The Ballad of the Sad Hotel and Travels in France and Italy

Where has the time gone since our late summer swims on Isola Capraia? We risked sunburn recently but now we need sweaters and umbrellas every day. We've had a busy couple of months filled with many pleasant things, like getting to visit with friends and exploring some nice new places, but also filled with less pleasant things, like a series of medical visits. We've also started our Italian classes which could be considered pleasant or unpleasant depending on the how complicated the lesson is for the day.

A Week in Albi, France

We met Tina and Tom at a scruffy bus stop in Athens in 2017. We were collectively confused about how to transfer from our intercity bus from Volos to the Athens airport. In a brief 20 minutes on the airport bus we hit it off and promised to stay in touch. Those 20 minutes were the only time we've ever spent in their physical presence until we touched down in Toulouse and they generously picked us up at the airport (yay for airport pickups by friends!) and drove us about an hour to Albi, our joint base for the next week. During that car ride alone we doubled our time in person with them. Luckily for us, they're great travel companions and delightful souls. Over the course of a week, they drove us around to a seemingly endless series of picture perfect French villages. But these places, like Saint-Sulpice-la-Pointe, Cordes-sur-Ciel are all real, not just pictures. Albi is a gem, too, even with its peculiar hulking cathedral dominating it.

At lunch one day, we looked at the placemat and learned that the French call the region Toscane Occitane and it does feel and look like a French version of Toscana Italia (but apparently these are fightin' words and Tuscans accuse the French of identity theft). Yet another parallel is that Toscane Occitane and Toscana both have some sort of penne. In Italy it's a pasta shape of course; in France its a town named Penne which is nestled below a precariously perched castle. Unlike our Toscana, though, the French version, in the shoulder season, seems relatively unknown to foreign tourists.

Despite laughing about our Lucchese friend Laura's warning that we wouldn't eat well in France, she augured at least partially correctly. This was less because the French don't know how to eat, as Italians contend, and more about the lingering tummy bug we got on Isola Capraia. We left France with only a few full-on French meals, though, thankfully we at least got to enjoy much, maybe too much, great French bread and other bakery delights. We'll have to go back and fix this. We also wonder if we had headed to France a year ago, if we might have found a place to settle there, instead of being here in Lucca. It seems quite possible.

Friends Lug Tea to Lucca

We met our British friends Al and Jules at a campervan park in Hokatika, New Zealand back in 2019. And as with Tina and Tom, our short time together there, amidst a massive amount of rain, made us feel like we'd already known them for years. They're part of the reason we are in Italy now (instead of France). We rendezvoused with them almost exactly a year ago and traipsed around together in Emilia-Romagna and further north before we decided by chance to check out Lucca. Al and Jules flew down from England a few weeks ago and spent a lovely long weekend with us here in Lucca.

Italy isn't known as a tea-loving country, but tea is our preferred morning drink. It's difficult to get high quality black tea here. Despite their limited airline baggage capacity, Al and Jules brought us the largest box of tea we've ever seen. There must be some irony here in British friends bringing a crate of tea to Americans, gratis. We might be set for six months thanks to them! And we've quickly become enamored of Yorkshire tea. The hole in their luggage space got filled by large wedges of Parmesan upon their return. We're lucky to have met such thoughtful and simpatico friends in our travels.

Escape from Lucca Comics

We arrived in Lucca last year, maybe a week after the annual Lucca Comics event took place. Lucca Comics is discussed by people here as if it were a Category 5 hurricane. But you can plan for this hurricane a year ahead of time. It's coming, it's already on the calendar. When you're in the path of a dangerous hurricane, the best strategy is to get away from it, and that's the advice we've heard repeatedly about Comics. Over 300,000 people attend it and pack this town that normally holds around 9,000 people within the walls. Days before the event, we didn't have a destination. Torrential rain was forecast over much of Italy and we hoped to find a dry place to spend 4 or 5 days. The forecast mostly got worse but we decided that just getting away was our chief goal. We opted to take the train down to Perugia for a few nights and then spend a couple more nights in Florence where a textile fair/market was taking place (which is music to Sam's ears).

It was our first foray into Umbria and we want to go back soon to explore more of it. It has a reputation as a less discovered version of Tuscany and maybe that's true. Most of the tourists seemed to be Italian and overall it felt less crowded. Perugia reminded us of hilly Siena but we enjoyed Perugia even more. It has a pleasant vibe, great views, reasonably priced restaurants, and nice streets to wander if your knees are in good shape. The town also has my new favorite cheesemonger. We went to a supermarket to pick up some snacks one evening and the cheese guy stole our hearts as he thoroughly explained the differences among a handful of cheeses. He even had us record his speech by video so we could study the cheeses later in greater depth!

On our last morning there, we visited a textile workshop/museum and Sam chatted with some weavers and we got to see how they still make--by foot pedal and loom--stunning textiles. On the down side, we learned you can get a hernia using a loom, which happened to the woman who runs the workshop.

Last Night at the Palazzo Morandi

And then it was on to Florence where our hotel stay felt like the plot of a sad novel. Our friend Joanne has been going to Florence for decades and she always stays at the same small hotel which has a vintage charm like many places we've enjoyed before Airbnb turned everything into Ikea blandness. Joanne had told us that they were closing the hotel for renovations right after her stay there (she was also avoiding Lucca Comics). We booked a couple of nights on her recommendation. But when we arrived on a rainy afternoon, the receptionist told us that we would be the last guests at the hotel, ever. Airbnb has gobbled up Florence, as it has many cities around the world, and this has: 1) killed the business for small hotels like his, 2) put him out of a job he's had for 19 years, and 3) made it impossible for him to find an affordable place to live. He's at risk of having to sleep in his car save for the generosity of some friends who let him crash at their places, as he continues his over 3 month long search for a place to live. He laid bare his plight during our check-in, while he listened to Metallica on his speaker, to vent his frustration. He did so at a surprisingly polite volume level given his circumstances, i.e., out of a job in 2 days and without a home. We felt a pall as we lugged our backpacks up to our affordable charming old-fashioned room. Like so many modern issues it's difficult to know how to make a positive difference amidst this larger forces of corporatocracy.

But our time in Florence was filled with positive experiences, too. Our octogenarian friends Marisa and Paolo, who live there, had us over for dinner. Before we came to Italy last year, Marisa made a spreadsheet of cities we might want to explore for everyday life. The spreadsheet contains about 10 columns which intelligently and amusingly describe Marisa's rankings of each city based on important quality of life factors. For example, given how important aesthetics are for Italian life, perhaps it shouldn't have surprised us that she included information about the predominant color palette of each town. Florence? Gray, off-cream, white. At the delightful dinner we shared, Marisa stuffed us with her homemade menu of artichoke lasagna, caponata, roasted fish, and tiramisu. I stupidly forgot how Italians like to course meals and indulged in seconds of the rich lasagna only to realize this filling dish was only the first course. And as much as I'd like to say that it was delicious, I can't say that in Italian because 'delizioso' is not a descriptor for food! So I'll say everything was molto buono, though our hosts were deliziosi (which is, strangely, something you can say about people).

We had a pleasant time in Florence at the craft fair, visiting with friends, and getting some necessary shopping done. On our last day before heading to the train station, we picked up our bags at the front desk of the hotel. As we arrived at the hotel front door, we saw a moving truck outside and they were already carrying furniture out of the hotel just a few hours after serving the last breakfast. We were truly the final guests to leave. What does the future hold for people and places like this?

Learning Italian Means Learning About Food

Several weeks ago, we both started our Italian language classes at the local adult learning center. My class is comprised of a dozen adults from all over--Mali, Morocco, Iran, Iraq, Indonesia, Colombia, and Japan. We have an excellent teacher who has a relaxed but effective teaching style. So far I've had 6 classes and 5 have revolved almost completely around food and drink. When I studied French 35 years ago, I think we spent the first 6 classes learning how to ask for and understand directions on the Metro in Paris. Different countries have different priorities, clearly. During one of Sam's classes, her teacher referred to the oft-stated English phrase 'the Italian way of life' at which point Sam chuckled and replied that actually, we generally just say 'la dolce vita.' And now we head into the shorter days at the end of 2023, after several nice visits with friends, but the with prospects of being able to speak pretty one day.