TUSCANY - OCTOBER 2004

TUSCANY - October 2004

Sunday, October 2, 2004 - Terminal 2, Charles de Gaulle Airport, 9:20 a.m. Standing near me are two uniformed soldiers with sub-machine guns. Carol is off at the other end of the terminal, shopping without European money - we haven’t changed any yet.
Suddenly, more soldiers materialize as well as police - and we are herded out of the middle section of the terminal - an unclaimed package equals a bomb scare.
We go outside and eventually make our way to the other end of the terminal, where all is quiet.
Welcome to Paris!
There is no panic, everyone obeys the orders of the authorities, and we go on to our gate to await the flight to Paris. (The layover in Paris is too short for us to go into the city - an hour each way - but long enough for both of us to resent the scheduling.

Sunday night - All went smoothly all the way into Montecantini Terme, a very pleasant city an hour by train west of Florence with a large park right in its center. The hotel is 3 star - which seems to mean it has all the usual amenities but no extras. Soap is dispensed from a large bottle - no more of the little bottles of soap and shampoo and mouthwash I have collected over the years.
The town is famed as a spa, with hot springs public baths in the central park.
The hotel and town will be our base for this Elderhostel trip. We arrived in late afternoon by bus from the Florence airport, had a light meal, and rested until dinner.
Poor Carol - the first meal was thin sliced English style roast beef with a roast potato. She filled up on salad. Roast chicken for the evening meal suited her much better.

Monday - We had thought we would awake this morning without a call - but at nine, an hour after breakfast, we were still abed. At ten after nine, we had hurriedly dressed, and sitting at our first meeting, and then strolling out on our orientation walk.
My back vigorously protested the walk, and I took medication which helped a great deal. After lunch, a rest and then three hours of lectures, followed by a moderately good dinner. (I bought a bottle of wine which stays on a near by table until I finish it.) Wine, coffee and tea are extras, not included in the trip price.
There are 38 in the group. The most interesting so far are two Jewish couples, the Sokols from Cleveland and the Kalkenbergs from (I never jotted it down).
Lecture this afternoon on Renaissance sculpture by Kevin Murphy, a Ph.D. Englishman resident in Florence for 12 years. Brilliant, funny, engaging. He brought Donatello and Michaelangelo to life. We hear him twice more, and he will be doing some museum guiding as well. Good choice.
Our trip leader is a gorgeous American married to an Italian - totally bilingual and quite pleasant.
The hotel is on a short street, a couple of blocks from the main square. It has a large courtyard in front of the building and chairs and tables and a small pool, currently overfull from recent rains. Only one member has tried it so far.

Tuesday, 1 p.m. - Nearly two-thirds of the group has been laid low temporarily by a stomach virus, lasting 8-12 hours. It happened during the night, and only 13 of the 38 members of the group showed up to go to Pisa this morning.
Carol was not terribly sick or terribly well - and she simply stayed in bed for the day. I was untouched.
Pisa is a 45 minute bus ride from Montecantini Terme, and tour buses now park on the outskirts of town. People then either walk into the center or take a “tram” - Toonerville trolley type - as we did.
The reason to come to Pisa is the “Field of Miracles” - a grassy rectangle inside the old city walls containing the largest baptistry in Italy. (Baptistry, a circular building, sometimes detached from a church, in which the rite of baptism is administered; the most remarkable, that of Pisa (Wikipedia). The open plain also has the Pisa cathedral, and the focus of all eyes, the round bell tower.
The famous Leaning Tower of Pisa is usually photographed as though it was a free standing structure in an open area. Actually, it sits very close to the cathedral, and along the longer side of the rectangular field, not far from the tower, is a passageway for pedestrians and bicyclists that is lined with street vendors, selling uniform junk to tourists.
The buildings in the area are magnificent combinations of Byzantine, Gothic and Romanesque architecture. We never got to see the city of Pisa itself, but after the previous day in Florence, I was perfectly happy to get on the bus and return to Montecantini for lunch.

Monday was our first excursion into Florence for a walking tour of some of the major attractions we will be seeing in detail ail over the next ten days. We had a great guide and used “whisperers” - a hearing device each of us wore over one ear, tuned to a wireless broadcast by the guide, making communication much easier on both sides.
We walked about three hours and were relatively beat by the time we got back to our hotel. The weather has been warm - high 70s, low 80s - and Florence seemed jammed with tourists, despite the lateness of the season .
Tomorrow, the group goes back to Florence, but we go to visit Carol’s friends in Arezzo, two hours southeast by train, via Florence - a definite test of our traveling skills.

So far, we have made no particular friends in the group. I had forgotten that most Elderhostelers I had met previously are relatively unsophisticated (although many have traveled widely) and generally conservative in their social and political views.
At this point, it does not appear that we will be exchanging addresses with many couples. There are several second marriages in the group, but no other unmarried couples, like us, that I have detected.
I am not sure I will do this again. Home exchanges appear to be a more attractive option if we can find people in places we want to go who also want to come to Boston.
(As things have turned out, this was our first and last Elderhostel trip together - we have found Overseas Adventure Travel, also aimed at seniors, to work better for us, with smaller groups and a clientele we seem to better adapt to.)

Wednesday, 7 p.m., on the train from Arezzo back to Montecantini Terme. - We started early this morning to visit Carol’s friends, Barbara and Paul Zinn, who live in New York City, and Barbara’s son Arthur and his wife and two very young children, who live currently in a penthouse in the small city of Arezzo, while rebuilding t wo 16th-17th farm houses on six acres in the mountains of Tuscany.
The project has been underway for four years, and they expect to finish one house by June. It will operate as a country guest house for large groups - it will have eight bedrooms, several kitchens, half a dozen baths. The site is high on a hill, with magnificent views to the west
The houses had been lived in and the surrounding land farmed until 1969, when the deteriorating economics of farming in Tuscany caused the abandonment and deterioration of the buildings.
Arthur is a lawyer with no previous construction experience, but he has been a laborer, a contractor, a general contractor, doing everything with the help of his brother-in-law and other locals. Only the plumbing and electricity have been farmed out.
This will eventually be an upscale resort aimed at weddings, family birthday parties and corporate events. Even with Arthur’s “free” labor, the investment will be close to one million dollars, I would guess. The furnishings have been accumulated from local second hand stores and from English auctions. Martha, Arthur’s wife, is doing in the interiors. Along other things, she has employed a local seamstress, setting up a workroom in their Arezzo apartment to make draperies, slipcovers and covers of all kinds.
For a family planning a major birthday celebration - that is, a family with plenty of money - this will be as beautiful and private place as one could imagine.
Arthur and Martha are delightful, and Barbara and Paul are very pleasant to be with. We left with reluctance, after eating fresh ripe figs from a tree on the estate.
(When we left the hotel this morning, there were new casualties from the virus which attacked the group and lots of absentees from the trip planned to Florence. We seemed to have been among the fortunate few who escaped.)

Friday morning - We roamed the Thursday market in Monte during the morning before a lecture on Leonardo by the least interesting speaker so far - a near monotone and a rush to get through the material in the allotted time.
Lunch yesterday was at a hotel in Montecantini Alto, the “old town” high above the spa city, reached by funicular. Another lecture in the late afternoon on the bloody history of Florence in the Renaissance period, then dinner and finally, a movie I hadn’t seen - “Tea With Mussolini”, set in 1935 in Florence.
This morning, we are off to Florence to imbibe more culture.

Tuesday - Today is a free day until 3 - and I’ve just finished lunch (1:35). Carol is off having a massage, and I am sitting in the front courtyard of the hotel under a cloudy sky with the temperature in the 50s.
We had inclement weather over the weekend, particularly on Sunday in Lucca. I had been carrying a jacket and umbrella in anticipation of continuing storms, but S Sunday seemed better. I left both at the hotel and wound up soaked before I bought a “brolly” from a street vendor.
More churches - I have finally realized that my early anti-church bias, inculcated in most middle class Jews in my generation, means I have no Christian frame of reference which to put what we are seeing and hearing. The speakers all assume a much greater knowledge of Catholicism - in particular - than I can provide.

We have established closer relationships with several couples. On man, now retired, worked for an Oregon company I once called on . We must have met, since he had been to the Velcro headquarters in Manchester several times.
His wife is a born-again Christian, but he doesn’t seem to have been impacted.
My back and hips and calves are not very comfortable, and I have been popping pain pills. I need to get to the bottom of whatever in behind these pains as quickly as possible when I get back.
I am trying hard not to complain but the act of walking itself has become difficult at times - not a position I want to be in.
(I had surgery to repair a herniated disc that December.)

Yesterday, Monday, was easily the best day of the trip. We bussed to Vinci, the original home of Leonardo. An American architect, married to an Italian woman and living in the area, was our guide.
There is a wonderful museum filled with models built from the many drawings he created. It turns out he built almost nothing himself, and many of his drawings and ideas were conceived using the ideas of others. But the broad range of his work is totally astounding, encompassing land, sea and air travel, construction machinery, lifting hoists and dozens of other facets.

Lunch was in a villa in Vinci, followed in the drawing room of the villa by a lecture and concert by a British musician who has devoted his life to the the music of Liszt. The room was a circular vaulted chamber in which the piano sounded absolutely wonderful.

Thursday, 1:30 p.m. Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris. - I haven't finished recording a single day’s activities- at least that is what it feels like - and now we are on our way home. Two weeks away and i suspect the world hasn’t changed much in our absence. Did we have a “good” time? One question - another: would we do it again?

The pluses: (1) Elderhostel provided truly excellent lecturers, all of whom were more than adequate and some who were outstanding. They brought insights which only an enormous amount of reading beforehand would have provided. (2) All the logistics were taken care of with virtually no glitches - the busses showed up on time, the tickets to museums materialized at the right times, the choices of venues was good, overall. (3) We probably got to see some places and things we wouldn’t have found on our own.
The minuses: (1) Of the 38 people in our group, we connected with two or three couples we really liked and would enjoy seeing again. In my usual intolerant way, I found some of the group truly objectionable.
I realized, too late, that what I was missing was some discussion of what we were seeing. The lecturers did just that - lectured. What I could have tried to do was start discussions about what we were seeing and hearing.
No one took the initiative, perhaps because no one was interested in doing so. From that point of view, I can’t say much of the experience will stay with me - too much surface and not enough depth.
Minus #2: I realize that that is typical of Elderhostel programs - they don’t seem to attract people who want to know anything very deeply or thoroughly. I think it is doubtful that I would try another.

Having said all that, there were several days that stood out as experiences I wouldn’t have wanted to miss. One was the visit to the Zinns in Arezzo, another the day at Vinci, and the third the trip to Lucca.
(A fourth which I find not mentioned in my journal occurred when we skipped one of the Florence visits to takea city bus from the Florence train station to a hill town north of the city whose name I did not record.
The bus ride was less than 30 minutes, depositing us in the town square in this elevated community. The square had several restaurants with tables set out under umbrellas or canopies, one of which we chose for lunch.
The main attraction, other than the views over the countryside, dazzling in themselves, was the Roman amphitheater which opened just off the main square. In amazing good condition, and virtually unvisited while we were there, I got a photo from the top tier of seats of Carol singing on the stage below.
We spent most of the day in the town, visiting a number of sites, including a school (?) at the very top of the hill, reached on a cobblestone road which appeared to be as ancient as the amphitheater. We walked on stones laid more than 2000 years ago.)

Florence itself I found exhausting - there were crowds everywhere we went, and although Elderhostel made sure we didn’t stand in lines as long as many others did, seeing orginals of which we had only seem copies before doesn’t do much when most are behind glass, and you are standing crowded in a room with hundreds of others.
It was in the small towns that I felt most comfortable, and had the time to absorb what was around us, at a lesiurely pace.