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Buondì.
Bug, Stefi and I are spending a few nights on a campsite in Toscana (Tuscany), near no place you’d have heard of, just over a third of the way down the road from Firenze (Florence) to Arezzo.
We have a six-bed cabin, with a kitchen, cramped bathroom, WC and a ‘deck’ furnished with garden furniture, so we can eat ‘al fresco’. Not that it’s likely to be very ‘fresco’, as the promised break in the tedious heatwave has not yet arrived, and now looks like it won’t until next week.
Toscana is pretty, as you’ll have heard even if you haven’t visited. We passed through rolling countryside with picturesque hilltop villages, just like you see on the TV.
The part we’re in now is more mountains than hills, which is fine too, after decades spent on the flat side of Bologna.
A funny thing Stefi said yesterday evening, about students at our Italian school, also in Bologna, specifically about Australians, who will typically complain that in the medieval city center they miss Aussie-style views to the distant horizon.
They’d only need to take a bus out to where we live, I replied, on the wrong side of town, where just looking out of an upstairs window is enough to see for tens of miles, potentially all the way to Ravenna or Rimini, then across the Adriatic Sea to the Balkans beyond. We don’t have kangaroos, though.
The campsite itself is well equipped with swimming pools, water slides and so on, plus a ‘trenino’ (little train) which carries everyone up and down the hill, from cabin to recliner/bar and home again at the end of a splash-filled day. The combination of water and train equals Bug’s dream holiday.
There are multiple on-site eating options – pizza sold more or less everywhere, an ‘old Roman trattoria’ which promises recipes based on nonna’s (grandma’s) recipes, and the place nearest to us, which offers dinner on a terrace with views of forrested mountains, though tree coverage hid any marsupials that may have been hopping from peak to peak.
Given that we’re in the Chianti zone of Toscana, the restaurant menu offered a Chianti (homonymous Tuscan red wine), but the waiter had to dig about in the back of the ‘magazzino’ (warehouse, storeroom) to find it, which didn’t bode well.
Worse, after having invited me to taste it, he poured me just a quarter glass, then started trying to put the cork back in the bottle.
Stefi asked if she, too, could have a glass, so he graciously fetched her one and added an inch or so of plonk to it, then went back to trying to wrestle the cork back into the bottle.
When I queried that, he explained that, with the cork in, the wine would keep fresh in case some other customer ordered a glass. Which didn’t seem likely, as we were virtually the only people there. And anyway, does a bottle of wine between two adults seem excessive to you? Good grief.
Neither the wine nor the meal were enjoyable. Ever-optimistic Stefi maintains that if this evening we take the ‘treninio’ to the other end of the campsite the restaurants there will have a greater footfall and, hopefully, offer a more pleasant dining experience. I think it’s highly improbable. Watch this space.
Perhaps I should have mentioned that cars parked outside the hundreds of cabins mostly bear license plates from north European countries, particularly the Netherlands, Germany and France.
I briefly chatted to some kiddies from Ireland, and on the ‘trenino’ we sat with an Italian/German family with two little girls who – Bug was assured – could understand his confused Italian. The children smiled but wouldn’t say a word. Unsurprising, as mom consistently spoke German to them.
Apart from the hopeless waiter, and a very kind chap at reception who gave Bug a tupe of bubble mix, Italians seem to be few and far between here.
Draw your own conclusions about any possible link between visitor nationality and the quality of food, but it’s certainly weird to be in Italy yet surrounded by people speaking other languages.
Not that I can make out much, as I’ve recently (and hopefully, temporarily) become rather deaf. I’m due for a ‘prima visita specialistica’ next week, so that’ll be something else to update you on.
Bene. Gotta get on. We’ve got a hard day by the pool ahead of us.
Alla prossima settimana!
P.S.
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