Tuscany, Radicofani, Lake Bolsena

When we left Florence in '03 we wandered south towards Rome, but took a couple of days to get there. Sadly, a roll of film disappeared later, which included the shots we took in Siena and district.

This was one of those pleasant phases of the trip with unexpected pleasures: tiny villages that seemed unchanged from the 15th century until you saw a Fiat in the barn; stopping for lunch in a lonely roadside tavern/cafe where the family were not serving because they were having their own lunch out the back - so we were given seats of honour and a nice lunch with them in the back room; another roadside lunch in a cafe with an outdoor seating area shaded by the leaves of an ancient single grape vine with a trunk 6" thick; and then Radicofani.


I had never heard of the place, not that that is special - just shows how little European history I know. We were driving down a narrow, sealed, single lane road with no particular destination when this hill in the far distance appeared with a thin post on it's summit. Initially it looked like just another radio tower. But as we got closer it became a turret.


When we saw a side lane heading that way, we decided to follow it.


The closer we came, the more imposing it became. Then we found a tourist information centre at the base and decided to get some info. There was no-one there; just a pile of guidebooks in German. After waiting a while I went into the store-room and found, after some investigation, boxes of guidebooks in six other languages and eventually some in English. As I emerged from the back-room I found customers waiting for information. It took a little while to establish the appropriate languages - but I acted as unpaid guidebook distibutor for some Germans, Swedes and Americans. I still wonder if they thought my Strine was an odd version of Italian dialect. But they left happy.


The text picture gives a better version of the history - click on it for a larger view.


The only local I found was at the gate, several hundred metres further up the road, when I paid my €3 to go in. It seems to be a volunteer operation - and in all fairness they've done a great job converting the interior of the main tower into a museum. A great way to have a rest at each level between steep flights of steps.


Those steps are worth climbing just for the incredible view of Tuscany from the top.

The white structure in the bottom centre is a cemetery with wall vaults, we saw a few more like that in Tuscany. The next picture is the village below the castle, as the Lord of the district would have seen it, and the next view is how the villagers would have seen the castle .



For those interested, I found an excellent web-site with more detail at http://www.castellitoscani.com/radicofani.htm

We stayed the night before in a 4* in Buonconvento; it was a hot, sticky night in early May and that was how we discovered that there is an Italian law which forbids the use of air-conditioning until a specific day - which had not yet arrived. Wonderful; the same logic that used to decree back in my RAAF days that we changed from lightweight summer uniforms to winter serge on a particular day that was always the hottest day in Autumn.



After Radicofani we continued until we found this 3* hotel outside Montefiascone above the shores of Lake Bolsena. I don't remember the name, but it's where the road curves away from the lake before you enter the town. It was typically old, but the bed was OK and the view was fabulous. We sat here on the balcony through the setting sun. Never to be forgotten.

On arrival we negotiated a price for a hot breakfast for my diet; the host, Tony, was a really nice guy, but seemed apprehensive - he had no English, I had no Italian. After some recent hotel hassles in Florence and Buonconvento it was really nice to get good friendly service so later that night I wrote a "thank you" note on one of their post-cards. As I gave it to him you could see from the look on his face that he thought it was a complaint.

Next morning he couldn't do enough for us at breakfast - a beautiful omelette, and after some fun with dictionaries my wife ended up ordering a bread roll with butter and strawberry jam - and received an enormous plate of fresh strawberries. It turned out that he had spent hours translating my note, and he was unused to getting written thanks.

I've written some fairly strong epistles to hotel managers during our travels - but the nice ones can be just as effective; both are best written on the night.

Cheers, Alan

Florence

We spent four nights in Florence, two in 2003 and two more in 2006. I found it a fascinating place. As I mentioned earlier we didn't go to the galleries - we meant to the first time and found that we had arrived on a holiday when everything was closed - and the second time I preferred wandering around the Old City and soaking up the atmosphere and looking at the incredible buildings in the piazzas.


Back in 2003 we arrived late in the afternoon without a booking, ate in a trattoria, then walked around looking for accommodation. It was an interesting lesson in "what not to do" in the top tourist cities of Italy. Pre-booking was essential. The prices being quoted looked like blowing our budget for the week. It was also our first experience of that odd European custom of hotels with reception several floors above the ground floor, sometimes without lifts/elevators. We finally found a hotel that charged only €75 - basic, old, lumpy bed and no lift, no breakfast, and then discovered parking was another €21. When we left and I went to pick up the car we found it had to be pushed out of it's position in the garage by hand, parked so close to the cars beside it that both mirrors had to be pushed back. Three cars had to be moved first. No wasted space in that garage.

On cars - I would love to have one of these to go to the shops in. Later we came across the "Smart Car"; these made those look big.


On the second visit we had learnt our lesson and pre-booked at a B&B http://www.gigliobianco.it/en-index.htm. The people were lovely, so was the room, breakfast and atmosphere. However, while I'm giving them a plug note that parking isn't free and you need to turn up in daylight to get the nearby carpark or go for a moderately long walk to the alternative, and the room is up the equivalent of two storeys of stairs. No problem if you don't have difficulties with stairs - but a bit of a struggle for Lorraine.

Of course, despite the directions we couldn't find the place - so eventually we parked outside this gate and went to exactly the same Trattoria "Sabatino" that we found the first time around. The food was cheap and delicious (you ordered each item separately - meat, veges etc so I was able to tailor the meal exactly to my needs), the atmosphere friendly and the waiter marked the B&B on our map with directions.


The B&B location was perfect, in the Old City, so we spent the day just wandering.



This street is actually one of the bridges, full of shops for the tourists - and patrolled by these special "Tourist Police". There were lots of them in attendance, all as alert and active as these. Luckily, we had no need for their services. The second river view shows the covered bridge in the distance.




The one museum I did go into was a very small one displaying models built following the sketches and sometimes detailed instructions of Leonardo da Vinci. What a mind, so far ahead of his time.


This had to be one of the best seafood meals I had on the trip; I know it was in Florence but I'm darned if I can remember the restaurant - just the meal.


As we left in '06, we stopped to have a picnic lunch and soak up the scenery just before we left the hills to descend to the Po delta en-route to Venice. Then this scene unfolded, as though we had stepped back in time to past centuries. A magic moment.

Cheers, Alan

Liguria to Pisa

Travel Dates May 2006 and April -May 2003



I should clarify the itinerary difference between our two world trips. In '03, we stayed a little longer in Europe and saw more of Italy and Greece. On the second trip we tended to move fairly swiftly across Northern Italy, re-visiting Florence and Venice, but mainly intent on spending more time in the old "Iron Curtain" countries that we were unable to see first time around.



So the next few posts will be based mainly on the '03 trip, until we reach Venice again and return to '06. Unfortunately, I've discovered that pics gradually degrade on CD, so quality has dropped on some. We lost a lot with a hard disc crash last year, sadly, so I had to re-copy from old CDs to my new computer.

We spent our first night out of Menton in a roadside hotel outside Chiavari that only wished for a star - the 1* on the sign of the "Monte e Mari" had actually been blacked out. But the bed was OK, and the shower worked. Like many places in the district the construction "walked" down the hillside - so we walked up three full flights of stairs to get to our room one floor above reception. Despite the lack of stars - the view was incredible in all directions.

Chiavari was an interesting town to wander through, but the main reason it stays in my memory was the dinner at a Greek Restaurant in the centre of town. I should have known better than to eat Greek in Liguria - but we live and learn. It was the worst moussaka I ever ate, washed down by the worst wine I ever drank. I was just too tired to walk out. But it set a benchmark to base others on - every restaurant was a step up from there:-)

The next day we wandered by car slowly via the Cinque Terre and Pisa to Florence. The Cinque Terre area was beautiful and we did a little walking - but it was extremely crowded even though we were there in early Spring. In Pisa I was fascinated by the buildings - not just the leaning tower. It was my first experience of the ornate decoration, mainly in marble, of mediaeval Italian buildings.

I didn't feel energetic enough to climb the Tower, so spent most of my time inside the cathedral. This was also my first experience of the true opulence of Roman Catholic Cathedrals in Italy. The combined effect of the paintings, murals, statues, frescos, precious metals and jewels congregated in that building was just breath-taking to a country boy from a modest background.



We saw St Peters later, and many other Cathedrals in other countries, but Pisa was truly stunning as a first experience.




Later, on the road to Florence as I stopped for diesel I noticed this deserted ruin on top of a nearby hill. It was almost impossible to wander around Europe without seeing structures like this in the background. The locals probably never even notice them; to us they were a constant reminder of an ancient past.

That was also the first time we filled the Clio on that trip. We consistently got 20km/L which is about 48mpg (US). Incredible little car. Having used them twice now, I'm very impressed by both the Eurodrive system and the Renault Clio turbo diesel (no - I don't get a commission - I wish:-)

Cheers, Alan

Musing on Museums.

I must admit to being a bit of a Philistine when it comes to art and all that. I appreciate beauty, but I am an old-fashioned conservative. I prefer pictures I can understand. I do tend to think that the art world is a tightly closed mutual admiration society and I am bemused by much modern art; I’m one of those who suspects I could achieve similar results by leaving a canvas on the floor of the chicken coop for a month and then on the garage floor for another month.

Like most people my likes and dislikes are complex, but untrained except by reading, traveling and experiencing. As an artist I’m a good engineer – hopeless. But I’m a good appreciator.

Even I don’t know what will impress me, or astound me or make me gasp at it’s beauty or it’s magnificence as I wander on my journeys – whether around the globe or around the corner. One of the magical moments on the Ring of Kerry was to turn a corner and find we were literally driving straight towards the foot of a rainbow – we kept expecting a leprechaun to appear on a pot of gold – then the sun went behind a cloud. Another time, three years earlier we got lost on backroads between Pompeii and Bari, stopped to check a sign - and saw these wildflowers beside the road. Beauty and art are all around us when you take the time to notice it.





I do tend to agree with Picasso when he said “Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters. We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things. Pablo Picasso”

That’s not to say that I don’t also wander through, and enjoy, museums and galleries. But when I do, I tend to look at the paintings others don’t, or look at the way they built the museum instead of what’s in it. So, I didn’t go to a single city with the intent of seeing it’s museum – yet I’ve probably been inside more than many scholars.

Of course, as a youth I spent hours in the Sydney and Melbourne Museums, mainly in the archeological and science sections. Somehow, over the past four years, I’ve stumbled across these, to name just some:

The Getty, in California
The Prado, Madrid
Vienna Museum
The Louvre
Musee D’Orsay
The British Museum
The Ashmolean, Oxford

Those are accepted as some of the great museums of the world. Yet, while I enjoyed them, the ones that stick in my memory were mainly smaller, often generally unknown – or even tiny. Or not even Museums. Because sometimes an ancient place, simply by continuing to exist becomes both a work of art and it’s own museum to me. Places like these:

The Far East Museum in the manor at Zbraslav, south of Prague. And the 16th and 17th European paintings/murals on the walls and ceilings there.
The small Greek Museum by the amphitheatre at Epidaurus.
Versailles.
The mosaic floor of the Cathedral restored from the mud at Aquileia.
The buildings of Pisa, Florence and Venice. To me those buildings were so much more impressive than the art they contained.
The Aya Sofia and the mosaics in it.
The Alhambra and Generalife.
Pompeii.
The Forum.
The Acropolis.
Radicofani.
The Vatican.
Tiny town museums, like the one in northern Vermont all about Ethan Allen, or the one in Prescott Canada about the boom years as a port – before the Seaway killed it.


The list goes on and on: the town of Trier, the Budapest Citadel Museum, Nordlingen; it’s part of why I travel. You can send a Rembrandt to Sydney for display – but you can’t send the Lion Gate from Mycenae, or sit alone above those mighty ruins for an hour or two and ponder on the past. Or do the same at Auschwitz.

Maybe that will explain why we passed through Florence without attending a single gallery - and the only museum I went to there was the exhibition of models of DaVinci's great inventions.
Yeah - call me a philistine.

Cheers, Alan

The journey starts here: Brisbane to Singapore

Menton Memories

Travel Dates April 2003

Before we move on to Pisa and Florence, it seems an appropriate moment for another flashback to 2003, our first time in Menton. We spent a week there, in a flat we rented via the net.


We didn't expect a lot from the flat at €26 per night. The most important thing was that the bed was comfy - but we learnt a little about different perceptions. The washing machine was brand new - with a broken spin cycle; we met our neighbour below when we hung our dripping laundry unknowingly over his front door - providing very damp entry and a rather cool reception.


The ad said "easy parking out the front". This is a two-way street - Riviera-style - and that was our official parking spot:-) We met that guy in the photo at 7 am the first morning when he banged on the door to ask us to shift the car - because a huge crane wanted to go up the road.



So I moved the car about a km and walked back.

But the picture was taken later that day when the crane was coming back down the hill - in reverse. This time he neglected to ask - so we watched this quite convinced that we were going to need the insurance on our second day in the car. I shouldn't have worried; the driver got that machine down that narrow road without scraping anything; something many of the local drivers didn't achieve, judging by the state of the body panels.


We also discovered that the French and Italians of this district seem to prefer building vertically instead of horizontally. These are views from the windows of the flat.

The third one, from just over the border in Italy, gives a new dimension to "come up and see me sometime".

We spent a couple of days just wandering around Menton, sipping in cafes, eating in beachfront restaurants or cosy pizzerias, but mostly we used it as a base for day trips.


Driving could be interesting, particularly on the Italian side.

On one drive we went up the river from Nice and spent some time seeing the small hilltop villages.



I'd see one perched on a hill in the distance, then try and find out how to get to it, then drive slowly up the twisty narrow roads and celebrate with a glass of wine in the local tavern on arrival.


Towards the end of the week we drove inland to Sospel - the picture with the bridge - and then cut across into Italy through the narrow hilly country, then had a pasta lunch in a tiny village cafe and lazily drove back via San Remo and the coast.



That's the way we prefer - no particular place to go, different sights, different people.

This was also our first experience of "closed beaches"; private beaches with associated restaurants or hotels; not something I'd like to see in Australia. The European high-density towns were also a surprise to us; we see flats like this in our inner cities like Sydney and Melbourne, but not in country towns and cities.



On the way back, this guy caught our eye. He was the most patient surfer I've ever seen (and the only one I saw in Europe). He waited, and waited, and waited. We must have been there for thirty minutes having a glass of wine by the roadside when - success!



Cheers, Alan