Europe Road Trip Day 3–4: Italian Homecoming

Among the many wildly optimistic assumptions I made when planning this trip was that, in a single day, I could drive across the southern half of France and then meet my friends David and Frances for a day exploring Nice. As it happened, I arrived at 11 and instantly crashed into my hotel room. Luckily, the erstwhile Hotel Meuniere concierge was still at his post, so there was someone to show me to my cosy attic room. I couldn’t stand up in half of it, but it had timber beams with a dozen names carved into it, and when I cracked open the wonky shutters, I saw a dozen vignettes through the windows at the other side of the courtyard: a women dusting a blanket down, another perched precariously on the windowsill having a smoke. The whole hotel gave the impression of faded 1920s glory, and I decided it was just the right side of the romantic/crappy divide, and then I went to sleep.

The next day dawned, and I cannot express this enough, bright. Nice stretches along a dozen miles of French riviera, and there’s something about the confluence of sea and sand and Italianate building which magnifies ordinary colours into something much more vivid. The contrast between this bustling city, seemingly in the height of tourist season, and the drab desolation of Avignon the night before was bewildering.

I met David and Frances for a quick coffee, orange juice and croissant in the sunshine. Wary of the day slipping away from us, not to mention sunburn, we decided to set off along the riviera pronto. This was the day I had most been looking forward to: I’d wanted to drive the French/Italian riviera for at least five years, when I realised that the famous Cinque Terre villages were only an hour or two from where I was living in Verbania. I’m more or less convinced that the area around the Switzerland/Italy/France border is the most beautiful part of the world, and we were going to head across a huge swath of it that day.

I’ve always felt that Italy is my spiritual home, if not my emotional or actual home, and it had been five years since I left. The circumstances then were really quite bleak, with chronic pain in my ankles and the onset of a global pandemic, so it was a real rush to cross the border now in glorious sunshine, with good friends and a body still largely intact. As the autostrade became the autostrada, the landscape turned a richer shade of green, the buildings now shuttered and terracotta-roofed, greenhouses lining the hillsides which dropped sharply towards the sea. The road itself was absolutely glorious, curving gracefully through hillside tunnels and across viaducts — when we stopped off in Menton, looking up at the road was a bit of an eyesore, but the experience of driving along it is brilliant.

For lunch, David directed us towards a town called Diano Marina, an hour or so across the Italian border. We arrived to a town which seemed to be winding down from the tourist season, until we stumbled across a “folklore festival” happening in the town centre. Folklore seemed to refer to local customs more than stories, so we stood, slightly baffled, watching a procession of people dressed in the native clothing of the Basque country, Romania, and Mexico. I felt distinctly unfashionable, and not for the first time.

As we drove onwards down the coast, it became clear that Cinque Terre would have to wait for another day. Google Maps has been, to be frank, a little bastard throughout this trip when it’s come to estimating trip timings, and so it was that after driving for 2 hours of our 4.5 hour trip, we still had just over 4 hours left. I’m no mathematician, but David is, and his calculations suggested that this didn’t add up.

So, we ended the day with a brief trip to Portofino, because it was a little closer and we were running out of daylight. That was a great decision: Portofino perches at the end of a rocky promontory like a very bougie bird of prey — beautiful but deadly. Deadly because we decided to sit down and have a beer each, and the bill came to 35 euros. And when we told the waiter we weren’t there for food, she whisked the napkins off our table as if they would become desecrated by such close contact with foreigners. Still, the town was stunning at sunset, and our billionaire overlords have not yet found a way to charge us for that.

It was late by the time we rolled into Pisa, and I had been driving for so many hours that I was about to do a Leaning Tower and just keel over. Luckily the Indian restaurant below our B&B was still open. A bit delirious, me David and Frances spent most of the meal in stitches because our waiter was training a new recruit who seemed incapable of doing anything. He put the drinks on our table in a strange kind of slow motion, as if he had never before seen bottles of beer or indeed used his hands. Then, as we paid for our meal, I asked the main waiter if he had any recommendations for Pisa cafes, and it turned out that the newbie spoke completely fluent English. He just hadn’t said a word to us the whole time.

Then it was Friday, a day I was quite looking forward to because we were picking up Eden, and Eden is my girlfriend and I actually quite like her. David and I spent the morning taking karate-kick pictures of us next to the Leaning Tower, which bizarrely led to a bunch of random tourists coming up to ask to see our pictures. In such a cliched tourist location, any creativity seemed remarkable, I suppose. Anyway, the pictures looked like this:

I then went to pick up Eden, before the four of us did the final leg of the tour, heading east from Pisa through Tuscany and ending near the town of Chiusi, where our friend Amalia’s wedding would be held tomorrow. As I write this a few days later, I can say with confidence that the weather peaked that day — driving through Tuscany under deep blue skies was exactly how I’d envisaged it, only instead of the Gladiator soundtrack we were listening to a whole lot of Chappell Roan. We stopped in San Gimignano for lunch and toured around this beautiful medieval hilltop town, but the real highlight of the day was the moment it popped onto the horizon:

That picture doesn’t do justice to the perfect postcard view, but trust me, the extensive photoshoot which happened next to that bend in the road testifies to how nice it was.

We arrived at our B&B on the far side of Tuscany just in time to collect the last member of our wedding troupe, Ella, and by “just in time” I mean she had been waiting outside a deserted Tuscan station for an hour and a half. Fortunately she’s the forgiving type.

After a quick turnaround, the five of us headed to yet another idyllic hilltop town, Montepulciano, for the first of the wedding celebrations. It was evening by the time we arrived, and I foolishly followed Google Maps by driving straight into Montepulciano’s centre. These narrow, cobbled streets had been designed for narrow, cobbled medieval peasants and their narrow, cobbled horses, and none of them had paused to consider how accessible their town would be to a five-door Skoda 500 years in the future. Baffled tourists frowned at our hire car as it passed restaurants and wine bars, but they mostly moved out of my way.

Fortunately, the welcome drinks at the end of the journey were worth the wait — good thing, too, because I had clocked up 2,200km of driving since leaving Paris. Amalia’s wedding welcome drinks were held in what seemed to be a cross between a bakery and an art gallery, perched on the hillside overlooking miles of Tuscan countryside. A huge wedding platter was music to our stomachs, and I even managed to snag a slice of lemon cheesecake before the night was out.