8/1 1:02AM EST, 7:02AM Rome time
My first sight of Europe was sunrise over the Pyrennes. Its jagged peaks split the red dawn light into slivers that disappeared into the clouds and fog in its valleys. I have flown over the Rockies and I have flown over the Appalachian Mountains, but I have never seen mountains like these.
As we descended into Rome, I noticed that all the surrounding land was farmland. No subdivisions, or shopping malls, or clusters of more than 5 or 6 structures. Only farmland, rolling hills, sprinklers. (There were sprinklers watering farmland not 200 feet away from the end of the runway.) And pointy trees! They had so many pointy trees - exactly the kind you would imagine in an impressionist oil painting of the Tuscan countryside. I've always loved those pointy trees...
We landed without incident, and I was 10 feet into the jetway when I knew that something was fundamentally different here - on all the signs and placards and warnings, they placed the English words *on the bottom*. Above them, in much larger letters, they were in Italian! Surprise at this simple fact is going to be a recurring theme, I just know it.
My first task, after getting my luggage, was to board the metro train from the airport to Tiburtina, a big downtown station where I could catch a bus to L'Aquila. I found the train stop without any problems, got a ticket at the tobacconist (all the ticket booths were closed, and this was the "official" place to get them), and boarded the #3 train. The train was a double-decker, and I choose the upper deck - who wouldn't? Well, apparently everyone. I was starting to really worry (perhaps riding in the upper deck incurred an extra charge?) when a tourist-like couple joined me on the upper deck. It turns out they were from France and Turkey, and both spoke English and Italian quite well.
As the train sped us through the outlying areas of Rome, from the airport into the city center, I noticed there was a LOT of tenement housing. Much of it was in disrepair - broken windows, junk on the balcony, laundry and food hanging from various anchorpoints - and many of the apartments seemed unoccupied. Also there were a lot of little things I noticed:
- lots of little mini-cars on the road. Volvos, BMWs, Peugots, not a single damn Chevy in sight. I did spot a Ford Focus though.
- the sketchy hunchbacked old men in the railway stations are very similar in demeanor to those found in Boston, except here they're all Italian.
- the muzak on the train features an accordian
- the graffiti is all in Italian, except for some words/acronyms that happen to be English words (e.g. "HOT")
- actually, most written stuff is in Italian, which is to be expected, except it really shocked me because... well... every written public sign I've ever seen in the last 20 years has been in English (except for a semi-French weekend experience in Montreal), and expectations are just hard to undo.
Riding the train is sort of like a surreal inverse of riding the Boston T: in Boston, when people board the train chatting away in a different language, everyone looks at them with curiosity. In Italy, when people board speaking a different language, everyone is in on it except me. It's sort of like walking into a sypmhony concert hall and finding that not only is there a sweaty Metallica jam session underway, but the grungy teens look at you strangely because you're dressed in formal attire.
I took the train 2 stops too far and had to board one heading the opposite direction back to Tiburtina. After getting out at Tiburtina, I was overwhelmed by the lack of skyscrapers and the massive numbers of busses. From the directions my parents had given me, I was under the impression that I could just cross the street to the clearly-marked ARPA station (all the way guided by P signs and bus icons). Following these directions was complicated by the fact that the station sat at a topologically impossible intersection of streets, drop-off lanes, sidewalks, and busses. The busses further complicate the matter because there was an awful lot of them and no two looked alike (apart from the fleet of shiny, new blue busses parked in a parking lot). I bounced from official-looking person to official-looking person, asking "Dov'e autobus L'Aquila? ARPA?" I was able to ascertain that ARPA was (garbled Italian and a horizontal circling gesture of the hand which I took to mean "this general area") and that the bus to L'Aquila was "over there", namely, in the general direction of some more busses across some more Moebius pavement. I finally converged, in a degenerate-Newton-method fashion, on a platform and a ticket booth. I knew this was the right platform because there was a bus flashing "L'Aquila" in its windshield display pulling out of the station right that moment. Simultaneously relieved and frantic, I tried to flag down the driver but he looked at me like I was crazy.
After waiting in the line to purchase a bus ticket, I realized I had not missed the bus by a minute or two, as I had initially surmised, but rather that I missed it by almost half an hour, which is how long I had to wait in line. I finally got my chance to make the magical utterance "desidero comprare uno biglietti a L'Aquila". This should roughly translate to "would like purchase one ticket to L'Aquila". (In a pinch, you can use it to system test babelfish's Italian-English translation routines.) With the help of a nearby Enligh-speaking lady, I was able to purchase my ticket for the 11:00am L'Aquila bus. I had half an hour to wait, so I sat by the station and took in the sights. And smells.
Honestly, the smells, on average, were not bad. That was really part of the problem - if everyone stank of B.O., I would have developed a tolerance after a few extremely unpleasant hours. It was the one or two exceptionally pungent passers-by that would really knock me out and cause a slight but unavoidable twitch of revulsion. Also the cigarette smoke was something else. When I lived in Boston, I tried to make a habit of honking at the car in front of me if its driver tossed a cigarette butt out the window; if I were in Italy, I would need a second battery just for the horn, or at least tune up the current output of my alternator.
I also noticed, while waiting at the bus station, that Italians are a very Zen people. Cars drive where they will drive. Pedestrians walk where they will walk. Cursory stops are made at the red octagonal signs, and implausibly tall busses patiently rumble along behind slow, noisy scooters, their helmeted drivers symbolizing the traffic bull, transcended.
When 11am rolled around (oh, and there is no such thing as 11pm in Italy - it's 23 o'clock, and what the hell is A.M and P.M. you silly American) I saw an ARPA bus pulling into the station, punctually and well-labelled. I should have felt some brainstem-level suspicion but I was too charmed by all the little Italian men with their avuncular mustaches. I waited for everyone to de-board the bus (debus? debuss? unbus?), then approached the driver with my ticket in my hand and "L'Aquila?" perched pregnant on my tongue, when I realized he was in the midst of a very interesting cell phone conversation. Five minutes later, he hung up, walked down to where I was standing, got up on tiptoe so he could see over my shoulder, and began talking to some station personnel directly behind me. After what must have been a colorful conversation, he turned his sad eyes upon me. "Uh... L'Aquila?" The mustache shuffled and then, a finger pointed towards a different section around the station building where people were piling into a blue ARPA bus. "La (garbled Italian) (garble) (syntax error) (syntax error) (more Italian) L'Aquila. (garble)." "Ah! Grazi!" I ran to the other bus, feeling somehow that it would leave just as I got to its door, no longer thinking about Zen traffic and metaphorical bulls, just wanting to not get hit by the car coming from over there - HOLY SHIT where'd that other car come from and what's it doing turning into this lane - this is a crosswalk and i'm in it and new york state law has things to say about not stopping for pedestria-- ok he's really not stopping, let's run a bit here... ok there's the curb over there.. and... I'm across. Rule #1 for crossing the road in Italy: don't be intimidated by the cars. They will hit you anyway, and they can sense weakness like sharks smelling blood.
I got on the bus, waited for someone to check my ticket, and was surprised that we were underway and no one even bothered to do so. I fell asleep for a while, and woke up an hour later and caught the last half of the rainy ride into L'Aquila. The little countryside villages in the hilltops were quaint and very Italian. The groves of olive trees were, too. And so were all the Italians zipping by us on scooters and Smart Cabrios. We finally arrived at the terminal in L'Aquila and I began looking for how to get on the #78 bus.
The main problem was finding out how to purchase a ticket. The inside of the terminal was quite empty, except for a bunch of foreigners standing around a machine that looked very much like an automated ticket dispenser, except it obviously wasn't one (or wasn't working), because they were furious and without tickets. There was an information window thingy and I tried asking the gentleman behind it "Dov'e comprare biglietti?", but he of course replied in rapid-fire Italian (and not in perfectly-intoned British English, as I had hoped), and I think my look of confusion was so miserable that he stopped mid-sentence. I showed him the address of the hotel on my PalmPilot; I busted out my trusty Parker pen and wrote "#78" in 48-point sans serif; I even got out a ragged 5 euro bill. Nada. I offered him the pen and paper and he wrote down something in Italian; I launched the English-Italian-English dictionary software on my PalmPilot and wrote graffiti far more quickly than I had ever done before. Apparently he was asking me, "Where are you trying to go?"
About 10 minutes later, after much sighing, Palm stylus-tapping, butchering of Italian, and proffering of increasingly large denomination Euro bills (which I swear look like Monopoly play money), I finally got through to him and he held up a 3" stack of traffic token/tickets. I think I was trying to give him $40 at this point, and things were not expedited by the 1" by 8" hole through which we had to hand things back and forth to each other. After he determined I just wanted to buy tickets, he held up two fingers ("due"), pointed at the stack of token tickets, held up one finger ("uno"), then pointed at the wad of sweaty cash in my hand. I handed him one (uno) Euro. He shook his head, vigorously, and repeated: "Due" (point at tokens) "Uno" (point at money). Hmm... OK. I handed him another Euro (thus making "due" Euro, if arithmetic works the same on this side of the pond). He smiled and handed me two tickets. Um... OK.
I got my hard-earned tickets, walked outside, and took in my first bit of Abruzzo air. I gazed at the misty lower Alps and got drenched in the rain. It was absolutely wonderful. The #78 bus pulled up a little while later, I got on and told the bus driver where I wanted to go, and a few stops later, he stopped right in front of the hotel and let me out. I made my way up to the 2nd floor, knocked on door #209, and there was my mom and sister! Dad was still at the conference and after exchanging hugs I unloaded my bags, got out a change of clothes, and got into the bathtub. (There was a jacuzzi, so why not?) It was very nice to relax in the bath for a while, and I took my sweet time.
After dad got back at 2:30pm - I mean 14,30 - and we all got our stuff together, we went out for a walking tour of L'Aquila and some of its finer sights. We ventured down into the main square and saw many churches and chapels. We also passed lots of little shops along the side of the road. The shops basically fell into a few general categories: places to get food, places to buy cell phones, places to buy clothes, places to buy shoes, places to buy underwear and swimwear, places to buy all of the above. Oh, and insurance companies. The underwear venues were very... not so much indiscreet as much as... candid. No airbrushed Heidi Klum in gray Signature Cotton, classic-cut briefs, smiling, beckoning in the window; here the underwear stores have their goods draped haphazardly over cardboard cutouts, as if to say "you know what this is and where it goes, you know what it'll look like on you, if you're not interested, fine." The clothing stores have mannequins with unbelievably pointy nipples. We're talking in your face, abnormal, custom-made-for-alt.binaries.pointy-nipples.poke.poke.poke. Every single one, whether it's modelling a halter top or a sweater, is like this. It was very, very odd, and not the least bit of a turn-on. (Maybe this is what makes the underwear stores look good by comparison? Or is there something about Italian women that I just don't know?)
In any event, the food places are mostly deli/pizzaria/bar (with well-stocked liquor shelves facing the street) or deli/pizzaria/gelateria. I don't understand how so many of the same little delis and cafes and wine bars can sell so much of the *exact same brands* of pre-made sandwiches, coffee, and liquor, but I surmise that the locals must really like eating, sipping, and drinking. This would explain the other big advertised item: fat-reducing pills and devices. In terms of frequency of occurence in store windows, I think the word "cellulite" came third, with "Gelateria" and "Wine/Bar" tieing for first. Perhaps there is much about Italian women I don't know...
We made our way through the thicket of stores around the main square and went to the big fort/castle which served as the main defense for this entire area back in the day. It was very large and very old and very European and definitely neat. However, like most stone buildings here, it didn't do a whole lot except sit there and get photographed. We could have gone inside but it was almost closing time, and it didn't entirely look worth it.
We then proceeded down the winding little city roads and found the plaza of 99 fountain heads (though dad claims he only counted 94). It was rather odd, but kind of neat. Again, like most small plazas surrounded by 90-some-odd stone human heads puking water into a trough, it didn't do a whole lot but puke, gurgle, and get photographed.
I think I will soon have to readjust my expectations with regards to the animation and featureset of tourist sights in Italy.
We made our way back up to the hotel, through windy roads and several hundred feet of elevation. We refreshed ourselves a bit and went up to the 5th floor for a delicious dinner. The language demon reared its ugly head but fortunately the maitre-d' was moderately conversational in English, and we got some great food. There was soup (puree of vegetable), seafood risotto, grilled sea bass, smoked salmon, salad and grilled vegetables. We ate until closing time and were all utterly stuffed. The sea bass was particularly yummy and tender, and almost had a pan-fried taste.
Posted by Peter at August 1, 2003 04:26 PM