On five weeks of Italy

One picture says more than a thousand words. I am currently for five weeks in Italy and have shot more than 1700 pictures. According to the saying that would mean I now have a serie of four novels over a thousand pages each. All in all it is high time to send some message out into the world.

Consider this post as a replacement for the standard ansicht from Italy. I made a selection of about 60 pictures and put them online at http://www.apms.nl/italycheers/index.html.


My adventures in highspeed:

So I am for two months with Chiara in Turin, here follows a digested selection of stories from a total of 1.700.000 words.

- Drinking cocktails on a busy piazza in the centre of Turin around midnight (because the temperature at that time finally allows me to wake up a bit).
- Questing for partially disappeared guardtowers from the 9th and 10th centuries that kept the region south of Turin safe from raids by Muslims from Switzerland (of all places…). Honest, I am telling no lies :) it is at least as exciting as it sounds (sometimes I feel like half an Indiana Jones in this place).
- Following a Roman canal carved from sheer bedrock, climbing through a cave to get to the mouth of the canal and go swimming in an ancient ruined Roman port (I did tell that I feel like Indiana Jones!).
- Priceless: while swimming in said port finding a rectangular carved piece of polished marble. I have no clue whether or not it actually is Roman, but as long as nobody proves me otherwise it is a good story.
- Trying hundreds of new cheeses and salamis, accompanied by ample amounts of aqua and better: vino. Something that I still don’t understand at all, but the deal currently is that I choose beer and ales (because Italians totally suck at making beer) and Chiara selects the wine. And cold beer is the best when you are high up in the hills of Tuscany in the heat.
- Protecting myself from mosquitoes with a killerinstinct, they are capable of stabbing me to death within half an hour (tally 28 bites).
- Cruising almost 5000 kilometers across Italian tollways. In a small blue Lancia equipped with a Telepass! That means indeed: avoiding the long trafficjams that stretch for miles filled with tourists waiting for the tollbooths! We have a private lane with priority :P
- Oh and about the heat, last week the thermometer measured in Tuscany about 38 degrees centigrade! In the shade around 14:30 ...
- Hiking in that heat over gravelroads in search for an Etruscan Necropolis dating back to the 7th century BC (and finding it of course!)
- Learning a new language, and no that’s not Italian, but its ancient predecessor Latin. I got permission for this by my very intellectual girlfriend who now has to translate a little longer between me and the Italian world around me. Still, I am currently capable of following the general sense of conversations… but that’s also about where it ends….
- This language deal does kind of mean that I had to promise that after Latin (and I am going pretty fast) I would start immediately with Italian. Looks like a fair deal to me, I mean, Latin grammar is essentially a very complicated version of Italian. We both kind of assume that as soon as I am done with Latin, Italian is going to be a so called cookie.
- Oh and a final word about the languagedeal... it also means that I had to commit myself to learning Harry Potter part 1 by heart. Chiara has bought the Philosopher’s Stone in Dutch and faithfully goes through it like a studybook. She expects me to read it out aloud for her, after which she repeats it. Dutch really seems to sound pretty weird for the average Italian. It’s not that I have an average girlfriend but it remains a weird language. For some strange reason it is not the gurgling G sound that proves the most difficult but the R. To return to the Philosopher’s Stone, I bought the same book in Latin. I am not yet capable of reading it (grammar in Latin is a tiny bit more complicated than Dutch) but I will soon go faithfully over it a second time.
- Flying twice back to NL because I got tickets for concerts of Leonard Cohen and Iron Maiden (I know, I know, the music styles are kind of different but that’s what happens when you have a broad taste like I do. To make it more complicated I bought here recently a cd with medieval churchmusic by Hildegard von Bingen).
- Returning back to Italy after Cohen and listening the entire concert back with good vino and a sky full of stars.
- Oh and after a barbeque in the middle of the night driving through the backroads of rural Italy in a car that’s running dry. There are sooooooo many fuelstations… but really, they are all closed at 2:30 in the night. And 24h-selfservice in Italy means a lot of self but very little service… most just don’t work.
- Falling Stars! (enough said)
- Trying to get WIFI access on an airport... at Amsterdam Schiphol: piece of cake, at Milan Malpensa: well, do we have a minute?
- At dark deciding that you really don’t feel like driving back over the highway but prefer backroads through forested hills.Yes it takes about three times as long and yes you see about four foxes and three boars. Other than that it is mostly dark, really dark, really incredibly dark, and what you now imagine as being dark multiply that by ten and you’ll have about the level of darkness we had (and yes exaggerating is an art).
- Jumping in the Mediterranean in Liguria and wondering who peed in the water. It’s about that warm. Oh, and the mountains run straight into the sea so taking two steps off the beach (which actually is little more than a collection of gravel) and the undersigned who is about two meters tall can no longer stand.
- Burning to kingdom come at said beach up to an extend that I was compared to Hiawatta skincolourwise.
- Searching antiquemarkets at Italian villages and finding out that we share the same taste in old junk.
- Italians love towers, towers with clocks and heavy bells. We love climbing towers, we are also clever, we are not going to climb such a tower at say, 11:55… but you’ll assume you’d be safe when you go up around 11:10. Unless you just happen to find that one single tower whose clock is running late. And in that single tower we arrived at the roof, about half a meter from the bells when it started to toll …
- Climbing a wall that hadn’t been restructured since the middle ages. Finding out that on the other side of that wall the hill makes a sheer drop of about ten meters.. Trying to keep your balance at said wall who is warning you “that it is actually too old to do this”. Still being stubborn enough to stay on top of that wall, risking life and limb to take that one single fantastic shot…. Which kind of disappoints you when you see the result… All for the sake of Art.
- To travel to Pisa to pick up Thijs from the airport and afterwards go into town with the masses to admire Piazza dei Miracoli. At said piazza ignoring the tower and searching for that one single windclock that is being ignored by all tourists simply because we think it’s cool and we know it must be there. Oh, and finally on aforementioned piazza entertaining yourself by taking pictures of tourists taking pictures of the Tower. People take up the weirdest poses to pretend they are pushing the tower over or (how original!) pushing it back.

So far my five weeks of Italy and the above short version doesn't do it justice.