The Dolomities

On seeing this title, many of my more lexically fastidious friends will be rubbing their hands with glee. “He’s done it again,” they’ll be saying to themselves, in their high-pitched, nasal voices. “This is like that time he wrote ‘knew’ instead of ‘new’, which I mocked him for because I’m sad and have no life.” Well I’m sorry, stereotypically nerdy friends, but this time it is deliberate.

‘Dolomity’ is a word I recently coined. You won’t find it in the dictionary just yet, but its definition is ‘a calamity that occurs in the Dolomites’. “But Alex,” you say, “this seems a bit unnecessary. Surely there can’t be much cause to use such an oddly specific word.”

I grimace painfully, my face contorted through the cruel patchwork of scratches and scars I still bear from my experiences. “That,” I say, “is where you’re wrong.”

DAY ONE

Interestingly enough, my troubles didn’t begin the moment I got out of bed. Usually when a day I’ve planned is horribly derailed, its due to my having woken up about five hours later than I intended. But in this instance I made the opposite mistake – I got up too early. I was up and about at 6am, a good two hours before my train left. Loads of time. So much time, in fact, that I was lulled into a false sense of security, and consequently missed the train. The train in question was one of three I was supposed to catch that day, and my having missed it set in motion an unfortunate domino effect. It meant I arrived in Padua an hour later than anticipated, in Montebelluna an hour and a half later, and that I didn’t arrive in Feltre until half-past-one in the afternoon, rather than at eleven o’clock in the morning.

That wasn’t an issue in itself. I had six hours of walking to complete that day, so I would have arrived at the malga at seven o’clock, had everything gone to plan. But sadly, everything did not go to plan.

The big wad of directions I had printed out the previous day told me I had to go to Porcen, a small village southwest of Feltre. This would have been fine, except the direction then told me I should take the road that led east in order to get there – in other words, the road that led directly away from Porcen. It’s worth pointing out that I was already sceptical of these directions, as flicking through them on the train journey I saw that they made a lot of references to building work that was ‘supposed to be finished in 2005’. I followed them east for about ten minutes before the nagging doubt that this was stupid grew to strong to ignore, and after a brief discussion with google maps it was decided I should probably go southwest – which led me to Porcen.

There is a saying that originated in Italy: “All roads lead to Rome”. In Porcen, however, it turns out that all roads lead to private property. I wasted another couple of hours wandering up and down people’s drives before I eventually landed on the right path. I then lost the right path, and ended up circling someone’s house for a while before a nice man on a lawnmower directed me through some woods to the path that officially marked the beginning of the Alta Via 8. It was four o’clock in the afternoon by the time I found the beginning of the trail.

By this stage (the beginning) I had been baking beneath the sun, and the weight of two backpacks in which I had all my hiking food and all my stuff for the trip to Austria, Switzerland and northern Italy I was planning on doing (and have since almost completed), for the entire day. I was supposed to climb a mountain and then find the accommodation on the other side, but it soon became apparent that there would not be enough light to find the accommodation. I didn’t bring a tent but fortunately it didn’t rain, so I spent a dry if slightly chilly night in my sleeping bag at the top of Monte Tomatico.

 

DAY TWO

You’ll notice over the course of this blog that I actually began every day by going in completely the wrong direction. The only day I didn’t do this was the fourth and last one – but I made up for this by going in the wrong direction twice on the second day. My instructions told me to ‘look out for a grassy saddle’ – which seemed less like a hiking direction and more like a message I might find in a fortune cookie warning me about a horse-riding accident. I went partway down Monte Tomatico, decided I couldn’t see said saddle, and went back up Monte Tomatico and partway down the other side before realising that maybe it was that way after all.

Then I sat down and thought about how I had survived this long as a member of the human species, and that if I had lived a few thousand years ago and David Attenborough had made a nature documentary about early humans I would have been the human who gets lost and ends up wandering alone through the savannah until it gets eaten by vultures or drowns in a bog, before a couple of Italian lumberjacks speaking a near-incomprehensible dialect finally sent me away from Monte Traumatico Tomatico in the right direction to the accommodation.

This was supposed to be my toughest day of hiking – eight hours in all – and as it was very warm on arriving at the accommodation I should have reached the previous night I bought eight small bottles of water, and strategically transferred the water to the larger, two litre bottles I had brought with me. Still well behind schedule, I set off for the second campsite, unaware of the disasters that lay ahead.

When the directions said ‘tough day of hiking’ I had assumed this meant it was very long. What it actually meant was I would be clambering up a verrrry steep mountain side covered in loose soil, clinging to a thin length of cable, wearing two backpacks (one on my back, one on my front) and four-year-old running shoes balder than Pierluigi Collina. It was tough. So I left my small rucksack balanced precariously on the mountainside and took my larger backpack to the top – placing my two litre bottle of water just next to it. When I finally got my rucksack to the top, exhausted, I hoisted my backpack onto my back, entirely forgetting the bottle of water I’d balanced next to it, and sent the water plummeting down the mountain.

Up until that point in my life, I’d always thought that people going ‘noooooo’ was just a trope used in films. But as I watched – or rather listened – to two litres of water bouncing down the hillside into the foliage, the word left my lips like it was the most natural thing to say in the world. I never saw that water again. I imagine it’s still bouncing down the mountainside even now. What it did mean was that I spent the next eight hours feverishly searching for water, and ended up drinking from a hose outside a farmer’s house.

That probably was the toughest day. I couldn’t move my legs by the end of it, and at one point I would have fallen flat on my face if it hadn’t been for the padding provided by my front backpack (frontpack?). But I did manage to catch up with my schedule, and spent the evening eating canned chicken salad outside a deserted cottage, where mercifully there was a water supply.

 

DAY THREE

On day three I was woken by the sound of an Italian family and their dogs walking by the cottage outside which I was sleeping. Having gotten myself ready I wandered down the path after them, and on catching up with them after about ten minutes or so the woman informed me that I would have been better off going the other way from the cottage, as it was easier and more scenic. By now used to this routine, I walked back to the cottage and started again.

If this new route was easier, I dread to think what the other route would have been like. By this stage my legs barely worked at all, and I kept myself going by imagining things I was walking like, including a scarecrow, an All-Terrain Scout Transport from Star Wars, and a person who was actually paraplegic. My listing was brought to an end when I hyperextended my right knee as a result of my newly developed walking style, which took the fun out of the game quite a lot.

Not that I’m complaining. An alternative name for the Alta Via 8 is the Alta Via degli Eroi, or the Way of the Heroes. The mountains I was walking on were the settings for a series of great battles during the First World War, and in 1917-1918 many Italian and Austro-Hungarian soldiers gave their lives here. The shelters and bomb holes are still visible, which put things into perspective. I later visited the stunning memorial atop Monte Grappa, where their remains are buried.

I was grateful to discover a restaurant at the end of the day’s walking, where I ate an enormous plate of bacon-and-tomato pasta and felt generally at peace with the world. Unfortunately there were no beds left at the hotel, which meant that after being welcomed back into civilisation I was cruelly ostracised once more, and went to sleep in my sleeping bag on the mountainside.

 

DAY FOUR

Fortunately my knee wasn’t too badly damaged, so after I visited the memorial I was able to descend from the mountains at a comfortable limp. In fact this was the most successful day, as I managed to get to my destination without asking anyone for help. I still got lost a couple of times, but I felt that was pretty good for someone who knows about hiking what a jumblie knows about sailing, and I collapsed into Bassano del Grappa train station in time for my train to Vicenza, feeling like I’d fully deserved a nice big meal and a good night’s sleep.

Needless to say the train was delayed by forty minutes due to an ‘incident with an animal’ so I missed my connection, and ended up having McDonald’s at midnight in Venice Mestre (which, incidentally, is about as different a place from Actual Venice as you can imagine) where someone stole my meal, and I got to Vicenza at 2am where I was able to enjoy being told how grateful I ought to be that I was able to check in at all by a man who, presumably, had spent the previous three nights sleeping in a bed, on a mattress, and as far as I was concerned didn’t know he was born.

C’est la vie. It was tough, but I am now on the shores of Lake Como, enjoying the cool breeze that wafts in through the French windows, so I accept these vicissitudes of travel. If I get a moment I’ll try and write about Austria and Switzerland, but I’ve got a few things to do before I head home on the 18^th – and besides, it might be nice to have something to talk about when I get home, rather than everyone already knowing because they read it here.

Anyway, Vicenza is the city another blog ends in, so it’ll have to be the pun vicenzanother blog. A big shout out to the man in the lawnmower, the lumberjacks and the hiking woman. Ciao!

Ven in Venice, Flo as the Florentines Flo

It’s a long time since I started this blog. Many of my younger readers probably won’t remember its origins, but if you ask your grandparents they’ll tell you that it was originally intended to help people going on their years abroad, as well as being about travel*. Doubtless your next question will be “Well what the hell happened?” in response to which your grandparents will mutter something about coca leaves.

It’s true few people who read this are prospective year-abroaders, and I doubt any of those who are consider it particularly useful, but I like to think it is still, by and large, about travel, even if on occasion that just means me travelling to the supermarket and then writing it up with as much prolixity as I can muster so that it fulfils the recommended minimum word count for a blog post. Anyway, in the spirit of these origins I decided I would write about two places I’ve travelled to recently: Venezia and Firenze, or Venice and Florence.

First of all it’s important to point out that both these cities played an important role in my choosing to study Italian in the first place, because they both feature in Assassin’s Creed II, a game I played a lot over the summer of 2014 before I went to university. I had originally enrolled to study Ancient History and Spanish, but on arrival was told that I needed to pick an extra subject to study during my first year, and could then drop one of my three subjects at the end. It was after casting my mind back to those many happy hours I spent clambering across the scaffolding of Florence’s Duomo and the Doge’s Palace in Venice that I plumped for Italian.

Overall I enjoyed the course, though I did consider the emphasis on grammar over parkour skills a flaw in the syllabus. But come the end of that year I decided I liked it more than Ancient History – and of course it offered me the chance to visit Italy, something Ancient History couldn’t do. Which I suppose is how I ended up here, touring these beautiful cities.

I’ll start with Venice. Venice is about one-and-a-half hours away from Ferrara on the train, and consequently I have visited it five times this year. This may seem excessive – but then they say life is about balance, and if life is about finding a balance between time spent in cities that are not constructed upon an elaborate canal network and cities that are, you’ll realise that actually I haven’t visited it enough. And if that logic isn’t enough to sway you then know that every time I go it’s been beautiful.

The first four times I went with friends and/or family to do the usual tourist trail to the Rialto Bridge and Piazza San Marco, both of which are must-sees, but this most recent time I decided I’d spend the day looking at the lesser known sides of it. I spent a lovely morning watching the above men wax their gondolas (not a euphemism), before heading off northwards to some of the less-pounded backstreets. With fewer tourists it’s easier to get an idea of what it might be like to live there (not that I’m planning on doing so, I don’t quite have the money), as I think these pictures show:

You’ll also notice the large grey swirling mass of clouds above the lagoon. I noticed it too, and thought nothing other than that it would make a great dramatic backdrop for my photos. I like to think I was right about this, as my photos are dramatic…

…but I didn’t factor in quite how torrential the rain would end up being. So torrential, in fact, that the water got into my phone and caused it to turn off, meaning I don’t have any pictures past the one of the street above. At that point I was at precisely the opposite end of the city to the station, about as far away as you can get without swimming – but considering how wet I was by the time I got back I might as well have tried to swim to it. Whatever the weather though, Venice is a stunning city and I was sorry to leave.

I allowed myself a few days to get thoroughly dry, and then headed off to Florence. Florence is a bit further away so I booked into a campsite to stay there for a couple of nights. I was very impressed by the train I got there. At one point it claimed to be travelling at three-hundred kilometres an hour, yet was somehow also twenty minutes late. I wondered whether the train might be lying to me, but then I thought about how I often cycled at what felt around three-hundred kilometres an hour to all my philosophy lessons and was always late for them, after which I decided the train was actually quite relatable.

I’ve been to Florence before, but only for a couple of days which in Florence is not nearly enough time to see everything. I reckon I could spend around a couple of days just staring at the Duomo which is easily the most incredibly detailed building I’ve ever seen – and made more amazing when you think that it was once climbed by Ezio Auditore da Firenze himself. Seriously though, I reckon I could do 48 hours just standing there, hands on my head, mouth slightly open, marvelling. It took 150 years to build, and you can tell. I don’t have photos, none of my photos could do it justice. Even Assassin’s Creed II couldn’t do it justice. It’s one of those things you have to go and see if you get the chance.

Anyway, while I could have done that, there are other things to do in Florence as well. In a moment of uncharacteristic cunning I had booked ahead for visits to the Accademia and the Uffizi galleries. The Accademia is most famous for holding Michelangelo’s David.

I once did a module called History of Art, and it would be safe to say that I didn’t really ‘get it’, but that David was a good-looking guy. A work of art, you might say. A sculpture, even.

That said, as someone who doesn’t really get art in an art museum, I wasn’t so keen on some of the other art on display. I mean, I love a good gold-framed triptych in which a blue-shawled behaloed Mary holds a nude behaloed baby Jesus as she sits on a throne in a room that has no other distinguishing background features while various assorted saints and other people gaze at them with meticulously detailed deferent adoration as much as the next guy, and I’m sure they’re very difficult to draw, but surely it wouldn’t have been so difficult for some medieval Italian artist to maybe say “you know what, I think I’ll draw a nice landscape today”. One of the few bits of information I took away from my History of Art module was that if the content of the essay I submitted was found to be similar to that of someone else I would be disqualified for plagiarism and potentially kicked out of university. These artist guys go about drawing the same thing, and they get their art hung on the wall of the Accademia.

I apologise, I’m probably coming across as quite judgmental and bitter. What I’m trying to say is that I think my History of Art essay should be hung on the wall of the Accademia.

Then to the Uffizi, said to be the finest art museum in Italy, home to works by Michelangelo, DaVinci, Botticelli and many more. In the Uffizi I was actually quite glad I did that History of Art module because it meant I could be silently condescending every time someone approached Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and muttered “So this one’s quite famous, is it?”

I particularly like the above half-finished piece by DaVinci. Mostly when I go to art museums (in between judging medieval triptychs and being condescending) I just stand looking at the art thinking things like “Whoa…” and “There is no way I could ever draw anything this beautiful”. But they also had a couple of the earlier sketches he did of the piece, and you can see various figures at various stages of completion. You see that he doesn’t just paint pure genius onto the canvas, but it’s actually a process with many stages that requires a huge amount of work. Having said that, my favourite picture was definitely this one:

Every time someone flips me off I will now react like this.

I went to three open air concerts in my short time in Florence – one on the Ponte Vecchio, one in the Uffizi square, one on the beach by the river. I hadn’t realised you could walk beside the river, but it allowed me to get some lovely pictures of the Ponte Vecchio.

I am going to wrap up there. I was originally going to post this before I went to the Dolomites, but due to circumstances within my control I failed to do so and am instead posting this from a restaurant in the Dolomites, and will shortly have to leave to find a nice hill to sleep on because they’re out of bedrooms. I could say a lot about my travels so far in said Dolomites, but I’ll give them their own blog. They have done plenty enough to earn it.

I’m not in Ferrara so you’ll have to spot the diffirenze in how I finish the blog – but I hope you enjoyed it and I will post the next one venice ready.

 

*one thing your grandparents will attest to that you won’t have trouble believing is that the titles have always been horrible.