la pietra di Lecce

// The stone of Lecce
Near Lecce, there are quarries for stone that has the curious quality of being soft when taken from the ground, before gradually hardening in the heat. This made it perfect for carving the town's many facades and, combined with its location near the coast, this has secured Lecce's popularity with Italian tourists. Foreigners are rare here, even in July.

In this city of pale stone, the heat waves settle into the ground by day and wend their way over your feet, around your calves, seducitvely warming you well into the night. When the sun shines, a cool breeze chases the heat through the many piazzas and along the blazing white streets. The sun strives to burn you even in the shade, bouncing off the facades of the buildings that line every piazza.

Leccese architecture is frothy, overstated glory in the name of decadent decoration. One architect in particular is responsible for most of the exaggerated 'flair', his name was Zingalo but they called him 'Lo Zingarello' ‑ the gypsy ‑ for he tended to wander between various projects. Zingarello's facades and interiors are a lesson in exuberance. Showing a clear disdain for moderation, he sculpted the faces of cherubs spouting from the petals of flowers that adorn the forehead of other cherubs. Horses, foxes, men twist and twirl around each other with such hedonistic abandon that one wonders whether this church was built to house the cult of Bacchus, not Jesus. It's so overdone it's almost sinful.

Not to be confused with Lucca in the north, Lecce is in Puglia in Italy's south. Her inhabitants are friendly, her tourists are mostly Italian, her food is cheap and her beauty is like an aged Italian woman who wears too much lipstick.

And now that it's 6pm, my siesta is over and it's time to venture back out into the gentle caress of Lecce's lurking heat waves.

questo ho imparato

// this, I have learned

• If you can't fix it with duct tape; you can fix it with Betadine.
• If you want an Italian guy to come onto you, learn Italian and speak it with a cute accent, stumbling over your 'r's when you say 'tre'.
• Apparently I look German, Russian, Czech and/or Swedish, but definitely not Australian. It's the pale skin that throws them.
• I speak Italian with a German accent.
• If you want a waiter to stop being an asshole, ask him/her how to say something in their native language; suddenly they see you as an intelligent, thoughful, cultured person instead of a tourist.
• The best travel clothing in the world is made of New Zealand wool by Icebreaker.
• The best walking shoes in the world come from Singapore and cost about 7 dollars.
• The ugliest jewellery in the world is in Italy.
• People will line up for two hours at the Hard Rock cafe, rather than order a pasta dish at the good Italian restaurant next door.
• The French are not that rude.
• The English and the Italians are.
• You don't need a guide book to tell you how to get there, you need it to help you decide where to go.
• Even if you end up buying cat food instead of tuna, supermakets are pretty much the same anywhere and therefore are a great cure for homesickness.
• Siestas rule.
• All the beaches in Europe are pretty shit. Even if you think you have found a nice one, you will change your mind when the fifth plastic bag floats gaily past you and the umbrella man charges you 8 euro for some shade.
• Ozzie Osborne has brought a new song out, and he really shouldn't have.

che cazzo

// what the f...

The reason the bread in Italy tastes like crap is that there was once a shortage of salt, so they made bread without salt. Then, when salt became readily available again, they just kept making bread the same way, saltless and tasteless. This may be an insight into why Italy is such a 'casino' (a mess) ‑ they don't bother changing things for the better, as though it doesn't occur to them that making an improvement might be...well... an improvement.

sono ancora qui

// i'm still here

I'm in Rome, my last day. Tomorrow I hit up Lecce and then a little town called Matera. Then north to go white water rafting and a balloon ride in the Alps. Annndd...yeah, that's about it.

Have written things for this blog but they are on my phone and I forgot the cable to transfer it across, so you'll have to wait to hear about the rubbish heaps in Naples. the views in Capri, the friendly people in Montepulciano and the heat in Rome.

Missing you all and hope you are all well and happy and still remember me!

mi piace roma

// I like Rome
Fontana Trevi, Piazza Spagna, Vittorio Emmanuele, Piazza del Popolo, Santa Maria Maggiore, Pantheon, Piazza Navona, Quattro Fontane, Colosseo; Rome is monument after piazza after monument. Everyone I've met here has been here for a whirlwind three days, seeing the sights and running around in the heat, rushing from one must‑see to the next. It's an insult to the city, in fact it's an insult to any city but especially to Rome.

My favourite hours here have been spent wandering the streets at night (don't worry mum there are always people staying in the hostel who come with me). The Trastevere quarter is especially charming at night, with bars and shops lining the Fiume Tevere (the river that runs through Rome) and a little island where you can sit on cushions, sip a spritz and marvel at the beauty of Italian men. Sadly it's only the old ones who ask me out, upon my polite refusal each of them has said "well, I am Roman, it is in my blood to try. Buona sera, bella."

In a city as ancient as Rome there are of course many idiosyncrasies and it's these that I have been seeking out. I've been rewarded with many little discoveries, such as the coolest shoe shop in the known universe tucked away in Trastevere. I've also come across 17 of the 666 known Madonna and Child mini ‑ sculptures (there would be a word for them but I don't know it) adorning the street corners throughout Rome. I was delighted to stumble across a pyramid a little south of the centre on my way to a whole suburb made up of thousands of ancient broken pots. There's even a Necromancer's Magic Doorway just near my hostel. The inscriptions lining it are the remnants of the notes written by a necromancer who fled mysteriously sometime before the 9th century. A marquis had been funding his research, and after the experts of the time were unable to translate the Latin inscriptions, the marquis had them carved into a doorway in the hopes that someday a passerby might be able to translate them. Indeed, they were eventually translated, but not until 1963, several centuries too late.

The Cappucin Monks are an old favourite that I returned to; monks who celebrated death as merely the portal to the next life, and used each other's bones to decorate their chapels. You come face to face with Death as he should be; grinning at you from between a pelvis, finger bones and femoras making up his scythe and scales. He reminds you that "what you are now, we once were and what we are now, you will be".

Un piccolo giro ‑ a quick trip ‑ around the ruins of Rome leads one to marvel at how the seat of ancient civilisation has evolved to become the centre of such a chaotic nation. Nevertheless, Rome is everything it should be and more, and even though I didn't bother to throw a coin into the Trevi Fountain, I know I'll be back.

napoli crapoli

"The city of Naples is resplendent with her crystal clear waters, the Isle of Capri winking from across the bay, the sparkling..." I lower the little pocket guide book I'm reading and stare dubiously across the Piazza, past the by now infamous piles of rubbish and across to the brown waters of the bay, crowded with people and cruise ships. Due to a mixture of problems involving the government and the Camorra (the local mafia) Naples has been steadily drowning in rubbish since 2004. The problem escalated recently and the EU stepped in, but the city is still overrun with waste which the citizens have been known to burn on the streets. Naples is chaos, crime, grime, and a few (ugly) monuments here and there.

If you wrench your mindset around to that of a wide‑eyed, excited, open minded traveller, who doesn't hail from one of the world's cleanest cities, you can detect an undercurrent of excitement beating steadily beneath the dirty, smelly, winding streets. One night I met up with Stu (college Stu for those in the know) and we watched Italy beat France in the soccer, with terrifyingly loud fireworks going off a few metres away every time Italy scored a goal. One firework in particular was reminiscent of WWII, but all it did was make noise ‑ no pretty lights! It's almost as though Naples takes for granted that its beauty has been touted for centuries (the guide books quote Goethe, Napoleon and the likes ‑ anybody who visited more than 50 years ago) and feels it's done its job; pretty is so passè.

However ugly the city may be, it charmed me in a strange, I'll probably never bother to return but I'm glad I came, sort of way. After all, Napoli brought us pizza, it's the gateway to Pompei, Erculano and various other sites of archaeological importance, it has some of the best museums in the world and the traffic is crazy enough that it's a tourist attraction in itself (best seen from the safety of your hotel balcony). Cars whizz in behind ambulances to get a free ride through the traffic, motorcycles zip along the footpaths, horns beep at each constantly, the modern music of an ancient town.

Food, ruins, friendly waiters and fireworks aside, the city left me underwhelmed. Arriving in the wide, clean(er), marble streets of Rome after three days fruitlessly searching for anything beautiful in Naples was a true relief.

forse non sono normale

// maybe i'm not normal

Am I a failure at culture for comparing the Cinque Terre to Dunsborough, and thinking that the waters at Dunsborough are a little cleaner, the beaches nicer, and the tourists refreshingly less ignorant?

In truth, it really is beautiful here, not to mention miraculous that it exists at all. Dry stone walls, hundreds of years old, scale the steep hillsides, supporting wild flowers, vineyards, and houses. Considering how much effort it takes just to walk along the established pathways, it's incredible to think that somebody once built all of it. The walls have been calculated to be at least equal to the length of the great wall of China.Even today the hills are so steep and the paths so narrow that people carry their groceries up by hand, with the occasional assistance of a sort of train style elevator contraption that runs up to a certain point.

For mum and I, the main beauty of the hills and the towns clinging to them lies in the way they show people's defiance in the face of the impossible. Just to get to our room from the street it's 41 steps! Of course, far from being a mere triumph of engineering, the terraced rails are pretty too, especially covered as they were today with wild flowers. Mum was annoyed to see so many flowers growing wild that refuse to take root in her garden at home.

We also had a little excitement on our first day. After finding a room and settling in, we went for a wander with some wine and olives and sat on the pier, watching tourists walk past with their walking stick/ski pole things (honestly, if you need those on the bloody jetty I really don't think you should tackle the trail tomorrow). We were treated to a spectacle when a bunch of cops suddenly appeared to greet a boat with Danny Devito on it! Ok, so it wasn't Danny, it was actually the minister of work according to a nearby Italian guy, but he was certainly short enough to be Danny. He thanked everyone profusely and he and his standard issue token blonde girlfriend posed for a few pasted smile photos before wandering off to do whatever, and returning half an hour later. The locals got a kick out of it and made jokes about short men,

It's a lovely place with plenty of people to watch and some really pretty places to see. Still, if you've been to Dunsborough, don't expect the tiny black beaches, overpriced souvenirs and the pale blue ocean to impress you all that much.

Of the five lands we are in Vernazza, which we think is the most picturesque, the perfect place for a picturesque meal on the beach, freezing our butts off and telling ourselves that we are more cultured because of it. At least we don't have hiking poles.

i canali e i muscoli

// the canals and the muscles

After two days of treating our taste buds to the flavours of Bologna, we moved on to Venice.
Venice wears its fame with a humble grace. The canals, the tiny streets, the masses and masses of tourists, the bronze and delightfully muscled arms of the gondoliers; the town is quietly charming.

As we rambled across the little bridges, following the signs that point in every direction to St Mark's square, I tried to pretend to mum that the place I was casually drawing her towards wasn't really anything that great. When we got to the square, she said something like wow and I was satisfied. The last time I was here, the town flooded in the afternoon (a daily occurrence at certain times of the year) so it was a far more crowded square that the one I had experienced before.

Saint Mark's square is the main feature of Venice, big and full of people and pigeons and cafes, and adorned with a duomo that stops you in your tracks. At one end of the square, sits the giant church like a jewel, a trail of people lining up for the privilege of peering inside. The building is supported by pillars of marble in different colours and patterns from purple to green. Paintings of various scenes stare down at you from the ceiling above and every tiny space on the rooftop is proudly occupied by a gargoyle or a statue or a carving, as though a swarm of little magical creatures stormed the church and each claimed their own little spot hundreds of years ago.

You walk around in awe, hoping a pigeon doesn't drop something distasteful into your open mouth, and you take a billion photos that will never do it justice, before you turn to be met with the sight of the clock tower, the sea, the people, the white stone, the overwhelming beauty and madness, and you think 'jesus, I need a drink' so you head for the nearest bar.

Venice is one of the few places in the world that can't be ruined by an over-abundance of tourists. The prices are high but you're ON a high (what exactly is in those canals anyway?) so you pay them without grumbling. You wander around, looking at the masks, glass, lace and leather for which Venice and her surrounds are famous, and you try to get lost. Everyone says it's easy to get lost but the town is only about three metres square and every steet leads to the Grand Canal so really, it's pretty hard to lose your way, but you do stumble across some pretty special things in the process.

(Side note: we ducked into a museum containing dresses and other items made by a single woman, from paper. Impossible to believe, her skill and patience were incredible. One of the best exhibitions I have ever seen.)

The whole place is indescribably impressive so I'll leave it at that.

lockdown!

My last night in Bologna, I was a little sad to be leaving the city and my friends there. After spending the day showing mum the sights of "my" city, I was in the hotel room throwing on the least stinky clothes I could find, ready to have dinner with Zoe before we headed out for drinks.

A few hours later, we left the cool (cheap) little place on a cool (slightly dodgy) little street and made the trek across the city, past the works of our favourite local graf artist, past the admiring glances of Italian men, around the dog turds and towards the bar that we both pretended we were 'so over', but had to admit we'd had some fun in. We were met on the street by a girl handing out 'two for one' drink cards which we happily pocketed before we headed inside. A smiling bundle of joy, our friend Ari (who featured in the drunken Friday adventures of week two) found us and brought us to the table where other friends awaited.

The night was a mixture of Italian and English, with some French and German on the side. We drank, we talked, we laughed at our (er..my) Italian mistakes, we drank some more. The drinks were cheap, the bartender friendly, and the company interesting. I got into some sort of debate with an American guy, which ended when we realised we both agreed, at which point we went on to the far more important topic of whether we should drink a spritz or a beer next. Finally, 2am and it was time for the bar to shut down.

Not quite tearful goodbyes, but sad nonetheless. Hugs and best wishes, write to me and all the rest, suddenly I realised Ari was still in the bar and it was about to close. I dashed inside to grab her for a hug, and suddenly the garage style doors slammed down. "Looks like you're staying a little longer" someone murmered, "have a beer, on the house". Friendly barman turned kidnapper, but when he's footing the bill who's complaining! I turned to check that Zoe was still there and we settled in for the night, beers in hand, our own private party of twelve.

4am and I was worried that mum would be worried (she was) so I announced that I was leaving. End of party, everyone suddenly realised it was late and they had school the next day, or they were tired, or maybe the owner had run out of beer. More goodbyes in hushed 'don't wake the neighbours' tones, a few last minute snaps, and a walk along memory lane to the tailor's street, a grumpy doorman and a relieved mother. 2 hours of sleep, packing in a hurry, onto the train to Venice.

If you're ever in Bologna, hit up the Lime Bar on Via Zamboni, you might just be in for one of the cooler nights of your life.