Italia

Buona Sera and sorry about the lack of blogging activity for a while. There was simply too much to do in Italy and not enough time to do it, so trips to the internet cafe were few and far between. Stage 1 was Rome. We came. We saw. We did a lot of walking. It turns out the city has quite a bit of history, so two days was nowhere near enough. Saw lots of ace, er, Roman stuff, including this truly amazing 2000 year old bronze of a boxer, and a prototype Zardoz mosaic.
I was also quite taken with the Goethe monument in the Borghese gardens. Didn't really get up to speed on the food front in Rome though. Disastrously we somehow ended up having lunch at the zoo - twice! Never mind, we had a good view of the giraffes. We then drove up to Emilia Romana (where Bertolucci set 'Novecento'), for the main event of the trip: the wedding of our friend Gianni, the Italian Bruce Springsteen. His bride Paola rather fantastically comes from the same town and has the same surname as him - hardly any need to get married at all really! We arrived in the 'Sagra' season whereby each small town has a festival which was once centred on the church but these days mainly involves the celebration of food and raising funds for the local football team. We went to a town specialising in tortelloni - this was the Zucca (pumpkin) variety and was very very good indeed.
From there on in the food was amazing. The sheer volume to be consumed at an Italian wedding is literally quite staggering. Anyway, here's me and Shelly in all our finery. We had assumed that everyone at an Italian wedding would be dressed up to the nines so we did our best to do likewise, only to discover a church full of people in shorts and t-shirts. Much more pragmatic, given the sweltering heat. Thankfully at least the bride and groom had made an effort so we weren't the most overdressed people there.

Giannni's band played a great set of rock and roll party classics and we all quaffed prosecco into the small hours. Brilliant fun, fantastic people, amazing food. Say what you like about the Italians, but they certainly know how to throw a wedding party, and not a vol-au-vent in sight.
Next stop was Verrucola in the hills of Lunigiana, to recover for a few days. We stayed in an old water mill across the road from a mediaeval castle inhabited by a rich sculptor. I finally managed to finish reading 'The Brothers Karamazov', which is an excellent tome, even if if it did take me over six months to get through. It's worth sticking with it through the heavy stuff and the bewildering passages of religious philosophising - I wanted to start again from the beginning as soon as I finished reading it. I didn't though, as I also had a Tommy Cooper biography demanding my attention. An ideal pair of companion volumes, as it turns out, which throw up some interesting points of comparison. Yes, really. Anyway, yes, Lunigiana: peace, quiet, lovely people, fantastic and cheap food, big flying june bug things and mini-scorpions. What more could you ask for?




Finally, here's the Duomo in Pisa, which everyone ignores as they make a beeline for the leaning tower. What looks like a tai-chi session is actually everyone trying to construct hilarious photographs of themselves appearing to be holding the tower up.

And yes, predictably enough, the combination of vast quantities of pasta with minimal amounts of exercise took their toll on the blood sugar readings, which rarely fell into single figures for the whole trip. I didn't quite reach the anticipated girth of Pavarotti, but made some progress to rivalling the weight of a lesser tenor. I came back full of resolve to get back on my bike immediately but the nearest I got today was watching Bradley Wiggins OBE heroically out on his own in front of the peloton for most of today's stage of the Tour de France. Tomorrow is another day though and I shall be out on the silver machine to start training again for the run to Suffolk in a couple of weeks. Andiamo!