“Going Up, Going Down ~ the Aliyah of an Ingénue”
Chapter 3 : Border & Beyond
We woke the next morning to the sun shining in a clear blue sky. It was a perfect site, a perfect May Day and we had slept deeply and recovered from the longest part of our alpine journey. There was now less than 10 kms to climb on a final precipitous route to the Italian border post before our descent into another country. We were in a wide meadowland, if you like, a high, green, shallow basin of pasture way above the plain in which Grenoble had sat, the area encircled by those frosted, glistening peaks which suddenly seemed no more high than ‘an elephant’s eye’.
We opened the door of the caravan and breathed in the fresh air and could hear the rushing stream down a steep bank a few yards away. We felt the sun hot on our faces. After dressing the children and enjoying a quick breakfast we went off to explore the stream in shorts and tee shirts, the babe in his papoose on Daddy’s back. The rushing water spluttered around boulders and large limbs of fir trees which, having come down in the winter winds, were lying tossed here and there across the stream as though a giant had been playing matchsticks. Arni with the babe and Adam clambered upstream while I lay stretched out in the sun listening with my eyes closed to the splashing and gurgling of the fast running, ice-cold water, feeling cleansed by it. There was not another soul in sight although I could hear Adam excitedly laughing and shouting to his Dad, the sound sharp in that clear atmosphere. I sat up and took great draughts of the pure and sweet mountain air, wishing I could store it in my lungs to use at will. A fanciful notion, maybe, but we were in a fanciful place, all of us entranced with this picture postcard spot we had happened upon. It was a wonderful tonic for the travel weary and made us feel bright and glad to be alive.
After a late lunch, it was decided we should put on a little more clothing, hitch up the wagon and start moving. We drove towards the final peaks in late afternoon and began another hair-raising, tortuous climb with sheer drops and many unguarded edges towards Montgenèvre as the mist rolled in and the sun hid behind it. The sky turned grey but vision was still amazingly clear. The ravines and valleys dropping away from the roadside were thickly wooded with deep green pine and fir trees. It was spectacular. But we could only look at it through the windows for there was nowhere to stop. We just willed Rosie, pulling the extra weight behind her, around every hairpin bend, afraid at any moment that she might start coughing. It was the longest few and constantly winding kilometres I had ever travelled and the closest to heaven, if not hell if you took your eyes off the road. But like the aristocratic lady she was in a time of trial, Rosie made it and rolled quietly into the ski resort of Montgenèvre without a moment’ s fuss. The resort was a damp and cold place that afternoon so we motored straight through to the nearby border post at Claviere, where we pulled up at the little Custom’s office.
The Italian customs officer politely asked for our green cards for the vehicles. We only had one for Rosie and were therefore asked to go and organise another card for the caravan in a café a little way down the street. Arni suggested I change some travellers’ cheques and get the card at the same time as my language skills were better than his. This gave him a few moments rest, so Adam climbed onto the front seat next to him and I left Bubble tucked up with a bottle on the back seat and went off on my errand. I was in the café filling in forms and paying up when their phone rang. “Scusi, signora,” said the lady behind the desk … “it is your blondie bambino in old car…? They are saying he cries.” At that moment I saw Arni and Adam waving and grinning at me through the window. So they had got bored and left the car with Bubble in it. We rushed up the street to Rosie…but the baby had vanished.
Arni looked quite as grey as the sky but not wishing to panic I was thinking about who ‘they’ must be and hurried into the little custom’s office. And there stood an officer in his uniform, gently rocking Matti in his arms and making little Italian cooing noises at him. “Grazie, grazie,” was all I could think of to say while I exchanged the green card for the baby. “Prego,” said the officer and then tutting quietly added “il bambino alone crying, no good.” I hung my head in shame.
We bought some bread, milk and wine, the staff of life, and continued on our way down the Valle de Susa, the river Dora running through the valley to Aviliagna,. It was a magnificent ride down the Italian side of the Alps. The ancient dwellings built on the steep slopes near the roadside were so different from the modern buildings around Briancon. The little roofs were slate tiled, the old slates laid on in criss-cross patterns, big ones and small ones as they came to hand and heavy enough to hold against wind and snow. The mist had rolled by and a watery sun was now low in the sky, casting its late afternoon light through the soft, wooded or vine-clad slopes. We passed numbers of simple dwellings along the road and one picturesque fortified village on a hill, centuries old, and little farmsteads dotted across the valley and after reaching Susa continued along our first flat road in Italy to Aviliagna. A motorist mis-directed us to the camp site so that it was quite dark when we eventually found it, somewhere near a lake which we couldn’t see.
Well, to be fair it was May Day and all the world and his wife had come to this camp site, probably from Turin, with their camper vans, caravans and tents, with their families and friends and children and cats and dogs. They had come in hundreds, I am sure. There seemed not an inch of space left when we arrived. But we were greeted kindly, welcomed and, like letting out the seam of a skirt, a place was found for us to just about squeeze in the van after unhitching it from Rosie around which stood a little gathering of admiring males. Our van was swung into place by several pairs of broad shoulders and strong arms, leaving maybe two feet only between us and our neighbouring campers. It was quite a feat and something which would surely have been forbidden in any campsite in Germany, France and England, not to mention the Netherlands, Belgium and most certainly Switzerland.
The noise of laughing, talking, shouting people, radios full on, the crying of babies, screaming of kids and barking of dogs was something never to be forgotten. It is doubtful whether a more complete contrast could have existed between that site and the silent site of our alpine meadow of the previous night. It seemed no-one wanted to go to bed for lights shone and the music continued well into the early hours. Having hardly slept, we crept away with as little fuss as possible at dawn, a couple of dogs yapping as we quietly manoeuvred the vehicles out of their tight spaces while the children were still asleep. It seemed rather bad-mannered, a little unfriendly after the welcome and help we’d received and it had only cost us fifty-five pence for the night but although as dawn broke we could see the lake and the green hills around it and all the scenic charms of the place, we had felt severely over-numbered.
So we continued on the main route to Turin, lying in its northern plateau, skirting that town to get to Asti and Alessandria. It was a dull, flat drive in a grey, heavy atmosphere but shortly after Alessandria we drove off into a field to have our lunch. All around us were maize and wheat fields dotted with stumps of trees in a wide, flat landscape. It had its own charm. In the afternoon the sun came out and we found ourselves approaching the green hills which rise to about four hundred meters above sea level on the road leading to the coastal port of Genoa. And so, having left the Turinese plateau behind us we began the steep descent towards the coast through breathtakingly beautiful scenery. Villages, all pink and sandy, spilled down the thickly wooded slopes at all angles.
Life is full of contrasts and having passed a huge oil refinery on the outskirts of Genoa, we found ourselves snarled up in an awful rush-hour traffic jam as Genovese workers tried to get home faster than was possible in the circumstances. We were not a welcome addition to that frenzied scene, being simply holidaymakers with a choice of when to travel and with such an old car and caravan how dared we be on the road. We continually felt we were being pushed from behind, willed to get out of the way and indeed had numbers of motorists who could not get past solidly hooting at us. The smell of the exhausts was reaching our heads and the frustrated queues, the dodging in and out was nerve-racking, especially as we didn’t know the road lay-outs.
It took us an hour and a half to travel through this small city of a population of under 700,000 and birthplace of Christopher Columbus, who might have sailed to Marseilles in that time with a following wind. We didn’t stop in Genoa but took the coast road towards Nervi, Rapallo and La Spezia. After Nervi, the built up area gave way to the natural scenery again and we found ourselves once more on a switch back, a road cut into the side of the hills. This area was where the well-off had their villas with beautiful sloping gardens and where more picturesque villages, houses painted to blend with the landscape - umber, cream, pink, soft green - tumbled towards rocky shores. The hills seemed randomly pointed with tall, elegant cypress trees.
We climbed from Rocco to Rapallo with magnificent views down the hillsides to the sea and a kilometre from Rapallo we found our camp site, Miraflores, at Santagna Santa Pietro. Apart from being tucked below the crossing of some curving motorways, the place was excellent. Nowhere was level on this sloping site but it was grassy and full of wild flowers and apple trees in blossom. The facilities were very clean and beautifully decorated in imaginative, colourful tiling. We met the Italian owners who, after spending thirty years in Peru, had decided to return to Italy when they found they could no longer stand the awful race relations, the inequalities, the corruption in that country. They had started working on Miraflores and had opened it only a month ago. Apart from the drone of lorries throughout the night, it was peaceful enough on site and we slept well.
The next day we jumped into the car and went down to the coast and holiday town nearby of Santa Margherita. The tall, plastered houses which formed a horse-shoe backdrop to the bay and its quayside were again painted in lovely colours; yellows, pale orange, chocolate mousse, brick pinks and so on, most of the shutters in contrasting colours, the wavy cypress gracing the gardens. The season had not yet begun so everywhere was quiet. We walked around the little harbour and had a difficult job stopping Adam from walking up every gangplank to the luxury private launches moored there, his taste for the good life evidently overcoming his fear of the water for he had been afraid to paddle in the sea. We shopped for lunch and dinner, bought a bottle of chianti and sat on a shaded bench where we spread out the picnic and poured out our wine. Bubble was happy with a baby jar of ragout and a chunk of fresh bread to suck on. The sun shone hotly on the sea, dancing with millions of pin-pricks of light.
After motoring in a leisurely way back to the site we did our chores, retrieved the nappies from the line we’d strung up, put the children to bed and started to prepare our supper of a good steak seasoned with peppercorns and garlic, mixed salad, bread and wine. Completely mellowed out we were about to turn in for the night when there was a loud thump on the door. This was Lilian and Norman, a retired English couple travelling across Italy in their Fiat campervan. They had arrived via Geneva and the Mont Blanc tunnel on a six week tour, hoping to get as far as the Calabrian coast before returning home. A very spirited pair, interesting and interested, we were to continue meeting them and enjoying their company all the way to Naples.
Next morning while I cleaned out the van, Arni took the kids for a little walk and met an elderly woman, all wrinkles and smiles, scything the grass. She stopped to talk and seemed fascinated with the children, the blondeness of them, gently touching Adam’s curly hair and stroking Bubble’s straight and almost white hair. Arni understood she was asking their ages so he scratched them with a stick on a nearby stone and she used the same stick to scratch her age. She was ninety-two, her handshake was firm and when Arni said goodbye and turned to come back she went on scything the grass in a steady rhythm that would have done credit to anyone half her age. He was so sorry he couldn’t speak the language to talk to her a little longer.
We left the site at coffee time and continued along the main route towards La Spezia and eventually Pisa, winding as before high up above the sea, sometimes close to the cliffs or further away in a green landscape dotted with houses and villages. As we drove inland we became part of the random, mountainous green hills all around us. Suddenly Norman and Lilian drew up beside us. We stopped for lunch with them and I noticed that the van was leaning again on one side. Another spring had broken! We all set off for the highest viewpoint and stopped to admire the scenery before descending to a village where Arni managed to find a piece of wood for a temporary repair of the broken spring. It was about five o’clock when we arrived in the naval town of La Spezia and seeing a sign for camping we followed it through a road to Lerici on the sea and out of that town until we found the Camping Garden an hour and a half later. Norman and Lilian had arrived at the same site. When the children were in bed and fast asleep we popped into a nearby restaurant within site of the van and enjoyed a wonderful meal of mixed hors d’oeuvres, a sea-food speciality of tasty squid, cuttle fish and muscles, followed by a mixed salad and a slice of country cheese. It was very reasonably priced, equivalent to £5.50p for the two of us including wine and service. We returned to our van for a cognac and more conversation until the early hours in a quiet site shared only with two other campers.
It was now Saturday 5th May and we had another nine days for the Grand Tour before embarking at Naples for our new life. The next morning we met on site a Dutch family doing a six month tour with a baby a few months older than Bubble, who had been all over France, Spain and Portugal and after Italy intended motoring to Greece in their Fiat dormobile. We agreed it was a great life. This was before we met the coast road through Carrara and Massa to Viareggio, an ugly stretch of main road; fifteen miles of beach huts, hotels and neon signs. We passed quickly through this and started along the road to Pisa in flat land around the river Arno. Our first sight of this town was the amazing architecture of the domed roof of the baptistery on the site enclosing the cathedral and ‘leaning tower’. We were lucky to be able to park just outside the old stone wall enclosing the cathedral square and very close to the tower, eating our lunch before visiting one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
The leaning campanile, cathedral and baptistery stood in an area of green grass with a little road running down one side of it for limited traffic. We were astounded by this graceful architecture of the middle ages, conceived and built between the 11th and 12th centuries, and the beauty of its shining white marble, its wonderful proportions, sophisticated design and lovely sculptures. In the baptistery we were treated to the echoing sounds of harmonic notes sung by a guardian which are sustained and catch themselves up to make a final heavenly chord, an eerie, beautiful sound, raising faith to a new pinnacle in an inspired building. We opted not to climb the 240 steps of the campanile but lay on the grass gazing up at its crazy height and tilt with respect. The interior of the cathedral also took our breath away with its outstanding gold ceilings, painted dome, lovely frescoes and the incredible, intricate sculpture of Pisano’s huge pulpit.