It must be something in the air, the water or the wine.
My friend was driving (sometimes it felt like flying) us back to Turino from Cinque Terre on one of the more spectacular autostradas in this country of spectacular scenary when an idea hit me; the people of the Italian peninsula have always been builders; especially of roads.
The sheer numbers of tunnels through mountainsides and the corresponding artfully designed bridges across the chasms we went through and on revealed not only the result of a need to connect point A with point B, but to do it with a singlemindedness of purpose and panache (to use a French word) that is nearly non-existent in the US. It is rare that a US interstate bridge is anything but strictly utilitarian in design and implementation these days, but the constant rhythmic tunnel-bridge-tunnel-bridge pattern of the autostrada was not an just impressive civil engineering achievement, it had a melodious grace about it as well. The barrel arches of the tunnels with their romanesque entrance fronts and the columns the bridges sat on all echoed the work of previous cultures in centuries past.
I spent the first weekend in Cinque Terre, a string of five fishing villages clinging to the cliffs of the Tyrhennian coast. We hiked between them, I fell off the narrow trail while allowing a party to pass in the opposite direction and immediately felt like I was going to roll all the way to the sea, 500 meters below. I was able to catch myself after only 3 or so of those 500, though, but I did tweak my ankle a little bit. The trails between the towns is at places no more than .3 m (1 foot or so, and I think we all know I am a bit wider than that.
After that, my friend went back to work and I came south to Siena, from where I am writing this morning. I did a whirlwind tour of Florence yesterday and will probably come back later in the trip. I saw "David" and the Uffizi, as well as the Duomo, the Baptistery and the Ponte Vecchio. I rode the Euro Star between Milano and Firenze, which is supposed to be a "bullet" train (and paid extra for it), but it never went any faster than an ordinary train.
Siena hosts a wild horse race twice a year called "il Palio" that is held in the main piazza and consists of local boys and thier horses careening around a mattress-lined square for 3 laps, which apparently takes about 90 seconds total. More on this later.
I've found a great post-dinner hang out called "Sal de Te", which is a tea room where the owner is very friendly, has lots of board games and books and sells beer, wine and hard alcohol as well as pastries and other yummy things.
I'm using Siena as my base for exporing Tuscany and I'll be heading off to a local hill town called San Gimignano in a few minutes.
On a side note, this is the home town of St Catherine of Siena, yet another in a long line of mystical saints from Italy. The Dominicans built a large church here to hold her head. I saw it yesterday (both the church and the head). Apparently Galileo's finger in a bottle is on display in one of the science museums (Milano, I think). So, I now truly regret not seeing Napoleon's penis when I was in Paris last year. Yet another opportunity lost.
I now declare myself cultured; I've been to the Getty in LA, the British Museum and National Gallery in London, the Louvre in Paris and now the Accademia and the Uffizi in Florence. The only one left is the Donut Museum in San Jose.
Back to the Italy page.