To cross the border from Slovenia to Italy, there’s an obscure link between Villa Opicina, a hill town just inside Italy and Trieste, the main border city with connections to the rest of the country. It’s a cute little tram which works its way up and down the steep hillside and is a fun way to make the connection. The carriages date back to the early 1900s and a few of them were even onsold to San Fransisco to be part of the street car network there.
The first part of the train ride from from Trieste to Milan to runs along the Adriatic Coast and is gorgeous, before it heads across the Lombardy plain with deat flat fields and windbreak rows of Poplars interspersed with the bleak concrete agglomerations of Italian industry.
Milan is the home of this year’s EXPO wqhich seemed like a good way to spend a rainy day. The theme of this Expo is [check] food and culture. The experience was a bit like a trip to the Royal Easter Show on steroids, with about half the countries in the world as well as each of the regions of Italy having a pavilion where they spruiked their wares, trying to outdo each other in architecture and enthusiasm. Just like the Easter show, there were queues – queues to enter, queues for food, queues for the toilets. I’ll ever know if there was a correlation between length of queue at a food outlet versus quality as I made the choice early on that I’d only choose places with a short wait. What I can say is the artisan beer I has from Birra Moretti was great, and the cheeseburger from the Dutch pavillion was, ahem, interesting. Despite the queues, the whole place had an air of fun and excitement rather than aggression and exhaustion.
Having been to Milan before and visted some of the more famous attractions, I was happy to follow my nose wandering the streets this time. It’s a great place for doing that with lots of parks, cafes and squares, along with a series of canals which were created in part to transport the marble used to create Milan’s massive Duomo cathedral. I capped of my last night there with dinner at a local restarant of caponata, an eggplant olive and tomato vegetable dish, handmade tortellini stuffed with pear and padano cheese, and a slow cooked pork main served thin sliced and cold. What was common to all these dishes was how subtle the flavours were in them. Although all the ingredients were fairly basic, they really combined them well with delicate use of herbs seasoning and olive oil. Yummo!
I stopped at Turin between leaving Milan and arriving at Genoa. If Milan is planned according to mediaeval random goat tracks, Turin is renaissance structure and order. There’s a definite rigour to the street grid here, and the main streets are boulevards with avenues and run the length of the city providing a structure on which the rest of the place is hung. Buildings are invariably colonnaded, giving shade and shelter as well as a certain character the place. Some of the colonnades even continue across the streets which they cross with traffic having to squeeze through the arches. The River Po hems in Turin on one side, separating the flat centre from the hills which surround it. South of the centre is the massive former FIAT factory, an early 20th century cool concrete and glass edifice which has since been repurposed but still reads as an imprtant part of Italy’s motoring heritage.
Genova is different again, pressed into the steep hills on the mediterranean coast. The street layout here is really an exercise in the taking of any available opportunity with ramps, stairs, switchbacks and even lifts here inserted whereever they can to deal with the steep changes in grade. Occasaionally a ‘corso’ will run along a contour providing a break in the schizoid layout. These corsos also provide a unique structure in that they run between sharp ridges and valleys of the hillsides – at each concave turn there is a small square with a park and few shops. At each convex turn there is a lookout.
Genova is quite close to the Cinque Terre National Park, series of villages clinging to the cliffs in between which an intricate series of trails have been incised to allow the land to be farmed. It’s named after the five most famous of the villages which are situated on the coast. I set out to do the hike between the five villages, made harder by the fact that the easiest part, the eastern coastal section was closed due to landslides, forcing walkers to go up into the hills to make the traversal. I was wrecked by the end of a long day but it was worth it to see this part of the world.