September 23 (Day Eleven)
Preparing to go to Trieste
I make a quick run back to the old city for one last round of email, to see if any place in Venice or Trieste has come through at the last moment. No, we’re on our own). I stop at a Frutta market and ask if they have organic frutta, biologique. From the response I see that I have drawn a solid negative on both accounts, English and produce. But there are so many beautiful fruits that I will not stand on ceremony. I pick out peaches, giant plums, containers of sliced watermelon, fat red currents on the vine, a bunch of purple grapes likewise, surreally large raspberries, and two salads: vegetable and calamari. I also get plastic forks, knives, and spoons. Added to the other food I have collected, this will contribute toward a picnic on the road.
We sit in the entranceway to San Domenica at the single table for travelers and manage breakfast without plates or bowls, using the utensils from the market. I open my bran flakes biologique from Esselunga back in Lucca and eat them by the fingerful, taking single big sweet raspberries and putting them in my mouth after the flakes. I did carefully wash this fruit in the sink in our room, not that that makes much difference; it’s the cells, after all, that eat the matrix of the soil. But these raspberries taste very sweet and distinct from any past ones. Lindy eats hers, one by one, while using the brie saved since Lucca and now rescued from the abbey refrigerator, spread on amaranth crackers from the shop in Siena.
Afterwards I do a run to the parking place, retrieve the car, find my way back to the nunnery along the complicated maze of one-way streets with fortuitously errorless choices of turns. We fill the tiny vehicle and are off. Siena was great, but now we are setting into the unknown—Italy beyond Rick Steves.
Driving to Trieste
Lindy finds A1 by always taking the downhill option. All downhills no doubt end in its vicinity. Then we are zipping back pretty much due North toward Firenze. Kilometers, at 1.6 per mile, tend to give the sense that you are moving quite rapidly, as distances on signs melt away. Thus we are rather euphoric at reaching the outskirts of Florence in under an hour. Last night we had been thinking to stop at some random town for lodging along the way, but now getting to Trieste is looking like a breeze, and then we can have Sunday free of travel. The trip is supposed to be a little less than six hours; I am guessing it is around 400 miles.
Heavy traffic around Florence dampens our ardor somewhat. We poke along in a single lane for twenty minutes before we are shot onto the open highway toward Bologna. The autostrada between Firenze and Bologna is very different from the one between Siena and Firenze. It starts out as an occasionally terrifying tour de force of sharp curves and tunnels through small mountains, bridges over ravines. The tunnels range from a brief hundred or so feet to maybe a mile at the most, and there are up to forty or fifty of them.
In addition, the road winds and curves continuously like an eccentric racetrack, into and out of the tunnels. It is psychologically and topographically much narrower than any equivalent American highway. Add the winding climb and an endless armada of huge trucks, most of them with Slavic writing on them, heading for central Europe—and you have a challenging course, especially for someone like Lindy who hates passing trucks, hates passing trucks on narrow roads, and hates passing trucks on curves. The gumption with which she dug into her two-and-a-half-hour stint was testimony either to her courage and realization that there was still a long way to do and she simply had to tough it out, or to her realization that it would be even more terrifying to be the passenger with me driving and have no control over her fate. Later, when I did drive, she was quite freaked at having the piloting taken out of her hands, as she kept reminding me that, because of the narrowness of the road and high speeds, there was no—repeat, no—margin of error. She was never sure I really got that because I am a looser, less intensely concentrated driver than she is.
After we passed Bologna, the road became straighter. Ferrara, Rovigo, Padova (Padua), and Venice made up the next leg—one that lasted two hours or maybe a bit more. Before undertaking this, I suggested that she pull into a gas station. It was half past noon; we were getting hungry. We needed a change of drivers. Plus the car, after seeming to have a stuck gas gauge, was finally giving some indication that it was consuming fuel, so it would need to be filled eventually, and here was as good a place as any.
Therein lay a problem. The manufacturer printed, “diesel/gasolio” right over the fuel tank, and I needed to figure out if this meant what it said in English or was a false friend, a cognate that meant something else.The phrase book confirmed that “diesel” is “diesel,” but I would have hated to lose something in translation and have the Renault grind to a halt and us get a bill for cleaning out its engine. I wanted to ask someone who knew the answer for sure before fueling.
At the service plaza Lindy and I stopped five different people, men and women, and queried if they parla inglise. It actually really only takes asking, “Do you speak English?” or “Inglise?” None of them did.
Then I had a perception. That other Renault Elf in the parking lot had a license plate with a blue square and a circle of stars on the left margin with the letters NL. I figured that corner must be where European cars display their flags. If that was true, NL was probably the Netherlands, and that meant the young couple sitting on the hood meant “English spoken here.”
Based on my question, the guy immediately struck up a conversation with us because he welcomed the opportunity to sing the praises of his Elf to another, albeit temporary Elf driver. Yes, the gas gauge hardly ever moves; he quantified it in miles per liter, but that part went by me. As I tried to ascertain whether to put in diesel, he grimaced at what would happen to the engine if unleaded went into it instead. “Yes, diesel; it means diesel.” He opened the gas door of his own to reveal the word “diesel” missing from the place above the cap.
So we fetched the car and got it filled. In fact, we could have proceeded right to the pumps because it wasn’t self-service, and the attendant would have known the correct fuel. It was about $30 American for half a tank.
Later I came back and asked the Dutch guy about picnic areas or scenic views. He rolled his eyes, “Not on this road,” and pointed to people standing by their cars, eating sandwiches and drinking beers and sodas on their hoods. “That’s as good as it gets.”
We figured to improve on that choice by sitting on the sorry excuse for a green mall, until we realized it was the dog running area with the attendant defects. We ended up making our picnic on a metal manhole-cover kind of object, hardly a bucolic Italian lunch, but quite Italian in its own way. I mean this wasn’t the Maine Turnpike with its picnic tables overlooking lakes. The fruits and squid salad made up for the locale, as we went from a plum to watermelon slices to currants and grapes, which gave an alternation of sour and sweet, while polishing off the entire salad and a large plastic-wrapped organic peanut-butter cookie. At least we weren’t using our car as a table like the other picnickers.
Now that we knew a bit of the code, we tried to guess the other names of countries of cars in the lot. “I” was obviously Italy. We figured “F” for France and “D” for Germany. “PL,” Lindy said must be either Poland or Palestine; “No, I’m joking; of course, Poland." “SK” we can’t guess: Sweden maybe?
The high autostrada speed is somewhat surprising at first from behind the wheel and imposes an unfamiliar rhythm for an American driver. Yet it is nothing even close to the insanity people warned us about when they said not to drive in Italy, e.g. the peril Rick Steves portrays. You just have to be aware that, when you are passing a slow-moving vehicle at 125 or 130 kilometers per hour, you have to get out of the fast lane pronto because there is always some race driver closing fast at 180 kilometers or more, much more. It is true that there is no dawdling or spacing out on the Italian highway. It is a fast-moving video game that sets the heart beating and gives an occasional chill of pure terror.
The diversion here is not license plates of the different states, as in America, but nationalities of trucks. We call them out to each other as we pass them knotted in convoys of unaffiliated vehicles that have fallen in together under the inertial current of the road, sometimes ten or fifteen semis long, most with great swaths of Slavic letters and accents across their flanks: Czech Republic, Bosnia and Herzogovinia (BH), Slovenia, Georgian Republic, Poland, Hungary, Macedonia, Croatia, Slovakia, Turkey, Lithuania, Estonia. The greatest number are Czech, Slovenian, and Hungarian, with the rest represented by an occasional truck or two. The growing mass of this armada is impressing us with where we are headed. As much as we are excited, it is a bit of a reality check. We are leaving the Romance and Germanic language groups. Of course, it is all the Common Market of Europe now. Despite myself (because I am rooting for the Eastern European countries and love the sounds of their names), I uneasily pass their sometimes swaying trucks, often covered with windblown canvass, with more trepidation than Italian or French ones.
As we get closer to Padua, the landscape becomes flatter, and fields stretch out to horizons. We have switched highways many times and yet we don’t hit our first tollbooth until outside Venezia: 14 euros for our biglietto that began at Bologna. At least there is a toll collector to tell us how much and receive it by hand. When we hit our first toll booth a few days earlier outside Florence en route from Lucca to Siena, there was only a machine, and Lindy was absolutely stymied as to how much we owed, let alone how to deliver it. I was no assistance. Finally, as we were creating a traffic jam, the woman in the car behind us got out, walked up and, without either English or exasperation, found the appropriate number of euros in our assortment and showed Lindy how to insert them in the slot.
I get a fairly easy stint on the straightaway, as we angle east, away from the mountains. My speed drifts upward effortlessly: 118, 122, 124, 128, 132, 136. Lindy is becoming increasingly nervous that I am getting in over my head, going too fast for my reflexes in a young person’s game. In fact, she requires I stay below 120. I tell her that’s 72 miles an hour, no big deal to exceed it when half the cars are going over 100, but she says she’s only concerned with our speed, and although she knows intellectually that 136 kilometers an hour is not miles an hour (and she will go a bit faster than that right away during her own next stint), the number itself scares her, so I slow down. Then I switch roles with her at a service area fifty miles short of Trieste.
When road and traffic seem safe, the drive is a lark, the rolling Italian countryside full of surprises: castles, towers, unusual colors, those tall thin trees, cultivated hillsides at steep angles, the covered trucks with Slavic letters and accent marks, the sound of being passed at 120 miles an hour when you are going 80. The day has become cloudless and magnificently bright, so everything to the horizons is in detailed rendition under the sun’s absolute probe. On the CD player we go from Slaid Cleaves to Emma’s Revolution to Tibetan chants to Dave Insley to Australian didgeridoo music. It has become a glorious all-day outing—the trans-Italian highway, no big deal.
Yet suddenly there will be a division of roads and confusion of which way to go or maybe a tight fit with a truck, and we are an immediate shambles. A few minutes later we are relaxed again.
When we planned this Italian trip, Venice was high on Lindy’s "A" list, along with Cinque Terra, Florence, and renting a house in Tuscany. We had more arguments about whether or not we were going to go to Venice than anything else during the months leading up to the trip. I said that it was going to be packed with tourists and grifters plus overcharges just for breathing, and we could do more interesting stuff almost anywhere else—say Slovenia—with the time. Lindy would respond, “How can you go to Italy and not see Venice?”
I had a joke line then that irritated her. “We’re not going to see the Taj Mahal or the Great Wall.”
“Yeah, but they’re not in Italy, wise guy.”
“It doesn’t matter. We’re going to see some things and not see others. It doesn’t really matter what we see, as long as it’s interesting. We probably going to miss the Taj Mahal and Great Wall in our lifetimes because we can’t do everything. So maybe we’ll miss Venice too.”
Now, a week and a half into the trip and veterans of traveling in Italy, we have reversed positions. Lindy has heard so many horror tales of 600-euro rooms, skyscraper parking lots, and wall-to-wall people that she wants no part of Venice, whereas I am challenged to figure out how we can get there skillfully. Yet all of my intricate plans collapsed with our failure to get any reservation at all, even through Elena’s friends. Today as we approach the Venice uscita, I have misgivings about not going there when we are so close, whereas Lindy experiences only relief that we don’t have to have to deal with it. “You see where my images have led me so far on this trip,” she says. “I just want to get to the next stop alive and conserve my energy. I have no wish to be in long tourist lines. I don’t care how charming Venice is.”
Right, Florence and Cinque Terra are probably charming in their ways too, but we won’t see them either. Trophy tourism can be a dangerous game that kind of creeps up on you. As we swing past the turn-off to Venezia on A4, I experience a last bit of “trophy” regret—postponing my image of canals and gondolas till another time because my updated fantasy is bleak: parking structures and Disneyland-style hordes.
With the possibility of Venezia behind us, we are clearly going to make Trieste in one day, around 4:30 in fact with daylight to spare, so our minds and hopes turn to that in anticipation. Trieste is no doubt lovely too, but a complete unknown. In our original plans it was just a train stop conveniently close to the border. We were going to take a cab from the Trieste station to our second rental car and immediately head to Slovenia—no sightseeing at all. Now Trieste is expected to fill in the last two nights that we were going to be in our villa in Tucscany and also be a poor man’s substitute for Venezia—elevated by default to a destination in itself. We have no images of it—no information at all because it does not even have enough pizzazz to rate a mention by Rick Steves, let alone a full description with restaurants, lodging, and attractions. It is a total blank, a likely nondescript town with few attractions, tourist or otherwise. We have no idea of what we will do when we get there except maybe look for parks and museums, and rest. We are quite satisfied, as it is, with the accomplishment of getting across the country by auto and readying ourselves for Eastern Europe.
Arriving in Trieste
The last 45 kilometers seem long and we are surprised there is no hint of a city sooner. The first indication we get of Trieste is an option to take either A13 toward Trieste and Ljubljana or the side road to Trieste and accompanying small towns. We choose the latter and exit into a great sweeping turn. A sign says Trieste, 13. As we come around the hairpin to a straightaway, we see one of the most startling, stunning and unexpected vistas of our trip. We are high in hills, on a cliff’s edge, alongside a vast luminous sea. The change in panorama is almost dizzying, and the sea has a color all its own, as seas do. This body of water stretches dramatically to our right, azure blue-green, and immaculate in detail, little boats dotting it everywhere—sailboats, motorboats, a single giant liner, plus strange rows of dark buoylike objects near shore, all scattered over a gigantic canvas that swallows them into mere punctuation marks. Water fills almost 180 degrees of view, a thin lens of haze in the far horizon, the city of Trieste in the near distance, still very far away and down below. We have what amounts to an aerial view, the dense habitation signature jutting out from the coast on several small hilly peninsulas and one large flat promontory that holds an entire miniature city. Beyond Trieste at the horizon is a hazy blue line of land and mountains bordering the sea, probably the Istrian coast: Eastern Europe.
Lindy marvels at how immense the city is by comparison with what she pictured, some small old Italian backwater. As we descend and scoot along the sea, we pass large hotels, crowds along the rocks and on little shreds of beaches. There is lodging out here, but it seem resort like and is definitely not the city center, so we keep going until we hit full urbanization. Gradually we are enveloped in a very different ambiance: city outskirts, lots of houses, sidestreets, increasing density. It is remarkable how you see a city from so faraway and it looks Ozlike and mysterious, then suddenly you are inside it. You lose all exterior perspective. It is no longer a patch of magnificent architecture along the distant ocean; it is mundane businesses and dwellings.
We finally stop when we encounter heavy traffic in the Centro, right by the train station. We clearly need to orient ourselves and take stock. Anyway, there is a big “I” for Informacione at the station.
Getting a legitimate parking spot here is impossible, so Lindy pulls alongside a curb on a striped zone for motorcycles a block from the station, and I get out. I am risking that she might be asked by the polizia to move, and we are skirting getting separated and major trouble here in the middle of nowhere, but I am already running as I realize this. A stiff breeze from the sea hits me, a tug that feels as though it could pick me up if it tried, but it is balmy (I learn later that the wind off the sea in Trieste is famous, called the bora, and during the winter it can reach 120 miles per hour, so the police have to tie things down all through the town). The feeling is different from anything yet in Italy. The wind welcomes, plays with me. I dash through the square. The ambiance is not old Italy so much as Austria or Germany: large palatial buildings with ornate stonework, even here around the train and bus stations.
I reach the stazione and look for the booth. Not finding it, I ask a number of people. I am redirected back onto the street: a sign reads: “Hotel Information, Lodging,” but it is closed (chiaudde), probably because it is Saturday
When I return to the car, I realize we are stumped, but there is always a next move. You just have to find it. Lindy makes this call.
She goes to a parked cabbie and elocutes with the driver for a surprisingly long time. When she gets back, she possesses a wealth of data. We should go down that sidestreet where the P is, park in the lot, and get rid of the car. Then there are five hotels in this immediate vicinity. We can either walk around to them one by one or go into the station and call them by phone for vacancies and rates.
I am wary of the sidestreet. It looks like Shanghai central, an empty alley along the dock, but we are short on options, so start down it. Very quickly we are in over our heads. The routing is complicated, behind buildings and through other narrow alleys, not at all what we expected, which was a bunch of meters or an outdoor grid. A we enter a gigantic parking structure, the ramp is nothing we have ever encountered. It is so narrow that Lindy has to go into first gear and, even then, stop repeatedly and angle herself around curves. Poorly lit but with occasional blinding flashes of sun, it is painted with striping and rolls and pitches in midair like a roller coaster. Not only does it remind me of the funhouse at an amusement park; it carries that precise horror-film, living-dead déjà vu.
We try to exit at the first level, but a flashing sign says Completo. We go to the second, which is also packed but not completo, find a space, and squeeze in, barely.
The garage is hardly lit at all. Too many American action films make this seem just about the most dangerous place on the planet, at least at the moment but, as our eyes grow accustomed, we see that there are other shoppers, leaving cars and loading bags into back seats and trunks. Yet, under the circumstances, I grab the laptop, as we emerge like groundhogs from our car.
We mark our place on the grid by coordinates A and G and then look for the way out. The backstairs are uninviting, but a sweet young woman, expressing by pantomime a lament that she can’t have a decent conversation with us, guides us to the exit (uscita) and even comes back to rescue us on the baffling series of staircases and lead us out into the street. I don’t see how a uscita could be any more confusing if they tried to make it so, either as to how many floors to descend or which direction to go in.
If there were phones in the train station, we never found them. Instead we decide to walk around the neighborhood and try the hotels in whatever order we pass them. Again, these are still days we pre-paid at our villa.
Traffic is intense and unrelenting, and we respect the Italian custom of not crossing at corners that are chained and gated off to prevent pedestrians from using them. Only gradually do we come to the realization that, of course, Trieste has no subway and those underground stairs lead you across streets via tunnels. Prior to that, though, we worked our way gradually and indirectly, corner by corner, to a spot from which we could traverse the hotel-ringed region across the plaza.
We have no idea of what to expect in availability or price, so we hold our breaths. At the first establishment, Hotel Impero, a fashionably coiffeured stocky young man shakes his head that there is no vacancy and directs us to the yellow-faced Hotel Roma, around the corner on Via Ghega. To Lindy’s question about rates, he says to expect 115 to 125 euros. At the front desk of the Roma a young woman tells us they are full up and says to try Hotel Milano 15 meters down. As we negotiate that stretch, I reassure Lindy, who is getting very worried about our lack of a reservation, that we can always abandon the city center and just drive out of town until we find something. "One way or t’other," I say, "it will work out."
A diffident but friendly blonde lady behind the desk of Hotel Milano, says that she has a double, a special rate, 100 euros, another 10 for parking the car a few blocks away. She then spends a good twenty minutes with us, giving us maps of the city, patiently demonstrating orientations in slow, clear, but limited English, and on one of the maps she marks a viable restaurant, La Tecci on Via S. Nicolo, then the main square, Piazza Unita D’Italia. Finally she draws a walking route to dinner with her pen: “Ten minutes, here to here.” She gives us a remote to open the garage gate and a four-language blow-up page designed solely for getting from the Milano to the parking structure and then finding your designated berth inside it—but first we must retrieve the car and unload in front.
We go up to view the room, 405, on the miniscule but adequate elevator. From our window we look out at the tile rooftops and stonework in the courtyard. Then we clean up before going to retrieve the Renault. (By the way, one thing that you need to stay alert to throughout Italy: raised floors. Be prepared to step up or down between adjacent rooms or where otherwise unexpected. One thing new in this room: instead of the square button or pull-sash to flush, this toilet is worked by a faucet, and the off-turn has to be very tight to the right to stop the water from continuously running.)
We set the computer on the bureau and head back to fetch the car. Using a subterranean tunnel for a shortcut, we emerge by the station and immediately have trouble getting into the structure. The mouth where we entered before is only for cars, and they are careening in and out of it so carelessly that we actually have to run to get out of the peril into which we have bumbled. It is like standing in the middle of a busy highway. An elderly woman perched outside a giant discount clothing barn located in this god-forsaken spot has been observing our slapstick quietly and now trudges slowly to rescue us. She has no English but points through the store and to the right. The barn occupies the whole block and, when we walk through its aisles and turn right outdoors, we find the cashier for the lot. Unfortunately we didn’t know the system when we parked, and our ticket is in the car.
We get in a crowded elevator, full of jabbering Italian, and pour off at Number 2 with everyone else. The place is huge, and we cannot find the car—plus Lindy’s notebook with our license number is in her bag inside it. We could not even tell the polizia in an emergency.
We have no trouble finding A and most letters in the alphabet before and after G. But G and D are missing. Lindy’s questioning of a woman is useless insofar as her nonexistent English causes her to instruct us to try the floor above but, when we get there by elevator we see that that is merely 3—unrelated to our goal. But, as we head back down the stairs to 2, we realize that there are many different separate garages on this level, stretching in all directions. The place is gigantic, a large city block. We begin to freak.
We circle dim corrals of cars from alcove to alcove—no luck. Finally I decide to do a methodical run of the entire perimeter. Lindy is dubious and thinks I will only exhaust myself, but I can’t think of anything else. I eventually spot G. It bears no rational relationship to F, H, or I . Once we are both at the crossroads of G and A, however, we still have no luck finding the car. Then Lindy realizes that she has the key and begins pushing buttons.
“Here I am,” the flashing lights say, and we go running to our lost vehicle.
Hot and exhausted, we are ecstatic just to be back in the car. Still we have to bring the ticket downstairs, pay 2 euros, and find the Elf all over again. This we do with painstaking care and without incident, and then Lindy navigates the roller coaster out. We work our way around the plaza to the Milano.
There is no parking lane in front of the hotel, and traffic is thundering down Via Ghega, so we do what must be the custom—pull up on the sidewalk. It is hard for walkers and baby strollers to get by, but, scuse, scuse, we unload as fast as we can. Then I leave Lindy in the lobby and set out for the hotel parking.
That is another intense puzzle. I make a U-turn off the sidewalk, barely timing my passage through an opening in both stampedes of traffic, then turn down Via Roma and look for Via Milano three streets along on the left. The trouble is, there are no street signs and I am looking for the name Milano and forget to count. I obviously have gone by it, as streets are now flying past. Furthermore, something I have never encountered in a traffic grid before: you can’t turn off Roma either way because, both to the right and left, block after block, one-way traffic is entering it. I work my way to the right lane as the better gamble and am finally given a turn. I head back along Via Trento, a parallel street, expecting to cross Milano from it but, since most streets aren’t marked, I have to ask a pedestrian at a red light. He points to the next corner: “Via Milano.” I turn right and scout the length of the street without seeing any P or opening in the buildings. There is nothing to do but be patient, stay in the present. I circle through plazas, come back past Hotel Milano from the other direction, turn left again, go three blocks, vowing to pull onto the sidewalk if I have to—I will not race past the invisible garage again.
Then, glancing down at the inadequate hand-drawn map at a red light, I am inspired to a new interpretation of the geography and symbols on it. From the placement of the concave icon with the P, the garage must be under Piazza Vitorio Veneto, the one with the giant horseman at the corner of Roma and Milano; the trouble was, the P and the opening were confusingly placed seven-eighths of the way down map Milano, giving a false sense of scale and distance. The garage wasn’t down the block even one iota; it was immediately upon the turn.
I creep along Roma, looking for a ramp as I approach Milano. Luckily a traffic jam aids my goal. I begin clicking the remote even as I turn onto my street, and I see a gate lift in the near distance.
Elation rises yet again from incipient traveler's panic.
Dinner in Trieste
While Rick Steves is MIA for Trieste, a brochure we get in the hotel lobby says that this is where the central European world meets Mediterranean culture. That is what the landscape looks like—how one would imagine Vienna, sort of grand in its architecture like Prague. Trieste at one point ceded itself to Austria to escape the hegemonies of Venezia. It was held by Tito as part of Yugoslavia after World War II and, though he got to keep the Istrian Peninusla and kicked most of the Italians out of what is now Slovenia, the city of Trieste was taken from him and returned to Italy in a final boundary settlement in 1954, not relevant to Rick Steves.
It is just past eight o’clock when we pull ourselves more or less together to seek the restaurant. We could just eat our remaining snacks in the room, and our weariness prompts that. On the other hand, this is a chance to walk the streets and see the city by night.
We review the map with our friend at the desk, ask her if the walk is safe, and upon her enthusiastic assurance that indeed all of Trieste is very safe, we head out and begin strolling down Via Roma, along my recent route, though it looks entirely different in the dark and on foot—gentler and more enticing. The breeze off the Gulf of Trieste is luxurious in fits and starts, too warm to be a problem. It fact it is a mead.
When we inquired about safety, Lindy was picturing dark secluded streets until we hit a main plaza, but in three blocks we encounter street vendors, and after another we are in the middle of a flood-lit street fair. Then two blocks later, at Via Rossini, we are standing in front of a giant gleaming colonnaded, cupola-topped building, like something you might see in Berlin or Washington, D.C. Flowing right up to it is a reflecting pool. By the map this is Piazza S. Antonio Nuovo.
The breeze has shattered the pool’s surface into so many crisscrosses that an extremely delicate scintillating pattern of broken lights appears in it like thousands of tinted minnows swimming back and forth just below the surface. Even more delicately described, they are fine threads or bits of colored wire, changing direction and mosaic as the wind keeps recomposing them in fits and starts—a kaleidoscope that it is hard for me to stop looking at.
But the scene is much vaster than just the water. In fact, it is not a reflecting pool; it is a canal. Later we learn it is the oldest one in Trieste. In the other direction, on the far side of Via Roma, it goes directly up to a low bridge against the sea, and small craft—rowboats and outboard dinghies—are parallel parked by rope, held at gentle distance from the curbs of Via Rossini and Via Bellini on the other side, all the way to the seawall, a few dozen of them jostling gently and aesthetically in the swell. It is a delicious scene.
Music is blaring. People are celebrating.The lit architecture looks like highly decorated wedding cakes. Suddenly a giant bouquet of pink and white balloons is released into the sky and separates above us, making the moment surreal.
We detour our journey to the restaurant and walk past the canal along a row of vendors. I stare at the chestnut cart of a monkeylike sideburned man; it is giving off the most delicious Old World smoke. As we pass him in my ambivalence about a snack versus dinner and how clean these roast shells aer, I decide to run back and at least ask the cost. He points to three tin cups of differing size. I pick the smallest. I misunderstand him and think it is half a euro. He scoops it overfull with chestnuts, blackened chestnut parts, and bits of shells, and pours them all into a little bag. When I hand him a gold coin with a 50 on it, he is disdainful, reaching right onto my hand and then treating my collection of small coins with disgust. I get more from my pocket and he immediately grabs one, two, three euros. I am surprised and irritated, and it shows. He is now glaring back at me, pocketing the money like a dog that has stolen a bone. My unconsidered reaction is, “Three euros?”
He shouts in Italian, holds up the small tin can, which indeed says 3 E on the side, and continues to yell at me as Lindy and I leave. A bad interaction, but now at least I have hot chestnuts to eat.
As we continue down the street, it becomes clear that this is no minor gathering of street vendors. It goes on block after block in all directions. It is a full Mercado—and more.
Here is someone drawing beer. Here is someone with a stand of sausages. Here is someone roasting rabbits on spits. We pass a full spotlighted fashion show with models traipsing in wedding dresses down a makeshift raised runway, the throng cheering while an amplified voices give even more lilt than usual to Italian. Here is a guy demonstrating panpipes and other instruments, playing songs for a crowd. Here is a humungous statue of a pretzel hanging over a booth of pretzels that range from very tiny to far-and-away the most obscenely large edible dough-twists I have ever seen, and then even larger ones.
Among the booths are people selling wooden placemats and table clothes; hats, ties and bags strung on wires, bright cushions with primary and secondary colors in irregular polygons; lipstick; perfume; weavings; wrapped hard candies and taffies; powdered cookies; sweetened frutta seccata (mango, papaya, pineapple among dozens of different hues); homemade pastas bare of wrappings (some white, some yellow, some whole wheat); cloths and kerchiefs of many dyes recalling the ancient route to Tyre; stacks of boxes, cans, jars, and wrappings of groceries; painted toys and puppets (lots of Pinocchios); little statues of animals and figurines; dried mushrooms; salamis of myriad sizes, shapes, and textures; Tiffany lamps; winter jackets; sections of boars; dozens of different-sized and various-colored sausages in rows; blue porcelain plates; vats of black and green olives; candles; small electronics; and so on. These are all mixed in with blaring speakers that change as you walk past them to the sound shadow of new ones. There is no live music, but everyone has his own choice of aural entertainment, most of it pounding and saturating its domain until the next takes over. We go from Italian rock to American rap to fifties love songs within a block.
We have graduated even further to an immense swelling crowd going in multiple directions such that we can hardly make headway, though the mood is so festive that we feel its contact high. The sheer number of people in the streets in states of merriment is stunning.
“It’s amazing,” Lindy says, “to get out of our little place and see how big and alive the world is. None of these people have anything to do with America. None of them care about America. Look at how much excitement and activity, camaraderie and richness there is. An American city would kill for this on a Saturday night. And all America wants to do is take it over and control it.”
“And this is just Trieste,” I added. “We happen to be here, seeing this one event. Think of a whole planet of cities and celebrations like this.”
“It’s a combination of a street carnival and a rave.”
“it’s like Mardi Gras and a parade with the mother of all yard sales.”
I experience a momentary epiphany that morphs from childlike joy into political outrage, a non-sequitur fantasy, some American politician, perhaps a future Barack Obama, addressing the people as regards W. Bush and his heirs:
I think: “Don’t you see. There is no war on terror. It is flimflam maneuvers with fake enemies and fraudulent imprisonments, to keep feeding the bloody machine. And they don’t even know why they’re running the machine, not really, beyond unexamined xenophobia and hard-hearted greed. They are not America’s protectors; they are destroying America. In fact, they are glorified sociopaths and war criminals. When you forfeit moral ground, you have only soul-less zombie weapons left to fight with. You have no hope of winning in the long run because there will always be more of them, and they will ultimately match your technology and dwarf your numbers. he only thing America really had in the long run ever was moral authority. When you start torturing innocent people and demanding young Muslim men admit to crimes they didn’t commit, you are nowhere; you have no hope left, none at all. When you lie and cheat routinely and suspend the rule of law, you remove the only safeguard America had from an antipathetic world. When you transfer wealth from the poor to the rich, you breed enemies who will mash you in the end. When you fight wars that don’t have to be fought, you demoralize your soldiers, disenfranchise your citizens, and drain your treasury into the coffers of your enemies.”
The ceremony in the streets of Trieste is a metaphor for me of a greater planet that intends to survive America despite us, that doesn’t believe in our imperial rule, that has its own celebrations, its own children.
We finally get to Via Nicolo, the block of the restaurant, and turn into it. It is little more than a café, almost a luncheonette—very disappointing. There are a few tables outside, two or three inside, mostly empty. We try inside first, then outside, but no one seems interested in serving us or even acknowledging our presence. they are involved in customers drinking alcohol, pouring in from the throng. We try looking purposeful and dinner-oriented by sitting in chairs outdoors, and a boy finally brings us menus. They are in Italian, so I get the phrasebook out but can decipher only insalatas, salads. We have been there ten minutes, and nothing further is happening vis a vis us, though more and more drinkers file in, packing the place. It is not even relaxing, for a speaker a few yards away is thumping Italian rap.
“Let’s bail,” says Lindy.
We continue down the street where she is sure there must be quieter restaurants, but it actually gets noisier. We never find an eatery. It’s just wine patios and beer gardens. If these places have anything but liquor, it is not apparent, and beyond the celebration, as we finally reach the fair’s limits, there are only darkened streets with banks and shops. We circle again, and Lindy tries investigating two crammed places while I wait outside. She departs each of them frustrated and disappointed. “I was looking forward,” she pouts, "at least to a salad and a bowl of soup. I just want to go back to the room and rest.”
We trudge along, having fallen out of spirit with the situation and each other, grumpy and unfestive. It is too wild and impenetrable, too adolescent with young people gathered in giant groups, too old and Italian as whole communities are socializing raucously. People passing along the streets greet others near and far, so we are, yes, little bugs in a very huge pond.
Without the fixed goal of a restaurant now, we feel somewhat lighter. We walk through the hoopla and energy silently, scanning and absorbing it. There is so much to see, so many unusual faces and bodies, such beautiful teenagers and young men and women, dark Italians, magnificent Ethiopians and other Africans giving the fair a pan-Mediterranean seaport feel, fantastically eroded elderly people, madonnas and boticellis, bambinos whose faces for centuries have been cast have in manger scenes. The series of songs, speaker by speaker, create magical cacophonous montages in zones where their influences overlap.
Now we reach a stand where a woman is carving a gigantic pig inside a booth, and people are buying slices. There is an odd empty table amid the dense melee. What to do is obvious. Once again, good-bye to dietary taboos. I would never have eaten this food normally, but this is a day that started out with nonorganic raspberries and currants, and I just got origin-less chestnuts from a grumpy street vendor. I get on line with Lindy for the sliced pink ham. We also buy calamari on sticks, an unknown breaded fish, onion rings, and a draft beer each (13 euros), and then grab the table and munch away. This is where we should have been in the first place instead of on a forced march to an irrelevant, arbitrary dining site.
We have joined the celebration or, more properly, stopped trying to impose our agenda and are accepting what is right here, before our eyes. The whole world was screaming, “Street food! Italia!” And we were looking for some formal dining situation, aloof from the riches before us. Of course, the restaurants weren’t serving. Fare was everywhere else.
Finally we are at peace, as we sit there, devouring ham and calamari. I muse about how I am using little bits of Italian automatically now because it sounds better in discourse: si (instead of “yes”), buongiorno (or just giorno for good morning or good day), buonserra, sinistra (during directions), gracie (Lindy sometimes slips into the Mexican gracias), scuse (necessary in poking through throngs), prego (my old favorite from the Bologna conductor, often used as the check digit for “you’re welcome” after gracie), ciao, inglise?, and Lindy’s favorite, quanto?, a much better bleat in every sense for what it means than “how much?”
On our way back I see a familiar panne vendor and pick the very loaf of rye that I had envied when passing through the first time.
On the way past the chestnut man, I can’t resist the smell of his wagon again, plus I have a chance to make amends. I get three euros ready and wait my turn, expecting his face to show surprise (as though to say, “I guess they were pretty good, not worth 3 euros, eh?”). But he acts as though he has never seen me before, grabs the small can, fills it, pours the embers into a bag, then takes my money smiling and jabbering away. Four blocks later, Hotel Milano.