Let's not hide it - we came to Montepulciano for the wine. It's a wine town, and the surrounding countryside is planted full with grapevines. When we pulled into the bus station in Montepulciano, our prospects did not look very good: arriving on the weekend, and the place we had in mind turned out to be a bed breakfast on the outskirts of town to which only regional buses would reach, seven kilometers away. A quick check of the math involved in bus tickets showed us that the money we'd save on accommodation would be eaten up by transit to and from the city, and, we'd have to be out of the city by seven thirty at night if we didn't want a seven-klick hike in the dark, without sidewalks, being passed by Italian race car drivers.So we did what most travellers do - we explored other options. A sign posted in the bus station offered rooms at a reasonable price, and our guidebook for Italy also promised a budget option in the heart of the city. So with two options, we struck up our two-person Italian phone call routine. Amy connected with the woman on the other phone, got the sense that if we went right now, we'd have a room, so that's just what we did.
It turned out as we got there, that the number at the bus station would have led us to the same place. The Il Cittino, a hostel-style hotel and restaurant, is located pretty much in the exact centre of Montepulciano, which involves much climbing of gradual hills and winding through switchback streets. Montepulciano isn't that big - you could cross from one side to the other in half of an hour - but when you're lugging packs around, every step up a hill feels like a trudge up a mountain.
Il Cittino is run by one woman - Marcella - a lovely woman who is a reserved dynamo of energy. She'd have to be: in addition to running a hotel that can cater to probably twenty people in a dozen separate rooms, she does all the cooking for a twelve-table restaurant. Lately she's been doing it single-handedly as her one permanent employee is recovering from an illness; however, she does have a weekend helper, a student from the nearby university of Siena.
We also met Henrik, one of the most interesting people I've yet to meet during our travels. Henrik isn't his real name; he's pretty secretive, and I've no wish to offend him by announcing to the world of his presence in Montepulciano. Henrik's story is pretty romantic: he came to Montepulciano seven years ago, just passing through, and his vehicle broke down. As the fog lifted, he saw the steeple of the nearby cathedral San Biagio, and it must have been a pretty spectacular vista, as he decided to make Montepulciano a permanent residence (as well, his vehicle decided not to start again, despite three days of repair, so I guess it was meant to be).
Henrik offered up to us his favourite impressions of Montepulciano: where we should and shouldn't go, what were the best deals, where was the best wine. It is fascinating to hear him speak, his English couched in a Italian accent that also betrays his northern European heritage. He is clearly a knowledgeable man, well-versed in many topics, but to describe any of them to you would be to give away points of his identity. I'll just say that it was great to spend time talking to him, and we hope to see him again during a return visit to Montepulciano.
We ate out for an early dinner at a local cafe-restaurant, Al Gambo di Gatto, where we had a light meal and some pretty great local wine. The owner, Emmanuel, and his wife Laura, were a great team with an obviously well-practiced routine: she would discuss the menu with the guests, translating where necessary, and take the orders; he would discuss the wines, profferring three for a taste and one for a selection. In Montepulciano there are two basic types of bottles, the first being the younger, cheaper selections that are aged for six to eight months and come from a variety of local grapes: fruity, lively wines. The second selection are the wines made from the local Montepulciano Nobili grapes, and aged for two to three years (or more) in oak. They're more robust, very tannic, and great cutting for through meat and game dishes. We went for a Nobili.
The presentation of the meal, and the warmth with which it was served, impressed us both, and moved me to the point of wanting to come back and do an interview for a story devoted just to the two of them and their history: why did they come to Montepulciano? What's their philosophy behind running a restaurant? So I discussed this with a very enthusiastic Laura, who suggested I return the next day when the restaurant opened.
In the meantime, we toured around Montepulciano, soaking in the flavour of yet another step-back-in-time city. That night we decided to attend what can only be described as an artistic event: "The Shop of Wilde Dreams", a combination of live jazz, video and painting. While I still am a bit unclear as to the actual order of things, my feeling is that the artists were all supposed to work off of each other when producing their art: the jazz players would play some music, the painter would react to that when painting, the video artist would project different video, and so on. But in hindsight I think the jazz artists had a few well-rehearsed numbers, and the video guy clearly had only so much material to draw upon. Only the painter could be truly improvised, and even then, there's no way of knowing whether or not he'd done his piece before. In the end it was worth seeing, and the painting was clearly inspired, but the jazz left me a bit hollow. The players - a saxophonist, keyboardist, bass player and drummer - were clearly experts, though it only became clear during their more formal numbers. In what I am going to assume was an attempt to inspire the painter, they did their best to produce a disorganized cacophany of noise, which you get the point of in a few minutes, and (at least, for me) get tired of after a few more minutes. I would have loved to stay for a few more minutes at the end to inspect the painting a bit more closely, but when they started up for their encore set of cat-strangling and screaming amidst syncopated drumming and bass-string screeching, we found it too much and evacuated the premises.The next day I set out to do my interview, armed with my questions. When I got their, Emmanuel had no clue who I was. Absolute blank, despite my attempts to inspire some recollection as to why I'd returned. We hit a wall of miscommunication: him with little English, me with little Italian, and after a quick cup of coffee, I left. A bit crestfallen, I'll admit. I rebounded though, with a photographic tour of Montepulciano: Amy and I had separated for the morning while I was going to do the interview, and I did get some photos I liked.
We spent much of the rest of our visit walking through the city, talking to Henrik, and tasting wine. In short, a great visit. But as the weekend drew to a close we made plans to visit our next Italian city, Siena.
A short bus ride from Montepulciano delivered us into Sienna, and after looking around at some of the expensive hotel options, we realized a visit to this city had the potential to be very expensive. So we cut our costs by staying at one of the city's three youth hostels, ours located relatively inconveniently about two kilometers north of the train station, the train station being one kilometer north of the city. Not having a map which actually included enough of the city to show us where the hostel actually was, we waited at the station for bus service to resume, having asked enough people to get a reasonably certain idea of which one we should actually take.
A side comment: when travelling, asking people for directions is a good idea. However, you should ask multiple people, and at various stages of your journey. Just because the person you talk to sounds absolutely certain about the turns, distances and landmarks, doesn't mean you've actually understood it correctly, or that they really know what they're talking about.
The bus dropped us off at the hostel, a former university residence building. We spoke to Giuseppe, an older, wiry Italian man with a pleasant demeanor but no-nonsense attitude when it came to business. We could certainly have a private room, breakfast was one euro and ninety four euro cents per day, all payable in advance. And in cash. Of course, we didn't have enough so I'd have to walk down to the nearest cash machine, to which he gave me directions... you can guess the rest. I did eventually find it, and spent a few moments cursing when the door wouldn't open. I tugged on it for a few moments before deciding to try pushing the door; another curious feature of European design is that it can be the exact opposite of North American design. Light switches are pushed down to activate instead of up; some doors open out instead of in. For whatever reason, I'd been conditioned that the door should be pulled open, and this one didn't work that way.
Breakfast is worth commenting about, to the extent that the lesson learned there was don't buy three days' worth of breakfast chits if you don't know what you're going to get. Or generally, none at all if you're staying at a hostel. They are universally cheap and terrible. The coffee was, from hell.
We decided to forego the bus and walk into Sienna's old city. It turned out to be a relatively easy walk, with the exception of a few stretches where there were no sidewalks and the traffic whizzed by on the left. We walked single file, which was only complicated by the appearance of walkers coming the other way. But it only took us about a half an hour to get to the city on foot.
Sienna: another timeless, walled fortress city. I hate to think that we were getting overexposed to midieval cities, but it could possibly be. It was impressive to look at. Its streets were overflowing with character. But after a while, you just wished that you wouldn't get so lost all the time.It was in Sienna that we would meet Lisa, the proprietor of Sienna's sole English book store. We were hoping to find the next in the series of a book that we'd been lent and had both enjoyed, and a quick search on google had turned up Lisa's store in Siena as a possible place where it might be found.
Lisa is an American transplant to Italy, having moved to Sienna some ten years ago from New York; three years ago she opened her store. A very knowledgeable and likeable person, we found the hours ticking away as we talked, finally getting around to the actual reason we'd come by - the next in the series of books we were reading. It wasn't in her stock, but she did sell us two other books that we have both since enjoyed. So if you find yourself in Sienna with a need for books in English, make your way to the Book Shop, Galleria S. Pietro 19, Sienna (+39 0577 226594).
It's at this point that I must confess some time has passed since we were actually in Siena - things have gotten busy - so the details are starting to get sketchy on what we saw and did while in the city. But I'll try to cover the big points.
We visited the Medici fortress, a huge structure on the west side of the old city (at least, it looked like the west side to me. You'll know it when you see it). Essentially, it's a big tall rectangular castle with around six diamond-shaped structures extending out from the points. The building has been reclaimed for other non-fortress uses, such as housing a musical conservatory, a high-end restaurant, and a wine museum that stocks over 1,600 different bottles from all of Italy. You would have thought that we would have visited this mecca of wine, but in the end the timing didn't work out, and we didn't make our way back there.
We also took in a visit to a museum that, in its previous life, had been a hospital dedicated to the care and well-being of the city's less fortunate. St. Maria de la Scala is undergoing constant renovation, and it is expected to continue into the long range future, so there was a fair amount of background noise to our visit. However, the main entry hall was worth the price of admission just by itself. Easily two hundred feet long and fifty feet wide, the walls and ceiling were covered in frescos that depicted historic scenes including characters from the hospital's history. As we toured the hospital it became clear just how huge the structure actually is: section after section of sculpture, paintings, a small chapel, an underground section devoted to an entire collection of Egyptian artifacts, even a special exhibition of canes and walking sticks. I think we spent most of the afternoon there and left with a ravenous appetite.
At night we had the idea of perhaps seeing a movie - something we hadn't done for weeks. We'd passed a poster for the latest Woody Allen movie and thought that perhaps it was subtitled, so we tracked down the theatre. Only to find out that it was in fact dubbed, and during our conversation with Carolina, the theatre's ticket agent, she suggested that unless we really understood Italian, we weren't going to enjoy it. That didn't stop her from having a good long conversation with us, in which we talked about all sorts of things both Canadian and Italian. Speaking with Carolina was interesting: she had moved to Siena from Naples, where in the south of Italy unemployment has become a real problem. This is especially the case since the formation of the European Union and inflation that came with the adoption of the Euro. She spoke of the cost of housing (both renting an apartment and the dream of owning a house - well outside of her means) and the cost of living, both of which had risen dramatically over the past seven years. All the while I couldn't help but wonder how it was then, with this increase in prices, that the cost of transit is so cheap. Our bus tickets that took us across Italy were a pittance, as were the cost of our train tickets from place to place.
Finding a place to connect the laptop to the internet has been a bit of an ongoing challenge - wi-fi connections seem to turn up where you least expect them - and this was even more the case in Sienna. As I'd written previously, outside a banco privato we happened to see a horde of people sitting on the marble steps with their laptops. There was nothing organized, just a conglomeration of people - probably it is locally known that it's a good place to find a wi-fi signal, but for everyone else, it's just a bit of a deduction to figure out that if someone's got a laptop, they probably have wi-fi. At any rate I've already extolled just how much of a contrast it was - modern laptops in front of an ancient building, but it also summed up Italy in many ways. The people are innovative, but also thrifty. Free wi-fi is relatively rare in Italy, if not Europe, so when you find it, you take advantage of it.
I have to digress a moment to talk about the coffee in Italy. It's been a bit of a bum ride for Amy, who is a devoted tea drinker, to visit France and Italy where a cup of tea can be almost twice as expensive as a cup of coffee (and this is for a poorly-made cup of tea with a cheap tea bag). The coffee in Italy (outside of the hostels) was universally superb. The Italians have got it down pat, as opposed to the French, who produce a coffee which is from time to time just "okay". Avoid the "cafe americano" - it's not worth it and most places don't really know how to make it anyway. You just get used to drinking the smaller espresso coffee, which contains exactly the same caffeine hit, just in a more compact package.
We left Sienna to head to the Cinque Terra for the weekend. The Cinque Terra is a loosely-knit community of five picturesque fishing villages, linked by road, rail and walking paths. All five of the villages are perched on the edge of the Mediterranean sea, which makes for some pretty spectacular panoramic views along the walking paths. We opted to rent an apartment for the weekend so we could make our own meals (something we had been missing for a while) in the southern-most of the five villages, Rio Miaggiore. We'd called ahead, as you never know how busy a popular tourist desination will be - but when we arrived, it was clear that we could have found anything. We were greeted by at least two people looking to see if we were interested in renting an apartment, and an older Italian lady - Mama Rosa, it turned out - held out a sign offering rooms from a paltry fifteen euros. While Amy looked around for the usual array of tourist information (maps, guides, etc.) Mama Rosa's husband (Papa Rosa?) listed to me all the places he'd been while serving as the engineer of an oil tanker. It got to the point where he could have tried to list places he hadn't been. At any rate, we'd already had a place reserved, and later on we encountered a sign that indicated we shouldn't accept offers from places that appear to be amazing deals - as they tend to just pack people in and the conditions can be less than appealing. Good enough, then.The towns are so small they don't have maps to provide to tourists: they are the definition of one-street towns. In the case of Rio Maggiore, the street ascends upwards towards the mountains, at a forty-five degree angle, with shops, hotel booking agents and speciality stores flanking you on either side. There wasn't a McDonald's to be seen but there were no less than three CORA outlets, disguised in small shops. I suppose you have to stock the villages somehow.
Our meals throughout the weekend were different pasta dishes, accompanied by local Cinque Terra wines. The bottom must have fallen out of the fishing industry, as we didn't see a lot of it going on - but tourism is unquestionably the larger source of revenue now, for better or worse, as well as a thriving wine industry. The arable land available in Cinque Terra is a series of terraces that ascends the mountains, thus, everything has to be done by hand. As far as the quality of the wines, well, they didn't knock our socks off, but they were certainly very pleasant.
And now, the walking trails. We'd very efficiently planned to do our walks over the weekend: however, a signficant rainstorm had forced the regulatory body that oversees the trails to close the trail between Rio Maggiore and Corniglio (villages 3 and 5, basically) for safety concerns. The tourist office underscored that while the path between Monterossa and X was still open, the quality of the trail wasn't going to be very good, and it wasn't recommended that we walk it. We decided that rather than wait for our next visit to Cinque Terra, we'd risk the conditions. So we hopped a train to Monterossa and started our walk along the trails back to Corniglio, where we'd hop on a train back to Rio Maggiore.The trails themselves between Corniglio and Monterossa are not for the faint of heart, the first leg taking over two hours to traverse and making a path up and down the terraces. You find yourself doing a lot of climbing, only to follow a path around the mountain and then descend back down into a valley. To top it off there are no guard rails, so coupled with some slippery, muddy paths it can make for some pretty slow going. I think we chose the right direction as it meant we could pause in Vernazza, have a look around and something to eat, and then hit the second and (slightly) less difficult path. Having just described how difficult the paths could be, the views were worth it, and the paths themselves showed off the diversity of the Cinque Terra region. It made me wonder at how difficult it would have been to cut into the mountainside and build the stair-stepping terraces on which so much is grown.
At the base of Rio Maggiore, a small marina boasts a few cafes and, further down the seaside path, a rocky beach. I remember this kind of beach from my previous visit to Nice. The ferocity of the waves means that thousands of stones get rolled up onto the beach, slowly getting chipped and eroded until they become small pebbles. The sound of the waves crashing onto the rocks is incredible to listen to, as it gives you an indication of just how strong the waves are. Occasionally there is also a moment, a pause in the waves crashing onto the stoney shore, where you can hear the water receding and carrying away the thousands of smaller stones that aren't heavy enough to remain on the shoreline. It's quite hypnotic and we spent a few hours there.While we were there they never did take the path between Rio Maggiore and Corniglio, as the conditions actually deteriorated on the paths during our stay (they even closed the paths between the other villages). We did do another hike (again, alot of climbing up through the terraced mountain sides) that took us to the western end of the five villages, where we encountered a nature reserve that gave us a panoramic view of the Mediterranean sea. In short: Cinque Terra is well worth the visit, but I don't think you need to spend a lot of time there to appreciate it.
We had figured out already that our next stop was going to be to visit my cousin Mary, who I hadn't seen for over twenty years, who lives on the other side of the Alps in France. We'd already booked our train tickets from Torino, but it meant spending the night there. So we took the train to Torino and spent a very few hours there. My impressions of the city are scattered, but essentially, they cleaned it up for the Olympics a few years ago and it shows. A new train station was added to allow access to the Olympic facilities, and the tourist office has a wealth of information at their fingertips. They armed us with a list of the hotels in Torino, a map of the city, and we set off to find ourselves a reasonably inexpensive place to spend the night.
Our first stop, the Albergo Romana, did not impress. For fifty euros we would have the pleasure of a dingy guest room, washroom down the hall. I haven't haggled much this trip, but I really couldn't believe the room was worth it. In addition, while I'm not an expert on tourism, I felt that we weren't in the prime tourist season and that it shouldn't be so expensive. The hotel guide even went so far as to list high- and low-season prices. So I suggested it was perhaps more expensive than we'd like, and offered forty euros, but despite us being the only people in the place, she didn't budge. So we did, and left - no hard feelings.
Our next stop, just down the street, was completely different. Granted, by this point we had been walking around a bit with our packs, but the people were nice, the room was excellent with its own toilet and shower, and internet access, for five euros more than the last place. I guess with the success of the Olympics, the whole city has inflated its prices, but at the very least, the consumer should feel like they are getting something for the money.
The train from Torino to Chambery, France was a ride of having one's face pressed up against the glass. For us, mountains are pretty amazing - yes, Canada has the Rockies but we haven't seen them yet - so crossing the Alps was stunning. There are even more impressions to be conveyed about the alps, but I'll save them for the next installment.
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