A review of the entire country of Italy: Pt. 2
A cave is an inferior dwelling and other controversial opinions.
This is part two in a series of three posts where I review the entire country of Italy. I wasn’t able to leave a Google review so this will have to do instead. You can read part one here if you missed it.
After our time in Naples, Polignano a Mare gave us a fresher outlook, a postcard-like white town sitting high on top of cliffs above the ocean. Walking around we noticed tiny puffs of wood smoke in the air but weirdly no ocean smell. I asked Raffaele, our Airbnb host, but he seemed confused by the question and didn't know what to tell me. Some Googling later on suggested climate change could be the culprit, a depressing theory to end what had initially felt like a fun puzzle.
Tuk-tuks scooted around the streets, most of them pumping out loud club music, some decorated with neon lights. Given the fact that most people were enjoying a slow stroll around the streets or a quiet dinner, it was a strange vibe. Seeing people riding in them I wondered if they'd considered what they might do with all that adrenaline and party energy once they were sitting down looking at the wine menu.
Staying in the beautiful old town we felt at times like we were living in a theme park. Other tourists constantly walking around our tiny apartment. Sometimes they would peer in at us through the windows. Tourists looking at tourists.
One morning on my way to the supermarket, I walked past an old local man sitting out on the sidewalk and we exchanged buongiorno's. It was a nice moment and I understood this as a sign of my acceptance into the community. Later, KB and I sat out the front of our house eating antipasti as other tourists shuffled past looking at us. Why don’t you leave us and that poor old man and all the others alone I thought to myself. No one exchanged buongiorno's with us. I would look forward to telling the old man and the others later on what had happened and we would all shake our heads and roll our eyes. There would be wine and the lamenting would feel good, cathartic. All of us locals together.
Walking slightly further out you noticed a change in the environment. The buildings looked different, more modern. Maybe slightly run down in parts. People were doing regular life things like popping into a mobile phone store, possibly to look at upgrading their plan. Unremarkable life things. It was a jolt back to reality, and in places like this where it felt like there was a clear delineation between the old and new, it made you question what was the real representation of the place. Can you say you've really visited a place if you haven't seen both sides?
Holidays, I suppose, provide us with the benefit of escaping all that real life stuff. Both Polignano and Ostuni, another old and beautiful white town sitting inland on top of a hill, provided that in particular through one of those wonderful travel experiences of getting lost on foot amidst mazey narrow streets. One of the few occasions where feeling lost is a welcome feeling. A soothing activity that brings you fully into the present. You can't think about whether to switch mobile providers because you need to make the very important decision as to whether to turn left or right at this cobblestone junction.
As nice as this was, the tightly controlled tourist environments in which we felt we were operating in made us feel cramped and itchy to break free. We craved a bit more freedom and perhaps also a desire to satiate our love of nature, and so decided to venture out beyond the walls of the designated theme park areas. We had spied some fields of olive trees and felt them calling to us.
This also meant an opportunity to put on my hiking shoes, a shoe perfect for clomping around in and saying yes to life and no to second-guessing and overthinking. Wearing them I always feel an immediate shift; an adventurous and unencumbered spirit takes over. I am a different person now, ready for any terrain. Would you like me to clomp over that pile of rocks to fetch that rusted old piece of metal and bring it back to you? More than happy to. Is that building bothering you? Let me kick it over using my clompers. Having hired a 4WD a few years ago to travel to the north of Western Australia, I can relate it to the same feeling I had driving that. A feeling of empowerment. I'm going over there because I can.
Once out of the old town, it didn't take long before we hit a dirt road. It came sooner than we expected and it was a blissful feeling. The soft crunch of the gravel and sand providing an instant rhythm to tune in to. I felt my whole body relax and I didn't have to look down to tell that my clompers were also enjoying it very much. Clomping away happily.
We walked along a road flanked by handmade rock walls about waist high that separated us from fields of olive trees - what we'd desperately been hoping for. They were spaced evenly apart, as is typical of the way olive trees are planted in this region, but that was where the evenness ended. Each olive tree was a unique individual, with wide, twisted and gnarled trunks. The degree of which showed their age. The younger ones still innocent with their straight trunks and their whole lives ahead of them, and the old ones warped by time and full of stories. Some of them aged in the thousands of years.
Van Gogh was apparently a big fan of olive trees, having spent a lot of time studying and painting them during his life. Perhaps he felt an affinity to their plight. The olive tree, so disfigured from the process of producing olives, is the quintessential tortured artist. All pained and misunderstood and bent out of shape in the labour of their craft. At least they were respected and had an audience for their work. Maybe they should try producing olives into the void and see how that feels.
Being a thousand plus years old, some of the trees had stacked bricks as supports for any drooping limbs. Not so much walking sticks but standing-for-a-very-long-period-of-time sticks. There was no retirement home for these old folks, they worked long into old age. Perhaps the secret to their longevity.
They kept us company the whole walk, watching us as we wandered off a side track at one point to investigate an abandoned grey trullo, a mud-style home unique to the region. It appeared to have not had much activity for a long while, which was why it was surprising to find inside one of the rooms, a row of chairs lined up facing a wall. As if someone had run some sort of terrifying seminar quite recently. A big patch of prickly pear cacti filled the backyard. Tricky to navigate around, I imagined the seminar invite had made a note of this: Attendees should please note not to try and come through the cactus patch and instead should hop over the small rock wall, careful to mind the soft mud. Clompers are to be removed before entering the seminar room. We may be creepy but we're not above cleanliness.
It started raining not long after, which only added to our feeling of adventure, and confirmation that what we were doing was important and freeing and no one surely had ever gone this far before. Not while it was raining, surely. We scooted around puddles and ventured on further, finally arriving at the end point, marked by the most perfect looking white trullo. An unexpected reward. A shining beacon contrasted against the grey sky with its tall, pointed tile roof and perfect white exterior.
We soaked up the moment and then eventually turned around and made our way back. The olive trees shepherding us back to the theme park on top of the hill.
In Lecce we met an artist skilled in the art of paper mache, a technique that dates as far back as the 17th and 18th centuries and is used to make many of the statues around the region. On his work table sat several half finished sculptures of putti, the flying chubby babies seen in almost every piece of art from the era, and surely the Renaissance period equivalent of Minions these days.
With the rate at which technology is moving these days and AI now entering the picture, perhaps this man had a lot to teach us. If anyone can navigate job uncertainty and make it through, it's a man whose job involves sculpting, among other things, winged cherubs. I can only imagine that demand has dropped dramatically in the last few centuries and that his is a success story that we can look to in uncertain times.
Lecce and Matera were the last two stops in this region. The former a golden, yellow colour palette and the latter a brown-y beige with gold tinges. Having come from two predominantly white towns in a row, on a subconscious level we had clearly not wanted to muddy the brush too much and had managed to group our itinerary by colour tones.
In Matera we stayed in a cave. Not unusual for the city - it's a city of caves built into cliffs and so a lot of the accommodation there consists of converted caves with frontage made to look like a house. It felt authentic in that way. This is the way that people had lived thousands of years ago in this very city, granted without some of the mod cons we had available. Whilst it was a unique experience, unique and authentic aren't often at the top of the list for where you might like to live and feel comfortable. No amount of nice couches or generous number of power points can make up for the fact that you're in a cold, dank hole. Some travel learnings sneak up on you in contemplative moments, and some are much more obvious, like realising you feel unsettled in a cave. These are the benefits of travel. You learn so much about yourself.
During one contemplative moment while waiting for the bus in Lecce, it struck me how much of travel is made up of the moments you don’t think about prior to the trip when you're planning it. So much of a trip is not being on a tour, or visiting a museum or eating at that restaurant with the great reviews. If these are the big rocks in the jar, then it’s the space in between these things that gets filled up the most. And it's these thousands of little pebbles and particles of sand that we fill that space with that can often be the most surprising and wonderful and make the trip special.
And it's the same with regular life. We deal in big rocks. Life updates and yearly recaps get boiled down to only the highlights: work promotion, marriage, buying a house. But these are not the things that fill our worlds. The real day to day stuff is where we live. The in between things, the sand and pebbles. The stuff that makes a life, and makes it worth living.
A nice breeze drifted through, teaming up with the cool metal seats in helping to provide some welcome relief to the heat of the day. It was quiet too, also a relief. In transit, with all our luggage, just waiting and looking out at the buildings in the distance, it was a perfect travel moment. As good as any other.
A man stood up, walked a few metres away upwind of us and lit a cigarette. A girl a few seats away, inspired, lit a cigarette too. Our bus turned up but then immediately drove off to refuel. We were back in the sun now. Forty minutes ticked by and it seemed entirely possible that the bus may never come back.
The moment had passed, but there would be more.
