Levanto and the Ligure Coast
After Milan we settled down for a while in Levanto, a small coastal town on the Italian Riviera. Our path there was a little circuitous. We had driven southwest to the Ligure coast, intending to visit the small fishing village of Portofino. A few km short of Portofino, in a seaside resort called Santa Margherita Ligure, we found a small pension on a steep hill. Our room had a large window looking out on the hills, a shower and television, and of course a bidet. We finally found a use for the bidet; scrubbed out and filled with hot soapy water, it made a fine tub to wash our clothes. This seemed rather unhygenic, given the intended use of a bidet, but this one was sparkling clean and our clothes had, after all, seen worse.
The family that ran the pension gave us Italian lessons. We learned that Kathryn had cinque dente and was almost ready to passeggiare. She was apparently getting more dente because one night she began howling and howled and howled for hours. Mary took her for a walk down the deserted street and in our room I could hear her wails echoing from as far as the town square. We were finally forced to drive around until long past midnight until she wore herself out. We "toured" Portofino and the surrounding area in this manner, but the charm of a centuries-old fishing village was largely absent in the cold hours of the early morning with an angry baby shrieking in the car. When we returned the next day, with Kathryn quietly sleeping in her car seat, the sun was shining on the old houses and fishing boats and Portofino was lovely.
When we first arrived, the peninsula seemed a sleepy place. The restaurants in Santa Margherita were empty and the town square, with its flowers and benches, ringed with shops and cafes, was deserted except for a few pensioners and dogs dozing in the sun. We did not do much ourselves. For my thirty-fourth birthday Mary bought me a pair of jeans and a toy car and we ate in the pension. After a while I began to have trouble doing nothing and invented a project. Many churches and museums did not allow tripods, making it hard to photograph in dim indoors light. So we decided to make a pistol grip/rifle stock attachment for the cameras. I had to learn some Italian that was not in our Berlitz book and hunt around through some side streets, but eventually we found a dusty shop where a young man was routing out window shutters in a cloud of sawdust. Looking down on my scribbled note, I read out my laboriously constructed sentence, "Per favore, posso contrare un piccolo pezzo di legno compensato?", and waited anxiously for his reply. Throughout Italy, we had already learned that asking the initial question in mangled Italian was easy but understanding the responding torrent of fast Italian was often impossible. Fortunately, the young man was either too busy for interrogation, or used to foreign tourists acting oddly, because he poked around his shop and handed me a nice piece of three-quarters inch plywood, and I was happily on my way.
The little shops in the sleepy town were stocked with expensive jewelry and fashionable clothes, which seemed rather out of place, but as Easter approached expensive cars began crowding into town and everything filled up. The quiet squares were ringed with double and triple-parked cars and more cars and their frustrated drivers struggled down narrow streets overflowing with babies in strollers and little children on pink bicycles. The nights grew noisier and soon Kathryn could have wailed all night in the town without being noticed. We could hardly find a place to park our own car. The pension was fully booked by American families on two-week holidays and we had to leave. The problem was, where to? Every room in Italy was full. Hotel clerks simply laughed when we telephoned. The family running our pension appeared genuinely concerned about our chances of finding accomodations anywhere around the coast. It appears that during Easter week tourists from all over the world come to the pretty villages of Italy and take every room and parking space in any town one might even faintly care to visit. We got a list of decidedly unpopular cities -- the Italian equivalents of Stockton or Bakersfield -- and headed south, hoping to find some minimal place to stay; truckers' motels and highway hotels were sounding good by now.
After an hour on the autostrada we decided to do some sightseeing on the way and turned off on the coastal road toward a town called Levanto. We had never heard of Levanto before, and neither had Michelin, Lonely Planet, or Fodors guides, but it was a place on the map to head for. It turned out that Levanto was a pretty town, with a pebbly beach and old buildings, and we decided on the spur of the moment to stay there for awhile. It also turned out that Levanto was a popular tourist spot during Easter, but almost entirely among Italians.. All the hotels were full, but Mary found a rental agency with a one-bedroom apartment available in the center of town for the right price and we settled in, happy to have a refuge and determined not to move until the flood of travelers had subsided.
The apartment had a miniscule water heater -- five gallons, at most -- and there was a clothes washer with no dryer, but the furnishing were modern and comfortable. We soon adjusted to the rhythm of living in Levanto. On a typical morning the sun through our bedroom window was our alarm clock. We made cafe lattes for breakfast. Kathryn would crawl around, eat a little bit, and get a bath in her big blue plastic tub with her toy boats. She invariably splashed water all over the kitchen floor, which we mopped daily. I usually walked a few blocks to the old church and poked around for an hour or two. Mary would put Kate down for a nap -- in theory, anyway -- and read her books.
When I returned we normally took a walk around the local shops to buy what we needed for lunch. We got in the habit of going to three or four places. The vegetable shop at the corner had the freshest tomatos, fruits and vegetables, but their lettuce and basil was not best. Down the block were two butchers and three salume e formaggio shops; we never picked a favorite but they all had good cheeses. The mini-mercato around the block had the best choices of fresh pasta and delicious pesto sauce, and sometimes good crisp lettuce too. We had to get to the paninotecas early before they ran out of good soft bread, so we sometimes headed there first. This shopping only took about fifteen minutes, since everything was within a block of our apartment.
In the afternoon we did a little more walking around, strolled down to the beach, took a drive somewhere, or just hung around the apartment writing and reading and playing with Kathryn's toys. All the shops closed for the early afternoon and an enforced sort of naptime seemed to settle on the town. Around five we normally made another circuit of the shops again and cooked dinner. In the evenings we would type on the computer, do more reading, watch Kathryn practice standing and falling down. I would work on my camera gunstock, sawing the shape out with my Swiss Army knife and attaching a metal bracket for the camera mount. There was no TV or radio in the apartment and no English newspapers for sale in the town's newsstands, so our nights were very quiet.
Buying everything fresh for each meal was a new experience for us. We started out getting two days' supplies of groceries, then one day's worth, and soon we only bought enough for the next meal. It hardly took more time to stroll to the store than to, say, to go to the freezer in the garage. After the dreary routine of restaurant meals over the last several weeks since we had left New Zealand, we delighted in cooking again, particularly with the fresh foods we found in the markets. Our meals were colorful; warm yellow tortellinis, rich green pesto, deep red Chianti, shiny red tomato sauce flecked with deep green basil and sprinkled with yellow-white Parmesan, tart red orange juice, creamy coffee in plain white mugs. Our days were organized around shopping time, cooking time, and meal time, and we found ourselves eating twice as much as normal and taking long recuperative naps, between soup bowl-sized portions of cafe latte thick with sugar. Our clothes seemed to fit a bit tighter every day and we worried that the weight we had lost in New Zealand was returning far too fast.
We did not feel tied down with a little baby in Levanto. There were hordes of kids here, and strollers and little bicycles were parked everywhere. Italians doted on their children, judging from all the baby clothes and toy stores in town. Every newsstand sold dolls and beach buckets and shovels. Kathryn now got a little dump truck and a can of colored plastic blocks of different shapes. We assigned labels to all of them. The red cubes were boxes of dynamite, the blue cylinders were canisters of poison gas, and the green triangles containers of airborne Ebola virus. We loaded them in her truck and roll it toward her. She picked up the truck and dumped out the deadly cargo, wiping out the sleeping town. This made playtime more fun, we decided.
The buckets and shovels sold in the newstands come in handy at the beach, where all the kids ended up sooner or later. We thought it was funny to watch the Italian tourists on the sand, laying on their leather jackets, smoking and sunning their bone white bodies in the thin sunlight and chilly breeze of early Spring. I suppose if one hadn't spent the winter in Australia and Bali, even a little half-sun would be an excuse to hit the beach. We preferred to poke around the colorful fishing boats, drawn up on the sand awaiting the real summer, and searching for driftwood on the rocks.
Pasqua (Easter) was a big day in Levanto. There were services at the old church, a visiting college choir from Wisconsin, and on Sunday evening a parade wound through town, dressed in flowing Renaissance costumes and followed by all the children. The parade ended at a giant Easter egg. The top of the egg swung open and doves flew out, and the bottom opened and released a flood of small toys, one for every child. Kathryn received a Smurf figure with comprised of tiny parts, which we immediately confiscated.
Most of my mornings were spent at the old church, Chiesa Sant'Andrea, which is a wonderful piece of local architecture. It was not the latest style even in the early thirteenth century when it was built, and will never make it on a list of history's great buildings, but it is typical of a lot of churches around this area of Italy. The facade is of alternating horizontal bands of white marble and dark green rock from the local hills, a design common in Italian churches of the period. The flat surface and shape of the facade, with sloped shoulders and a single peaked central section, is also a typical look in this part of Italy. The interior had a simple rectangular plan with a dark stone floor, plain white walls, single aisles, small square windows high over the nave, and white plaster vaults over simple round arches, supported on simple columns of alternating light and dark stone. The inscription over the entry read Intra, Adora, Illuminare; "Enter, worship, and be enlightened". Sant'Andrea was built during the Gothic period when spires and sculptured facades were the style, but here on the Ligure coast they apparently stuck to their traditional ways. It was finished in 1230 (the rose window was added in 1922) and had stood here for forty generations of children, many wars and at least three empires. I liked to walk inside when no one was around. The interior was very dim. Every tiny sound echoed and the candles flickered as I walked past. I thought about all the people who had prayed here, wearing grooves in the stone floors, in peace and war and prosperity and famine, for seven hundred years. Sant'Andrea is only an obscure local church in a small town, but her worn steps and sunny courtyard was a fine place to spend time.
I did a little drawing from a warm spot on a low stone wall opposite the church. It was hard work. The facade was simple and geometric and required precision, counting elements and getting all the angles and spacings right, so the finished drawing would not have twenty bands on one side and nineteen on the other, or a window that should end on a dark band instead ending on a light one. The drawing helped me appreciate some of the care and thought that went into Sant'Andrea. The arches above the side windows hold six dark blocks of stone. There are six small inset arches under each wing of the roofline. From the point of the large arch above the entry, to the capitals on either side of the doors, there are six dark bands. Then there are six more to the bottom of the door. There are six petals in each side of the rose window. And so on.
We took some daytrips, to the old walled city of Lucca to see its churches with their whimsical facades and colored, spiral-fluted columns, and to the Cinque Terre coast town of Monterosso-al-Mar which was barely visible under the layers of tourists, some of whom had been forced to park their cars nearly two miles up the steep access road. But mostly we stayed put in our cosy town by the ocean and felt lucky to have a comfortable place to wait out the crowds. After a week, the crush of Easter travelers subsided and it was safe for us to travel again, and we sallied forth from our refuge -- well rested, and each a few pounds heavier.
Traveling on a Budget:
One-star hotels in Santa Magherita Ligure charge around L100,000 ($US 60) a night, depending on the room, and often give a small discount (20% or so) in slow season. We liked the Pension Nuovo Riviera in Santa Magherita very much.
Our apartment in Levanto was L700,000 ($US 420) a week, which seems a bit steep. However, we didn't have a lot of choices available at the time. Heat, and sometimes cleaning and electricity, is often a separate charge when renting apartments in Italy.
Food is not especially expensive in the markets, but it all looked so appealing that we found ourselves buying and eating quite a bit more than normal.
Petrol (gasoline) is about L1,900/liter (about $US$4.40/gal.) Diesel, fortunately, is a bit less; L1,500/liter (about US$ 3.45). Still, filling up the car is painful. The smallest practical car with the thriftiest engine and manual transmission will be the way to go for penny-pinchers. Tolls on the autostrada are also steep.
Staying Connected:
Neither our hotel in Santa Margherita nor our apartment in Levanto had phones in the rooms, and our battered laptop was no longer functioning on battery power. Compuserve has indirect access points throughout Italy through the SEVA network, but the only direct Compuserve nodes were in Rome and Milan, and we did not know how to configure our palmtop to log on to SEVA. Stringing a long extension cord to the nearest phone seemed like entirely too much of a headache, and calling long distance to Milan seemed too expensive, so we were out of email contact for the better part of two weeks.
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