Taranstales
December 2, 2018
Sitting in a sun-filled room and looking out over green fields rolling away towards small craggy mountains nearly hidden in the distant mist, and in the shadow of war-torn Monte Cassino with its rebuilt abbey, it would be lovely to be able to say “Yep, we know where we are going to spend the rest of our lives”. Alas, the only thing I can say quite categorically is that we have found plenty of places where we most definitely will not be replanting our roots!
Italy has proven to be a fascinating melange of conflicting qualities. We found there beauty both natural and classical contrasting with a lot of manmade ugliness, mainly the result of some terrible post-war concrete architecture; we breathed sweet fresh air in every corner that had not been scarred by the works of modern man and then were apalled by streets strewn with detritus from a society unable to care for itself; and to make matters worse, everywhere there seemed to be a blatant disregard for rules and regulations put in place to make sense of the chaos that prevails. What Italy is not is a never-ending realm filled only with romantic relics from its glorious past, a haven of peace and beauty unscarred by the carelessness of modern man. And then there is the small matter of the weather. I’m sorry to say but those who have become acclimatised to Southern California’s never-ending sunshine over many years don’t take kindly to the idea of facing what Northern Italy is capable of dishing out three or four months of the year. Personally I am still sitting on the fence over that one, believing I am still a tough Canadian but occasionally starting to have doubts!
During the course of the past eleven weeks Celine and I have been on a quest. We arrived in Italy each with our own idealised memories of past visits, expecting we would easily fall in love with some part of the country that we had both previously held in such high esteem. It might have been simpler if we both had exactly the same idea of the perfect place and the need for compromise had never entered the equation. But we are your normal married couple with the inevitable differences of opinion, who don’t always share the same likes and dislikes, and have a few different priorities in life.
Our saga started with three days in Rome, where our transcontinental flight from Los Angeles disgorged us back in September; we needed some easy time to get over the usual jet-lag and acclimatise ourselves back to the Italian lifestyle we both remembered. We stayed in Trastevere within walking distance of most of the main tourist sites, bought slices of very delicious pizza at a ‘hole-in-the-wall’ pizzeria, ate some very good rabbit stew at a trattoria around the corner from our digs and tested out the local transport system to seek out the second largest Basilica in town. Suitably into the travelling mode again, we took a couple of weeks on a side trip to Portugal and Spain (see “SFTF Pt3 – Ten days with International Living”) before getting on with the main project, searching for our future, which we believed might well involve la bella italia.
Doing the tourist thing wasn’t really the intention of our trip but there were a few places we both wanted to revisit to remind ourselves what we had seen and liked so much in the past. So we gave ourselves three days each in Venice, Bologna and Florence. Venice and Florence were much more crowded than I remembered and had ever so slightly lost their charm as a result. In Venice our gondola trip was, at times, almost like being in a waterborne traffic jam; and we only just caught our vaporetto back to the carpark before a record high tide brought the city to a standstill. Bologna was new to me and I was suitably impressed by the renaissance architecture and its arcades that enabled us to walk nearly everywhere without an umbrella – it was a bit damp during our visit. And Florence disappointed us in one important regard as we had to miss out on the wonderful Uffizi Museum after we discovered too late that it is sometimes now necessary to make reservations for tickets 48 hours in advance.
The tourist theme continued albeit unintentionally. We were travelling long distances and needed to break the journeys into easy stages, stopping sometimes for just one or two nights. The simplest plan was to look for towns that had something of interest, a focal point for the time we would be there, and often it was somewhere we had read about or that had been recommended by someone or other. In Italy this was almost inevitably a town or city of historical significance, rarely a town that was simply a very pleasant place to live. Thus we visited the red brick town of Urbino with its unusually large student population, the ancient troglodyte city of Metara which is said to be the third oldest continuously occupied city in the western world, Campobasso high in the hills of Campania with a marvellous museum about the Sammites, the wonderful baroque city of Lecce, the capital of Puglia and the Firenze of the south, Cassino where we visited the site of one of the bloodiest battles of WWll, and finally San Stefano di Sessanio, a tiny earthquake shattered village high in the foothills of the mountains that are the heart of Parco Nazionale del Gran Sasso.
In this way Italy, or at least the Italy we have seen on this trip and in the past, is its own worst enemy, for there is history of some sort everywhere, whether it be ancient Greek or Roman, medieval, baroque or renaissance, and where there isn’t history as we know it there is some of the most beautiful natural history to be found in all of Europe. Thus we seemed to spend days and days, tramping the streets of cities and towns, and even small villages, looking at archaeological sites, churches, museums, and castles, but rarely gaining true insights about the quality of life these places could offer us as potential new residents. We stayed in some beautiful homes, most notably an antique penthouse with marvellous views over the valley in the Umbrian town of Todi, and a wonderfully renovated farm house at the top of a hill in the little village of Moricone. I believe that our only mistake on this trip was to never stay anywhere really long enough to become even peripherally involved in the local community or get a real feel for the neighborhood.
When we did get a view of Italian life in the raw, such as our 48 hour sojourn in Naples, the drive through the modern city of Pompeii on our way to the Amalfi coast, the visit to the coastal town of San Cataldo some twenty miles east of Lecce or simply driving between our various destinations, the experience was not always entirely gratifying. For starters parts of southern Italy seem to have a serious problem with refuse. You see it everywhere, either dumped in black bags in laybys, thrown into the bushes alongside an otherwise attractive country road, or casually thrown out of car windows. Which all seems to be totally at odds with an apparently serious attempt by the authorities to have a well organised system of recycling. We found three or more different coloured containers, each destined to collect clearly defined streams of recyclables, in practically every place we stayed. Recycling bins were visible in every town and village, and collection schedules were posted for all to see. Yet every time we questioned locals about this rather anomalous situation, we received roughly the same message, namely that the local population really can’t be bothered and doesn’t have the will to clean up it’s own backyard.
Sadly the reality turns out to be . . . 
rather different!!
And then of course there is the ‘excitement’ generated by meeting other road users. Much has already been said about the exuberance of Italian drivers, in blogs and travel guides of all ilks. I have driven in many parts of the world and have rarely been fazed by what has come my way. In my several jaunts into Italy it has usually been my passengers who have raised the “Oh my God” alarm bells as I have deftly avoided another heart-stopping situation. But once away from the wheel, I do have to admit to have now become quite neurotic about the sound of a scooter vaguely approaching in my direction at full throttle even when I am in a supposedly pedestrianised area, to totally distrust the actions of all motor vehicles anywhere near pedestrian crossings, and to being unnecessarily nervous when it comes to crossing a road without the sanctity provided by well signed semafori. Well okay, this sickness did reach the acute stage after 48 hours in Naples which has to have the worst case of scooter-mania we have seen in all of Italy, but it is something that has been a grumbling pain every time I have hit the shore of this bel paese. And, sadly, the ‘mad’ driving has a serious effect on Celine for whom, like so many US citizens, driving anywhere in Europe creates unwarranted fears of not being able to cope, even though she is a perfectly competent driver on her home turf.
Last but not least in this litany of complaints about what is still in my opinion an otherwise very desirable place to live . . .what on earth has happened to the Italian flair for architectural style and a desire for beauty as well as function that started in Roman times if not before, and continued for many hundreds of years possibly into the later years of the industrial revolution, or even the 1950’s? Practically without exception, every city and village that we visited and of which we enjoyed the centro storico within, had its outskirts filled with ugly concrete buildings, both residential and industrial, designed and built without the slightest pretence of artistic merit or architectural innovation. And to make matters worse, particularly in southern Italy, it seemed that the majority of these structures were in a sad state of disrepair with rusted crumbling balconies, weather stained walls in dire need of plenty of TLC and unkempt yards and gardens. [To be fair the post-war period of ugly architecture is not a phenomenom unique to Italy, just such a surprise in this country!]
There are almost certainly many reasons, some may say excuses, for these ‘unfortunate’ aspects of Italy, but it is with regret that I have to admit they do little to entice Celine, and myself, to make the move that we had been hoping might be the result of this year’s Italian saga. Countering these blights, there is of course the prospect of living in a country with hundreds of square kilometres of very beautiful countryside, a country whose people have proven to be nothing if not friendly and who have made us feel welcome everywhere we have gone, even including the most touristy areas. As is so often the case in a foreign country, a little of the local lingo has gone a long way in making us welcome and particularly Celine’s command of Italian has opened up many a fascinating conversation for us. We have spent time with ex-patriots who have had nothing but good things to say about their lives there, that is apart from the perennial complaints about Italian bureaucracy which most seem to have been able to endure, even if not enjoy! And yet we have also talked with several Italians, and ex-pats married to Italians, who can’t wait to get away from that self-same bureaucracy and from a country that they find to be increasingly unliveable; not exactly sure whether or not this is a case of rose-tinted spectacles versus the grass being greener on the other side of the fence.
The most important lesson that I believe to have come out of this really quite wonderful trip, in spite of its unhappy conclusion, is the need for us to decide exactly what makes the ideal place for us to live. So many times Celine and I would find ourselves waxing lyrical about a hilltop village, or a view of the countryside, or sometimes even the old centre of a historic town or city, until one or other or both of us would ruefully admit that the place we are admiring would never make us both as happy as we hope to be in a new home. We both know the wishes of the other but neither of us is very good at accepting the need for compromise, if indeed compromise is the answer.
Something for me to go away and think about and, hopefully, write about sometime.
