Author's note: the following tale may include historical inaccuracies, sweeping overgeneralizations, dubious fact-checking and outright falsehoods. That's how you know it's on the Internet.--CV
June 1999 was quite a month for Heather and me. We'd gone on our first-ever visit to Yosemite, moved into our new house in Carlsbad, CA, and spent a lot of time trying to coax our cat Crash out from under our bed. But the big adventure was still to come: our honeymoon to Italy!
Our plan was to fly into Venice, stay two nights, take the train to Florence and stay there for three or four nights, then head into Lucca and meet up with my new in-laws for a few days, then fly home from Pisa.
We left San Diego on a Monday evening via British Airways, took on fuel and passengers in Phoenix, then proceeded to Gatwick Airport in London. Most people are used to switching planes on trips; we switched airports in London. We boarded a bus and took the 45-minute ride to Heathrow. I told Heather, "At least you're getting to see Britain." Heather was hoping for a view of the City of London; what she got was a constant panorama of green hills and sheep.
By the time we arrived in Venice, it was around 11:30 p.m. local time. Here's where our adventure really began. We took a taxi from the airport to the "waterbus" terminal, dragging our luggage behind us. Riding the waterbus along the Grand Canal of Venice at midnight was a fun, surreal experience, like the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride brought to life. And the water didn't smell as bad as we'd been told it would.
We got off the waterbus at St. Mark's Square, again hauling our bags. I wondered aloud where our hotel was, and at that moment, a mysterious figure appeared. He was wearing a pale yellow three-piece pinstriped suit and glasses, and spoke British-accented English. "I think your hotel is just a block or so that way," he said, pointing. We thanked him, walked in the direction he'd indicated, and soon came to our hotel.
The hotel proved to be in a marvelous location, close to the Square and several of the main attractions of Venice. Heather was bemused by the room's air-conditioning system: a big humming box with a pipe hanging out the open window. "Makes the room really secure, as we're just on the second floor," she said. Luckily, no one entered illegally and we stayed cool.
The next day we walked into St. Mark's Square to find it full of tourists and the people who try to separate tourists from their money. We passed on several amazing, today-only tour offers and checked out some Renaissance art instead. I must admit, seeing a five-hundred-year-old painting of the Virgin and Christ Child is pretty cool ... the first 50 times. Luckily we were able to "cleanse our palates," so to speak, at the Guggenheim Museum, which featured modern art with a greater variety of subject matter.
Speaking of palates ... yes, the Italian food was exceptional. Breakfast was bread and cheese and coffee. Lunch consisted of light pasta or pizza. And dinner involved the full three-course, antipasti-pasta-salad sequence with gelato following. We had dinner on a restaurant right on the Grand Canal, near the famous Rialto bridge--it's hard to say what was better, the beauty of the surroundings or the taste of the food and drink.
Did we go on a gondola ride? Of course. We tapped a gondolier right by our hotel to be our guide through the canals. Heather thought he was pretty cute; I thought he sort of looked like an Italian Brad Pitt. Somehow Heather kept her attention on me during the ride and we had a terrific time. Gondolas (gondoli?) are constructed with a curve to the right so the gondolier can paddle on the left side and the boat will go straight ahead. Our guy sang, recited history and came within inches of canal banks, bridges, boats and other obstacles, but never once hit anything. Very impressive.
Later, we went to the famous "Harry's Bar," an old hangout of Ernest Hemingway's, where we paid the equivalent of a small mortgage for a couple of mixed drinks. We noticed our British benefactor was at the bar, wearing the same suit we'd seen him in the previous night.
Our second morning in Venice was spent sleeping in and getting to the train station. We boarded the 12:30 to Florence, settled in and watched the landscape of the Veneto and the hills of Tuscany pass by. Alas, there's no more disillusioning way to arrive in a city than by being screwed over by a cab driver. This Florentine joker headed right onto a gridlocked one-way street toward an accident scene, then took an extra lap around another block before finally deciding to head for our hotel.
Heather and I dropped off all our stuff and took the bus back to the center of town. However, the bus ride was problematic too: at one stop, the driver turned off the bus, got out and had a smoke for 15 minutes. Once in the heart of Florence, we were surprised to see and hear how crazy and noisy it is. There were a lot of locals riding scooters, talking on cell phones, and gesticulating wildly like cartoon Italians--sometimes all at once.
The famous Duomo was already closed for the day, so we walked down a few side streets to the Accademia, where Michelangelo's David stands. All the pictures you've seen don't do it justice; if you've seen the Dave in person, you know what I mean. We were very impressed and dutifully took our own inadequate photos.
Afterwards, we walked back through the center of town, toward the Uffizi museum. It was in this central square that we saw some of our favorite contemporary art of the trip: bronze sculptures of rounded, stylized people, cats, dogs, horses, birds and disembodied heads and hands.
The Uffizi, which we visited the next day, featured some Renaissance art we actually liked, along with the expected Biblical scenes. Botticelli's "Birth of Venus" and "Le Printemps" were like a breath of fresh air after stifling roomfuls of crucifixions, annunciations and ascensions. (On viewing one particular Biblical scene, we identified the major players in the painting--Jesus, Mary, John the Baptist, St. Jerome, etc.--but couldn't figure out who a figure dressed in medieval-style armor was. I thought back to college and Fine Arts 101 and remembered, "That's probably the guy who paid for the painting.")
Other highlights of Florence included watching a rowing race down the Arno River; visiting the Science Museum, which displayed a finger bone that once belonged to astronomer Galileo; and probably the best part, a stroll through the Boboli Gardens. These "gardens" are actually a huge park that overlooks the city, affording magnificent vistas of the Duomo and the surrounding countryside. We walked up hills and through stands of trees; it seemed every time we rounded a corner, there were exponentially more areas to explore. Finally we got tired and hot, and found a grassy spot in the shade where we took a nap. There are worse views to wake up to than that of Florence and the Tuscan hills.
We took a day tour to Siena and San Gimignano from Florence. Usually a coach tour is as uneventful as it is entertaining. However, that wasn't the case here: just as we were turning onto the autostrade, a car ran into the side of our bus. No one was hurt. Our guide and driver got off and talked to the motorists, then returned saying, "We have to wait for the police, because the people in the car are Germans." Huh? "It will be perhaps 20 minutes." So we sat by the side of the on-ramp for about a half-hour, and then drove away before the police came. Interesting ...
We'd been told Siena was a beautiful city, and we weren't disappointed. Less crowded (though not really less touristy) than Florence, Siena offers fascinating architecture and tradition. The latter is expressed most famously by Il Palio, a twice-annual horse race that dates back to medieval times, attracts over 40,000 people to the center of town and gives modern-day animal rights activists shit-fits. The race is run around a track in the city's amphitheater with little regard given to the safety and well-being of the horses and riders. Cheating, doping and gambling are fixtures of the event. And anticipation was running high: when we visited Siena, the first of 1999's two races was only a few days away.
My favorite attraction in Siena had to be the head of St. Catherine. In a beautiful church consecrated in her honor, one could view scenes from St. Kate's life--as well as her semi-well-preserved skull. There's still some skin left on it, though it's stretched back in a sort of eternal face-lift. Heather wondered why the church would dismember their revered figures and scatter the pieces all over Europe. I commented somewhat cynically (big surprise) that they had to attract worshippers (and their lire) somehow.
We had a delicious lunch with the tour group. At our table were a British couple and a Japanese father and daughter. We all laughed at the "clash of cultures" evidenced by who ate what: each of us was served a "salad plate" which included fresh greens and cheese. The British folks scarfed the cheese and left the greens; the Japanese ignored the cheese and polished off the greens.
On the way back to Florence, we stopped in San Gimignano, known as the "Chicago of Tuscany" for its skyscraping medieval stone towers. There were some pretty building and views here, though the central street screamed "tourist trap." I'd been intrigued by some billboards on the autostrade that pitched San Gimignano's "world-famous Torture Museum." I delighted in dragging Heather through this collection of racks, whips, chastity belts, stocks, iron maidens, hot pokers and pincers. The wryly written commentary on each exhibit was worth the price of admission in itself. At the end I signed the guestbook, noting I thought the museum was "smashing." Heather insisted I not include her name, adding the cryptic aside, "I don't want people to think I enjoyed it."
We drove out of Florence in a rented maroon Renault/Elf. The trip down the A11 took about an hour. Lucca is surrounded by Roman-era walls, which we drove by on our way to the Molino.
A bit of explanation: the Molino is my brother-in-law Onno's family's vacation home. I call Onno "the international man of mystery" because he's Dutch, his father was the Dutch ambassador to Italy, he can speak six or seven languages, and he was visiting Italy before moving his family from Slovakia to Japan. We'd be meeting Onno and Peggy (Heather's sister) and their two kids, Paul and Tessa (hereafter, collectively, The Family) for the second half of our vacation.
The Molino was actually once a working olive-oil mill, built hundreds of years ago. Since then, it's been retrofitted with modern conveniences (with varying degrees of success, as we would discover).
We were greeting warmly by The Family when we arrived, which wasn't hard to do as it was definitely over 90 degrees. It was the first time I'd met my new brother-in-law, though I'd been introduced to Peggy and the kids last Christmas. We all gathered on a shady patio for lunch: bread, cheese, fruit and champagne. The heat and drink made a nap deliciously inevitable.
Later--actually much later, we were going to be eating on Italian time now--we headed off to a local restaurant for dinner. I found I could amuse Paul and Tessa (not to mention myself) by drawing cartoons and maps at the table. We planned to head out to the beach the next day: the shore is less than an hour's scenic drive from Lucca.
At about 3 a.m. Monday morning, Heather and I were awakened by distant thunder, then entertained by hard rainfall and lightning. We slept in the next morning, then packed up for the beach as the weather was once again pleasant. The drive was as beautiful as promised, with green hills, picturesque towns and sea views. It was this day, in the beach town of Viareggio, that Heather and I would be introduced to the concept of "regimented beachgoing."
In Viareggio, the beach is subdivided into what I'd call "franchises." Each franchise (ours was "Ernesto") offers a parking lot, restrooms, showers, changing rooms, snack bar and patio area. Once we changed into our swimsuits (I was sporting a nifty blue one-piece), we walked past volleyball courts toward symmetrical rows of beach chairs and umbrellas. Onno spoke the the gentleman in charge, a swarthy Italian clad only in a red marble-bag, and we soon had our "assigned seats." Heather and I attempted to sit in some empty chairs that were not ours, and were promptly shooed back to our proper place.
On the way back we stopped in Lucca proper, walking and shopping. Heather found a great black leather purse. I briefly entertained the idea of purchasing a fine Italian-made suit, but abandoned it when I realized I'd have to stand still, try on different stuff, be fitted and so on. Not high-priority vacation activities.
Through the course of the next week, we fell into a pattern: late lunch, late dinner and wine with every meal--all of which had me ready to fall into a coma by 10:30 p.m. each night. Heather and I took a day trip out to Pisa, where we saw the Leaning Tower, as well as hundreds of tourists posing for photos as if they were holding up the tower. There wasn't much else to see in Pisa beyond the tower, so we took a trial run to the airport and headed back to Lucca.
We stopped in a pizzeria for lunch, probably right around the time they were closing for the afternoon. If the proprietess told us in Italian to go away, we didn't understand her. No other customers were in the restaurant; we were sent to a back dining room, along with an elderly gentleman acquaintence of the proprietess, who was seated at a nearby table, presumably to keep an eye on the stupid Americans.
On Wednesday of that week, we babysat Paul and Tessa while Onno and Peggy went to Cinqueterre (spelling?) overnight for a 10th-anniversary celebration. We took the kids back to the beach and out to dinner. They behaved well and were a lot of fun; Heather and I were nonetheless exhausted after we put them to bed. Cinqueterre was a place we'd heard good things about before we came to Italy, however, Onno and Peggy reported it was choked with backpackers.
The next day, Onno took Paul and Tessa to the local public swimming pool. Heather and Peggy went shopping in Lucca. And yours truly stayed back at the Molino, sitting in the sun, drinking beer, reading science fiction and freely slipping in and out of consciousness.
Our final day in Italy was spent with The Family, driving through the Tuscan hills, stopping at towns mostly unaffected by rampant tourism. The beauty of the region is as spectacular as the descriptions one often hears or reads. Our spirits weren't even affected by the fact that something had happened to the hot water system at the Molino, and Heather and I wouldn't get a hot shower until we got back to Carlsbad.
Though our honeymoon was truly wonderful, by the time it came to leave, Heather and I were ready to go home. The transatlantic flight was uneventful, and after we cleared customs in Phoenix, I walked into a men's room and sang "America the Beautiful" while standing at the urinal.
Heather and I made jokes all the way home about the honeymoon being over. Seriously, however, I'd like to think that even though our vacation to Italy is over, Heather's and my honeymoon has just begun. (Isn't that nice?)
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