Good bye, platinum, and Tuscany
Trip Start
Sep 15, 2007
1
18
23
Trip End
Oct 08, 2007
Pomarance, Italy
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
(actually pretty early), and go to the small village we were recommended to see
(Tellaro), it's already nearly noon and we have to move on. Plus I wake up with
a stuffed nose and feeling rather under the weather; we decide another two
hours in the water might seriously spoil the rest of our vacation. So, good
bye, ring. Maybe on our ten year anniversary we'll come back here and find you.
Or maybe you'll be scavenged by the local treasure hunters.
Travelling by car you find things you wouldn't see
otherwise. For instance, trying to get to Tellaro via GPS we find a small
village called Montemarcello, perched on top of a hill overlooking the ocean.
The village is virtually drenched in sunlight and seems about as Italian as you
can get; still, when we park and get out of the car the first thing we hear is
Russian speech coming from a fenced-in house.
Anyway, once again the pictures will speak for themselves.
I'll just say this is the kind of place to live at if you want to write a book.
Or paint. Or do any kind of art. Italy lends itself to art like a pillow lends
itself to the head. Later on, as we drive through Tuscany, I get that
impression even more strongly - I could live here. Not that I ever will,
probably, or until retirement... but I could live here.
The other thought that gradually comes up is the inability
to reconcile this Italy with the one I remember from 1990. I suppose that's
very obvious - back then we didn't have money; what we spend on one night's
dinner now was a third of our entire savings back then - but still, you
remember something back from your childhood, you come back to it years later,
and it's the same but different. Know what I mean?
After Montemarcello we go to visit Tellaro, another small
village perched on a hillside overlooking the sea. Again, narrow streets, tall,
white and ochre houses, and a picturesque sea. As we try to find the way among
the maze of streets toward the sea, a bald old man smoking a curved pipe, who
looks remarkably like I always imagined Sherlok Holmes to look, walked past us,
and gestured silently for us to follow. We look at each other, and follow.
The old man disappears behind a corner of a building, and
when we round the corner he's standing at a vista, leaning on the old iron
railings, gazing out onto the sea. We join him, and snap some pictures. Sherlok
disengages from the view, and motions for us to follow him. Once again, we
follow.
Sherlok leads us from one vista to another, never saying a
word. We finally find him on an embankment by the huge rocks that make up the
beach of this place. He's sitting with his back against a railing, still
smoking his pipe, still looking out to the great blue horizon. We walk past him
toward a closer vista, and when we turn back to look he's strolling down the
sidewalk in the other direction, still puffing on his pipe.
We go to lunch. For some reason in Italy it seems impossible
to have a quick lunch. The concept of quick service doesn't seem to exist here
- the waitress gets to you when she gets to you, and until then you're just
going to have to wait. So it takes us an hour and a half to eat, then we rush
off toward Pisa. (We decide we'll drive to Tuscany where we have the night's
hotel through Pisa, so we can take some pictures next to the tower.)
Pisa is remarkably unremarkable. If you think about it, it's
a tourist attraction founded on the road kill-like concept of a gradually
falling building. I.E. "come look at an accident waiting to happen." Anyway,
nearly every tourist there (including us) takes the same photo - they stand a
couple hundred feet ahead of the tower, and position their hands such that it
looks they're propping it up. The photo is admittedly cool, but I was reluctant
(although in the end agreed to do it) to take the exact same pictures.
Anyway, we don't go into any of the buildings (we've had
enough buildings for about a year, I think), just walk around a bit on the
outside then head back to the car. The place we're staying is situated in a
tiny village off the tiny town of Pomarance, and we almost don't get into it.
It's nearly 7:30pm by the time we turn off onto the last road, and dark. The
GPS shows we still have 15 minutes to go, when we see a car coming towards us.
The driver rolls down his window and gestures for us to do the same. We do. He asks if we're going to Guado al
Sole (the place we're staying.) We say yes. He says he'd been waiting for us to
show up (apparently we said we'd arrive at 6) and that he'd given up and was
going home. Apparently he was the last member of the staff at the hotel, and 5
minutes later there would've been nobody there to unlock the place for us.
And that's it, really. We got there, the restaurant was
closed, so we just watched Сибирски 81; Цирюльни 82;
(Barber of Siberia - if you haven't seen it, make sure to), and ate the fruit
we'd bought back in Tellaro.
