Return to Italia

Leaving the Ferrara Valley we pushed east, passing the town of Davos through varying road types. The first part was on wide autobahns which soon gave way to the usual convoluted routes though the mountains. We linked multiple valleys before beginning to climb earnestly. It was getting late and the road was chiseled into country with few spots to camp, benched into impossibly steep valleys. As we got higher it began to open out into a gentler alpine valley and we began passing snow patches.

The cloudless night beautifully illuminated the surrounding mountains towering either side of us, giving the illusion that they were glowing. After a solid section of climbing we hit a few chalets at the pass and a sign announced that we were now at 2383m. Not wanting to camp right next to the alpine commercial enterprises in the saddle we turned around and drove back down the pass for a couple hundred metres until we found a place level enough to camp. As I set up my tent in the starlight I found it hard to concentrate on the task, captivated by the still snow-covered faces of the peaks around me. Despite the large quantities of snow still hanging around it was a warm feeling eight to ten degrees or so at this elevation after 11pm at night!

In the morning we packed up our tents under the curious eyes of passing motorists and began descending into the valleys that would carry us through a small corner of Austria to Italy. In Switzerland camping outside of designated campsites, or “wild” camping as they like to coin it is illegal. Occasionally there is free camping on the side of the rode to sate the results of this legislation but it is rare. It's also rare to see people stopped on the side of the road camping, so maybe others actually look for campsites before traveling to adhere to this.

We really weren't concerned with the arguably uptight laws in Switzerland; the book is one thing and enforcement is another. We were camped on gravel with no potential for environmental degradation and had no plans for a long stay. In Switzerland I learned that although many organisations and the Swiss way of doing things may seem a little uptight on the facade it isn't really underneath. The Swiss seem very warm and reasonable in comparison to experiences I've had in other cultures with heavy Germanic influence.

Before commiting to solid progress towards Italy we stopped in a town in the valley on the eastern side of the pass to clean our teeth by the river and check out what the town had to offer. It was nicely situated but lacked any real intrigue so we continued on after a quick stop.

We were pulled up by customs at the Swiss border and an officer began talking to us in rapid German before making the switch to English, noticing our lack of comprehension. Over the course of our five minute stop every other car was waved though, likely due to their number plates. Having a Czech number plate makes you more likely to be subject to the “curiosity” of border authorities than if you had a car that was registered in a wealthy EU member state.

The man asked if we had anything to declare and I responded with a definite “no”. He countered, asking me to get out and open the boot. I could see a sniffer dog off to the left. The boot can't open fully because of Dan's kayak on the roof so I was expecting us to have to remove it to capitulate to his investigation. To my surprise the sniffer dog remained by the border control centre and he simply asked, “Hashish? Marijuana?” I said we had none and he turned to Dan, asking the same. Two no answers and literally a glance in the boot, as if any contraband we had would be in plain sight, gave us a wave forward, into Austria.

The short drive through Austria and the following journey through Italy was great. The temperature was up to 35 degrees, the windows were right down, the shirts were off and an Italian radio station we found was blaring out some great tunes. A three hour drive goes by in no time with that kind of set up and the side benefit of spectacular country.

We had liked our stay in the northern city of Meran/ Merano so much the first time that we stopped in to enjoy the afternoon sun on our way through to Trento. We got the customary gelato in the city centre and hooked up to the free WiFi. The rest of the afternoon was spent in repose by the river, subdued by the heat and fully content.

A little after four we continued on to Trento, a mere eighty kilometres away. We hit the city limits with no navigational hassles but had a little trouble finding the turn off to Pergine, a town in the hills east of the city, close to where my great uncle lives. We pulled over and asked two people before managing to get on the right road. The first couple spoke little English and I only understood what they said out of correlation to the Spanish equivalents. The words for left and right are quite similar between the two languages. Italian sticks more firmly to the Latin root while the first vowel in the Spanish versions often splits into two, e.g. destro/ diestro.

The second man I asked spoke great English and gave a very helpful response, right down to indicators on the road to know if we had passed the turn off. He had just finished a road skiing session, a sport I'd never seen practiced back home.

Before long we were in Pergine, accessed through a tunnel in one of the hills flanking the city. I drove towards the prominent hilltop castle, remembering Masetti, a small town just out of Pergine itself sat close to the base of this. We began climbing and before long came to the town. However, things weren't straight forward from here.

My Nonna, or grandmother in English, had given me an address that basically narrowed down the location of the town. Trento was mentioned on the right and Masetti di Pergine on the left, gradually narrowing it down from greater area, to suburb, to town. In Masetti there are no house numbers and few of the laneways are named meaning that's all the information I could physically have to help me find Zio Toni's house.

From my first visit, some seven years ago, I could remember it was on the right side of a laneway at the bottom of the town so I drove down the first one I saw. Nothing looked familiar. I stopped and talked to some locals who did not know him, surprisingly, being such a small town, but helped out by giving him a call on my behalf. We retraced our steps and as promised he was standing, waiting for us, on a corner near the entrance to the town.

I stopped to greet him before parking the car where most of the rest of the village parks theirs and heading in to have a drink. The general small talk you'd expect was exchanged; what we'd done in Europe so far and the state of the family back home. After twenty minutes I returned to the car to consolidate my things and see Dan off. He was driving to Ljubljana that night to meet the Australian team in the lead up to the world cup on the following weekend.

Returning to the house I helped Toni harvest some strawberries and met Giovanni, a middle aged Italian guy who is staying with the mission program. I was happy to discover that he spoke Spanish and conversed with him a little about my time in Europe, the Spanish language and his experience with the language which stems from time spent living on the outskirts of Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic.

Another of the guests originates from Eritrea and another from the Ukraine, making for an intriguing mix of people to talk to. All have been extremely welcoming and warm hearted, despite the language barrier. It's a bit of a struggle at meal times when all the discussion is in Italian, a language I would love to learn but seems to provide a lot of conflict with my Spanish. Sometimes I find it hard that I can{t make a slightly stronger connection with my roots but I think I really have to stick to only one language with a strong latin foundation. Whenever I want to explain anything it takes a lot of hunting around for a bridging word unless I get lucky and it happens to be mutually understandable between the two romance languages.

When in doubt I often make a guess off a Latin root word in English. I learnt long ago that having a reasonable vocabulary makes things much easier. For instance, if you would instantly recognise the word “edifice” in English its extremely easy to remember a building is an “edificio”.

The immersive environment I've experienced so far has made me more excited to accomplish my own language goals despite rarely encountering Spanish speakers. This morning I got up and spent 30mins reviewing conjugations and building vocabulary in Spanish followed by 30mins learning the Cyrillic alphabet, routine I would have struggled to achieve at home. Traveling in many ways has given me the mental freedom I craved at home but couldn't quite find; its a completely different mode of life.

After warm milk and biscuits for breakfast I went for a walk to San Cristoforo which sits by the large lake not far from Masetti di Pergine. I sat for a while, captivated by the tranquility of the place before watching a TV episode that I had downloaded in the guesthouse in Ausserferrara. It was the first time I had sat down and watched a movie or TV episode in five weeks; since leaving home.

In the afternoon I started on a spoken Russian course, experiencing all the usual memory struggles that come with almost no familiarity in a target language. In Spanish I overcame these quite fast because Spanish and English aren't incredibly foreign to each other but in Russian I think it'll be a different story. The Slavic languages have considerable linguistic differences. Words in general seem far more foreign, even without taking the currently strange alphabet into account.

I'm still toying with the idea of whether I'm going to make a concerted effort at gaining any kind of competency in Russian but it would certainly be nice to be able to communicate in a Slavic language to some degree while I'm in the Balkans. I felt so uncultured to have no grasp at all on any Slavic language when we spent considerable periods of time in both the Czech Republic and Slovenia.

Here I have few things I desperately want to see or do so It'll give me a chance to simply relax a little and focus on some goals I want to fulfill with my gap year. It certainly feels great to have a few days where I don't feel like I have to be on the go 6+ hours a day to make the most of being in a here. I can simply live.

Pergine Rooftops