Slow food, fast bikes, leaning towers and climbing cliffs

Since our mechanical misadventures when we first arrived in Italy, we have finally been able to start exploring.

We headed up the coast and inland to a lovely Agri-turismo farm.

Agri-turismo is a system of accredited farm-stay holidays. With some you can help out around the place, others require less investment from you. Often home produced and cooked food is on offer.  It is a great way for small scale farmers – often promoting organic farming – to make some extra money, and for us to get a better insight into what it takes to feed us all.

We camped at Ca’ du Chittu in Carro, Liguria. When we arrived we were greeted like old friends by husband and wife team Ennio and Donatella and their son Mattia.

 

Although they hadn’t yet opened their camping ground for the season, they let us pitch next to the house and then use the indoor facilities.

We also availed ourselves of Donatella’s home cooking and were delighted to find that the family are followers of the Slow Food movement. Slow Food is all about growing quality, without chemicals and with attention to the whole growing, harvesting and distribution cycle, not just the profit from the end product.

 

Our four course dinner was a zero-kilometer meal, having all been raised, plucked, picked and harvested from their own land. Bellisimo!

While we were there, we managed to hook up with fellow travellers Pete and Frances – friends of Geoff’s who have been riding their motorbike from Australia for the last eighteen months, through Asia and the Pacific.

It was great to swap stories and experiences over another home-cooked feast.

Carro is close to Cinque Terre and many of you had urged us to go there. It is a series of five coastal towns, clinging to the rocky cliffs that run from the Apennine mountain range and drop straight into the sea.

Cars are banned in Cinque Terre – but they would be pointless anyway in these steeply stepped and terraced towns.

A train runs along the coast and through the middle of all five, but the local ferry is the nicest way to see the best of the scenery.

 

When we arrived in Cinque Terre it was bathed in sunshine and glowing with Mediterranean colours.

 

It is hard to imagine that a devastating landslide swamped the towns, killing eleven people, only three years ago.

 

The famously precarious coastal walk is still closed as a result.

 

But locals seem defiant, and after generations battled just to carve a life out of these rocks, it’s not surprising they are determined to rebuild and go on.

 

From coastal paths and rural idylls, we hit the road again and headed to Bologna, a classy place with old world charm, mile upon mile of porticoed avenues and some lovely laid back piazzas.

 

Bologna is also home of the Ducati motorbike. So of course, we promenaded the factory floor as well.

 

If you work for Ducati, you get a 35% discount on your bike. Your bike gets its own parking spot out front.

 

If you don’t work for Ducati and you don’t have one of their motorbikes, you get to peer through the railings.

 

The latest model is a Diavel – a beast of a bike, but not a Monster (Google this joke if you don’t get it!) that looks good in red and black. Father Christmas, take note.

Like us, you may well have thought that there is only one leaning tower of note in Italy. But like us, you would be wrong. The symbol of Bologna is not one, but two leaning towers and they have an excellent angle to their dangle.

While Bologna might have numerical supremacy, Pisa still holds the crooked crown of leaning towers. The tower began to keel within three years of the start of construction and before they had barely got four stories up.

It is amazing that the builders who produced such solid beauty in the cathedral could make such a hash of the tower.

 

Many corrections have been attempted and now, although it is clearly off kilter still, it has been declared to be safe for the next few hundred years.

 

Of course it would be a tourist tragedy if they fixed the tilt entirely. Where would our comedy photos come from then?

 

 

 

 

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