It’s now 5 weeks since we left, and just over 5 weeks to go – the time’s gone more quickly that we expected. I'll cut down on the photos a bit as it's taking a long time with the slow and sporadic links that I can find.
Today we left Lago Maggiore and headed south with the aid of the GPS. Incidentally, I thought my Italian pronunciation was pretty rusty, but compared to the voice in the GPS, I speak like a native. I now understand why Frances criticized its Dutch pronunciation.
On the advice of the teacher we met in Stressa, we diverted via Lago Orta and the lakeside town of Orta San Guilia. On the way we happened to pass a granite quarry, and had to stop to look at samples of their work. They had sculptures not only in local granite, but stone from all over Italy and the rest of the world, including fruit sculpted in stone!The lake was similar to Logo Maggiore, although on a smaller scale.As we approached Orta, we saw the most ornate (as in just about over the top) hotel, Villa Crespi, above the town.
After parking the car in an underground carpark (no parking in the town) we walked down narrow streets to the town hall and a beautiful little park on the lake. Orta San Guilia (also) is an amazing little town with buildings dating back to the 1700s, and build with a large proportion of stone. They even use stone (up to 8cm thick) for roofing. A new feature is the Hotel San Rocco, an upmarket four star resort for those with unlimited budgets. It was stunningly designed and built with designs and materials that exuded quality (and money). It must have cost an absolute bomb to build on the base structure of a 400 year old monastery.For lunch we stopped at Ristaurante Poncetta, a family run restaurant a few kilometres south at Gozzano. There we were, the only customers, sitting by the window, gazing out over the lake when a white swan came in for a landing and made a rather large splash on landing – I mean really! We decided to have a simple lunch of an antipasto of proscuitto, ham and salami with an assortment of pickled vegetables, button mushrooms in a creamy pesto sauce, cooked capsicum, Russian salad, and a side dish of beetroot salad.
The next stage involved driving approximately 330 kms to Bologna. The drive was pretty ordinary, the mountains giving way to a mixture of flat industrial or agricultural landscapes almost all the way. We finally arrived around 6pm in peak hour Bologna traffic with no accommodation booked. By a combination of blind ignorance and good luck, we arrived outside the Place Hotel that actually had rooms at a reasonable price and car spaces (extremely rare in these old Italian city centres). We parked the car in a space that makes the carpark at the Dendy in Newtown look like a football field, and went up to our room on the fourth floor. The hotel is quite old, and has few of the accoutrements of the modern hotels – physical keys, old furniture, high ceilings although with a modern bathroom. It was great. In addition, we found that we were only a 5 minute walk from Piazza Maggiore, the centre of the city. Of course nothing is perfect – the floorboards creak so much that not even a ninja would be able to sneak into the room without waking us up.
After freshening up we headed off the piazza. What a shock! It was noisy, full of tourists, historic buildings under renovation, and essentially looking pretty decrepit. I actually felt disoriented and made Frances sit for a while until we’d got our bearings, taken in the scene before us, and read a little about the history of the city. A little while later, we walked off to see the ‘two towers’ which are quite a feature of the city – one was half covered for renovation, and the other was leaning at an incredible angle – quite a sight.
Anyway by now we were hungry and began looking for somewhere to eat. There were the usual restaurants and trattorie, but not seemed very inviting, and just a bit too busy. Then we found ourselves in a small piazza, Piazza San Stefano that had no traffic and seemed like a quiet oasis. We decided to eat at a café there called the Sette Chiese (Seven Churches). The arrangement was that you bought drinks, and they provided free snacks. WARNING: Food stuff coming. We started with a Prosecco & a Suave and a small plate of snacks on slices of bread – Salami & cheese, tuna and egg & mayonnaise, zucchini and egg & mayonnaise, blanched cherry tomatoes with herbs & 2 others. It was so good, we the both had another glass of Prosecco and some other snacks – yellow capsicums stuffed with potato & white sauce, rolled ham slices filled with a tuna mayonnaise, capers and bean sprouts, and penne pasta with a sauce of olive oil, cherry tomatoes, Spanish olives, small pieces of ham and eggplant and capers.
What was interesting was that all of the patrons and almost all passers by were Italians – it really seemed like a local hangout and had none of the feeling of a tourist trap. We then took a roundabout stroll back to the hotel, through what appeared to be the expensive part of town – past the Hermes, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, etc. stores. We debated whether these stores were patronized by wealthy Italians, or tourists – no definitive conclusion.The overall impression is a huge difference from the laid-back feeling around Lago Maggiore, the neatness and ‘polish’ of Basel, and the quietude of Holland.
