Wednesday, July 16... Pisa, Carrara, Barolo

We are packed and out of apartment by 10am. The real estate guy comes to the apartment BEFORE 10am and stares at us till we leave. He's nice about it, but I prefer to be left alone while doing my final "sweep" of the rooms, to make sure we don't leave anything. His staring is compromising my process!!!

We lug our 200 pounds of crap back down the 65 stairs and onto the street as the door closes behind us. We are now officially on the clock and on the run. Margaret waits with the luggage at a cafe a few feet away, while I hurry over to a photo store called Bongi to pick up two rolls of film. We walk to the Herz office to rent a car. What looked like an easy walk becomes exhausting and hot as we drag the luggage over many blocks of cobblestones. We get a Fiat 500 with a stick shift, which means Margaret is driving. The car comes with a TomTom GPS, which (of course) is a pain in the ass to use… though it eventually pulls it's weight after struggling with it for two days

Bongi Photo (actually sells film)

We navigate out of Florence and hit the open road. It feels good to be in a car. The urbanity of Rome and Florence are great, but they require one to always be walking… to always be obeying the ebb and flow of cars and pedestrians and the obstructions of tight spaces in the city. But the car reminds us of the addiction to the open road and belief in freedom that we grow up with. One feels in control behind the wheel.

Our destination today is to get to the small town of Barolo in Northern Italy. But first we are going to make stops in Pisa to see the leaning tower, and then in Carrara to  check out the marble mines located in the mountains there.

From Florence to Pisa, then north along the coast to Carrara.

Pisa is maybe an hour away toward the coast from Florence. We manage to navigate into the city and get some street parking a few blocks from the Leaning Tower. The actual site of the Leaning Tower also contains the Cathedral of Pisa and the Baptistery of Pisa… both of which have their own historical and artistic significance. But don't have the time or inclination to explore those things. We are here for the tower… so that we can say we saw it… and we did… and it does lean precariously. The whole complex of buildings sits in a vast open field of close cut grass. Visitors lounge on the ground and walk in every direction. It's quite a difference from the Duomo, which sits amidst the many buildings that it dwarfs.

The rumors are true.

Ingenious concept.

Colossal building for baptizing babies

Cathedral (bad iPhone picture)

Is it me or is the Cathedral also sinking into the earth?

Ever present scaffolding.

We hang around for about an hour, grabbing a beer and fries. Then we hit the road and head north along the coast. We get off the main highway, and make the effort to drive along the coastline… which was a big mistake. We drive along the coast through Viareggio, which is the Italian seashore... a combination of the endless oceanfront drives through places like Fort Lauderdale and Wildwood New Jersey. And just like those places that purport to bring you an ocean experience... you cannot even see the ocean from a block away. All you see is the backside of the bars and restaurants and hotels… and on the other side of the street are more condos and endless cars trying to park. Here and there people dart across the road as motorcycles break all the rules create pointless havoc.

The whole scene sends me into a funk, providing yet another depressing reminder that there is nothing on earth that hasn't been taken over by the very big business of making us believe it exists. Most experience has been reduced to the experience of having it provided to you by the tourism and service industries. Thus, the myth of the ocean experience is replaced with the reality of obstructed ocean views, cheesy tourist restaurants, high rise hotels, and massive traffic. The only people who can experience nature are the very poor who live in it, or the very rich who can afford to have a personalized interaction with it constructed in such a way that they believe they are living in it. For the rest of us… the massive middle class… we are sold a myth of the ocean experience… but the only thing we consume is the industrialized experience, not the thing itself. The tourist industry erects the machinery (hotels, restaurants, parking lots) to accommodate our presence near the "thing" (the ocean), but such massive scaffolding obliterates the "thing itself" and becomes thereby the experience... because (as always) the medium is the message.

The terrible "seaside" boulevard finally runs out of room, and we head inland (toward the mountains) to the small city of Carrara. It is a place long famed for the marble that is mined from the mountains it is perched upon. The pure white marble of Carrara was transported to Ancient Rome to build it's temples. Michelangelo personally supervised the selection of stone in his own time. And today (no doubt) counter-tops in American kitchens first see the light of day on these ancient mountains.

To see the mines, one simply drives uphill through the town and out other side. The roads grow small and pitch steeply through switchbacks, as the city falls away behind you and you climb up into the mountains. You quickly come upon the mining operations. Or should I say... you are now in-and-amongst the mining operations, as huge trucks full of marble rumble by regularly, and the road is covered in marble dust and debris.

We pull over here and there to view the mines through fences, from a few hundred feet away. Referring to them as mines is a bit misleading, as the marble is not harvested underground, but is rather sheered off the face of the mountain, in plain view.  At one point I hear an explosion, and then see rock and debris sliding down a distant slope. I suppose they must dynamite at times. The exposed marble blocks are the size of houses... their faces perfectly flat and edges and perfect 90 degrees. It's amazing that such large and continuous chunks of earth exist.

I begin poking around the edge of the road, and wander down a few dirt roads, looking for chunks of marble that I might take. At first I feel that I am pilfering the wealth of the mines. But after awhile it occurs to me that there is so much rubble produced as a consequence of mining... and that the rubble has no economic value to the mine... and so it just sits there like rocks on a riverbed... and endless supply of material. If you one piece of rubble per day, it would take a million years to clear out all the rubble.  In other words... have at it. The only limit to my good fortune is that I can only take so much before the suitcase I take it home in is too heavy. So I find two piece that are the size of a grapefruit, one white and one grey. And then a few very small samples. And in a final act of "ah-ha"... I take a plastic bag and fill it with the dirt from the side of the road.... which isn't dirt at all... but is several inches of marble dust. With my booty in the back seat of the car, I feel contented.

As we begin driving back down the mountain, the road we are one goes into a tunnel. The opening to the tunnel is small and there are a bunch of signs next to it that we kind-of ignore. The important thing is that there was no "Do Not Enter" sign (a red circle with a line through it). But no sooner are we in the tunnel then we both have the immediate impression that we have made a huge mistake. Inside the tunnel the road narrows to barely more than the width of the car. The walls and ceiling form a rough-hewn archway of dirty grey stone, and the roadway seems to glisten with a dank coating of water. The road begins to pitch downward. Tiny bulbs on the tunnels arched ceiling are spaced 150 feet apart, and put just enough dim light to give a ghastly glow to the proceedings.

The car lights are not on. We do not know how to turn them on. Margaret comes to a stop and struggles to find the switch. I take out my iPhone to us the luminance of it's screen to light the interior of the car. Margaret turns the lights on and we creep forward. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, only a black emptiness, as the road gets steeper and steeper downhill. Margaret rides the brake. We try to turn around and go back, but there is no room to turn around. Margaret fears that a car might come the other way, but I fear that we are going sharply downhill into an underground mining operation, and that we will not be able to turn around until then.

The situation feels critical. Our minds race back to the tunnel entrance and the signage we didn't read. Had we taken the wrong bend in the road. Had the signage been there to warn visitors to NOT drive to their deaths in an abandoned mine shaft? Was there any end to this tunnel, or would it simply disappear into the void? The road begins to sweep down and to the right into more darkness. But just when all hope seemed lost, we see a slight glow on the wall of the tunnel... and finally a glimmer of light, indicating that the tunnel emerged somewhere. And it does. We exit with a huge sigh of relief, and see that we had taken a tunnel that cut through a chunk of mountain and deposited us a few hundred feet lower than our previous position. We find our way back down the mountain to the city of Carrara, and pull into a supermarket there to grab some food. Then we hit the road again, as we have a long ride north to Barolo.

We had considered driving along the coast through the region known as Cinque Terre (pronounced Chinka Terr-ah), which begins at the town of La Spezia and continues north on the coast for several miles. Apparently the towns there are built into the sides of the cliffs overlooking the ocean. I have no doubt this is a beautiful, can't-miss site. But the delays of the day have put us behind schedule, and Margaret wants to get to Barolo before the sun starts going down. So we stick to the main highway. Though I find this disappointing, it occurs to me that perhaps I would be disappointed in Cinque Terre, as I had been along the ocean earlier. Probably the tourist industry and real estate developers have managed to obscure the natural beauty of Cinque Terre, making only accessible from the ocean-side decks of private home or expensive restaurants. I guess I'll never know.

The landscape changes. The big mountains around Carrara (The Appian Alps) give way to smaller, smoother mountains, and then to hills... and then to rolling country side. It is utterly charming. Here and there tiny towns sit perched on the hills, a remnant of long ago fortified town planning. It's easy now to understand how Italy was a land of city-states... geographically isolated and independent worlds, with no sense of national unity until the 19th Century.

An hour north of La Spezia the highway passes over a huge and imposing bridge that traverses (at high elevation) the city of Genoa, which sits far below looking like the blue collar town it is reported to be. There's something creepy and grinding about it... something post-apocalyptic, though I can't say what it was. Sometimes things just come off weird.

At Genoa we are instructed by the TomTom GPS to head dead north. I confirm this with the iPhone's map app. Our destination of Barolo lies at (roughly) the 10 o'clock position, relative to Genoa. But there is no straight line to it, probably due to some terrible mountains between here and there that we must go around. So instead, we have to head north for 40 miles, then head west for 20 miles, and then south for 30 miles. It's quite a round-about way of getting there... but you can't argue with a foreign country and terrain you don't understand. I'm glad to know we have a route that will work, even if the lines on the map seem odd.

The route from Genoa to Barolo... taking the long way home.

Two hours later finds us in the countryside around Barolo. We locate the small road that leads off the main highway and takes us up into the hill on which the old town stands, like a medieval fortress town of old. We see the the tower of the of the Falletti Castle, which is one of two medieval castles there to protect the town from frequent raids by Hungarians (but not anymore).

Perfectly picturesque Barolo

 We roll into town, going up, up, up the winding, empty streets. Nobody is around, and we have no idea where our bed-and-breakfast (Rossa Barolol). The road dead ends at the castle, so we stop and ask a gaggle of older Italian women where it is. Actually, we don't them anything. We simply look lost and utter the words "Rossa Barolo". As is typical in Italy, the natives always repeat back to you what you just said... but with correct pronunciation... rolling the R's and such. Until they perform this act translation, they look like they have no idea what you said. Finally, one of he women's face lights up, and she knows what we're talking about. She beings giving us hand-waving directions in Italian.... which she repeats three times, each more slowly than the previous time. Finally she just waves for us to follow her, and she walks our car three blocks to the place.

We check into our room, move the luggage upstairs, and park the car down a steep hill. Then we walk around the town, marveling at how totally charming and serene everything is. But we are tired from a very full day, and end up crashing back in the room. I am quite exhausted, and am not looking forward to having to wake up and do anything. Sleep comes easily.