Villa Il Patriarca, Chiusi

“The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.”  - Rudyard Kipling

 Waving the very grateful and still tipsy cab driver off back to his tavern (and hoping he actually made it there in one piece), we entered the lobby of the Villa. Patriarca is a nobiliary villa which was constructed above the remains of an original ancient Etruscan structure. It has only 22 rooms and is very, very lovely. We were greeted by the desk clerk, Luigi (no!, I thought to myself, that is just too stereotypical), a gracious man who, with limited English made us feel very welcome. As Barry checked us in, I wandered about the lobby, furnished with a piano, beautiful paintings, and gorgeous inlaid ceilings. Luigi told me the history of things as I mused about – a man very proud of his hotel. When I stopped to stare down a floor window in the middle of the lobby, he explained that below were the ruins and that they had been built by the Etruscans 2005 years ago. 

He introduced to us Christian, the man that would take our luggage to our room (which was up four flights of stairs  - no elevator). Christian nodded curtly at us and before I could get out all of “those suitcases are very heavy”, he had hefted one in each hand, clean-jerked them off the floor (he was not a very tall man) and proceeded to run up the stairs. Barry and I crawled up the stairs after him. He opened the door to our room, threw open the drapes and shutters, nodded curtly again and left – all before we could utter one “grazie”. The inside of the villa is lovely but really the more beautiful are the grounds and the surrounding countryside. After hours and hours of travel, Bar and I just listened at the window for a bit. Nothing. A slight burr of cicadas, birdsong, and nothing else. There was the slight odour of burning cedar and poplar – as from a grill, and beyond that a predominant odour of lavender. And lemons.

We took an amble around the grounds. Banks and banks of lavender, lemon trees, a few tangled olive trees, lush Tuscany views of hills and vineyards.

Later that evening we opted for eating dinner in the hotel’s less formal trattoria rather than the more formal restaurant. At a table next to us a local man sat with his newspaper, a whole bottle of wine, and his little dog at his feet. I loved that we saw dogs in restaurants, on trains, on buses, and in bars throughout Europe. We ordered a glass of wine each. The waitress exhibited a little bit of consternation that we were not ordering a whole bottle. After all, I suppose, this nearby gentleman had ordered one all to himself. Barry and I were so travel-whacked at this point that I’m not sure what a whole bottle would have done to us.

The food was home-cooked and so served slowly. The man read his newspaper and drank his wine through five complete courses. Between courses he would take his dog out on to the nearby patio for a pee and have a cigarette. Occasionally he took a phone call. He obviously knew some of the people that came after us as he greeted them with a handshake. Eventually he left, his little dog following obediently behind, a cigarette quickly lit up and hanging from his lip, and his newspaper tucked under his arm. After a delicious meal, and a great deal of travel, Bar and I retired. The next day we were to return to the Chiusi train station to meet our cycling guides.

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

Arrival in Italy

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”  - Mark Twain

Augustine of Hippo said “the world is a book, and those who don’t travel only read one page”. As my husband, Barry, and I are such inveterate bibliophiles it seems only appropriate that travel be the reality manifestation of the many mind trips we have taken with books of all ilk. My husband and I are in our sixties. Up until last year we had not travelled anywhere, except for a few camping trips with the kids, for forty years. Our world was feeling very small. Last year a river cruise along the Danube was a first tentative venture into travel. The historical and cultural richness took our breath away (and used up more than a few brain cells trying to absorb all that information). But you are very pampered on those river cruises and the exposure to the reality of the countries visited very controlled so we wanted to try something more adventurous.

So this year, it is to be a gourmet cycle trip to Tuscany, Italy and then a venture through Norway, Denmark, and Sweden travelling predominantly by train and ferry.

We had to book these trips last year to ensure a space and take advantage of various deals. I tend not to get too excited about trips until practically the day before we leave as I am always sure that something will happen to complicate things. Call me cynical or negative or whatever but I have never been let down in that respect. As writer John Steinbeck mused: “A journey is like a marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it”.  I had major surgery less than 8 weeks before our departure and was not able to ‘train’ for our bike trip. I was hoping that the ‘reserves of fitness’ possessed before the surgery would be enough to still make cycling around Tuscany possible. To add to the worry, several people upon hearing about our upcoming trip made the same comments: “you do know that Tuscany is all hills, don’t you?!?”  Well, no, actually, I hadn’t known.

Nonetheless, it was too late to cancel and no refund so the trip was on, regardless. Besides, I had learned all that Italian. I wanted to be able to use it. And I am so very glad it did go on, despite some ‘complications’.

Except for arriving in Rome and leaving from Bologna, the cycling tour was situated in the province of Siena.  The itinerary was Rome to Chiusi, Montepulciano, Pienza, Castelmuzio, Petreio, Monticchiello, Montalcino, Rocca D’Orcia, Castelnuovo dell’Abate, Siena, Radda in Chianti, Castelnuovo Berardenga, Firenze (Florence) and Bologna.

We arrived a day before the cycling was to begin so as to get acclimated and to hopefully shake off any jet lag (I would suggest that two or three days for acclimation is more realistic). It was a long flight. We flew from Vancouver to Montreal, and then Montreal to Rome. We disembarked from the plane and immediately got on a train that would take us from the airport to the main train terminus in Rome. The route took us along some not very beautiful, mostly industrial places along the outskirts of Rome. It seems that it doesn’t matter where you are in the world, tagging is pervasive. Just the language was different. There were a lot of run-down little houses along the track. But though the houses themselves were disheveled, each and every one of them had a lushly growing garden, full of vegetables and flowers. In a couple I even saw the occasional lemon tree. We were served water on the train (still or sparkling? – a question that was asked in every restaurant or trattoria that we ate at, or train that we rode). Water came to be all-important in Italy. The heat was already oppressive and the non-stop travel to this point had made us parched. “Si”, we answered the porter gratefully. “We’ll have ‘still’, and grazie”.

We arrived at the Roma Termini about three hours before our connection to the little town that we would meet our guides at the next day. We were lugging two large suitcase and two backpacks (having packed not just for Italy but for the colder part of the trip later on). Laden with this and not really having enough time, we knew that this was all of  Rome that we would see.  The terminal was huge (29 platforms), it was a zoo, and it was architecturally beautiful. The building is of monumental dimensions, has immense glass walls, concrete ceilings with vaults and arches (mirroring the Roman barrel vault architecture of the ancient Roman baths across the street), the train sheds go on forever, and pigeons and swallows nest in the girders. The termini supposedly services over 150 million passengers a year. I think they were all there on the day we were. The pigeons have become very skilled at walking around and through thousands of feet as they go about looking for popcorn leavings and tearing apart cigarette butts (hundreds and hundreds of cigarette butts). We checked with an official looking man that we were in the right place and that the platform noted on our tickets was indeed the right platform. He assured us that all was well, to come back to the gate in three hours, and to watch very carefully for pickpockets. This was a refrain that we were to hear over and over again – watch for the pickpockets. So we found a couple of places in the (very hot) waiting room. And people watched – and dozed. I couldn’t remember when we were last ‘not moving’. 

An Italian family next to us pulled a picnic lunch of lovely-smelling sandwiches out and sat and talked and ate as though they were on a beach. They hailed various people as they came in like it was a frequent event to meet at the terminus. An elderly gentleman in a black suit and bare feet in sandals sat and dozed with his small Dachshund dog in his lap. Three different denominations of nuns came in and out of the waiting room. One group very quiet and sedate, another garrulous and giggling, another pulling their own picnic lunch out of various baskets and containers, one offering a bun to the elderly man. The dog took it instead and the nun giggled as the man dozed on. One group in black habits, one group in brown habits, one group in blue and white.

Finally our train was called and we boarded wearily, on to the small town of Chiusi.