April in the Garden of Eden (and Beyond)

April 1, 2008

Poisson d’Avril! That’s the French equivalent of April Fools’ Day. Today all the children walk around sticking pictures of fish on the backs of their teachers, parents and other witless adults. Felix and Agnes in particular took to the concept with gusto the whole day.

There’s light at the end of the cold, dark, tunnel, and we’re thawing out as the weather warms up. Spring has sprung, snow-melt surges down every ravine. When I bend over the old bridge and watch the swollen river barrelling along I feel like it should be dammed or stored or stopped somehow. It seems such an embarrassing excess of water gushing mindlessly to the Garonne and onto the sea.

Singlets, scarves ugg boots and coats will soon be packed away until autumn. It’s such a good feeling.


We’ve been working hard putting a vegetable garden in and have planted potatoes, celery, herbs, carrots, tomatoes, lettuces and a raspberry bush! We’ll see how successful we are, because I don’t intend watering it (there’s no water connection at the garden) and we’re spending two weeks in Italy at the end of the month. Hmm.

April 10, 2008

Emile decided to cut his hair a few days ago. He emerged from his room at 8am with a new look. From the front it looked great, as that’s what he could see in the mirror. The sides were interesting ….

Today Mahalia learnt to ride a motor scooter at school. She loved it. Kids are allowed a scooter licence at 14 here. Her friend will have her new scooter soon and I’ve already started worrying about her being on the road, especially if she doubles her friends.

April 27

Two weeks in a Bella Italia! What an adventure, what a road trip, what a lot of history, and what chaos! It’s crystal clear to me how the concept of Slow Food and Slow Towns started in Italy.

The Colisseum

Rome hasn’t changed since the early 90’s when Mum and I lugged our backpacks around which isn’t surprising given that most of it hasn’t changed in 2000 years. The highlights of our 4 days there were visiting the Forum and hiring bikes to ride around the spectacular gardens of the Villa Borghese. Now that I reflect on this, I can see that these were the highlights perhaps because they were the only green spaces we saw?? Are we turning into country bumpkins (I think I always was one at heart)? The downlight (so to speak) was having my wallet stolen out of my backpack/handbag at the Forum. I felt so stupid.

My Wallet is in the hands of someone down there.... : Kids happy not to be in front of a yet another ruin;

After the Pantheon, the Piazza Navonna, the Vatican, the colisseum, the Forum etc. the kids were pining for a day of nothing to do, so we headed to the gardens of the Villa Borghese for a picnic. We hired bikes and had a fab time cycling around these beautiful parklands. Paris needs something like this in the centre of the city – an oasis of green – like central Park in New York, or Hyde Park in London. The Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes are also beautiful, but a bit far from the action to provide easy relief. We walked back via Spanish Steps covered in hundreds of pots of rioting azaleas in full bloom.

Another huge highlight was the Vatican Museum. What an incredible collection of sculpture, painting and architecture. In some rooms it seemed that every square centimetre of every surface was decorated, including, of course, the incomparable Sistine Chapel.

Vatican Museum; tapestries; the Map Room; Mosaic, some other fantastic room

One of the very clear lessons we learned from the trip was not to travel in Italy in July or August. Everywhere there were legions of tourists like us (they should have cleared out while we were there) and our litany each day was “I’m so glad we didn’t come in summer”. Nowhere was this clearer than in the Sistine Chapel. Given that it is, in fact, a place of worship, there were minders asking people to keep their voices down – I can’t imagine how they manage the crowds in summer.

When we left the Vatican at about 2pm the line to get in was literally a kilometre long. I wouldn’t have stood in it, so it’s just as well we arrived at lunch time.

Bees were everywhere in the Vatican (really - must find out what that's about);
Swarms of People Want to see the Honey Pot

Rome was great, but we were all relieved to leave and head south to the Sorrentine Peninsula and Naples. We had booked a stay on an olive/fruit farm for a week, 700m above the Amalfi and Sorrentine coasts. The first thing to remark about this part of the world is that every driver is completely out of his or her mind. Naples apparently has the lowest suicide rate in Italy and I can only imagine it’s because they express any suicidal tendancies every day on the road. They are absolutely crazy, insane, unsafe, idiotic, joyous, risk takers. One Sunday we drove against the tide to Pompei. Half of Napoli seemed to be driving the other way. The road was sinuous, narrow, a drop of 200 m into the sea on one side and a cliff on the other. There were as many mopeds and motorbikes as there were cars, and they seemed to create a third lane on our side of the road – they and the even more suicidal Sunday cyclists. We had to move into the gutter to avoid meeting them head on. Absolute lunacy. There were also pedestrians, dog walkers, double prams and the elderly sharing the two skinny lanes, and no footpath. Never again!!!

Another point to remark on was that the south of Italy seemed a little like a developing country. Ludo thought that, in terms of economic development, it fell somewhere between northern Italy and Tunisia, which is exactly where it is geographically! And it was dirty. There was garbage everywhere. The newly built incinerators around Naples apparently don’t work, so there’s no point collecting the garbage. It’s piled metres high on the sides of the road, and once the dogs and cats are through with it it ends up all over the road. Apparently the newly elected Berlusconi has promised to govern from Naples three days a week until the problem is fixed. Ha!

Pompei was amazing, absolutely amazing. An entire city preserved for 2000 years. Most of the buildings and ampi-theatres were intact, and you could see the ruts made by the chariot wheels in the large stones paving the roads and the frescoes still with their vivid colours on the walls of the villas. It must have been a very beautiful city. The pedestrian crossings comprised 3 or 4 large oblong stones raised from the level of the road – would keep your toga dry! I found it incredible that we were allowed to wander around the area unobserved – millions of tourists each year trampling and touching this precious monument. I found this curious about many Italian monuments. Either they don’t have the money to properly police them, or there are so many of them that they are a blasé. For an Australian starved of built history, it was puzzling.

Felix's Shop at Pompei: A Pompeian Pedestrian Crossing; The Baths

It was a great place for young tourists too, as they didn’t have to refrain from touching and didn’t have to be shushed. Felix was thrilled when we found a shop owned by a Felix. The kids also liked the plaster casts of the bodies excavated there, twisted as they were trying to protect themselves from the blast of the volcanic explosion in 79 AD. The day was clear and blue, marred only by a weirdo walking around shirtless (though with a nice torso) who seemed to always be where we were, for 6 hours, which freaked me a bit when I found myself alone with him in the baths (they were empty).

We made the typical boat trip to Capri which cost an absolute fortune for a family of six and was, in a word, disappointing. Don’t know what all the fuss is about. Sorrento was good but entirely geared to tourists. Positano is a jewell perched precariously on the spectacular Amalfi coast. The road there was perilous, and apparently becomes a car park in summer. Even in April we had to park kilometres away. Walking down through the town through its very steep steps was breathtaking. We ate an icecream at the bottom and, looking at the gunmetal grey sky above us, thought we’d better head back to the car. It was going to be a long walk. Then the heavens opened and the hail fell and we ran up those steps as fast as we could. It’s an interesting town planning fact that the stormwater system and the pedestrian system seem to be the same in Positano, which meant we had to wade uphill through torrents of gushing water as the hail hit our heads. The kids loved it!

Coast of Capri; Entrance to a Villa

One of the Jet Set on Capri

We spent the last day in crazy Naples (we drove there can you believe?) Saw the famous archeological museum with its Pompeian mosaics. Some of these magnificent mosaics were made with tiles half the size of a ladybird’s wing. The old city was a labyrinth of dark streets festooned with washing hung out to dry, alters to Mary and Jesus on every available surface, and the constant buzzing of mopeds with two or three passengers texting and talking at the top of their voices. We had the best gelato of the trip in Napoli.

The Incomparable, Chaotic Napoli!

Felix's Shop at Pompei: A Pompeian Pedestrian Crossing; The Baths

Our farm stay was perfect. It had great jam. We could retreat there at the end of each day and be in a peaceful place where the kids could feed the cows and chickens and play under the trees. They also developed a passion for a really good French card game called Tarot. The only trouble is it requires 5 players and we have six passionate converts.

'Le Tore', our Agriturismo accommodation


Amalfi Coast

Sorrento

The 17 hour drive back home was very long, made a bit stressful by the fact that our remaining credit card wasn’t working and we had little cash and didn’t know how much the toll would add up to at the border! Colin Thiele’s stories on CD (a present from Mum) saved our sanity, as did a few packets of Vichy mints and a plastic bucket for a carsick little girl. We stopped in Arles, near the Camargue, to break the journey, and thought its colisseum was better maintained than the one in Rome.

When we finally entered our valley we were so excited to be surrounded by the mountains and the river and the trees again. In two weeks the colours had changed and everything was bursting with verdancy. It was wonderful to go to sleep with the sounds of the river clacking over its stones and the birds singing their night tunes.

April 30

For our birthdays, Ludo’s family offered us a night away somewhere in France and we chose to go to the Aveyron region, to Rodez. Francoise and Roger came to visit and kindly looked after the kids for us. Coming so soon after the Italian sojourn the thought of leaving again was a little tiring, but it was wonderful to be just the two of us for a little while.

Rodez is a medieval town on a hill with an imposing cathedral built of a warm pink stone. It was a miserable day – rainy and grey – but we could see how beautiful the town could be. I say could be, because even though most of the buildings in the centre were centuries old, the ground floors had been converted into modern shopfronts that you can find anywhere in the world. I’m sure it’s constraining to operate a business out of a medieval façade, but it so spoils the one thing that attracts business to the town – its history.

We stayed just outside Rodex in a 16th century chateau, complete with towers, that has been converted into a successful ‘hotel de charme’. The building was fabulous, but in the conversion to a comfortable hotel, the rooms had lost any sense of the original building. What a difficult balance to find – living in a modern word whilst preserving such a precious history.

The next day we visited a village known as one of the most beautiful in France – Conques. It was splendid, tumbling down a hill in a narrow valley, the buildings built of local stone with slate roofs. The streets were paved with rough, oblong rocks, a gutter of flat rocks angled in the middle. It also had a magnificent cathedral – odd for such a small place, and the town guarded a collection of religious treasures that were amazing: a huge statue of Sainte Foy covered head to toe in gold and encrusted with precious and semi precious stones and gold filigree, ornate boxes of various saints’ bones, precessional crosses and reliquaries. Incredible.

Conques

The wisteria is drowsily falling all over the place, the scent of lilac lingers in the air everywhere we go, the red poppies and buttercups are colouring the gardens, the chestnut trees are dense with foliage and white spears of flowers, and the tender green foliage of spring covers the hillsides. All is well in the garden of Eden.

Mahalia's birthday; Felix

Agnes