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Air Time in Italy
Love and Lunch in the Appenines
It’s The Bear doing what he does best — buggering off to somewhere exotic aboard a bike, in search of ... lunch
How much trouble you get into is usually directly proportional to how stupid you are; or, in other words, inversely proportional to how much you use (the contents of) your head. I say usually because I’ve been remarkably lucky to be spared the to-be-expected results of some remarkably dumb things I have done. But every now and then, I do get a touch of what I deserve.
It happened in a small but intensely embarrassing way as I was heading out of Bologna on my way across the Apennines to La Spezia in November last year. You’ll read about why at some other time; for now, just pay | | attention and you may avoid similar embarrassment. Italian motorways north of Naples are toll roads. (A friend of mine in Milan told me they were free down south because nobody down there would pay, anyway, and it saved repairing shotgun damage to toll booths. When I ran that past a Calabrian buddy, he just shook his head and said: “Who’d waste a cartridge on a toll booth?”)
The difference between Italian and Australian toll roads is that in Italy there are toll booths where you enter the motorway. Now, I should have known how this works because I’ve encountered this system before, but I was a bit flustered from coping with Bolognese traffic on an unfamiliar bike. That’s the only excuse I can think of, anyway, that doesn’t involve Alzheimer’s. Oh, maybe jetlag. That’s always good. It must have been jetlag.
This was a fully automated booth, as these entrance booths all are. I tried to insert money, but there didn’t seem to be an appropriate slot. Hmm. While I was thinking about this conundrum, a small queue of cars built up behind me. There was no shortage of advice from their drivers; the trouble was it was all screamed in rapid-fire Italian. I do not capiche screamed, rapid-fire Italian. I have enough trouble with it when it is enunciated clearly at geological speeds.
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| | In the end, to the obvious relief of the drivers, I pushed my Ducati Sportclassic GT 1000 backwards out of the booth lane (fortunately, it was not just a small queue of cars but also a queue of small cars), parked it and went looking for an office. The bloke there listened to my attempt at explanation in stumbling Italian and replied in perfect English: “You must take a token from the dispenser and show it where you leave the autostrada so they can calculate how much you owe.”
Yes. Yes.
Of course. I knew that. With a series of grimaces and gestures I attempted to convey that, ah, I had perhaps suffered some brain damage, but I was getting better and I was very sorry to have disturbed him at his obviously important and urgent work. This was while backing out of the office and banging my elbow as its doors closed automatically. He went back to his crossword.
The autostrada is not quite as quick as but even more insane than some of the German Autobahnen; top speed tends to be well below 200km/h, but there’s constant high-energy shuffling going on. I still found the safest place to be was the middle lane, out of the way of the smoke-belching trucks and countless fibreglass campers in the kerbside lane and the quick boys in the centre. Some of those fast cars were unexpected; I’d never realised Fiat Puntos will go over 160km/h if you wind their diesels up long enough.
Leaving the autostrada in Reggio was a lot easier than getting onto it in Bologna and I am used to the endlessly complicated ways in which traffic is shunted around in most Italian cities, so I just stuck with the ‘Passo del Cerreto’ signs until the houses thinned out and I was safely on the S63 heading southwest.
Rapid contrasts are a way of life in Italy and one of the most obvious is the difference between the plain of the River Po and its surrounding hills. The plain has some of the densest and most ubiquitous smog outside communist countries. It’s the result of a lot of heavy industry unconstrained, in the classic Italian way, by a lot of environmental concern.
Parma, Reggio, Modena and especially Bologna form the outstanding centre of internal combustion engine design and construction in Italy, some would say the world. From Lombardini in the north to Maranello near Bologna, a huge variety of engine manufacturing is right there and Ferrari’s prancing horse is featured on every possible surface for many kilometres around.
It takes fire to build and run engines and, of course, where there’s fire, there’s smoke. Lots of smoke. That smoke settles like a comfortable, corrosive rug over the countryside. But only in the plain. Once you start climbing the hills, the air clears up quickly and almost completely. Fortunately, State 63 begins its climb very soon after leaving the raggedy suburbs of Reggio.
It’s a wonderful road, very variable in width, surface, surveying and everything else. Several times, I wondered if I’d perhaps taken a wrong turn and ended up on a minor road instead, but then there’d be a beautifully surfaced stretch of wide, carefully line-marked tar and perhaps even a near-new road tunnel and I knew I was still on the right route.
For quite some time after Castelnovo (Newcastle), a huge volcanic plug I think was Mt Cusna dominates the view off to the left of the road, looking for all the world like a cover illustration from a fantasy paperback. You could easily imagine a dragon roosting on its vertical crags and carrying off a maiden from one of the many small towns dotting the valley.
My own transport was coming into its own, too. If there’s something better than a Ducati vee twin thumping away under you as you climb one curve after the other up into the cool, clean air of the Apennines, I haven’t experienced it and can’t even imagine it. I found that initially I was changing gear quite a bit, but once I decided to let the natural torque range of the air-cooled powerplant do some of the work, it went just as well with far fewer changes.
Traffic along what is quite a major road was very light and, except for the occasional overstressed Fiat Punto on the wrong side of the road, quite easily dealt with. I think this part of Italy must be like so much other European (and American) countryside that’s losing population at far too fast a rate. All the small towns along the way certainly looked half-empty at best and I didn’t even see many people out in the fields.
The GT was happy, though. As we growled up towards the watershed of Passo del Cerreto, it occurred to me I had so far skipped lunch and the small towns were thinning out rapidly. When I saw a sign to Cerreto Alpine, pointing down an interesting-looking side road to the left, I took it almost automatically. The road wound around the hillside for a couple of kilometres and then dumped me at the typical entrance to a small Italian hillside town. Everything that could be a street could also just as easily be someone’s driveway, so I went on cautiously over the cobbles until I could see a small ‘bar’ sign on the wall of a plain stone building.
Lunch proved to be excellent, although ordering it wasn’t so easy. I mean, how difficult can it be to speak Italian; Piglet was doing it fluently that very moment on the bar’s TV and even Tigger didn’t seem to have any trouble understanding and answering him.
I, on the other hand ... ah well, the daughter of the house turned out to have a smattering of English and, as a result, I actually understood what I was getting before the arrival of the saw-toothed tagliatelle with a tomato and ham sauce and the small pork cutlet, crisp on the outside and moist on the inside, covered in mushrooms and tomato. This was all topped off with an excellent espresso and a sample of the padrone’s homemade grappa (in a chianti bottle). Pity I so often find Italian bread dry and relatively flavourless; otherwise, the meal was just terrific.
I didn’t even mind being overcharged: €18 was probably about twice what the lunch should have cost, but I couldn’t bring myself to care. Served me right for not asking beforehand.
The scenery so far had been very pretty and even impressively rugged, up at the pass it’s not especially outstanding. It became quite a bit more spectacular once I was on the western side of the watershed, and the road was better as well with wider, faster corners. The GT 1000 did what Ducatis do best: it took me around the corners with the minimum of effort and the maximum of enjoyment.
You can tell the bikes are bred on these roads; the Passo della Futa, Ducati’s main “test track”, is not far to the east. The GT has the same surefootedness as the ST series bikes, which is high praise indeed, and the tyres even coped really well with the ubiquitous diesel spills. I lost the rear end once, but only for a fraction of a second.
The road tightens up again as it drops into the valley that holds Fivizzano and leads to La Spezia. Fortunately, there was no real equivalent of the other side’s air pollution here near the coast. Even La Spezia itself had only the kind of light haze you’d get in any industrial city. A couple of days later, when I returned to Bologna, there was nothing like the difference I’d noticed on the other side between the Po plain and the hills, either.
I had a bit more time for the return trip, so I took the side road over the Passo dei Carpinelli across to the S12, which connects Livorno and Modena. This turned out to be a great move, because it took me through some wonderfully rugged countryside north of the Apuan Alps. The little towns were even littler and looked even more abandoned except for the occasional 50cc two-stroke Ape howling its way up an impossible-looking slope with grandpa, two bags of cement and a wheelbarrowload of sand on board.
Here, like everywhere else, the Ducati got a lot of respect. Italians know their bikes and support their local brand — with lots of waving, anyway. Going by what I saw on the roads (away from the big cities), they don’t buy many. Of course, once you get to within Sunday ride distance of somewhere like Bologna, there are plenty of Ducatis, MVs and also Yamahas and Hondas.
Near Fornaci di Barga, the most beautiful milkbar attendant I’ve ever seen made me the worst hot chocolate I’ve ever had. She was a match for a young Sophia Loren and the chocolate was a fair imitation of Boulia mud. Ah well, one out of two ain’t bad.
The road I was heading for, the S12, had a green line all the way from where I joined it near the very pretty little riverside town of Bagni di Luca to Maranello on the outskirts of Bologna. It deserved it, too, although there was one problem: I hadn’t done my research quite thoroughly enough and had failed to pick up the fact that Abetone, where the road crosses the watershed, is a ski resort. Yep, it was cold. Fortunately, I had brought my Spyke riding suit, so except for my hands, I was all right. But I did worry a little about ice on the road. No big deal as it turned out; there were a few slippery bits in the shadows, but they were easy to identify.
I had a wonderful late lunch of cheeses and cold cuts and (finally) excellent sourdough bread near Pavullo for a ridiculously cheap €7.50 and even managed to dice with a few of the local Sunday riders heading down into Maranello.
Dipping back into the chemical soup that passes for air on the northern Italian plain was less enjoyable and, sadly, I then had to return the GT to the Ducati factory at Borgo Panigale.
But I’d had a couple of excellent lunches...
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