Holidaying on the Italian Riviera

When Italians talk about their holidays, the first question is usually the same: are we going to the mountains or to the seaside? Understanding Frenchman and I were lucky enough to be able to do both this summer, as after our stay in the Valle d'Aosta and our friends' beautiful wedding, we headed off for a few days on the Ligurian coast, a.k.a. the Italian Riviera.

There are lots of lovely things to do in this part of the world. You can visit the Cinque Terre, the 5 gorgeous little fishing villages nestled in the cliffs west of La Spezia, mingle with the international jet set in Portofino, or hike the Alta Via dei Monti Liguri, high in the mountains which drop so dramatically down to the sea.

This time round, however, we decided to have a relaxing time at the beach and booked a little studio in the little fishing village of Laigueglia, half way between Savona and Sanremo. If you would like to do the same, here are some hints and tips from our experience:

Where to stay: there are hundreds of hotels in towns all along the coast, but we preferred to rent an apartment in order to have more space and more cooking options. We found ours on www.abritel.com, a site which has a good choice of accommodation with clearly presented information.

Transport: we had a hired car, but a train line runs nearly the whole way along the coast and there seemed to be plenty of buses. If you have a car, it's worth using the motorway for speed and high-up views, and the coast road if you want to visit the towns of the region at a slower pace. Be prepared for lots of tunnels on the motorway, and steep, narrow, twisty roads if you venture out of the town centre. Our studio was at the top of a hill that had to be taken mostly in first gear, and, for the safety of our relationship, I chose to let Understanding Frenchman drive it every time.

Activities: in August, it was too hot to do much other than stroll around the towns and go to the beach, but there are lots of trails in the hilly hinterland behind the coastal towns. The views are spectacular, but we sweated out about ten litres of fluid each on one little climb from the coast up to the ridge behind Laigueglia, so be careful!

Places to Visit: some of the towns seemed to be little more than strips of hotels, while others had more character. We liked Alassio for its shops, Noli for its architecture and history and Sanremo for its old town, which is a maze of dark stairways and little alleyways which manages to be both picturesque and a bit rough around the edges, and a huge contrast to its glamorous new town, seafront and casino. Sanremo also has pretty public gardens.

Choosing your Beach: at first glance, the Italian Riviera looks quite uniform, with endless promenades and narrow beaches covered with coloured umbrellas, but on closer investigation, we found quite a lot of variety. Most of the beaches are private, and you have to pay around 13 euros to rent a deckchair and parasol for 2 people for the day. While I kind of resent having to pay to go to the beach, I would say that if you plan to stay all day and don't have a parasol of your own, this is probably worth it, because the sun is so strong that spending the whole day without shade is neither healthy or very pleasant. Because we preferred to go to the beach a couple of times a day for an hour or so, we sought out the public beaches, which are easily recogniseable because the the parasols are a non-matching mishmash, rather than being uniform and arranged in straight lines. In Laigueglia, the public beach was stuck way out at the end of town, but Noli's was bigger and very central. 

It's also worth thinking about if you want sand or shingle, and deep or shallow water. We were quite surprised by the difference between Noli (shingle, and it got deep too quickly for small children to play there safely) and Laigueglia (which had sand and lots of very safe, shallow water.

Irritating Creatures: I thought that the sea air might chase away the mosquitoes, but if we hadn't had repellant we would have been eaten alive on our terrace in the evenings. We also spotted a few small jellyfish in the sea, but they were quite easy to avoid and nobody seemed too bothered by them.

Eating: Local specialities include mixed deep-fried seafood, and trofie (a type of pasta) with pesto. We got in the habit of having at least one gelato per day, with the best one coming from a shop in the centre of Alassio. I can't remember the name, but it had a long, curved counter perpendicular to the entrance and an enormous range of flavours. Finally, we were surprised not to find fruit and vegetable markets more easily, but there is a little supermarket in the centre of Laigueglia with excellent fruit and vegetables. We found it on our last evening and were so excited, we bought lots of delicious things to take home with us. We were also delighted when the owner of our flat offered us four big, juicy tomatoes from the garden to eat with our dinner one night.

We were surprised to find that there were hardly any other foreign tourists in most of the places we visited. Nearly all the other people at the beach seemed to be Italian families on their annual summer break.Our time in Liguria wasn't the most action-packed of holidays, but it was nice to relax, take in the lovely scenery and live like an Italian in vacanza for a little while!

Italians in Slow Driving Shocker!

The summer of 2013 presented me with the opportunity to tick off one of the items on my Ultimate Bucket List. Unlike a regular Bucket List, which is simply a compilation of things you want to do before you kick the proverbial pail, to qualify for the Ultimate Bucket List must meet a second criterion: an increased risk that the kicking might happen during your attempt rather than before or after it. 

Because I am a bit of a wuss, driving in Italy was risky enough to qualify.

My first experience of stereotypical Italian driving occurred when I was working in Campania during the summer of 2005 and a local guy who was, ironically, a member of the Protezione Civile offered to drive us to a nearby town for a party. After an hour long white-knuckle ride where Mr Civil Protection zigzagged along the motorway at double the speed limit, taking both hands off the wheel every couple of minutes while he called his friend for directions (the friend had no idea either) before overtaking on the hard shoulder and finally parking on the hatched triangle between the main road and the sliproad while he worked out where to go, we emerged pale-faced from the car looking terrified enough to convince someone else to offer to drive us back. This was followed by a year in Milan, where I never sat behind the wheel myself but was a fairly regular passenger and was impressed enough by what I saw to write this post. Which was why doing my fair share of the driving on our journey from the Valle d'Aosta to the Ligurian coast via Milan grew in my head to be something of an adventure, and worthy of the U.B.L.

When we popped out of the Mont Blanc tunnel and on to the autostrada, I realised that I wasn't very sure what the speed limit was. Italian roads, like French ones, often don't have times to tell you the actual number of kilometres per hour if it conforms to the national speed limit for that kind of road. In France, as long as there are other cars on the road, this isn't a problem, as the vast majority of people will be driving at precisely the limit plus 2 or 3 km/h . If you let your speed drop to even just 2 km/h below the limit, the person behind you will probably very kindly remind you to speed up by tailgating you and flashing their lights. 

In Italy, we had no idea.

Unsurprisingly, people seemed to be doing more or less whatever speed they wanted. 

Surprisingly, that speed, more often than not, seemed to be well under the limit, often by up to 20 or 30 km/h.

(In fact, the limits are exactly the same as in France: 130/110/90/70/50 depending on the type of road. The main difference is that the Italians seem to enjoy using a wider range of numbers for more dangerous sections of roads, such as 100 and 80 as well as 90 and 70.)

Our second surprise was that we never heard anybody honking their horn in the whole time we were there. Not when people parked in the middle of the narrow Ligurian high streets and nobody could get past. Not when we had to queue for twenty minutes to pay the tolls on the Turin bypass. Not even when we had to a poor old man hadn't understood how to pay for his ticket to get out of a car park and kept everyone waiting behind him, meaning that the time limit on everybody else's tickets ran out and we all got stuck inside.

All in all, driving in Italy was a relatively stress-free experience, apart from when we got stuck behind someone driving slowly on the motorway or couldn't honk the horn when we were desperate to get out of the car park. 

Just in case anyone is disappointed, as I was, a little, that driving in Italy isn't guaranteed to provide the adrenaline buzz I expected, I can confirm that people rarely use their indicators and you can still experience that sense of tension as the car in the lane in front of you repeatedly veers to the left as if it is going to pull out in front of you. I guess most drivers are still too busy gesticulating and using their mobile phones to keep their hands on the steering wheel.

Estate Valdostana

The Valle d'Aosta is a tiny region nestled in the north-west corner of Italy, next to the borders with France and Switzerland. Tiny in horizontal square kilometres it may be, but in its verticality it is grandiose, home to some of Europe's most impressive and beautiful mountains, including, but not limited to Gran Paradiso and the Italian sides of Monte Cervino (the Matterhorn) and Monte Bianco. It's also officially bilingual, having once been part of Savoia/Savoie/Savoy, but unlike in Italy's other bilingual region, Alto Adige/Suedtirol, whose questions of cultural and linguistic identity stem from much more recent and painful history, it carries its two languages with ease. Most of the people we met seemed to be mother-tongue Italian speakers but all were perfectly at ease in French. One old lady we met sitting outside her house in the hamlet where we were staying explained to us that, unlike most people in the area, she never learned to read and write French because she was at school at the time of Mussolini, but she could speak it fluently.

I learned to ski in the Valle d'Aosta five years ago, and I remember being awestruck as the instructor named the peaks of Europe's highest summits that were dominating the view in all directions. (Gran Paradiso is the highest mountain entirely in Italy, and as well as Mont Blanc and Monte Cervino, you can also see Monte Rosa, the highest peak in Switzerland and the second-highest in the Alps.) But if anything, I liked it even more in summer, when as well as the sweeping vistas, I could enjoy the detail of the tiny wild flowers, the stone houses with their characteristic slated roofs and the geraniums that spilled over every windowsill and flower pot. It's a story that tells itself better through photographs than words, so without further ado:

The centre of Vens, where we stayed. As well as this hotel, there was a church and some houses, and that was all.

Pretty Flowers

Roofs and mountains

Monte Bianco emerging from the clouds.

Wild Flowers

Butterflies were everywhere.

Wild Rose

Free range chicken in the town square!

Hiking up to the Lacs de Laure

Approaching the Lacs de Laure

Lac Inferieure

Waterfall

Looking across the valley from Vens.

Vens

Bologna: The Portico Walk

Luckily for our waistlines and our general health, Bologna had an excellent antidote to all that eating: one of the world's longest portico walks, leading from the Porta Saragozza on the edge of the city centre, to the Sanctuary of the Madonna of San Luca on  a hill overlooking the town. There are 666 porticoes covering a distance of almost 4km and many steps climbing up to the 300m high summit. While the porticoes are designed to protect pilgrims from the weather, it's actually better to do the walk on a clear day because the views from the top, looking over the city and out to the mountains behind it, are beautiful. The church is also gorgeously decorated and definitely worth a visit, although the famous icon of the Madonna is a little disappointing, being practically swamped by its chunky gold frame. And as a further reward, the walk down is a lot less strenuous than the hike up!

Looking down the steepest bit of the walk.

View from the Sanctuary

You have to continue down the other side a little to get this perfect view of the sanctuary itself.

Bologna la Grassa

Bologna's third nickname, "La Grassa", proved during our visit to be at least as well justified as the other two. From the moment we arrived to the moment we left, every meal was delicious, as were the many snacks we had in between.

On our first night, we went out for drinks before dinner and discovered that Bologna has adopted the Milanese concept of aperitivo with gusto. Our friends claimed that it's still more difficult to have an entire meal for the price of your drink than in Milan, but we were nevertheless plied with delicious snacks which were extremely hard to resist, especially as our hosts were friendly with the bar owners, meaning that it would have been rude to refuse.

Which would have been fine, except that we had reservations for later on for a pizzeria in Via San Vitale (which I think was probably Spacca Napoli but I'm so behind in writing up this blog that I can't guarantee the recommendation.). Despite the reservation, we still had to queue for our table, but after about fifteen minutes we squeezed our way past the waiting crowds, inhaling the delicious aromas of tomato sauce and melting cheese, to the small room at the back where tables, chairs and customers jostle for space to consume the restaurant's ENORMOUS pizzas. The sensible thing to do would have been to follow the example of the group of girls behind us, who ordered one pizza between about four of them, but we weren't sensible and ended up with our own individual pizzas that were so big there was barely room for the glasses on the table. Luckily the restaurant was happy enough to wrap up the leftovers for us to take home, but I learned a useful lesson: if you plan to do this, don't order the pizza with fresh rocket and parmesan, because it's probably the only one that won't taste great when you take it out of the fridge the next day.

On our second day, we worked up an appetite by climbing the Torre d'Asinelli, before going for lunch at Bracce, another Neapolitan restaurant also in Via San Vitale. Understanding Frenchman had the tagliatelle al ragu', which is the authentic version of the dish known to the anglophone world as spaghetti bolognese. I had some generously filled pasta which was supposed to have ricotta inside, but a pumpkin one also got in by accident and it was delicious too, so I would highly recommend either one. We were too full for dessert, but they did bring us limoncello to finish off with, and even my friend who doesn't really like limoncello drank it and said that it wasn't bad. Bracce was also the restaurant with the waiter who really should have been an actor, who after discovering where Understanding Frenchman was from, spent the whole time we were there doing a very funny impression of a Parisian waiter, while simultaneously talking to my friend in German because he had decided she had a German accent when she spoke Italian.

The final gastronomical delight that we encountered in Bologna was breakfast. In the culinary capital of Italy, even the brioche are more solid, more cake-y and more buttery than elsewhere, and even more delicious. It was probably just as well that we left after three days, although not without taking plenty of Parma ham and parmesan cheese with us!

Bologna la Rossa*

If I was mildly frustrated by the experience of being a tiny dot in the hoardes of tourists in Florence, Bologna was the perfect antidote. Not only were we visiting friends, and therefore slightly less "touristy" ourselves, but even when we did go touring around the city's many sights, we didn't have to queue for anything. Not once.

The most obvious buildings to visit are the Two Towers, which were built in the 1100s and are the symbol of Bologna. There used to be many, many more, but they either they were demolished or they (gulp!) collapsed. Both of the towers lean, although the one that you climb, the Torre d'Asinelli less than the smaller Torre de Garisenda.




Small Tower from Big Tower



Climbing the (very old) wooden staircase.



Another interesting building is the Basilico di San Petronio. It is the fifteenth-largest church in the world, but would have been bigger than St Peter's in Rome if the money for its construction hadn't been spent on the building the university instead. It does hold one record though: laid into the floor is a 66.8m meridian line that is part of the largest sundial in the world.

 

One quirky attraction in the city centre is this arcaded walkway, where you can speak into one side of arch and the sound echoes so that you can be heard perfectly on the other.

 And finally, for perfect views of the main square, you can't beat climbing the stairs in the Palazzo d'Accursio (the town hall) and looking down at what's going on below:

 


* Bologna is often called "la rossa" or "the red" for two reasons: the colour of its bricks and the colour of its traditional politics. The political red has faded somewhat in recent years, but the bricks, as this post proves, remain red (dish brown) as ever.




Queueing with the Carabinieri in Florence

When Understanding Frenchman and I went to Italy back in October, the 27 hours we spent in Florence were something of an afterthought. Our main plan was to see friends in Milan and Bologna, and Florence just happened not to be too far from our planned itinerary.

Turns out, though, that it's not really a place you should try to visit as an afterthought. Or in 27 hours. Because in Florence, to visit just about any place when you haven't reserved days in advance tends to involve spending several hours standing in a queue. Also, you have to pay (a lot) to visit absolutely anything, including churches, so wandering in and out of places just to see if they're interesting isn't really an option.

The most impressive waiting we saw was when we lined up for half an hour in front of the Uffizi to book a slot to visit the following day. The massed queue was managed by the carabinieri, (one of Italy's many police forces), but that didn't stop some brazen souls from jumping it. Once inside, we were informed that all the times up to three o'clock were already full and, with a train to catch at 5pm, we were forced to give up. I was also sad not to climb up to the cupola of the cathedral or the bell tower, but again the queues were so long that both times we tried, we would never actually have got to the front of it before either the place closed or we had to be somewhere else.

Nevertheless, we managed to have a good time, mostly by strolling around and admiring all the gorgeous architecture from the outside:

View of the Duomo from La Rinascente department store. A sneaky look at the view from their tiny terrace is FREE!

Ponte Vecchio. Also free, but better enjoyed from a distance, especially if crowds scare you.

 

Santa Croce church, with a massive piece of public art in the piazza.

The Campanile. I would have loved to climb it, but even just getting this shot made me happy because it's so tall, it was hard to fit it all in!

 

We also visited the interior of the Duomo, which is free, and where the highlight is definitely the cupola, which everyone stands underneath straining their necks to see this amazing work of art:

 

 You just look up, and up and up!

 

 Eternal fires of hell

 

I particularly liked this cheeky skeleton.

 



 In such a touristy city, I was surprised by the friendly service in nearly all the places we ate, particularly from our lunchtime pizza seller who made the effort to check that the temperature of our slices was just right, and the charming waiter in the little trattoria on Borgo Pinti. And on our last walk back to the hotel after dinner, we came across a mime artist doing an old fashioned performance that kept us and the rest of the audience amused for at least half an hour... and there was no queueing involved!

 

 

Sirmione: the Good

I know that normally the good is suppose to come before the bad and the ugly, but actually, our horrible experience at the hotel in Sirmione was just a bad beginning to what turned out to be a very good day, so much so as to almost wipe the memory of the morning from our minds. We found a friendly pizza place for lunch where they didn't seem to care that we were dripping wet, although the waitress did raise her eyebrows when my friend ordered a tuna and onion pizza with no mozzarella but with anchovies instead. Even the hoards of Germans who dominate the tourist business in the Veneto and have caused wuerstel to appear on every pizza menu haven't changed the idea that you don't mess with Italian culinary tradition.

After lunch, and feeling relatively dry again, we went to visit the remains of the Roman villa which lie at the very point of the peninsula. According to its name, the villa belonged to the Roman writer Catullus but in fact historians don't believe that he ever lived there. The villa was enormous, with its own baths and olive groves and even if you're not very interested in Roman history, the ruins combine with the views over the lake to make a very scenic place to wander around for an hour or so.

After the villa, we visited the castle. Despite a childhood spent running around endless old Scottish fortresses, I think this is one of the best castles I've ever visited. It has a drawbridge, a moat and interesting parts that stick out into the sea, as well as towers that you can climb to get a fantastic view of the peninsula and the lake. Highly recommended.