Tuesday, May 7, 2024 Adventures in Italy Part 6

(To start at the beginning: Adventures in Italy Part 1)

The station itself was beautiful.  Kris said that when he’d been on his tour in Milan (during which he got to see “The Last Supper,” by the way), they were told that the architecture and design of the station were fascist, having been done during Mussolini’s time in power. 

Food in our bellies and having taken care of necessities, we just wandered around and then sat for a while, waiting for the train. We boarded it 20 minutes early and it was about a 2 hour trip.  The owners of the B&B (Giovanni and Allesandra) had sent us very explicit directions for finding their place from the station and after one rabbit trail, we found the correct exit and began looking for the street: Via Borga Incrociati. Giovanni was standing right at the end of the street looking for us and seeing a couple with luggage pointing at street signs, came up to us saying, “Kris and Lynn?” He spoke English fairly well and greeted us warmly.  We followed him up the narrow street and he saw another couple appearing to be looking around. He stopped and talked to them, finding out that they were a French couple also staying at the B&B. “Enchante,” he said, switching seamlessly to French while speaking to them. Mighty impressive. He told the four of us how to use the key to the B&B and then led us up a narrow and steep flight of stairs.  Our room was on the first floor (the ground floor in Italy is called “zero” not “1”). I was immediately delighted with our quaint little room.  There are no screens on the windows, from which we deduced that there are no irritating mosquitos here. 

It seemed so charming to me to look out across way and see laundry hanging on the line and a couple women chatting through their windows. 

By the time we were ready to go find a place to eat, it was 7:30.  We took a little walk around to get our bearings and came back to a place on the corner of our street called “Antica Hostaria Pacetti” established in 1885.  We pondered the menu outside for a while, googling for words we didn’t know (most of them). When we went in we were greeted by a tall, official looking man who greeted us in Italian and then, discerning that we weren’t from around these parts, switched to English. This never fails to impress me. He seated us and since we were the only ones there at that time, lavished us with attention in the form of trying to explain the menu to us. His English was fairly good, but he still had a hard time describing certain things and there was much that was vague and incomprehensible. He was quite cheerful and gregarious and I was prepared to order anything he recommended, but he kept moving from one item to another and explaining more. Finally we settled on a pasta pesto dish and a salad for our first course – at least we thought it was a first course. 

At this point, a waiter took over, a smaller man who spoke very little English, but was nonetheless polite and accommodating of our poor Italian skills. We split the pasta and it was heavenly. I mean it!! The salad came after that (kind of a surprise, since we expected the salad first).  When we finished that, the waiter removed our plates and we assumed that menus would be returned so we could choose our main course; this is what we thought the first guy had told us and Kris confirmed it when we ordered the pasta. After about 10 minutes our waiter came back and asked about desserts. Kris explained that we needed the menus back to order a main meal, so he brought them to us. By this time it was 9:15 and we realized it would be better if we ordered a little dessert instead of a big meal. Our poor longsuffering waiter. There were about 10 dessert choices so we told him what we wanted. Even this was fraught with difficulty as he tried to explain something and we got the idea that not everything was available. He pointed to a couple items so we got those: sorbetti (a fruit ice, papaya flavored) and a pistachio ice cream with coffee-flavored sauce. We waited another 20 minutes or so for the check and finally left the place a little after 10:00. Everything is an adventure here!

Today we’ll explore Genova and you can look forward to (or dread) the same tedious amount of detail tomorrow!

Ciao!
Love,
Lynn/Mom

I’ll probably cancellare this in the mattina.

Next: Adventures in Italy Part 7