After a brief nap Sunday evening Cholo & I made our way back in to the center of town. We drove around for a bit, trying to get a sense of the city and avoiding collisions non-stop. Rome is rally car territory, an every-person-for-themself gas and deisel driven free for all. Oddly it's less intimidating to drive in than NYC. I give credit to small cars and stick shifts. I think the perfect car for Roman driving would be a Cooper Mini: low to the ground, nimble, good wheelbase and able to fit into tight places.
Antiqity abounds. Rome is like a collage of buildings cobbled together over 3 millenia, patched together but never dissonant. Your head cranes to see the old, the very old and the very very old. I don't know how much more time I would need here to see everything I'd care to. Weeks probably.
Monday morning we carve out a couple hours to visit the Vatican. Really just St. Peter's Square. Trying to find parking anywhre close is a problem but I manage to find a quiet, shady space not too far away, Unfortunately there are some stairs involved as we navigate our way around the city's massive walls and towards the entrance to the square. Cholo struggles a bit with the climb and we breathe deeply every time we feel a bit of cooling breeze creep over the hill.
Tourists.
The Coliseum, taken from the window of our Lancia as we drive out of town.
Hey, we were in a hurry.
Fountains
Public water fountains can be found everywhere you go in Italy. I'm not talking about big, ornate fountains like you might find in a park or piazza, but small fountains designed for the practical purpose of supplying clean, fresh drinking water to anyone who has a hankering. We saw our first in Rome but found them in every village and city we visited, usually with an inscription stating when it was built and in who's honor. Apparently this tradition of supplying copious amounts of free public water goes back to the old acqueduct system the Romans built and has been carried forward since then. Nowadays they're a great place for you (or your dog) to get a drink but in the past these fountains supplied the public with cooking and bathing water before indoor plumbing became commonplace.
A fountain near the Porta Cavalleggeri. Two inscriptions in marble lie above it, one for Pope Pius IV for installing it in the 16th century and another for Pope Clement XI who had it repaired in 1713.
The fountain in Piazza San Michele, Sciconi, Calabria.
Cholo has cousins in Brindisi, a small but very ancient city in Puglia, the "heel" of Italy. Monday morning after possibly the Best Coffee I Ever Had (more on that later) we pack up, take a last look at Rome and head South. With close to 400 miles ahead of me I start to get the feel of the Lancia Musa on the open road, all 1.3 liters willing themselves along the autostrade. Of course just outside Rome we hit a 4K traffic jam behind an accident and all momentum is lost. A dead stop for almost 45 minutes. We move again but I'm drowsy and am literally slapping and pinching mysef to stay awake until the next rest stop.
Cafe
I'm a coffee drinker. In moderation. I never drank coffee before meeting May and her family. I couldn't understand how they could make a pot of percolated coffee at 9:30 at night just after dinner. I've since developed the taste if not quite the appalling addiction to coffee. When we left the Crowne Plaza in Rome Cholo & I deliberately avoided the hotel restaurant and their $18 euro "american breakfast" and simply drove around until we found a quiet neighborhood with an unassuming "gastronomica" like thousands and thousands of others, I'm sure. Italian breakfast is coffee and "brioche", or pastry. Cholo has cappucino and I had caffe latte and that motherfucker was better than any coffee I remember. Crazy good. And every coffee since has been amazing. We stop at a stand by the autostrade on the A1 to Brindisi and the espresso I had there was like black cocaine. Plus the gas station is loaded with sandwiches of freshly sliced prosciutto and mortadella. I could imagine an Italian stopping at the Vince Lombardi rest stop on the NJ Turnpike for coffee and a sandwich and reeling at the vomit they serve. I've seen Italians act laissez faire about a bunch of things but coffee is definitely not one of them.
Mimo, Sara & Peppino
Pictures coming soon! We arrive in Brindisi late Monday night and check into our shitty hotel by the ferry that takes folks back and forth to Greece. At least the AC works. The next morning Cholo calls his 2nd cousin Mimo. I'm a bit worried. Cholo has made a lot of effort to set up this visit with Mimo via email over the course of a few months and has seen few replies. I'm not sure any kind of meet is going to happen. And what's worse, Cholo's cousin Raphael died just 3 weeks ago at the age of 85. Raphael and his wife Sara lived across the street on Pasaje Coligue when Cholo was growing up, but he hadn't seen either since the late 80s.
Sara Bonavota, 91, and Cholo
Cholo gets a call and it's Mimmo; he's on his way. Tall, tan, grey and balding, Mimo is in his early 50s with 3 kids (Sara, Allessandro and Barbara) between 16 and 3. Mimo takes us on a short tour of Brindisi's major attractions and we set off to meet his mother, Sara. Cholo doesn't exactly have fond memories of Sara. The one word that keeps coming up in his description of her is "seca": dry. It's true. Our welcome is a bit stiff, we're offered only water to drink and Sara makes a big point of turing off all the lights in the apartment after we enter before complaining about the poor price she (imagines) she got when she sold her house in B.A. in the 90s.
Pete, Mimmo, Alessandro, Sara Irene, Little Barbara and Cholo
After a long story recounting the sad and painful death of Cholo's cousin Rapphael, the door opens and a breath of fresh air enters. Peppino. Peppino is year younger than the deceased Raphael and a cousin Cholo has never met. He too was born and raised in Sciconi and knew Cholo's mother Carmela until she left for Argentina when he was 8. He's everything you would hope and old Calabrese to be: funny, animated, smiling and energetic. He launches in to a story about when Cholo's older brother Rafa came to see him in '53; something about a haircut gone wrong. My understanding of spoken Italian is servicable but I can hardly make out a thing Peppito is saying in his Calabrian dialect. Cholo is smiling from ear to ear and I see immediately that this kind of interaction is exactly what he's been looking for, not La Seca. Peppino pours us vermouth in his best glasses and Cholo "cagar por risa"; shits from laughing. 
Peppino
Peppino tells a tale
We say goodbye and Mimmo takes us to a great dockside restaurant for lunch and then to his beach/pool club "Palm Beach". The irony is not lost. Mimmo talks incessantly about cars and his job, easing from clipped Italian to loquatious Castellano (Argentine Spanish) when he has a few drinks, and back again as he sobers up. His family is lovely and his wife Irene works the rust out of her English as we sit by the Adriatic sea. 
Mimmo and Cholo at Club Palm Beach
We come all the way to Puglia to see Palm Beach?
Lancia Due: Brindisi to Catanzaro
7 PM comes and we are way late to depart for Calabria. 5 hours later than I expected. That said my expectations were based on air and rumor so no worries. This means, however, that I have to drive 230 miles down to the Ionian sea and cross the Calabrian Apennines in the dark. The advantage is that I'm not distracted by what I'm sure would be stunning scenery so I can concentrate on the road. The negative is that I'm snaking across mountain passes in total darkness in a thin-tired car with a whining 1.3 diesel. I covet every Audi, BMW and Mercedes that smoothly travels the roads like buttermilk dripping down an Austrian girl's chin. Frank would love to slam these roads in his Miata, and I'd like ot have a turn behind the wheel in the Miata myself. I feel like a cook with a dull knife in this car. If I can I'm going to find a Europcar Tomorrow and change it for the Peugeot 207 I expected. It's only a 1.4 but at least it's gas, lower to the ground and way more aero. I never thought I'd jones for a 2.0 liter engine in my life until this moment. My Caddy would eat this car and shit out a tin can.
No comments:
Post a Comment