The Kindness of Strangers a lá Nancy

Buongiorno from Italy's boot heel. Speaking of heels, my entire lower half of my body hurts.

We are having a great time. Hard long day today, but every new surprise and experience is fantastic. We got our bikes this morning along with perhaps 14 other people - seems like mainly british and French    and German retirees. Quite a few couples that look about 55-65? We got acquainted with our fancy lux bikes, bike lock, helmet, repair kit, package of maps and tips. We left beautiful old Matera early and got biking on busy narrow highways leading out of town and past cow farms. Luckily pretty overcast this morning, so we didn't fry. But after the umpteenth steep hill climb, we were wrecked. 45 + miles today. And we unwantingly went without food for way too long. Then got shaky and crabby and spent. We biked hard, navigating all these weird turns on smaller rustic roads past cool deteriorating farms and fancy villas and olive tree groves and pastures. I had the map on my handlebars in this slick Velcro doodad that I liked a lot, I liked knowing every turn and Dayna would find the small arrows (stickers from the company) on certain turns on signs and she liked it like a scavenger hunt. We fantasized we were on the Amazing Race. When we saw other bikers from our "group", we'd help them find their way. It was easy to miss the unmarked turns. Our two little encounters helping these couples get back on path was nothing like the help we got in return from sweet strangers. There are sights or diversions you can independently opt to do (we chose a non-guided tour so we could do our own thing at our own pace) and everything we tried today didn't pan out. All closed. We biked down a gravel road to a private farm where we could "sample products" like bufala mozzerella and veggies and salamis, etc. As we got closer, it was obviously not inviting for visitation. Chiusa/ Closed. Many large dogs viciously became unglued, Cujo style, so scary. If not for a huge gate & fence... We turned around and passed by another farm, where two big growling , barking dogs got out of their gate and came running after us down the road. We pedaled so fast! A tiny black bunny raced alongside us excitedly :)

Back on the road. Decided to try detour #2:

We ended up in a dead town Putignano- which you had to leave the main map trail to do an optional detour, if you wanted lunch or gelato or a lil break. We'd been biking hard in the heat for maybe 2 hours at this point and were out of water and very hungry and exhausted- I was panting. We went up this insanely steep hill forever to get into this weird depressed town that was all shut down because it's Sunday and it's siesta nap time. Nothing was open, hardly no one out or even driving cars. Seemed like a ghost town of ugly high rise buildings, which is very unlike anything we've seen so far. We searched for 2 possible suggested good restaurants. Both closed. Every cute pizzeria and wine bar and gelato place, closed. Google maps kept failing us. We were shaky hungry. We thought we saw one gelato cafe open, but it was a high end patisserie with fancy cakes and weird little fancy sweets. The owner/ baker guy spoke zero English and was our guardian angel. He tried to think of an open restaurant. We all couldn't understand each other and we couldn't go on another goosechase to perhaps find another closed restaurant . He poured us an unknown milky white sweet liquid to drink. Almond milk from a glass bottle that was unlike the almond milk I drink daily. We lapped it up and he poured us more. He refilled Dayna's 2 water bottles and even apologized so kindly and graciously for not knowing English (Dayna was like, we're the fools who can't speak italian!)
We felt refreshed and ready to hit the road for the next town, all uphill about 1-2 hours away. Getting hotter outside as we get into the afternoon, and we have to backtrack to where our original trail map's detailed turns were. We got back on our bikes and looked at maps and he came outside with two tiny chilled ice cream cones dipped in dark chocolate & sprinkled with pistachio dust. The gelato under the hard chocolate shell was maybe strawberry gelato, so creamy yet seeded and we could have cried. The lil cone was like the size of 2 pinky fingers together, but it kinda saved us.
We biked for about another 18 miles , started to see the traditional 18th century Trulli houses more and more as we got closer to Alberobello. Weird whitewashed little gnome home with pointy witch hat roofs made of grey flat stones. Steep landscape. We saw bikers getting off their bikes and walking up. But for the most part, it was just me and Dayna all alone in the middle of nowhere. Which was nice :) We wave to oncoming cars and motorcycles and even some dogs and cows.

Got a little lost trying to find our hotel check-in. Locked up our bikes and picked up our bags and had to walk quite a bit further away to our own little Trulli! I'm writing from my own bed tonight. The bathroom door is a short hobbit arched wooden door. Dayna has to be extra careful not to clock her head (again.) the shower is just an attachment head above the toilet, very petite. Like my old apartment in Denmark where the entire bathroom IS the shower. We peeled off our sweaty spandex, power washed off, got dressed up nice in dresses and makeup, walked like broken people into the piazza square to find a 3 star fancy schmancy restaurant and got lost. Again. Our theme so far. I love getting lost and navigating maps, but we were pretty much at our wits end tonight and overly hungry after just having a little gelato cone and biking 45+ miles and walking all over with heavy luggage and whatnot. Thank Jesus for internet and google maps. I hated caving in and looking it up on my phone, but we were on a wrong path . And the street names change like every other block- just for fun times!
We found the swanky legendary restaurant, ready to throw down serious euros on fine dining, and they were just closing. The bearded waiter said we will find nothing open for food in the entire small town because it's Sunday and everything's over. It's like 4pm. We were more than deflated. Now not speaking, just hoofing around bumpy cobblestones in fancy shoes, we tried every bar/ cafe/ pizza window. No dice. We contemplated buying our own pasta from a vendor on the street, but then what? We kept looking and Dayna walked up to this crappy looking pizzeria that was just closing and had just rudely turned  

away a lady in front of us. The gal behind the counter was bitchyfaced and obviously done with being a service person that busy tourist summer day. We bought the last two stale, cold pieces of pizza left sitting out on display (unforch one had mushrooms and corn on it which makes Dayna gag.) we ate them cold out of the paper bag on the bench outside in our fancy outfits, not speaking, our fingers actually shaking. My eyes hurt ? My left fingertips hurt? And omgee my poor big butt. The owner or cook guy stepped outside where we were sitting and I asked him if he speaks English. No. We asked as best we could if any place has any food tonight. He said sorry, no, it's all done. We

wondered what all the other older slower bikers were gonna do for a meal tonight when they arrived to town later. He left, then came back and showed us a picture of a plate of pasta. Oreiechette , the local jam- the ear shaped pasta that I love. It's a puglian thing, big time. Originated right around here. He offered to cook for us and invited us back inside to sit. He gave us white plastic cutlery and plates and made us this family -of-five size huge serving bowl full of fresh oreiechette , fresh tomatoes, fresh salty grated cheese- not sure what kind, never seen it like that, and fresh basil and a tish of olive oil. It was better than the $$$ fine dining food we had 2 nights ago in a cool cave in Matera. And objectively, not just because we were starvin' Marvin. He didn't want us to pay, but of course we did. I hugged him, he asked us for a photograph, we tipped him extra, we had our 2nd saviour of the day.

 

Then I bought a bootleg of Primitivo red wine on the walk home and I asked the shop owner to open the bottle for me, and he did. We are now crashing out and we get up early tomorrow morning to bike to a winery in Locorotondo (Spumante samples for lunch- and guess who's glad she packed Clif bars) then to Ostuni, a port town. Water! The Adriatic coast. Supposedly not the cutest city but the seafood is tits.
Each day has been great and full of surprises. D is a great travel partner, down with everything, up to everything. She cheerily exclaimed "Buongiorno!!" To every speedy, chiseled italian cyclist we passed this morning. Caio, NJ

The Kindness of Strangers

Allora, we picked up our bikes and they gave us a 30 minute overview of our course and how to use our maps - I was surprised to find out that they actually put little yellow arrow stickers along the route on signposts. You can practically navigate the whole day just by keeping an eye out for these stickers. We still had our maps - Nancy used a turn by turn version and I had a general visual overview version- but the yellow arrows provide reassurance that we are going the right way and allow me to make turns if I get ahead of Nancy. See the small arrow on the post?

The day was warm, but actually pretty overcast until about 2 or 3 in the afternoon, so we didn't have the sun beating down on us all day. Small parts of the route were on busier roads, but overall there was very little traffic and we were on little country roads the size of bike paths at home most of the day. The countryside slowly changed from large farms, to smaller vineyards and olive trees, to more residential with small, beautiful buildings or estates. As we got closer to Alberobello, we started to see the trulli style of buildings as well.

We didn't stop in the first little town we passed - Giola del Corre - so we decided to take a little detour into the next town, Putagnano, for some lunch. After climbing a very large hill to reach the town, we realized there was not a single business open - the streets were shuttered and empty. We tried to find somewhere to eat, or at least to buy more water, after 28 miles or so of biking, my water bottles were empty (Nancy's Camelbak was still going though).

We happened to pass a little sweet smelling shop that looked open, so we stopped, hoping it was gelato. It turned out to be a pastry shop and the thought of cookies and chocolate was just not what we were looking for. The shop owner spoke no English, but we tried to ask uhim if any restaurants were open in the town. we couldn't really understand and figured we didn't want to wander around aimlessly anymore so we thanked him and started to leave. But, so sweetly and amazingly, he called us in and poured us giant glasses of cold almond milk and refilled my water bottles. It was just so nice and it was exactly the reenergizing pick me up that we needed. We got back on the main road and finished our last 16 miles in to Alberobello.

Nancy actually wrote a big email about first day - so I'm going to paste in her take on the next post  and let her get us to Alberobello -

Ciao Matera!

Allora (means "and then" - we hear this a lot), we did find our restaurant - there was a sort of ring road along the edge of the city next a deep gorge that we followed - and it was beautiful, with whitewashed cave walls and petrified mulberry roots curling out of the ceiling in places looking like coral. Most of the waiters didn't speak English, but there was one that spoke more and we tried to teach us some things and communicate with us - even running off to use a translation tool when we asked about things like petrified mulberry roots..

We ordered the local wine - Anglianco del Vulture - and Nancy order d the most amazing cheese plate we've ever seen with a giant ball on fresh burata mozzarella in the middle that was flaking apart and melted in your mouth. It was mozzarella soft you could easily spread it on bread. We ate so much cheese and bread and fresh green olive oil and sharp balsamic that we could barely eat our dinners - oops! We capped it off with some limoncello - once again closing the place down (Nancy and Dayna, always the last ones to leave!) - and headed back to our cave dwelling.

In the morning we had breakfast with our hosts in their home next door - they made us a beautiful spread of fresh mozzarella, peach juice, cherry pastries and some kind of melon that was like a giant, juicy, more firm cantaloupe. They were very sweet and didn't really speak English, but we managed to ask a few questions and then the woman typed some recommendations for our day on Matera into a translation program on her computer.

On her recommendation, we walked to the main cathedral - the Duomo - and found it after only maybe one or two dead ends. It was under construction, but we visited a multimedia presentation at Casa Noha next door that showed the history of Matera and development of the site as a protected UNESCO heritage site. Matera was a site of great poverty and shame for Italy with huge families living in the caves without sanitation until well into the 1950s. The infant mortality rate was nearly 50%. Some well-meaning, but ultimately failed, socialist programs were enacted to move all the people out and the city was actually largely abandoned until the 1990s. You can still see many of the sassi that are boarded up, but it is being revived and people were proud to tell us that in 2019, Matera will be called out as a cultural example in Europe.

After this fascinating review of the city, we headed down to another church on the other side of the sassi - Chiesa San Pietro. From that church, you can see the ravine that we noticed the previous night, which is pockmarked with super primitive caves that no one lives in. You can kind of get a sense of what the landscape naturally is and how the sassi came to be. Next to this church, there was another attraction (Casa Grotto) that recreated some of the old cave life and showed how people lived before the city was abandoned. The cave would have had a little area carved out for their farm animals and typically all slept in one room.

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We then walked further up the road and found a great lunch place Nancy had heard about. It was a busy, fancy white table cloth kind of place, but we were seated by the owner and we ordered some
local rosè and a mixed plate of their appetizers - panzanella salad, potato and spicy sausage purée capped with the crunchy local peppers (crusco- my favorite - we tried to find a big bag of them -they look like spicy hot peppers, but they are dried so they are almost like a potato chip with a mild peppery tang), fresh warm mozz and ricotta - we stuffed ourselves and headed over to check in to our first hotel on our bike trip agenda.

The Locanda do San Martino was just a few doors down from our BnB (thank god or we could have ended up wandering all day with our luggage). We checked in only to find they also have a thermal pool in the caves under the hotel along with a sauna and steam room! Our room was actually off the courtyard with a separate entrance - very spacious and cool.We relaxed for a bit and then headed down to the pools for some hydro massage therapy - heaven!! Afterwards, we loaded up bananagrams and headed to a bar to have some aperitifs and play - Nancy beat me three times, but I won the first Scrabble game with a comeback late in the game (293-277).

We had an unexceptional dinner at Nadí where they cooked my lamb to oblivion and Nancy mimed sawing and cutting the tough meat so that she could get me a steak knife rather than watching me saw away at it with the butter knife provided. Oh well, I wasn't really hungry anyway. We had one more night cap at a little wine bar (we are biking 44 miles the next day- what's one more class of wine!) and then went to bed.

We picked up our bikes the next morning - luckily we had visited the garage the day before so we could avoid getting lost in the morning, only to take a wrong turn and end up somewhere else. We still found it relatively quickly after a lovely breakfast spread at the hotel. Nancy found some yogurt that appeared to be sweet corn flavored based on the picture on the label, but we didn't try it. Hard boiled eggs and some bread and ham would prove to be my only meal of the day - spoiler alert - traveling in Italy on a Sunday does not offer a lot of food options.

Lost in Matera

After a little thunderstorm delay out of Rome, we made it to Bari and got on the train to Matera. The airports and trains have been so wonderful - clean, modern, efficient, so easy to navigate. We had an amazing lunch in Rome of fresh pasta and chicken grilled to order. The Bari train station was right in the airport - the ticket agents were all so helpful, from the women we bought tickets from, to the conductor teasing Nancy for momentarily losing her ticket to the guys and our transfer station helping us figure out how to punch the time on our tickets. My rugged Italian and their pretty decent English gets us through. We've been meeting people with a lot less English than in Naples and it is so fun to piece together communication.

We arrived at the Matera train station and our Air BnB appeared to be only 0.6 miles from the station so we decided to hoof it. All went well until we turned off the street from the station and we entered the labyrinth of Matera. As background, Matera is the oldest inhabited city in Italy - 7,000 years old. It's built into a mountain of caves and tunnels. I likened it to an MC Escher painting. iPhone directions quickly became useless.

We barreled by a group of teenagers only to find ourselves at our first (of many) dead ends that the iPhone directed us to:

We asked the kids if they knew where we should go and they started pointing all different directions, giggling at each other for speaking English and generally being about as helpful as a group of 15 years olds can be. Our BnB is a cave that was actually a former convent, so I told Nancy to just start following some nuns:

That didn't work either. Nancy finally found a passageway we had missed and we found our way to our street and our gorgeous apartment. It was about 8:30 and we arrived to our cave BnB:

We decided to head out for dinner to a place Nancy read about and had meticulously mapped ahead of time. She had written out turn by turn directions that lasted for exactly one turn before we were lost. We wandered around following our gut which led us through restaurants, up and down stairs to lots of dead ends - including helpful signs like this:

To be continued...

Napoli in Pictures

Gelato stop número uno!!

Pulcinella - lots of these masks and art featuring this character - people rub the nose for luck

Pizza número uno - Pizzeria Sorbillo - margheria con Bufalo mozzarella

Gratuitous giant knocker shot - we might have been a little tipsy at this moment

Pizzeria Starita - margherita con prosciutto

so hard to capture the feeling of the narrow streets and balconies and always the laundry!

Patisserie for breakfast - so many pastries, so little time

Typical Napoli - tiny alley, speeding scooter, carrying some giant parcel

Religious shrines on many corners

Reunited and it feels so good!!

We found each other in Rome and made our connection to Naples without any problems. We were tired when we got to Naples - Nancy hadn't slept at all on the plane - but we decided to go out into the hot afternoon sun and have some pizza and explore a bit. We walked to Pizzeria Sorbillo for our first Napolitano pizza experience - fab pizza, not so fab casa vino - but first, gelato!! Giant scoops of strawberry and coffee flavored frozen delicious purchased on Via Toledo near our hotel.

After we put in our names for the  45 minute wait at Pizza Sorbillo, we checked out a street (Via San Gregorio Armeno) that we heard about on the plane that was supposed to have a huge display of nativity scenes. We thought these were going to be large scale window displays with moving baby Jesuses or something, but it turned out to be a street full of touristy key chains and statues - maybe there were a few small nativities, but it was not what we expected (though that didn't stop us from buying some small gifts - Nancy bartered with the woman and would not back down - no getting taken advantage of on this trip!).

After our first Napolitano pizza (dreamy!), we walked down to the water to check out a castle and see the coastline, but the seering heat and steamy blacktop turned us around. We stopped for a beverage and then headed back to our cool, tiny room for a nap. We slept until 10pm and got up to head back out for - wait for it -- more pizza!!

After a wrong turn and some wandering in Naples at night, we found Starita Pizzeria, famous for fried pizza (pizza fritta) and fried zucchini flowers - sadly we arrived too late for zucchini flowers (è  basta!), but we got a table in the back of the packed at midnight ristorante.

Sidenote - we heard so many warnings about crime in Naples and how ugly/dirty the city is and I have to say people couldn't be more wrong. I'm sure there are dangerous parts, but we found the centre area so welcoming - it was cool to see people's tiny apartments right on the busy main streets. The tiny winding, narrow roads with scooters parked everywhere and fish sellers with buckets of seafood, the ancient buildings with fresh laundry hanging from every balcony, the graffiti and street art and religious shrines - everything just so perfectly Italian.

I love the music of the Italian language, but even though I've been taking online lessons from the Duolingo app, I'm not exactly speaking in full sentences. We met a great family at Starita Pizzeria that tried communicating with us - correcting our atrocious pronunciations of words like Puglia, Capri and bicyclette - we at least know how to say pizza (and vino). The grappa drinking father convinced Nancy to sing Oh Sole Mio with him - I think there's a video of it somewhere - and overall they were so sweet and smiley and excited that we were traveling all over their country.

We were too late to take the Metro back to our hotel, so we walked back and stopped for our first really good glass of vino - Barbera? - and finally got back to our hotel around 3am - love that jet lag!

After a night filled with dreams of pizza (Nancy literally talked in her sleep about having another slice and how she will still fit in her seat on the plane - ha!), we visited our dinner friends recommended breakfast (colazione) place near our hotel - a fancy patisserie with beautiful domed ceilings and tiny cups of caffé. We tried the babà (rum soaked mushroom shaped pastry), rustico (ricotta stuffed pastry) and a small pizza margheria (pizza for every meal - check!). We enjoyed the cool morning weather to walk around a bit more and then headed back to the airport for our flight to Bari via Roma where we will take a train to Matera. After some much needed protein in Roma we are standing delayed waiting for our next flight - Napoli pics to come in a separate post (pics are turning out to be difficult to load here). Ciao!!
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Upgrade!!

International upgrade - it's like Christmas in September up in here!!

(be prepared for a lot of double exclamation points over the next few weeks!!)

Holy crap!! It's like I have my own apartment on the way to Rome!! Grazie Alitalia!!