Mike's Italy blog, March 4th - March 15th, 2004

I'm at work at the new job right now. I'll post more when I get home tonight. I have SOOO much to talk about.

OK, so right now we’re on the plane headed home, somewhere over Nova Scotia, at least according to the GPS map system on the plane’s screens, and I realized I haven’t updated the blog since Wednesday or Thursday, and here it is the following Monday. It’s not like I didn’t try though – I made some updates from the hotel’s web machine, and for some reason the posts show up at the blogger site, but they don’t show up on our site. I think something is messed up with updating cookies, so I’ll fix it when we get home. As it is right now, I’m writing this in Word on the PC aboard the plane, so I’ll cut and paste into the blog this afternoon – we’re scheduled to land at 2:30 PM or so, so if traffic isn’t a nightmare and our checked bags arrive ok, we should get home by about 4:00 PM

So, if I recall correctly, the last post I attempted to describing our day on Monday, two days before Jan’s birthday. Just to summarize (and to remind myself too) these are the things we did from the day we arrived until we left this morning –

Day 1, Friday, March 5th, arrival in Italy, drove to S. Margherita Ligure, stopping at McArthur Glen on the way to do a little shopping.

Day 2, Saturday, March 6th, went to the aquarium in Genoa to get out of the rain.

Day 3, Sunday March 7th, went to Portofino.

Day 4, Monday March 8th, drove to Dolceacqua and through a bunch of towns in the Ligurian Alps (and where I left off the last time I posted)

Day 5, Tuesday March 9th, drove to Chivasso (near Torino) to meet Roberto Donna’s family and friends. Went to Torino for a bit, then went to see Juve get eliminated from the Champions’ League by Deportivo La Coruna.

Day 6, Wednesday March 10th, Jan’s birthday, started the day with plans to drive back to Genova, but ended up stopping in Camogli and liked it so much we spent the entire day there. That night we went to Ca’ Peo in Leive for dinner to celebrate Jan’s birthday.

Day 7, Thursday March 11th, drove to Piemonte again, this time to buy wine.

Day 8, Friday March 12th, Cinque Terre.

Day 9, Saturday, March 13th, started the day in S. Margherita Ligure, drove to Milano and checked into the hotel there.

Day 10, Sunday March 14th, saw as much of Milano as we could in the morning, then went to see Inter Milan play against Chievo Verona at San Siro stadium.

Day 11, Monday March 15th, back home.


The above was written on the plane.

We just got home. I'll post a bunch of stuff about the things we did when we were there. Needless to say, we had a great time. Also, our access to the internet was not all that great, and it was kind of a hassle to get online which is why I didn't update things too often.

I'll update stuff and flesh out the details of stuff we did each day as soon as I get a chance. We have to unpack first. :)

I'm a bad person. Well, maybe not, but I have a lot of catching up to do, and I'm pretending like this week is the week we were on vacation. So, I'm reporting on what we did on March 10th, Jan's actual birthday.

Here goes. We slept in a bit, since we didn't get back to the hotel until pretty late, what with the autostrada being closed and getting sort of lost trying to get from Genova to Santa Margherita. Oh well, such is life.

So we got up a bit later than we wanted, but we left the room by about 10:00. We had tentatively planned to go to Genova again to see the historic center. All we did the first day we were there was go to the aquarium, since it was rainy and cold outside. We started driving towards the city, but not on the autostrada. We wanted to take the "scenic" route. On the way there, we saw the exit for Camogli. When we went out to eat on our first night in S. Margherita, the owner of the restaurant suggested going to Camogli. He said he thought it was prettier than Portofino. So we figured why not. Let's stop and check it out. We thought we'd look around a bit then drive on to Genova.

Well, I can saw I'm VERY glad we stopped. Camogli is beautiful, as you can see from the three picture albums we put up of our photos. It's very beautiful. We had a great lunch at a very nice restaurant called La Rotunda. It looked kind of touristy, but we were hungry, so decided "why not." We were lucky. It seemed to be the place to eat for the locals, always a good sign. We started off with the foccacia ai formaggi, which was amazing. Then we had the rissotto frutti di mare, which can only be ordered for two. It blew us both away.

It's Saturday, March 20th, and I'm in my living room right now editing the blog. I'm pretending that today is March 10th, Jan's birthday. Why, you might ask? Because I'm a weirdo, and I want to make sure that all the posts show up in order and that they describe what we did on a day to day basis. We were so busy having fun that updating the blog became one of the last things on our mind. Now that we're back, and my first week on the new job is over, I've had time to start uploading pictures from the trip and updating the blog. I apoligize to the millions of readers (yeah, right) who were waiting with bated breath for me to post. :)

On March 9th, we drove up to visit Roberto Donna's family. For those of you who don't know, Roberto is the owner of Ristorante Galilieo in Washington, DC. Jan used to work for him years ago as his pastry chef, before he got famous. I won't go into the details as to why she's now a software engineer instead of a chef, but if you don't know and you're really interested, e-mail me. Anyway, she left the restaurant in '87 or '88, and we met and got married in '89. She took me to the original Galileo for my birthday in '89, which was the first time I met Roberto, but I don't think we went to the restaurant again for the next five or six years. We were too poor. :) Regardless, we started going to the restaurant as regular customers again sometime in '96 or so, and I'm happy to say that both of us are now friends of Roberto. We were very honored and happy that he wanted us to meet his family. For those of you who are not Italian, this may not seem like a big deal, but it is.

I had called Lori, Roberto's sister, from a pay phone when we were travelling through the Ligurian Alps. I think I used a phone in Castelvittorio. It was then I discovered that she really spoke no English, but my Italian was good enough to arrange to come to her house around 1:00 - 1:30 pm. Cool. We got up early on the 9th, and drove up the Autostrada in the direction of Torino. We decided to stop by Chivasso to see it for a bit before we visited with Lori, since the town she lives in, San Sebastiano da Po, is only about 5 km from Chivasso. We got off the autostrada onto a secondary road and noticed that there were a heck of a lot of trucks - I guess they were transporting agricultural products. That part of Italy is the flat area south of the Alps, north of the Ligurian Alps, and west of the Apenines. It's really the only part of Italy that is relatively flat, and it has been a center for agriculture for millenia.

Finally, after passing a lot of trucks (glad it was flat, since I could at least see to pass for a change) we got to Chivasso. I didn't really expect much, but it really is a nice town. Beautiful cathedral, and a very nice "area pedonale" (pedestrian zone). We stopped in a shop to buy scarves and gloves (it was cold, and we were going to Stadio delle Alpi that night to see Juventus play). Another transaction made completely in Italian! I asked the woman if there was a CD store anywhere near because I wanted to buy some Italian music. She directed us to one that was past the cathedral. It really is a nice old building, with beautiful carvings in the facade that appear to be made from terracotta. It's also old, judging by the way the bas relief looks today. We found the CD store, and I asked the guy there (again in Italian) for popular Italian music, that is similar to Articolo 31 (an Italian rap group). We bought a few Italian hip hop CDs, and then walked back to the car to drive off to Lori's place.

We found it with no problem thanks to our trusty navigation software. Without it, I don't know if we ever would've located the place. San Sebastiano da Po makes Chivasso look like a raging metropolis. We met Lori and she invited us in to sit for a bit and chat. We talked about our trip so far, and how many times we've been to Italy (this was our sixth trip), how much we loved the country, how much fun we were having, etc. Then we went for lunch. I'll have to ask Roberto for the name of the place, but it was really good. It was a trattoria near Lori's house, and we didn't get a card when we left - something we always do when we leave a restaurant. It was a lot of fun. I had some incredible prusciotto crudo for an appetizer and these amazing home made gnocchi that tasted just like the gnocchi my grandmother used to make. Really good.

We had been joking around with the owner, who's name is Pino, during the meal. At the end he asked if we wanted coffee. We told him we did, that I wanted "normale" (espresso) and that Jan and Lori wanted caffee lungo (somewhat less strong). Pino told me he'd bring the "special" coffee for me. He went off to make it and came back a few minutes later. He gave Jan and Lori their coffee, then as he was getting ready to give me mine, he "spilled" the cup toward my lap. The thing is that he was playing a joke on me. The cup was empty, and he had a spoon through the handle, so it looked like it was falling on me, but the spoon kept it in his hand. I must've jumped three feet out of my chair. Then he handed me the real cup of coffee, and we all laughed about it. I guess he liked me. :)

After we finished coffee, we got ready to leave. We went to the cashier, and I pulled out my wallet, but of course Lori wouldn't let us pay. She was so nice to us. Finally, we were exiting the restaurant, and Pino sidetracked us again and "forced" us to drink a limoncino (the northern equivalent of the limoncello from Campania). There wasn't much arm twisting involved.

During the meal Lori told us that Roberto's mother was planning to meet us as well, and that we were going to visit her house when we were done. So that was our next destination. I drove behind Lori's car, and followed her to her and Roberto's mother's house. As soon as we got there the door opened, and we met her. What a sweet lady. She was so nice. Then we found out that Franco and Anna, who are close family friends of Roberto's, were also there to meet us. Their 19 year old son Gianni is currently working as a sous chef for Roberto at Galileo, and he arranged for his parents to meet us there as well. So we sat around Roberto's mother's kitchen table, drinking grappa, coffee and chatting about politics. We didn't see any of Torino, which was our plan for this day, but we didn't care. This was far better. Franco spoke a bit of English, so we had to do our best in Italian. I'd be willing to bet that we got about 80% of the conversation, which isn't bad.

We were there for about two hours or so, and the discussion turned to the fact that we did want to see a bit of Torino before we went to the soccer game that night. So Franco and Anna said that they would take us there. I don't think they were planning to do that - they just decided they'd be happy to help us out in that regard. But first they had to stop by their house, so we followed them there. As they pulled into the driveway, a littel black dog ran after them, barking excitedly. We got out of the car and met Neralina (little black, or "Blackie"). Anna told as that Nerilina misses Gianni, and the we should tell him that when we see him again. Then as we got out of the car we met Anna's mother, who is Gianni's grandmother. We went into the house and Franco gave us a tour of his wine cellar, with his own home made wine. And then their younger daughter comes in, Gianni's younger sister. All told, we met Gianni's parents, his grandmother, his sister, and his dog. And Franco gave us a magnum sized bottle of home made Barbera, Anna gave us some preserves and tomato sauce, and Gianni's grandmother sent us greetings back to Gianni. Wow! It was great!

Time to go to Torino. Franco and Anna get back into their and we get back into our rental and follow them. Traffic was a little heavy, but it was about 5:00 pm, so I figured it must've been rush hour. I'd expect heavier traffic at home. Finally, off to the right, I can see the "Mole" above some apartment buildings so I know we're close. We got into the downtown area, and tried to find a place to park. Well, that didn't quite work out. We drove around in vain trying to find somewhere, anywhere, to park. So they pulled over, we pulled in behind them, and they told us we' park illegally near the Piazza Castello. We did. When we got out of the car, Franco volunteered to wait by the cars in case the police came by while Anna gave us a quick tour of the city. Keep in mind that we NEVER met these people before. I was amazed at how incredibly nice they were. Anna took us down the Via Roma, through the various galleria in town, to the Piazza Carlo Felice, to the Via XX Settembre, etc. We saw a lot in about an hour and a half, and realized that we HAD to go back again. I wish we had had more time for Torino, but not at the expense of spending time with Roberto's family and friends.

After we toured around Torino, we walked back to the cars. Of course, not a single cop showed up - they only do that when you're NOT looking for them. We got back into our cars, and followed Franco and Anna to Lo Stadio Delle Alpi, where the game was taking place that night. It took a while, but once we arrived, we pulled over to the side, and chatted with Franco and Anna again for about 10 minutes. They told us that next time we visit, we should stay with them rather than a hotel. They told us they had plenty of room, and it would be good to have friends from America stay with them rather than in hotels. It's amazing how friendly they were. We told them that if they ever made it to DC that we had lots of room as well, but that they'd have to put up with two dogs and five cats.

After all that the Juvenuts v Deportivo game was almost anti-climatic. Actually, it was pretty dreadful match. The Juventus supporters near us called it "un disastro." This was the second leg for the round, and Deportivo had won the first leg in Spain by a score of 1-0. That meant Juventus had to win 1-0 to force extra time of penalty kicks. As it was, Deportivo scored early in the first half. Since away goals are weighted more than home goals, Juventus couldn't time the game by scoring 2. That would be a 2-2 draw, but Deportivo would've won because of scoring one of their goals at Juve's home stadium. So at that point Juve would've had to score 3 goals to go to the next round. You could tell they didn't have it in them, and as it was the first goal was the only score of the match. Juventus loooked terrible. Of course, Roberto and his family would be happy at that. They're Torino supporters, and as such they hate the "other" team from Torino, Juventus.

We left with about 10 minutes left to play so we could beat the traffic, then I drove the two hours or so back to Santa Margherita Ligure. Unfortunately, when we got near Genova the autostrada was actually closed for construction, so we had to exit, and drive a bit through Genova. Rather than get right back on, I thought that I could figure out how to get to S. Margherita from there (I had done it the other day, but it was light outside). We didn't get back to the hotel until nearly 2:00 am. We slept well that night.

On Monday, we drove to the very western regions of Liguria, on our way to visit Dolceacqua (literally, Sweet Water in Italian). Dolceacqua is near the French border, and in fact we got off at the last exit on the Autostrada, at Ventimiglia, before we headed north from there to reach Dolceacqua.

It's a beautiful little town, that hasn't changed since the Middle Ages, and walking around the "old town" feels like stepping onto a movie sound stage. When we arrived, we parked a few hundred meters north of the center of town, and walked towards it. We wanted to call Roberto's sister, so we ducked into a bar to see if they had a phone, but they only had one that used a card, so we were out of luck. Before we went into the bar though, a man who was using a Nikon D100 saw my camera and asked me if I knew how to zoom in on pictures when you viewed them on the LCD - I didn't, but I tried to help anyway. He was a very nice man, from Canada, and we chatted a bit about cameras, travelling in Europe, and what it was like to drive around the area of the continent we were staying in - he and his wife in Eastern France, and Jan and I in northwestern Italy.

So we toured all over Dolceacqua, which is drop dead beautiful. Before we toured around though we walked by a "bar" (those of you who've been to Italy know that it's more than just a place that serves drinks) and we were planning to go inside to call to Roberto's sister to confirm meeting her the next day. As we did this beautiful collie started barking, and we thought it was us. The dog's owner told it to settle down, in Italian, so we thought that the owner was Italian. I went in, asked about the phone, but the owner told me that we needed a card to use it, and we didn't have one - incidentally, this was all because our T-Mobile phones didn't connect properly to the European GSM 900 system.

We came back outside, and the collie's owner started telling us, in English, how sorry she was that the dog was barking when we went inside, but that it wasn't barking at us but was barking at a "motorcycle" which the dog hated. She had no Italian accent, and in fact sounded really American to us. I was about to ask her how she learned English so well, but then she told us she was from Chicago originally, and that she moved to Italy. When I asked her how an American from Chicago ended up living in Dolceacqua, she told us it was an "accident." Not such a bad one, if you ask me. :) There was an older Italian man sharing the table with her, and we started talking about how cold it was - way colder than normal, both agreed, and Jan and I said something along the lines of "typical, every time we go somewhere, the weather is always worse than usual."

Then, of course, it started to rain.

Fortunately, Dolceacqua is a town that is mostly covered. It's as if it was cut out of a cave, and the buildings were put inside it. So we went into town and just wandered around, amazed that anyone lives in a place that looks like a movie set. It was really awesome. The Chicagoan and Italian we met earlier told us about a good pizzeria in town, so we had lunch there. I can't remember the name of the place, but what I'll do is list the names of all the restaurants we ate in every day and how the food was. Be patient. :)

After lunch we drove to Pigna, Buggio and Castel Vittorio, all medieval hill towns a bit north of Dolceacqua, and all very pretty in their own right. The folks who recommended the place where we ate lunch also recommended visiting Apricale and Perinaldo, so I was looking at the map and said to Jan, "hey, let's go the other way out of Castel Vittorio, there's another road that goes through a town named Bajardo, and that way we won't have to backtrack."

Well, that was kind of a mistake. Turns out that the road between CV and Bajardo was more or less a single-laned goat track, and there were parts of it that had snow and ice. Not what we expected. It took us about 30 minutes to drive the 15 or so kilometers between the two towns. But we were glad when we arrived. Bajardo had a ruin of a very ancient Romanesque church on its highest hilltop, and there were signs indicating that before the Christians, the site was a holy place for Druids. Very cool.

After that it was too dark for any more sightseeing, so we started the long drive back to the autostrada. On the way though we stopped at a restaurant that was recommended to us by Massimo, who's a waiter at Galileo. It's called Da Matteo, and it's in Varazze. We went in and after we sat down asked the waiter if he knew Massimo, or if anyone at the restaurant did. The owner/manager, who's name is Michele, did, and said that Massimo used to work there as a waiter. That was pretty cool. BTW, the food was excellent, and there were two guys playing some jazz. One played flute and alto sax, and the other was the singer/guitar player. They had CDs for drums, keyboards and bass. They were both very good, and the music they were playing was excellent. When Brubeck's "Take Five" came on, I thought no way, but the guy sounded a lot like Paul Desmond when he played. Very good indeed.

When we left, we got Michele to write a note to Massimo which we'll give to him when we go to Galileo again.

After that, we tried to get home, but the autostrada was actually closed at the Verazze exit, and we couldn't get on. We were going to go onto the SS1, aka the Via Aurelia, which was a parking lot. Then I looked up and noticed traffic was moving on the autostrada, so I turned around, got back on, and managed to get us home relatively quickly after that.

It was a very long but very fun day.

OK, I think I left off with Saturday, which we spent in Genova.

On Sunday, we drove to Portofino, which is only about five kilometers from Santa Margherita Ligure. It is absolutely beautiful, and quite picturesque. In fact, I took at least 70-80 pictures there. We really enjoyed walking around the old town, at sea level, then we decided to head up to the Chiesa San Giorgio, which is a church that houses a reliquary for the remains of Saint George. Pretty good Italian site here.

The church is beautiful, but it's the view of Portofino that is really nice, and it also has a very nice cemetery. We were walking around it, and for the first time in our trip to that point I heard American accented English. There was a group of Americans walking around being led on a tour of the town and the cemetery by an Italian man who spoke English very well, but had an Italian accent. I looked at him and had to do a double-take. He looked EXACTLY like Silvio Berlusconi, the president of Italy. I said as much to Jan. She was off taking pictures herself so didn't notice him. Oh well, I said that there was no way it was him.

A bit above the church there's a place called Castello Brown, a Medieval castle that is no open to tourists. The entrance fee was something like 3.50 Euros,,so I bought a couple. When I did, the person taking tickets told me, in Italian, "Il Presidente è qui." "Berusconi?" I asked and she said yes. We walked in and there were about three or four body guards walking around. They checked us out, and must've decided we were no threat so they let us pass. They were wearing blue uniforms that looked sort of military, but had no rank insignia nor writing on them, and all of them had little earphones jammed into their ears.

We walked around a bit and saw a couple of men nearby, wearing civilian clothes. One of them checked us out pretty thoroughly, and the other ignored us. I think the one who checked us out was a personal bodyguard for the other, who I think was one of Berluscono's secretaries. We looked out over the sides of the castello, into Portofino, for an even better view, and I said to Jan, in Italian, how beautiful it was. The gentleman was wasn't not the body guard asked me if I wanted him to take our picture with the background behind us. So of course I said yes. We had our picture taken in Portofino by one of the people in the president of Italy's cabinet. Pretty cool. We've both lived in the DC area for decades, and neither of us have ever had such a close brush with our own president. We had to go to another country to have such an encounter.

The rest of that day was pretty much spent back in S Margherita Ligure.

OK, finally back online after Saturday.

So many things to catch up on, so I might as well do it one day at a time.

On Saturday morning, we woke up to a downpour. I was thinking that maybe we should start finding pairs of the local animals and start building an ark, just to be on the safe side. :)

So Jan very practically decided that we should drive to Genova and see the Aquarium (l'acquario). What a great idea. The place was fantastic. According to the guide books, it is the largest aquarium in Europe (but also, according the the guidebooks, Barcelona says the same thing about its aquarium). We even learned a few things, like the Italian word for shark (lo squalo). The best part was that since it is off season, the place was pretty empty even in bad weather.

Not only was it raining that day, it was also cold. We thought about walking around Genova to see as much as we could, but decided driving back to Santa Margherita Ligure would be a better idea. So that's precicely what we did. We took the long way round, on the Via Aurelia instead of the Autostrada, which came in handy last night (I'll get to that later).

Let's see. We got back to the hotel, and after that we decided to go out for a few pre-dinner drinks. We found a place called "La Vaca Loca," which is Spanish for either "The Crazy Cow" or "Mad Cow." I prefer the former to the latter. In Italian, I guess it would be "La Mucca Pazza." It was a fun place. We had a couple of drinks (Jan with her Prosecco, and me with a Fernet-Branca). We were the only Americans in the place, and the other patrons were all locals. In fact, thinking about it, we haven't seen any other Americans at all except for Sunday (which I'll also get to momentarily).

After drinks we went to a very nice restaurant called Trattoria dei Pescatori (trattoria of the fisherman). It was quite nice, and also very inexpensive. We will go back again.

That's about it for Saturday. Oh, and the place we went to Friday night was recommended to us by the concierge at the hotel (what is the Italian word for concierge anyway?). It was called Caffè del Porto. Also very nice, and a great staff. All the places we've eaten in seem to be fascinated that any Americans are here at all in "the winter."

Jan just came downstairs (I'm on the hotel's Internet terminal) so we're going to go have some breakfast. I'm also finally getting used to this Italian keyboard. It took me forever to figure out where the apostrophe key is, but now that I found it I'm (see?) using it like a champ.

So, a quick breakfast, then we're going to try to find a dry-cleaner so I can get the clothes I bought on Friday worked on (shirts pressed, and trousers hemmed). It's only about 8:50 or so, so the dry cleaners aren't open yet.

Oh, and today we're heading to Torino to meet Bebo's (Roberto Donna) sister Lori. That's going to be a LOT of fun.

I'll catch up on Sunday, Monday and today when we get back tonight. I have to admit I thought blogging was kind of pretensious, but now that I'm doing it myself, I've found that it's a lot of fun. :)