Category: Traveling

Happy, well trained?


UMBRIA, TUSCANY, Italy— Be not afraid. Trains are no big thing at all in Italy. In fact, trains and training are a good thing. Look at these happy trainers. And why shouldn’t they be smiling. There are no Audis and Alfas bearing down on them. They can sit back and gossip, doze off, read their guide books, just be one with their inter tourist. The Italian trains have had a lot of of practice over the years and they almost run on time and they are a good value for the money. And the time saved over parking and driving as such makes them well worth the price and the effort. Being Italy, they do things how they do them there. Not always how we would do them in the perfect world where we ran everything. And we just need to get over it and adapt. The best part of the Italian train system is the Web site for Trenitalia Get it? Treni (trains) + Italia (Italy) = Trenitalia. Very nice contraction. Anyway, everyone in Italy takes the site as nearly gospel and refers to it constantly. It seems very dependable. Go to the English language section and it too is pretty bullet proof. Someone with English for a first language is vetting it and it seems to be entirely lucid at all times. Even for us foreigners!

Can you say “andata”? Can you say “ritorno”? Can you say “andata e ritorno”? That means round trip. Ask for it by name. If you are coming and going. Or just say “solo andata” if you are just going and never coming back, for example.


WE’VE GOT A TICKET TO RIDE
If you get a ticket for a specific time and date and it is in a cabin, just read the ticket carefully and you will see a train car and cabin and seat number. In the example shown here, to get back to our house in Umbria I was going from Rome to Chiusi on May 26th, leaving at 2:09PM. 14.09 in Italian or military time parlance. With this particular ticket, I was on train 586, car 6, seat number 53, in the middle of three seats. It makes sense after awhile.

We generally don’t get cabins but just get a generic ticket to Rome. Trains leave for Rome more or less constantly and you can go whenever you want with the generic ticket. Tickets are good for a long time.

STAMP COLLECTING?
Here is the only tiny trick. Which I conveniently forget fifty percent of the time: stamp the ticket. Stew. Are you paying attention? Like I said, the ticket has a long shelf life, but because of that if you don’t stamp it and the conductor doesn’t check it, you could use it again. So, they want you to stamp it in one of the yellow boxes that are all over all the stations and the platforms too usually. Either end, just slide it in the slot and it will make a bit of click and there will be really faded almost out of ink impression that only conductors care about. Says the date and time you stamped it. Then, after this stamping, the clock is running and the ticket/biglietto is only good for a finite period of time. An hour? I do not recall. Something like that. Just stamp it before you get on and everyone goes away happy. I’ve seen Italians who “forget” to stamp their tickets get yelled at. Of course, they yell right back. The conductors usually figure silly foreigners are hardly worth the effort so we play the poor blissfully ignorant tourist depending upon the kindness of strangers in a strange land and they just sigh meaningfully at our boneheadedness and write Who knows what the heck on the back of my ticket and shove it back at us with a world weary sigh of what is that? Pity? Disgust? Oh, well.

Do as I say. Not as I do. That seems to be the message here, doesn’t it?

See you on board,

See you in Italy,

Stew

Taking flight

UMBRIA, Italy. — Omg. Where did the time go? Oh well, that’s alright because we are heading back to Italy and have tickets in hand that will get us to Umbria in October. But we’re not even caught up on stories from the last trip! Don’t ask. It has been wild. Ok, since you asked yes we did buy an old house here in the states and the brain scans show we may be quite totally insane. Stuff happens. It was getting waaay to easy around here, living in the same finished home for the last multi, multi years. That is another story entirely but that’s our excuse and we’re sticking with it.

But here’s the thing to remember about taking trips and taking trip notes. Keep the note book in your hand or in your carryon. Violently resist the siren call of the back of the seat pocket ahead of you. See, here’s the deal: that seat pocket generally stays with the plane. Lost a note book two trips ago and royally put me off my feed being mad at myself.

FREE. LEG ROOM.
But on the other hand. That seat pocket can conceivably be your friend. Now this may not be a big break through for you. But it was for me so I pass it on to you. In fact, it may be blindingly obvious to you, but it took me many millions of miles to tumble to it. The villain here is not the seat pocket but the in flight “magazine”. Toss it. Toss it now. There. Isn’t that better? Put it in the overhead, under your neighbor’s seat, on the drink cart when the sky waitresses aren’ looking, anywhere. Just not right there at knee level.

On my last flight, an Air France flight, the magazine, cleverly named “Magazine” was over 3/8 of an inch thick. No big thing you say? Well, they say God is in the details and here is a detail: The seat ahead of you has some flex. But not the magazine. When its lumber hard 8×10 inch mass was stuffed in the pocket of the seat ahead of me and the big guy in the seat was in full laydown position, my knees were killing me. And that was five minutes into a 6 hour flight. As soon as I had dumped Le Magazine I felt like I had been upgraded. And don’t forget the Duty Free magazines. They are not a magazines, just bad news for your knees. Get them all the heck out of there and stretch out a bit.

This next trip we are going to Italy via London because our daughter and travel correspondent is going to grad school at Central Saint Martins. So, we’ll visit the Wiley Traveler there for a couple days on the way over. Very wiley of her to be so relatively close to Italy. Good choice, Wiley.

Next up, having solved the air travel issues we take on the Italian rail system.

See you in Italy,

Stew

WE ROME AROUND WE ROME AROUND

DATELINE: ALL OF ITALY— NEWS FLASH! ITALY WINS! THEY ARE IN THE WORLD CUP SOCCER FINALS. OPPONENT TO BE DECIDED TONIGHT. EITHER FRANCE OR PORTUGAL. Forza Azzuri! Yay Italian Blue. Did you see the match yesterday? Nice of them to have it on the Fourth of July. Wow. What a match. Beating unbeaten Germany in Germany. OMG. There must be much dancing in the streets in “football” crazed Italy today. FINAL MATCH ON FRIDAY, JULY 9TH.

We return you now to our regularily scheduled blog:

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ROMAN AROUND PANICALE

PANICALE, Umbria— There is a Roman family who live on the street below us. And some other Romans who live beside us. Now we have another new neighbor from Rome: Amselmo. He’s not new. Just new to us. Like many a Roman in Panicale, they are more often than not actually originally from Panicale, but they live and work in Rome. And come home to Panicale on the weekends. It’s a couple hours and couldn’t be easier for them. He and his wife have a building down the street from us. They live on the top two or three floors and for the last year or so have been renovating the ground floors of his building into a stylish weekend home for his adult kids. We’ve been watching the progress every time we go by and if Amselmo’s there he invites us in. Very much a constant twinkle in the eye kind of guy. He did the place for his kids to lure them to Panicale but no dice, they didn’t come as often as he had hoped, so he’s selling it.

PANICALE GOES ROMAN

ROME, Italy— They say Rome wasn’t built in a day. But we saw the heck out of it in a day. Did not know you could do that. So, I had to be coaxed and cajoled into spending a day in Rome. Well, I got my just deserts there. What a fine and fun day in the sun that turned out to be. Like all recent converts, I’m all fired up and ready to go again at the drop of a hat. Mood swings? Yike. Here’s the no-stress way we spent the day. Got up at seven. See that wasn’t so hard, now was it Stew? Had a leisurely coffee with Aldo, caught the 8:59 Chiusi to Rome Termini. Trenitalia (trains of italy) by the way, is pretty much bulletproof train schedule site. With brother Roger and his wife Donna in hand we pulled into the Rome station at 10:46. I defy any one to pilot a car to central Rome in an hour and three quarters from Panicale in the middle of Umbria. Usually it takes us three solid hours to get to Romes’s airport. I’m guessing the trip to the center of town would be a comparable driving nightmare.

The train pulled in right on time, ten euros later, by cab (yes, yes we could have walked but we didn’t know that now did we?) we were at Hotel Giuliana on Via Agostino Dpretis. Antonio greeted us happily as Roger’s reservation filled his last room. Hey, Antonio, save us a room. We will be back!

GETTING AROUND IN ROME

We found the hotel in DK Eyewitness Travel under “Rome” under “Termini”. This book proved bulletproof too. So helpful for scooting around town. Ok, one drawback. The book is not only heavy with detail, it is just plain heavy. Another time I might just read, review and leave at home. But as a security blanket, it was worth its weight in gold. A slightly braver Roman Traveler might find true happiness with just one Dam map. We used our really tough, light, durable Van Dam “Street Smart Rome” folding map a hundred times in the one day. Unlike a lot of embarrassingly large, bed sheet sized maps, this one is discrete and folds out more like a brochure. Colorful, simple, helpful, laminated. Would not go without it.


WHEN IN ROME

So, what did those resources help us see in one easy day? Lets start at the Terminal:

Hotel. Got in, chatted up the nice staff, got settled, oriented.
Coliseum. This was no drive by. We did the complete guided tour. See below.
Roman Forum
Hadrian’s Column
Victor Emanuel Monument. Also see below.
Bernini’s Elephant based obelisk
The Pantheon!
Trevi Fountain

All on foot and all casual. This was absolutely not one of those forced marches tourists sometimes inflict on themselves. We’re way to lazy for that. We stopped, we gawked, we took each other’s pictures in front of every piece of carved marble in town, we sat in the sun, we ate paninnis, we licked gelatis. And then, Midge and I caught the 5:14 back to Chiusi after making sure Roger and Donna were all organized, finding them tickets for their next day’s trip to the airport. We showed them the trick to catching that train. (The trick: that train comes in off to the side of the major tracks. To your right as you are looking at the trains going to every corner of Italy. To the side and waaay down the corridor. That’s right, just keep going. Airport train is a bit different as it is sort of inter-city, special deal) The train station in Rome has become very uptown and cool. Like a trendy mall versus the greasy gritty third world dump I remember it being. I was, and remain, impressed. With train, station and Rome.

LOOKS LIKE THE TREVI TO ME

What a lovely way to spend a sunny Sunday. To think that two days ago my sister in law was wearing my parka! If I had had a wool scarf in Montepulciano even the day before, I would have worn it too. Today Rome was blessed with Tshirt weather and we were reveling in it. And loving the fact that a lot of the city was closed to cars and major streets around the forum were reserved for pedestrians and bicycles. Not sure what the occasion was, but regardless, let us just wave goodbye out our train window and say Viva Roma!

I hope to be writing up some Helpful Italian Train Riding Hints shortly. Fun for all ages.

Until then,

See you in Italy,

Stew

Where ARE we???

Great question. Whew. Long strange trip we’ve been on. That is for sure. No short answer but trying. The bad news is that we had some technical difficulties while we were on the trip to Italy and Amsterdam. Technology. Can’t live with it, can’t travel without it. Well, we can’t. But this time we sort of had to. Was impossible to put up blogs for awhile and eventually we even lost a couple days of emails in early June. If you wrote us then and didn’t hear back from us, we weren’t being rude we just did not get the emails and please try us again. Sorry for any of that disconnect. Must have been a total full moon. Because before we could get out of Amsterdam we even got to see the interworkings of the Dutch hospital system. Youngest daughter got an infection in a bug bite and shut things down there too.

The good news is we have pages and pages of notes (last resort, use pencil!) and mountains of photos from Panicale, Montepulciano, Rome, Amsterdam and beyond and will have lots of fun bringing you all kinds of stories in the very near future. Stay tuned to this Bat Channel for more travel news as it becomes available.

Let me just say that if you get a chance to see a Caravaggio in person, do it. I’m still reeling from the show in Amsterdam and making a list of all the many locations in Rome, Sicily and Malta that have paintings by Caravaggio and are now at the tip top of my Must See list.

Stew