There’s nothing like being a few days early or a few days late for a major festival.
We have the dubious honor of being able to both without thinking. I guess this is why you should try to plan your holiday around events, if possible.
We love Italy.
We’ve been a number of times, but the last visit was the best. Of course, it was not without a lot of hiccups just getting there, but in the end, later than we expected, actually about five minutes before they closed Florence airport, we made it.
So, little did we know there was such a thing as Calcio Fiorentino an early form of football and rugby that originated in 16th-century Italy and thought to have started in the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence. But we were in Florence, at the right time, and even got to see the procession through the streets of Florence.
We were not so lucky in Siena where we were about a week early for the Palio di Siena which was to take place on 2nd July.
Nor were we in Arezzo at the right time for the Saracen Joust which was held on the penultimate Saturday in June. It is held at the Piazza Grande in the heart of Arezzo and is one of the most beautiful piazzas in Tuscany.
The Piazza Della Liberta and the Town Hall tower
The Piazza Grande, also known as Piazza Vasari, is said to be situated on the site of the ancient Roman Forum. Here, it is being set up for the coming Joust.
A different view of Arezzo Cathedral | Cattedrale dei Santi Pietro e Donato
I’m always rummaging through the endless photographs that, if you were to ask me, I would vehemently deny I took.
It’s like the camera on my phone takes them itself, you know, the latest upgrade they didn’t tell you about, the artificial intelligence.
OK, so it’s simply a ferry crossing a wide stretch of water. You ask, why didn’t they build a bridge? A good question, and not one I can answer.
But, what does the thought of a ferry conjure up?
It brought to mind the film Jaws, and the summer visitors to the island, or should I say, shark hunting ground.
Here?
Perhaps a little less sinister…or not.
To me, at this point, it suggests the possibility of a get away, depending on what side you’re on, mainland, or island. I’m going to say, you’re on the island and going back to the mainland.
Running.
The island is like one of those remote places, with one way in and one way out. a place where people go to try and breathe life back into a marriage that’s falling apart under the stresses of city life, but it failed.
The problem wasn’t the fact you didn’t see each other enough, it’s just that you had grown to dislike each other, and going into a small isolated situation only made the problem worse.
It was just easier to blame everything else.
But going home, well that’s a whole different kettle of fish, because bridges were burned before you left, and going back, well, there was going to be grovelling involved.
Or not.
There’s a story here, but not right now. Perhaps in a day or two.
It’s late, very late, and I need some sleep … well, thinking time.
We have visited this town on a hill, famous for its fourteen towers, twice. The first time we stayed in a hotel overlooking the main piazza, and the second time, for a day visit, and return to a little restaurant tucked away off the main piazza for its home cooking.
No cars are allowed inside the town and parking is provided outside the town walls. You can drive up to the hotel to deliver your baggage, but the car must return to the carpark overnight.
This is one of the fourteen towers
I didn’t attempt to climb to the tower, which you can do in some of them, just getting up the church steps was enough for me. Inside the building was, if I remember correctly, a museum.
Looking up the piazza towards some battlements, and when you reach the top and turn left, there is a small restaurant on the right-hand side of the laneway that had the best wild boar pasta.
Another of the fourteen towers, and through the arch, down a lane to the gated fence that surrounds the town. The fortifications are quite formidable and there are several places along the fence where you can stand and look down the hill at the oncoming enemy (if there was one).
Part of the main piazza which is quite large, and on the right, the wishing well where my wish for a cooler day was not granted.
Officially, the Piazza della Cisterna is the most beautiful square of the town, San Gimignano. The well was built in 1273 and enlarged in 1346 by Podestà Guccio dei Malavolti.
And not to be outdone by any other the other old towns, there is an old church, one of several. It is the Collegiate Church or the Duomo di San Gimignano, a monument of Romanesque architecture built around 1000 and enlarged over time.
Next door is the Museum of Sacred Art.
And I guess it’s rather odd to see television aerials on top of houses that are quite literally about a thousand years old. I wonder what they did back then for entertainment?
This is like so many roads off in what is known as the Gold Coast hinterland, that tract of land between the ocean and the mountain range that runs along the eastern side of the country, known as the Great Dividing Range.
This is the road that runs behind where friends of ours live, and runs on down into a valley where a river runs, and when the rains come down, floods.
It’s hard to imagine that a few hundred years ago all of this would have been tropical jungle, and intrepid explorers would be making their way north or west, just to see what was there.
I imagine in another 100 years, all of this will be gone, given over to housing, shopping malls, and factories, and anything that resembles country living will have been moved out to far beyond the mountain range and towards the what is called the ‘red’ centre.
Or over that time there is a reckoning with mother nature, and if there is, I know who I’d put my money on.
But, as for a story…
…
It was quite literally the road to nowhere.
You just had to follow it until it disintegrated into a dirt track, and then for another 20 miles before you finished up at a rusty gate attached to a dilapidated fence that surrounds the a house that was cleverly hidden behind a grove of trees, the only place I knew as home. We had no phones, no television or radio, no real contact with the outside world.
Until, one day, my fairy godmother came and rescued me.
Yes, it felt like that.
Little had I realized that there were any other people in our family, and it took until the death of my parents to find out I had grandparents, and a much larger extended family.
There had been, according to my father, no reason to leave. Or for anyone else to come, and the few that ventured to end of the road, found there was nothing to see, and no reason to stay.
For all intents and purposes we didn’t exist, and, oddly, I was content with that.
Until I decided to venture further afield, run into two people, a man and a woman, both of whom said they were related to my father, and ask me to take them back with them to meet my father,
A bad choice, but I didn’t know it at the time.
Not until my father ran them off at the point of the gun he always had with him.
He knew who they were, and it surprised me to see the change in him, from the strong silent type, to a man greatly afraid, though he would not tell me of what.
He just told me to lock myself in my room, and not to come out for anything.
I heard him leave, but not come back.
It took three days before I left that room, to find I was completely alone in the house. Outside, it was a different story. There, half way between the back door and the barn were the two people I’d brought home, both dead. A little further away were my parents, also dead.
And another man, who was leaning over my father.
I stopped when he looked up in my direction.
“You must be Jake.”
How did he know my name? I nodded, warily watching him in case I had to run.
He went from body to body, checking to see if they were still alive, then stood and turned around to look at me.
“Do you know what happened?”
“No.”
“Do you know who the other two are?”
I assumed he was referring to the visitors.
“No. The man said he was a relative, asked me to bring them here.”
“How did you…”
Escape? “My father told me to hide and not come out.” If this man was associated with the other two…
Perhaps he saw my trepidation.
“I’m a friend of your father’s, a policeman. You were supposed to be safe here.”
We were, until I brought the harbingers of death. “Not any more,” I said.
There’s nothing like being a few days early or a few days late for a major festival.
We have the dubious honor of being able to both without thinking. I guess this is why you should try to plan your holiday around events, if possible.
We love Italy.
We’ve been a number of times, but the last visit was the best. Of course, it was not without a lot of hiccups just getting there, but in the end, later than we expected, actually about five minutes before they closed Florence airport, we made it.
So, little did we know there was such a thing as Calcio Fiorentino an early form of football and rugby that originated in 16th-century Italy and thought to have started in the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence. But we were in Florence, at the right time, and even got to see the procession through the streets of Florence.
We were not so lucky in Siena where we were about a week early for the Palio di Siena which was to take place on 2nd July.
Nor were we in Arezzo at the right time for the Saracen Joust which was held on the penultimate Saturday in June. It is held at the Piazza Grande in the heart of Arezzo and is one of the most beautiful piazzas in Tuscany.
The Piazza Della Liberta and the Town Hall tower
The Piazza Grande, also known as Piazza Vasari, is said to be situated on the site of the ancient Roman Forum. Here, it is being set up for the coming Joust.
A different view of Arezzo Cathedral | Cattedrale dei Santi Pietro e Donato
I’m always rummaging through the endless photographs that, if you were to ask me, I would vehemently deny I took.
It’s like the camera on my phone takes them itself, you know, the latest upgrade they didn’t tell you about, the artificial intelligence.
OK, so it’s simply a ferry crossing a wide stretch of water. You ask, why didn’t they build a bridge? A good question, and not one I can answer.
But, what does the thought of a ferry conjure up?
It brought to mind the film Jaws, and the summer visitors to the island, or should I say, shark hunting ground.
Here?
Perhaps a little less sinister…or not.
To me, at this point, it suggests the possibility of a get away, depending on what side you’re on, mainland, or island. I’m going to say, you’re on the island and going back to the mainland.
Running.
The island is like one of those remote places, with one way in and one way out. a place where people go to try and breathe life back into a marriage that’s falling apart under the stresses of city life, but it failed.
The problem wasn’t the fact you didn’t see each other enough, it’s just that you had grown to dislike each other, and going into a small isolated situation only made the problem worse.
It was just easier to blame everything else.
But going home, well that’s a whole different kettle of fish, because bridges were burned before you left, and going back, well, there was going to be grovelling involved.
Or not.
There’s a story here, but not right now. Perhaps in a day or two.
It’s late, very late, and I need some sleep … well, thinking time.
I’d been on the starship for almost three hours when…
…
The captain was coming up from the earth station by transport, not wanting to trust the transporters, and I’d just finished the orientation of the ship by the second officer, and had arrived on the bridge to see various crew members hunched over their consoles.
The captain had told me, before stepping onto the transport, that we would be leaving the dock shortly after he arrived.
Nothing I’d seen so far had led me to believe it would be going anywhere, anytime soon.
Nevertheless, the crew briefing had run smoothly, the second officer assigned to correlate the complaints/problems list, and everyone else had taken their assigned positions.
I was waiting for the captain, standing beside the ‘chair’, ready to hand over. In any other situation, we would be off to an illustrious start.
Until the dulcet tones of the Chief Engineer rang through the bridge, uttering those fateful words, “the warp coil has had a catastrophic failure”.
This was at odds with another statement he had made earlier when I was in Engineering, and given I was told the Chief Engineer was prone to hyperbole; his statement ‘they just don’t make warp coils like they used to’ hadn’t exactly filled me with confidence, but I had been expecting we would be ready to depart.
I had been looking at the screen, an overlay of the window that looked out over space, or at this moment, the space dock, where there was a representation of the planets that were ‘out there’.
I had been curious about M75, but the helmsman, a rather taciturn chap who seemed to resent the fact he was assigned to this ship, just shrugged and said, “it’s something, somewhere, but not of much interest,” then went back to his console.
If this was Star Trek, we’d be ejecting the warp coil by now, but in the space dock, that didn’t seem to me to be a viable option.
“How long before we can get this bucket of bolts moving,” I ask the Chief.
“I’m going as fast as I can.”
Yes, words ripped right out of the script of a Star Trek episode, I thought. A sad case of life imitating art.
A strange whistling sound emanated from the speakers, then the whoosh of the elevator just before the doors opened. OK, new ship, squeaky doors, another item to be put on the ‘look at’ list after the shakedown cruise.
The Captain had arrived.
“Why are dock workers still on the ship, Number One.”
For a moment there, I thought I was talking to John Luc Picard.
“Faulty warp coil. You know how it goes, save a billion by outsourcing to the cheapest supplier.”
The captain didn’t appreciate my sardonic humour, or my apparent disdain in outsourcing what we had once built ourselves.
He gave me a frown, a slight shake of his head, then said, “I’ll be in my quarters. Let me know when we’re about to leave.”
He didn’t wait for acknowledgement and disappeared through another squeaky door. More repairs.
The Chief’s voice then came over the speaker. “I can give you impulse speed, warp speed will take a little longer.”
“Doesn’t that refer to miracles over the impossible,” I ask.
“Perhaps. But in the meantime, I need a specific spanner and the replicators are down. So, now we have to fix them first, before moving on. Might take a while.”
I look around the crew, seeing their expectant faces drop with disappointment.
Outer space was going to have to wait a little longer.
My phone, being smart and all, has been creating a notification that tells me I have some memories stored on it for this day a year ago, or two years, or many years.
The pictures it is showing are of our trip to China a few years ago.
Not much chance of going back, and, back then, neither of us could imagine that everything that has happened in the last six months could happen.
But, it did.
And one of the effects of those events is no more overseas travel. There was, for a breif few weeks a possibility, if fully vaccinated, that travel was on again, but now there is this new variant, and everything seems to have fallen apart.
For me, anyway, there is no prospect of more travel of any sort at the moment, having a compromised immune system. We are able to fly to other states, but not all. Some are still closed, and others are seeing record numbers of infections.
It’s put a damper on Christmas, and the usual family get-togethers that have been posponed for the last two years.
Travel, of course, is the main escape, where we can get away from our daily lives, and go somewhere quite different from where we live and experience a different world. The people, the food, the sights.
What is probably more significant is that we might not be able to go away again, if there is no cure for the virus, or if these variants continue to come out of the woodwork. No one will want to risk catching it in another country, simply because of the medical expenses, the chances are that travel insurance will not cover you for the Coronavirus, or if it does, will add significantly to the cost.
And no cover, no travel, even if you are able to.
So, it means that any travel we will be doing, when we can, will be in our own country. One day.
So too for New Zealand, and we may be able to travel there, only they seem to shut their borders at the drop of a hat, and you could go there one week, and not be able to go home for, well, ever.
So, all I have, is dreams.
Until then, my smartphone is going to keep sending me gentle reminders of what it was like in another lifetime.
It’s a town we visited in Italy when on a private tour. Of course, I wrote it down on a notepad app on my phone at the time, and, yes, not long after that, an accidental reset lost all the data.
Now, I have no idea with the name of the town is, just that it was a picturesque stopover in the middle of a delightful private tour of Tuscany.
There are narrow laneways that I suspect no one 300 hundred years ago planned for cars
Narrower walkways that lead to very dark places
Walkways on the side of the hills that look down on the picturesque valleys
And rather interesting hillsides, some of which provided inspiration for Leonardo da Vinci
Or maybe it was this landscape, though it is difficult to see what could be found as inspiration in such a bland hillside
A lot of houses, some of them quite large, nestled in amongst the trees
Gardens, of sorts, balcony’s, not so big, and hidden doorways
Even not so secret passageways between houses.
All in all, it was an interesting visit, and it made me wonder what it would be like to live here, all crowded together, rather than living on our relatively isolated quarter-acre blocks.
