Tuscany, travel, medieval village, Italy, festivals, celebrations, customs, cooking, recipes, living in Italy, moving to Italy, visiting, visit, restaurants, language
The older I get, and with a birthday coming up on Monday that is top of mind, the more I realize that one of the most necessary elements in my life is adventure. And one of my top adventure partners is Meg Ray, the unstoppable founder and cake boss at Miette. She’s in the planning stages of her third book which is on several chefs and bakers in France who are breaking all the rules and French traditions. When she suggested that we take an overnight trip to Normandy to visit the new restaurant of one of her favorite rebels, John, another friend, and I were in.
The Presbytere is in, as the name promises, an old church and parsonage on an estuary of the river Sienne, by the hamlet of Heugueville-sur-Sienne. The restaurant was started by British chef Edward Delling-Williams, who originally trained at St. John in London, then moved to Paris and opened a successful restaurant Le Grand Bain and bakery Le Petit Grain. He describes his new restaurant as part English pub, part Norman bistro, and he features the best of hyper-local ingredients prepared in sophisticated, yet earthy and simple ways.
Ed sat with us before dinner and revealed his reason for choosing this new location for his work. With three young children he wants to be as close to self-sufficiency as possible, growing much of his own food and being well away from urban centers. Thought-provoking actions from a self-declared collapsist.
We changed the subject to a lighter topic, namely where we should have lunch the next day, and he suggested one of his favorite places, a shack on the beach that serves only mussels, oysters, lamb, fries, and wine, called La Cale (I am afraid there’s no website to link you to). I didn’t need more persuading. We walked along the beach at high tide before the restaurant opened—it doesn’t take reservations and we were warned to get there early. It’s located next to a concrete boat ramp that leads into the sea and the “shack” description was not stretching reality. One whole wall is constructed of glass panels and swings out on hinges to embrace the wooden outside deck and protect it from wind, leaving the restaurant completely open on one side. There is a small stage and a big open fire that was crowded with pieces of meat on a grill. A hutch contains serve-yourself plates and utensils. All the walls are covered with paintings—badly-painted nudes, mostly female. I didn’t notice when we sat down that my seat placed my head right next to a penis in the painting behind me. For some reason the other side of the table found this amusing.
The place filled up almost immediately and we got bread, oysters, a steaming, enormous pot of mussels, lamb, and local rose wine, just as promised.
The band was a duo in their late sixties which upon closer inspection revealed that the lead singer was a transvestite. The meat-cooker was a person with a beard wearing hiking boots and a pink gingham dress. I was in heaven.
Midway though the meal, when I turned to the right to converse, I realized that I had unconsciously noted a series of large tractors going by, all loaded with standing men. It was like I was watching a parade going by through the small plastic window I was facing. The mysterious thing was that they were all headed towards the concrete ramp which ended in the sea a few yards beyond the restaurant. I was mystified about why I didn’t see any tractors coming back and where they all ended up.
We left the restaurant and when we looked towards the sea we were shocked. The tide had gone so far out that the water was now nearly invisible on the horizon, leaving a huge patch of revealed sand. And oyster traps. And men in waders who were loading the oysters into the tractors, which were now dispersed all over the still wet and boggy sand. In addition to the more organized oyster farmers were locals, mostly French grandmothers, armed with hoes, shovels, buckets, and wearing rubber boots headed out to harvest their own oysters in unfarmed areas.
In the afternoon we took the train back to Paris completing a perfect adventure which will stay with me for a long time.
Those of you who have been with me for awhile know that my favorite part of the holidays is the impressive presepe vivente, or living nativity, that the neighboring village of La Ville puts on. I have missed it dearly the last two years when it was suspended due to Covid. It was epic—200 volunteers, 50 scenes of ancient Jerusalem lit by 1500 candles over a route over a kilometer long. It had it all—nasty Romans with a slave market, donkeys turning a oil press, women washing clothes in a stream, a field of lepers, culminating in a manger with a rotating Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus cast from families who had recently given birth in the local hospital.
I kept driving past the location eagerly looking for signs of activity and notices of the dates it would happen; it always ran a few days between Christmas day and Epiphany. But nothing.
Doing some research I discovered that there is a new parish priest in the church that was located at the center of the event. The church had always given space to the volunteers to house the sets and props, and to build and repair things from year to year. The new priest wanted to end the arrangement causing the organizers to find a new home. They mustered and moved it to another nearby village, but have a much smaller area to work with. We went and it was impressive how much they had managed to recreate, the Jerusalem part was very similar, but the truly magical bits that occurred out in open fields weren’t possible. They still had a few lepers, but it just wasn’t the same without a field of them, it turns out.
Should I send the new parish priest a Grinch outfit?
So what were we to do? We had paid for tickets for all of us to convene in Edinburgh to drop Sebastian off at the University of St. Andrews. Four days before we leave everything changes and he is no longer going there. Cancel Scotland? “No way” says Donella, and she is usually always right, especially as we were already headed to London directly after to attend her graduation. Sebastian informs us that he is not going anywhere near St. Andrews. He’d just started bonding with it and making friends online when the last minute shift to Oxford happened and it was all too sudden and fresh to be able to be just a regular sightseer. I had happened upon a just-released Travel+Leisure article touting the wonders of Fife, Scotland, and I unilaterally decided that twelve miles or so outside of St. Andrews did not technically count as “near,” and a truly magical four days started.
The Fife peninsula lies between Edinburgh and St. Andrews, bounded by the North Sea, the Firth of Tay, and the Firth of Forth—say the last aloud and you’ll see that the fun has already started. The terrain is stunning, reminding me a bit of the Pt. Reyes peninsula in California, but with ancient ruins. It also happens to have a terrific food scene, along with villages right out of one of my favorite movies, Local Hero. I was in love. I haven’t been so strongly drawn to a place in years.
I booked us into one of eight tent cabins right on the sea at Catchpenny Lodges. The “tent” part is an exaggeration. Although they have canvas walls, nothing else is particularly tent-like—the floors are wood, there are two bedrooms with comfortable beds and good sheets, a charming sleeping loft, a bathroom with a rainforest shower, a well-outfitted kitchen with a wood-burning stove/oven, and a front deck with a grill and furniture from which to try to catch a glimpse of dolphins, humpback whales, and sea birds. And it’s totally off-grid. The best part was that in the few yards between the porch and the sea is the Fife Coastal Path, a 116-mile stretch of trail right at the edge of the water. We walked for a half hour to the left and climbed around the ruins of the 15th-century Newark Castle. To the right we walked past the ruins of the Lady’s Tower to the too-cute-to-be-true village of Elie where we had just-caught fish and chips.
The food options rivaled almost anywhere I’ve been in freshness, sophistication, and local sourcing—a few talented chefs and farmers moved to Fife during the lockdown from more urban locations and stayed. I didn’t get a whiff of food preciousness or pretensions either, quite the opposite of what sometimes drives me nuts about food in the Bay Area. Our first dinner was in the tiny fishing village of Lower Largo at the Crusoe, which also has a few rooms and is located right on the beach. We had a memorable candlelit dinner in our own tiny, dark-blue wainscoted room, complete with a fireplace in 17-century pub, The Kinneuchar Inn, with a hyper-local menu that changes daily. But one of my favorite food finds was the Andross Farm shop right at the end of the driveway to our tent cabin. The family farm raises grass-fed beef, mutton, lamb, and vegetables and has a lovely store that features their own bounty as well as loads of freshly prepared meals and pastries—perfect for going back to the cabin and cooking. I loved learning the intricacies of cooking on a wood-fired stove and oven.
And way too soon our few days in Fife were over. We were on to London for a couple of days for Donella’s graduation from UCL, then onto Paris to join friends for an overnight trek to Normandy to go to a new restaurant that one of their friends had started. More on that later, including finding one of the most memorable restaurants I’ve ever had the pleasure of eating at.
And no, we never set foot in St. Andrews. But I can’t wait to. This area of the world is calling me back.
I have had about enough. I’d been behaving rather well making sure that between guests and life most of the critical things had been accomplished and no one’s feelings had been ruffled, basically keeping the trains running on time. I’d stifled many a thought and comment and was feeling a little pent up. Standing at the kitchen window, overlooking the olives and doing dishes (the view is above), the Velvet Underground’s “Sister Ray” comes up on shuffle. (According to Spotify, I’ve had quite the year with the Velvet Underground, with it coming up as my most listened to band.) But even though I am a fan, “Sister Ray” pushes it. At 17 minutes 29 seconds it covers all the basics of rebellion and then some—some transvestites bring home some sailors for a drug and sex orgy when one gets shot and killed. The main concern seems to be whether the carpet will get stained. They recorded it in one take and the sound engineer left midway, saying he’d return when it’s over.
But there was something about this song that saved me in that moment. I turned it up, loud, and revelled for all of those 17 minutes and 29 seconds in being bad. Well, bad adjacent. In reality, I actually have no desire to have an orgy with transvestites and sailors, kill one, and shoot up heroin. But when I was describing this moment to John and Sebastian last night at dinner I realized that I wish I’d been badder in my life. They asked how I would define my sense of bad and I had no answer at that moment. They said that it was like I was holding up an empty container labeled “bad” and there was nothing inside. It reminded me of what I just wrote about my mother and the beer garden and Mom wanting to rebel but never doing it. I guess that this apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree, indeed. What a terribly frustrating realization.
I’ve been thinking about what caught me with such power that afternoon and what kind of badness I aspire to that doesn’t scale to transvestites, orgies, or murders. I am not sure I have the answer but it does include caring less about whether I am pleasing people, taking care of things, doing things right, and always, always trying to be perfect. Frankly, it’s getting a little old. So if you happen pass our house and you hear “Sister Ray” being played with the volume up, watch out.
I’m not going to even count the fact that I love orange, because that’s an all-year basic for me.
Going out on a limb I’m going to say that Italy is at her very best in the Fall. Temperatures are perfect—crisp at night but warm in the day, the light is gorgeous—those long slanting beams of sun across the landscape, and most of the tourists have left allowing cities and villages to draw a deep breath.
If that’s not enough, here are a few more reasons to love Italy in the autumn.
The olives are ripe
Every year I turn into a farmer, not something that past Nancy would have imagined on the list of possibilities for future Nancy. I scrutinize weather predictions. John and I walk the orchard to see how far along the olives are in ripeness. I scheme about who I can invite to visit and rope in to help, and beyond that how many additional pairs of hands we’ll need. I call the olive press to see when they open for the season and book our time on press. That appointment starts the picking clock—not good to allow olives to sit any more than 48 hours between when they are picked and pressed.
This year is in the can, so to speak, and was a good one. Despite record-breaking heat in July, an epic drought in August, a hail storm in September that knocked off about a third of the olives, and an unusually aggressive pruning we did in the Spring where we took off about 2/3 of the main trunks of many trees, the unphased olives trees did their thing and gave us slightly over 500kg. of olives, resulting in about 65 liters of oil. Thank you trees.
L’Intrepida, the vintage bicycle race
One of the most wondrous things our village does, out of many, is L’Intrepida, which, just to be clear, means “The Intrepid”. This year over 900 riders assembled from all over, including a friend of ours from California, to ride either a 42, 85 or 120 kilometer trip through the Tuscan countryside. As charming as this thing sounds, it is not for the faint of heart. All bicycles need to be pre-1987. Hasn’t it been since then that they’ve developed all those good gears and tires that make you actually able to climb mountains on dirt roads? That doesn’t stop this gang. Not only do their bikes look uncomfortable, many are also cycling in vintage wool pants and shirts. Luckily they are well fortified by rest stops at castles with wine, vin santo (a local dessert wine) and pastries. Water is not on offer. Apparently there is a hell of a lot of hydration in red wine.
My friend from California had mistranslated the registration form and hadn’t come prepared with a doctor’s report clearing him to participate. The ever-practical Tuscans quickly came up with a solution. He could ride, unofficially, then when he got to the finish and was clearly still alive he could claim his number along with his goody bag. Sadly, upon arriving at the finish he wasn’t given his original number, “123” but did get the locally-sourced goods: a big bag of packaged pre-toasted bread slices, a bag of coffee, a package of feminine douche products, some pasta, and an herbal antibacterial nasal spray and throat wash. Now wasn’t that worth a bunch of kilometers on a gravel road, uphill, on a bike with lousy brakes, wearing wool? Apparently, it is.
Step back fifty years, complete with a local band playing music from the roaring 1970s over distorted speakers that date back even further. Join the queue to choose and pay for your meal in advance from the volunteers lit by glaring overhead fluorescent lights. In an adjoining tent you’ll find a line up of cooking stations, usually involving large open fires and sometimes cauldrons of polenta, manned by local cooks and volunteers. Go into a large tent and sit down at endless banquet tables, all covered with the latest in plastic tablecloths, hand over the ticket you received when you paid, and you will be rewarded with the local speciality in small plastic bowls, often with plastic sforks. Welcome to the world of the sagra, or village festival.
They mostly take place in the fall, and almost every village has one dedicated to its own speciality food. Just up the hill from us is the sagra of a special kind of chestnuts, called marrone. A nearby village in the other direction celebrates polenta. A tiny hamlet in between has a festival dedicated to ciaccia, the local deep fried bread. Slightly further away you’ll be able to find sagras focused on truffles, or porcini.
Our village’s festival celebrates a really fat spaghetti noodle, called bringoli. You’ve got two choices: meat sauce or mushroom. Next to the pasta cooking stations are these really wonderful grills they have here with roaring fires in an upright chamber in the back and a long flat tray in front in which the hot coals are spread, perfect for grilling sausages and pieces of bread that are then rubbed with garlic and drizzled with just-pressed olive oil. Prior Itch: In praise of fat spaghetti. (I do love this post.)
Although popular with the few tourists who are here at this time of year, it’s mainly locals who attend and a time to catch up, see old friends, and for kids and teens to run loose in packs with their own codes and rules. All is accompanied by young wine, almost undrinkable. Usually a euro for a plastic glass and about four for a bottle.
I adore the purity of these events. There’s no hushed-voice, precious attitude that I sometimes found in the Bay Area around food. This is just what’s always been eaten and celebrated, a justification for pleasure and joy, but not for self-gratification or congratulation. And there are absolutely no long descriptions of the provenance of very element. People just know where it all comes from by who brought it to the festival and who is cooking, which is deeply lovely. Give me a plastic sfork every time.
Melvin gets his winter body
Melvin was born in the woodshed, the product of a fly-by-night father and an indifferent mother. She had clearly had too many children before and did the bare minimum to keep the babies alive, visiting only long enough to feed them. Dad was just out for a good time and never showed his face when it came time to raise the kids.
John found Melvin and his siblings one night while getting wood for the fire and we put Donella, who is our resident feral cat tamer, on the case. I have learned that every locality, from Berkeley to the Upper Tiber Valley has a Feral Cat Woman. You figure out who she is and she will always have a feral cat trap you can borrow to catch the kittens so you can bring them into a small enclosed space (like a bathroom) and start the process of taming them. (As you can tell, we have some experience in this having been “blessed” on three occasions with feral kittens in or around our homes.) We got three of the four siblings adopted but ended up with Melvin.
Melvin lives life on his own terms. He never lets you forget that he is, in his heart, still wild and untamed. But he follows you around the yard when you work, usually directly under foot or in the tree you are working on, demanding snuggles. Indoors he is much more aloof, at least until Sebastian “broke” him this summer and now he will sometimes be cuddled even inside, as deeply conflicted as this makes him.
We see Melvin’s relatives everywhere. There’s the old Melvin, clearly the survivor of many fights, whose body moves like a wooden block—no feline undulation here—who could be dad or granddad. There are teenage Melvins swaggering around. We see mom occasionally, usually escaping from where she has hidden another litter. (Don’t get me started on how spaying and neutering is less common in Italy.)
But all the male cats, not just in Melvin’s family but across the valley, share an extraordinary trait. The Winter Body. Male cats gain significant amounts of weight in the winter and are thin in the summer. The first time we went through this with Melvin I thought there was something wrong and was ready to take him to the vet when I started noticing that the same thing was happening to all the male cats around us. It’s extraordinary to see this skinny cat suddenly add another half-cat or more to his body mass. November is a prime month for beefing (or catting?) up and we are suddenly filling the dog food and cat food bowls several times a day. (Melvin often eats Lola’s dog food as he believes that she is actually his mother.)
Maybe we should all embrace the Winter Body. It would make the season much more fun.
Halloween
The big event in Italy is not Halloween, but All Saints Day on November 1st, which is a national holiday. The roads around the cemetery are packed as people come to clean and decorate the graves of their loved ones with fresh plastic flowers and battery-operated candles. (For more about how Italians celebrate All Saints, or the Day of the Dead.)
When we first moved ten years ago I was feeling guilty that the kids wouldn’t have a proper Halloween. Sebastian and I tried—he dressed in costume, I put on a hat and carried all his Nerf guns, and we went out trick or treating in the piazza to the local merchants who reacted with confusion and tried their best. Sebastian scored a sausage from the butcher. A friend had brought us bags of Halloween candy so I handed it out to people we saw in a sort of reverse Halloween tradition.
Things have changed in ten years. Now Halloween is becoming very popular—it gains momentum every year. Now our village was packed with kids in costume. It’s the most profitable evening of the year for the big disco twenty minutes away. Trick or treat is still going from store to store rather than house to house, which is lucky for us as they don’t yet sell packages of small candies for this purpose.
But what really stopped me in my tracks was the a local grandmother in our hamlet who drives a Lada 4×4 and is about as far from trends as anyone I can imagine put a lit, carved pumpkin in her window, behind her protective metalwork. This was Halloween breaking through in an unprecedented way. When I saw her a day or so later I complimented her on her pumpkin and she beamed. Did you notice that it was smiling, she asked.
My mother was an artist, but her pallet for rebellion was limited. When I was growing up and she was really, really fed up—a fight with my father, or a particularly bad period of ennui—she would always say that if she’d been a different type of woman she’d go and hang out in a beer garden. To her, this was getting out the big gun. She always said this with a bit of wistfulness, but also a tiny edge of fear tinged with her fascination. Like the things that happened in beer gardens were not to be fully imagined as one might be contaminated by going too deeply into one’s inner beer garden. Born in 1920 of very conservative parents, she lived a constrained life, even after she married my father.
You can only imagine the space, both broad and deep, that a beer garden inhabited in my young brain. It’s such an innocuous, innocent sounding word. I’d never seen one, or heard of one outside of my mother’s yearning for rebellion and a taste of what it might mean to be bad. What possible things could happen there that exerted such a fascination to my mother? In a beer garden could you even see through the foliage—did the sun ever shine? Did the plants serve beer? What else could be happening there besides beer that was so wicked? It had been many years since this archetypical den of sin had ever crossed my mind, but earlier this week John and I found ourselves in Bavaria for a shoot and suddenly we were surrounded by beer gardens.
Most were, shockingly to me, merely a fancy name for an outdoor patio where beer was served. No jungle, no woman-eating plants, no scantily-clad servers. Just some picnic tables. What a letdown.
Our last night of the shoot we made it into Munich and went to a beer garden for bratwurst that our client had recommended. The Nuernberger Bratwurst Gloeckl am Dom fit the description of what I’d said that we wanted. Somewhere in the old section that had good local food. It turned out to be very happening, but not at all hip—the beer garden (i.e. outside tables) was packed and people watching was fascinating, and very different from our village, London, or Paris—all of which are pretty damn distinct already. Mainly men, mostly comfortably plump, largely in groups. A few couples on date nights. A man at the next table, who looked like a relative of Einstein, rocked a thick head of pure white hair extending in all directions, its exuberance matched only by his moustache. The table behind us had a group of teenage boys wearing some type of antique military uniforms and one carrying a large flag. A soccer team arrived. A popular dish seemed to be a platter of 150 sausages, all cooked over the inside beech wood fire.
The whole beer garden sat in the square in the shadow of Munich’s cathedral, the Frauenkirche. Haunting as it loomed in the dark—many places in Europe, including our village, are not turning on lights to illuminate monuments due to the energy crisis from the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Doing a little research I discovered that the cathedral is well known for its Devil’s Footprint, a black mark resembling a footprint near the front door, which has several competing theories about what the devil, who clearly was the only entity who could possibly have caused such a mark, was really up to.
But my mother would have known exactly why the devil was hanging out in proximity to the beer garden. I wish that my now self could have told her then self that it would have been a powerfully good thing for her to have hung out in a beer garden. That trying so hard to always be good cut off a part of herself that I think she’d rather have enjoyed and would have given more spice, texture, and fulfillment to her life. That packs of men often just want beer. That we can trust ourselves, make mistakes, and find redemption. And that sometimes that dark shape on a floor tile is maybe just a mark from the kiln rather than proof that the devil lives in a beer garden.
When I left you last on our European road trip we’d headed out of the tunnel from France to England with hearts full of anticipated adventure, fun, and not the least of it, great meals to be had. Turns out that only the first was true, and not in the way we imagined.
Oxford
We headed directly to Oxford—Sebastian was an offer holder—and he wanted us to attend a university-wide open house. The British system is different from the American one. A British university gives a student an offer to attend, most of the time dependent on the grades obtained at the big tests at the end of the academic year. There is no senior year coasting. And the results don’t come out until late summer.
We checked into a hotel that I am still not sure how to rank in my order-obsessed brain. Location? Great. Charm? Pretty darn high, but in an eccentric way. Room size? Smallest I’ve ever stayed in. Historical interest? High. Bathroom? Pretty damn awful. Mildew? Just maybe. Bath Place Hotel is a collection of tiny cottages around a cobbled courtyard, built in the early 1600s by Flemish weavers who were given permission to settle right up against the Oxford city walls. Before the weavers came there was a communal bath house, explaining the odd name.
From the hotel’s courtyard there is a less than arms-width passage between two of the cottages that leads directly into the outside terrace of the Turf Tavern, where Bill Clinton famously did not inhale marijuana while a student. Its foundations date back to 1381 and it was built outside the town walls so that various kinds of illegal activity wouldn’t be under the jurisdiction of the colleges. In addition to Clinton, the Turf has hosted Ernest Hemingway, Steven Hawking, David Bowie, Oscar Wilde, Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, C.S. Lewis, Margaret Thatcher, to name a few, and us. Although now very touristy I was still glad we went as I was toweringly tall when ordering at the bar, barely fitting under the beams. Others, more truly towering (over 5’4″), have to duck.
Just steps further was the heart of Oxford University, where the first courses were taught in 1096. Three of the oldest colleges were built in starting in 1249, so the architecture, as it evolved through the centuries with the creation of more colleges, is varied and truly beautiful. Oxford is made up of 44 colleges, which are usually closed to the public and the best you can do is to catch glimpses of the splendor within through metal gates, manned 24-hours a day by watchful porters who have heard every excuse from people wanting a look around inside. This weekend was special as all the colleges were open and we wandered through a few.
All Souls College, Oxford
My current favorite of the batch is All Souls, which is a graduate-only academic research institution. Applicants have to take what is informally known as the hardest exam in the world—twelve hours of grueling questions—and those who survive go on to oral examinations. Beyond subject specific exams there are three general essays from a long list, including questions like: Should we bring back woolly mammoths from the dead?; If Margaret Thatcher and Nelson Mandela had died on the same day, whose death should the BBC have reported as its top story?; ‘Taste is first and foremost distaste, disgust and visceral intolerance of the taste of others’ (PIERRE BOURDIEU). Is it?; and Is it ‘colonialist’ for the UK to pressure its former colonies to repeal anti-sodomy laws imposed during the period of British rule?
After all that two students are accepted on a good year, sometimes none. There are usually around a dozen students at All Souls in total. The college is one of the richest at Oxford, with an endowment of £420 million, which students, who are full fellows once accepted, can use for research. This is important because it breaks the usual academic cycle of graduate students having to limit what they research and study to appeal to funding opportunities and academic publishers who determine what might be publishable, to make a career and a living. All Souls provides the money needed to research, study, and write about anything a fellow wants, without restrictions—a pinnacle of academic freedom. T.E. Lawrence was a fellow, and I can imagine him fitting right in.
Graduation and The Plague
We leave Oxford for Sebastian’s graduation from Ardingly College. They have erected a big white tent where a ceremony happens in the morning and a black tie ball in the evening. Covid rates in England at this time were staggeringly high but we were the only ones wearing masks in the audience of 500 or so. As evening approached John and I were faced with a dilemma, all dressed in our finest, was there any way to approach the evening and still take some basic precautions? We debated and realized that the answer was no. Our tablemates had been carefully chosen by Sebastian and his friends so that we could meet their families. There was no way to wear a mask at dinner in this context, and we couldn’t be those people—”Sebastian, are those weirdos in masks your family?” So we went for it, quite the leap for us, who’d huddled under heat lamps all last winter to avoid eating indoors.
Cotswolds adventures
We then went back up to Oxfordshire to meet family from California in the Cotswolds, one of the most beautiful natural areas of England with a higher than usual share of gorgeous villages. The rental I’d chosen, largely by proximity to family, turned out to be located in a nice wooded, rural area, very quiet and secluded except for the six lane freeway separated from us by a thin line of trees. We were basically sleeping on the shoulder. (I will never ignore John’s trick again of looking up addresses of rentals and doing an overhead Google Maps look at where it is actually located.) We drive back into Oxford with family to show them Sebastian’s perhaps future college, punt on the river, and have a picnic. Tempting fate certainly, but probably the only chance they will have to see his college if it works out and he gets in. All adding up to more and more emotional investment in this outcome.
A few years ago I happened upon Hidcote Gardens by myself and when I realized we were staying right nearby I encouraged the family to go, a little nervous that it wouldn’t live up to my memories, or my hype. Fortunately it didn’t let us down. And yes, for you gardeners, it is the home of Hidcote lavender.
Another highlight for us was Chedworth Roman Villa, one of the largest Roman villas in England, dating from its heyday in the 4th century. As with other of the Roman villas I’ve visited I am reminded how elegant and beautiful the life of rich Romans was—putting much of our modern architecture and lifestyle to shame. The idea of having different dining rooms for each seasons to take advantage of the patterns of sun, shadow, and views is inspirational to me, and it was great fun to stand in the footprint of the summer dining room looking out at basically the same view that they had centuries before.
The underfloor heating systemJust a little Roman dude
By evening John is not feeling well at all, the first of the three of us to succumb. He tests positive in the morning. Sebastian and I are still testing negative. We are supposed to head to London for a action-packed few days with even more family, but that is clearly off the table. We decide to head back to France to wait it out because if something goes really badly health-wise we want to be out of Britain’s painfully underfunded and understaffed NHS and into the French health system. We pack up the car and head toward the tunnel.
Getting real, fast
It also happens to be results day for Sebastian for the IB exam, which are supposed to be posted at noon. We are driving along on an unseasonably cold day, with all the car windows open, trying to avoid getting John’s germs, in the off chance it makes any difference at this point. John is in the backseat with his head resting on a metal fan while we bounce down the road, all wrapped up to try to stay warm through his fever. I kindly ask whether he’d like the dog blanket to cushion his head, which he refuses saying that the cold metal feels good. Sebastian is next to me hitting refresh on the results site, which isn’t responding due to the large number of students checking, and trying not to let me see what he is doing as he huddles next to the passenger door. As we approach Folkestone I see his face turn pale. His marks were over in every category for his offer except one. We have no idea what this means, but it’s not good news. He met his offer for St. Andrews, but at this point has his heart set on Oxford. The news feels gutting. I could so clearly imagine him there. And I am also surprised by the force of my feelings—what of this reaction is about me, and what is really about him? And feeling bad about feeling bad—having either of these options is an enormous privilege—why are we feeling so strongly that this isn’t the right outcome?
The ride back on the Eurotunnel train is silent as we sit in our car underwater in mood as well as body. We exit in Normandy and head to a little gîte, built in the 1700s, I’d found that was self-contained, allowed a dog, and we could have for a week—one of five available at the last minute in all of France. Our plan is to reunite with the family in the Loire valley at a small chateau we’d all rented after we’d weathered the Covid storm. John heads directly up the tiny ladder-like stairs to bed, Sebastian and I are madly calling his school to get advice. He and I are still negative but feeling worse every day. Finally, I test positive as well. I don’t remember much about this week except a couple of trips into Five Guys burgers because we could order and eat outdoors, away from everyone. And the beautiful color of the drying flax when I could muster the strength to walk to the end of the driveway and look over the fields. (Spoiler alert: It all did work out in the end for Sebastian after his problem exam was regraded, and we’ve just returned from dropping him off. This summer reinforced the idea of not giving up until all roads are followed to their end. And patience, as it wasn’t all resolved until the very end of August.)
John is finally negative, but I am not. Fortunately the chateau for our next leg had a maid’s room with a single bed off the kitchen with its own bathroom, perfect for me, so we all decide to go ahead with the next stage of the vacation, and we are off to the Loire. We make one stop enroute at Jumièges Abbey, a Benedictine monastery that dates back to 654. As with many ruined churches and monasteries in France it reached its end after the French revolution when the grand buildings were raided for their riches, stones, and lead roofs, leaving only impressive ruins behind that only hint at the extravagance that was once there.
The Land of Castles
The Loire valley is the rich heartland of France, filled with chateaus. As John observed, you can drive for hundreds of miles in Italy, which was a much poorer country, and not see a house the size of these—hundreds of rooms, surrounded by beautiful gardens—but here we seemed to see one every few miles.
Our rental chateau, called Chateau Alaire, was a mere speck compared to its neighbors, but charming. We cook a lot, picnic, and take a walk to visit a church dating from the millenium which the local tourist office gave us the key to for the day (hero shot at the top), but mostly I lounge about masked and rest. We are located next to a couple of well-known French villages, Montrésor and Loches, but I keep noticing a very odd thing about the villages we were seeing, that even my niece’s seven year old daughter brought up, is that they are creepy. Immaculate and perfectly restored, but they seem to lack any semblance of life—no cafes, no old people standing out on the street and talking, no lights on in houses at night, not a single small, tempting bakery or restaurant. Although it’s the height of summer it felt as though everyone had left but us. A sign of too many second home owners sucking the life out of little towns. And yet there we were, searching for lunch, sleeping in a rented out second home. I started to yearn for our thriving, quirky, and very alive village in Italy.
The adventure that didn’t happen
The next leg of our planned journey was the biggest part of the adventure—three nights on a barge on a canal in Burgundy. Something I’d been curious about doing for years. I’m still not testing negative and as we’d be in such tight quarters, 12 of us on the boat, we decide to head back to Italy and forgo this particular adventure. And it sounds like it was a stroke of luck, especially as one of the intense heat waves that hit France this summer was gearing up for another strike. Christine Sarkis, my niece and travel entrepreneur, writer, and editor, who was on the barge, wrote about it for Itch, which I will share in a separate post.
As we start the long trek home it’s apparent that this “vacation” profoundly reinforced that nothing can truly be counted on—not health, weather, conditional admissions, or good times that we assume will happen as we plan ahead. Although always true—and the more at peace I am with this the happier I become—it’s an aspirational state for me and it’s of maximum importance to strengthen those muscles now. Grab the moments that delight you and hug them tight and try to let the rest go. And don’t forget to breathe.
Resources:
— Our cottage in Normandy, at Gîtes Normands de charme les châtaigniers, known to us as the Plague House, was one of five cottages a rural and beautiful property, watched over by an old horse. Ten kilometers from the sea and a couple of lovely towns. Reviewers said that some of the cottages were pretty unbelievably tiny, but ours, the section on the right of this photo, was small but manageable and had some lovely architectural touches.
— Beaune, France might be a bit overrun with tourists, but it at the heart of Burgundy and has a delightful Saturday market. There’s also one of the most stunning kitchenware stores I’ve ever seen, The Cook’s Atelier, run by an American woman, her daughter, and her son-in-law. Sets of antique cleavers, copper pots, and the like. They also run a cooking school and have cookbook we really like which is orderable from overseas. We’ve stayed in both the Najeti Hôtel de la Poste and the Hotel Remparts, both were lovely and located in the middle of things.
— Somewhere outside of Turin… When driving from France to Italy the Turin area is a convenient place to stop. We found this aged beauty, the Sina Villa Mathilde, and enjoyed it. John pointed out that it reminded him a bit of business trips to India. A kind of faded colonial glory surrounded, right up to the property walls, by not the most pleasant urban sprawl, but once you are in the walls and the hotel’s large garden it’s a different world. Not bad food either.
“Would you like to come and watch my wife and me dance the tango?” asked Paolo, the dynamo of a contractor and stone mason who rebuilt our house and is now working on the restoration next door for our friends. He’s a whirling dervish of a man, curly grey hair, intense, sparkling eyes and always enthused about an arch he’s built or a particularly nice rock or bit of old beam he can reuse in a creative way. In addition to building walls that are art pieces and controlling a crane he and his wife are professional dancers on the Italian tango circuit. His invitation was several years ago and was our first exposure to Italian tango. We enthusiastically agreed that we’d love to come—it’s always fun to watch passionate, skilled dancers and hear vibrant, sensuous music. We closed our eyes, imagined Italians doing the tango, and couldn’t wait.
That evening they’d closed off one of the smaller streets in town and built a wooden stage. The DJ was readying the sound system to play the best of tango music and the dancers were assembling, all dressed in their finest.
Then the music and dancing started. It was about as different from our preconceptions of the tango as we could imagine. It was like taking the tango and instead of turning it to an eleven (you either get this reference, or you don’t), turning it to a two. Slow, stylized, formal, and to us, not in the ballpark of passion and rhythm of what we’d expected. Dancers barely touched, moving around the floor in predefined patterns. The music as well seemed like a pale interpretation. To say we were puzzled was an understatement but fortunately we ran into an Italian friend of ours who delights in knowing odd bits about his own culture, and he explained.
The years around 1890 to 1920 saw a large wave of Italians immigrants to Argentina (up to 60% of immigrants were Italian), mostly young men who came to make money, with many hoping to return to Italy. Buenos Aires became a melting pot with immigrants from all over the world living in close quarters. Into this stew pot the tango was born. Many credit the Italians as being a key influence in the creation of the Argentinian tango, along with mazurkas; milonga (the folk music of the Argentinean pampas which itself combined Indian rhythms with the music of early Spanish colonists); the habanera of Cuba and the candombe rhythms originating in Africa. A dash of traditional polkas and waltzes were thrown into the pot. Scholars say that Italian men were some of the first tango dancers and that they brought a particular note of wistful longing for the homeland that became a trademark of the tango.
The tango bounded around the world and became very popular around 1913-15 and at that time many Italians immigrants returned, eager to share this amazing music and dance with their villages. They tried to teach the music to local musicians and to show off this soulful, passionate dance at festas in the village square. But, apparently, they did not factor in Italian grandmothers, who were appalled and quickly put some decorum around this show of overt sensuality. No more touching than strictly necessary, lose the throbbing, passionate rhythm, make the music sound more familiar. And they would surround the dance floor to make sure all was to their liking. And the Italian tango was born.
Paolo and his wife were at a village event dancing last week and we filmed so that you can get an idea. He’s on vacation now for a couple of weeks and when I asked what they would be doing he quickly replied “Dancing”.
We’ve spent the last year improving the nest, getting around to things that we haven’t tackled after being in the house close to six years. One category was getting some large mirrors. When you live in a house that’s somewhere north of 600 or so years old the aesthetic choices about something like a mirror get a bit complex. Do you go in-your-face modern, real old (which is often gilded and simply too much for our simple house), or pseudo old, most of it screaming out every bit of its fakery. At the risk of sounding pathetic, we’d not found the solution since we’d moved in and wanted it solved and to never think about it again.
The next small town over from us has an intriguing store, although it rarely seemed to be open. One dusty window facing the street revealed a long, narrow space piled high on both sides with all sorts of old wood, some frames, and assorted furniture. We’d tried to go a few times, with little success. Sometimes a worker or two would be there but they seemed unable to give details on what was available because the owner, Paolo, wasn’t there.
One day, this lovely woman who seems to specialize in decorative and faux painting, offered to contact Paolo, who was in his office, and have him come to the shop. She called, and about a minute later he appeared. He sorted through the mess, sometimes needing to crawl on top of tottering furniture to get to what was behind, while the woman called out warnings, and finally we had several possible frames. He helped us pile them in the car to take home to try out and although we’d met five minutes earlier he wanted neither deposit, name, or phone number. And we drove off with hundreds of euros worth of frames.
Several of the frames worked, so we returned the following week to buy a couple, return some, and have more made. Once again Paolo had to be called from the office. We discussed what needed to be done and he invited us back to the office for a coffee. We had things to do so declined.
Several back and forths to check on progress all yielded a similar pattern and it was revealed that the office was in fact the cafe just around the corner. We finally took Paolo up on his offer of refreshment at the office, and he shared his philosophy of life to the tune of church bells.
You choose a work you enjoy and is fulfilling—he has worked with wood since he was a child at the side of his father—but you never, ever let it dominate the rest of the mix. Your life always needs to be bigger than your work or you are lost. He works (or more from what I saw his charming and talented employee works) but it is only to support life and to provide funds for enough time “in the office,” a cafe adjacent to the town square, in the shadow of one of the most famous paintings of the Renaissance, Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection, and filled with his friends and enough new people wandering through to keep life interesting.
With that he invited to come visit him at the office whenever we happened to be in the area for a coffee or glass of wine and more conversation. And we have our mirrors at last.
One graduating kid, one car, one dog, four countries, four languages, three seemingly endless tunnels, eleven different places to stay, three positive Covid tests, one quarantine—all in twenty-four days. What it is like to do a road trip in Europe. We were, as the Italians would say, in giro.
Or, the things my dog makes me do. We’ve done road trips in Europe before, instead of taking other modes of transportation, largely so that we could take Lola with us on vacation. Destinations have included Switzerland, Croatia, Corsica, Germany, and France, but this was our most ambitious road trip yet. Sebastian’s high school graduation outside of London in West Sussex, and a twice postponed Loire-valley chateau and canal boat rental in Burgundy with family from California, bookended the trip with plenty of time to explore in between.
The freedom to easily access different worlds is one of the things I like best about living in Italy. In California we’d go for long road trips but still end up, it felt like, not that far from where we started. To start adventuring as soon as possible I try to get further than northern Italy on the first leg, although it is a good five to six hour slog. On our first night out we pushed across the Swiss border to an area near Lake Maggiore called Ticino.
I’ve explored a lot of Switzerland but never this region. It has been strategically important for millenium as it’s the entry to the Gotthard pass, one of the routes over the Alps and into the main Swiss plain. The pass is grueling so Ticino is distinct from the rest of Switzerland. The language and food are Italian and it feels almost tropical, lush, and verdant. But the prices are unmistakably Swiss. Swiss prices have the same effect on the respiratory system as a plunge into the Baltic in winter. I reflexively check the exchange rate—surely 50 CHF for a pasta with tomato sauce and a 12 CHF bottle of water is more reasonable when converted to euros or dollars—nope. Nearly one to one for my currencies. Sometimes a 50 CHF plate of noodles with tomatoes is a $50 plate of noodles with tomatoes.
We stayed in a tiny town called Tegna which next to the Ponte Brolla gorge on the Maggia river, one of the rivers where water rushes down from the Alps to feed the Po River. From an elevated bridge the gorge looks like it has a pretty normal stream at the bottom until I realized that it was all supersized. When we walked down near the river what looked like small river rocks turned out to be immense boulders. It looked like giants had been playing games with rocks and had gotten called home for lunch mid rock skipping.
We left the relaxed, Italian-speaking region behind and headed through one of miracles of modern road building, the Gotthard tunnel. The first tunnel under the Gotthard was for trains and opened in 1882. Cars had to wait their turn until 1980 when the 11-mile long tunnel opened, the longest tunnel in the world at that time (it’s now the fifth longest). It turns out that eleven miles in a tunnel is a long time, not as bad as twenty-two minutes of a hypothetical Thanksgiving dinner between when an uncle declares his support for Qanon and when you can escape after dessert, but definitely longer than twenty-two minutes of most anything else. The first time that we drove through I didn’t know anything about the tunnel and remarked to the family after about five minutes in the dark that this was a really long tunnel. We were at about mile three at that point. It’s one lane in each direction and there can be quite a wait to get in, but we were lucky this time. I’ve done it now five times and each time I’ve been impressed by how respectful drivers are of this stretch of road. The speed limit is 30 miles per hour and drivers mostly obey, as well as leaving an abundant distance between cars.
And then you see light, and you are out, and in a different world. Soaring peaks with snow, and German road signs and food. We stopped for lunch with a friend who lives overlooking Lake Zurich and then decided to drive five hours into France to position ourselves well to make our all-important ticketed time on the Eurotunnel train with the car.
Google routed us along some stretches of the autoroute, but largely along country roads that followed through small towns and countryside, and around countless roundabouts. John recently read David Gilmour’s The Pursuit of Italy where Gilmour posits that the differences in Italy and France’s culture, history, and wealth may be partially due to geography. Italy has a mountain chain that runs its length north to south cutting off one part from another and has almost no navigable rivers. France, on the other hand, has mountains on its borders with most of the country being a fertile plain, and has many wide, deep, navigable rivers. This was dramatically apparent as we drove from Zurich into the Champagne region passing lush, fertile fields of crops and flowing water, so different from our Italian landscape.
We arrived for the night in a tiny village called L’Épine, the hotel chosen mainly as it was touted as very dog-friendly. When I mean a tiny village I know of what I speak. It makes our village look like a metropolis. But it does have the huge hulking Flamboyant-Gothic Basilica di Notre-Dame (yes, Flamboyant Gothic is a thing) in the middle of its three streets, one shop, and one restaurant. We walked around it after dinner when it was dark and misty and the three people who might have been out on the street during the day had left and it was like aliens had planted this thing in here. How could this place have ever created this?
The next day ended in Calais. Calais is the closest French town to England—the channel is a mere 21-miles wide here, so it has been a strategically-important port town pretty much forever. This geographic fate has hit it hard, most recently in WWII, where much of the town was bombed flat. We stayed in a sweet family-run Victorian B&B about a mile from the sea, and as we walked towards the shore the buildings abruptly changed to post-war architecture in every direction. The town was in the throes of Tour de France anticipation, with banners and signs everywhere, as the Tour was due to end Stage 4 in about a week.
The next morning was something I’d fretted about since we started planning the trip—Calais to Folkestone on the Eurotunnel. We arrived 90 minutes early for our ticketed time and pulled right up to the drive-through area of the Pet Welcome Center. A woman walked up and said “Nancy Raff? Is this Lola?” I was amazed—turns out our license plate was scanned on the approach and the records pulled up in advance. She checked Lola’s EU pet passport and I got to scan my dog, a first for me and Lola. All was cleared and we went to the automatic check in. I put in the reservation number and the screen said we were early for our train and would we like to change to the one 30 minutes earlier? Why, yes! We drove on to a parking lot with multiple lanes, like the staging area for a ferry. After about five minutes they started loading us. We drove down to the train and on to one of two levels. We got the top. You drive forward the length of the train until it is filled. Attendants urge you forward and make sure to leave enough room to close doors sealing off one train car from another. Five minutes later we were off. You can get out of your car but as there’s nowhere to go everybody just stays seated.
I am only a tiny bit claustrophobic, but these tunnels did cause me a few moments of careful thought. I am not sure which I found more intimidating, to be deep under a mountain in the Alps or under all the water of the English Channel. Thirty minutes in the dark to ponder various ways of dying, then we arrive in Folkestone and drive off the train. Easy. And yet a whole other world in a matter of minutes.
Next week, Part 2. The son graduates and the Plague hits.
Resources:
Ticino area, Switzerland: our inn, Boato Bistrot & Bed, was clean and simple but I wouldn’t really recommend it. One of those places where the photos on the site were so much better that you wonder if you’ve arrived at the right place. We passed a restaurant on our walk, Da Enzo, that looked very much worth a visit—and it is right on the edge of the gorge. I’m actively looking for recommendations for this area from readers who use this route often.
L’Épine, France:Aux Armes de Champagne, comfortable stop right next to the basilica, although modern in its restoration. Good restaurant too with an impressive chariot of cheeses. Very dog friendly and seems to be a popular stop with the British vacation diaspora. Convenient for exploring the Champagne region.
Calais, France: We looked hard to find something with some charm in very post-war Calais and found it at the quirky and simple Les Secrets des Loges, a bed and breakfast in old Victorian house overlooking the theater. The best part was the lovely family who ran it along with their four cats. One downside was very thin walls.
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