Stresa in the Sunshine

I realised that after my long story about sly old ladies skipping the queue at the train station, I never posted anything about my actual day in Stresa.

I've probably said this before, but I love Stresa. It's as if they combined the best of Italy and Switzerland and put them into one little town surrounded by stunning mountains and lakeside scenery.

That day two weeks ago, my first goal was to do something energetic, so I got the cable car up to Mottorone (Ok, so not that energetic!) and set off for a bit of a hike. This is where I finished up:

If I hadn't been starving and short of water, I would probably have done the 2.5 hour walk back down to Stresa, but under the circumstances I decided that it would be better to go back to the cable car. In the interest of diversity, I decided to go back a different way, and it turned out to be steep, exposed and definitely longer than the way I came. The sun beat down and the sweat dripped off me and the half hour back to the cable car seemed endless. I arrived looking as though I had been swimming and was too embarrassed to sit in the restaurant to eat, so after mopping myself down in the toilets, I bought a sandwich and found a place to hide among the trees to eat it.

Then I got the cable car back down to Stresa and jumped straight in the lake, which is probably what I should have done at the very beginning. Hiking at midday in 35 degree heat is not good for your health!

The Post Office Again

Just in case anybody was thinking of sending parcels from an Italian post office and was utterly terrified after reading about my experiences, I thought I would post the end of the story here. Four of the boxes arrived within 3 days with most of the stuff intact (although one broken mug did lead to a whole other adventure).

The other one arrived almost 3 weeks later, when I had given up hope and was assuming that customs officials had taken umbrage at or a fancy to the bottles of wine that were carefully wrapped and included in the package. When I went to collect it at the post office, I was surprised to be given a completely different box, smaller than the one I posted and covered in Chronopost International labels. Some of the stuff was missing and a lot of it was broken. A lot of the things were newly wrapped in cardboard. A lot of the things were covered in red wine.

I'm assuming that since so many of the things were broken and since they had taken the trouble to repackage the whole lot that this was somehow the post office's fault and not mine, but there was no explanation, so who knows?

Incidentally, one of my friends posted boxes and boxes full of old clothes from Italy and wasn't even asked at the post office what was in the parcels.

Buying a Train Ticket

I came back to Milan on Saturday, and with a day to spare before getting the train back to Paris, I decided to go to Lake Maggiore on Sunday. Before I even got on the train, however, I found enough material for an entire blog post.

The trains to Lake Maggiore leave from the Porta Garibaldi train station, which has over 20 platforms and lots of departures, even early on a Sunday morning. Despite the frequency of the trains, however, the ticket office was closed. This would not have been a huge problem if two of the automatic vending machines hadn't been broken, meaning that anyone who hadn't bought their ticket the day before had to either use the regional ticket machines, which only accept coins, or the one main line ticket machine, which took bank notes but could only give change up to 4.95.

This initial hurdle eliminated many participants before the ticket buying test had even really started. Many wandered off towards the bar, which was desperately asking customers to pay for their 85 cent coffee using something other than a 50 euro note. The rest of us passed on to the competitive part of the exam: queueing like an Italian.

The queue was long. I arrived and took my place behind a guy with a suitcase. An elderly-ish woman came and stood next to me. Possibly even slightly in front of me. Despite the fact that she was invading my personal space, I sidled a little further into the space between me and suitcase man.

At this point I should say that I am normally nice to my fellow citizens. I give up my seat on the bus, let people with one item in front of me in the supermarket and would have no problem letting someone who was about to miss their train go in front of me in the ticket queue. Where I am perhaps not so nice, however, is in the fact that I like to have a choice about it. If old ladies try to cheat me, there is no way they are getting my place in the queue. Being British, however, I am incapable of turning to people and saying, “Excuse me, I was here first.” Instead I sidle, refuse to make eye contact, and spread my feet and elbows out in an attempt to fill the space that they are trying to steal from me. So, for several minutes, that is what I did.

Old Lady Number 1, however, was an amateur compared to the next one that came along. Peering over her glasses, she pretended to be examining the machine in an attempt to understand how it worked. She sighed a lot and addressed a few questions to the crowd. (“What do I do? Does it take banknotes? Can I buy a return ticket?”) A man near the front of the queue who was clearly a better person than me answered all her questions.

“Oh, signore, do you think you could help me buy my ticket?”

And with one neat move, there she was by his side at the front of the queue.

The fun didn't end there though. The machine refused to accept people's banknotes. It spat out their cards and cancelled their transactions. People at the back of the queue were offering change to people at the front in a desperate attempt to get their tickets on time. Old Lady Number One began to feel concerned. She asked Gentile Signore to help her. Gentile Signore looked worried. He had a train to catch.

“Don't worry, I can help you,” I said. We arrived at the front of the queue and, after a couple of attempts, bought first her ticket, then mine. She thanked me, and I smiled back.

“My pleasure,” I said. And it was.

Apparently, living in Italy can bring out the wartime spirit in all of us.

In the Veneto

When I first came to the Veneto, it was not my favourite part of Italy. After the Amalfi Coast, the lakes, and the rocky cliffs of Liguria, its plains seemed dull and the mountains on the horizon far more enticing than the flat fields that surrounded me.

That was before I discovered thunderstorms and the big, dramatic skies that come with them.

Shooting Stars

Last Wednesday I discovered a new Italian tradition. For an hour and a half, from nine thirty until 11, I lay on a sun lounger in the dark, staring up at the sky and looking for shooting stars. It's traditional to do this around Ferragosto (the 15th August), when there are many of them in the sky. I saw about 7 or 8, but the children I was with (aged 7 and 10) managed to see “20 real ones and lots of fake ones.” I was distracted some of the time by trying to convince Child 2 (aged 7) that there weren't any wolves lurking in the garden ready to come and get them, and some of the time by convincing him to pretend to be the wolf to scare his brother, and some of the time by laughing so hard whenever we tried to do wolf calls in the dark.

It's something everyone should do. Lie down in the dark, stare at the night sky and watch as the stars multiply as it gets darker and your eyes adjust to the lack of light. Watch the aeroplanes, some low and some far, far away and be amazed as every so often a shooting star zaps across the sky. It feels like watching the universe go by.

And if all that sounds a bit too exaggerated, make sure you have a wriggly and slightly scared seven year old next to you to bring you back down to earth.

Turandot

On Friday night, we went to the opera in the Arena di Verona. Tickets for a plush red velvet armchair in the stalls cost a fortune, but if you are prepared to sit for five hours on a hot stone step, you can get a seat at the top of the arena for under 20 euros.

I went to the opera in Verona last year, to see Rigoletto, and, although it was worth going just for the experience, it wasn't necessarily something that I was desperate to repeat. Turandot was different though. It had all the over the top extravagance that you expect from opera, with a gorgeous set, an exciting story, an enormous cast and fantastic performances. Sometimes the stage was so busy that I didn't know where to look – at the opera star singing the arias or the acrobats and dancers who were creating a virtuoso backdrop to the story. Like everybody else in the arena, I was looking forward to hearing 'Nessun Dorma', but I didn't expect it to be so entrancing that it sent shivers down my spine. The poor orchestra didn't even get to the end before the whole of the audience burst into applause for the singers.

I like the idea of going to the opera in an enclosed theatre, where I would probably see and hear what was going on better, but the atmosphere in the Arena was something special. Sitting there with my wonderful Italian friends, in a building constructed by one of the world's great civilisations, listening to music by a native composer, I was reminded that there are many things about Italy that are hard to beat.

Bardolino

On Sunday, we did actually make it to Lake Garda. We went to Bardolino, a town pretty much like all the others on the eastern shore of the lake, with pretty streets, clean water to swim in and lots of extremely civilized tourists. We were particularly taken with this mother duck and her one little ducking, who very kindly stopped to preen their feathers just a couple of metres away from us on the beach.

There was also this little leaning tower just behind the harbour. Almost as good as Pisa!