Crowded Beach…Empty City

After leaving Sarah to her fate (she is safely back in the US), Jess and I headed south to Moneglia, a tiny seaside town on the coast between Genova and the more famous (and once-upon-a-time quaint) Cinque Terre. Our goal was to slow down and relax for a few days. Mission accomplished.

Honestly, there’s not much to say. We took a walk each morning up one hill or another and then we walked from the apartment we rented across the street to the beach. The biggest hiccup was that most of the beach space is controlled by private owners who charge for access to their lounge chairs and sizeable umbrellas. Our vision of going to the beach involved lounging on the loungiest of loungy chairs. We failed. It turns out that mid-to-late-August is the high season for Italians to shut down their businesses and flee the cities. We asked at five different private beaches and each one told us they didn’t have a single spot open for the rest of the month–that’s the next three weeks! Oh well.

Instead we grabbed the not-so-comfortable plastic chairs and slightly thin umbrella from the apartment and found a tiny sliver of sand on the narrow bits of public beach between the private spaces. The public beaches had stakes in the ground at about 10 foot intervals, marking where each group should sit for social-distancing purposes. So, while the beach was full, it wasn’t like people were shoulder to shoulder.

The only other problem was based on our excellent location. Our apartment was half a block from the intersection of the main road out of town and right on the road that divided the town from the beach. So, naturally, on Thursday night, that intersection was the site of a free concert. And, naturally, that concert didn’t start until 10pm. And, naturally, we had to get up at 6:00 to catch our next train. Great timing. But, it was amusing nonetheless. Nothing beats some aging Italian dads singing 1980s rock hits in English (Springsteen, U2, Bowie, etc.). The best was their rendition of “Puible Rain.” At least, that’s what I assume the song is called based on their pronunciation…

Overall, we had a great few days there, despite the “Lucifero” hot weather our Italian weather apps warned of. (I mean, it was hot, but we stayed in the shade or the water as much as possible.) We ate well, we read a lot, and we enjoyed the cool but not cold ocean temperatures. It looked something like this…

After Moneglia, we spent the next five days in Torino. Unlike the packed beaches of Moneglia, Turin was a bit of a ghost town: probably two-thirds of the small businesses in town and maybe half the restaurants were closed for the entire time we were there, the streets were pretty devoid of traffic, and the museums had all the space in the world to spread out. It was pretty chill.

And, overall, Turin struck us as a pretty chill city. It’s got a bit more of a French air than Milan did–largely thanks to the fact that it was controlled by the Savoy family into the 1800s–but it was still definitely Italian. We enjoyed the numerous palazzos, giant piazzas, abundant public art (both new and old), and the fabulous arcades that ran along most major streets (beacuse Carlos Alberto didn’t like being out in the sun). And those arcades really helped since temperatures were in the 90s. Here’s a bit of what Torino looks like…

We spent most of our time visiting one museum or another and walk-walk-walking all over the central part of the city. We got a tourist card that covered entry to about 50 different museums and other locations in town (and another 50 or so in the surrounding provinces). We managed to visit at least nine, which is more than two per day when you factor in that almost everything is closed on Monday.

The crown jewel of the museums in town is the Museo Egizio, which they claim is the second best museum of ancient Egyptian artifacts in the world (after Cairo’s). I don’t know if that’s true, but it was incredibly impressive. We spent about three hours there and definitely did not have time to read or closely observe everything. Some of my favorite bits were the mummified cats, the amazing preserved “book of the dead” scrolls, and an extensive exhibit about how archaeology is done nowadays with great visualizations around various technologies that have helped to uncover some mysteries and created it others. There was also a thoughtful discussion on the politics of displaying corpses, especially foreign ones, and one of the most amusing finds was a scroll that was used for planning the construction of the tomb of Ramses IV on one side, but was used for a variety of unrelated notes on the back (“hey, papyrus ain’t cheap!”). Here’s a bit of what we saw there…

I’m not really into the Renaissance/Baroque/over-the-top-wealthy madness of a lot of the palazzos and such, but we did enjoy poking around at the Palazzo Reale from which the Savoys ruled. Some of the highlights include Carlos Alberto’s monogram on the ballroom ceiling, crazy fancy jousting armor, and some Roman mosaics discovered in the city and collected in the palace’s basement. Probably the coolest part of the palace was the amazing domed room bult to house the Shroud of Turin (which may or may not be the garment Jesus wore to his death). The dome connects the palace to the cathedral next door, where you can now see a replica of the shroud on display.

Other museum highlights and lowlights:

• Museo Diffuso della Resistenza della Deportazione della Guerra dei Diritti e della Libertà. This place was pretty awesome. It was basically a series of videos of folks talking about their lives in opposition to (and sometimes complicity with) the Nazis during WWII. Towards the end there were some pretty interesting videos discussing the qualities of the new constitution established in the post-war period. Super-interesting place.
• Museo Nazionale del Risorgimento Italiano. In contrast, this museum, dedicated to the story of the unification of Italy, had tons and tons of artifacts, including some fascinating 150-year-old political cartoons (if only I could read Italian), but…almost no English translations. In retrospect, we should have paid for the audiotour. Without it, we were pretty much lost and bored. Sad.
• Museo Nazionale della Montagna. We love mountains, so a museum about the mountains sounded pretty cool. It was…OK. Great views of the city from the hilltop (see above), and some intersting stuff about the history of mountaineering, but not exactly a life-changing experience visiting there. We hear there’s another similar museum in Austria…maybe we’ll compare the two?
• CAMERA – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia. This place had an amazing exhibit of photography by Walter Niedermayr, an artist from South Tyrol, the area where we will be hiking shortly. The exhibit looked at the human impact on landscapes, variations of perspective based on time, position, and focus, etc. It was pretty fascinating and well worth the stop.
• Museo Accorsi Ometto. While there was a cool special exhibit of Ivan Theimer sculptures (see dolphin above), most of the museum was the collection of overly-stuffy, frilly, sometimes ridiculous “decorative arts” that Pietro Accorsi collected in his lifetime. I was not terribly excited by it if you couldn’t tell. In particular, some of the table decorations struck me as just kinda tacky. On the other hand, it is supposedly home to the “most beautiful piece of furniture in the world.” Not sure I agree…

One of the other fun bits of Torino was the Mercato Centrale, which happened to be located outside the back window of our apartment. We bought a giant watermelon, and also got a bunch of free veggies. See, we were trying to buy enough just to make a salad for ourselves, but almost everything in the market is sold by the kilo, so when we asked for just one carrot or one onion, people just gave them to us for free! On the other hand, at another stall we did end up with a kilo of cucumbers and three heads of lettuce because we were too slow to explain what we actually wanted. Language barriers suck sometimes.

While we’re on food, check out this awesome dessert: gianduia gelato (that’s hazelnut-chocolate), with a chocolate shell and hot chocolate sauce poured over it. Yum. (This is at a place that supposedly invented the chocolate shell over ice cream thing.)

Also, compare the meager snack offerings shown in my photo of apertivos back in Milano with the mondo “apercena” (apertivo becoming dinner) that some places in Torino offer. Ridiculous quantity of food with your drink. Definitely didn’t need dinner after that!

I should also mention that we went on a great “free” (except for the obviously expected tip) walking tour of the city. It was nicely done and we learned about a lot of the history and oddities of the town. It covered a lot of the ground we’d been walking for several days already, but gave us some new insights. For instance, the site of the former Gestapo office is now Piazza CLN, named for the National Liberation Committee who resisted the Nazis. We also learned about the history of the Shroud (uncertain), vermouth’s origins in the city, and the fact that a lot of people don’t like the one building that ruins the uniformity of the Piazza Castello. That building was once the fascist headquarters in Torino, so now the building is known as “Mussolini’s Finger.”

Anyhow, that’s enough ranting about the awesomeness of Torino. We’re off to the mountains again now, so look for an update on the Dolomites in a couple of weeks…

Finally, I just wanted to share this one image from the train station in Moneglia. Just an example of how, even when it is slightly falling apart (as in “plants are busting through the walls”), Italy still always manages to be beautiful.