We have just returned from the most unexpected holiday we ever had: ten days in the north of Italy! Here's how it happened: on a Saturday at the beginning of July, we were just winding down and getting ready for a trip to Legoland in Denmark, when Mary received a surprising call from Gunnar Stålmarck, managing director of Prover AB. Gunnar has invented a very efficient method for proving theorems automatically, and had been invited to speak at the Computer Aided Verification conference in Trento, but was suddenly taken unwell. Since Mary has coauthored a tutorial article with him on the method, he wondered if she could go and speak instead. The catch? The talk was to take place at 9 o'clock on Wednesday morning!
We thought long and hard about it, because it meant cancelling our holiday plans, but we finally decided that if Prover would pay for air tickets to Trento for me and Liam also, then Mary would do it (John Desmond was to go to his summer camp on Monday for these two weeks). Gunnar was happy to agree, so we started feverish preparations for departure.
At this time Liam didn't even have a passport: his expired a few months ago and we hadn't yet got him a new one. We couldn't decide anything finally until I spoke to the Embassy in Stockholm on Monday morning, and they said they would be able to issue one on the spot. We booked air tickets on Monday for travel on Tuesday, for collection at Stockholm airport, and still somehow managed to get a cheap deal. And then after dropping John Desmond at summer camp on Monday afternoon, we set off to drive to Stockholm at 4pm.
We arrived between nine and ten in the evening, and were guided to Gunnar's house by mobile phone. There we were fed, and then Mary, Gunnar, and Carl Johan (another colleague) sat up all night with Powerpoint putting a talk together. Next morning, after Mary put the finishing touches to the talk, we set off for the Embassy where we got a passport in 15 minutes flat, to the amazement of the other people waiting! Girl at the counter: `do you have a travel date set´? Me: `in about one hour´ -- works wonders! Then we still had to drive past the Prover offices for Mary to print out her talk on slides, before zooming to the airport to collect our tickets a few minutes before last check-in. It wasn't until we were sitting at the gate with boarding cards in hand, at around midday on Tuesday, that I really believed we were going to go!
We flew to Verona, inland from Venice, with quite a long wait at Gatwick. Then on arrival we collected a Ford Mondeo estate I had booked from Hertz, and drove for about two hours to Trento in the Dolomites. It took us another half hour to find our hotel, since the street plan of Trento is positively mediæval, but at last we arrived, close to midnight, and tumbled into bed in the suite the hotel provided us with. At eight thirty next day Mary set off for the conference, gave her talk, and it went very well. Mission accomplished! Now at last we could relax, and enjoy nine more Italian days.
I'm happy to report, by the way, that driving in the North of Italy is much more relaxing than it is around Rome. The traffic is positively disciplined, if a little disrespectful of speed limits. But there are two traps for the unwary. The first is that Italian signs rarely point straight ahead: to show that you should drive straight on, they put an arrow pointing left on the right hand side of the road, or an arrow pointing right on the left hand side. We had an inkling of that from our last visit many years ago, but some people going to the conference took two hours just to find their way out of Milan as a result! The other tricky thing is that the Italian autostrada cost money to drive on -- which is OK, since they are pretty cheap -- but so as to avoid surprising you, the signs for a particular city never take you onto the autostrada! You have to follow signs specifically for the autostrada to get onto it. Not realising that, we drove all the way to Trento on back roads.
| While Mary gave her talk, Liam and I looked around Trento. It was ruled by prince bishops for many centuries: the Holy Roman Emporer bought the bishops' loyalty by giving them secular power also. Nowadays the town has not only a cathedral, but is full of fifteenth and sixteenth century palaces. There are so many of them that one becomes almost blasé about them: some are a little dilapidated, or used as office buildings, but even so there is a great deal of atmosphere to soak up. The streets are a warren of tiny alleys, full of tiny bars, restaurants, and ice cream shops where a cornet of deliciously fruity ice cream costs less than a pound. In one small street we found the Natural History museum, where Liam saw real fossils and dinosaur footprints for the first time. A thrill, although the best part according to Liam was that I bought him a plastic lizard that he was inseparable from for days. |  |
On Thursday, Mary took most of the day off and we drove to Lake Garda, said to be one of Italy's most beautiful lakes. It's about the size of Loch Lomond, and the northern part reaches into the Dolomites, so it is surrounded by beautiful mountains. It is also very popular. We drove down the eastern side, looking for a quiet beach to picnic on, but we eventually realised no such thing exists. The shore is essentially one continuous resort. In the end we just gave up and turned inland, driving up into the mountains on a narrow, twisty road. Italian mountain roads have to be experienced to be believed: they twist back and forth up astonishingly steep slopes from one hairpin bend to another, with no room to pass a meeting vehicle except in the hairpin itself, and demand constant changing between first and second gear to crawl up. Many times we glimpsed a church on a seemingly inaccessible pinnacle high above us, and realised that somewhere up that apparent precipice there must be a road! On this day we finally found a place wide enough to park, high up on the mountain, and climbed over the fence into an alpine meadow to eat our simple lunch of prosciutto, Gorgonzola, olive bread, and sparkling wine, sitting in the shade of an oak tree in a sea of flowers, with a stupendous view over lake and mountains. Ah, the simple pleasures of life!
The next day Mary wanted to attend the conference again, so Liam and I decided to go skiing. That's possible in the Dolomites: there is a glacier at 10000' with snow on it all year round. [To quote our guide book, the Dolomites are `a range that has glaciers even in summer´ (sic)!] So we set off after breakfast, and after a couple of hours of driving arrived at Passo Tonale, the pass that the ski lift goes up from. But when we arrived the place seemed terribly quiet, and eventually we discovered that the ski lifts on the glacier close at 1pm: by the time we could have rented skis and got up there, we would have had little time left to actually ski. I suppose the warmth of the sun spoils the snow by the afternoon, and so skiing is only possible in the morning. Of course we were disappointed, but instead we drove into a national park and walked up to a little glacial lake. Glacial meltwater is full of rock dust, which gives lakes it flows into a beautiful emerald green colour. Liam enjoyed throwing stones into the lake hugely, and then we walked further up the mountain side to a little waterfall which he also threw stones into! It was quite beautiful, but at the same time exploited: the lake has been used for hydro-electric power, which must have raised its level at least 5 metres. When we were there the water level was four or five metres below its maximum, so we stood on the exposed shore among dead tree stumps. Natural lakes vary only by a few centimetres, and as a result nothing is adapted to live on the shore of a power station reservoir. It's a dead zone, just mud and stones. I'm amazed, really, that such a thing was built in a national park.
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On Saturday the conference ended, and we left Trento, driving north into the Alto Adige. You may recognise the name from wine labels: this is grape country extraordinaire! We followed the `wine road´ through countless little wine producing towns -- but imagine our surprise when the wine road turned out to be the Weinstraße! The Alto Adige is part of Italy nowadays, but it was part of Austria for a long time, and most of the population is still German speaking. I was glad I hadn't had time to try to learn a smattering of Italian before our journey, since it wouldn't have helped a lot. We stopped for the night in a guest house in Kaltern, a little town with five or six vineyard `factory outlets´! You can wander between them, tasting their wares for free, and when you find wine you like purchase a case or two. Many people were loading big Mercedes estate cars full of wine, but our air tickets cramped our style a little, so we restrained ourselves to only a dozen bottles or so in total. The wines were very good, and to be able to taste before you buy is very civilized! |
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On Sunday morning we visited the wine museum in Kaltern, where we discovered that the area was a big producer even in Roman times, and saw the tools that have been used over the centuries. We didn't see any sign of trampling grapes with the feet: even in the old days they used big grape presses, where the weight of large stones was used to extract the last drops of juice. In the museum garden we could inspect many varieties of grapes, and see how the vines are trained over a frame to make gathering the grapes easier. As you can see in the picture, virtually every patch of arable ground is a vineyard! |
In the garden at the wine museum |
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The poster for the museum was interesting: it showed someone dressed like a red indian, but who was actually a vineyard guard. Just before the harvest, farm hands used to spend the night in the vineyards to discourage pilfering, and when the tourist trade started they began to dress as outrageously terrifyingly as possible. Certainly not someone you would want to meet in a dark vinyeard at night! |
| We decided to eat our lunch up in the mountains overlooking Kaltern, so after buying picnic ingredients we set off for the pass above. There is a funicular railway up to it (there are funiculars everywhere), which goes up a 60 or 70 degree slope. Makes the Snowdon railway look flat! But we drove up the road, which took ages. Imagine our surprise when we arrived at the pass at around 6000', to find that instead of an open mountain landscape there were half a dozen hotels and a golf course! Rather than eat our lunch in a hotel car park, we followed a small road even higher up into a larch forest, and found a suitable picnic spot right at the top of the cliff overlooking Kaltern. So we lunched a few metres from a precipice, high, high above the valley floor. As we ate, the clouds drifted past and below us, and the view opened and closed again many times -- it was quite beautiful. |  |
That afternoon we drove from Kaltern to Bozen, or Bolzano as Mussolini renamed it, to visit the museum of archeology. You probably remember the discovery of a frozen corpse in an alpine glacier a few years ago, which turned out to date from the Bronze Age. Well, that fellow `Ötzi´ is now on display in Bozen. He is by far the best preserved body from that period, and since his clothing and equipment was also preserved, then archeologists have had a field day with him.
The exhibition itself is fascinating. It turns out that he was well equipped for the mountains, with warm and comfortable clothing, and moreover he didn't die in an unexpected winter storm as was first thought. Pollen samples have shown that he died in the Spring -- perhaps as the result of a fall -- and was gradually dried out by warm summer winds before being covered by the snow in the winter. Hence the excellent mummification. We noticed that some of his arrows lacked tips, and assumed they had simply been lost, but no! Archeologists noticed that his bow was unfinished -- it hadn't been rubbed smooth -- and conclude that he was in the process of making a new bow and arrows at the time. Usually that would be done at home, so the fact that he was doing it in the mountains shows that he must have suffered some accident earlier. One wonders what story lies behind his death.
The story of the find was quite amazing also. He was spotted by a middle-aged couple out walking, who saw an arm projecting from the ice. They assumed that it was a climber who had fallen and been trapped in the glacier, as did the mountain rescue. It seems that in that season alone, seven frozen corpses had already turned up in the area. So when the rescuers found a strange hatchet nearby, they didn't know what to think. They took it to the police station, where it was pronounced to be `at least 50 years old´! Next day the archeologists turned up, the age of the corpse kept increasing, and in the end it was found to be no less than 6000 years old!
On Monday we drove back along the Weinstraße to Tramin, the little town that the GewurtzTRAMINer grape comes from! The whole area is very charming: a broad, and completely flat valley bottom running between vertiginous mountainsides, with a string of little old villages and every arable patch covered in vines. Even on the mountainsides, wherever there is a less steep bit of slope, there are vines. This area must need to import every other foodstuff, even milk! The villages themselves look ancient, in a Germanic alpine sort of way. And then, there are the vineyard outlets... This was another day of tasting, focussing on Gewurtztraminer, and we tasted so much wine that by the end of the day we were even asking for just one taste of each wine (rather than one each), and leaving half in the glass! Very enjoyable, though, and of course one feels obliged to buy something at each place! In the late afternoon we found a very charming B&B with the help of the tourist office, and installed ourselves for the night.
| By now we were getting a little fed up of eating in restaurants the whole time, not to mention a bit concerned about the cost! So we decided to have a real `cheap day´. I had brought my camping stove with me, and we had bought a few ingredients, so as the evening approached we set off on foot from our B&B up the mountainside through the forest. Before long we found a perfect little glade with even a picnic table, and set to work to prepare our dinner. We had bought fresh pasta and a huge packet of chantarelles (a delicious forest mushroom which is very popular in Sweden and on the continent, but unfortunately almost unknown in the UK). We made up a sauce with spring onions, chantarelles, cream and prosciutto, and ate it with our deliciously al dente pasta, with fresh berries to follow! Both the food and the surroundings were hard to beat, although I wonder what the villagers thought when we returned down the mountainside about 10pm! |  |
Making chantarelle sauce |
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Next morning we were treated to an excellent breakfast in the garden, which we enjoyed so much that we decided to try to stay in the same B&B on more night. But the lady didn't understand a word of English, and even her German was harder to catch than most people's. I can't understand it, but sometimes, knowing both English and Swedish, one gets a feeling that people are talking about something. Do you remember Rabbit showing Owl the notice that Christopher Robin had written `Gone out. Back sun´, and Owl getting the feeling that there was something wrong with Christopher Robin's back? It's sort of like that. Anyway, in this case Mary could get an inkling, but I hadn't a clue. At first the lady said a very definite `Nein´, but I kept trying since I didn't think she had understood me, and sure enough a little later we were all happily agreed. We were very pleased since the place was very charming. |
View from our balcony |
We decided we had had enough wine for a while, so we headed into the mountains to a small town called Calavese.
Views of Cavalese |
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In Cavalese we bought a walkers' map, picked a nearby path, and set off along it through the forest. The native forest in the Dolomites is wonderful: the trees grow widely spaced (presumably because of poor soil) giving a park-like feeling, and in between them grow grasses and an immense variety of flowers. But before too long, we entered a plantation which looks just like those anywhere else: densely growing spruce trees in rows. What's more, I had succeeded in choosing a route with a steep 2000' climb up to a pass, which ran in the forest virtually the whole way -- hence no views. (Write out 100 times: I must pay attention to the green shading on the map!) Mary developed a blister, and when we reached the pass a thunderstorm broke out, so you could say the walk was not an unadulterated success, which one can mostly put down to a lack of good information. Still, we all got some exercise, and it was the first time Liam climbed so far.
When we got back down again the weather had cleared up a little, and we decided to return to our B&B via a scenic drive. So we headed north from Cavalese over another pass, and this time, when we reached the pass, a panorama suddenly opened out before us, with a magnificent mountain ahead. The view was brief, but whetted our appetites for more! On the way down, we returned through Val d'Ega, which our guide book calls `nature's sore throat´, an incredibly narrow valley whose sides are almost vertical cliffs of red rock. As we wound our way down the road, clinging to the side of the valley just above the river, we suddenly rounded a bend to see a mediæval fortress perched on the cliff-top above us! A perfect view, which the attention needed for driving did not permit me to photograph!
On Wednesday, with Mary's blister making its presence felt, we
decided to go for a scenic drive. This time we headed up
the Val d'Ega, and continued eastwards towards Rosengarten, the
mountain we glimpsed the previous day. 
After a little while we came
to a little glacial lake which many parked cars revealed must be
a beauty spot, and Liam and I decided to get out and take a look.
Halfway around the lake, we realised why it was so popular: it
affords stupendous views of the surrounding mountains!
Continuing onwards, we reached the high mountain passes, and at last we found the kind of scenery I associate with the Dolomites: jagged limestone peaks in unlikely looking shapes towering into the sky! We had found the heart of the Dolomites proper, and we spent the whole day driving through truly magnificent scenery. I drooled over the walks we could take, if only we had more time, but Mary's blister kept us firmly in the car. Virtually every mountain carries ski lifts, leading up to places you would swear no sane skier would attempt to ski down from (presumably you don't see the runs from below). I would love to come back in winter! If only we had had more time, we could have taken a lift up just for the view, but this was our last day in the Dolomites, and we had to return to Verona in the evening. Still, what we did see was fabulous. Just take a look at these pictures, and drool!
Amazingly, this area isn't at all a wilderness: every pass has its flock of alpine hotels, some very charming, and even the wildlife is much richer than you would expect.
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When the afternoon began to wear on, we turned the car towards Verona, where we would spend one more day before flying home. But mountain roads are slow, and as the hours passed we realised we wouldn't arrive until late, late at night. Because hotels are outragously priced there, we decided to stay in Verona youth hostel, but we hadn't been able to contact them in advance. So when we finally got there at 11p.m. and asked if they had a family room, they just laughed at us. I quote: "Our family rooms were all booked last November"!
They did offer us dormitory beds: Liam and I would be in one, and Mary in another, but come on. Youth hostels in Sweden go very much for the family market, and there are hardly any dormitories left, but I guess elsewhere there's more emphasis on the lone young traveller with a rucksack with less concern for comfort. Anyway, there we were, 11 o'clock at night in the middle of a strange city, with nowhere to sleep. Then they said: "but you can camp in the garden if you have a tent".
Now I love camping, and in an effort to endear it to Mary I had brought the tent along, but she had refused point blank to use it. On this occasion though, it seemed like the best solution. So we headed into the garden and started looking for a good spot.
What they didn't mention at reception was that 20 other groups
had already done likewise, and it was not a large
garden! Pretty soon we discovered that not a flat
piece of ground remained, and you know what camping on a slope is
like. At last I found the flattest remaining patch, got the tent
up, and we started munching our dinner in the darkness, while
trying not to wake anyone else up. 
We finally turned in around midnight,
and Mary didn't sleep a wink, so I hardly think this experience
will make it easier to get her into a tent in the future! Still,
we were warm and dry, and Liam and I slept. In the morning when
the sun came up, we saw the garden in its full horror: the place
looked like a shanty town, with tired travellers trying to dry
their washing and eat their breakfast on a `lawn' so hard-packed
by constant camping that hardly any grass remained. It is at
moments like these that I sincerely want to be rich! The best
thing about the youth hostel, though, was that we could leave the
car there, and so we got free parking in the centre of Verona for
all the next day.
Anyway, we ate our breakfast, took down the tent, and stowed it in our -- suitcase? Yes, actually! This is the only occasion on which I have ever camped out of a suitcase. It felt truly wierd! But if you only need to carry camping gear on a plane and in a hire car, why not? The airlines are so rough on rucksacks, after all.
The rest of the day we spend looking around Verona. It turned out to date from Roman times -- it was one of the most important cities in Northern Italy. The city still has a great deal of charm.
 The most impressive relic from Roman times is an arena -- the best preserved outside Rome. It's hard to beat the Coliseum, but take a look at this!
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 A courtyard in Verona. |
Ave Caesar!
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We were unable to find a hotel in Verona itself at anything other than totally exorbitant price, so we booked an only somewhat exorbitant place a few miles out of the centre throught the tourist office, with their assurance that the hotel restaurant was wonderful. When we got there, our hearts sank: the place was a concrete monstrosity. We checked in with some apprehension, but the room turned out to be comfortable.
Then we started going through our luggage to see what we could leave behind, and how we could manage the rest on the plane. The trickiest item was my `white gas´, petrol fuel for my stove (which I had bought in Trento). Not the kind of thing you want to take on a plane with you! So I took it down to reception to ask them how to get rid of it. Big mistake! As soon as you speak a word of English in Italy, they run off to fetch the person who `speaks English´. As usual, that turned out to be a wild exaggeration! I say: how can I get rid of this petrol safely? He says: `you want petrol? There is a petrol station down the road´. Me: No, I want to get rid of this petrol! He says: `There is something wrong with your petrol? Perhaps you can get better petrol at the petrol station.´ Me: No! This is petrol for a stove! He says: `Ah yes! Petrol for a barbecue, yes! I understand. Give it to me, I take it!´ So I gave it to him. I just hope I don't have an Italian's life on my conscience, if he tried to use it as barbecue lighter fluid...
We dined in the restaurant, and despite our original misgivings, it turned out to be the best meal we had in Italy! And then at 6a.m. we headed for the airport to return our hire car, and begin the long journey back to Göteborg.
