Siena

Today’s adventures took us to the Tuscan town of Siena, located about 90 minutes south of Florence.  Although often thought of as a medieval town, the walled city of Siena was formally established by the Roman Empire in 70 AD, and prior to that settled by the Etruscans sometime between 900-400 BC.  There is much to see in Siena, including the Piazza IL Campo, Museo Civico (Palazzo Pubblico built 1308) and bell tower, the Duomo, a variety of other churches, and the usual architectural sights associated with a city so old.   

Since our plan for today was a short day trip, our focus was on the Piazza IL Campo, Museo, and to climb the bell tower.  That leaves us plenty to see on our next trip. 

Just as you would image a medieval city to be, Siena is characterized by narrow streets, arched alley ways and bridge abutments that connect building together.

Our first activity was to climb the 400 winding steps up to the top of the Palazzo Pubblico bell tower.  Visitors can climb all the way right up to where the bell itself is.

The bell tower is one of the highest points in the city – 400 narrow, winding steps up.  Angie gives the courtyard columns the once over inspection before we start our climb.

A quarter of the way up and our visage of the piazza changes dramatically, giving an excellent view of the piazza fountain.  This is the level where the ticket office is located – I guess they figure that if someone is exhausted at this stage there is no point in selling them a ticket for the steep climb ahead!

A dizzying view up the winding rows of stone stairs kicks off the serious part of our ascent.

Pausing for a look back down, the steep narrow stair wells are so constricted that I had to walk partially sideways to avoid scraping both shoulders on the walls.   The overhead clearance was tight too - when Angie has to duck her head, that is a low ceiling!

When you are climbing a bell tower and you see one of these, you’ve reached your destination! 



















Looking back down on the piazza from the vantage of the top of the bell tower show just how beautiful Piazza IL Campo is.  It is also a key social center of town too – the people you see below are not tourists (there aren’t very many this time of year) these are the locals out with their children, visiting friends, and enjoying the sunshine of a bright February day.

A few blocks over finds the city Duomo, its cathedral and bell tower as well.  We didn’t climb that one. Yet.

Looking east gives a good view of the city wall, the oldest parts of the city within the wall and the later expansion outside the wall.  Also shown here, both within and outside the city wall is the land being put to use cultivating olive trees and vineyards.

Although city buildings are constantly remodeled (inside), upgraded, and re-roofed, the basic architecture of buildings constructed in tight clusters, with clusters divided by narrow streets and passage ways has been preserved and can be seen throughout the city.

The frescos inside the museum (Museo Civico, which is the Palazzo Pubblico) are magnificent, well restored and brightly colored. 

Whether on the walls or the ceiling, their detail is beautiful.

Somewhere along the way we managed to break for lunch at the Ristorante al Mangia. We started with an appetizer of mushrooms and pork ragu on polenta that was outstanding.  For Prima Piatti Angie had a salad with grilled chicken and I had the very traditional Tuscan dish of Pappardelle al Ragu di Cinghiale, a flat, medium wide handmade pasta served with a wild boar ragu sauce – and it was phenomenal!

We look forward to a return to Siena, most likely in April when the Powells are staying with us and we can all go together.  In the meantime, I expect my posts will slow down a bit since starting tomorrow Angie and I are back in Italian school for the next 3-4 weeks.  Now that we have gotten our Permesso di Soggiorno, Residence Registration, and have taken receipt of our car we had shipped over from the U.S. (and finally got it to clear Italian Customs….), we are in a position to go back to school and apply ourselves to our studies, hopefully without too many distractions.

Ciao !!

Making Tracks to Genova

Today’s adventure found me on a high speed train to the seaside town of Genova, located in the NW corner of Italy. My interest in going there had nothing to do with historical points of interest, hiking, or general sightseeing; I was there for the massive sea port terminal – today I picked up our car that was shipped from America.

It had actually arrived a week earlier but like all things Italian, the ubiquitous bureaucratic pound of flesh must be paid before any progress can be made.  I’ll spare you the details but a big round of thanks is owed to Alessandro Villa, our agent in Genova who handled the meetings with Italian Customs and got the approvals necessary for me to take receipt of the car. 

Anyway, the interesting thing about all this was what I got to see on the way up there – so, if you are going to an Italian seaport terminal you can expect to see (care to guess?) an ocean – or more precisely, the Mediterranean Sea.  

It wasn’t easy shooting the pix thorough the window of a fast moving train.

I must have taken 50 shots before settling on a handful worth posting.

The amazing thing is how calm the Mighty Med is – I’ve spent some time looking at it, photographing it, boating riding in it and swimming in it, and I have never seen it rough.  Yet.

The other thing I love about the Med is how the mountains come right down to the sea.  I first saw this on the Amalfi Coast, but it’s a reoccurring theme when the Apennine Mountains meet the ocean.

The way the sun shimmers on the smooth water you would hardly know it was February.  I'm wishing it was June already!

Have ski boots, will travel. To Cortina d’Ampezzo

Wednesday Feb-6 I began my much anticipated trip to Cortina d’Ampezzo to ski the Dolomites (dolo-ME-tas), the cream of the Italian Alps.  I had skied the Alps in eastern Switzerland some years ago at Davos and Klosters, and was looking forward to my first ski adventure in northern Italy.  My plan was to leave very early in the morning, arrive and ski all day, stay overnight, ski the next day through mid-afternoon then travel home.  Since I was traveling by myself and didn’t want the expense of a 4wd rental car I would use public transportation entirely.  My first of 3 trains left at 1:47am Wednesday morning and the second of two buses delivered me to the front door of the hotel at 10:00am.

Needless to say, when the bus let me off, Hotel Villa Argentina was a welcome sight!! The large Tyrolean styled hotel is reputable, inexpensive, clean, and entirely self-contained; it is also one of the few hotels servicing the Cortina slopes that is ski in/ski out.  

Villa Argentina has their own ski rental shop, a good restaurant, a small bar, and a very helpful and accommodating attitude.  And they always have someone around who speaks English.  Once I got my early room check-in, changed into my ski clothes, collected my excellent Atomic skis from the rental shop downstairs, I headed out the door – and was promptly stopped dead in my tracks by the staggering view of what passes for the backyard of Villa Argentina:

The Dolomites are not “pretty mountains” - they are awe inspiring. Their sharply chiseled peaks claw at the sky like battle axes.  They are beautiful in a raw, rugged way that no camera can capture or words can express.  When you stand before them in the shadow of their grandeur, you will understand what I mean.

Yet they are skiable too – the tram and the chairlifts go right up to the bases of their sheerest cliffs, providing all you can handle and then some.

I definitely wanted some of that and promptly clicked into my bindings and shoved off for the lift down below.  A few chair rides later and I was well up the first peak.  The weather was great, the snow was soft, the skis were fast, and very quickly I was testing the limits of my knee brace and my asthma; I was just totally stoked to be skiing the Dolomites!!

That’s pretty much how the whole morning went, punctuated with a tram ride to Ra Valles where I broke for lunch.  It was my only tram ride of the trip – I don’t get car sick, sea sick or even roller coaster sick but I must confess I do get tram sick. Being crammed into a swaying, yawing, seatless school bus, standing squished together nose to nose and being breathed on by dozens of sweaty European skiers doesn’t agree with me so much…. Fortunately much of the mountain range is accessible by conventional chairlifts, many of which are modern, high-speed detachable units.

I was nearing the end of lunch when I ran into a bit of an episode.  I suddenly felt dizzy, nauseated, and a little disoriented, and immediately recognized these symptoms as the on-set of altitude sickness.  The restaurant was at about 8,000 and I had been riding the Bus Tofana lift, servicing the trails of Busc, Aquila and Camosci that lie above the Tram discharge.  These cover an altitude range of up to about 9,900 feet.  The average skier (even without acclimatization) can usually tolerate those altitudes without too much drama, but asthma reduces this threshold for me, particularly if I’m not acclimatized.  I can ski up to 10,000 feet but I cannot loiter; if I exit the chairlift and immediately ski down to 7,000 feet I’m fine, but hanging out at an 8,000 foot restaurant after skiing the higher ranges turned out to be not such a good idea.  I hastily paid my bill and bolted for the tram back down – I did not want to risk skiing down in this condition.  Fortunately the tram was empty and let me off at Col Druscie, well below 6,000 feet where the oxygen was much more to my liking.

I spent the balance of the afternoon skiing in the Pomedes which top out at about 7,500 before heading back to the hotel, just as some of the lifts were starting to shut down. 

Dinner is served at 7:30pm at the Argentina, I had an outstanding mushroom Tagliatelle and a tall draft of Dolomite Birra for 13€ (that’s right, the entire dinner was only 13 Euros) – after which I went straight to my room and passed out for 9 hours before getting up to do it all over again. 

Thursday morning dawned bright and clear on the craggy faces of Cortina’s peaks, the clear blue sky holding the promise of a great day of skiing.

After the complementary continental breakfast I spent the morning exploring new trails over in Colfiere and Socrepes, following the sun where I could to stay in soft snow.  The modern Cortina lift system (unlike some of the lifts I used at Davos) made it easy to charge down the mountain, catch a chair for a quick ride back up to a different trail and head off in a new direction.

By 11:00 I was ready for my coffee break at the caffe bar near Socrepes “Ra Freza”.  It was the typical on-mountain coffee, drink and snack shack with an open outdoor sun deck facing a terrific view.  In all directions.  Life is good when you have your caffe Americana latte and apple strudel in the backdrop of the magnificent Dolomites, while German folk music plays over the speakers and all the cooks, waitresses and baristas are all clapping, dancing, and singing along to the tunes. 

I finished the day out at Rumerlo, returning to the hotel at about 2:00 to return my skis, collect my gear and grab a quick burger before catching my first bus back for the trip home. 

The train ride home was enjoyable because it was still daylight when I left and I could take in the panoramic views.  It had a feel of what you might imagine old time European travel must have been like; a single ribbon of track winding over a narrow path etched into the sides of snowcapped Alps, the train crossing over steep gorges and rivers below, then disappearing into long tunnels blasted deep into the heart of mountains.  Leaving the Alps by train felt like going back in time. And I lucked out as my return trip only required 2 trains, the last one being a sleek aero high speed model with few stops.  Several times I noticed the monitors indicated 179kmh (about 110mph), which helped shorten the trip home considerably to only 7 hours.

My trip to Cortina d’Ampezzo was truly outstanding!!  I could easily have spent another 2 days skiing the remainder of the resort, or used some of that time for a bus ride to other peaks 20-30 minutes away.  Good snow, good weather, good lift system, and an unbelievable setting!!

Reflections on skiing Cortina d’Ampezzo:

- I have skied all over the Rockies in Colorado, all over the Wasatch Mountains in Utah, skied every mountain at Lake Tahoe, and skied the eastern Swiss Alps – I have never skied a place as beautiful as Cortina; I’ve never skied mountains before that even look like the Dolomites.

 - Renting a 4wd SUV and driving to Cortina is much faster than public transportation from Florence.  I could easily have saved 3 or more hours each way, however, costs go up considerably.  SUV rental costs are 50€+ per day, plus tolls (probably 40€ round trip), plus fuel (diesel is $8.80 US per gallon, gas is $9.15 US).  For a minimum of 500 mile round trip, fuel costs alone are at least $250 US.  In contrast, my all in round trip costs for public transportation (5 trains, 4 buses) was about $105€ ($141 US).

- I need to round up some ski buddies – my current acquaintances were all met at the local pub while watching NFL football.  None of them ski (none of them ride motorcycles either…) so I need to make some more friends.   This makes skiing more fun – and splits the cost of driving too.

- Hotel Villa Argentina was the perfect choice for me.  65€ bought me a small, clean single-bed room, complimentary breakfast, and ski slopes in the backyard.  

My short trip did not allow time for the attractions of the town of Cortina – my sole mission was to ski, eat, sleep, and ski (a pretty good plan btw…).  However, had I stayed a couple of more days (without having a car to get to town) I would have made different plans to stay in town and bus it to the mountains.

- Angie and I will definitely go to Cortina in the spring or summer to stay in the town and to hike the Dolomites.  I can only imagine how magnificent that will be for us.