[NOTE: I encourage you to click on the links in this journal as you read them - they will pop up new windows appropriately without getting too cluttered. Try it!]
Here it is the end of May and I’ve only been out of the country once so far this year. Time for another trip and another journal. I have almost 50 countries under my belt, and I hope to hit that number this year, but in the meantime the rain in New York makes me think of sunny Italy. Let’s go.
First, let’s clear up a big misconception about Italy. Most maps of Italy show the country vertically, with the “boot” standing up. Most people think of Milan in the North and Taranto in the South. Right? But that’s only because it saves paper and you can make the map bigger if you orient it vertically. In fact, the line from Milan to Taranto lays on its side more than it stands up. So even though we speak of Northern Italy, we really mean West-by-Northwest Italy. Check it out:
Trentino
Destination Trentino: the Italian Alps. Naturally, the best way to get there is to fly to Milan and then take a train, no? No. I’m headed for the hills, not the plains. The best way to go is to fly to Munich, walk around town for an hour or so, then take a train south. The train goes through Austria, where I had two hours to explore Innsbruck, a charming mountain village that struck me as a great place to get away from it all.
Click on the image and it will pop up the photo album in a new window so you can see both side-by-side.
Two hours later, I caught the next train and continued through breathtaking Brenner Pass, over the top of the Alps, and down to Trento, known in English as Trent.
Trent was part of Austria until 1919, when Italy reclaimed the mountainous region as the Austro-Hungarian Empire disintegrated. It’s a charming medieval village surrounded by small industry. The people here are practical, unpretentious, and unstylish.
I met my friend Karina in Trento. Our goal was to spend the weekend exploring the mountains, the highlight of which was a visit to the Val di Genova – one of the few valleys left untouched by development. It’s a beautiful river-cut valley with four waterfalls and lush greenery and animals all over the place. Then she took me to a place I never would have found on my own – the Santuario de San Romedio. It’s a remote alpine monastery that has two brown bears living in a pen. The monastery closes at 6pm, but we arrived at 6:10 and the very nice old monk who lived there said he had waited for us to see the place before he closed the doors.
I’m generally proud of my sense of direction. When in Trento, which has a typical medieval layout (little streets going every which way), I was quite good at getting around. Karina came to rely on me to know which way to go, even though I’d only been there a day. One evening we parked and she started walking in the wrong direction. I told her I thought that my hotel was the opposite way. We asked some drunk guys hanging out near a tavern and sure enough, I was right. We entered the main square, where I immediately turned left. Karina asked whether my hotel wasn’t to the right. I looked at her as though she were 3 years old and said, “I’ll handle the directions, okay?” She shrugged and followed me. As soon as I took 3 more steps I realized she was right. This is one difference between men and women – men deal with directions so they can be right; women deal with directions so they can get somewhere.
After a lovely weekend in Trentino, I took the train north to Bolzano, the capital of the Alto Adige (Sudtyrol) province, more Austrian than Italian. People here speak mostly German, and the food is 60% German. Bolzano is cleaner and more efficiently run than Trento, and the shops are more upscale and sophisticated.
The amazing thing about Bolzano is that almost everyone has a bad haircut. For some reason, the majority of people here between 15 and 50 years old have two-tone hair. It’s like the hair colorists use the town as a testing ground. I got the impression that most of the women were wearing bad wigs from Halloween stores.
I stayed at a lovely small luxury/business hotel called the Greif, right on the town square. The selling point was an in-room laptop and high-speed Internet connection. Unfortunately, I couldn’t figure out how to get an @ sign on the keyboard, so I resorted to finding one online and then cutting-and-pasting it to send email messages to friends.
The next day I took a bus north into the heart of the Sudtyrol, the Val Gardena. Situated in the Dolomites, this wide glacier-cut valley is home to some interesting languages and dialects. In my last journal I wrote about Germanic languages. Today I’d like to break down the Latin languages.
The Latin-Based Languages
The primary Romance languages derived from Latin are: 1 French (including Occitan), 2 Italian (including Sicilian), 3 Portuguese, 4 Spanish (including Catalan and Valencian), and 5 one other major Romance language. Can you name it?
Europe is also home to several non-Latin languages, like Basque and Hungarian – Indo-European languages on their own separate branches of the tree. But a few languages developed from Latin independently of the “Big Five” – these languages survive today because they are isolated geographically from the main Romance-speaking areas. Galician, Corsican, and Asturian are examples. And a group known as Rhaeto-Latin languages have remained throughout the centuries because their speakers live in remote Alpine valleys with few visitors. The Rhaeto-Latin languages divide into three groups:
Friulian is spoken by about 500,000 people living in Italy’s Veneto district north of Venice and close to the Austrian and Slovenian borders.
Romansh is found in the Engadin Valley of Switzerland (center: St Moritz) and is that country’s fourth official language. Romansh has five dialects (Vallader, Puter, Surmiran, Sutsilvan and Sursilvan) spoken by a total of 50,000 people – less than 1% of Switzerland’s population.
About 30,000 people speak Ladin, which is divided into five dialects for five valleys in the high Alps just south of Austria. One of those valleys is the Val Gardena, where I stayed.
The Climb
My guide, Adam, was a Ladin speaker. Soon after I arrived in the town of Ortisei (also known as Saint Ulrich), I found him in his mountan-guide office across the street from my fantastic hotel Adler (means “eagle”). I had brought my climbing shoes and wanted to get vertical in the Dolomites. Adam showed me several routes. We chose the First Tower of the Sella group.
If you haven’t followed along with the online pictorial, now’s a good time to go see the photo of me and Adam and our route up the rocks:
The tower is about 600 feet high, with about a 90-degree pitch, which means fairly easy climbing. As it was my first outdoor climb in 23 years, we chose a route that had a few hard spots but was not too challenging overall.
Adam is a local climbing legend. He has several climbing records in the region and is going with an Italian group next year to climb Everest. He made his first ascent up El Capitan in Yosemite valley in seven hours (most people take 2-3 days). He’s one of those super-nice, easy-going local guys with an understated no-nonsense approach to life. Growing up in the vertical world of the Dolomites, a big ego is a liability.
We tied ourselves together using two skinny ropes rather than one thick one. It was chilly in the early-morning shade as Adam showed me the tricky spot on the first pitch that keeps many average climbers from attempting this route. My fingers were cold and there were no footholds, but I got past the first section and continued up. I found that my fingers could hold my weight even though they were too cold to feel the rock. I got to where he was standing and tied myself into the rock for the second pitch.
The Dolomites are carved of the same white limestone that runs from Normandy’s beaches to the Acropolis. It’s the remains of an ancient seabed, so it’s mostly powdered fish bones and shells – porous and soft compared to granite. The valleys here are carved by glaciers, so they have wide, flat floors and steep near-vertical sides. Most of the erosion is from frost action rather than moving water, so the cliffs are steep, jagged, and have occasional grottos carved out by the frost. Although the cliffs look ominous, the great feature of the Dolomites is their accessibility. Every tower, cliff, and peak here has hard, medium, and easy ways up. Nothing is unclimbable. The rock is angular, flaky, and positive – a climber’s term for easy to grab.
In the climbing gym, I tackle some fairly difficult routes, most of which are angled back over my head. I do a lot of pull-ups and keep my upper-body strong. But outside, with wind and insects and cold – I was reminded how different it was. I went slowly and carefully, listening to Adam’s instructions. My main concern was getting hurt carelessly, so I took my time and concentrated on form – keeping my hands low and looking down for foot placements rather than up for handholds. “Slow is fast,” I told Adam. “Right,” he said.
On the third pitch, I somehow lost my sunglasses. I LOVE my sunglasses. They are Maui Jim Waileas. When they’re not on my face, I wear them around my neck, from which they’ve never fallen. Until one difficult section on the third pitch. These are the lightest sunglasses in the world. They flipped off my neck and into space, immediately stabilizing themselves face-down and floating down the cliff face. Because they’re so light, they followed the air currents down the face without touching it for what seemed like minutes. We watched carefully and made a mental note of where they went out of site near our starting point. Then I went back to work. The sun coming through the clouds had warmed my hands but wasn’t so bright that I would need my glasses anyway.
The fourth pitch had some challenges. At a hard section, I tried and tried to do what Adam had done, but I couldn’t get a handhold, so I called up to Adam that I was falling. I swung on the rope a few meters to the left, found some good handholds, and made my way up. I only fell twice during the entire climb, which felt good. For Adam, of course, it was a walk in the park, another day at the office. These towers are climbed so often that there are cemented-in rings protruding from the rocks that you can tie into. Only a few times did Adam have to set a piece of portable protection (using a special device that clamps into the rocks to hold a loop through which you thread the rope).
The last pitch was easy climbing, so Adam made it a challenge by taking a more difficult route than normal, which was fun. After about two hours of climbing we were on top of what in Manhattan would be a 60-story office tower. I felt great. Energized. Not sore or fatigued at all. It was a great feeling to have lunch on top and to have been challenged but not so much that I was wiped out. It was a great first outdoor climb. If I were here for two weeks, I’d be climbing the difficult stuff with the good climbers. We looked over at the only other people climbing, and Adam told me their route was much easier than ours.
We threw some hazel nuts for the yellow-beaked blackbirds, who dived over the cliff after them. We ate a lot of chocolate and nuts and drank down Adam’s home-brewed Gatorade stuff. We had a nice rest, then the clouds decided our lunch was over and it was time to put on our rain gear. It hailed on us for a few minutes as we roped in and took off down the mountain.
We went up in six pitches and down in three. The slight rain made the rope a bit wet, which made descending harder because the wet rope heats up more as it slides through the rings you use to slow yourself as you descend. So you go even slower and it’s more work to go down. Every time we descended, we had to haul the rope down through the top ring, from which it came sailing down on top of us. This is why you are glad you’re wearing a helmet – a rope falling 120 feet whips through the air with a sound you only hear in movies. You look down and hope it continues past you.
At the bottom, we found my glasses about 20 feet from my pack. The lenses were a little scratched, but not too badly. We packed everything up and headed for the car to take our photo. Adam complimented me and made me feel like a real climber, not a city-slicker, and the whole experience was so positive that I can’t wait to come back and climb again.
Spending time with Adam, I realized something about liars. I’ve been struck by the number of people in New York who lie. They lie about all kinds of things, from their identity to how they feel to keeping their word when they say they’ll do something. Not everone lies in New York, but I believe that there are more liars per 1000 people in New York than perhaps anywhere else in the US, with the probable exception of Los Angeles.
Growing up in a town of 5,000 people, as Adam did, there is practically no way to get away with a lie of any size. People from small towns are 100% honest because they have to be. Which made me realize that the following theorem is likely to be true:
The larger the city, the higher percentage of liars.
In a large city like New York, liars can easily escape a difficult situation by moving to a different group of people in the same city (in some cases, several times a day). In medium-sized cities, liars escape by moving to another city. In a small town, there simply are no liars.
Val Gardena
In the Hotel Adler I had accidentally found the luxury spa of the region. People wandered the halls in robes and terry slippers. There was a “waterworld” of pools, saunas, and plunges. There were many kinds of massage. There was an excellent gym with sophisticated machines that I’d used the previous day. After my climb and a shower, I found one of the single-person waterbeds and lay down for a nap.
This valley sees hardly any American tourists. Tourists come mostly from Germany and a few from Italy. The French have their own Alps. (Besides, what would they drink – Italian wine? I don’t think so.) The Austrians and Swiss enjoy the same mountains. So the language you hear most often is German.
At dinner in the hotel each night, you had your place reserved for you, which meant I sat next to the same couples every night. They explained that the strict seating arrangements were to help the wait staff provide the best service. The food was fantastic. I remember one night I had a fresh cherry-tomato juice that was really special. They handled my vegan appetite with relative ease.
The day after my climb, I joined the hotel group (they had so many activities that they printed a daily Adler News) for a long hike in one of the beautiful valleys. We were about 14 people plus the guide’s big sheepdog. We climbed about 3,000 feet and walked perhaps 8 miles in six hours. We saw lots of sheep, and I spotted the day’s only chamois – a brown mountain goat. These goats are excellent climbers, able to climb straight up in places where only good human climbers can go. I’m told that eagles who see them climbing will try to buzz them and cause them to fall and become dinner.
At the Hotel Adler, which I’m sure means well, the beds were so hard that I got a four-alarm back-ache on the second night. Fortunately, I always travel with Tylenol-3 with Codeine, and I needed it after our hike.
The Best Bed
Perhaps hotels have hard mattresses that please most of the people most of the time, but I had to ask for two extra feather beds so I could sleep on top of them. At home, I have two fairly firm mattresses and each bed has a wool mattress topper. On such a platform, I sleep like a rock without waking during the night. Guests who stay with me always ask what magic caused them to sleep so well. Here’s the recipe:
Get a fairly firm mattress that doesn’t cost too much and isn’t too fancy. A cotton futon works well because it breathes. Put it on a SLAT support, not a box-spring.
Then go to www.shepherdsdream.com and order one of their wool mattress toppers. They have three types, according to your body:
Order a travel mate (thin) if you are heavy and easily compress the mattress.
Order a snuggle mate if you are light and bony and need cushion to sink into, or if your mattress is really firm.
Order a David Siegel Special (which is in between the two) if you’re normal. They’ll make it for you.
The mattress topper is where you want to put your money. It’s good to keep it aired out and turn it often. Do this and you’ll sleep like a rock too. When you travel, simply get extra blankets to sleep on when you encounter a hard bed.
The Zipline and the Kids
The last day I was there, I went for a hike in the morning. I passed some children playing in an alpine playground. One of the apparatuses was a platform with a zip-line that the kids could slide down. It was a stainless cable with a poma-lift seat attached to a pole and a pulley at the top. You pull the seat up to the top platform, get on, and – zing! – you swing down the line about 60 feet to a gentle stop. A girl of about 5 was riding it, but a few kids were too small and wanted to ride, too. The babysitters were busy, so I hopped up and took control, making good use of my fictional years as an amusement-park-ride operator. I hauled the seat up, put the small kids on, and instructed them in my best German to keep their legs tight around the pole, and – whoosh! – off they went, screaming and giggling. I did this until everyone had taken a couple of turns and then said goodbye.
Querciabella
On to Florence, city of tourists. I transferred to a bus that whisked me south into the heart of the Chianti district, to a village called Greve in Chianti. My friends Jane and Sebastiano hosted me for two nights at their beautiful estate, where they grow some of the best San Giovese grapes in the country. Here were all the comforts of home: a Mac laptop and a DSL. Also, some of the best vegetarian food in the region, and some of the best wines. I sat right down to a dinner that included five wine glasses. We ate perfectly-cooked pasta, fresh sauce, and tried all the different wines.
The winery is called Querciabella, which means “beautiful oak tree.” Not surprisingly, you can learn about them at
You can order the wines through various distributors and restaurants. My personal favorite was the spectacular Palafreno 2000, a blend of San Giovese and Merlot grapes that was really unforgettable. As I said after Sebastiano poured it into the biggest of the big glasses, the glass was too small to hold this wine. He smiled. He’s very proud of the record he’s established since he took over the vineyard and winemaking operation several years ago. Querciabella wines are now ranked very highly and sell out easily. Their chianti is considered to be one of the three best in the region (hence, the world). Although Sebastiano noted that the war and other events have conspired to drive wine prices down seriously, he said that the French had been hardest hit and that Italy was reaping something of a windfall. His wines have done well.
Much of the credit goes to the care he takes in the process. They dry-farm the grapes (irrigation is illegal in Chianti) with special methods called BioDynamic, which are much more strict and careful than simply organic. You can see and taste the difference in the grapes. They use only the most expensive French oak casks, and only for two years, after which they send them to someone else to use in making inferior wine. The place is spotless and very controlled. So much work for a bottle of wine! So much love. So much taste. A toast to my friends in Chianti – I hope to come back soon.
I’ll quit while I’m ahead. See the links below if you’re planning a trip to Italy.
This travelogue is dedicated to the memory of Charles Steele, who loved Italy and will be missed deeply by his friends.
Happy travels…
David Siegel
Notes
The fifth Romance language is Romanian.
Links
This page shows all language diagrams and maps for the world. The maps are fascinating:
Language Family Trees
The best sunglasses:
Maui Jim Titanium
Bed resources:
Shepherd's Dream
VSS Sleep
Italy:
In Trento, stay at the Hotel Accademia:
Hotel Accademia
In Bolzano: stay at the hip Hotel Greif:
Hotel Grief
In Ortisei, Hotel Adler:
Hotel Adler
Planning a trip to the Sudtyrol? Visit:
Val Gardena
Want to go climbing? Make arrangements with
Catores Climbing School (they even have shoes for you)
Planning a trip to Venice?
This map will come in handy
Planning a trip to Florence? Search for Hotel Berchielli on this site:
All Florence Hotels
Try the wine:
Querciabella
Learn more about BioDynamic viticulture
