A tagliatelle tale of travel

The sun is out, a bright halo in a brilliantly blue sky. The air is crisp, cold enough to refresh the lungs but not so cold that I can’t feel the sun’s warmth on my face. The light is bright behind my closed lids. My cheeks are flushed, maybe from the wind whipping my face as I rode down the mountain, or maybe from the third aperol spritz I just finished. I am seduced by this moment, my face tilted towards the sky, eyes closed, absorbing the sun and the tranquility. In this peaceful pause, I feel so content. I feel a buoying joy that I have not felt in years. I open my eyes, smiling gently to myself. I look out at a vista so spectacular you know it is only by accident that it has arrived there, for no one could design such imperfect beauty. I recover a lost memory; what it is to travel. To discover new places and tastes. To feel truly transplanted to some place else. Perhaps even to be someone else, at least for a while.

We were in Italy for two weeks. I wrote here about navigating the complexities of travelling in a post-covid world. (Although, we really haven’t quite arrived in such a place at all. While some of our travel freedoms have returned we only have one foot out the door and the other still hovering inside our homes).

The first week of the holiday was spent in the small mountain town of St Vigil for snowboarding in the Dolomites. At the top of one of the mountains sat a restaurant with an expansive wooden deck that hung over the edge of the precipice. We sat there, drenched in bright sunlight under cloudless blue skies spattered with criss-crossings of contrails. The ornately carved timber benches and tables were straight out of a fairytale book and surrounding the edges of the deck were little wooden birdhouses, nestled among the conifers, tiny birds flitting in and out. I was captivated by an uninterrupted view of the surrounding mountains and valleys of snow-covered spruce stretching out to meet the horizon.

The small valley of this alpine area is more reminiscent of its northern neighbours than the rest of the country to the south. At this cafe on the mountain edge, we enjoyed traditional South Tyrolean food, local wine and grappa. While pizza and pasta dishes more commonly associated with Italy do feature on the menus, the Austro-Hungarian roots have led to a delightful culinary melange that is one of Italy’s most distinct regional cuisines. So you would also find polenta on the menu, as well as more Germanic dishes such as knodel, spaetzle and goulash. Much of the food is locally sourced from the surrounding valleys and hillside terraces where livestock is raised in the lush mountain pastures and game and mushrooms foraged from the forests. It is as idyllic as it sounds.

And of the spoken melange, German is as equally as prominent as Italian. We became friendly with a waiter who lived locally and we learnt that in this small pocket of South Tyrol, only in two valleys, they speak an almost lost language called Ladin. We learnt a little about the local history and he gave us a good recommendation for hay-infused grappa. We returned each day for another.

Feeling content with our last day of snowboarding and our last mountain-top meal, we clipped on and prepared to take our last run of the trip. Barely 20 metres into the descent, Dylan rode a jump, realised too late it wasn’t the right angle and being unable to bail from it, tumbled over the lip of the jump and landed hard on his shoulder. Crack. Coming to a kneel, facing up the slope, he knew something wasn’t right. ‘There is something sharp pointing out of my shoulder’, he said to me with a pained expression on his face. We called Max down, who was about to attempt the same jump, who helped Dylan unclip and awkwardly climb back up the slope, snowboards under armpits. The medics took a look at his disformed shoulder and thought it might be a torn ligament. They put his arm in a sling and we rode the three gondolas down to the bottom. Opting for a medical centre at the base of the mountain in a nearby town over the hospital which was some distance away, we drove to the town to get an x-ray and see a doctor at the medical centre. Broken clavicle. Navigating medical advice in broken English, they showed me how to fit the brace they gave us and advised Dylan to wear it 24/7 and to see an orthopedic specialist when we got home to Australia.

The next day, our rental car packed to the brim with 3 adults and 6 suitcases, we navigated south to an Airbnb rental in the medieval walled town of Monteleone d’Orvieto, located in Umbria, close to the bordering region of Tuscany. The house was a unique experience. At the bottom of a winding stone staircase was an underground heated pool and wine cellar. After long days exploring nearby places, we sank ourselves into the warming waters, usually with a glass of wine selected from the cellar.

As part of the Airbnb reservation, we also organised dinner on arrival and two cooking classes. These special additions were run by the host’s sister, Valeria, who lives nearby in Rome. On these days, she arrived at the house at around 4.00pm, carrying shopping bags full of fresh produce, and we spent the evening preparing delicious Italian dishes for a 5 course meal.

We learnt how to make all kinds of pastas, main courses and desserts. We were attentive to each step, recording with both pen and camera, ensuring every detail necessary for future success would be at hand when we came to recreate these dishes at home.

During our stay we took some day trips to nearby villages. In a classic Tuscan image, these quaint villages were perched high on the hillsides of vine-covered valleys. We went to the beautiful town of Assisi and the smaller Citti della Pieve, where I ate what was possibly the best pizza of my life at Ristorante Pizzeria Taverna del Perugino - a thin crust topped with super thin slices of pork cheek and a generous dusting of parmesan.

We also wanted to explore the wineries of the Montepulciano area, but unfortunately a lot is closed at that time of year. However, we did manage to find one cellar door in the town that was open for a tasting and, after wandering up and down many cobblestone lanes, eventually found a family-owned taverna that was open for a simple pasta lunch.

One evening we had dinner at Seven Cafe, a highly rated restaurant located in the town we were staying, known for its truffles. The owners take their truffle hunting dogs to find these special subterranean tubers and then serve them to their restaurant guests atop their exquisitely presented plates.

With a clear objective in mind, we also took a day trip to Rome. The sole purpose of our visit was to go to two specific bottle shops to pick up some hard-to-find delights to add to our home bar collection. With Dylan out for driving with his broken collarbone and me too terrified to drive into Rome, Max took one for the team and expertly guided us through the hectic city, notorious for its fast-paced traffic, crazy drivers and apparently lawless road behaviour. The once omnipresent smart cars are no longer small enough for Italian cities; now there are microcars, teeny tiny Fiat pandas and unbelievably small 2-wheel cars that can hardly be called a car at all. We laughed at each new sighting of a tiny vehicle zipping through traffic and squeezing into unimaginably small parking spaces that became increasingly absurd the closer we came to the city centre.

It was a mild winter day. The sun was warm and the soft winter light was perfect for photography. The streets were quiet; no queues of tourists lining up outside the Vatican or the Colosseum. We wandered the bygone cobblestoned streets, passing by and photographing Rome’s ancient sites, with rare foregrounds devoid of selfie-taking tourists (well, except us).

The last time I was in Rome I was 18 and mid-way through a backpacking tour of Europe with my best friend. It was a whirlwind two-month tour of the continent with only 2 or 3 days in each city, sleeping in hostels, skipping meals to buy booze instead and standing in long queues to tick off the “top 10 list” in each city. It was the time of my life, a gratifying right of passage, with so many firsts experienced. Returning 15 years later as an adult was a different experience, not better or worse. I could afford to eat out and not have to choose between food and wine. I wasn’t stressed about seeing the sights and was gratified with one good meal to experience culture through food.

After a long walk through the city, tummies grumbling, we came across a deli with a queue for lunch. And, with delight, we saw there was a restaurant next door of the same name. So we ate lunch at Roscioli. We had two of the traditional Roman pastas: cacio e pepe and carbonara. When in Rome. The restaurant was two levels and we sat underground, surrounded with wall to wall shelves of wines and spirits, which were also for sale. We bought two infrequently seen bottles of rum that were hiding in the corner on the top shelf.

After lunch, we headed north towards our first bottle shop, stopping on the way for a gelato at Giolitti, which had been recommended to us the night before by Valeria. We chatted for a while with the proprietor of Whisky & Co and bought more rum. We then ventured back the way we came, heading south to the second bottle shop: The Alchemist Since 1933 where we bought… more rum. It was a successful trip and we only wished we could have stopped in at a few cocktail bars while we were there. But we had a 2 hour drive back to our accommodation. By now it was dark and our feet sore from a day of walking on cobblestone, so we took an Uber back to the carpark.

On our last day in Umbria, the Saturday, we stayed at the house, drinking wine in the pool, cooking food and packing our bags, shuffling the rum and sundries back and forth until everything coming home could fit. Despite a 2 year hiatus on travel, we’re well-rehearsed at securing bottles among our luggage.

As we enjoyed our final soak, wine in hand, we started to think - is it possible we’ve managed to spend 2 weeks in Italy, driving around, eating out, interacting with other people, and we haven’t got covid? Will we be able to test negative and take our flight home on Monday?

The big test would come on Sunday morning. On Sunday we would be driving to Milan, via the touristic coastal road, so we could stay the night in an airport hotel before taking our flight home on Monday. But first, on Sunday morning we would take our own rapid antigen test to check whether we were negative, before taking our official test on Monday morning at Milan airport.

Sunday morning arrived, and with an unwelcome amount of trepidation, we spat in a tube and waited the obligatory 15 minutes… really hoping only one line would appear on that little white stick. If not, we would be booking another week’s accommodation somewhere in Italy, waiting out the covid until we could board a plane back to Australia. Thankfully, only one line appeared. Happiness compounded the relief when we got email confirmations that we’d received business class upgrades for our flights home.

With increasing confidence that we’d be able to get home as planned, we left on Sunday morning to drive the coastal road back to Milan. With the hire car once again crammed full, me barely visible in the back seat, we headed north. We stopped first at Pisa where we schooled Max on how to properly execute a cliche hand holding the leaning tower photo (he really had no idea what he was doing), had the first gelato of the day, and found a highly rated deli selling crusty bread sandwiches with a choice of fillings. After a quick lunch, we got back on the road and headed to the coastal town of La Spezia. We grabbed another gelato and stood at the edge of the grey sand looking out at the grey sky. Home was calling.

We continued north, sticking close to the coast so we could drive through the seaside terraced villages of the Cinque Terre. Stopping only briefly for a few photos, we continued on, turning inland at Genova. By now, the sun was setting and the traffic was building. We’d been on the road for 10 hours and the fatigue was setting in. We crawled along the motorway, blasting the tunes and cracking the windows for some cool mountain air. A couple of hours and a wrong turn later, we arrived at the hotel to check in, feeling hungry. The local lady who checked us in told us where we would get good pizza, so we had our final Italian pizza of the trip, on the bed in the hotel room.

To be very sure we would avoid Italian hotel isolation, we took another RAT early the next morning before going to get our official test at the airport. Negative again. Two negative tests over two days across the three of us was surely a good sign. And it was. When we took our official test an hour or so later, it was negative. We were free to board the plane and re-enter Australia.

We’d done it. We spent two weeks in Italy without getting covid. We pulled off a trip that we didn’t think we could. The irony was not lost on us that it was not until we were seated for the flight home from our holiday that we could finally relax.