Up the Adriatic & over the Alps (and back again)
Trip Start
Feb 10, 2008
1
33
45
Trip End
May 13, 2009
Salzburg, Austrian Alps, Austria
Monday, October 13, 2008
By a remarkable coincidence he is there visiting his family, so I´m invited over for lunch, then Antonio and his brother show me the town, we have a beer made on the premises at a local pub, eat, and by then it's late so I stay the night.
You will know nothing about this (neither did I) but the city is famous in Italy for the Disfida di Barletta (Challenge of Barletta) in 1503. The Spanish and the French were fighting for control of the area, the Spanish captured a number of French knights, and as was the custom at the time, they took them out to dinner (what a choice - you either died in battle, or were captured and taken to dinner). During the dinner the Spanish were boasting about the local knights who were helping them fight the French, and one of the French knights made an insult, and the upshot was that a tournament on horseback was held between 13 Italian and 13 French knights. The Italian knights won the battle, and the French then left the area.
It is also famous for the Colossus of Barletta, a huge bronze statue, which a legend says washed up on a shore near Ravenna, after a Venetian ship sank returning from the sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade, and eventually ended up here.
I work my way up the coast to Rimini, stopping along the way at the beautiful small city of Ascoli Piceno in the mountains behind the Adriatic for a few hours.
I take a few days to get myself ready for my next long trip, then head north from Rimini along the autostrada, following the coast to the very top of the Adriatic Sea until I reach the town of Caorle. Ok, none of you have probably heard of it, and neither had I until March this year when I met a young Italian guy on a cod-fishing boat trip off the Lofoten islands in northern Norway above the Arctic Circle, and he was from Caorle.
Such is the way I travel. Anyway, I have no idea what it's like, and when I arrive I find it's a beach resort. Most of the hotels are closed as the summer season is over but I find one open on the seafront and book in there. I arrive at night, so go out and have dinner in one of the seafood restaurants in the old town (sardines in saor - raw sardines & onions pickled in vinegar and spices, and broeto, a local dish of mixed seafood braised slowly in a rich sauce so that it's extremely tender, with polenta), then repair back to my room and watch a bit of tv.
Most Italian tv is pretty awful, and even the national broadcaster RAI has a couple of channels which compete with the private stations (nearly all owned by companies controlled by the current Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi) - they show ads, have quiz shows, lotteries, etc. The program I watch however is on RAI 3, I think, which is more like our ABC. Two young actors from Naples are being interviewed - they are the stars of a film called Gomorra (as in Sodom & Gomorrah), a play on the name of the Camorra, the organised crime society of Naples.
One is a bricklayer, married to a wife who is 16 years old and they have a new baby - he left school in year 3 of secondary school and he earns 30 euros a day (about 700 a month, roughly $1,300 Australian dollars). I imagine he would not be untypical of a sizeable section of society in Naples. The other works in a fruit & vegetable shop with his father.
Why am I telling you this? I don't know - possibly to give you a more realistic view of the lot of many people in Italy. Anyhow, the film was nominated at the Cannes Film Festival and for the first time in their life these young men have visited another country. They were both very modest, humorous, didn't act like they were celebrities, but were happy they had made some money for their families and been able to use some of their talents.
Next morning is beautiful and I go for a stroll to the old town. I pass 4 men playing cards at a table outside a bar in the sunshine, each with a glass of wine in front of him it's 11am. I know there's a world banking crisis and it's causing people to review their lifestyles, pull in their belt, etc. These men are probably not even aware there is a world banking crisis, and if there is, they're not likely to let that change their life.
A little later that morning I walk past the main church, and there is a wedding on. The bride & groom are in the piazza with their family and friends, and as they and the wedding party wend their through the narrow streets and small piazzas towards the venue for their wedding lunch people sitting at restaurants and bars along the way spontaneously clap.
I get back to where my car is (illegally) parked just in time to see a female parking officer in the vicinity. She looks along the line of cars ready and waiting to be booked, then climbs up the steps to the lungomare (beach promenade) and takes a stroll in the sunshine instead. Isn't that a wonderful attitude - why do something unpleasant on a sunny morning (even if it's your job), enjoy the last of the summer.
This makes me think about my own lunch and I have a simple light lunch of finely chopped raw orata (a local fish), placed on some thinly sliced orange and with a few splodges of a sorbet of berries), and a grilled eel (small, beautifully cooked, not fatty at all), and a glass of Tocai, a reasonably full-bodied local white wine. A number of garden pots with herbs define the perimeter of the outdoor eating area, and the waitresses come and snip the herbs for the various dishes as they need them.
In the afternoon I head down to the eastern beach to have what is probably going to be my last swim for the year, then I lie down and read. I'm reading It's a Long Way Down, by Nick Hornby - I am completely absorbed and am in a world of my own reading a farcical comedy about 4 would-be suicidal people who meet on the rooftop of a building on New Year's Eve as they were about to jump off. It's quite surreal when the reverie is broken - I'm lying virtually alone on a huge empty beach, roughly 200 metres wide and several kilometers long, with just the odd person or couple within sight. Behind me there is the beach boulevard lined with brightly coloured hotels, mostly closed, but which less than a month ago were jam-packed with holiday-makers.
Caorle is surrounded by lagoons and wetlands and was originally a settlement of fishermen. They built Casoni (tall A-shaped buildings made of local cane) along the shores and on islands in the lagoon, and used them as shelters, as well as sheds for nets and fishing tools. After my last swim for the year I went down to the lagoon for a walk along a track running alongside some casoni, which have now been turned into holiday houses and look for all the world like huts in the Pacific islands.
Ernest Hemingway often used to be a guest of a local baron and spend some periods of time in the lagoon, and it was the inspiration for one of his short stories, Beyond the river, among the trees.
I set off in the late afternoon and not much more than an hour later I have gone from the absolutely flat countryside of the Veneto region, full of lagoons and marshes, to Tarvisio in the Julian Alps, only a few kilometers from Austria and Slovenia.
Next morning, a Sunday, I have breakfast at the Bar Commercio - a caffe macchiato, a cream & sour cherry brioche, and a glass of ribolla, a slightly sweet young wine - it's cloudy and has probably been drawn off before this year's wine has finished fermenting.
I feel good, so I decide to climb Mt Mangart (2678 metres) on the border of Italy and Slovenia that day. But not before lunch. A restaurant which makes good local food, al Montone (Montone is mutton) has been recommended to me in a nearby town, so I take myself there, and find it's booked out - it's Sunday morning and there's a large party celebrating a christening. The owner is very apologetic but says I can sit out in the covered outdoor eating area (a bit chilly) but I happily agree (there's some heat from the huge barbecue area) and sit out there as lonely as a shag on a rock:).
I have a great meal (in more ways than one):
Prosciutto crudo of goose breast (like oily silk, so tender it almost melted in my mouth)
3 large ravioli of a local slightly bitter green (a bit like silverbeet) with a sauce of melted local Montasio cheese
A coil of sausage about 45cms long with grilled polenta (deep yellow and coarse, completely different to the pale fine polenta of the neighbouring Veneto region)
A half litre of local red wine, and I am given a glass of grappa infused with wild strawberries on the house
You are going to wonder whether I am still going to climb Mt Mangart after this (normally I trek on an empty stomach). What do you think the answer is (you should know me by now) - I park my car less than 30 minutes later at the beginning of the track and start walking (sometime after 3pm).
The track winds through the forest and is extremely steep (more than the Staircase spur on Mt Bogong, for those of you who know it). I plod manfully on, my stomach overloaded with goose breast, ravioli, sausage, wine, bread, etc, and my legs feel like lead. I feel like throwing in the towel but my mountaineering self-respect keeps me going and I decide I will just try to make a refuge below the summit. I finally make it above the tree line and reach a slope of loose rock and scree. I keep climbing and lose the path and end up below an impassable wall of rock with a thin cascade of water running down. It's too late in the day now to try and find the track for the refuge and make it up and back again before it gets dark, so I decide to turn back.
If I could drill through the rock I would be only several hundred metres from Slovenia, and if had been able to climb above the wall of rock, I would have been able to see Mt Triglav, the highest mountain in Slovenia (only about 30-40 kms away as the crow flies), which I tried to climb almost exactly a year ago (almost).
By the time I get back to Tarvisio I have digested lunch and I notice a special truffle and mushroom menu at the Italia Hotel, so I can't resist going in for dinner. There was a cheese fondue with egg yolk and truffle which looked compelling but I just couldn't face eating such heavy food, so I had tagliatelle with butter and truffle (shaved by the waitress right in front of me - smelled fantastic), then a dessert of baked dough balls stuffed with plum, in a cinnamon sauce. A glass of local sweet white wine and a glass of grappa finished me off and I slept like a log.
My next crazy scheme is to go to Salzburg, so I briefly dip into Slovenia, then drive into Austria and completely across the alps from south to north (about 200kms), and the first thing I do on arrival in Salzburg is have a coffee with whipped cream on top, and a hazelnut pastry and a sweet cheese pastry.
Salzburg of course is most famous for being the city of Mozart and for the setting for parts of the film the Sound of Music. Its old town is one of the best-preserved baroque cities in Europe and it has a massive fortress looming over it. I was only there for a couple of days but managed to fit in a visit to the Hohensalzburg castle, the Cathedral, Mozart's house, the Residenz Palace (the home of the Prince-Archbishop), and a concert of Beethoven and Mozart music (concerto for sextet) in the Marble Room at the Mirabelle palace. I'm not generally a huge fan of Beethoven but I really enjoyed the pieces played.
I stay at a cheap youth hostel called YOHO, and eat at a stube, one day eating noodles and cheese baked in a pan, and another a huge wiener schnitzel, both very gut-filling, and drink dunkelweiss beer (literally dark-white, it's a dark wheat beer).
About 4 in the afternoon of the 2nd day I head south again towards Italy, and take a secondary road through the mountains, from Zell to Lienz. The road is extremely steep and windy and there is plenty of snow on the mountains already. It goes over a high pass which is only open during certain hours and I just make it through at 6.30pm (last entry is at 6.45pm) - I can understand why as at night ice would have formed on the road making it really dangerous, and snow would very probably have fallen. It's a fantastic drive and I see only a couple of other cars during the whole trip, arriving back in Italy late that night.
