Tales From The Travels

I’ve seen some news articles about people being gored at the running of the bulls this year in Pamplona, Spain. I’m really not surpised by this. I went to the running of the bulls in 1974 while traveling around Europe on a rail pass and it was great. It was one of the biggest parties I’ve ever been to with plenty of song and dance to go around. And there lies the problem. Like I said, it was a big party. So, when morning came and they ran the bulls up the street, the place was packed like you wouldn’t believe. It was so crowded I was stuck in one of the side streets and never even saw a bull. I could hear people yelling and cheering, but I couldn’t see anything except masses of people all around me. From what I could tell, I would expect people to get gored simply because they’re in front of a charging bull and neither they nor the bull has anywhere to go. If a bull is running up the street and the street is filled with an unmoving mass of humanity, you gotta figure someone is going to get gored. Then, throw in the fact that most of the people are either hung-over from drinking too much, or actually still drunk from drinking too much. And, that was 34 years ago. I’m sure the crowds have only gotten worse and the drinking heavier. As hard as it is for me to imagine, I have to believe they have squished even more people into those little streets. Just a bunch of more obstacles for the bulls to get through.

It was a good time, though. Even with all the crowds.

I graduated from the American School in Milan in the spring of 1974 and for my graduation present my parents gave me an Inter-Rail pass. This is similar to a Eurail, except that Eurails are purchased outside of Europe and Interails are purchased inside. Either gives you a period of unlimited rail passage. For an Inter-Rail, its 30 days.

I was only 16, but I was an experienced traveler already and I had no apprehension about my ability to get around safely. My parents probably had some, but never expressed any. In any event, in June a couple of friends and I left Milan on a train for Paris. I was equipped with my Inter-Rail pass, a backpack, a railroad schedule for all of Europe, “Europe on $10 a day”, and a careful allowance. The condition on an Inter-Rail pass is that you get one train trip in the country where you purchased it in order to leave the country. Any other trips in that country have to be paid for.

This was the beginning of a really great adventure. In the next few weeks I was to visit, among other places, Paris, several cities in Germany, Amsterdam (twice), Brussels, Copenhagen, Zurich, Geneva, Monaco, Vienna, and Athens. I learned my how to schedule my train trips to be overnighters, allowing me to sleep on the train and save money for other things. I was quick to find interesting parts of every town I went to and visited numerous museums and historical sites. I met people all over the place and made several friends. I went to the Louvre for the first time, but since the tourist season was in gear, it was packed. I kind of saw the Mona Lisa in that I found the room where it’s kept. But, the line was tremendous and I didn’t see any reason to spend a couple of hours in line. I walked by the line and could see the top of it. A few years later I made an October trip to the Louvre, after the tourist crowds had all cleared out. I was standing in a room all by myself and when I turned around, there was the Mona Lisa, just the two of us. But, that wasn’t about to happen on the June day in 1974.

I am firmly convinced that train travel is the only way to go. If you can afford the time, there is just no better way to get somewhere. The seats are roomy and comfortable and you make friends quickly. You can eat and sleep and get up to walk around. Plus, you don’t have to worry about being taken hostage by the railroad the way the airlines do. It was easy sleeping on them and I did so many nights.

But, I didn’t sleep on the train every night. There were times when I spent a number of days in several cities, including a stay on a canal barge in Amsterdam.

Athens was another place I spent some time, taking a train from Munich that passed through Yugoslavia. In 1974, Yugoslavia was still under the iron-fisted rule of Marshall Tito and was a good 20 years from the horrible civil wars and genocide that would rock the area in the 1990s. In 1974 it was a peaceful and beautiful land. I remember pulling into the train station in Sarajevo and thinking about how beautiful it was. I didn’t stop because it was a communist country, but I enjoyed the scenery from the train.

Athens was great and I enjoyed seeing all of the history. While in Athens I had a very strange thing happen to me. I had studied a lot of math my senior year in Milan and had become well acquainted with the Greek alphabet. I was out in the town with this girl I had met and she was kidding me about reading the signs. I took a hard look at one and realized that I actually could read it! The sensation was very peculiar when I realized this.

Along the way I made friends with a guy from America and he told me that the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain was coming up. Even at 16, I had heard of the festival of San Fermin where they run bulls up the city streets. He suggested we go, and away we went. This was one of the biggest parties I have ever been to. The entire town, and I really mean the entire town, was doing nothing but celebrating. In addition to the residents, there were tens of thousands of visitors. Every room that could be rented was filled. Every campsite that could be rented was filled. Every bench and sidwalk was filled. By this time, there were four of us and we just found a place on the side of the road where we could squeeze between other campers and we could toss our gear. That was ok, we really didn’t plan on spending any time there. Then, away we went – drinking, eating, dancing, and singing all night long. We would just go from one party to the next. If you were seen walking down the street, people would grab you and drag you into their party. It was a blast.

Come morning, we all headed towards the town center. Well, I now know why people get gored in this thing. The people were packed in there so tightly there wasn’t any room left to get out of the way of the bulls! The bulls didn’t have any choice but to run over people! I was on a side street packed in so tightly I could have passed out and I wouldn’t have fallen over. I never even saw a bull, but I could hear the crowds cheering, ‘Toro! Toro!’

From there, it was to Madrid and Barcelona, before heading to Brussels to meet my friends again (by plan, we had split up after Paris), before leaving for London. This was my first trip to London and I really fell in love with the city. I’ve been back several times and hope to return several more. There is so much to see and do there, or to just sit and enjoy life. I did a little of both on that first trip.

My plane ticket to the U.S. was from London. My parents had left Rome and moved back to Texas, where I was to join them before beginning my first semester at college. I got my flight out of London without mishap, but when I got to the U.S., they looked at this scraggly teenager, with a backpack and guitar (I played some in those days), who had been traveling Europe and all of the profiling lights went off. They took me to the side and I got the most thorough search of my life. They turned out the pockets in all of my clothes, looked inside my guitar, and even checked the seams in my backpack. They were sure I was smuggling drugs back with me. But, they were out of luck. The joke was on them. I had smoked it all while I was still in Europe. Hah!

The Inter-Rail was a really great gift from my parents and I’ll always cherish the memories. Something I would love to do is to go back and do it again. Someday, when I have the time, I think I will.

While we lived in Taiwan I heard the news report on the Armed Forces Radio Network of an event in Italy. It was May 21, 1972 and a crazy man in the Vatican attacked Michelangelo’s Pieta with a hammer, doing substantial damage before he could be stopped. The blows knocked pieces of the sculpture out, but he also broke the arm of the Madonna, which then crashed to the floor and shattered. They closed the St. Peter’s Basilica and painstakingly crawled over the floor of the chapel, recovering every single flake of the sculpture. This, I thought, was a terrible crime. I could not have imagined at that time what effect it would have on me.

A little more than one year later we left Taiwan and moved to Milan. At the end of the fall semester my parents moved to Rome and I stayed behind, living with another family, to finish my senior year in high school. On one of my visits to see my parents I took a tour of the Vatican and stood before the Pieta. They had put it back together, but the damage was very visible with large cracks and pieces missing. Still, it was magnificent. Even though I was only 16 years old, I was awed by the beauty. I had always liked art and appreciated beautiful things, but never like this. I loved art after that. The damage this madman had done to this wonderful masterpiece really came home to me. Who was this person to think that he could rob all the rest of us of this wonderful sculpture? How could it ever be justified? I matured and grew substantially that afternoon.

After looking at damaged Pieta I understood. Art is not just something pretty to look at. It is an embodiment of the artist. Looking at the damage I could see the effort and genius of Michelangelo and see him in my mind’s eye as he labored over a piece of stone to free this sculpture from within. I could also see the love and dedication of the master craftsmen that the Vatican had called in to repair it. Their names would not be known to the general public, but they knew the value of their labors. The greatest testimony of their skill and dedication would be if there was no trace of the attack remaining when they were done. I could also see them in my mind’s eye, arranging the pieces in a workshop and studying them for hours before taking any action.

Art became alive after that. I understood and saw so much more than I had before.

A few years later, when I was on the USS Comte de Grasse, I made a second tour of the Vatican. I knew where the Pieta was and went straight for it and was simply stunned. I mean stunned! You could not see any sign of the damage! The artisans had repaired it all. This time, I not only saw the beauty of the sculpture, but the beauty of another kind of artwork, the artwork of the restoration. I could picture in my mind the diligence of these masters working their craft to the best of their abilities in order to restore the statue and undo the damage. What a wonderful gift they gave all of us.

This is an example of the nature of the Italians. Good enough simply isn’t good enough. They will drive you crazy getting that last one percent, but it’s worth it. Even their cities showed this devotion to art. The streets themselves were more than just a functional piece of pavement. They would artfully work the stones and cement to make them attractive.

Every little town in Italy has some amazing example of dedication to artwork. The country from north to south is just teaming with it. Usually, it is much more impressive in real life than in any pictures. A good example it the Leaning Tower in Pisa. We made a port call nearby and I decided to go over and see it. I wasn’t really expecting much because I had seen plenty of pictures, but when I got there I was amazed. The pictures just don’t do it justice. It is much more beautiful than any picture I’ve ever seen.

I would walk around Milan, just looking at the city. There were buildings that were hundreds of years old, built even before Columbus sailed, and they were still occupied. (These were new buildings to the Italians. When they talk about ancient structures in Italy, they really mean old.) The buildings were normally beautiful, not just some plain box, but decorated and ornate. I’m sure there’s a story for each building.

The cathedrals and churches are special examples of the devotion to beauty. Each is worth seeing. There is the giant Duomo in Milan, the second largest cathedral in the world. My school was just a few blocks from it. We didn’t have a cafeteria in the school and had to go into city for lunch. There were times when I would head over to the cathedral and the big square out in front. There was a giant open air mall right next to it. This whole complex is a shining example of the beauty of Italian artwork. To walk through the mall and the square, just being around the beauty of the architecture was a thrill. Then, when you look up at the Duomo you understand why they made these giant churches. It is impressive in the extreme. The entire outside is carved and decorated. You can spend hours just walking around the Duomo, inspecting all of the details.

The inside of the Duomo is even more amazing than the outside. I can’t even begin to describe it. Again, you could walk around for hours, examining every little detail, and never see it all. The amazing craftsmanship with the lighting and the smell of incense is compelling.

Of all of the cathedrals in Italy, none is more impressive than St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican City. This is the legendary home of the Pope and the location of the Sistine Chapel. I’ve been to the Vatican three times and each time I was unable to see the chapel. I guess that just means I have to make another trip.

But, of all of the great artwork in Italy, nothing compares to Florence. This is the embodiment of the beauty of artwork, in my opinion. The city, the countryside, the museums – it is all just as beautiful as you may have heard. This is an area I could settle down and live in. And, right in the middle of it all is one of the greatest statues ever carved – Michelangelo’s David. This is truly a monumental masterpiece. By itself, it is worth the trip to Italy. If you flew to Italy and went straight to see David, then returned home without seeing or doing anything else, it would be a good trip.

I am not an art scholar by any means, but that time I spent in Italy created a love of art that has stayed with me since then. I have made it a routine to visit art museums every where I go. I am an example that there really is room in a scientific mind to appreciate the world of art. This love has brought me a great deal of pleasure and even peace of mind. To think that this love was realized as a result of my first viewing of the Pieta and observing the horrible damage done by that viscous attack. Its true, something good can come from anything. It makes me think that maybe the attacker doesn’t have to burn in Hell for all time. A few centuries would suffice.

I was at the grocery store this evening when I passed the fresh-baked French bread and couldn’t resist temptation and bought a loaf. It smelled so good I ripped a big chunk off and ate it on the way home. When I got out of the car I had bread crumbs all down my front. I ended up eating the whole thing for dinner.

When we were in Taipei we could get most American style foods, including sliced bread. But, when we got to Italy it was pretty near impossible to get those kinds of things. We were forced to go local. Oh, my! We got the local variety of sliced bread and it was just terrible. It not only had a terrible taste, but it would crumble in your hands while trying to make a sandwich. But, then something wonderful happened. I discovered the local bread and I haven’t been the same since.

The low-carb diet was wasted on me. There is just no way I’m going to give up bread. I love it. And, when I discovered just how good the European breads were I was in love. I started sampling all these different varieties and tried different ways of eating them and I think they were all good. Sometimes I would just buy a loaf of bread, some fruit, and something to drink and have myself a feast. One of my favorites was a ham sandwich you could buy in the eateries, a prosciutto caldo. They would take this roll that was so hard on the outside that it would hurt the roof of my mouth to bite down on it too hard, but the inside was light and fluffy and tasted so good. In the very center was a big hole that was formed in the baking. They would cut this roll in half and stuff that hole full of cooked ham. Holey moley it was good! Eat it with a beer and it was a memorable experience.

I’ve since become a pretty good bread baker. I really enjoy the work, and the smell of bread baking is just one of life’s great pleasures. Then, to top it off, you get to eat the bread! What a deal! My father, a gourmet chef among other things, taught me his secret recipe for bread before he died. It is really wonderful. But, don’t ask. It’s a secret.

One of the great benefits of living in Milan was skiing. The city is on a plain, but the Alps were just a short drive away. The school I was in had a ski program where, starting in January, we would ride a bus up to a ski resort every Saturday and ski all day. I can’t remember how long it went for, but I think it was for about three months because I remember commenting one time about skiing in April, so probably ten weeks total when you take out a couple of weekends for spring break. I had never skied before and didn’t know the first thing about it, but, with my parent’s encouragement, gladly signed on.

The ski resort we went to was called Alpe de Susa. I’m not sure of its exact location, but it was to the northwest of Milan and in the vicinity of Turin, which hosted the 2006 Winter Olympics. Alpe de Susa was not one of the venues for the games, but was in the same area. Without being aware of it, I was completely spoiled as far as ski resorts goes. The snow was always meticulously groomed and the runs were astoundingly long. It would take 20 minutes or more of non-stop skiing to go from the top to the bottom. It wasn’t until I started skiing in the U.S. that I really appreciated how good of a resort it was. I did my first U.S. skiing in the east and the runs were very short, the crowds overwhelming, and the condition of the snow terrible. But, a bad day skiing is still a good day. I’ve skied some of the resorts in Colorado, and I’ll tell you that they are great, but do not compare to the ones in the Alps. There’s a nice resort in the Black Hills of South Dakota that I enjoy. Some of the best slopes I’ve skied in the U.S. are, surprisingly, in New England. The mountain sides are so steep you can’t just ski straight down. You’ll get to the top of the lift and almost be looking down onto the bottom of the slopes. As a result, the slopes wind around the hillside and are pretty long. But, I didn’t know any of this when I started skiing in Italy. It was a whole new world to me.

But, this exciting new world started out pretty slowly. Ski lessons were included in the package and covered most of the morning. The first week I went to the lesson and spent most of the time just standing there. It was a large class and there was only one instructor, so he would teach us something and then watch each of us go down the training slope one at a time, followed by a critique. The only thing I learned was the snowplow, the most basic thing in skiing and a good place to start, but I was hoping to advance beyond that. I’m not sure I got to go down the training slope twice in the whole lesson. The afternoon was then free for us to practice. So, I practiced and watched with envy as the skiers went whizzing past, wishing I could ski like that. I talked to some of the other kids on the trip with me and they told me it would take years to learn how to ski like that. This wasn’t good news to me.

I went to where I thought the lessons were the second week, but couldn’t find the class. I looked around for a while, then decided I could do just as well on my own. What I did was to watch the other, more experienced skiers and started imitating what they were doing. It was really rough at first and I’m glad I did this when I was 16 and not 46 because the snow can be pretty hard when you fall down, and you better believe I was taking some hard falls. But, within a few weeks I was skiing like crazy. I started going faster as I got more confident. Of course, this also meant I was taking harder falls. I had a pair of blue jeans that I wore on these trips and there were times when I fell so hard that it forced the blue out them and there would be a long blue streak in the snow where I had hit. I remember once hitting a hill wrong and doing a complete flip and a half, landing on my face. Another time I looked down and realized I had a big blood stain on the front of my shirt. When I looked inside I realized the knife edge of my ski had hit me in one of my falls and sliced right through my shirt and opened up about a one-inch gash in my chest. It had quit bleeding by the time I found it, so I didn’t pay it any mind. I still have a faint scar there. But, despite the hard falls, I stuck with it and kept getting better. Before long, I was skiing like I had been doing it for years and would just shoot down the slopes, reaching the bottom drenched in sweat from the exertion.

I quickly learned that not all slopes are the equal, that they all have a characteristic personality. Some are made for speed and others are made for a relaxing ride. Others are filled with moguls (big bumps) and require great effort to work your way through, or over, them. I loved moguls in those days and enjoyed using my knees like shock absorbers as I swerved back and forth between them, using the side of the moguls to push off of. Today, my knees are not such good shock absorbers anymore and I prefer to pass on those slopes.

Then, there’s the black runs, the most challenging of all. I’m not really sure they are made for anything other than making your hair stand on end and to give you bragging rights. They should make patches that you can wear on your coat. ‘100 black slopes’ ‘500 black slopes’ ‘1000 black slopes’ They’d probably sell like hotcakes. I remember my first one vividly. It was an accident that I went that way when I took a wrong turn. I was going along at first, thinking, ‘This isn’t so bad,’ when I came to the reason it was a black. I stopped and looked down at the slope in front of me and started trying to figure out how I was going to get out of there. It wasn’t a slope, it was a cliff! I had never seen something this steep before, at least not from the top. It was a bad sign that I had been standing there for several minutes and had seen only a couple of other skiers. Everyone else was smart enough to keep the hell away from the thing. There was only one way out. I was really scared to go down it, but it was impossible to climb back out to the other slopes. Finally, I decided I just had to point my skis straight down and brave it out. With a prayer that I would survive with only minor broken bones, I pushed off and headed down the cliff. My speed shot up very quickly and I tucked in to help keep my balance, which increased my speed even more. The wind was whistling past my ears and tearing at my clothes. I was watching as hard as I could for obstacles, but I wasn’t sure what I would do if I saw any. With the way my eyes were watering from the wind I couldn’t see very far and I don’t think I would’ve had time to react. The scenery all around me was flashing by in a blur and I was concentrating as hard as I could to stay erect. I probably would have peed my pants, but was too scared to. It was a very long slope, but well groomed and I just kept going straight, a somewhat easy task considering there were no other maniacs on it at the time. After a minute or so, the slope started leveling out and I came to a stop. Looking up at the monster I had just gone down I started doing a little dance, shaking my fists in the air and going, ‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’ It was a total rush! I did that sucker about six more times that day.

There were probably 10 weeks to the program, then throw in another six days from spring break at a ski resort in Austria, an extra weekend at Alpe de Susa, and a weekend at Courmayeur on the border with France, and I got around twenty full days of skiing that winter of 1974. That’s nearly half of my total skiing time. It was a great time and a fond memory of my senior year in high school. It has also paid a lot of dividends. I met my wife on a ski trip to Snowshoe, West Virginia. Her brother is a ski instructor at a resort in Pennsylvania and we got our son started very young. Today, he and I enjoy going on trips together and are planning on a good one to Vermont this coming year.

So, if you’ve never tried it, you should consider it. Like I said, a bad day skiing is still a good day. And a good day skiing is a great day.

Milan, of course, has many wonderful sights. One of them is Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, ‘The Last Supper.’ Its on a wall in the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie and I use to pass by there fairly regularly. In the 1970s, the painting was suffering pretty badly. Leonardo used the wrong kind of wall treatment and it was slowly flaking off. Back in the 70s you could practically walk right up to the painting and look at it in detail. The area right in front of the painting was roped off to keep people from getting too close, but you could have reached across and touched it, if you had a mind to. As flakes would fall off, the people in the chapel would carefully collect them and catalog where they found them in the hope that one day they would be able to restore the painting. I haven’t been back there since 1974, but I understand they’ve done just that, at least as much as they could. An amazing story about the painting is how it survived World War II. The Last Supper and another painting, of Calvary Hill, are on opposite walls of what was the church refectory. During a bombing raid during the war an allied bomb hit the building square on and blew it to smithereens. The entire room was turned into rubble, except those two walls. When you go to visit them you can see where the old walls meet up with the new construction. They have pictures on display showing the two walls standing among all this rubble. Its one of those stories you would think is an urban myth, except this one is real.

For me personally, it was nice to see this painting up close for another reason and that’s because it got me kicked out of Sunday school one time. One spring my Sunday school teacher was teaching us about Easter and had a picture of The Last Supper for illustrative purposes. Well, I studied this picture while listening to her talk about Jesus and the Apostles at the last supper. When she was done, I asked her who the woman was in the painting. She told me that there was no woman. I pointed out the figure to Jesus’s right and said, ‘Right there. That’s a woman.’ The teacher barely even looked before telling me that only the apostles and Jesus were at the last supper, therefore the figure had to be a man. I commented that it sure looked like a woman to me. At that point I was invited to spend the rest of the period outside. Since that was almost always my first choice I considered it winning situation. I found it interesting years later when Dan Brown wrote ‘The Da Vinci Code’ and this very point was a big piece of the story. Once again, I was ahead of my times.

I was never big on pizza before we moved to Italy. Mainly, I don’t like cheese that much. In Taiwan, whenever I told someone I didn’t like cheese I would get this reaction as if I had said I hated my mother and would get this third degree treatment. “How can you not like cheese? Here try this! You’ll love it. What’s wrong with you?” I got so tired of it that I just started telling people I was allergic to it and they left me alone. Well, in Milan I went out to lunch with a friend one day and he took me to this pizza place that was literally a hole in the wall. It was this place left over from World War II where a bomb had blown a hole in the side of the building. They had sealed off the interior portions of the hole, but not the outer wall. As a result, you could step through this big hole in the wall into this bare room, but you couldn’t go any further than that. This guy would come there everyday and unload all of his kitchen gear and set up shop in the room. Then, at the end of the day he would load everything up and go home. There was no door on the hole, so he couldn’t lock anything up in there. Patrick took me there one day, it was just a block or so from our school, and we had lunch. I was really enjoying the Italian food, so I tried this pizza and just fell in love with it! I still think it was the best pizza I’ve ever had. One of the big differences is this guy used loads of olive oil. He used so much that it would run off the pizza while you ate it. The Italian cooking taught me there’s nothing like cooking with olive oil and this is a lesson I’ve used in my own cooking. Don’t spare the olive oil! I still not big on cheese, though.

The Italian drivers were crazy. They weren’t anywhere near the worst drivers I’ve ever seen, but they would do things that were just plain crazy.

My introduction to Italian drivers came very quickly when we arrived in Milan. I was out walking and I came to this narrow road, which I happened to notice was a one-way street. I looked both ways and there was no traffic coming from my right, but to my left I could see the rear of a car driving in the direction of the road. Without a second thought, I stepped off the curb and barely avoided being run over by that car backing up the road. I found out later that the Italians think its ok to go the wrong way on a one-way street, just as long as the car is pointed in the right direction. When I saw the rear end of that car, it didn’t even dawn on me that they would be backing up the road. Sometimes, you’ll see someone backing up a one-way street that meets someone else driving up it. They’ll get out and yell at each other until someone will give in and drive up onto the sidewalk to get around. Hey! Why limit yourself to going the wrong way on the one-way street when you can run over pedestrians on the sidewalk, too.

Like most of the rest of the world, speed limits mean little to the Italians. You are quite literally taking you life in your hands when you’re around them. I have seen drivers take turns on two wheels and go about their business as if it was perfectly normal. That’s probably because it was normal. There was this rotary in Milan that I would go through every now and then and I always wondered why they didn’t keep an ambulance on permanent duty there. Drivers would charge into the traffic around this rotary and it was mayhem! It resembled a mixing bowl that has been stirred up with a beater with all of the cars streaking around in a big circle at the highest speed they could manage, which was always considerably higher than the maximum safe speed. I remember one time I was there with some friends and we had to drive all the way around several times before we could fight through the traffic to get to our exit. The driver was navigating through the traffic, while one of us kept an eye on the right exit and someone else kept a watch out for a break in the traffic behind us that we could move into. It wasn’t until later that I thought about how we had done that and then just resumed our conversation as if nothing had happened. We had been acclimated.

But, the Italian drivers were a brave lot. A measure of just how brave they were was the size of their cars. To think, they were going out and doing battle in those little things. They were among the smallest cars I’ve ever seen. I was walking along one day and saw a VW Bug parked on the side of the road and was amazed at how huge it was. A friend told me that if a Bug comes up behind you on the highway, you get out of the way! One of the popular cars was this one called a Mini Minor. Think about that name. Being small, a minor, wasn’t enough! It’s a small small! And, I’m telling you, it was an appropriate name. Anyone willing to drive one of those things on the freeway surrounded by a bunch of Italian drivers was braver than I!

We lived in Milan, Italy my senior year in high school, the 73-74 school year. Of course, it was great and I really enjoyed Italy. I have been back to Italy several times and everytime I just fall more in love with the country and the people.

 Certainly, one of the things I love most about Italy is the colorful nature of the people. They’ll do things so beautiful it can make you cry. Then, they’ll do something so aggravating it will also make you cry. It’s all part of the attraction.

One of the things that drove my mother crazy was the way they would give you these little candies for change. When we there the exchange rate was about 1500 lira to the dollar. So, if you had 5 or 10 lira coming to you (less than a penny), they would give you a little piece of candy. I, like most people, would take the candy and go on my merry way. But, my mother hated this and decided to save up the pieces of candy she got at this one store. Then, when she had enough she went there to buy something and gave them the candy as payment. When they told her she couldn’t pay with candy, she said, ‘Why not? You gave me this for change? I’m just giving it back!’ I think she won that one.