Five Lands

1. In Cinque Terre, Italy, there are five small towns along the coast that make up one of the more beautiful places on earth.

A trail leads from town to town but unfortunately as we arrived, flooding and landslides caused the trail to be mostly closed down.

Our hotel was in the southernmost town of Riomaggiore -- a small, hilly town with wonderful locals and good food.

The night we arrived it had just finished raining and I took to the road for a run up into the hills south of Riomaggiore. Water was gushing down the road and a light rain was still falling from the sky.

The hill kept climbing and climbing as my legs ached more and more with each step. I passed a small bar that looked out at the water. I passed dozens of small cars and some bicycles that sped down the hill into the town.

My shoes became sopping wet by the time that I was able to turn around and make the quick descent down the hill back into town.

The run had literally taken my breath away. The view only figuratively did.

2. We ate at a restaurant in Riomaggiore for our first meal and as seems the custom in Cinque Terre we were warmly greeted by the restaurant owners -- a beautiful Italian family with the grandfather serving as the gracious host. I would call the food at La Lampara good but not great -- however, the wine and ambiance were incredible.

We laughed the night away drinking glass after glass of wine until we ended the evening at a bar up the road with some good, American mixed drinks. Even with a cocky (kind of a jerk really) waiter, we managed to enjoy ourselves.

3. Run number two was to become more of an adventure race than a run for me. I overcame my hangover with some late morning prosciutto and bread from a market near our hotel and filled up my Camelback bag with water. Up the hills once again but this time heading north on the paved road leading to the next town up the coast. I ran at least 5 or 6 miles to get to the town but pleasantly ran into the Waldorf group by the time I arrived.

On my way there I took time to enjoy an espresso and blood orange on that bar overlooking the coast, I found a place to swim in the ocean for a while and I meandered about the town before running into the group.

We sat to drink some schiacctera (sweet dessert wine) and eat some cheese before heading back to Riomaggiore in the late afternoon.

4. That evening was kind of a drunk-fest. Not going to lie. I bought a bottle of Chianti and we headed down to the water to do some swimming and jumping off rocks. My and 3-4 of the Waldorf girls braved the really cold water and swam around for a while in the salty, ocean water. (The wine helped us stay warm!).

After that we headed to dinner in Moterrosso (and I managed to get a 50 euro ticket for not having a train ticket on the way there -- by the way, Italian train police are absolute douschebags and are the main reason that I am cheering against Italy in the World Cup -- a bunch of dramatic babies!).

Dinner was fun and we enjoyed great service and quality food (and more wine!).

When we got back to Riomaggiore, guess what!, more wine!

The night ended at the spot we had been swimming earlier in the day with that "jerk" of a waiter from the night before, a bunch of Norweigan women who loved my blond hair and a couple of the Waldorf kids. We drank more wine. We drank Limoncello. We drank beer.

The former "jerk" Italian waiter was now our friendly guitarist for the evening and he sang Bob Marley songs as we drank the night away.

As 4 AM rolled around, I decided to stumble up the hill to our hotel. No running for me on this jaunt -- heck, I could barely walk.

5. Leaving Italy the next day with a severe (and I mean severe) hangover in tow, I realized that my romance with Italy was falling apart.

My first trip to Italy had been a punch-drunk love affair. The museums, churches, food and wine, the culture......they had made me fall in love with an ancient remnant -- a life lived in the past but a life not lived by me.

This second trip to Italy was an open-eyed balancing act. Teetering on the edge of affection for the beauty that the country provides while nearly slipping into the frustration and anger that came from a boastful people clinging to old ways without accepting the new.

I realize now, looking back on the trip, that Italy doesn't have to be a singular idea in my head. It can actually be a place that changes for me -- from good to bad, a love-hate relationship of sorts.

A place of variety. Not just one or two places, really.

Something more like five lands -- or as the Italians would say "Cinque Terre."

Enjoy the ride,
Damm

The World of Venice

"Today it is too old a story. The world has forgotten the mighty fleets of Venice, her formidable commanders and her pitiless inquisitions. The dungeons of the Doge's Palace have lost their horror, to the generation of Belsen and Hiroshima; and even power itself seems too frail and fickle a commodity to waste our lyrics on. The Venetians may still half-mourn their vanished empire, but to the foreigner the sadness of Venice is a much more nebulous abstraction, a wistful sense of wasted purpose and lost nobility, a suspicion of degradation, a whiff of hollow snobbery, the clang of the turnstile and the sing-song banalities of the guides, knit together with crumbling masonries, suffused in winter twilight."
Excerpt from "The World of Venice" by Jan Morris.

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On a rainy night in Venice, we sat outside and listened to popular classical music by a quintet of musicians in St. Mark's square. The lead violinist was a virtuoso. She played so lightly, so easily, that one could easily have fallen in love with her musicianship alone. But upon looking at her face, it was much easier to fall in love with her arrogant beauty.

She knew she was good at the violin and even though this was neither the grand concert hall of Paris nor the orchestra of a major city, she acted as if Issac Stern himself had something to learn about playing the violin.

I sat mesmerized for that hour. And then promptly, at midnight, the music ended and she rushed off with her cell phone -- surely texting her husband or a boyfriend.

I didn't even get to say goodbye.

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I have no desire to visit Venice again. None at all.

Venice, for me, is like an ex-girlfriend whose beauty no longer holds the same place as it once did.

The churches and monuments are stained with graffiti. The waiters and bartenders seem tired of the tourists even though we keep the city afloat. The daily way of life is completely absurd for Venetians.

Small boats navigate the canals to deliver cans of Coca-Cola, bottles of Peroni and cheap, trinkets for the tourists to buy. Rough-looking men unload these goods and seem to move as slowly as possible. I imagine their day doesn't involve a great deal of work -- just enough to keep us tourists happy.

Venice was once a great nation but now it is a Disneyland of sorts.

"A city with canals for streets and hundreds of little bridges?" the tourist says with a sense of wonder. "How truly interesting."

No wonder then, that upon my second visit to Venice, the facade of winged lion's and Doge's names in the buildings had started to turn to ruin for me.

Being treated as a tourist isn't why I travel to Europe and Venice treats you like a tourist, whether you like it or not.

Venice is a city that lives in the past and it's as if the world still clings to her dying breath -- finding beauty in the melancholy of it all.

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Our hotel in Venice was nice enough. I enjoyed the Peggy Guggenheim museum and had a couple of decent (but by no means great) meals.

The cuddlefish in ink at Al Conte Pescaor was actually very good and I enjoyed the octopus-celery salad even though it was ridiculously overpriced. Two glasses of Prosecco and my bill for lunch was soon 35 Euro ($50 or so). A very good meal but not worth $50 in my book.

I think the best time I had in Venice was sitting on the edge of the city with a friend drinking a Coca-Cola Light and eating some prosciutto and cheese. A cruise ship passed by and we waved to the people aboard the ship.

"Ha," I thought. "Look at those silly tourists."

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We made our parting trip to the Venice train station during the morning rush hour for the water taxis of the city. As we traveled from the Salute stop to the station stop, I moved to the front of the water taxi and sat by myself.

I watched the gruff men unloading their goods for the day from the various boats. A worker stood in a plaza filling a hole with dirt -- looking around after each scoop to see who was passing by on the Grand Canal.

Somewhere in the city, Timothy Dalton (who my sister took a picture of during a water taxi ride the day before) was filming a movie called "The Tourist" (appropriately enough) with Angelina Jolie.

More tourists were coming into the city as we were being taxied out.

We got off the water taxi and headed toward the train station. A girl in our group came running up to me as we walked up the steps.

"You'll never guess who I just sat by on the taxi," she said.

"It was that violin player you were so in love with the other night. She was taking her daughter to school, I think."

Twice I had been so close to her but each time I wasn't even able to say goodbye.

So with a tip of the hat and a smirk on my face, I turned to the Grand Canal and told Venice, for what was probably the last time, "Goodbye."