From Umbria, we trained to Varenna. When Dawn asked me to come to Venice to meet her, I had to change my ticket to Sydney so that I left from Milan. Milan, hmm, she said. That’s pretty close to somewhere wonderful. I’ll take you there, she grinned, after Umbria, but it’s a surprise.
We arrived at Torontola, the stop for Umbria, from Venice, in the rain, and left it in the sun, after some tortured negotiations about tickets to Milan and onwards. Train travel in Italy is fraught with changed time tables, tickets that don’t guarantee seating, stops that may not happen, platforms that change just as the train is coming in which involves hurtling myself and my luggage down the stairs and up the other side before the whistle blows, risking life limb and vertebrae to get onto the train, wondering how I’m supposed to drag 25kg of hated luggage through a passage that is as wide only as a wedge heel, and finding out that the 6 hour train that promised food, doesn’t. It’s all part of being in Italy and I follow Dawn like a love struck puppy as she works the system.
Why are you wearing a short white pleated skirt when its raining and we have 60kg of luggage between us and three stops and we don’t know if we have a seat or what platform the train will be on, and how come we’re sitting in first class when we’ve booked second? Shhh, she grins. This skirt has got me a lot of help in the past. Sure enough, at the top of a flight of stairs, when we are almost being mowed down in the rush of other passengers, blonde Dawns does a little Marilyn Monroe twirl, and instantly her giant pink case is carried by a total stranger, the tickets are sorted, nobody dares move us from our non guaranteed seat as she unpacks the cherries she’s brought for the journey.
We changed at Florence for Milan. I forgot to write about the ride to Torontola when we first sat in a coach where an ancient man, stretched across the seats, was gasping his last breaths as his daughter watched anxiously out the window. Dawn and I smelled death and decay and would rather stay in the aisle for four hours than sit with them. Later a whole coach was disabled and sealed off, so all its passengers were moved into a few crowded coaches, while we wondered if he had actually taken his last ride. In Florence station, I sat on the suitcases swinging my red shoes to detract would-be gypsies, thieves and pickpockets from thinking I was a naive tourist, while Dawn rushed around changing tickets so that we’d arrive earlier, at a different station, on a different train, which meant we wouldn’t have to take a taxi, just a ferry, but she had to pay a bit more, and maybe she could get credit for the ticket we don’t use, and she could use it later, but then again she has a Europass, but then we’ll have to get a lift from the ferry, so we better hurry because that’s the train, right now, first class that looks and sounds like second and the conductor is blowing his whistle and waving his green bat, and there is nobody around to appreciate her white frilly skirt and take pity on her huge pink suitcase that goes up to her waist, so we haul our cases up the four metal stairs and wedge them into place taking up two passenger seats and lurch into two window seats to spend the journey talking to an Italian architect from Venice who travels the world with her husband who makes sails for yachts. And who says that where we are going is the most spectacular place in Italy.
We arrive at Varenna, in pouring, drenching rain, running down hill over the cobbles after our runaway cases that have had enough abuse, thankyouverymuch, to last a lifetime. The road ends, before it branches into tiny lanes that weave up through the ancient village, at a ferry terminal, lurching in the rain. Our clothes are soggy. Our hair is frizzy. Luckily, I have proved to Dawn that my shoes are really Italian leather because the colour hasn’t bled onto my skin.
We’re on the shores of a very very large grey lake. Mountains race to the sky and crash back down into the sea. Magnificent villas buried in hydrangeas cling to dripping forests. Motor boats, ferries and fishermen break the surface of the lake. Snow tips the mountain tops. Houses are painted pink, cerise, salmon, cream, pale yellow, ochre. Oleander bushes the size of houses scatter the cobbles with petals and magnolias the size of oak trees drop their blooms in the water.
I’m on Lake Como, rowing distance to Switzerland, home of the terribly rich and some incredibly famous, and eccentrics and recluses and people who just want to be here because this is where earth was invented, and I think I’m going to faint, surrounded by so much beauty.
I stand like the French Lieutenant’s Woman on the prow, ignoring the drizzle as the car ferry churns its way across the water to Bellagio, built at the fork of the lake. Ochre and yellow villas loom out of the rain as the ferry pulls up at the quay: we’re met by Ornello, in whose apartment we’re staying at San Giovanni, one km from Bellagio. She’s clad from head to toe in oilskins, and wellies, and flings our luggage into the minute boot of her Fiat, tears up the road under bridges and down winding lanes so narrow the mirrors have to be tucked in, and deposits us in the 300 year old apartment. I fling open yet another set of shutters, lean way out and breathe deep, seeing the boats, and mists, and silver water. I go up to Dawn and hug her. Grazie mille.
The apartment is part of the Villa Melzi complex, a magnificent 17th century villa, built by a man who was crazy about gardening, and every morning the grounds are swept by hand, every out of place leaf picked up, every azalea inspected for blight or bugs, every Japanese maple trimmed and plucked, every white marble statue dusted. Below the apartment is a coffee shop, and a pizza restaurant under creaking vines, where old boats bob in their shallow water.
One day we’re taken up to Bel Vedere, a restaurant way up the mountains by F. He arrived here in the sixties, fell in love with the place, kept coming back over the years as his fortunes changed in America, and then met his girlfriend who ran the local laundry. He's a lively raconteur and has become a vivid fixture in the village.
You see this here, he says pointing to a house, this is where Antonio (all names changed to protect identities) lives. Antonio’s wife left him and now he grows olives, you must taste his olive oil, the best in the world over there is CIAO! he leans his huge frame out of the tiny car and slaps the hand of the man selling fruit from a truck, that’s Marcello, he’s having trouble with the tax department so had to leave his villa to rot and he’s living with the daughter of .. Bon Jello! he shouts to a kid wheeling past on his bicycle, are you gonna play tennis tonight with me, that’s Giorgio, his mother is French and she ran off with the baker, now living in Milan, her husband Luciano sold me my goats because I can’t mow such steep lawns see those lawns there mine are just like that except the fken goats eat everything else as well, oh he’s back! that restaurant is run by Luigi when he wanted to renovate it and put on a third story the communale got wind of it and he had to tear it down, there’s that tree that fell on top of Maria’s house and killed her mother, what a story so Maria had to go and work in Luigi’s restaurant and now she makes the best breads in town, you must try them, specially with Antonio’s olive oil, Oh! there’s that old man, CIAO, Bon Jerimino! Ya wanna ride? he pulls up alongside a wheezing puffing octogenarian leaning heavily on his olive wood cane as he makes his way painfully up the impossible mountain road, I see this old dude every day he walks miles to visit his friends, sometimes I give him a lift come on old fella, claps his hands, hurry up, we haven’t got all day, move over we’ll put him in the back because he usually doesn’t smell too good, old man gets in, whiff follows him, old man starts shouting ..
F's contribution is interlaced with the hitchhiker: There you are old man, out you get, you can walk down the road now to your stone house, careful you don’t fall on your cane what a crazy old man I sometimes give him a lift his wife used to make the best goat stew we also have 37 cats which drive me crazy and eleven dogs and they sleep on the bed I don’t mind but you know it can drive you crazy CIAO BON Jeeorno! there’s RIccardo, his father owns that villa up there his second wife comes from Como, his first wife ran off with the fisherman ....and so on.
He “took” us to lunch at a crack in the mountain with views down to Bellagio where the speciality was wild boar (oh, yea, I could think of a wild boar that isn’t even Italian) rabbit, home made cheeses and the famous olive oils Fred was going on about. Th grappa flowed, he ordered more dishes that we said we didn’t want and couldn’t eat, and the grappa flowed more, and so did the wine, and platters of cheese came out, and home made honey and jams, and finally when we dragged our bursting bodies from the table, he disappeared to talk to his friend who owned the restaurant with a Thankyou For Lunch, ladies, and left me with the bill for what would otherwise be spent on a very nice Italian leather handbag, indeed. I didn’t say a word all the way down, apart from aren’t we going to be too late for Como, Dawn, if we don’t try and get the ferry now? which he ignored as he took us to the cycling museum, and the tennis club where I was swarmed by flies and deafened by kids playing pin ball machines and other kids screaming and splashing in the pool and the buzz of flies, and was almost traded to his CIAO! Bon Jeeorno! amici who sells melons in the street. Fred hasn’t learned a word of Italian, and doesn’t want to. He says his tongue just can’t get around the words. His girlfriend is learning English ... slowly.
