It’s always tempting to think that it would be unmitigated bliss to run around Italy with a travel guide written by a local. Locals, after all, should know every secret hideaway, every hidden corner, and every culinary anomaly that makes the local cuisine the best.
The problem is, being a tourist is different. A tourist demands that a city open up its secrets any time of year. Those secrets shall be available at the drop of a hat, or the drop of a couple of Euros anyway.
The other problem is that locals assume everyone knows that you don’t get wild game in the spring, or that the road to the archaeological site always gets waterlogged in May and those idiotic tourists who try the non-improved road in their rental cars end up getting stuck up to the roofline in mud, which violates the terms of the rental contract so that their credit card won’t pay the supplemental insurance costs and they’re really up the proverbial creek in more ways than one…
I once acted upon some local information, going to a rural hotel where local game was supposedly served by two little old ladies who were said to be cooks so legendary that their names were not to be repeated in public. I had to ask people about ten times where the danged hotel was located. It was that remote.
It’s also hard salivating and trying to speak a foreign language at the same time.
Anyway, we made it. We weren’t even unpacked when the little old ladies asked us what we would like for dinner. I said, “What do you have?”
“Pasta pomodoro, or pasta con pesto,” came the reply.
Hmmmm, not the exotic fare I had expected.
“Pesto,” I said, “e per secundo?”
Pork on the grill, or chicken breast on the grill. About as boring as it comes.
And when we ate the pesto, the faint, acrid smell of vinegar wafted from the pasta. The pesto came from a bottle.
Such was life. Expectations dashed, we went to bed early.
Except we didn’t sleep. It turns out there was one other family in the hotel. Italians. They had taken over the entire floor and were involved in a really noisy game of hide and seek which was made more “adult” by evidently requiring lots of smoking in the communal bathrooms where there wasn’t an ashtray so butts made their way into the sinks and the bidets and the toilets, which made morning as unpleasant as night.
So, Shangri-La it wasn’t. But then again, game season it wasn’t either. We wanted it now. Whatever “it” was.
There is a divide between Tourists and Locals, one that can’t be bridged by just wearing the right trousers. But you knew that, right?