Do You Need a Car to Visit Italy? · Jan 4, 12:44 PM by James Martin
It always amazes me when I see Internet writing types who’ve used bold text to spout loudly the unequivocal law of the Italian countryside, “you definitely need a car to see Italy right!” If you research, you’ll likely find that these are people who have bought a house in an agricultural wilderness and turned it into a Bed and Breakfast that train-riders can’t visit because the tracks don’t go anywhere close to there. It’s a vested interest thing.
There’s also a romantic side. Every Italian tourist’s noggin has been graced with a portion of memory devoted to an endless loop revealing a red car gloriously shredding the asphalt between idyllic Tuscan villages over and over again. The top is down, the exhaust note is throaty, and friendly folks wave encouragingly as you zip along with Italian verve. It’s a virus caused by overindulging in Italian Romantic Comedies and taking to heart the hyperbole found in tourist brochures. Really.
These days (sung sadly to a tune by the Duke), you “don’t zip along much anymore.” Not legally that is. Millions of Euros worth of autovelox cameras make sure that zipping is kept to something you do when your trusty steed, parked discreetly, is approached by the constabulary just as you’ve finished getting amorous with your sweet honey. “Nothing to see here, officer…”
Presumably the fees extracted from the jauntier drivers pay for the machines. It doesn’t often work out like that, but these days folks are increasingly willing to go into debt to keep everyone else in line. “God,” they will explain, “wants them to.” And so you will likely find yourself and your rental vehicle in frequent lines, except in Italy the line of cars you wait in is called a coda or a “tail”—except you don’t want a piece of this one…
There is another problem with driving these days. The price of fuel has skyrocketed. Taxes, you see, have been added to rebuild the towns that bad weather has crunched. And, remember, the prices have skyrocketed from stratospherically high prices we now think of as reasonable. We are a flexible people.
I’m not trying to scare you from renting a car and driving your butt off. It’s just that it might be time to consider the train. It’s (relatively) cheap. It lets you off near the center of cities—bypassing the industrial crap that rings them—and you don’t have to pay attention to anything you don’t want to pay attention to.
I mean, look at what’s on a single rail line: Torino to Trieste. It’s like a box of assorted chocolates, these sweet and compelling cities and towns: Torino, Vercelli (known for risotto with frogs!) Milano, Brescia, Verona, Padova, Venice. And you pay just a few Euros to travel between any two of them. You can spend weeks along this one rail line without thinking you’re missing the “real Italy.”
And in Italy you’ll find passes that integrate the public transportation experience, from boats to metro to buses and trains. In little-visited Lazio, for example, you’ll find the BIRG Pass that will save you money and make getting places darned easy. Check with the local tourist office wherever you land.
And don’t think the train stations themselves are seedy little stink-holes like some in the US. Both Venice and Florence stations have been named in one of those ubiquitous Top Ten lists of train stations in Europe.
So, no, you don’t need a car to visit Italy. You can get to some mighty sweet places on the train.
Do You Need a Car to Visit Italy? originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Jan 04, 2012, © James Martin, 
Italy Travel Toolbox
- All About Italy Rail Passes
- How to Ride Italian Trains (video)
- Italy Maps
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- Italy Autostrada Map
- Cinque Terre Hiking Map
Rebuilding Vernazza, a pixel at a time · Jan 1, 05:38 PM by James Martin
Vernazza is one of the 5 lands, the Cinque Terre, a series of cute and colorful villages strung out along the Ligurian coast and well known around these parts. The Cinque Terre was hit hard by devastating floods, as you know. Vernazza is still a bit dirty and needs cleaning up.
One of the ways I’ve been told that this cleaning up can be facilitated is by the donations of folks who remained high and dry through 2011, the old year, the one whose ringing out might make your head throb in pain on this solemn day after.
Would you buy some pixels to help the Cinque Terre? Well, you can. What can a pixel or ten cost, anyway?
Look here: A Pixel for Vernazza. Not only can you buy pixels in 10 by 10 blocks to bring color to the iconic photo, but you can also link your luscious box of color to your web site. If you don’t have one, perhaps you can link it to your favorite site. Perhaps that is Wandering Italy. I’d like to hope so, but I suspect other sites with neked babes or sleeping cats might be more popular. Use your own discretion. Or, if you have none, use someone else’s. It’s what I do.
I do not know if this avenue will produce a better Vernazza. Nor do I know where the money goes, exactly. But you might want to check it out. There are worse places to send your money, I suspect. Giving it to rich people is popular in America, but I think that’s nuts. I’m pretty much alone in this.
Rebuilding Vernazza, a pixel at a time originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Jan 01, 2012, © James Martin,
Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power · Dec 20, 02:09 PM by James Martin
Martha and I recently attended a fab art exhibit called: Masters of Venice: Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. The snappy title titillates, doesn’t it?
But hey, the history of art is all about titillation! They cover it up, but it’s there. You aren’t supposed to know. But artists, and those who write blurbs about them, leave hints.
You see, after we had learned about the challenges of painting an aristocracy who’d taken to wearing black from head to toe (the signs pointing out that Venetian painters took to squeezing out so much detail in the faces that a viewer’s eyes couldn’t linger on the black hole of clothing but were instead coerced into focusing on the area of greatest detail right from the get-go) we snaked around the folks blocking the paintings, all spellbound with wires hanging from their ears as they listened to voices ping-ponging around their heads, and we finally made it to the end of the exhibit, where an erotic revelation awaited us. They always leave the erotic at the end so you’ll remember it.
So here you go, pumping toward the great end, the climax: Like everyone else, the Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power made a great deal of money painting scenes from mythology. That’s why there are so many paintings depicting them. When have you ever gone to any kind of historic art exhibit without seeing a plethora or two of paintings depicting a scene from mythology?
And it’s just any old mythology, either. You know what the big spenders were throwing their money away on, don’t you?
Come on! Mythology is full of it! Yes, sex! Nudity! People with arrows penetrating their soft and yielding flesh! (?!)
You see, in mythology, ladies of mythical bodily perfection were never far from the gods who manipulated them got manipulated by them. Crazy things happened of course, but you can’t really put that in a painting, so, you’re left with things like perfect breasts. Well, perfect for the Renaissance. Perfection changes. But whatever, the rich folks wanted to see sexual perfection on their walls. So they created a bull market for such things.
Rich people are such a hoot.
Berlusconi,
and a man named “Newt”…
Anyway, those rich guys studied mythology, looking for the nasty bits so they could have their favorite starving artist paint scenes full of breasts and other fatty things they liked to look so they could have them framed and slapped up on the walls of their inner sanctums. So now, hundreds of years later, museums everywhere bulge with pictures of naked women involved in some sort of odd relationship with muscular netherworld beings—and for balance, besides them will always be the glistening white flesh of frail Saint Sebastian festooned with many arrows, accented by the blood that couldn’t help leaking out…
And thus we have arrived at the end.
Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Dec 20, 2011, © James Martin,
Popular These Days
Italy After Berlusconi · Nov 20, 04:14 PM by James Martin
I’m worried. So worried that I haven’t been able to write for the last couple of weeks. I’m worried about the state of Italian culture now that a coup d’état, beautifully executed by Europe’s hit squad, has left in its malodorous wake an unelected representative of Goldman Sachs sitting as Italy’s PM—just as everyone and his rich brother is clamoring for growth!.
Sure, Berlusconi was an embarrassment; my Italian neighbors felt ashamed every time the conversation turned toward the skirt-chasing midget. But growth? I mean, not a single one of my neighbors salivates over an iPad they will never use. Their desire for goods doesn’t seem to be growing. Population isn’t growing. You’re telling me growth is the answer, the only answer?
Well then Bunky, Italy is certainly dead—or doomed to an endless coma. Can half hour lunches be far behind this clamor for industrial efficiency and growth? Is the pursuit of pleasure also dead, something the Italians do extremely well, even well enough to irritate the delicate sensibilities of America’s right wing lunatics who ignore that part of their own constitution? Will the pursuit of pleasure have to be jettisoned in favor of the nose-to-the-grindstone life so the “the Vampire Squid” (Goldman Sachs) can fatten itself like a tumor with its tendrils immersed in the delicious fattiness of that unlimited growth? (To ancient Romans, cancer was the crab because of those tendrils visible on tumors, but maybe they were thinking of squid…)
Perhaps I am underestimating the Italians because they aren’t on the street like Americans trying to get their government to return to the good old days of “government of, by and for the people,” the days before huge industrial companies magically became “people” by someone’s misinterpretation of law and banks simply lent money provided by depositors.
Definition: good old days—when being conservative meant you didn’t take unnecessary risks with your capital. Today bankers get bonuses for taking risk. The bigger the risk the bigger the bonus. There is no downside, no deductions for failure. Any engineer worth his salt would see the same thing as I see: Positive Feedback=Highly Unstable System. Avoid! Avoid! (Meaning bailouts will be needed every goddam time if this idiocy continues. And they’ll use your money.)
Yes, that’s it. I’m not reading the Italians right. They have their savings. They have their underground economy. Perhaps just a shrug is all they need. Ignore the bastards in Government; get on with your life. Plant by the moon. Eat what you plant. Love like you’ve never loved before.
That’s the ticket. Nothing bad will happen. I’m better now. Perhaps I’ll go to Venice. Venice is a good place for a fantasy life disconnected from reality.
If asked to give a speech on the issue, I’d give this one:
Is anyone else worried? Is it just me?
Italy After Berlusconi originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Nov 20, 2011, © James Martin,
How to Know When You're in Liguria · Sep 22, 05:18 AM by James Martin
Part of Italy’s charm is that everything within it is so darned regional. Mountains and seas have long conspired to keep people apart long enough for regional specialties to develop, and that’s what we like. There’s always something new to admire just around the corner.
Sea power Liguria has a few regional quirks that shout out “Liguria!” to me. I thought I’d point them out just in case you were standing somewhere in what you think is, perhaps, Tuscany, and then began to have doubts. Italy is not all Tuscany. Let’s get that out of the way first.
Pebble Mosaics
The first Ligurian specialty you see in the picture up there to the right. It’s the little piazza in front of the 18th Century Oratorio di Sant’Erasmo in Santa Margherita Ligure. The piazza is spruced up with a Ligurian specialty, the pebble mosaic.
To make a pebble mosaic, you just go out and get stones that look like miniature rugby balls, sort them for size and color, and have at it, sinking them into some sort of substrate like cement. This is called “risoèu” or “Risoèu”. Another aspect of regional and sub-regional traits is in the spelling of the name.
In any case, if you go to Santa to see this little gem of an Oratorio, you should at least peek inside and see the model ships that sailors have left as ex_votos because their lives have been spared by God during some storm or other. (David Downie of Wandering Liguria says the locals shorten “Santa Margherita Ligure” to a simple “Santa,” and so will I).
Ligurian trompe-l‘œil
The next major Ligurian specialty I’d like to expound upon would be the faux painted houses. You see, Genoa wasn’t so rich as some of the other places that had all sorts of foo-foo design to amaze the eye, and so they cleverly trained painters to make pretend sculpture out of their bland facades.
They tell me that this Ligurian trompe-l‘œil is making a comeback. You see plenty of freshly painted houses with clever designs painted to trick your eye these days.
Christopher Columbus Statues
Then of course, there’s Columbus. While Genoa claims as its own the famous man who didn’t exactly know where he landed, other towns have tried over the years to join in on the celebration. So there’s likely to be a Columbus statue in any town within spitting distance of the sea in Liguria. The one you see in the picture was sculpted in 1892 by the sculptor Odoardo Tabacchi. It’s one of the more fascinating ones. Below the famous explorer and his globe, below his ship which seems to be made of four back-ends, you’ll find some quite interesting and quite toothy dolphins.
And then there’s that clear blue Ligurian sky draped over it all.
(To find out more about Liguria, check out Wandering Liguria. To find out how to park in Liguria, see: How to Get a Parking Spot in Liguria)
How to Know When You're in Liguria originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Sep 22, 2011, © James Martin,
But First the Weather · Sep 19, 06:13 AM by James Martin
I have a lot to talk to you about. But first, the weather. That’s the way they do it on the tee-vee, if I remember correctly. You can wait for a story all day, but there’s the weather, reports about ball games, lots of ads, a list of the new murders—and before you know it you’re too tired to wait for the main story.
Anyway, yesterday was a day of much-needed rain here in the Lunigiana. It poured pretty much all day. There was a little thunder in the afternoon. Otherwise dreary.
But today began with a stunning clarity and blue skies. We yearned to get out. As soon as we did, clouds started forming. Then, after lunch, it actually rained a bit again. We went in search of stunning views. Even though these pictures were taken with a little pocket camera, the views of the Alpi Apuane were so good I thought I’d share them with you before returning to work on the Wandering Europe newsletter.
Even the non-mountain landscapes were sorta purty.
(You can click the picture in the upper right and it’ll get bigger. You can click the bottom one, but it will just sit there and do nothing. If it does do something, call me.)
But First the Weather originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Sep 19, 2011, © James Martin,
Italy in Decay · Aug 31, 09:56 AM by James Martin
Italy in Decay originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Aug 31, 2011, © James Martin,
Funny, This Italy · Aug 30, 09:16 AM by James Martin
Italy, and its current economic crisis, is having a profound effect on Americans.
Political Americans seem to derive great pleasure from pummeling the soft underbelly of this Italy, pointing out its political and structural “flaws” with a particular delight. Italy’s economy is not growing. Italy is burdened with a bureaucracy that is slow and inefficient. Italians drink a mere ounce of coffee standing up, for god sakes, an empirical measure of the immense poverty of these deluded people—at least compared to a country in which the same amount of coffee is used with 32 ounces of tap water to produce a medium-sized big-gulp cup filled with the dirty water they charge a bundle for.
Expats point to the lack of things like cool-whip and Kraft cheese singles, among other things they can’t seem to stop missing. Italy is a civilization in decline, certainly. Life there is hell, certainly.
The not-so-complimentary invective “Old Europe” has even been known to reverberate through the hallowed halls of American Congress—even as (somebody’s) God lashes out in anger over the deficit that ten years ago mattered naught. It’s been like that forever, or at least since Dick Cheney’s reign.
I was thinking about all this while reading a review of Cheney’s book in the NYT. I perked up considerable at the mention of Italy:
And in the epilogue, Mr. Cheney writes that after undergoing heart surgery in 2010, he was unconscious for weeks. During that period, he wrote, he had a prolonged, vivid dream that he was living in an Italian villa, pacing the stone paths to get coffee and newspapers.
Yes, in the end, the wannabe warriors, imperialists, cooks and accountants all seem to dream of living in this Italy.
Why is that, do you think?
Cheney’s dream is just starting to be analyzed. I like the Freudian one:
Dr. Paula Ellman, director of the Psychoanalytic Training Institute of the New York Freudian Society, agreed with the majority of Kazes’s diagnosis. For her, Cheney’s dream is “lifeless, concrete, [and] devoid of rich symbols.” It might reveal “his desires to have a life of ease, with its ordinary, mundane pleasures.”
You know why I like the analysis? It’s because it focuses on the major elements at play here. No real person cares about the growth of industrial monster Monsanto, or the increasing money accumulated by those of unimaginable wealth.
Nope. Some people—I’ll call them “real” people—are hooked on mundane pleasures. The pleasure of eating a fish fresh from the sea, cooked by people who own the restaurant and care about bringing pleasure to their customers. The sun peeking out from under the storm clouds gloriously. The harmony and pleasure of letting one’s eyes wander over the delicate curves of the southern Baroque expressed in a simple country church in Puglia. The things pictured on this page in other words—those Italian landscapes that always seem to be inhabited by something built by a culture that values and nurtures creative types rather than obscenely large corporations. And when we “real” people get to feeling a bit peckish, we know our plate will soon be brimming with simple food peasants have spent years learning to make glorious.
So why do people never seem to come to grips with the fact that they can bellyache as they damn well please about all these flaws and the simple fact is that it doesn’t matter a bit. Yes, everything they say is true about Italy. Awful place, this Italy, by modern political standards. But the reality confounds them. What they see can’t be real. To real people the incredible awfulness is well hidden; Italy is a very desirable place to spend some quality time. Ask nearly anyone.
So why wait for a near death experience to clear the buffers and make you see that all you want are sparkling days peppered with mundane pleasures?
Why can’t people see this simple fact? The signs are all over the damn place.
(Perhaps, just perhaps, that vile and impenetrable bureaucracy binds Italians not to government services, but to their families and to each other. Just a guess.)
Funny, This Italy originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Aug 30, 2011, © James Martin,