| Mon. | Date | Week | Region | Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| June | 13 | 1 | Veneto | Treviso |
| 14 | ||||
| 15 | ||||
| 16 | Friuli Venezia Giulia | Palmanova | ||
| 17 | Trieste | |||
| 18 | ||||
| 19 | ||||
| 20 | 2 | Udine | ||
| 21 | ||||
| 22 | Lago di Sauris | |||
| 23 | ||||
| 24 | Alto Adige | Bressanone | ||
| 25 | Bolzano | |||
| 26 | ||||
| 27 | 3 | Trentino | Trento | |
| 28 | Veneto | Bassano del Grappa | ||
| 29 | Vicenza | |||
| 30 | ||||
| July | 1 | Lombardia | Mantova | |
| 2 | ||||
| 3 | Emilia Romagna | Bologna | ||
| 4 | 4 | |||
| 5 | ||||
| 6 | ||||
| 7 | ||||
| 8 | ||||
| 9 | ||||
| 10 | Veneto | Padua | ||
| 11 | 5 | |||
| 12 | ||||
| 13 | Venezia | |||
| 14 | ||||
| 15 | ||||
| 16 |
About
2015 sees five year anniversary, Sam turning forty five, Hal just turning thirty five, and a mentally significant milestone of making it to five years post leukaemia diagnosis. So with our new Lonely Planet and our ever trusty, but pompous, "Fred" ("Italy for the Gourmet Traveller", by Fred Plotkin) we are ignoring Spain once again! The plan is for five weeks, arriving on the 13th of June and leaving on the 16th of July. This is our first attempt at flying via Dubai, which means that we can fly in and out of Venezia airport direct, as opposed to the previous trips that have taken in the delights of Heathrow.
Treviso (June 13-15)
We started our trip with a quick 32 hour door-to-door trip from South Melbourne to Treviso. That sounds like an awesome idea as long as you forget to mention the large amount of time spent in a chair that is statistically designed to fit 95 percent of the population and you are not in the that 95 percent. The A380 for the first leg is a wonderful building to fly in; the 777 on the second leg is also spacious and modern; and both are great when operated by Emirates who gave us exit row seats because they do not like my human pretzel pose (worst yoga pose ever!). I don't like them, but short of developing a teleport that doesn't involve the uncomfortable idea that making a copy of yourself and sending that via light thus leaving the subtle issue of disposing of the original, or suddenly becoming so wealthy that I decide I can afford better seats, I guess I can't complain more than I already have. (That is, of course, a lie.) The trip was slow and rapid at the same time, involving enough airplane food to clog a hippo, and four movies (What We Do In The Shadows, Chappie, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Kingsman). The end result was us trying manically to get in to a 13th Century Palazzo at 4pm in the afternoon as check-in is only between 10am and 2pm.
Treviso is awesome. Go there. Particularly go there whilst jet-lagged and trying to get into the right time zone. It is a delightful place, with windy cobbled streets, cheap spritz (Hal is Aperol, I'm more Campari), and two rivers that have had their flow divided so much that even the supermarket has it's own open water stream running by the front door. We spent three nights in Treviso in a converted 13th century local noble palace, an upstairs room that opened up onto the hotel balcony that no one else was using. We managed to spend three days simply breakfasting, second breakfasting (another pastry in a cafe), lunching, and going for spritz and dinner, the latter two sometimes combined. The town is your proto-typical Italian town with winding streets, churches and piazzas, with the added twist of water coursing through the place, to the point that they've split the river to get to go everywhere they want it to go.
As a place to stay, I'd rate Treviso four stars (got to have somewhere to go on the rating scale).
Palmanova (June 16)
On the Tuesday we headed for Palmanova. Well specifically we headed on an adventure to end up at a winery villa outside Palmanova called Villa Chiopris, which is part of the Livon group. This adventure started with the usual morning ablutions of breakfast, visiting the fish markets in Treviso, second breakfast, and then catching a bus to the airport to pick up a hire car (which wanted to charge an additional 170E to add a second driver -- all the driving for Sam!). After picking up luggage we then tried to work out how the hell you get on the tollway -- who knew there were tolls or how to read the signs to get to the right booth -- to Trieste while simultaneously trying to get a phone with a new Italian SIM to love google maps, and relearn how to drive on the right side of the road, drive a manual car on the "wrong" side, drive like an Italian, drive at 130km, and drive while in a torrential downpour.
We managed to survive the roads and land in Palmanova, a "city" that was planned in the 18th century as a modern day utopia that would obviously develop from it's design (seriously you should check out the map for this place). Of course they ended up moving criminals in to take up some of the plots. The large and open "square", famous for occasionally having concerts such as Sting and a chess match with live pieces, is possibly too large.
We ended back at Palmanova for dinner that night and discovered that most places are closed on Tuesdays. This ended up as a recurring theme for the trip: places can be closed on Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, either for the full day or half of a day. This is beside the usual closed during the day for a few hours and the somewhat random we're closed for a few weeks because it's summer thing. The greatest predictor of when a place is closed is whether we are planning on being there. Back in Palmanova, we had spritz in the square and then hunted for dinner. All but one recommendation we had form the hotel and guide books was closed. The recommendation was the "top" pick which wasn't all that top. The main issue being that the pasta we ordered came back undercooked, and the owner insisted on telling us that this is how they eat pasta in Italy: seriously this was the worst pasta I had ever had in the country.
I've neglected to discuss the winery we stayed at. Lovely, except you had to preorder any tasting, and the english speaking person was not available.
Palmanova: worth a lunchtime stop over (one star).
Aquileia (June 17)
Our next detour stop was in Aquileia, a former roman settlement. It was apparently one of the largest trading ports with a large river and docks, and a population of over 100,000. At one point it was considered one of the nine most important cities in the empire. Next to the ruins there is now a small creek, so things change. The place was besieged by the Visigoths in about 400, and the people fled to the lagoons, so it probably was the precursor to Venice. I love Visigoths. So that is probably the worst potted history of a place ever.
Now the place is a large dig surrounded by about 2000 people catering to tourists and hungry archeologists from Austria one assumes. The main part of the town seems to be around the Basilica and extending towards the old docks. The Basilica is particularly impressive with frescos from the original Christian peoples of the area. Not sure where that plays with the visigoths. Sorry.
Trieste (June 17-19)
Trieste is at the edge of Italy and you get the feeling it doesn't really want to be in the country. The home of many coffee brands, it has been a huge trading port for centuries. Nestled against hills, the winding series of one-way streets are a complete minefield to navigate, particularly when your actual navigator gets out to check on the hotel and some nicks the parking spot you were aiming for, thus leaving you with a phone-based navigator that reels off directions naming streets in english not Italian pronounciation for which you can't see the signs, and it frequently loses it's bearings thus telling you to head east, where ever the hell east is. Fun!
After settling (calming) down a bit, we headed into the city, with spritz on the largest ocean facing piazza in the country (even if they don't want to be in the country). We followed this up with a visit to a local food establishment who is known for their pork products: Buffet da Pepi. It's a buffet of pork products. Some we could identify as tongue; others we didn't ask about. All of it was delicious. The wine, however, was served in thimbles which required me to throw it at my shorts.
At the start of this trip we have been plagued by some pretty ordinary weather, a case in point being when we went above Trieste to view the visa of the city, whilst also undertaking a tram journey with a funicular section. Ridiculously steep while also being almost unphotographable (now I think I'm making words up). It rained on the way up, while we were in the town at the top of the hill that seemed to lack anything resembling a view, and while we came back down. The sky cleared up once we were back.
There is an interesting thing in Italy where regional identity is now very much encouraged. Five of the regions in the country have special economic status that allows them to generate their own laws and collect their own taxes. Not sure how that fits with the national debt. So Trieste, being in Friuli Venezia Giulia -- so named for Julius Caesar and not for Venice which isn't in the region -- is part of one those regions. Trieste sits in a smaller part of the region which is dominated by the sub-region of Udine; in fact if you look at a map of it, it really is the appendix to the region's stomach. (Of course the region is collected into the European Union collective region of North East Italy, where we are spending most of our time, but that is another story.) Trieste also has flavours of Austrian and Slovenian, as evidenced by our pork sausages at Pepi, because why not.
The other good thing about Trieste was the cafes. Lots of them and mostly apparently frequented by James Joyce while he was writing Ulysses, which explains the writing style as he must have been off his brain on caffeine. We went tasting one afternoon: well I went tasting while Hal supervised -- she is not a coffee drinker -- until such point as I was wired enough to require spritz to calm me down. Good times. The bananas are apparently also very good. We didn't test that.
The Romans had been here before, of course, and then mad people built on top of what they built. At least the Romans had the decency to raze everything that was there before them.
As a place to stay, Trieste rates three unidentified bits of grilled pork.
Grazia (June 20)
When we left Trieste -- having got the car into the carpark, we were not inclined to move it from there during our brief stay -- we went up into the hills and towards Grazia, a lovely town that straddles the border with Slovenia. It rained. We didn't take many photos. We did have lunch though, which included parmigiano gelato. Yep: I forgot everything else.
Udine (June 20-21)
The next place we stayed was Udine. Fred's classic town saw us staying on the outskirts and walking in. Through a 5km running race. This as another one of Fred's classic regional towns (Treviso was his for Veneto), and we could see why. Again with the winding streets, and waterways in a much more understated way than Treviso; this time a castle in the middle of town dominated the landscape, with marble fronted buildings and piazzas everywhere. This place was stunning, and the main piazza was simply teeming with people, though it was a Sunday (I think).
The visit to Udine, though, was punctuated by a short trip to Cividale (see below). This means we spent two night wandering the city and not much in the day. The nights were excellent: traditional spritz followed by a couple of restaurants. The first was recommended after Hal got up the nerve to ask some locals where we should go for dinner, tucked in a corner we had excellent salumi and proscuitto crudo, followed by some pasta dishes, and a half litre of wine. The second was overlooking one of the numerous rivers running through the town. Entertainment provided by ducks continually swimming to stay in one place before shooting off down river. Our last morning was another coffee and gelato fuelled wandering adventure where we just enjoyed being there.
One thing about food in Italy that we intended on chaining in this trip was the