So, I was up at 4AM, on a truly uncomfortable Italian train with the exact same itinerary as the one I’d been scheduled for, but with the convenience of running an hour earlier. It was quite chilly at Torino, in the early morning, but the subsequent ride through the beautiful French Alps was mind-blowingly worth it.

I had a different issue. The compartment door had no lock. I could not fathom how I could jury-rig one. I stowed my heavier big red bag in the rack above my head, and clipped the arm strap around the rack; Safe from the casual snatcher. The lighter small backpack I stowed under my window seat with my shoes. I then reclined my bed, and reclined the middle set of seats, leaving my backpack pretty well concealed, with more room for me to stretch out.

It must have been at Verona that I stirred and saw a man sitting upright in the seat by the door. He had de-reclined the middle seat by my head, and was sitting with his right leg splayed into the space it had freed. I sat up to appraise my new roommate, and something just didn’t feel right. I sat and watched him a little while, dazed with sleep. I started adding things up. He wouldn’t greet me or even look at me in any way, he seemed pretty uptight. Fair enough. He had no luggage. Okay, maybe he’s just taking a late ride between two stations. Why did he choose to sit in my dark compartment, which had had the door shut and curtains drawn, when the train was barely populated? Surely there must be a more favorable seat. He had moved my newspaper across the compartment, and when I retrieved it he made no note of having moved my stuff around. If you rearrange someone’s possessions and wake them up, and you desire to spend some portion of the night in their company, the least you can muster is a sheepish grin.

My creep detector started to go off. This guy had his foot inches away from my backpack, whose company I valued greatly. He was hoping I’d be tired enough to relax and go back to sleep while the train was still waiting in the station. After that, he could make off with my bag. Well, this was my suspicion. After a few minutes of tense waiting, he skulked off down the hallway. After the train left the station, I checked around for him, and I found no sign, just a lot of dark, empty compartments with open doors.

Along the idea that perhaps the authorities would want a description of a suspicious person to keep an eye out for, I tried to talk to the conductor about it. He said he’d send someone around who spoke more English. I was later visited by a pair of chubby women, who explained that there would be police on the train at Milan, but they seemed to lose interest once I clarified that I wasn’t actually robbed.

I chalked it up to a victory for me, for taking some basic precautions to secure my belongings, and to trusting my instincts and wits enough to keep an eye on the guy. Even though I’d technically won the encounter, I’d passed the test, and, above all, I hadn’t lost the laptop computer, images, travel journal, postcards, and other important belongings that rest in the small backpack, the experience put me off balance and it was some hours before I could relax again.

Otherwise, everything was the same, except for the placemat that described, in Italian, how it was all Italian beef, adorned with fresh, quality ingredients, accompanied by a picture of a Big Mac with an Italian flag sticking out of it.

I used to work at Burger King!
I used to have it my way!
Now I’ve got an M-16!
I kill Iraqis my way!

Airborne Ranger is what I want to be,
You get to shoot!
And kill!
And mutilate!

Ranger!

The garden at Maximilian’s Castle.

After breakfast this morning, I strode with an Italian and a German pre-school teacher over to Maximilian’s Castle, built on the Adriatic coast, a few meters from the Ostello. The castle was nice and luxurious, and the gardens were very pleasant. I could see why the guy on the bus had talked the castle up: you could very easily kill a morning or an afternoon just relaxing in the tranquil gardens.

I thought that it was interesting that during the whole of her trip, horticulturist Janet managed to miss every botanical garden she wanted to visit along the way, and the day after, I find myself standing amongst a wide variety of trees, and an Italian garden. Unfortunately, she was no longer at my side to rattle off horticultural trivia.

I missed the bus that would have gotten me to the train station on time to catch the train for Budapest that would have gotten me to Ljubljana. I actually saw the bus pull up, and decided that if I ran with my bags, I was unlikely to make it. Best to leave things to chance. I caught the next bus twenty minutes later.

At the station, I saw on the board that the 1036 for Budapest that could get me to Ljubljana was running twenty-five minutes late! It was still there! If only I could possibly purchased a ticket in an Italian train station in time! A mere twelve minutes later I ran down the hall with my €20 ticket and was seated in a train compartment. A moment later, the train rolled from the station.

I could swear that the first bus had lingered for me to catch it. I could swear that the Italian ticket line somehow managed to squeak me through just in a nick of time to catch the train that just happened to be sufficiently late to pick me up. So, I had to wonder, what awaited me in Ljubljana?

I decided to head for Trieste to get to Slovenia. Why not? I was accosted by two panhandlers the moment the machine issued my ticket and change. One spoke English, the other did not, both had googly eyes. 24€ via Venice.

On the train from Venezia Mestre to Trieste I considered my options. The Lonely Planet book Janet had left me omitted Trieste. A black hole. My Hostelling International guide listed a hostel 8km NNW of city center. That did not sound promising.

Upon arrival, it was pretty clear that I was at the End of Italy, a narrow strip of territory between Slovenia and the sea. The departure schedule at the station had about half or a third as many entries as any other Italian station I’d been at. Most trains were bound for Udine or Venezia, one or two Eurostars for Milan, Rome, trains for Bucharest, one or two overnight to Romania, Germany . . .

To Ljubljana, it was a bus. The bus left at 1730, and arrived after 2000. I considered my options, and decided that I’d rather not struggle around Ljubljana in the dark after the Tourist Information Center had closed. How to get to the Trieste hostel?

A tobaccanist told me which bus to take, and sold me a ticket. On the bus, I gave my seat up to an old lady, and considered whom would be best to ask for the right stop. A middle-aged man looking over my shoulder saw the address for the hostel, and explained that it was a nice place, right on the beach, near the castle. All of this was communicated with hand grestures. I answered his questions as to my origin, and the old lady and her old lady friend mavelled to each other all the more with each progressive answer, “America.” “California!” “Chicago!!”

They didn’t elaborate, though.

The guy then indicated that I should get off. The bus actually stopped right behind the hostel, but it was necessary to walk back down the road a piece to switchback to its front door, on a beautiful, rocky coast, with Trieste visible back where I’d come from, and a castle just a stone’s throw away in the other direction, which the guy on the bus had praised and explained that it was important to visit.

Upon checkin, the lady looked up at me and asked if I was related to the famous American movie director Ron Howard. No, but people have told me I remind them of Richard Cunningham plenty of times before.

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Colorful fall scenery seen while walking across the river in Padova.

All the better one and two-star hotels were full. We stumbled on a $150 room in a four-star hotel, but opted instead for the $20 beds in the youth hostel, which was actually pretty cozy. Since we’d burnt most of the morning searching for lodging, we decided to forego a visit to Venicia, and stay in Padova, strolling through the markets, eating fruit. I spent some time reading the international versions of Time and Newsweek thanks to the Cafe in the middle of Padova that is always open, while Janet went window shopping and dropped by the train station to get the refund for our previously soppressed Eurostar.

That evening, in her dorm room, Janet ran into the trio of girls she’d spent time talking to on the train. They were exchange students studying in Bologne, visiting Venice for the weekend. One was Swedish, another Argentinian, and the third a Korean girl who had moved by herself to Toronto to finish high school when she was fifteen.

Since we weren’t sure what “so” meant on the big board, and we weren’t about to stand in the one, very long line that everyone else was standing in to get the skinny, and since there were so few people around, especially ones who seemed to know anything, we went ahead and bought tickets from the nice, naive, machine for the first train we could get to Venice: a Eurostar that was on the board, scheduled to leave soon, with an “so” annotation.

We subsequently learned that “so” was another way of saying “sopp” which is another way of saying “soppresso” which apparently means “cancelled” although other trains were actually “cancelled” or routed “via soppresso” which confused us when we saw that a train was leaving for Milano “via” another station that was on my map, so I was able to convince Janet that that “via” did not meant cancelled, via soppresso, soppresso, sopp, or so.

We had actually woken up early, but since our 9:30 Eurostar wasn’t meant to be, and the IC for Milan via Bologne wasn’t until 10:36, I got in line to change the tickets, while Janet went looking for breakfast. At about 10:30, I was very very near the ticket window, but since lines are never single-file in Italy, I wasn’t sure when I’d actually see the ticket guy. From what I could tell, we had an IC ticket clear to Venicia, which was valid to get us to Bologna, as a connecting point. The Eurostar fare was billed as an IC plus a supplement that was on a seperate ticket, that we could get refunded. Janet was inclined to stick with the line and have the guy make sure everything was cool, but at 10:34, with maybe one or two people still ahead of me, and other anxious folks wishing very much to squeeze in to see the guy, I made an executive decision to ditch the ticket line and get on the train, which we managed to do shortly before it started rolling for Milan.

At Bologne we found ourselves in a line with other luggage-toting folks, running through the underground walkway between platforms to catch the Venicia train in time. Since it was late Friday we decided that finding a hotel in Venezia would be either impossible or insanely expensive. We stopped short in Padova instead. We found ourselves in a one-star hotel that charged more than what it said on the room’s door, so on our way out the next morning, we collected a receipt, with the intention of subsequently contacting the hotel licensing authority in Padova. But first, we wanted to find a better hotel.

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Ancient steps that we walked up, carved in to the cliff on Capri.

We took a ferry over to the island of Capri. Janet wanted to see the famous Blue Grotto, which is a bit of a ways from the port where the ferry comes in. We decided on exercise and hoofed it up and up and up and up these stairs carved in a cliff by some ancient peoples whose only means of getting to the other side of the island was to climb up those steps in the cliff. Well, it was good exercise, and back down and down and down again to the Blue Grotto.

The Blue Grotto is this little sea cave that, well, the sunlight shines in through the sea water and the place looks blue. You pay a few bucks to take your turn on one of the rowboats that is constantly being paddling into the grotto and back by strong Italian men who understand the tourist value in embodying a stereotype. As they row into and out of the grotto, they sing loudly that ladadadeeda that I know only from Tom and Jerry.

The Blue Grotto . . . is blue. Well, Janet liked it, which made me feel that the trip was worthwhile. We took a bus back up the hill, before taking the ancient steps down the cliff, and back to the ferry to Napoli. When we got off the ferry we stumbled across a pasta show, that was being held on Naples’ waterfront to encourage Italians to eat pasta. What we were told is that Italians were getting fat, and the government wanted them to stick to their healthy traditional foods. So, for dinner, we ate pasta at the pasta show.

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White columns stacked in front of what was once some important public building.

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Vivid colors on this ancient wall mural greet the modern eye.

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Raised sidewalks and pedestrian crosswalks. The spaces between the stones in the street are for wheeled carts.

We rode on from Rome to Naples. As you travel North to South, Italy shows you two sides of Europe. The north, Milan, is like anywhere else in Western Europe, where wealthier people shop in fancy stores. As you move South to Naples the sun gets brighter, the mountains get more barren, and the people hang brightly colored laundry on clotheslines out of their homes. Rome represents the Southernmost outpost of Western Europeanosity, beyond which, to the South, lies a land that’s still wild. Sicily is where the mobsters came from, and Janet picked our hotel because the guidebook described it as “safe and affordable.”

We visited Pompeii, which is a bit of a train ride outside the city, but worth the trip. We wandered for hours through this ancient Roman city, frozen in time by a volcano. Walking along narrow, but sturdy streets, with raised sidewalks on either side to keep the pedestrians out of the filth. Columns, mosaic floors, painted walls, restaurant ovens . . . it felt very much as if we were in some special place where ancient Roman culture was still fresh.

Walking along modern Naples’ crowded streets was challenging, as sidewalks were narrow when they existed at all, and the cobblestone streets had guys on scooters racing whichever way they wanted. Napoli is home to Italy’s best pizza, and we picked our way over to Napoli’s best pizza place. It was a pilgrimmage, for me, because Chicago has the best pizza in the world. But as I learned in Rome, Italian pizza is an entirely different food, magnificent in an entirely different way. In Naples we experienced the penultimate pizza.

The pies are thin crust, and they come in margherita and marinara - which means with cheese, namely thick slices of fresh mozerella, or without. The pies come in medium size or large and even though the menu and the food is simple, it is a wonderful, delicious, filing meal. They offered water or coke. I had two pizzas and two cokes. It is unfortunate that Chicago Pizza and Neopolitan Pizza share the same name, because they are different foods, and they are each the best of what they are.

Pizza Forum
Via San Giovanni in Laterano 34-38 (Telephone 06 700 25 15)
Variety of tasty, authentic Napoletian pizzas near the Colloseum. Great service and value.

Internet

Yoon’s Park
Via G. Lanza 73
Inexpensive, friendly, laptop accessible, with provision for Asian keyboards.

At the Colosseum, we encountered a cute little kitten, who had a cold, and any number of parasites, and sunburnt ears, but seemed well-fed. It was a lonely critter, so we wiped the snot off its face with a tissue, and I pet it for a good long while, which helped clean its fur, and brought much purring. As we walked towards the elevator to check out the second level, it excused itself from my arms and snuck back in to the ruins.

We then walked over to Trevi Fountain, back up to the theater to see our movie. On the way back to the hotel, Janet spotted a supermarket which had really cheap food. We got juice, and some sandwich material, and from this was provided our evening meal.

We set off towards the Colosseum area, and ended up in this museum commemorating Italian unification, which was itself pretty dull, but was way up high, and gave us great views of Rome. Dinner was had at a deli-type of place near the station. Janet seeed to like it, even though the place was full of smoke, coming in part from the chef, who was smoking as he prepared our food. I swear my pasta came in a bowl that hadn’t been washed. The clientele were pretty colorful as well. One family was from somewhere south of the Rio Grande, dark Indian faces speaking Spanish. A guy in a suit, sitting near us had a woman in tight pants walk up to him and start speaking in French and Italian, while a third guy joined them in Italian. The bill was pretty reasonable, and they gave us grapes for dessert.

I had seen posters for Robin Williams’ “One Hour Photo” and one of the waiters directed us to a nearby movie theater. “One Hour Photo” was not playing there, in part because it wasn’t open ’til next week. We found a glossy promotional piece that explained what movies were playing where, and a friendly movie theater employee walked over and pointed out to us the section with subtitled movies. Janet was keen to catch “The Tracker”, an Australian movie playing at a little art house a few metro stops up.

Metro tickets can only be purchased from a vending machine, which can only give change in multiples of five cents, for tickets that cost €,72. The machines furthermore refuse to short-change either you or themselves, so without a couple of cents in change, you can not aqcuire a ticket. We established all of this in Italian.

When we arrived at the relevant station, we asked a young guy who was standing around with throngs of other youth for directions. He grabbed the glossy movie thing, flipped through the pages some, puzzled at the theater we wanted, asked a couple of buddies, and pointed us in the wrong direction. We later ran in to some nice older ladies who asked if we were walking or driving. It was nine blocks from the Metro station. When we got there, the movie was well underway, and we spent some time talking to the ticket vendor, Giorgio, who was chilling outside with some English-speaking buddies. He was originally from Naples, and recomended a good Naplotean pizza place near the Colosseum.

On the way back, we didn’t have any two-cent pieces. I told Janet to forget it, because you don’t really need a ticket, and we have expired tickets, and that’s not a bad story for some dumb, exasperated, frustrated tourists who are just trying to get home, in the unlikely event that the authorities should ask to see our tickets. I’m sure there are a fair number of Romans who have trouble enough getting these insane tickets, such that the authorities have probably given up hope.

I think the ticket thing goes like this: people are sensitive about the subway raising its fares, but the system needs all the money it can get, so when they convert to the euro, they don’t round the prices at all but translate the lire fare directly into €,72. This is fair, of course, but the problem is that the existing ticket machines can only dispense so many varieties of coin, and will only be able to give change as small as five cents, even if it can tell the difference between the one, two, and five-penny pieces when inserted. As a result, anyone who rides the metro regularly either has some sort of pass, or carnet, or hoards two-cent pieces like an American college student hoards quarters for laundry. (Assuming they bother paying the fares at all.)

The Italian ladies figured out they had to ask for S. Whatever, instead of Saint Whatever, then they had to figure out what train they wanted, and so forth, and finally how to pay for it. Just as they finished purchasing the ticket they proceeded to stumble through another, and another, and another … as Janet’s line quietly shrunk in size. I figured that the line would blaze as soon as the ladies were done, because behind them stood a Japanese lady, and an Italian man who started coaching the ladies’ transactions from behind.

Janet got to her machine first, but not before a young man she figured was German kept changing his mind about the details of his transaction. After she deftly coaxed our ticket from the machine, she explained that the Americans in her line seemed entirely proficient with the automated ticket machine, which I took as a point of national pride. Of course, we forgot to validate our ticket when we got on the train. We noticed this fact just as the train was scheduled to depart, and as I explained to Janet how if I jumped the few feet over to the little gadget that would “validate” our tickets, the train would start rolling, leaving me on the station platform with her right to travel on the train that she was on with our luggage, and the train began to roll, and I explained that validating your ticket was not at all a big deal, because the conductor knows we’re dumb tourists anyway, and we’re just doing our part to make him write more stuff on our tickets, and besides, hey, we still know how to work a simple computer, which is saying a lot in Italy.