Max's Summer Travel Journals: Days 41-43: Milan, Genoa, Turin

I am, alas, in the worst hostel in which I have so ar stayed—Ljubljana sucks. I will try to write this letter to the sound of the techno music blaring outside of my window.

I expect that I caught my train from Bologna to Milan, cursing my travel agent for having vicariously hauled me out of bed at the crack of dawn—it was an intercity train, and missing it would have been costly. People on the train mostly seemed as sleepy as I was; some looked a little tense, as though they were heading to business meetings. Someone had recently reminded me of the high fashion that one expects to see in Milan, so I began to look for it. The only evidence of it that I found was its being popular for men to wear shoes with no socks (and long, often corduroy, pants). I got so tired of seeing their bare ankles, which I considered flagrantly unfashionable, that to see a man in socks became a godsend.

Milan itself has very little recommend it as a tourist destination. It reminded me a lot of Chicago with its “brutalist architecture”—its large, solid, unadorned concrete buildings, built in both cities following their being gutted (by fire and war, respectively). The cathedral itself is a remarkable architectural achievement, and, tired and uninspired to walk fire, I ended up spending most of my time outside of it, eating nectarines and looking at the passing tourists. Milan had recently had an expo, and it is a major tourist draw for Russians, many of whom come with barely a word of English or Italian. I helped some of them to find the ticket office to get inside the cathedral (which is, of course, one or two hundred metres from the cathedral itself), while I helped another to decipher exactly what her ticket was for. My meeting her was kind of funny: I saw a Chinese-looking woman taking a photo of something and said, in Russian (for I almost always speak Russian in foreign countries), “Watch out!”, as a crane—that is, the type used for construction (do not ask why it was in the cathedral; evidently, they were doing some sort of work on the walls)—was coming toward her. She said, “Thank you” in a funny accent—she must live near the border and have studied, the language, I thought. When she asked if I spoke Russian, I realized that she must be Kazakh, and we got to talking; as it turned out, she was one of Kazakhstan’s most famous pop stars, and she and a friend of hers, who taught Russian at a university in the south but spoke it poorly, had bought tickets without knowing what they were for. “They were asking me what kind of tickets we wanted,” she said, “and I didn’t understand, so I pointed at random.” I was able to interpret for her, asking a cathedral employee in English what the ticket was for, and I showed her how to get to the stairs to the cathedral roof. She, in turn, tried to teach me a few words in Kazakh, and she told me how to find her on a social media site. “Just look up ‘Manzhar from Turkestan,’ she said; everyone there knows me.” It was true. I looked her up and listened to some of her songs (in that most bizarre of languages) that very evening.

My train ride to Genoa was marked by a funny coincidence. When someone asked to switch seats with me so as to be witht he rest of his family (for these were separate little rooms of several seats each, not dual columns of seating, as in most trains), I ended up in the same room as a theatre teacher from the University of Arkansas and her husband, who wrote and directed the best play that I saw while I was there (I will not, for the sake of anonymity, say which one.). It turned out that they were great friends with two of my former teachers and knew many of the other teachers there, past and present, and they were intrigued by our being, as it turned out when we got to talking, in the same compartment as a student of classical literature and a linguist (and her boyfriend, who was, sadly, an ordinary person). We chatted about fairly ordinary things on the way to Genoa, and I lamented not being able to say anything profound about Higher Art, as I wanted to say something profound but had nothing in store. I took a picture with my teachers’ friends at the end of the train ride (they were staying on to go to La Spezia) and emailed my teachers, who got a kick out of our having met in such an aleatory fashion.

When I got to Genoa, I discovered that I had printed the wrong map to my hostel, and a Genoese woman, originally from Peru, helped me to find it. My notes from that first day are, to my good fortune, scarce. I noted the nearby hills, dense with verdure, and the city’s obvious poverty—it is much dirtier than, say, Bologna; many of the buildings are run-down; it is full of cramped, dark side alleys. My most remarkable experience on that first day was, if my memory holds, going out for dinner. I ate at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant that an employee of my hostel recommended to me and had some of the best food in recent memory, a pesto dish and, for dessert, panna cotta (sp?). The pesto was Trapanese, or tomato-based, which I had not expected, but it had an incredible combination of flavors, layer upon layer of them (I think that I have already mentioned the multifariousness of Italian pasta dishes.), while the panna cotta, flavored with saffron, or something equally unusual, was better than I knew that food could be. I resolved to return to the restaurant on my last night to try the basil-based pesto and another dessert.

Turin, the city to which I was doomed to travel by dint of already having booked a ticket, blew me away. I remember almost nothing of the train ride there except that we passed what looked like the ruins of an ancient Roman temple outside of Genoa’s city limits and that I was surprised, on arrival, to find myself in a clean train station with seating for people waiting for their trains. I stepped out, having looked up the way from the station to the Palatine Towers on Google maps, and promptly got lost. When I heard a man giving directions to a woman in Russian, I stepped into the store at which he worked and discovered that it was a Russian grocery store, where I got my lunch for the day and something to take home. The owner, who had moved thirteen years ago, said that Italy had been much nicer ten or so years ago, before the crisis, but was now going downhill, and he advocated sending African migrants back where they had come from when they arrived on their boats. Our conversation, like all conversations, came with a highlight: when I asked the man where the main thoroughfare through town was, he told me how to get there but said that it was not worth going, as there was nothing worth seeing there but a market where I might get pickpocketed. (The street, named after the twentieth of September (an important date for Italians, as all cities seem to have a street named after it), goes right through the heart of Turin’s historic center and takes one past palaces for which it has been named a UNESCO World Heritage site.)

Turin was by far the most European city that I visted in the whole of Italy. It had broad, neatly arranged causeways, clean streets, and an overarching, non-Italian atmosphere of law and order. It is regal (in contrast with Genoa, quite clearly a workingman’s city); it is easily walkable (again, uncharacteristically for Italy, where to walk is usually to risk death in a vehicular accident); and it has an efficient tram system that reminded me of Strasbourg. Much of the historic city center was gutted, as in the case of, apparently, almost all northern Italian cities, during World War II, but it has retained some impressive Roman ruins, and many of its old churches and other buildings of grandeur are intact. There was far more to see than I expected, but I noted that the city was relatively uniform (with its broad streets and manicured four-storey buildings), while Genoa strikes the traveller in its variety, its layering of different cultures upon one another. Turin was quiet, had spacious public squares, and was not a tiring city to visit, perhaps because it was so much more orderly and pleasant than any other that I had seen in Italy—one actually felt kind of good while walking through it. It has a long, winding river, some nearby hills, and breathable air; it seemed like the kind of place where one could spend several weeks, not so much as a tourist, though there were plenty of museums to visit, but just as someone living there like a normal person (it really did not feel like Italy). People there drive sanely, and one of them even jumped out of his car to see if I was all right when I tripped on something on the sidewalk and fell down on the way to the train station.

I must have gone shopping and gone for a run when I got back from Turin. (I forgot to mention that, on the train, I met a woman who chatted with me, in passable French, about travel and the Greek crisis; she had heard that, if Greek left the European Union, other countries would also start to leave, and the system would be shown to have failed. This was probably the first time anyone in Italy engaged me in conversation on a train.) I had wanted to do a little cooking for some time, having done zero on the trip, and decided to try to eat like an Italian, buying, in addition to the pasta that I had been carrying around for weeks, mozarella, kale, pesto, and cherry tomatoes. I noted the evening light in my notes; I went running, one evening, along the waterfront, struggling, at first, to find it, as the area near the harbor was mostly industrial and laced with highways; and I must have enjoyed the light. Italy’s ubiquitous water taps (for they are not exactly fountains) are a real boon. (I noted my fatigue. I must have still been tired at this point, as I am now.) When I cooked dinner, I met an Englishman who had studied Arabic and taken a trip through the Middle East soon before the revolutions of 2011; he kept saying, when I described people’s behavior in Italy (and particularly in the south), “This reminds me so much of Egypt.”

I decided, on my third day in Genoa (blissfully), to skip Cinque Terre. It was, I knew, a sin, but I had to skip something in order to catch up on sleep and on writing my blog (which did not happen), had already seen a similar coastline in the Amalfi Coast, and was not intent on taking another train when there was so much to do in Genoa itself. Genoa is surrounded by hills, which are dotted with forts used for defensive purposes when people from the north wanted to ake it over. It has dozens of palaces, in which rich people used to host emissaries; parts of the city’s town wall are still preserved; Christopher Columbus’ house is there; and the winding streets themselves, with their churches and statues of the Virgin Mary, are fascinating. Every other building in its old town is a deli, bakery, fruit and vegetable market, restaurant, ice cream shop, or butcher; while cities like Lindau and Salzburg are chock full of restaurants and cafes, Genoa seems to have a lot more of the raw materials for making food, probably because its residents are so much poorer than those in Lake Constance or Austria. (Someone whom I met today agreed that people in the south of Italy might seem so angry all of the time in part because of their poverty and resentment toward the wealthier north; the people in Croatia, she said, all seemed angry, probably for the same reason.) Parts of the old town are very quiet, as in Venice, when one steps off of a main thoroughway onto a forgotten side street, and lots of locals wander through it, perhaps to do their shopping. As a whole, it was endlessly fascinating and varied.

It is, however, still a part of Italy. When I walked up a bunch of side streets to a viewpoint, I found the gate at the very top barred, and when I decided to take a trip by funicular to the nearby hills, I found the finucular out of order. An Italian girl originally from Germany who also wanted to go to the hills took me to the bus stop, where, when the bus came, I was sent across the street to get my ticket at the tabaconnist. I had the foresight to ask if I could get a ticket from the stop in the hills and was told that, no, I would have to get it down below. I ran back to the tabacconist, got another ticket from the wordless, saurian woman behind the counter, and was taken, a short time later, most of the way to my destination, the bus driver telling the German-Italian girl and me that we had to walk the rest of the way up the hill to get to the final stop.

From there, it was as though I had left Italy temporarily (not quite—the trails were poorly marked): I saw a total of four people, three joggers and one cyclist, while in the hills. The day was brutally hot. The paths were overgrown, in places, with weeds. Still, I could see nothing around me but forested hills and, as I got a little higher, the deep blue lip of the Mediterranean Sea. I saw a little string of a highway down below. A few liners sat out at sea. I was alone with the flowers, bees, rocks, and forts.

I did not explore the whole of the park, as I had not left myself much time and wanted to be back in Genoa proper before dinnertime for fear of the transport system’s failing and my being stranded in the hills; I turned back from my walk just as I was starting to run out of water. I regret to admit that the bus system in Genoa is not actually that bad: bus schedules are everywhere posted; buses come more or less on time; and stops are announced fairly clearly. Bus tickets can even be used as transfers for up to ninety minutes, which fact enabled me to switch buses in town and get one that went almost to the front door of the hostel. (I needed this; I was tired.) I went back to the same tiny restaurant as before for dinner; the waiter recognized me. To avoid paying extra (due to a deal with the hostel, which gave its guests a different, special, cheaper menu), I eschewed proper pesto for a dish of scallops and spaghetti, just as heavenly as the tomato pesto dish had been; for dessert, I had the best creme brulee of my life. It was delivered to me on fire, so I dutifully blew it out, like a birthday cake. The waiter protested and set it on fire again with a lighter; he said that I had to wait until the sugar had browned and the alcohol had burned away—perhaps thirty minutes, he joked. (It did not occur to me that the fire itself died down when its fuel, the alcohol, ran out.) My dessert attracted a crowd—that is, people from the adjoining tables watched it burn. I entered into conversation with the girls sitting beside me, a pair from Appalachia (sp?), and we talked about travel and environmental politics. This restaurant turned out to be an excellent place to meet people, perhaps because of being so small—the first time I went, I had met a pair of girls from Lyon, who claimed that one could make anything with the right olive oil and that only the French made real bread. I remembered what Dima, the man whom I had befriended in Bologna, had had to say about restaurant interiors, which interested him, as all of cafes in Irkutsk, he had said, had shiny, new interiors with bright lighting, and he had assumed that all cafes were like that until his wife and he had started travelling. His theory of what made a cafe interior pleasant was roughly that it be made of something closer to the natural materials, like wood and stone, that we encounter in the non-human world. Indeed, the interior of this cafe had uncovered brickwork and, if I recall correctly, a wooden ceiling; it had music playing on the radio and small distances between tables, and the waiter seemed more like someone doing his job, an ordinary, friendly person, than someone waiting on people or simpering before them (as in, say, the hotel in Dobbiaco, which was much more upscale). The interior seemed unabashedly old, and the restaurant appeared, to anthropomorphize it, not to be trying to be anything more than it was.

After this dinner (and ambrosian dessert), I reflected that there was so much to do in Genoa and the coastline surrounding it that one could easily spend a week or two here, as in Florence or Bologna; I even noted the possibility of spending a week in each of those places in five or ten years, though I have, luckily, realized that I will be unlikely to have enough money to take such a trip in five or ten years and that if I have the money, I will probably be smart enough to spend it in a country that does not suck. The fruit in Genoa was phenomenal. For just a couple of Euros, one could buy a kilogram of nectarines so ripe that the fruit ran down one’s arms and dripped onto one’s shoes. My final note is one that I forgot from Bologna: the owner of the hostel in which I stayed explained that the city tax still levied on visitors is a holdover from several hundred years ago (when it probably made some sense, as the city offered wayfarers some measure of protection); she joked that five hundred years had passed and nothing had changed. This sums up my impressions of Italy. I was delighted to leave the country on the 10th of July and do not intend to cross its borders again, as interesting as it was; and, while I would like to see Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Turkey (despite knowing that they will almost assuredly suck in equal measure), I at least know what to expect now and will not hope for them to show the slightest signs of societal development.