Last time, I had just finished sweating all over Florence and was headed to a dinner to consort with Communists. And now my thoughts on all that. Florence is one of the primary stops on the "Two Week Tuscan Holiday" trade route, so busloads and trainloads of tourists pour into the city for the day, clog it up, sweat all over it, and then disappear, to be rushed to the next stop on the itinerary. I've been thinking the traveling equivalent of Tread Lightly (the outdoor ethics program that among other things encourages you to pack-out your own poo when you camp) is to not travel in a Pullman coach with 43 fellow travelers, but if you decide to, don't all go to the same gelateria at the same time, but if you do, don't all stand around in front of the counter blocking it from the nice Italian woman; she probably goes there the same time every day and now thinks we're all obnoxious.
I can see now why there is such a love-hate feeling among Italians for us foreign visitors. We're a key part of their economy, but we really do get in the way. Most of the traveling I’ve done so far in Italy has been during the low-season so maybe it was jarring to find myself in a city during the high-season for the first time. And not just any city, but a city that was named, in one study in 2007, as the world's most desirable tourist destination. It’s considered the “Cradle of the Renaissance” and is perhaps the last preserved Renaissance city in the world, stuffed with important attractions, a World Heritage Site since 1982, the home to the Medici family, the birthplace or chosen home to Dante, da Vinci, Botticelli, Donatello, Gucci, Ferragamo, Cavalli, burial place of Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli, and home to the Ponte Vecchio. Even so, I don't know if I really liked Florence. Which makes the fact that I've spent all this time writing about it just a tad ironic and more than a little galling. I felt like I was supposed to be amazed and huzzah'ed and I tried hard to be but I came away feeling like the best I could muster was a resounding “m’eh”. I know, I know, I’m acting like a jaded, annoying, superior tourist, but to me Florence has the same sort of reputation as Paris or Venice - spoken about in breathless wonder, but those two cities knocked me out of my casual yet sturdy walking shoes from the first moment I saw them. But Florence? I can’t get excited by her. And as such, I’m eager to go back in the late fall and see it with the smaller crowds in cooler weather to give myself a second chance to get a first impression.
Back to my long-lost original theme: sometimes it feels like I’m on an extended vacation. And that’s because of nights like Saturday night, a regular Saturday night on the 2010 calendar, but choking on the feeling that I was in the middle of an extended getaway, not another weekend night. We got back to Bologna from Florence, breathed a sigh of relief in the cool night air and headed off to meet two of Valentina's friends from high school - Katerina and Elisabetta - for dinner.
The dinner was actually a Festa de l’Unità sponsored by the Partito Democratico which is a political party on the left in opposition to Berlusconi's government. Emilia-Romagna is the region at the heart of the Communist party and the Communists originally organized these parties, but since the Communists aren't in Parliament these days, their members usually support the PD, but since they are still Communists at heart, there are still lots of these traditional parties all through the summer. The festa is organized in different cities with cheap dinners, live music, midway games, dancing and such stuff to recruit new members, sway voters, build loyalty, etc. Since Valentina was back in town for the weekend and wanted to catch-up with her friends and Katerina is quite active politically, we ended up at this Communist Party party. I was practicing saying "Si, Comrade!" on the drive over and wondering what was in store for this capitalist pig.
The heat of the day had evaporated with the setting sun and in its place was a beautiful late-spring evening with soft light accented by the glowing neon from the various booths. There were flags and banners and posters for the PD everywhere and the sounds of several bands, kids playing and the buzz of voices mixed in the air. It was distracting and entertaining and pulled us in towards the smell of the dining tent, a huge covered area separated into three large sections. You sat in a section depending on what kind of food you wanted - pizza/panini in one, pasta and grilled meat in another and fish in the third, all of it regionally appropriate. We chose the meat section. The "restaurant" was staffed by volunteers and the waiters were all old men. We were a group of four with three women and myself and the women attracted a lot of attention from the waiters which was fine by me because it meant the service was fast and there was a little extra of each dish. We had handmade tortellini, one bowl served in ragu and one in a cream sauce, two platters of grilled meats - the pig is king in Romagna - with ribs, sausage, chops and chicken, and another platter of grilled steak with shaved Parmesan cheese and rucola with lemon. A cold bottle of lambrusco (sparkling red wine) washed it all down. After walking around for a bit and playing a few of the fair games (where Betta won a slinky) we found a tent with live music hosted by a local microbrewery where we drank our way through each of the different varieties and relaxed and talked our way into the early morning.
On Sunday, with no race to attend, I slept late and then Valentina and I took a couple bikes and road to nearby Cento to have breakfast and work-up a healthy appetite for the Sunday lunch to come. This was my longest ride in nine months, done without the aid of bike shorts (oh the horror, oh the pain) and in flip-flops. We probably did over 20k in total, passing and being passed along the way, folks on rugged utility bikes, roadies in full team kit, kids on BMX bikes, and even a fixie or two. This region is the heart of bicycling in Italy, is pancake flat, and on Sunday, the bike rules. Crowds of old men gather in all the piazzas, arriving by bike, to have a coffee and gossip about the latest regional news. Church-goers arrive on bike. Along our ride we road tarmac, cobblestones, gravel and dirt roads, along the shoulder of the road being buzzed by cars and scooters, in painted bike lanes and on separated cycle tracks. Single-file on busy streets and two-up on the quieter ones. We signaled turns and blew stop signs. I popped a wheelie off a curb. I saw three helmets out of a few hundred people on bikes. We imagined ourselves climbing the Gavia Pass over the one hill, a slight rise over a bridge, on the route. It was glorious. Although the after-effects, experienced a few hours later while sitting on the train, were much less than glorious.
Sunday lunch featured the last strawberries of the season, the first pesto of the season, zucchini flowers stuffed with prosciutto and buffala, melon and prosciutto, roasted eggplant, roasted potatoes, roasted chicken, more of those pork ribs, gelato, 30-year old grappa, and homemade wine (slightly fizzy with the subtle scent of burnt wood and the unmistakable flavor of gasoline). With loaded bellies we boarded the train to Ancona where I spent the next three hours watching thousands of Italians turning themselves horrific shades of red on the beach as we trundled by resort town after resort town along the Adriatic coast.
The World Cup starts on Friday!
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