Odds and Ends

Somehow I forgot to mention in an earlier post one of the things that makes hiking here so special – herbs! As we hike along the aqueduct, or just walk up the road, wild herbs are everywhere – rosemary, thyme, oregano, bay laurel, … Sometimes they are a little hard to identify; they often have much smaller leaves than ones in the herb garden at home, which get a lot more water than wild plants here. Regardless, they still smell great and work well in cooking. Add in the olives and figs we see everywhere and you’ve got everything you need to make food interesting!

However, despite this abundance, some things seem to be universal, and not in a good way:

Really? Pizza with hot dogs and french fries on it in Italy?? Normally I would blame this on a bad American influence, but given it says “Wurstel” I’ll blame the Germans this time. Egads!

Fortunately, better food could be had. We took a cooking class and learned how to make a variety of pastas, including cappellacci, tagliatelle, and gnocchi. This was, to our surprise, all gluten-free pasta and surprisingly tasty compared to GF dried pasta I’ve made in the past. It’ll be fun to try a side-by-side comparison of pasta with and without gluten when we get home.

As we drove up from Umbria to France, a couple of things were notable. From Florence to Pisa, the highway was lined with plant nurseries. Mile after mile, there were trees and shrubs of all sizes and shapes. We’d never seen anything like it. Given how hot and dry it is here in the summer, it’s hard to believe they can keep all those plants alive!

As we got further north, the mountains come right down to the sea and we started to go through tunnel after tunnel. We wished we had started counting, because there must have been at least 50. The road was basically tunnel-bridge-tunnel-bridge, ad infinitum. After spending the night in Varazze, Liguria, we did start counting – we went through over 110 tunnels that day, 86 of them in Italy. What an engineering feat! And a naming feat – every bridge and every tunnel had a sign stating its name and its length.

From the highway we could see the enormous Carrara marble quarries extending back into the mountains and the stone yards full of cut stone ready to be shipped all over the world. It made me wonder how many people had worked there over the centuries- and how many died there. Stone cutting couldn’t have been easy…

As we reached western Liguria, the narrow valleys and steep hillsides sprouted greenhouses everywhere. This area is known as the Riviera dei Fiori, the flower riviera, and grows flowers for florists. Given how isolated these valleys are, it must have been hard to get the flowers to market in good condition before the highway was built.

Soon we were in France once again and the roads grew shoulders and the drivers started obeying the speed limits. What a difference that border we breezed right over makes!