Springtime in Italy: scorpions, snow and opera at the beach

"Dusk in the lovely town of Sienna.
Since I was here 45 years ago I’ve harboured a special love for Sienna.
Now it’s no different.

This evening Greg and I padded down to the Campo to drink Negronis, as we have every evening since we’ve been here.
The frighteningly powerful cocktail accompanies a thousand swallows swirling around the ancient buildings, squealing with the joy of spring, and a thousand people thronging the piazza.
Everyone seems happy, the kids run up and down the hill and the cameras snap.
It's a warm comfortable sitting room, homely and welcoming.
I think it’s the best piazza in Italy, and there are some…
Tomorrow we leave after nine satisfying days here getting to know the place.
We’ll miss the Negronis, the magnificent food, and the warm wrap-around city..."

Ahhh! Wouldn't it be great if every email that arrived in your inbox was like this? It’s my uncle Michael Morrissey writing. He and his partner Greg went to Italy for three months this year and sent the most wonderful emails about their adventures. So after they got back I asked them to tell me about their fabulous trip.

Michael you’d been before in the '70's. How was it different this time? M: I loved the first time and the experiences I had there have stuck with me ever since. So I never forgot it. But I had no idea what I was looking at, I really didn’t. All that stuff that happens in your 20’s; it was a lot of fun but there was a lot you miss. This time I had more experience and knew what I was looking for and what I was looking at.

What made you choose Italy and why for three months? M: Greg is a painter and we had talked a long time ago about making a real big trip and spending a year away. That was going to be Italy because Greg needed to see those paintings and I was quite happy to go back there again because I loved it so much. I rang (the consulate) and they said if you’re going to stay a year you need a special visa and you’re going to have to prove you’ve got hundreds of thousands of dollars and blah blah. But you can stay three months without a visa or anything.

Roma. Temple of Vesta Hercules Near Tiber

How did you plan your itinerary? G: We wanted to do as much as we possibly could in the three months and we decided we’d have really intensive city experiences with intermittent countryside rest to recover and get over what we’d seen! M: You have to fly into Rome so you work yourself out from there. Because it was so early in the season we thought that after Rome we’d go south to where it was warmer (as it turned out it was fucking cold!) and then work our way north as the months went on. We enjoyed Rome and then made one flight to Catania. From then on we just travelled by train and car. G: It worked well because although it was cold down south – there was snow in Sicily - as we went north it was beautiful. We arrived on March 17th and left on June 7th.

Bride among travertine, Ascoli Piceno

Why spring? G: We didn’t want the heat of summer and there’re too many tourists in the summertime it becomes absolutely congested. M: There are crowds but we were amazed by how localised they were; there’d be five or six places in Rome and that was all. Same in Florence and Venice. And we found that most of them were made up of school trips. It sounds marvellous, you’d want that for young children but honestly as I said about my own twenties, they’ve got so many concerns going on in their lives that what is outside you, what is in your environment, means fucking nothing! They just go skimming through Pompeii or by the Trevi fountain and don’t notice anything.

G: Well they do; they look at the artwork or the cultural object for five seconds and spend the other five minutes they’re there texting and taking photos of themselves. M: They particularly love paintings of hell because there’s people with no clothes on doing strange things to one another, they love all that! 

Florence from Uffizi Gallery roof

Did you settle into a daily routine? G: Sure did. Because we had our own apartment we’d get up in our own time and have breakfast and then we generally had our days planned. We’d often have a major excursion to a site, then we’d have lunch, a bit of a rest and go out in the evening for dinner.

Pompeii Mosaic

Aren’t you forgetting the Negroni’s…G: Oh yes, at the end of a gruelling day a Negroni is a must. M: It’s paradise. You walk to get a Negroni and you stagger away! Oh they’re wonderful and we enjoyed many of those. Sienna was our place for finding that because one of the things about Sienna is the amazing piazza: it’s like a great big beautiful pink brick sitting room in the evening: hundreds and hundreds of people walking around the piazza or sitting outside the cafes– you can groove there for ages and ages, thousands of swallows whizzing above your head, flying around in all directions – it’s absolutely perfect. In that atmosphere we started drinking those Negronis and that hooked us! We actually did find the very best Negroni when we were in Florence but there were some very good ones in Sienna.

How was the food, compared to New Zealand? G: Italy is famous for its pastas and pizzas of course and the quality varied from place to place but as a rule they were absolutely superb. We had some of the most sublime meals that we’ve ever had in some of those restaurants. But we also had some pretty boring, mundane fare. Italian food isn’t as exciting as New Zealand food, not as varied. We’ve got an incredibly comprehensive fusion diet here; it’s Mediterranean and European and Asian and Pacific Island so we’re much broader in our food experience. Nonetheless the quality of the food we had in Italy was superb. 

Beautiful Napoli

You mostly stayed at AirB’n’B’s? M: I thought if we get our own apartment it’s like having your own house, you sort of go and live in the town. And I don’t particularly like hotels; you’ve only got one room and you have to sit on the bed and blah blah. There’s some flunky bowing and scraping and that’s bloody awful so the AirB’nB was really good; you get let in and it’s yours. G: You have privacy, you have laundry, you can cook your own meals and if you’re staying for any length of time it’s quite important actually, especially laundry facilities.

Did you do much cooking? None! I cooked one meal Michael cooked one meal and the rest of the time we spent sampling the local restaurants and cafes. We had our breakfast almost every morning at our apartments.

Were there any challenges with the accomodation? M: When we went to the country, I just assumed the Italian countryside would be as I remembered it from before, which was rolling Tuscan hills and marvellous houses and beautiful views over the valley. So we booked a country house, very, very lovely too; the only thing was it was at the top of the Apennine Mountains and it was miles and miles away from anywhere and it was a bit like being at the top of the bloody Southern Alps!

Isolated on the Apennine mountain tops

Well not quite but it was pretty basic and I was disappointed because I wanted it to be romantic for our lovely quiet time in the country. It turned out alright but it was so high in the mountains that when the weather turned a bit miserable it became shitty cold. So here we were in a very basic farm cottage – with shitty weather! (laughs.) Blam, that was our country experience!

You make mistakes but Gregory was so wonderful in that (because I did most of the booking); he’d say no, this is good, this is great. I was going shit, this is terrible and he would say no, it’s fine, it’s wonderful.

G: When we got there the house was full of scorpions. The first time I saw one, I just went into a fucking primal thing and got a rolled-up newspaper out and attacked it and squashed it. Then I thought the poor thing it’s living here by itself the whole time and then suddenly I come along and kill it. From then on if I found a scorpion I just got it a jar, took it outside and threw it in the long grass.

A house full of scorpions

I didn’t know there were scorpions in Italy. Where was this? M: Yes they’ve got snakes too, and bears and wolves. It was in a national park outside Florence in the Apennine Mountains which run right down the back of Italy like the Southern Alps do. G- It had had a recent earthquake so certain routes into the place we were staying were cut off because there were slips and things like that so we could only get in one way and out the same way so we were quite isolated.

Sounds a bit like New Zealand! M: Well it was very NZ. We couldn’t get over Italy because it had the Apennines, which were like the Southern Alps, and it had volcanoes all over the place. But in others it was so incredibly different: the human relationship and reaction to the environment was entirely different. It’s not completely extractive like our culture is; it was more benign - and they love their past. G: The Romans were living in cities not unlike ours! They had apartments, central heating, running water. I have a dicey stomach and it takes me a while to acclimatise to a new country, I usually get sick and have diarrhoea and vomiting but the whole time I was in Italy I never once had a gastro incident and I was drinking the water from public fountains all over Italy - beautiful, clear, cool, fine water and I never got sick once. I was amazed.

Greg loved to drink from Italy's many public fountains

How did you feel when you flew home? G: Tired, content and deeply, deeply satisfied. There were a lot of things we didn’t see and I had no regrets at all about that. I was deeply contented.

The English Cemetery, Florence

Frecciaroosa, Milano Railway Station

Michael and Greg’s three-month itinerary: Rome six days. Fly to Catania in Sicily, train to Enna, then up to Ganji for a week, down to another town called Castelbuono for few days, down to Cefalu on the coast and on train to magical Palermo. Palermo to Napoli about seven hours on train, brilliant museum plus Herculaneum, Pompeii and Oplontis. Then train through the mountains to Ascoli Piceno, Travatino Town. Drive to Siena through breathtaking mountain tunnels. Siena to Florence easy. After Florence, drive up to the mountains and back for train from Florence to Padua. Sail down the Brenta Canal into Venice. Take the Red Arrow train, sometimes 300 kms an hour across the Veneto to Milano. Train to Paris.