Winter 2006

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Why Italy?

Naida Hobbs

After years of cruising the Gulf Islands in our sailboat, and several driving holidays around B.C. and Alberta, my partner Steve and I decided it was time to try an overseas adventure. We settled on Italy as our destination. “Why Italy?” folks would ask, and our reply was “the art, the wine, the coffee, the food!”

Not wanting to pre-plan the whole experience, we drew up a very loose itinerary based on our “must see” stops. I booked a hotel in Rome (www.TripAdvisor.com was a good source of information) to give us some sense of security upon arriving in a foreign country, but trusted our ability to find our way around after that. We stayed in Rome for four nights, walking and marvelling at the amazing sites. Then our real adventure began!

We intended to travel by train, and assumed that there would be printed schedules. Though some folks alluded to such a thing, none of the newsstands or bookstores that we were directed to knew what we were talking about. So we studied the schedule in the Rome train station, bought tickets at the easy-to-use, multi-lingual ticket machine, and were on our way. This is how we managed the entire trip—we would look at the schedule posted on the board, or consult the ticket machine, which, when given a destination and approximate time, would give us options of train type, stopovers and times.

We really wanted to get a feel of the place, and we didn’t have the luxury of a lot of time, so we kept moving pretty well constantly. Although it would have been nice to settle in one place for awhile, we knew that if we stopped for long we’d be wondering what was around the next corner.

Briefly, this was our general route: from Rome we went down the coast by train to Sorrento, by bus around the Sorrento Peninsula to Amalfi, took a train across the country to the Adriatic coast, then north along the coast to Venice, across the “top” to the Cinque Terre, and then down to Florence, where we rented a car and drove around Tuscany for five days. In all we had about four weeks, which certainly wasn’t long enough to the country justice!

Before we left, we had some ideas of what we wanted to see, either by reputation—of course you can’t miss Rome, Pompeii, Venice, Cinque Terre, Florence—or by research. Our interests led us to the amazing Venetian glass mosaics of Ravenna, the ancient hill town of Urbino, the castle and gardens at Caserta, the polenta in Bergamo, the Vespa museum in Pontedera, the incredible Il Giardino dei Tarocchi sculpture garden of Nike de Saint Phalle in Capalbio, and the Punta Falcone Park, a wild nature reserve with World War II ruins. We weren’t disappointed by any of it—it was all amazing!

And then there was so much that we happened on by chance. Like the Castello di Brolio, home of the Ricasoli family (of Chianti fame) since 1141. And driving in to a small coastal town that we had picked off the map because the shape of the land looked interesting, we came upon a harbour full of beautiful classic yachts. “Wait a minute,” Steve exclaimed, “this is a famous shipyard that restores boats.” We then noticed that we were, in fact at Monte Argentario, the land mass the shipyard is named for.

In preparation for our trip we had bought a CD Rom to learn Italian and had studied our translation book, but we found that we had very little to work with when we got there, and needed to carry the little book with us in case we really needed to say something. We had no difficulties, finding that a big smile, hand gestures and our few Italian words usually got us what we needed. In every case, our request for assistance was met with incredible generosity. More than once we had people walk us to where we wanted to go, some distance out of their way, then turn around and walk back to where they were going.

All in all, our trip was a resounding success. There was pretty much nothing we would change, from our decision to travel very light (the easier for getting on and off trains), to the route, to the degree of pre-planning. As for our reasons for chosing Italy for our first trip abroad—the wine was great, the coffee was always fabulous (even in train stations) the food was incredibly salty, the art was amazing, the history inspiring. Our biggest regret was that we couldn’t speak to the wonderful people that we met. It seemed rude to assume that they should speak English, and it surprised us to find people who did. We’re studying Italian now for our next trip!