So Saturday Thursday [Saturday? What? — ed.] evening I caught the overnight train to Florence. Because this is Europe and you can do stuff like that here.

Figure 1. What I woke up to: the Bologna train station. Now you know where baloney comes from.

Figure 2. The view from the train. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised to find that Italy looks a lot like Mendocino County.

And also because my friend Fran and her family had flown over from the States and rented a Tuscan farmhouse for the week. I hadn’t been able to get in touch with Fran since I’d figured out the train schedule — the best I’d been able to do was send a fax c/o the owners of the farmhouse, something like “I ought to make it to Montevarchi about nineish” — but I figured with a fair bit of Spanish and a little Latin, I could manage Italy on my own if I had to.

Figure 3. Firenze S.M.N. I don’t know if this was really the longest train platform I’d ever walked down, but I was glad I didn’t have much luggage.

Figure 4. It’s kind of like Penn Station, only without that whole freaky troglodyte cave thing.

The overnight train was about 45 minutes late, but because Europe is a civilized society I had half a dozen local train choices and made it to Montevarchi right on schedule. (I did have to pay an extra five euros on the train because I hadn’t figured out I needed to get my ticket stamped, but I’ve learned plenty more expensive lessons than that.)

Fran and her dad John met me at the train station just as if we’d planned the whole thing, and we drove up to the farmhouse. Fran’s mom, Linda, and her sister Jenny made breakfast. We sat on the front porch eating frittata and toast and fruit and drinking Sienese coffee and watching the fog burn off.

Figure 5. Nothing but rolling hills covered with grapevines and olive trees — I don’t know how Fran and her folks put up with this for a whole week.

Figure 6. I think Italy gets a better grade of sunlight than Switzerland.

The house they’d rented was one of half a dozen or so on the grounds of the Fattoria Petrolo, a working winery and olive farm that was at least a couple of hundred years old. After breakfast Fran and John and I hiked up to the office so John could get on line and try to find them a hotel room for their last two nights. (As it turned out, on line didn’t work — booked solid, or so they claimed — but accepting the Petrolo folks’ offer of phoning the hotel and being Italian at them worked fine.)

Figure 7. The road up to the main villa. Look at those flowers — you’d almost think it was spring, or something.

Figure 8. I figured it wasn’t fair just to take pictures of the back of Fran’s head.

While John was dealing with that, Fran and I went on over the hill to look at the rest of the Fattoria.

Figure 9. Looking from the main villa down toward the church.

Figure 10. The church.

Figure 11. I was trying to take a picture of the tower up on the top of the hill, but my phone doesn’t have a zoom lens.

Figure 12. Looking back toward the main villa.

Figure 13. And again.

We went back to the villa and cleaned up, and then Fran and John and Tony (Jenny’s husband) and I went wine tasting while Linda and Jenny and Jenny’s nearly-two-year-old daughter Josephine went into town.

The first winery we hit was only just open — the kid who ran the place (I say kid, but he was probably thirty) had to run up the road ahead of us and drop the chain between the gates, and he couldn’t find his corkscrew till Fran pointed out that it was sitting next to the sink where he’d just rinsed out four glasses for us.

Figure 14. I have a bad habit of photographing buildings and machinery instead of people. I’m trying to work on it. (Cool tractor, though, ain’t it?)

He’d just bottled the wine on Monday. Considering that, and that it was mostly Merlot, it wasn’t half bad — simple but drinkable. And only six euros a bottle. John and Fran both thought it was the sort of thing Linda would like, and John bought three bottles.

(Full disclosure: I was bored with Merlot long before Sideways. I never even saw Sideways. If you like Merlot, please drink it, and if anybody gives you crap about it, let me know so I can smack ’em for you.)

The next winery, I wasn’t clever enough to take any pictures of. It was a little more established, and the wine was a little more expensive — eight euros — but it was good stuff; mostly Sangiovese, with a bit of a couple of other varietals none of us had ever heard of. John bought two bottles and I brought one back for myself.

Then we kept going up over the hills toward Chianti proper, but we didn’t make it that far. The thing about traveling with Fran is, she works for the California Culinary Academy, and her job is arranging student internships. So when you’re with Fran it can be hard to throw a rock without hitting a five-star restaurant where she knows the chef and two or three of the chef’s student assistants.

In this case we didn’t have to throw a rock; we just happened on the sign for Badia a Coltibuono, a winery, restaurant, and B&B on the grounds of a converted monastery. Fran just wanted to stop and say hi, but once we made it as far as the restaurant it was hard to pass up lunch. I had an aubergine purée with sheeps-cheese gelato followed by pork chops with . . . well, damn if I can remember, but it was good.

Figure 15. Badia a Coltibuono. Did I photograph the part of the monastery with the restaurant in it, where we actually were? No I did not. On the other hand, there’s this great church tower.

Chianti’s heraldic emblem is a black rooster. We asked Chef Paolo if he knew the story behind it, and he didn’t, so we spent a while trying to make one up — I think a plague of weevils was involved somewhere — but after a little research he came back and told us that it was in memory of the rooster that alerted the Sienese to the approach of the Florentine army and saved Chianti from Florinese domination. (Which was suspiciously similar to John’s explanation of why the rooster was the emblem of Oporto in Portugal, but I suppose everywhere in Europe with a rooster for an emblem must have more or less the same story.)

Then I had some fruit flan with candied orange peel and pistachio sauce. And several bites of Fran’s chocolate torte. Plus we drank a couple of bottles of the estate’s Chianti Classico, since by that point it was pretty clear we weren’t going to make it to any more wineries.

Figure 16. Me, Fran, and Tony. Let’s try to figure out what kind of pictures my phonecam sucks at taking, and take those. But if you look closely you can see some barrels with that black rooster logo in the photographs on either side of my head.

We came back to the farmhouse and sat on the porch talking and drinking for four or five hours . . .

Figure 17. Linda, Jenny, Josie, Fran (a.k.a. “Auntie Beanie”) and Tony.

Figure 18. John, Jenny, Josie, Fran and Tony. The great thing about digital is that you can just take a hell of a lot of pictures instead of waiting for everybody to get settled.

Figure 19. John, Jenny, Linda, Josie, Tony, Fran. Getting a little closer to an actual family portrait.

Figure 20. Here we go.

Figure 21. Now let’s get me in there, courtesy of Linda. Josie’s wine is watered — yes, we’re giving a two-year-old her own glass of wine; can you tell we’re in Europe? — but she’s still more interested in it than in being photographed.

Figure 22. Okay, now everyone’s looking at the camera, except Tony. This is either just before or just after I managed to spill that glass of wine on Jenny and Fran simultaneously.

. . . after which Linda cooked up a feast every bit as satisfying as lunch, if simpler: lamb, chicken, pork, salad, risotto, pasta — it was their last night at the farmhouse, so there was a fridge to empty out.

Then we opened a couple more bottles of wine and sat and drank and talked some more while the sun went down and the stars came out.

Figure 23. Evening in Tuscany. Again: How could anyone put up with this?

It’s a difficult life.

The next morning, early, John took one of the rental cars and took Jenny and Tony and Josephine to the Pisa airport. Fran and Linda and I packed up the other car and followed about an hour later.

Figure 24. Man, I’d hate to wake up to this every morning.

Figure 25. Another of my photographic weaknesses, besides buildings and machines, is pictures taken through windows.

Figure 26. It didn’t really look much like this, but you take a picture straight into the sun with no filter, you don’t expect much.

I’d been a bit irritated, when I made my train reservations back in Basel, that I hadn’t been able to get a direct return train from Florence, and was going to have to change trains in Milan. But again things worked out just as if we’d planned the whole thing: Fran and John and Linda were headed in that direction anyway, and since my train from Milan didn’t leave till five, we had plenty of time.

When Linda said that I ought to get a look at the Leaning Tower while I was here, I kind of figured we’d take a quick spin around it in the car, like Brandon and I did with the St. Louis Arch, and then get back on the autostrada. As far as I was concerned, I’d already had a fantastic trip, and I would have been able to go home contented.

But, like I said, we had plenty of time.

Figure 27. Getting out of the car in Pisa, two blocks from the Leaning Tower. This is the moment when I finally turned to Fran and whispered “Holy shit, I’m in fuckin’ Italy.”

Fran and I were going to climb the tower, but they only let so many people up in it at a time, and it would have been a good hour before we’d have been able to get a time slot.

Figure 28. You’ve been seeing pictures of it all your life. Those pictures, let me tell you, completely fail to capture the reality of standing in front of it. Which fact I will attempt to demonstrate by showing you yet another picture.

It’s probably just as well, since from the top of it I doubt I’d have been able to keep myself from phoning everyone I know in the States and saying “Yeah, I know it’s three in the morning where you are, but I’m standing on top of the goddamn Leaning Tower of Pisa.”

(At this point I should note that this was only my second trip to Italy ever, and that when I took the first one I was about three years old.)

Figure 29. It’s not just the tower. The baptistry, left, and the Duomo, right. Why the top of the baptistry looks like a medieval Chinese helmet I’m not really sure. But according to John it was the baptistry that was supposed to be the architectural star of the place. Show-off tower.

Figure 30. Again, it’s not just the tower — look at the last five arches on the lower left. See how they don’t line up? It’s really too bad they invented all this beautiful architecture before they invented geology and structural engineering.

So instead we just walked around the Piazza. Fran and I bought some postcards. They were selling all kinds of other stuff as well — from your normal touristy stuff, like Leaning Coffee Cups and Leaning Tower refrigerator magnets, to your abnormal touristy stuff, like bad imitation Japanese swords and Playboy Bunny t-shirts. Plus there were some African guys selling watches — I’m pretty sure I saw a Seiko I lost in Tokyo seven or eight years ago. But Fran just bought a tote bag for one of her coworkers back home, and her folks bought some non-leaning salt and pepper shakers. I stuck to postcards.

Figure 31. Fran and me: circumstantial evidence that we were actually there. By this point Linda was getting pretty good with the phonecam.

Then we had another pretty good lunch, at some little cafe that was between the Piazza and where we’d parked the car. And then we got back on the autostrada.

From Pisa we drove up along the coast to Genoa, and then north to Milan from there. I don’t remember where all we passed through — other than Carrara, where we drove past yards full of enough marble blocks to build a medium-sized pyramid — but it was beautiful. I wasn’t clever enough to take pictures of the drive, but if you’ve driven Highway 101 in California, it looked a lot like that. Like all different parts of 101, from Santa Barbara up to maybe Ukiah, but without the ten-lane suburban nightmare stretch from San Jose to San Francisco.

Actually, most of what I saw of the Italian countryside, from when I first woke up on Friday, somehwere north of Bologna, felt like one part of Northern California or another. It felt like home. Except that all the towns were Italian, with monasteries perched on the hilltops and terra-cotta apartment buildings in the valleys, but I could live with that.

I think I need to talk my new employers into opening an office in Tuscany.

They dropped me off at the central train station in Milan. Milan didn’t remind me of California; it was more like Madrid, tree-lined avenues with lots of big blocky buildings with iron balconies and painted shutters and graffitti from ground level as far up the walls as a hand and a spray can could reach. I didn’t get any pictures of that, either, but I did get some of Milan Centrale, a Mussolini-era monster that by weight, at least, must be one of the world’s larger train stations.

Figure 32. Milan Centrale. I’m not sure they have enough kiosks.

Figure 33. The Fascists, like the Nazis, clearly had what William Gibson called “a scary excess of design talent.”

Figure 34. Viva Roma Nova Eterna.

Figure 35. Germany has western pulps, Italy has Diabolik comic books. Tells you everything you need to know, really.

Figure 36. Yep, it’s a train station.

I bought a can of Chinotto and sat and read for an hour or so till my train pulled in.

Then it was back to Switzerland. Which suddenly seemed a lot less isolated and a lot easier not to take too seriously.

Viva Italia!