MY PICKLE IN PESCALLO AND MORE

MY PICKLE IN PESCALLO

"John, stop! YouÂ’re going to scrap the side of the car," yelled my wife at me as I drove our small, four-seat Fiat Panda into a narrowing cobblestone passageway in Pescallo, a small fishing town on the Lecca branch of Lake Como, where the concierge at La Perla Panorama, our hotel of the day, said we would find a good seafood restaurant.

We had just walked through the beautiful lakeside town of Bellagio, located at the dividing point where Lake Como splits into a wishbone; one arm reaching to the city of Como close to Switzerland and the other to Lecca, about 35 miles north of Milano, theHurleyy burly capital of the province of Lombard.

After walking up and down the terraced town steps full of shops that served as the model behind Bellagio, the now-famous casino in Las Vegas with a giant oval shaped lake in front of it that features a choreographed lightshow, we thought weÂ’d explore the tiny fishing village of Pescallo.

The road along the lakeside from Lecca to Bellagio was narrow and windy. At one point on our route, I followed an Italian driver who scooted between two trucks stopped in a standoff because the road was not wide enough for both to pass. One of the truck drivers had to back off. One truck, the smaller one, started backing up. But while other cars were stopped awaiting the outcome of the maneuvers, I took my cue from the driver in front of me who had just passed me because I was going too slow. Barely slowing down from passing me, he threaded the needle caused by the awkward traffic puzzle and I followed despite my wifeÂ’s protestations not to. Driving from Bergamo airport east of Milan where we landed on Ryanair from Amsterdam earlier that day, I felt comfortable jumping into the flow of Italian traffic as
Kathy helped navigate using a combination of our Michelin driving directions (see earlier post on travel planning) and Italian road signs, which by and large are pretty good.

The sun was setting over the Italian Alps, which are to Lake Como like the Rockies are to Estes Park, Colorado, big and impressive. We followed the traffic signs to Pescallo. Although I knew the roads in this area were narrow and had observed cars, vans and even some buses make their way slowly through Bellagio, I was unprepared for the surprise awaiting me in Pescallo.

Spotting the first sign I saw pointing the way to Pescallo, I darted our small car in that direction. Thinking this was the main road, I flashed by two young boys kicking a soccer ball to each other as I drove along a stone pavement that lead into a shadowy passageway.

The roadway narrowed. Slowing down to better negotiate the path before me, I soon came to a point of checkmate where I thought I would wedge the car in and be unable to remove it from the impending situation of stomach-sinking proportions.

I heard scrapping noises and thought I had damaged the sides of car on the vertical canyon walls of the tiny village with only a handful of streets. When I reached a slightly larger square that connected to an equally narrow street through a small archway, it hit me like a punch in the gut that I would not be able to make the turn and continue forward. I had driven us into an untenable situation. The scrapping noise I heard came from the side-view mirrors on each side of the car being pushed toward the car by the walls of the buildings that were now only a couple of inches on each side of the car.

To make the situation even worse [or funnier on hindsight], a very large unleashed dog barking forcefully at us was standing on the bottom step of a stone stairway leading into the small square.

Dusk had arrived and I cherished the remaining minutes of light we had left to us to figure a way out of our emerging dilemma. Other than the two boys we had seen a few minutes earlier, we saw no one to whom we might appeal for help. We were clearly up a creek in Pescallo.

Our five-gear Fiat Panda crept forward by inches. Working the gas and the clutch when every inch counts focuses the mind becausedidn'tidnÂ’t want the car to drift backward into one of the buildings causing more damage to the carcouldn'tuldnÂ’t turn right and with my side mirrors out of commissicouldn'touldnÂ’t back up either.

"Way to go, John. Now what are you going to do?" I said to myself, feeling deservedly panicked. "Not only have you gotten a small Italian rental car stuck in a small Italian village, which will surely eat up your $250 security deposit, but no one is here to help you. Being in a remote part of Italy, god only knows how youÂ’re going to get help at this time of night and how much that help will cost. YouÂ’ll be the funny story villagers will talk about for decades to come as they laugh about the night the stupid American got his car stcouldn'td couldnÂ’t get out."

A few days earlier in Amsterdam I saw "The Da Vinci Code." Recalling the scene where Sophie Neuve and Robert Langdon escape the Paris police by driving her Smart Car backwards through oncoming cars and onto the sidewalk and then finally through a slit of space between two trucks, I said to myself, "If she could do it, so can you. This car is nearly as small as hers. Concentrate and slowly back out the same way you came in," I advised myself calmly.

Without the aid of my mirrors to allow me to see exactly how much room I had, my confidence left as quickly as it had arrived

"KathyÂ…get out of the car and tell me how close I am to the buildings," I pleaded to my wife seated next to me.

"Get out? No way with that dog standing there barking at us," she snapped back.

With cold sweat forming on my brow, I measured in my mind the size of my car and the proportions of the slightly larger square in front of us and came to the only plausible strategy available to me. "Could I pull into the square and turn the car around so I could head out front first and escape as we had come in?" It was a HobsonÂ’s choice of monumental proportididn't If it didnÂ’t work IÂ’d be in even worse shape, if that possible.

I inched forward into the square, turning the steering wheel right until the nose of the car was up against the stone archway. Reversing the car, I moved back until I saw clearly the outline of the red taillight, which told me there was no more room left. The dog was still there barking. I was probably the highlight of his day. As IÂ’ve grown older my paranoia of dogs, especially like the large one barking at me from just a few feet away, has increased.

Forward then reverse; again and again I moved the car until a ray of daylight and hope shown through the darkening skies. Finally, much to my amazement, I had achieved what only a few minutes earlier I thought was the impossible dream.

Now pointing in the right direction, I moved forward slowly. Both of us, with our windows rolled down so we could stick our heads our as far as we could without hitting the buildings but enough to see the distance between the carÂ’s bumper and the walls, called to the other with advise and pronouncements of progress.

With only inches to spare, we threaded the needle of Pescallo. The car cleared the dangerous squeeze and moved into a widening passage that would lead us to the highway we had exited a quarter hour earlier.

I stopped the car to survey the damages. The bad news was that the side view mirrors had indeed been scraped, but ever so slightly as to be virtually unnoticed. The good news was that the body of the car itself was untouched. We both looked at each other in wonderment of what had just happened.

Putting Pescallo in the review mirror, we headed up the hill in the dark past our hotel to stop at a restaurant, Trattoria Busconi, where we had a drink and savored the sweetness of escaping the pickle in Pescallo.

MINGLING AND MIGRANES IN MILANO

Unlike the morning drive from Bellagio to Milano that was bumper to bumper, stop-and-go from Como to Milano despite paying two tolls [1.60 and 1.20 Euros respectively] to be on the Autostrada, ItalyÂ’s multi-lane freeway where cars can zip by at impressive speeds, the drive from Milano in Lombardy to Lucca in Tuscany was free of traffic problems.

Even with a stop at an autogrill on the Autostrada so Kathy could make a scheduled call to our rental agent in Lucca, the intact medieval walled city where we would stay for five days and a stop for gasoline [in Italy it is called Benzine and costs 1.37 Euros per litre], our driving time was about three and one-half hours.

We would have cut an hour off the trip but for our adventure in leaving MilanoÂ’s historic center. It took us nearly an hour to find our way out of the center of Milano, where we had beginnerÂ’s luck in finding a parking garage with an open space [around the corner from The Duomo, the huge gothic cathedral first started to mark the uniting of the powerful Visconti and Sforza families. The ornate cathedral, which dominates a huge square and is next to the Vittorio Emanuel shopping arcade, an immensely impressive glass domed cross-shaped shopping mall, took upwards of five hundred years to build.

As happened in 1999 when I first visited Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome, The Duomo was undergoing a giant restoration. The entire front façade was hidden by scaffolding and a giant veil. The shopping arcade, however, was open and bustling with tourists and Milanese eating and drinking during their midday break. Our lunch in Milano consisted of three fresh "salsicce" found at an open food market full of wonderfully tasteful offerings – like one vendor who was slicing off meat from two roasted pigs for panini sandwiches and the stall selling fried rise balls with interiors of spinach, pomodore or cheese.

Having escaped the pickle in Pescallo the night before, we had another tourist moment at the parking garage in Milano. Expecting to see a ticket taker who would total our time and take our payment, we naively followed an exiting car down the spiraled road to the exit. The driver of the car in front of us put his ticket in a machine and the gate rose and the car zipped into the street. Pulling up to the machine, I likewise inserted thedidn'tket but the gate didnÂ’t open. The digital message told me to first pay my ticket then reinsert it. I knew parking wasnÂ’t free but with no one at the date, who would I pay and where would I find that person?

Parked at the ticket machine wondering what to do or who I would talk to, I saw cars starting to line up behind mcouldn'te we go again. I couldnÂ’t go forward and I couldnÂ’t back up. Thinking of the famous line delivered by Oliver Harder to Stan Laurel when the comedy duo found themselves in a tragic but funny situation, I admonished myself, silently saying, "HereÂ’s another fine mess youÂ’ve gotten us into."

I lept from the car and ran to what looked like a window where someone might relieve me of my embarrassment. Unlike America where using car horns is tantamount to giving someone the finger, in Italy car horns are needed and necessary to send important signals to pedestrians and operators alike. I was ready to hear the waiting drivers behind me blasting away at their horns like cannons firing at a battle.

The window I thought was open was closed. Holding my ticket and money in plain view for a group of people exiting the elevator and asking in my evolving Italian where I could pay, one of them pointed back to the elevator. But I didnÂ’t know what he was referencing. I next collared a woman on the street and again went through my pathetic routine. She understood and took me to a ticket machine that takes your ticket and money and returns the ticket and change, if needed. Thanking her, I walked away from the machine with the man whose car was waiting behind me in close pursuit. Another learning lesson came and went.

After touring the block twice, unable to figure how to get off the one-way street, we spotted a cyclist who made the turn we were looking for and followed him. As we made our way away from the historic center and its tangle of streets seemingly not found on our map, we followed signs leading to the Autostrada and Paciencia and Parma, two cities on our route to Lucca.

At one point we saw a smallish delivery truck suddenly turn into our way. Surprised by its sudden appearance, I was even more surprised when I saw in big letters printed on it "Spinelli Mozzarella." That made my day.

LIVING LIFE LARGE IN LUCCA

We met our rental agent Debra at the east gate of Lucca, located about 45 minutes northwest of Florence, one of ItalyÂ’s fabled art cities we would visit soon.

Our two small-car caravan wended through LuccaÂ’s narrow streets first started by Romans in 180 BC. The birthplace of Giacomo Puccini, a composer of operas, most notably "La Boheme," Lucca started looking as it does today around 1400 and acquired its quintessential medieval walls starting in the 16th century. The walls, which are tall, thick and wide, took about two hundred years to build and represent a three-mile hike.

In America we think things are old after fifty years or so. In Italy, the "new stuff" as I call it, started after 1000 AD.

Debra took us to meet Duccio, the owner of the tiny garage where we parked our tiny car for 7 Euros per night. The four of us walked to the next street over – Via Guinigi – to be introduced to the self-catering [full kitchen, bathroom and laundry accommodations] we would call home base for the next five days as we made day trips to the five small hillside sea towns collectively known as the Cinque Terra, Florence and nearby Pisa.

Cars generally are expensive to own, drive and park in Italy. This explains, in part, why Italians from the tip to the heel of the boot and from kids to grandmas and professionals to students ride bicycles or scoot along with Vespas or their equivalent. Bicycles are everywhere and in my opinion are integral to the active Italian lifestyle that when combined with their Italian diet augurs for a healthy and long-lived life. Compare this to the America lifestyle based on poor exercise – cars are the key -- and poor diets – fast food, pizza and sugar in everything. I mentioned to Kathy that we had yet to see any Italian that was as grossly obese as is now common among many Americans who increasingly eat a steady diet of fried, sugary midway fair food. Aside from kids and teenagers for do wear T-shirts, Italians, especially professionals, wear long pants, shirts, ties, skirts and snug pantsuits with an accent of color coming from scarves, shoes or eyewear.

Our apartment is huge, sleeping six or more, and offers a glorious rooftop view of the brick and stucco walls with their terra cotta tiled roofs and no fewer than three of the cityÂ’s signature towers. One of them boasting a grove of trees growing on its top is only two streets away. Being on the top floor of the building, I discovered a skylight that leads me to our rooftop where IÂ’ll have an unobstructed 360 birdÂ’s eye view of the town.

Speaking of birds, at sunrise and dusk the air is alive with packs of swallows darting and diving for their dinner. Other birds, especially pigeons, are in good supply as well.

The medieval brick wall surrounding Lucca is high, wide and thick, with only a handful of entrances and exits. To walk the top of the wall, which has occasional parks that are quiet and shady, is about three miles.

Without electric lights at night one can imagine being transported to a time when candle power guided horses and carriages through the quiet streets instead of cars, small trucks and motorcycles that today navigated their way through the high-canyon walls of the village alive with residents and tourists.

We Americas have been raised on the notion that horizontal space is unending. This sense of entitlement to open spaces, I believe, has in part resulted in the outward sprawl from our central cities. Here in Italy, density is vertical. This notion of using limited resources, like open spaces, is key to making mass transportation like trains, buses and subways work and it also encourages the use of bicycles, an eminently sensible people powered form of propulsion to shop and visit without concern for parking a car. Speaking of cars, IÂ’ve only seen a couple of SUVs and not one Hummer or similar silly-sized American vehicles. It seems to me that if someone wants one, by the very size and cost of running it here, its use would be limited to non-city driving because Lucca central would be inhospitable to the status statement such a vehicle would represent. Considering I nearly got a small Fiat stuck in a small town, driving a Hummer here would be sheer insanity.

Shopping for sundries like soap and toothpaste and groceries like meats, cheese, fruit and vegetables and bread in Lucca consists of visiting a string of small shop owners. No Wal-MartÂ’s or KrogerÂ’s here, although Tesco, a European facsimile of Wal-Mart, are found but not in dense surroundings like Lucca.

For our grocery shopping, IÂ’ve adopted Macelleria Tuccori Mariano, run by Graziana and her husband. Located on Via S. Croce, a five-minute walk from our apartment, the small market offers a variety of fresh meats, cheeses, breads and a small assortment of fresh vegetables and other items like canned and packaged goods, wine and soda. Lured in by a handwritten note taped on the front window saying "English Spoken," Graziana, born in Canada where she grew up speaking English, is helpful for "touristi" like me whose spoken Italian is hit and whose understanding of spoken Italian is on a word-by-word basis, depending on the context of the conversation.

There must be an Italian law that stipulates that at least one gelato vendor be located on every block in the country. They are everywhere, more prolific by far than barbecue joints in Texas. Gelato, Italian ice cream, is luscious, creamy and comes in a multitude of flavors. In general, four scoops in a medium cup costs about 2.5 Euros.

In contrast to me, who despite my pedigree as a government journalist wanted to leave the pitiful politics of America behind for the duration of our trip, Kathy wanted to keep a lifeline open to new from home. As the technology expert in the family, she managed to figure out the satellite TV system in the apartment. Instead of watching Italian entertainment and game shows, we can now tune into CNN World News and other American shows.

Last evening as we were walking the top of the Lucca wall, we came upon a gathering of smartly dressed people and heard the sound of someone speaking into a microphone. Seeing two Carbinieri standing outside the gathering, we were curious to learn more, so we walked into the proceedings.

Turns out it was a political dinner gathering for Mr. Gambogi, running for a province seat and endorsed by five parties, one of which was Forza Italia, the powerhouse party created by billionaire Silvio Berlusconi, ItalyÂ’s prime minister for the past seven years who was recently defeated in national elections by Prodi, the socialist candidate. Those in attendance were well dressed and were listening to remarks after clearly having had a nice sit-down dinner. Forza Italia is the equivalent of the Republican Party in America.

Not speaking with anybody about the event, we headed into the town, walked around and had another gelato, then became attracted by more amplified speech coming from another plaza. This gathering, it turned out, was for an opposing roster of candidates, who like American Democrats, meet in a square to listen to speeches and a band. The main candidate here was Stefano Baccelli, young, good looking, with a beard, compared to Gambogi, who was older but dressed in a suit in his candidate photo.

After having spoke to a women and her son from Czechoslovakia, they in their broken English and me in my punctuated Italian made more understandable with hand gestures, it turns out regional elections will be held this Sunday and part of Monday. Politics and political candidates are everywhere and as the European Union moves experiments with morphing sovereign nations into cooperative states, the importance of politicians with real skills will increase.

FABULOUS FLORENCE

The drive from Lucca to Florence, or Firenze as its called here, was without mishap until we got off what we thought was our exit. It wasn’t, as we soon found out. Suddenly lost, we did what we’ve grown accustomed to doing – asking many people the same question: "Dove ce ……?" which means "where is….."

The first woman we asked directions from actually gave us the course correction we needed, but it a little moxy and a U-turn to get where we were going. Driving in Italy is definitely freeform, to put it mildly. As I learned in 1999 when I first visited the homeland of my gene pool, Italians donÂ’t really stop for anything but they do make way. Movement is constant but its considered. Drivers in America would think it horrible if a scooter ducked in and out of traffic as the driver and maybe a passenger moved forward through clogged traffic. In Italy no one takes notice because its an accepted and obviously legal tactic.

We’ve seen very few Italian police on either city streets or the Autostrada. When they are seen, they dress more like military men than city cops. Last night in quiet Lucca we actually saw two police cars with their flashing lights on, a rare sight. Lucca: CSI – The Gelato Affair – what a boring show that would be.

When we did make it into historic Florence, where to park the car legally again raised its ugly head. In a reversal of fate from my pickle in Pescallo and my migrane in Milan, by sheer luck we ended up being the last car accepted into a central-district parking garage. That was worth the four-hour, 16 Euros parking fee.

We walked to the Duomo, another magnificent, one-of-a-kind church of monumental proportions and artistic exuberance whose dome was completed in 1463. As large and as domineering as the Duomos in Milano and Florence are, they remain hidden in their giant plazas until you actually set eyes on them because they are sequestered among the labyrinth of old, tall buildings that surround and that were known to the likes of Dante, Michelangelo and Leonardo among other notables of history.

Being a warm and beautiful Saturday in Florence, the entire area was crawling with people. It appeared as crowded as an Ohio State University football game day in Columbus. The central market, reminiscent of the West Side Market in Cleveland with its bounty of ethnic stalls brimming with all the wonders of the area, from fish and meats to cheeses, wines and local produce, was buzzing with local shoppers, hungry tourists and everyone else in between.

The fish stalls were especially impressive. In Columbus, Ohio, fresh fish is often times a misnomer as it was likely caught days before in a fish farm elsewhere. In Florence, just an hour from the rich fishing coasts of the Mediterranean, the fish were so fresh that you would surely loose a starring contest their eyes were so clear and unspoiled.

THE UPS AND DOWNS OF CINQUE TERRA

The Cinque Terra, five small hillside towns that cling to the sides of the cliff like the lemon and olive trees planted in terraced forms, are exceedingly popular for tourists of all nationalities.

We drove to La Spezia, a seaport where we purchased two day-trip tickets that included the cost of hiking the sometimes rugged foot paths no wider than a yardstick. We hopped the first train to leave the station and the ride was super fast, but being the express train, it flew past the stops we wanted. We had to get off before we ended up in Genoa and take a local train back to Monterosso, the furtherest north of the five absolutely charming little villages that each were agog with people either sunning themselvs on the beaches or resting for the trek that should be done only by those were are in basic good shape.

It took us two hours to walk up and down and up and down the narrow two-way pathway that took us to Vernazza, the next stop in the string of villages. We met several folks from either the USA, Canada or othe countries that, like us, found shade to rest as we geared up for the next segment.

The day was sunny, which meant the hillsides were hot and dry. Fortunately for us I had frozen two bottles of water the night before, otherwise we would have been hard pressed for water on our trip.

When we did arrive in Vernazza, we basked in the rest we took and the pesto pizza and gelate we had to curb our hunger and treat our tastebuds to a cool and refreshing treat.

The seaside here is spectacular but hard to view if you don't walk the rugged paths.

Tomorrow we're off to Pisa to see the Leaning Tower. Then our stay in Lucca comes to an end as we drive to Rome and points south.