, and while away the hours talking to your neighbors or, if there’s sports or new on the TV, you watch and make comments to your friends. Five or six hours can pass in a pleasant haze.

And as soon as we sat down and ordered in this particular bar, the England-Argentina World Cup soccer game came on the screen. It is impossible to avoid the World Cup in Europe. It is more important than politics, religion, or sex. When World Cup games are on, entire city streets become deserted. In Ireland the crime rate fell through the floor on the days that Ireland played. So even though I am not a soccer, or sports fan, I have been forced to understand something of the cultural importance of the World Cup and even learn a little about the standing of the teams.

Now maybe it was the wine, or the food, maybe it was the conviviality of the place, or just the general interest in soccer that you find in Europe, maybe it was the fact that I had picked up some soccer knowledge by osmosis, but I actually found myself becoming interested in the game. That’s a first for me. We had to order ANOTHER half-liter of wine (Signore! Un altro, per favore!) so we could watch more. Amazing.

So I would like to propose a deal to all my friends and family who have, over the years, tried to get me interested in baseball, hockey, or whatever. I WILL watch the sport with you on one condition: that you bring me to Tuscany to watch it in a bar. Not too much to ask. Pre-book now for the World Series.

We were heartbroken to leave Cortona and take the train back to Bergamo. To make up for the disappointment, we went back to that restaurant near the hotel and had another really fabulous meal. It was a Saturday night and this huge restaurant was rocking. There was a teenager birthday party going on: 20 Italian teens at a huge table scarfing pasta, drinking beer mixed with coke (yikes), and bursting into spontaneous song. At a table beside us, a family of SERIOUS Italian eaters were getting down to business: plate after plate of fresh oysters; then huge plates of pasta; THEN individual pizzas; then a meat course. They were still going at it when we left. The place was packed, noisy, and heaps of fun. The waiters were efficient and loved our kids because the boys always said thank you in Italian. A great way to spend our last night in Italy.

Then it was back on a plane to London, Stansted, the Wallmart of airports. We had an eight-hour layover, so we thought we’d take the kids into London for a while. Uh huh. Then we discovered that it would cost 22 pounds each return. That’s 50 Cdn bucks. $200 to take the family to London for a few hours. That’s more then the cost of our airfare from Ireland to Italy. So we bought novels, played video and card games, and watched as the skies of England filled with lowering clouds. Guess where those clouds were coming from? That’s right, Ireland. Hey, remember those commercials on TV where some Mick in a cap, standing in a sun-dappled pasture, would cut open a bar of mould-colored soap, sniff it and say, "As fresh as an Irish spring," and then some lass with a bog-cutter accent would pipe in, "Manly yes, but I like it too!"? Remember that? Well guess what? Sometimes TV commercials lie! Because when we landed back in Ireland, it was bitterly cold, pouring rain, and the wind was blowing so hard it could uproot a fire hydrant. This was on June 9th, deep into the Irish spring. It is now June 14, and the weather has not improved. I’m wearing a sweater.

In twelve days we rotate back to the world. I’ll try to give you one more update before we leave and I get to see you in person. Until then, ciao ragazzi.