Arrividerci, Italia

I first visited Italy in 2007, when I entered the country on foot through a mountain pass during a two-week trek around Mont Blanc. My second entry was by cable car, over the Alps near Courmayeur, during the same trek.  My third and fourth entries were by plane into Venice from England, and into Rome from Malta, also in 2007. In 2010 I did some walking in the Piedmont area with my runner mate, Giorgio. Last year, I lived in Florence for all of September, and I’m now near the end of a visit of two months, again using Florence as my base. The chances are good that I’ll return to Italy.

Since my return from Venice I’ve been winding up a big workload and squeezing in excursions and day trips where possible. Lucca was a fun place to spend a morning. It’s only an hour by train from Florence and has some interesting buildings and a lively centre, but I was attracted by the old city walls that are intact and form a sort of square. The walls were intended to defend the citizens of Lucca from their enemies, the Florentines, but the planners had the foresight to make them wide enough for recreational use. Today they are used by runners, walkers, cyclists and dog walkers. I ran twice around them and then walked down to a central piazza for breakfast.

Another day I took the train (and the bus back from) Prato, which is a big place (190,000 or so people) only 30 minutes from Florence by rail. There are two overseas universities (Monash from Melbourne and an American college) with campuses here. It was early afternoon and most of the shops were shut and very few people were about. It’s probably really bustling in the early evening. At the textile museum I saw an exhibition called “Vintage”, about how fashions and garments are recycled. There is an important museum of contemporary art that is undergoing redevelopment, so nothing from their permanent collection was on show. The conceptual art in the two current exhibitions showing in a temporary space did nothing for me, and I like conceptual art. I think it has to work on some level without needing to be explained, though, and these didn’t do that for me. The gallery is in a very bland location out by the highway, though the building itself will be impressive. Cities (like my hometown Albury) that have a cultural precinct are very fortunate. I doubt that many of the students based for a few months in Prato would bother to make the trek out to the suburbs to see this museum.

My main excursion was to Lake Como for three nights last week. I’ve heard a lot about this area and tried to visit it last year when friends Sue and Neil were there from Oz. It was grey and drizzly on Friday when my train pulled into Como from Milan, but then it cleared up and the next three days were beautifully sunny and warm. I stayed in Bellagio, which is halfway up the lake and on the tip of the promontory that separates the two lower arms of the lake. From here there is just one arm that extends north towards Switzerland. There were a lot of German speakers around, so I guess many of them were Swiss from around Zurich.

I was surprised by how many villages and towns there are along the lake. There is also a pretty extensive road system linking the towns. It would be fun to spend a couple of weeks walking here, so long as you could stay mainly off the roads. I got lost on some of the walks I took and ended up hugging some rock faces while cars whizzed by at my back. That got the adrenaline pumping!

One walk I took around Bellagio visited a number of “suburbs” (they have their own churches), accessed via steep cobbled paths. Lots of flower boxes were out, so it all looked gorgeous. I had dinner in Varenna one evening (I took the car ferry across) and breakfast on my last morning in Menaggio. The gardens of the Villa Melzi are worth a visit. Azaleas are out everywhere at the moment and look gorgeous.

On the Sunday I took the hydrofoil back to Como (past George Clooney’s villa at Laglio) because I wanted to take the funicular railway up to Brunate. The track is very steep and the views over the lake and the town are pretty awesome. I walked back to the lake on the path that winds mostly off-road down the mountainside, then had a gelato and made a quick visit to Como’s very beautiful Duomo before taking the slow ferry back to Bellagio. There was a half marathon held in Como earlier that morning but I hadn’t been able to get entry and wasn’t motivated enough to jump in and run it as a bandit as I did in Florence last month.

My friend Lisa from New York City (and upstate New York – I visited her in Woodstock last summer) has arrived in Florence. Yesterday we saw a Steven Soderbergh film, the psychological thriller Side Effects, at the Odeon and found the fabulous NapoLeone (in Piazza del Carmine), which instantly became my favourite restaurant in Florence. Earlier we had visited a craft fair in the Corsini Gardens, where I bought a necklace from a glass artist.

So much that is beautiful in Italy is to be found behind the beautiful big wooden doors that line the streets; beyond the high stone walls that contain private gardens, behind the painted wooden shutters, or further up the covered cobbled or stepped lanes that locals use to get from place to place. Italy is very compact, but there is a lot going on that is mostly out of sight of visitors like myself. Florence is so rich in architectural treasures it took me more than a month even to notice a church around the corner that has been dated to the year 910 or thereabouts. It’s a privilege to be able to call Florence home for any length of time. I'm very grateful to have had these two months.

Grazie mille.