Sickness and Travel Planning

I have an unpleasant cold, which means as the birds sing in the 60-degree sunshine in the courtyard, I'm sitting with the space heater cranked up in the office, one blanket on my lap and the other around my shoulders.  One of the downsides to living communally is that when you're sick and would rather not see anyone, ever, you still run the risk of meeting people if you actually want to leave your bedroom for the office, the kitchen, or the bar (where Gabry has, unsuccessfully this time, been petitioning me to try his "grappa cure").  Luckily IDAF and will walk around ensconced in my blanket like a human burrito.  I have not, however, yet reached the stage of being willing to exit the bedroom in my too-large lilac chenille bathrobe, which I think initially belonged to Jen but which I swapped for a kimono-style robe my mom had given me.  That bathrobe is the color of my childhood bedroom but it's warm as hell.

However I have used this time to plan out some of our final major travels!  The first is at the end of March, when I will head to Boston for RSA and Sean heads to Nantes for a conference of his own; I'd known about RSA for a long time (and in fact the second half of my shoptalk was basically that paper) but Sean just found out about the Nantes thing and so had to withdraw from the Sicily AAR trip.  We kind of resigned ourselves to not going to Sicily, especially because of the expense and difficulty of getting an automatic rental there.  We changed our minds, though, particularly after our friends Heather and Larry came to Rome from Siracusa, where they're living this semester.  Now we're going to go down and spend three nights in Siracusa in April--no rental car, no grand scheme to "do" Sicily, just three days to chill out and explore one part of the island with people who know it well.  There are plenty of ruins and an archaeological museum, which Woody and Leslie recently saw and raved about.

The trip I just booked is for May: we're going first to Budapest, where we can stay with Danny and Kim for a few nights, and then we'll take the train/bus a couple of hours to Vienna, spend three nights there (including our seventh wedding anniversary!) then fly back to Rome.  There are lots of Titians and other relevant artists in those museums, so I'm very excited.

Apart from that, the other travel we're hoping to do is within Italy itself.  Carla and a friend went up to Turin, rented a car, and drove through the Barolo and Barbaresco vine territories, which looked incredibly beautiful; she brought back lots of bottles, several of which I've been lucky enough to sample.  We'd like to do that, maybe in June with friends from the Academy.  We've also got to go back to Naples, and at some point try to go see some of the places where Sean's family came from (though as he recently discovered, his paternal grandmother's family, the Brignoli, were from Piedmonte and not Campania like he'd thought).  In other words, to edit what I said in my last post, by the time I leave here I'll have been in every region of Italy except Valle d'Aosta, Liguria, and Calabria (forgot that one!)

Molise

At some point during our three-day road trip through Molise (and a bit of Puglia), I told Sean that I felt like I owed my great-grandparents an apology, since I had always sort of assumed, without ever really thinking about it consciously, that the place they had left to come to the US must have been pretty drab and dull.  Bonefro itself might not be anything out of the ordinary for a tiny hill town, but the larger region of Molise was really quite stunning.  We basically drove for three days, practically eating up the scenery outside the windows with a spoon--and we were lucky to have incredibly beautiful weather to do it in.

Leaving Rome on Thursday, we headed east and stopped at Subiaco, site of St. Benedict's first monastery.  Nathan had raved about how beautiful the site was, perched on a mountain in a heavily wooded region, with water flowing invisibly but audibly below.  Unfortunately, we got there right at 12:30, when the monastery closed for the 3-hour afternoon break.  What's our least favorite Italian word? Chiuso (closed)! Even the path up to the "Sacro Speco", the cave where the saint lived, was roped off.  So we breathed in some fresh air and hopped back in the car.

Three hours of driving took us straight across the calf of the Italian boot, through some incredibly beautiful snow-capped mountain ranges (the park of 'Majella' is especially awesome) to lush green fields and then finally, Pescara and a view of the Adriatic. We drove south to Termoli, where we had a B&B.  In the morning we headed to Bonefro, thirty miles or so inland, and that's when the landscape was at its most exceptional.  People don't really visit Molise; it's the Italian region with the lowest population density, and one of only three regions without a single UNESCO monument.  There's not much in the way of attractions in the cities, but the landscape is just incredible.  We agreed that we were really lucky to be able to come and explore it, which we never would have done if I hadn't wanted to visit Bonefro.

To my delight, there was indeed a Bar Di Marzo in the main square of the town.  The bartender wasn't particularly surprised when I said that was my name; he first asked if we were Canadian (not just in Bonefro but in all of Molise, most emigrants must have gone to Canada, because everyone thought we were Canadians, except for the one guy in Lucera who thought we were English!) and then pointed to a fat older man standing next to us and said "that's his last name too."  I met 1/24 of the people remaining in town with my last name, haha.

After Bonefro, we went to Campobasso, which turned out to be much more crowded and anxiety-producing than we'd thought.  Still, on our way out of town, we stopped at a gas station with an attached bistro that turned out to be yet another extension of hipster culture, even to the furthest reaches of Italy!  Mason jars for glasses and outdoor seating built out of reclaimed pallets, etc.  But the food was delicious, which is what matters.  From there we headed toward Lucera, technically in the neighboring region of Puglia, which for 75 years, 1225-1300, was home to a Saracen Muslim colony displaced from Sicily by Frederick II.  There was a cool-looking castle on the mountain top, but once again chiuso!  I took a brief nap in the car while Sean poked around, we stopped into the two medieval churches (one of which was built on the site of the destroyed mosque), grabbed a coffee in a very friendly bar, and set out again.

It was about 5pm, and we decided to head for Vieste, on the tip of the Gargano peninsula, which forms the spur of Italy's boot.  The GPS said it would take two hours, and there were lots of well-recommended restaurants in Vieste, so we figured why not?  The drive looked like a lovely coastal itinerary and we hoped some light would hold out for us to see the sea.  Well, what GPS doesn't really tell you is that you're heading UP into the motherfucking wilderness, where you will enjoy two hours of completely unlit hairpin mountain roads, while somewhere far, far, FAR below you lies the silent Adriatic.  Holy shitballs, that was nerve-wracking!  On the plus side, we saw three foxes.  Then, we arrive in Vieste, which is a summer resort town, and find it so packed with people at 7pm on a Friday that parking seems impossible.  We find a (free) spot and head off for our recommended restaurants, only to find that they, and every other eatery we pass, are closed, apparently for the season.  It was amazing--so many people walking up and down in the streets, and apparently none of them were planning to dine out!  In the end we ate at La Teresina, the only open place in town, which turned out to be just fine, with a surprisingly friendly owner/waiter, and then got back in the car to head north around the peninsula back to Termoli.   The roads in this direction weren't hairpin for as long as they were on the other side, for which we were grateful, but it was ironic that here we were, in a place of stunning natural beauty, according to the pictures, which we couldn't even see!  Not our most well-thought-out plan, but an adventure.

Yesterday, we drove from Termoli back toward Rome, taking a different southern route and stopping in Montecassino to see the reconstructed Benedictine abbey.  Coming down the mountain, we practically stumbled onto a really great restaurant with the un-Italian name of Ethan's--thanks, we learned, to the father having emigrated to the States and then having returned to Italy.  Later I discovered it's the top-ranked restaurant in the small city, and with good reason, as their food was not only incredible but inventive, which is usually anathema to Italian chefs.  Our appetizer was this savory "millefoglie" involving layers of thinly-sliced beef, crema di bufala, thin apple slices, and a basil reduction.  I had pappardellini with sage and butter, one of my favorite non-tomato dishes, and god was it good. They even brought us homemade cookes with our coffee, which definitely won Sean over.

Our very last stop before the Academy was Parco Leonardo, the shopping mall by the Fiumicino airport, to hit the Auchan, a megastore that makes most American Walmarts look tiny.  I actually found it anxiety-producing, a sign that I have grown to accept the tiny cramped Conads, Coops, and Docs that form my grocery world!  We picked up groceries, but we were actually there so Sean could get new pillows, since he's never slept comfortably on the Academy pillows.  Last night was the first attempt and so far, so good.

So with this trip, we only have a handful of Italian regions left to visit! Calabria and Piedmonte on our list, so by the end of the year I think we'll have visited all of them except for tiny Val d'Aosta in the north, Sicily to the south, and perhaps Liguria.