Castles & Wine

(Day 17 - 22 Adriatic Sea Expedition, Tuscany) 15 May 2015





Bus to Siena, walk in the rain down very steep, stone streets to car rental place where Millennial Italian Budget worker was never taught ‘customer is always right’ or that humans in the 2010’s use images and PDFs on their phones instead of printouts. Remembered how to navigate traffic circles, got a bit lost in the hills of Tuscany and then found our farmhouse B&B in Castelnuovo Berardenga. The calm quickly seeped in, removing the madness left by Florence.



The Casa Cernano B&B was much more beautiful than we imagined. Catherine, an Austrian native, her Staten Island born husband Lawrence and their young son welcomed us like family. We booked six days and and we immediately knew we could have stayed longer.




Day one was decompressing and catching up on some work out in the yard, surrounded by olive trees, under the Tuscan sun. Could be worse. We actually worked just about every minute we were out here in the country though this "work" is better than many people's vacation.



Dinner night one was fruit, cheese & wine at the farm house. The blue sky turned to orange sunset to starry night.



Breakfast was excellent: fruit & chocolate croissants, bread, homemade jam, yogurt, local cheeses & hams, cereal, eggs to order, coffee, juice... a perfect way to start a long day.









Tuscany, in case you didn't know, is all about wine & food, in that order. We were at the southern part of the Chianti Classico and we spent our first full day driving around vineyards and olive groves. Not an ugly place.







The first two medieval, stone walled towns we visited were very touristy. An Italian couple from the north suggested we go to San Gimignano and Volterra. Coming from Venice and Florence we were used to the camera totting crowds but we hoped for something different.



We finally found it at San Gusmè! There must have been ten people out in the village during the three hours we were there: six tourists, three cafe workers and a local old man walking at a turtle's pace cracking jokes to us in Italian as we passed. The castle/hamlet was right out of a fairytale. I kept looking up for Rapunzel.



Went to "the big city" of Siena one day. I was excited to see the center square where they shot the opening scene to the recent Bond film Quantum of Solace. It was a bigger piazza than most in bigger cities and stunningly beautiful. There is a yearly bareback horse race in the square as depicted in the Bond pic. We had a Spritz and beer here at sunset, spectacular.





No trip to Tuscany is complete without visiting a winery. We got a private tour of Fèlsina winery after another couple cancelled. Traveling “off season” has it's advantages!







Most of the food we had in the area was very good but we splurged one night on a fancy restaurant with a known chef in Villa a Sesta. The restaurant was L’Asinello (translation: Donkey). Heaven.

Tom Hanks & The Selfie Stick

(Day 14 -17 Adriatic Sea Expedition, Florence) 12 May 2015

Florence was a mixed bag of extremes for Vân & I. There was some foreshadowing before we even got into town. On a crowded train a guy was not happy that we were standing so close to his girlfriend and gave us some attitude. Then Vân got in a scuffle with an elderly American on our way to the hotel. The sidewalks are nearly nonexistent and the traffic is complete anarchy. We were sweaty, frustrated and exhausted by the time we found our accommodation.



But then we met our good friend, Emmy Award winning super artist Andy Ristaino and all was good. A few Aperol Spritz’ near the city’s impressive Duomo and all were happy…

Well, mostly happy. My thumb started to swell two days earlier in Venice. My usual reaction to this type of medical condition is to ignore the pain in hopes that it will go away. The swelling got worse and by the time we meet Andy I could no longer bend my thumb or even lift light objects. I could not open twist-off bottle caps. Drinking my Spritz was difficult. Time to go to the hospital. We made tentative dinner plans with Señor Ristaino but warned him our hospital trip could take hours.



Over seven hours later, around 1:30am, Vân shook me awake in the hospital’s waiting room. A doctor was finally ready to see me. We witnessed some interesting events on a Friday night in the emergency room of Ospedale Santa Maria Nuova. Drunks who had crashed their scooters, drug addicts who have overdosed, foreigners who were drunk and sprained their ankles, a man who looked well over 100 years old and couldn’t breath. We overheard one American on his cell phone telling a colleague, “She was very drunk then passed out. We couldn’t wake her. What are we going to tell the company? Yes, she is breathing.” After some very broken English and a whole lot of single finger typing, the doctor gave me three prescriptions and had my finger wrapped in gauze with antibiotic cream. Sorry we missed you for dinner Andy.



Next plan was to meet Andy for lunch the next day. After a few WhatsApp communications, Vân and I were on our way to a restaurant recommended in one of The New York Times excellent 36 Hours series, Osteria Belle Donne. Fail #2. Apparently Tom Hanks, Ron Howard and Felicity Jones were filming the third part of The Da Vinci Code right outside the popular eating establishment. Vân and I were turned away from many alleyways leading to the restaurant until we found Andy sitting on some church steps having had the same experience. Damn you Tom Hanks!



Meal attempt #3 was Trattoria Toscana Gozzi Sergio, known to locals as Da Sergio. The New York Times said the indigenous inhabitants scowl at foreigners trying to eat at this simple, “locals only” restaurant. We got a great meal of very traditional food sans scowls.









Next was a random walk over the river and through the woods to find the highest point above the city. Beautiful neighborhoods, super cool street art, massive allergy attacks, a church with many graves.



Back down the hill to find an aperitivo (Italian happy hour) place which we never found. A few beers at an Irish bar called the Friends Pub before heading over to our best dinner of our trip so far: three pizzas, take away, from Gusta Pizza, two 1-liter beers and a bottle of chilled white wine all consumed on the steps of Basilica di Santo Spirito while listening to live music with a healthy crowd of locals. Perfection. Thanks for the pizza recommendation Christine Ristaino!

p.s. Dear Florence, you have a serious Selfie Stick problem. There is help. For the sake of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, please seek it out. As for your problem with loud, drunk, obnoxious college-aged Americans massively infecting your city, there is no known cure, sorry.

Avoid the Herds, Drink Spritz

(Day 10 -13 Adriatic Sea Expedition Bologna to Venice) 8 May 2015

Packed up all our gear and headed to breakfast with our bags: two cappuccinos and two plain croissants, eaten the Italian way, standing at the coffee bar.



A painless two hour train to the watery city. The pain was getting the €7 Vaporetto or water bus from the central station, Venezia Santa Lucia, to the fairly far away neighborhood where our B&B was located. The water bus, which took us down the Grand Canal to the Arsenale stop (not kidding), was very crowded. You would think that the main form of transport in such a touristed city would have a plan for suitcases and backpacks. Nope. And this is not even the ‘High Season!’ Not a comfortable ride.



Having been to Venice before, I had one suggestion for Van: we avoid the masses of tourists. Even though we are traveling in the ‘off-season,’ Venice is known for its huge crowds and I know there are beautiful parts of the floating city where we can avoid them.

We had arrived a day early and had grab a last-minute B&B. It was in the Castello neighborhood. A nice place in a quiet part of town.





The next three nights we had a room in the Cannaregio neighborhood where our friends Jim and Lynn Willhite were staying. I knew this was the Jewish neighborhood but I didn’t know the Venetians restricted Jews in this ghetto for more than 270 years until Napoleon Bonaparte conquered the Venetian Republic in 1797. Wow, anyway, incredible neighborhood. If you want to be in an area where the locals really live and the tourists rarely visit, this is the place.





We bumped into Jim and Lynn a day before we were to meet them. We were exiting one of the many thin Callèttes (alleys) when we saw a bridge where many people were enjoying adult drinks in stemmed glassware. I immediately said to Vân, “We need to have a drink on that bridge.” As I looked around to see where to buy said drinks, Vân heard her name being shouted. Jim and Lynn had sniffed out the drinking bridge before we even arrived. Many glasses of Prosecco were drunk that night in the sunset and dusk.



There are approximately 340 bridges in Venice. As we tried to avoid the crowed bridges we found this cute, small, railless bridge. We should have gone in search of the “Bridge of Fists” and the “Bridge of Tits” but again, we were avoiding what we started calling “herds,” large groups of organized tours, often from cruise ships. We borrowed the term from what Rick Grimes’ group calls packs of zombies in The Walking Dead television series.





We discovered the ‘Spritz’ while in Venice. These nuclear red or orange looking drinks are made with white wine or sometimes Prosecco and a dash of some bitter liqueur such as Aperol or Campari. If made with white wine, some sparkling mineral water is added. Very, very refreshing on a hot day.





Older Italians seem to be much nicer that younger ones. Simple suggestion to the unhappy Italian Millennials working in the tourist industry: If you’re not happy at your job, get a job in another industry and stop being obnoxious to those you are paid to serve.

Eat, Pray and Eat, Love and Eat

(Day 8 & 9 Adriatic Sea Expedition Riomaggiore to Bologna) 6 May 2015

Breakfast in the usual spot. Put our dirty clothes in at coin-op Laundromat and ran around taking last minute photos and video.

The luggage was a challenge to get on the train. Way too much for two people to carry. We’ll have to take care of this somehow.

I drank two 66CL bottles of Birra Moretti, Italy’s tall boys, on the train. People drink cans and bottles of beer just about anywhere here and it doesn’t seem to be a problem. Where has the United States gone wrong with it’s excessive prohibition on alcohol consumption in public?

Excellent graffiti on trains in Italy! I miss this in New York City. This piece is from the university area of Bologna (more on this in a bit). I didn't take any from the train window unfortunately.

I didn’t have much expectation for Bologna. Maybe this is why I loved it so much. Old, old buildings. Feels very medieval, probably is. Our hotel is on the fourth floor right in the middle of town. It has one of those old school elevators like the one in the film Angle Heart, just much cleaner (this photo borrowed from the interwebs from the Angel Heart film).

There are about one million inhabitants of Bologna and it’s first settlements date back at least to 1000 BC. The Celts ruled this city way back when and now it’s home to the oldest university in the world, University of Bologna, founded in 1088. This is the university area:

Bologna is known for it’s food and Vân and I are ready to put the weight we lost walking in Cinque Terre back on via Bolognese sauce, tortellini and lasagna, all originating from this city.

You know that toxic luncheon “meat,” Bologna Americans feed their kids? Yes, that originated here as well. But it’s actually animal flesh in Italy, not… whatever our food factories produce for us.

My Bologna has a first name,

It's O-S-C-A-R.

My bologna has a second name,

It's M-A-Y-E-R.

Oh I love to eat it everyday,

And if you ask me why I say,

Cause' Oscar Mayer has a way with B-O-L-O-G-N-A!!!!

It’s unlikely you forgot the commercial but if you weren’t born before 1973, here it is: