Here I’ve been gallavanting from Barcelona to Milan over the past three weeks and offered nary a glimpse to my reader friends.  Scusa.  Of course, the longer I go without recapping our Italian adventures the more the little details accumulate.  I see the tall, shiny pile of them and they begin to blur together.  Then I start to worry I can’t do justice to them.  Then I decide to hold off writing for another day.  And then…

Twyla Tharp, in her wonderful new book, The Creative Habit, writes about the problem of beginnings.  You will be hearing more about this book in times to come.  But for now I’m tossing some toothpicks on the cafe table, selecting one at random, and letting it dictate my beginning.

Which happens to be about how we broke the long drive from Moraira to Lucca.  We drove from Moraira to Barcelona, from Barcelona to Marseille, Marseille to Rapallo, Rapallo to Lucca.

Originally, we’d planned to take a ferry from Barcelona to Livorno.  But then we opted to take the slow approach and see what we could along the way.

So, we drove to Barcelona where we planned to spend the night.  We walked around for a few hours and enjoyed a coffee on the Ramblas.  I love the architecture of Barcelona, and the vibe of this city.  We have yet to stay in this city for more than 36 hours, and I think we need to do something about that in the next year.  Mark those words.  You saw them here.  Today.

Marseille, Old Port

Then, Marseille.  It isn’t a beautiful city.  It’s kind of gritty and chaotic yet exotic and confident.  It’s on the Must See Again list.  There’s a youthfulness about it, stylish people, and loads of outdoor cafes in the Vieux Port area.  A good dinner is not hard to find.  We visited the cathedral and baptistry, walked in some of the different neighborhoods, strolled through the market stalls of a less fashionable quarter, sipped wine while the police dealt with some shoplifting youths, lost count of the ambulances roaring up and down the streets.  Over a lovely Lebanese meal we dealt with the bad news that a tree fell on our house in Atlanta.  C’est la vie.

Portofino

Next, Rapallo – a town on the Italian Riviera. En route to Rapallo we drove through Monaco, just cause.  And then held our breath as the autopiste on the French side became the autostrada on the Italian side and many many motorists took full advantage of the fact that there are no speed limits.  While in Rapallo we wandered through the pretty streets, felt a bit shabby in our ho hum clothes next to the well-heeled Italians, bought dog food and a phone charger, and enjoyed a very good dinner at a bistro.   The next day we drove to the neighboring village of Portofino, which is pretty much dripping with money so there was no point in continuing the shabby-style comparison.  It began to rain rather hard, so we bought some foccacia to go, and hit the road for Lucca.

Tuscany

Lucca, book stall

Lucca was my first glimpse of a Tuscan town.  It’s old ramparts are still intact and have become a kind of park encircling the city.   Puccini was born in Lucca, and so the town takes great pride in his association.  That is now. In Puccini’s time they weren’t’ so fond of him.  He was an upstart of none-too-high birth who had a thing going with the wife of a very wealthy man.  She ditched the money bags for the composer.  It’s not clear if their life together was all that rosy once the romance ebbed.  Eventually, they married, but apparently Puccini had a bit of a roving eye and that instigated some spectacular arguments – we’re talking the full orchestra.

At any rate, I’ve kind of fallen in love with Lucca.  There’s a feeling of spaciousness to it, that you don’t always find in old towns.  We spent a couple of afternoons walking around and being tourists.  One evening went to a concert.  It wasn’t a particularly good concert, but we couldn’t be on Puccini’s home turf and turn down a recital showcasing his standards.

Elsewhere in Tuscany…

Pisa, Duomo after the rain.

We spent an afternoon in Pisa, too.  As we were walking into town it began to rain, and the rain shower turned into a rather blustery, uncomfortable rain “event”, the sort where the rain comes in sideways and finds your eyes no matter where you look.  As the storm ran it’s course, we huddled with a hundred other tourists from a multitude of nations under the eaves of the Baptistry which gave a little cover.  It occurred to me, while huddled, that people have been doing that for hundreds of years, seeking shelter from the elements under the eaves of this same building and grateful for what little cover they get out of it but still wishing the storm would hurry the hell up and move on.

By the way, the leaning tower is rather impressive.  But it also seemed kind of short.  It’s like when you meet someone in person who sounded tall on the phone but turns out to be a shortie.

The other memorable moment in Pisa was a traffic incident in which a man got out of his car to yell at another driver for something.  We don’t know what the issue was, because naturally he was screaming in Italian.  Something went down that really got his goat, because he had a good yell in the street, hand gesticulations ablazing. Very fun to watch.  Not so fun for the other driver who seemed very confused by the fuss.

Siena, Il Campo

The day after Pisa we drove to Siena where we stayed overnight.  Maybe it was how the October sun hit the brick buildings, but I was drawn to the town from step one.  We stayed at hotel just outside one of the impressive gates, and didn’t have more than a 10 minute walk into town or 20 minute walk to Il Campo, a wide,  magnificent plaza where everyone congregates.

Yet as much as I enjoyed every minute spent in the city itself and admire its magnificent duomo, what I remember most is lunch, dinner and the colorful laundry hang outside the houses.  We both had pasta for lunch.  Moi:  papardelle with duck.  Tim:  porcini ravioli in a ewe’s cheese sauce.  He’s tried replicating the cheese sauce a couple of times since then, but it’s been tough going.  Personally, I think it might have had a little young balsamic tossed in, but his jury is still out on that one.  For dinner we found a ristorante just off Il Campo, where our dog was made welcome in the main dining room.  The proprietor’s dog, a lovely golden retriever, slept in the bar side of the restaurant.  He had a sly humor about him, the proprietor.  So we enjoyed that as well as the perfectly cooked food on our plates.  Moi:  grilled lamb chops with a potato and fennel mash.  Tim:  Beef stew over rice. Our plates were bare, very nearly licked clean.

As for the laundry, I’m putting together a Flickr album of the laundry scapes we’ve been taking.  File that under “Coming Soon.”

From outside the walls of San Gimignano.

The following day we toodled through the Tuscan countryside,  stopping in San Gimignano and Castellina di Chianti along the way.  The scenery was everything it was touted to be, I’m delighted to report.  Don’t let the lousy lighting on our photo mislead you into thinking I’m waxing on without reason.

Later in the week we spent an afternoon traipsing around Florence and trying to dissuade our dog from barking at buses.  Rufus has developed this thing about buses – he wants to kill them.  Since he can’t get do that, he barks.   And not little barks.  Barks that have scared the bejeezus out of people not expecting such a roar from such a little dog. When he wasn’t barking at buses, Rufus had horses on his mind.  Horses induce this high pitched squeal in Rufus that’s hard to describe.  It’s kind of like he’s dying, and maybe he is in a way because he is absolutely dying to have a go at those horses, startle them into running so he can have a merry chase.  Horses are just big sheep to him.

When we weren’t keeping our dog quiet, we were letting him pose for pictures.  Tourists kept asking if they could take a photo of him.  He was the toast of the Ponte Vecchio.  We think he’s very cute, but dang, the Italian ladies have taken a real shine to him.  And he knows it…the little barking-at-buses-squealing-at-horses bugger.

The point of going into Florence was to get a taste of it, more than try to see any of the big ticket attractions, and to have lunch.  Lunch in Florence, unfortunately, was memorable because it was totally blah.  Shame.

Florence, near the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella

However, they day was not lost.  On our way back to the car we passed the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella.  To the right of that plaza an old-ish man played his violin beneath the awning of the Hotel Universo.  Somehow all the pieces of the day melded into a circular still life in which old is now and now is timeless – the dimming light of an autumn afternoon in an old square, the pretty Renaissance church, the plaza abuzz with students, and the lone man off to the side playing his fiddle for coins.

I’m trying to sum up three weeks of travel and feather plucking into one tidy post, and I’m not succeeding.  So, I’m going to just let the words roll and see what shows up.

Book Stall in Lucca

Let me start off by saying that our expedition to northern Italy has been fabulous so far.  It’s been chillier than expected, and we’ve had a couple of rain events to contend with, and I’ve come down with a cold, but those aren’t even mild complaints you’re hearing.  I’m loving, loving, loving this time in Italy.  It’s just so beautiful and fascinating and old and modern and everything I hoped it would be. It took me 40 years to get here, but it was entirely worth the wait.

The one bummer bit of the trip is that the gods of internet connections have been showing their trickster sides and having a good belly laugh at the Vodafone dongles supplied for our internet-ing.

With connections as slow as dial-up, until today I haven’t been able to upload even thumbnails and emails can take five minutes to send.  So, my intention to blog at least in brilliant snippets, decent photos included, was shanghaied.  That is…until we scored access to a Wifi setup at a cafe here in Argegno, a village on the western shore of Lake Como, thus restoring some normalcy to our technology oriented lives.  (Mwahahaha, internet gods, I’ve snagged some of your golden apples and I’m baking them into a fruit turnover not wholly unlike what you’d find at a McDonalds, and you can’t do jack about it!)

Big bowl of cheese.

We have to be careful about how much time we spend in this cafe and when we go, because they do this daily happy hour thing whereby they offer free eats – cheeses and coppa and salami and pizza slices and bruschetta and these delicious cheese/rice balls rolled in bread crumbs which are deep fried and to die for…I believe the need for boundaries with regard to said cafe is obvious.  Their vino rosso della casa is nothing to sneeze at, either.  (We’ve already broken the rule imposed yesterday which was that we wouldn’t come here too close to dinner, because we’re weak-willed people who can’t seem to say no to free nibbles.)

Anyhow, in between sight-seeings and experiencing and feasting on some of the best pasta and non-pasta dishes on the planet, I’ve had a couple of burning learnings on this trip that I’m capturing here for posterity.

Uno – My Internet-centricity Is Serious Stuff
I’ve noted and and noodled upon this topic quite a bit in the past three weeks, mainly because it seems that since mid-September I’ve had one internet connection problem after another.  Which is inconceivable to me given that it’s year nine of the 21st century, and I live in Western Europe.

Not being able to blog regularly has been a stretch.  Actually, it’s been a royal pain and a messer-upper of my creative equilibrium.  Actually, at times it’s felt like an amputation.  Something integral – a limb called ADSL – has been lopped off.  More than once.  And the loss of that limb has been both discombobulating and isolating and confusing.  My creative medium has been compromised, and I’ve struggled to adjust.

Call me a product of my time, call me an internet junkie, whatever -  I like being connected to the wider world…at least through broadband.  And I don’t like for my connection to be limited to three hours a day and at speeds reminiscent of the internet’s woolly mammoth days.  I want high speed access.  24/7.  The strength of which not subject to normal weather events like bog standard rain showers.   Am I asking too much?  No, I isn’t.

Anyhoo…there’s been a silver lining, too, with not being online so much, one that I’m duly noting and noodling about.

Apparently, not reading about the amazing feats and ideas that others are blogging about has given my whirring brain a chance to consider a few very interesting ideas of my own.  They’re still in the toddler stage, these ideas, so I couldn’t dish coherently about them even if I wanted to.  But I know they’re growing, cutting teeth and crawling towards the next phase of maturity.  Never in a million years would I have connected the dots of “no internet” and “flash of insight”, possibly because so many of mine from the past have come from rabbit holes I’ve found online.  Yet, there you have it.

So, what’s the takeaway from this that I can carry forward?  Well, a) disconnecting from the world is conducive to creativity.  That’s hardly a new concept, but one I’m experiencing firsthand for the first time and in such a positive way.  b)  I’d like to be the one who pulls the plug on the router.  Forced marches are not fun, and neither are forced internet absence.  Or abstinence. Whichever word best applies.  Both do, frankly.

Due – Not Being Bizzy and Not Feeling Guilty

The impossible has taken place – I’ve barely thought about work on this trip, but that’s not the impossible dream – I haven’t felt an iota of guilt about it.  Not a jot.

Instead, I’ve totally savored our days spent walking around towns full of amazing buildings, churches, frescoes, gardens and eats. I’ve set my watch by the 4 PM ritual of a latte rather than an email inbox review.  Rather than mulling new service offerings for 2010, I’ve mulled over whether I want pasta for dinner or some other savory treat.  That’s been the nature of my to-do’s.  Yeah, there’s been some stuff to take care regarding the tree that fell on our house, but for the most part I’ve been focused on where I am in the here and now and not someone who feigns to be engaged with her surroundings but is really fretting about all the marketing she ought to be doing or all the appointments that ought to be on the calendar.

Now and again I get a biz-related twitch, but I’m letting it fizzle rather than fester.  What’s helping me do this is a thought I keep looping back to:  I may never again have this opportunity to be so unbizzy, to be exactly where we are at this place and time.

I mean, I hope I get to come back to Italy.  In fact, I think I will pine for it.  But that’s not something I can fully predict or control.  I can only grab hold of the here and now, and be guided by it.  That’s what’s tangible.  So, why the hell not?

Exactly.

Wrapping Up

Now, it wouldn’t be at all fair for me to rattle on about the beauty of what we’ve seen without providing a glimpse. In fact, it would be rude.  So, here’s a Flickr album I’ve put together for your viewing pleasure. (Link included here just in case you didn’t catch it at the beginning.)

And you’re 6000 miles away and can’t do jack…and don’t know the full extent of the damage…just know that a very tall tree whose graceful shade you previously admired fell during a rainy night, clipped the side of your house, knocked out the top half of the chimney, sent the upper deck smashing through the lower deck, and landed across your backyard.

Where there was once decking there is now air.

If you’re me (and Tim), when you get that news you make a few of the necessary phone calls, exert extreme self-discipline to not visualize the debris and freak out, thank the gods that nobody died, thank the gods that you have caring people in your life who will help you sort this shit out, and concentrate on finding a really good dinner.

We found out about the fallen tree when we reached Marseille, made our calls, took an aspirin with our aperatifs, and truffled the good dinner in due course in the Vieux Port area of the city.  Actually, it was a meal that will go down in our history of plate-licking good meals.  I had the Pintade (guinea hen) with some kind of savory mousse, seasonal veg and gratiné potatoes, and Tim had the pistachio encrusted salmon.  That meal fed more than our bellies.

Funny, isn’t it, how as soon as I yammer about my intention to pluck the feather of paying super duper attention to my travels, life gives that resolve a good whack.

I’m not backing down from that intention, by the way.  It’s a little wobbly on the ol’ feet at the moment, but still walking.  Which is all that’s needed.

{More about Marseille in a day or two.}

On my first day of practicing a kind of single mindedness towards our travels and simply relishing, referred henceforth as feather plucking, I noticed birds:  a green parakeet near the Tetra Grec, a magpie in Poble Sec, and geese in the 14th century cloister of La Seu Cathedral.

Actually, you can’t help but notice the geese.  I mean, c’mon.  There’s thirteen of them in permanent residence… in the cloister.  They have their own fish pond  and a steady stream of adoring tourists who slip them nibbles through the fence of their enclosure.  The saint they honor, Saint Eulalia, was tortured to death by the Romans, but the geese seem to have scored a better fate.

Bright and early tomorrow morning we hit the road, our GPS set for Barcelona.  That’s our first stop.  On Wednesday, we stop in Marseille for a couple days.  On Friday, we pause for a night in Rapallo, a town on the Italian Riviera.  That will tee us up nicely for a leisurely drive on Saturday to our first base, Lucca, a Tuscan town that officially launches our Italian adventure.

You have no idea how excited I am to be writing those last three words.

Bringing equal satisfaction and pleasure is the softness of our planning for this trip.  As in we haven’t done a whole lot and don’t intend to.

Our planning is deliberately spongy, and we are choosing to be more like sponges positioned for experiencing rather than on edge and scuttling like crabs from one “must see”/”must do” event or place to the next.  I don’t want to get boxed into worrying about what I might be missing on our travels; I want to pay attention to what we find.

Which is not to say we’re completely thumbing our noses at our guide book and declaring an embargo on travel organization.  It’s an exercise in balancing, just,  really.  (Rather than an exercise in  balancing + juggling + gum chewing + itinerary orchestrating)

I’m being spongy, too, with setting goals for this trip.  In fact, I don’t want goals.  No goals.  ( Do you hear me Coop of Doubt?  No goals.) And no, the earth’s rotation won’t be knocked off kilter as a result.)

Instead of having goals I want to pluck some feathers.  Whole different game, plucking feathers.  Right about now feather plucking looks like this:

• Pictures or sketches – I hope to regular-ish post a photo or a sketch of something  I see that strikes a chord.  What strikes a chord of mine might not strike a chord of yours, but I’m not going to get tangled up in all that. If it moves me, you’ll get to see it.  We’ll take it from there.  I want to say I’ll try to post something daily but don’t want to promise it, because – you know – I might get caught up in the experiencing and forget to do.
• Rekindling my wordy spark – I haven’t been all that moved to write for the past few weeks.  It’s a rare occasion that I don’t have something to say about something.  Lately though, I haven’t felt the spirit of impassioned articulation stirring.  I don’t have a resolution straight up my sleeve about that, but I’m keen to muddle my way back to writing here and elsewhere.   Patience, patience.  Kindness.  Lightness.  Buckets of curiosity.
• Tug some boundaries.  I can’t quite explain what boundaries are plumb for tugging.  It might be as small as not grumbling if we have dinner on Spanish time (i.e. 10 or 11 PM at night).  I have a feeling stuff around boundaries will creep up later, so if it sounds vague an squishy now that’s the way it is.  Besides, if the boundary topic creeps up later, it will be more interesting.  So, let’s let sleeping dogs lie for the sake of interest? (Speaking of sleeping dogs, my oh my the husky snores roaring out of our little terrier right now…)

Big day tomorrow.   So, time for bed.   G’night. Auf wiedersschen.  Bon nuit.  Buona serra.  Bye.