Europe Road Trip Day 5–6: True Love and Real Creeps

Saturday was significant for more than one reason: not only would our friend Amalia be getting married to her fiance, Guillaume, but I would be turning 29 years of age. In all seriousness, the idea of being twenty-nine was surprisingly difficult when it first appeared on the horizon — the grave surely can’t be far behind — so it was actually something of a relief to have something very fun and distracting to do on that day.

I entered my 29th year stood alone at midnight at the end of a dirt track in Tuscany, in the absolute middle of nowhere, looking up at more stars than I have seen for a long time. Stargazing is supposed to make you feel insignificant, but my overwhelming feeling is normally that an enormous meteor really could appear out of nowhere at any moment and obliterate us (did you know the meteor which killed the dinosaurs was invisible to the naked eye a second before it made impact?). It occurred to me that, for my 29th year, a good resolution would be to try and catastrophise a little less.

I woke up six hours later to find myself in heaven. Mist clung to the valleys of the Tuscan countryside surrounding our farmhouse B&B. A cat and her kittens twisted around my ankles as I stepped into my boots and wandered at random past vineyards, paddocks and small farms where Italian farmers got the hard jobs done before the heat of the day. It was impossible to believe the landscape had ever or would ever change. I thought vaguely about whether I should use my grandma’s inheritance money to buy a Tuscan farmhouse, learn to renovate it, and live like a hermit surrounded by books and cats. But all hermit fantasies are ultimately cowardice, a desire to simply quit the world because it’s just too hard, so I turned back around and went to celebrate my birthday with some of the many important people in my life.

After that, I spent the weekend living in an episode of Succession, only if everyone in Succession was actually very nice. I don’t think Amalia or Guillaume would resent me suggesting that they both come from pretty affluent backgrounds, and they can sure throw a massive bloody wedding. The proper ceremony was held in a cavernous church in Chiusi, a full Catholic service as well as a wedding, and then the reception was held in a mansion once owned by the niece of Napoleon Bonaparte. This in particular was a real tour de force of compromise between Amalia’s Italian roots and Guillaume’s French roots — yes, the wedding will be held in Italy, but how about we revel in some Bonapartean splendour?

And oh did we revel. Arriving at the reception, we were greeted by hundreds of guests spread out over the lawns, surrounded by tables piled high with food: piles of pastries, chunks of cheeses, a man carving slices of bresaola from a haunch of meat — and this was just the starters. After we’d nattered away for a few hours and heard the parents’ speeches, we were directed behind the mansion into a sort of enormous greenhouse decked with chandeliers, where the main dinner was served European style, over the course of a few hours, interspersed with more speeches and a few comedy skits by the groomsmen and bridesmaids. All this had been painstakingly translated into Italian, French, Spanish and English for the benefit of us philistines who had never bothered to learn another language. If my GCSE French teachers had told me I would use the language at snazzy international parties, I would’ve tried a little harder.

Safe to say it was an unforgettable occasion, I wish Amalia and Guillaume all the best, and I remain very glad that I went to South Africa that summer eight years ago. (For more info on how we single-handedly saved South Africa’s disadvantaged schools, scroll back eight years on this blog.)

On Sunday, there was one final goodbye brunch before Amalia could stop constantly greeting people and finally get on with married life, while the rest of us headed to the winds. Me and Eden were feeling very smug, since, as everyone else flew home, we would be extending our holiday for another few days by driving back to Paris.

Short on time, we shot northwards through the afternoon, watching the rolling hills of Tuscany morph into the more serious Alpine foothills. On the way, we stopped in Florence for a couple of hours to find the city in the full swing of tourist season, a strange feeling after passing through so many quieter cities on the way south. We had time to see the Santa Maria del Fiore, still probably my favourite building in the world, plus the Piazza della Signoria, still probably my mum’s least favourite building in the world, because she twisted her ankle at the top and had to hobble all the way down and back across Florence. The city is wonderful to wander around at random, but we had places to be.

Specifically: Verona. It seems a bit silly to look around Florence only to then look around Verona, essentially its smaller, less spectacular cousin, but I have a lot of vivid memories of the city. When I visited with family, our plane had a false takeoff and slammed to a halt on the runway, solidifying my fear of flying. Later, I visited with my best mate on a holiday he’d originally booked with his ex-girlfriend; I went in her stead. We got so drunk on our last night that my friend threw up on the bedsheets — I tried to clean them by stomping on them in the shower (I was a little drunk too, at this point), only succeeding in spreading the wine stain and dying the entire bedsheets purple. Waking up hungover to our furious B&B owner was one of the low points of my life. So it’s safe to say that I wanted to have a calmer Verona experience to balance out my wild and adventurous youth.

It was a calmer visit, but I wouldn’t, in all honesty, say it was good. The B&B I’d found was right next to the main road, and when the owner finally deigned to let us in, we heaved our suitcases up a pitch-black staircase to find an oily man in late middle age. When he set eyes on Eden, the first thing he said was “But this must be your sister, right?” When I explained that this was, in fact, my girlfriend, he seemed very surprised, and then he showed great interest in what we might get up to that night. My Italian comprehension skills checked out at that point, but there was a lot of “Romeo and Juliet” and “amore” and suggestive grunts at the bed.

So, Eden spent the night slightly unnerved, repeatedly checking the door was locked, and I spent the night with a renewed belief that people often look at us and think, “How did he get her?” It’s such a pointless worry, especially when triggered by a man with enough skin grease to lubricate a steam train, but then insecurities can be fed by any and all circumstances, no matter how dumb. In the morning, we bailed on the man’s cooked breakfast, left our key in the room and got the fuck out of there, nearly barrelling him over in our haste to get out of the door. Romance takes many forms, and as me and Eden got to the bottom of the still-dark staircase and escaped the building, both letting out a strange audible full-body shudder before getting into the car and speeding away, I felt particularly close to her. Maybe that wedding rubbed off on me.