We took a family mini-vacation to Bormio again. This time we stayed at the hotel of the Bagni Vecchi (old baths), whose price includes unlimited admission to the spa, and breakfast and dinner.
above: View from the window of the hotel restaurant
Tourist information for Bormio
^ Ceiling decoration of a pharmacy built in 1555
^ Bormio is a typically beautiful Alpine town, with ancient stone houses, their gray exteriors enlivened by bright flowers
Pitigliano, Tuscany. I think this trip took place in the summer of 2001.
The old Roman roads still serve, though they’ve been repaved a few times in the last few millennia. We left Rome on the Via Aurelia (which goes up the west coast from Rome to Genoa), heading for a friend’s summer house in Marina di Bibbona in the Maremma region of Tuscany. Marina di Bibbona is a resort town with little to recommend it unless you’re there for the beach. Our friend commented that, since the tourists who come there are mainly German, there aren’t any good restaurants. <grin>
Leaving Marina di B., we headed east to Volterra, originally founded during the 8th century BC by the Etruscans. Like many such towns in Italy, it is richly layered with the accretions of successive conquering cultures.
A long-exploited natural resource of the area is alabaster, found in the surrounding hills in the form of large and small nodules embedded in clay. The artisans of Volterra carve this soft, luminous stone into urns, tabletops, lamps, statues, and chess sets. The most interesting work we saw was a chess set with pieces in the liknesses of film stars (Marilyn Monroe for the queens, John Wayne for the knights, etc.). The board was made of separate, undulating strips of celluloid – all carved from alabaster, of course.
Left: An alabaster lamp.
Castelli is a small town in the hills of Abruzzo (the region on the east coast of central Italy, on the Adriatic sea), famous for its hand-painted ceramics – a centuries-old tradition in the area thanks to its local deposits of clay.
You start to see shops along the road kilometers before you get there, and the town is full of shops with wares ranging from the cheap and tacky to ornate, elegant, and expensive.
The traditional designs are rich floral themes, landscapes, portraits, and animals. The people and animals are mostly copied from/inspired by San Donato, a tiny church on the outskirts of Castelli whose ceiling is entirely covered with thick, decorated ceramic “bricksâ€, created centuries ago as votive offerings by local families.
Those traditional designs are very busy, so if you prefer simple dinnerware, the Castelli style is not for you. The more elaborate pieces are better suited to hanging up as art than eating from. They are also fragile: after some years, the glaze on my serving bowl cracked when I put hot pasta sauce into it! (I still use it for salads.)
A few artisans are breaking with tradition and trying innovative, modern designs, but, at the time we visited, we didn’t see anything terribly exciting in this vein.
After extensive searching, we found a couple of simple pieces to “match†our eclectic collection of china. Then, having done enough shopping to work up an appetite, we decided it was time for lunch.
Tip: Although it’s almost impossible to eat badly in Italy, you can eat really well by asking local people for recommendations. Avoid the places advertising “tourist menus.” The food there will likely be cheap and decent, but, in Italy, you can do a lot better than decent!
We asked a shop owner to recommend a place. She sent us to Ristorante Tortella, where, she said, the Castellani themselves go when they eat out.
Lunch was indeed excellent: samples of several kinds of pasta, including maltagliati (“badly cut” – sheets of homemade pasta sliced into long triangles and rhomboids) with spinach and herbs; followed by grilled local lamb, washed down with a cheap but good local vintage of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo.
Tip: Wherever and whenever you travel in Italy, eat the local and seasonal specialties; these are almost always the tastiest items on the menu.
Looks kinda like Montana, doesn’t it? As a matter of fact, many “Spaghetti Westerns” were filmed here. The scenery comes complete with cattle, horses, and sheep, brought here to graze during the warm months.
The latest movie to be filmed in Campo Imperatore is White Hell (Inferno Bianco), a low-budget horror Western, available on YouTube.
