A taste of Italia (Italy, Part I)

The best part about adventures is that you never know where they’ll take you. If you’re open-minded and up for whatever comes along then that ‘whatever’ could be just about anything.

After a sleepless night I had my earliest morning for one of my adventures yet. 4:00am on Sunday – that is, 4:00am after a middle-of-the-night adjustment for daylight savings – saw me up and out of bed eating breakfast and dressing for the long voyage ahead. The taxi was waiting at 4:30am, and it dropped me at Place de la Porte Maillot on the west side of Paris. The metro doesn’t run that early on a Sunday. From Porte Maillot I took the shuttle bus to the budget airport at Beauvais, an hour north of Paris. Despite all my worrying and panicking, my carefully packed bag fit the weight and size requirements perfectly. The Ryanair jet was on the runway. I boarded my flight to Italy and we took off.

Flying around Europe is just like doing the same in Australia. Paris to Milano is about the same as Melbourne to Sydney, or maybe the reverse, since Paris is north of Milano. Because I was on a European Schengen flight there was no need for passports, no big boarding gates, nothing notable about the whole experience. Boring, but easy. Just like Melbourne to Sydney.

My friend Alessandra and her father met me at the airport. Alessandra was the reason I was here – she and our German friend Silvio study in Milan, and our friend Andrea lives in Florence, so after Alessandra’s suggestion I had decided to take my autumn holidays and come to Italy to visit my friends and see the country. Conveniently enough, Alessandra’s hometown is a place called Bergamo, 45 minutes north of Milan, where the Ryanair airport is located. We threw my bag in the back of the car and headed for breakfast.

They took me to a popular café in Bergamo, where Alessandra’s father ordered cappuccinos and something called a ‘cornetto a la crema’ for all of us. Turned out to be like a croissant filled with lemon cream which was really really nice, if a bit messy to eat. After our ‘typical’ Sunday breakfast we jumped in the car, out of the rain, and headed to Alessandra’s to drop off my bag. Alessandra tried to book a restaurant for lunch and to keep me amused she gave me one of her sister’s books to read in Italian, pausing every so often to correct my pronunciation. Thanks to my polyglotism I didn’t have too much trouble, and once Alessandra had told me the key pronunciation differences between Italian and the other Romance language it was just a matter of practise – and, of course, comprehension!

Alessandra’s dad dropped us at the funicolare, or funicular railway, which runs between the raised mediaeval city of Bergamo, known as the Città Alta, and the surrounding expansion of the modern city. A couple of minutes later we were standing on wet cobbled streets in what was clearly a very old place. We walked towards what was once the centre of the old city, where we visited the archaeological dig site of an old Roman city underneath the main cathedral, the cathedral itself and one other nearby. Then we headed off to a traditional Alpine lunch at a Bergamo restaurant.

I knew that being vegetarian on exchange would be losing a lot of the experience. What I didn’t entirely anticipate were the problems in finding something vegetarian to eat in Europe. The concept is almost foreign to them. While Alessandra asserts that Australians eat a LOT of meat, and while in the context of something like a barbeque it may be true that we consume a lot of it in one meal, Europeans feel the need to have a small amount of meat in almost every dish. So Caelli tried the traditional polenta dishes of the Alps, of which Bergamo sits at the foot, as well as the local mushrooms (which weren’t so yummy). Once we were thoroughly full, dry and foot-rested, we ventured out into the rain again. With the weather so inclement, we headed through the old town for a café famous for its creation of a particular type of ice-cream. Shaking off our umbrellas, we sat down at a table where we ordered Italian hot chocolates and HUGE servings of the tiramisu that the waiter had recommended. We spent another 45 minutes at the café trying to digest the tiramisu. Lesson #1 of Italy: Food is everything. EVERYTHING. Eating is like a sport here, so bring a good appetite.

Me and Alessandra outside the porta

As we headed back down from the Città Alta Alessandra showed me one of the huge old gates, or portas, that allowed access through the huge wall that surrounded the old city.  I’ve noticed a pattern with these walls.  Lesson #1 of Europe: We’re paranoid that everyone is going to attack us, so let’s build the biggest damn wall you can imagine to keep them out.  Sometimes, it even works.  We walked through part of the new city as we went from the bus stop to Ale’s house.  Alessandra’s grandmother was there when we got back, and guess what the first thing we were offered was on entering the door – yes, food!  We were both grateful for the warming tea, though we were both so full I couldn’t touch the pastries, lovely though they looked.  Another interesting cultural note about Italy: informality in meals is not tolerated.  Though it was only tea and nibbles, all five of us were seated around the table with placemats, cloth napkins and everything in its own little silver teapot or holding dish.  Food and food traditions are like a second religion here.

Alessandra’s sister Giulia arrived home, and I chatted with both the girls as we played with the cat Macchiolino downstairs.  Unlike her parents, and like her sister, Giulia also speaks very good English and was pleased to find that I spoke Japanese, since she’s a Japanophile and speaks it too.  Just before 6pm Alessandra grabbed our stuff and her dad dropped us at the station to take the train to Alessandra’s place in Milan for the night.  We didn’t get very far, though – the trains were on strike and her dad, Peter, ended up driving us the 45 minutes to Milano.  Still full from the day, Alessandra and I vetoed dinner in favour of water and introducing Ale to the 1995 BBC Pride and Prejudice before collapsing into bed at some very early hour.

Il Duomo, Milano

Monday started at a comparatively late hour. After packing our bags for later that day and eating a simple breakfast of tea and toast with strawberry jam made by her nonna, we set out for our tour of Milano.  First stop – Il Duomo.  Churches here in Italy are just insane.  In France they felt the need to build large, elegant religious buildings.  In Italy they felt the need to build large, elegant, elaborate religious buildings and then decorate them extensively.  The paintings on the inside of the roof were my favourite, and we were both creeped out by the tradition of placing beatified former bishops of Milano on display while they continue their path towards canonisation (it’s worth noting that the Diocese of Milano has produced two Popes in the past few hundred years).  When I’m 500 years dead, I sincerely hope to be buried and long since rotted away, not wrapped in gold cloth to disguise my decaying and put on display for tourists.

Teatra La Scala, Milano

We visited a couple more important places in Milano, like La Scala opera house, and Alessandra taught me one of the Milan traditions.  Placing your heel on the balls of the mosaic bull in the floor of La Galeria and spinning three times is said to bring good luck, so I stuck my gummy foot out for the honour and twirled around three times on the worn-in mosaic.  She also tells me that it’s considered good luck to touch the nose of the bronze statues of wild boars in Firenze…another one to add to my list!

We had lunch at a little bistro in Milano, where I discovered good Italian pizza the way the locals eat it, the story of the Margherita pizza and one or two other Italian specialties.  Afterwards Alessandra and I walked towards the castle for a little while before turning back and taking the tram home to pick up our bags for the metro ride to the central station.  We bought tickets and boarded the 5:25pm train for a little town called Desenzano del Garda, where Alessandra’s friend Fede would pick us up and take us to a little house on Lago di Garda, Italy’s biggest lake.

Chef Silvio (and his helper Alessandra)

It was dark for most of the train trip, so I couldn’t see much of the scenery.  We were greeted at Desenzano by a slew of purple and orange balloons and two bottles of Italian beer courtesy of Silvio, our German friend, a sure sign that he hasn’t changed! We piled into the car and drove ‘home’, where Silvio proceeded to cook a pasta dinner for Bei-Shi, Federica, Alessandra and I, followed by several games of Murder, Celebrity Heads and music videos on MTV, before we all collapsed into bed thoroughly tired.