Chiusi

“Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things – air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” – Cesare Pavese

It was about an hour and a half train trip from Rome to Chiusi. When we arrived at our stop I wasn’t at all sure we were in the right place. It appeared to be in the middle of nowhere. We disembarked and stood on the wooden platform, feeling for all the world like a soldier returning home to a barren train station in the middle of 1940’s Saskatchewan. I expected tumbleweeds to amble by. There appeared to be no one about, it was quiet and still though it was the middle of the afternoon. By this time we had been travelling for a brutal number of hours and things were starting to feel a little Kafta-esque – especially when it came to dealing with the elevator. 

The platform was a little lower than street level and so an elevator was required to get up to the actual station. It took us a bit to realize that once the elevator car had been called and had seemed to come down, that we were required to open a door to enter the elevator. We felt rather silly waiting and waiting for the door to open when all that was required was that we not take automation for granted. Once in, Barry figured out that to get and keep the thing moving, one had to push the up button and keep your finger on it until you reached the next level. Take your finger off and you stopped moving. The whole alien elevator was a little thing, but different enough in our travel-addled altered mental state to make us feel like strangers in a strange land, indeed.

We entered the station. There were a couple of other people around. A young couple looked like they were set for a holiday of hiking. They were from California and seemed very relieved to find an English-speaking person to help them with the elevator. We went out and stood by a tiny sign that had both ‘taxi’ and ‘taxi’ with an accent on it. No one in sight, though there were a couple of taxis parked haphazardly against the curb.  A man drifted by, “taxi?”, he asked. We nodded and he disappeared around the side of the building. Back he came “He’ll come soon”.  I took a peak around the corner where there was a small taverna attached to the station house. Several men sat with beers and cigarettes. 

A few minutes later a short, stout man came round the corner. His cheeks were ruddy and only half his shirt was tucked in. “Scusi. Hot day. Need to finish my birra”. He was quite jovial and piled our luggage into his cab. We told him our destination – Villa Il Patriarca. “S’okay”, he slurred, jerked the car into gear and proceeded to drive us, at great speed, to the Villa. The way there was very hilly, with very windy roads, lots of curves, sharp hairpin turns, and at one point we encountered a section of the road that had fallen away such that it was down to one lane. I have no idea how drivers coming from opposite directions determine who gets to go first but in our case, we did. Perhaps because our driver was just so much faster than the van we encountered on that stretch (or couldn’t care less). The route to the Villa was very pretty, the taxi driver very jolly (and tipsy), the air conditioning jacked up to maximum a relief. The taxi driver pulled into the driveway of the Villa with a great spraying of gravel and cheerfully took our suitcases into the lobby. Barry tipped him very well, with a thank you. The driver looked at the money and his eyes bugged a bit. “Grazie, you!”  I thought he was going to hug Bar. It wasn’t until later that we realized that tipping is rare in Italy.

Chiusi Train Station