Italia '07

Feb. 27th, 2007 03:48 pm
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[personal profile] millionreasons

19th – 23rd February 2007

Monday

I live across the tracks and I know what it’s like

Good god but I hate Ryan Air. I realise that Easyjet, BMI baby, Monarch et al are approaching the same level of evil, but RA is the Tesco, the McDonalds, the uber-shit of the poverty jet set. Evidence:

1)       Charging us £2 each to not book in any luggage

2)       Insisting that we arrive 2 hours before the flight leaves, but not opening the check-in desk until an hour and forty before the flight leaves

3)       Having one member of staff on the check in-desks, thus we queue for over an hour

4)       Never. Ever. Admitting. That. Anything. Is. Their. Fault. Ever – the long queues were Stansted’s blunder, apparently.

As with Argos, I keep swearing to never go back but their cheap(ish) prices pull me in. When the “value” flights started, one gave up meals and films and seat numbers for £50 or so off but now the little extras start to add up and make one wonder if it’s worth it. One gets the impression that if the plane crash landed on a desert island, you’d have to pay for a bottle of water.

Stansted is disgusting, there were 2 toilets out of 8 working (the rest were overflowing), the Stansted Express wouldn’t sell us return tickets using David’s gold card, and the security was just an arbitrary joke. Dave had his toiletries searched because his camera batteries were setting off the metal detectors, I wasn’t allowed to take 100 ml of water onto the plane, we said we didn’t have any mobile phones or ipods, but they were in our bag, nobody checked, and I saw plenty of people with more than one hand baggage or hand luggage bigger than the regulations. Since the liquid explosive attempt last summer, the restrictions on hand luggage have been relaxed 3 times, but everything is still appalling. I would have thought the long queuing/security time would really affect the duty free shops’ profits and they would be kicking up a fuss, but then again if you have to finish all your liquid before check in you have to buy more afterwards or face Ryan Air’s high prices or dehydration. The staff are horrendous too; I understand that they work long hours for low wages whilst dealing with drunk passengers, but they insist that everything is somebody else’s fault. “Hurry”, instructs the sour-faced gum-chewing ground-staff woman, as if we’d arrived 10 minutes before the plane left rather than 2 hours. Everyone on the plane bar us is Italian yet no-one speaks any language other than English and they announce this almost proudly. An air hostess’s reaction to bashing someone with a trolley is to accept their apology with a “Well yes, you moved forward as I was pushing the trolley”, as if her responsibility to look where she was going was diminished by her need to meet her targets on perfume-selling.

Oh yes I could not put my money where my mouth is and boycott the moneygrubbers (I imagine that they’ll charge people for not buying the duty fee in the future) and I guess until the Eurostar gets faster, my carbon footprint insists that I should only holiday in Paris or Brussels. Or Rhyll.

Touch down at Bari and get the last bus into the city, arriving at the train station sometime later. On Bari’s outskirts are French supermarket chains Carrefour and Auchan. I suspect that Starbucks and Pizza Hut haven’t taken hold as yet. Our hôtel seems to be on the wrong side of the tracks with the station cutting us off from the new town, the old town and the harbour beyond. We wander around a while practising “ho fatto una prenotazione” and trying to decipher the map that I printed off the internet whilst scooter riding men trying to help us, before we finally arrive at Residence Moderno which has a powercut. The man behind the desk who no parle inglese looks at my internet reservation in the dark before telling us that we’re in the wrong place and gesturing vaguely in a different direction. I’ve printed a map for the wrong hotel. Fortunately the reservation has the address and double fortunately the map I broke copyright and photocopied out of the Rough Guide has the road on it. So we go back around the train station and eventually the largest Moderno sign in the world shows us that we’ve found the right place: it has both lights and an English speaking man (who “thank[s] God for Ryan Air”) and a large room with a fridge, TV , a hairdryer and the loudest horn-blowing traffic jam outside which goes on until 2 a.m., but I’m too tired to care….


Tuesday

Rude Esperanto

….until we’re woken up by cappuccini, a bottle of orange and carrot juice and um, a cream horn. I think we’re paying €1 for the ingredients and €4 for the luxury of breakfasting in bed (in the absence of a dining room). Venture out through a palm-lined piazza through the new town with the usual shops: Nike, Vodaphone (it still costs us money to receive calls however: globalisation sucks for the majority), the Body Shop, the Woolwich (!) and the Lord Byron School of English (I wonder if the lessons involve orating Don Juan) through to the old town; a trad. medieval high-walled washing-covered medina-style area. We can smell, but not see, Pizzerias. Go into mini-caves selling cheese and wine, and biscuits by the bag. We wander under the wonder arch, into the Basilica de San Nicola (Santa Claus Church!) and down into the tomb/grotto which incongruously reminds me of an amusement in Blackpool where if you hit a target a mannequin will make an action. There is also a collection of crosses, 15th century frescos and pillars & arches similar to the ones in the Mezquita in Cordoba. Russian orthodox pilgrims used to travel here to see their patron saint’s church; this tailed off somewhat after 1917. All the notices in the old town are translated into English for a non-existent tourist population. This place could be good, could be a little undiscovered San Sebastian-syle seaside town if a little bit of effort were put in and the swastika/sickle/anarchist graffiti cleaned off all the buildings. We come out of the windy little streets onto the sweeping harbour (where cats are eating lunch); it’s a relief to be out in the open - the smart cars and mopeds on the wet slidey streets were starting to faze me.

 

We try to look for lunch but everything seems to be shut; Barese must live on coffee and cakes. Eventually, back where we started from, we go into Antico Caffè for a lunch of pasta al funghi and “local vegetal” which consists of puréed something and braised something, but it’s not un-tasty and definitely not expensive. One place that is open is the gelateria and so we go for giant choc ice creams with squirty cream and sit in the sunshiney Piazza Umberto before wandering back to the old town. We stop to phone our solicitor for the third time today – we’ve gone on holiday at exactly the wrong time in terms of flat buying – and we’re told that we’re about to exchange. Seems very incongruous to receive the news whilst sitting on a stone bench in Pizza Mercantile in a forgotten Italian seaside town as boys zip past on Vespas looking for handbags.

 

The Cathedrale de San Sabino says it’s open but a man chucks us out before we’d had time to look at the Madonna Odigitria, which is supposed to be most realistic portrait of the Virgin Mary – it was copied in the 8th century from a sketch by (St) Luke. There is a poster however, where Mary looks suitably dark/Jewish and not the Aryan version seen on the shrines all over town. But the pre-Renaissance Baby Jesus freaks me out – he looks like a mini-person, not a baby, my eyes can’t comprehend it – it’s like looking at an Escher drawing. We go into the Chiese D’Anna and sit at the back looking at the bling alter and electric candles and listen to bontempi version of religious songs. Quite disappointed that there have been no OTT Catholic Mardi Gras parades or processions or events, not even a lasagne eating contest.

 

The word for crypt, tomba, makes me think of tomber, to fall, in French and the similarities between the languages. I wonder if the gender of words is the same in French and Italian. Looking in a bookshop earlier I saw The Little Prince – Il Principe Piccolo - which made me realise where the word Prince comes from in English. Everyone we have come across seems happy to try out their English which is useful, as my Italian is limited to:

Ø       Food words

Ø       Starbucks words – piccolo, grande etc

Ø       Anything the same in French

Ø       Musical terms – piano, forte etc.

 

We go to sit by the fort and listen to the flags flutter, one of the loveliest sounds in the world.


 

We head back to the hôtel. The greatest thing about holidaying is not having to do things at set times – except eat, that is. I have an Englishwoman’s approach to evening eating – after 7 p.m. is too late and wrong. We watch Lost in Italian; they are at the beginning of the second series: it’s tempting to walk around the streets shouting: “Shannon’s dead! Ana-lucia, Libby, they’re also dead! Michael’s gone! Oh yeah and we’ve just found out that Charlie’s gonna cark it as well!” If I knew how to say this in Italian.

 

We go back to Piazza Mercantile, a little pedestrian square with covered restaurants and eat in the aptly named Tratttoria Mercantile, where it turns out that we’re not the only English tourists here after all as a Yorkshire man comes in and demands they turn off the rap music and then proceeds to speak slowly and loudly to the staff. We order a bottle of prosecco to celebrate the flat exchange, antipasto vegetariano and some un-needed pizzas as the starter consists of mozzarella balls, spinach and broccoli, garlic bread, normal bread, grissini, aubergine, beans and capers, and deep fried ricotta with ruccola and olives. Yumo. Afterwards they bring us limoncello and chocolates. Fat Tuesday indeed.

 

We walk via the orange-lit harbour back to the hôtel. Moderno sounds so old fashioned: like “modernist” and “mods” and 1940s futurists and all the cars-in-the-sky silver spacesuit 1964 idea of the 21st century. Everything in Bari looks like it was built in 1831, the place is full of birthday cake stucco houses. There are apparently examples of fascist architecture, but I’m not sure what right-wing buildings look like – Adam Smith quotes on the exterior? Nasty little moustaches wrought into the façade?

 

Wednesday

Back in old Napoli that’s amore

A cacophony of 5 part ‘harmony’ car horns which are nothing to do with traffic movement and more a “beepo ergo sum” philosophy, dissonant church bells clanking, couples arguing, cats miaowing, tellies blaring, sirens ringing, drills drilling, pipers piping and the bass on the stereo of cars turned up to 11 try their best to keep us from sleeping but again we wake to a (10% smaller) breakfast in bed. If we stayed here for a week we’d be down to a few crumbs and a thimble full of water. We are watched over by a munificent Mary, who regards our sin. I wonder if there are any countries left who would object to unmarried couples staying in the same hôtel room. I suppose Iran, Saudia Arabia et al might oppose it - but I really can’t say that those places appeal as holiday destinations. I wonder how many people in European countries don’t allow gay couples to share a room - with all the standardisation the EU is so keen on, it would be nice if the anti-anti-gay legislation in the UK was rolled out across Europe.

 

We walk down Corso Vittorio Emanuele in the sunshine, past cabbages, palm trees and a green copper statue of a horse with a big bum. We sit down awhile, moving when a man upwind of us starts smoking a cigar. All the bars and restaurants are vietaro fumare which explains why everybody in the street has a fag in their chops. On the first night we saw that a closed tobacconist had a handy machine built in the window to facilitate after hours sales. Clever. 

 

We stop in Caffè Hausbrandt (del Trieste) which has a wrought-iron chandelier, cave walls and fin de siècle mirrors (although possibly fin de 20th siècle). They have delicious sounding bruschetta on the menu but they are not for sale until 3 p.m. Ah yes, I forgot that cafés shut at lunchtime. So we have coffee and later, a slice of salty pizza and a calzone in a takeaway place. The guidebooks always want you to go to authentic taverns but a fastfood pizza is what the Italian office workers are eating. Some phrases from our books: “If you’re not invited to a Neopolitan’s home for dinner, this is the 2nd best place.” “This place serves seafood and pasta and that’s it.” “The grubbiest places serve the best food”. Get Your Authentic Italian Experience Here. But if tourists go to these places then don’t they lose their legitimacy? And sometimes can’t tourists have menus in English, somewhere to sit down, and serviceable toilets? The guide book’s notion of authenticity doesn’t stretch to the modern and is situated somewhere in 1953.

 

Over to the train station, having purchased our essential train provisions of crisps, biscuits, fizzy pop and yesterday’s Guardian, and onto the TGV to Rome through the ubiquitous euro-scenery of olive groves, white apartment blocks with orange roofs, palm trees, oil seed rape meadows and prickly pear fields and – to the right, the blue blue Adriatic giving a lovely primary contrast with the fields. Everything goes comfortably smooth until the train decides to sit outside a rainy hill for half an hour (“technical problems”) and then travels v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y onto Caserta where the next train to Naples is cancelled, necessitating another ½ hour wait for the next train which is also late and so we arrive over an hour late and in the dark rather than the sunset.

 

Naples is one big busy buzzy city. We come out of the train station into a car park-cum-roundabout (the Italians’ parking only rivals the Belgians’ in its ludicrousness) up the busiest noisiest fumiest street selling all manner of cheap tat (although I still enjoy being in a country where every 2nd shop is a café rather than an estate agents) to the Via Duomo. Into a courtyard which also houses the Partito Communista di Naples and up the stairs into the hotel. The room is smaller than in Bari, with no fridge or hairdryer but - blessed be - the courtyard cuts off the noise from the road. The cars can beep all night if they want to. Also: no bolster pillows (my constant European fear).

 

Venture out through the darkened streets, the muttering retreats, down via Tribunali, squeezing past cars and mopeds and people and food stalls, all outside on the cobbles, bottles of limoncello for €5 and litres of wine for less, pastries, arancina, deep fried aubergine (20 cents), tiarismu, chocolate tart, crepes, donuts alla nuttella: reminds me of South India, a life lived outside. I can sort of understand now what EM Forster was trying to say in Room With A View and Where Angels Fear to Tread: the wonder of the Other, but I did have to translate these books in my mind as being set in India - which seems as alien today as Italy did to the Edwardians. But when we reach Piazza Bellini, a little café covered square with potted palms and plants, I realise that this city is more like Athens: noisy and dirty and full of mopeds and graffiti, but where there are outdoor stands where people gather, little squares of repose and history history history everywhere. A city is only made by its outdoor life.

 

We eat at Sorriso Integrale, a vegetarian restaurant filled with customers who have presumably given up meat for Lent (and tourists). We choose the “unified meal” and get a really good plate of bean soup, sliced chicory in lemon and sesame oil, risotto, spinach and broccoli, cauliflower gratin, sauté potatoes in rosemary, and bread. The people next to us eat seitan in lemon sauce - which looks unpleasant. We walk around the block looking for a gelateria; down a narrow street of overhanging flats with washing, heavy wooden doors, narrow cobbles, hidden pizzerias, mediaeval churches and no ice cream parlours, until we come out onto the main road where it starts to rain. I give up the idea of a strawberry semi-freddo and shelter from the drizzle in the duomo, singing That’s Amore and waltzing David to a moonless sky. We have to ring the hôtel bell for a good five minutes before it’s answered and ironically, the silence in the room means I can’t sleep and at 4 a.m. am listening to the tourist snores of someone 3 rooms away and the bark of a lonely dog in a suburban backyard. I am the Principessa and the pisello when it comes to night noises.

 

Thursday

Mambo Italiano

We have cornetti and cappuccini in a nice caff and then make our way to the funicular which takes us up the hill and into an area of green and gold villas with orange and lemon groves. Oh! to live in a place with a citrus tree. We look out over the city, Vesuvius slowly smoking, a jumble of green and yellow and orange and cream houses, spiked by TV aerials, then trees, then the harbour and Ischia, Capri, Sorrento. The hustle and the bustle of the city are way away. Dave tries to explain to me how a funicular works but I’d rather not know as I get vertiginous visions of tumbling to my death (and it takes the fun out of funicular). We walk down many many steps and eventually reach the Galleria Umberto - a Victorian arcade similar to Leadenhall market - which has the zodiac symbols in mosaic on the floor and a spiralling glass roof.


 

We go to Umberto’s for lunch because the guide book says that it’s vegetarian (it’s not). It’s a smart trattoria for businesspersons and bourgeois families and we grubby tourists are a little out of place. Still we have a nice pizza made with tomatoes grown on Vesuvius (it says on the menu) and Frittura all’italiana (deep fried goodies, although it’s a far cry from the 20 cent aubergines in the old town).

 

Downtown Naples is frightfully fancy, reminding me of the town centre in Seville or the Avenue Louise in Brussels. We take a long walk around the bay, through the park and past the band stand, to Mergellina which is supposed to be a place of poetic beauty but it is traffic choked (the London air must seem clean and fresh to Neapolitans) and featuring dodgy geezers on mopeds who try to sell us camcorders and then make offensive gestures when we decline. Down to the harbour, taking endless pictures of the blue bay and visiting cat village.


 

Up to Piazza Plebiscito and stop at Caffè Gambrinus, ex-gaffe of Oscar Wilde and now filled with roses, chandeliers and ladies lunching. We have an extraordinarily expensive cappuccino freddo and a Brasilien coffee; again I’m reminded of Brussels and le Metropole in the Grande Place.

 

Back to the hôtel for a rest and then down the Via san Biagio dei Librai, also known as the Spaccanapoli, the Roman road that divides the old town to the Piazza San Domenico where opera is playing loudly from buildings (although when we walk back later it’s reggae), round to Piazza Gesù Nuovo, the studenty area of cheap pizza, churches and the Guglia Dell Immacolata – an 18th century tower dedicated to the Immortal the Immaculate one. There is a similar tower in Domenico, although that one is 17th century and dedicated to the (end of the) plague.

 

Naples at dusk is once again humming. Coffee shop employees take espresso round to fellow workers on plastic trays, wait til they’ve drunk up and bring the trays back. No cardboard Starbucks carriers here; a takeaway coffee is in a plastic cup with a bit of foil over the top. All the bars are tiny, all you need is a gaggia and a few bottles of spirits and everyone stands out on the street, no need for chairs. But the congestion charges of Ken Livingstone and the public toilet policy of Westminster Council would improve Naples fivefold.

 

Arrive at the plant-lined Piazza Bellini. We eat very salty pasta and gnocci (I’m the sort of person who adds salt to tinned soup but everything here is overly fond of the old sodium chloride) in Caffè Letteratura which does indeed sell books and has a drawing room atmosphere. We sit on the terrace and I have a peach juice and Prosecco as it seems apt to do so. Possibly not as authentic as the ones in Harry’s Bar but probably cheaper.

 

Walk back down some quite scary dark alleys which I realise are the lively streets of sundown and are now the deserted roads of night. Italians must go home for their dinner before coming out again, but we’re not fuelled by moped fumes and espresso and need our 8 hours sleep.

 

Friday

Breakfast at Scaturchio on sfogliatelle (flaky pastries) and coffees and then to the Chiese de Santa Chiara which has a 14th century crucifix and less gold that the average Catholic Church. Odd to have so many old relics in every place, but then I suppose that Italy didn’t have the reformation. To the Duomo where San Gennaro’s blood liquefies every first Sunday in May and on 19th September. It used to be just the Saint’s Day in May but then the miracle started taking place on the Saint’s Feast day as well, by popular demand or mysticism or something. David says that it’s unscientific, but I think it’s just icky. We go down to the crypt where I reckon that fairtrade coffee could be served (protestant style), using the monk statue as a counter and the graves as stand up booths. I am once again reminded why old stone churches are so popular in hot Mediterranean countries.

 

We sit in the fresco-laden Basilica where God’s love the sun shining through the yellow window bathes us in golden light.

 

Opposite is the Chiese Giro Lamine, a small church open at 10 a.m., 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. – there are people queuing outside for the midday praying. David jiggles his fingers in the holy water (“to see if it burns”) and reports it to be “waxy”. One would think that the priests would just bless the reservoirs and then to whole city would be sanctified. But who am I to question the Holy Roman Church?

 

We take a slow atheistic walk up to the Orto Botanico which, unlike London’s, isn’t owned by the queen and is therefore free. It is also beautiful, home to orange and lemon groves, instructive notices in mosaic and only the second public toilets I’ve seen (the other being at the funicular). There are cyclamen, a cactus garden and budding magnolia trees. It’s permanent Spring in the Mediterranean; until July at least. We sit and then lie down and really, there’s no better thing than reclining in the sunshine with no particular place to be. The life lived outdoors is so attractive to us English, so protective of our four walls and our body temperature.

 

We walk down a market – oh! the cheapness of artichokes - and buy pizza from a vendor who is aggrieved when I ask him if €1.50 is for 1 or 2 slices ,before laughing at me in front of his friends and then short changing me 7p. Back over the Corso Umberto where Dave almost walks headlong into a moped and back up Tribunali for a final ice-cream and snacks for the bus and a tiny bottle of meloncello. I want to buy a big bottle and some limoncello and some prosecco and a bottle of olive oil but of course we’re not allowed to take liquids in our hand luggage. We could pay an extra €15 to put bags in the hold but I’m not convinced that glass would survive and at Easyjet’s bag-in-hold prices, we might as well just buy the goods in England. The remainder of the Euros are burning a hole in David’s pocket and so he decides to buy a Neapolitan coffee maker to add to our coffee collection of two stove top espresso makers and an inherited-from-my-parents filter machine (I gave up on cafetières after breaking at least five).

 

There is some kerfuffle as we get on the wrong bus but then jump on the right one for a third of the price of the official airbus and arrive at the airport in double-swift time. Leap in the queue in front of a skulk of school children and are sitting drinking coffee in the viewing lounge in no time. Smuggle through my meloncello and we drink it on the train home. It goes nicely with chocolate biscuits and mini cheddars.

.



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