A normal working day today so plenty of buses to the city and no need to get out early. Also it's drizzling gently. That's probably why I slept well. It looks like the dramatic rain clouds that overshadowed Firenze when I was passing through have arrived in Emilia Romagna.
Today I will just wander around the city. The shops are full of wonderful produce and foodstuffs. This is indeed a foodie's heaven.
I have a lunch of chicken fillets wrapped in prosciutto at Tamburini, a well-known deli and restaurant. The place is full of workers in their lunch hour. It was very casual self-service, you just pick what you want and pay at the cashier. There are no labels on the dishes, I guess the locals know what's what. It was so hard to decide, everything looked good.
After that a desert of a rum ball from a confectioner for 1€. The Italians can even make a sundae from Maccas taste good. The secret is Baci chocolate sauce. Baci is of course made by Perugina, whom we met back in Perugia. The Maccas is quite tolerant, I'm sitting at an outside table reading The Story of San Michele and writing in my diary and nobody's asked me to move on. San Michele is on Capri way down south near Napoli and the events in that autobiography are a century old. The style of writing is quite idiosyncratic and fanciful in parts but the book is entertaining and was very popular. I visited that villa on my first journey to Europe 25 years ago and I remembered that the setting was as beautiful as Axel Munthe lavishly praised.
Porticos are a feature of buildings here. They extend for long distances out of the city and it is possible to walk kilometers without getting exposed to sun or rain.
Here is one of the old city gates.
From research in book shops and online I have collected enough information to decide that I will take an overnight sleeper south, then stay overnight in the resort town of Trani, which is about 40 km from Bari, before taking the Jadrolinija ferry to Dubrovnik. Trani is more pleasant than Bari and yet is close enough for me to get to the ferry terminal without stress. The ferry goes east on certain days only and I have picked next Wednesday so my touring days in Emilia Romagna are numbered.
I have arranged to meet Davide, from the local Linux users' group, ERLUG, for dinner. He takes me on a walk to a member's home, where Luigi and Lorena live with their two sons, Francesco and Nicolo. Luigi and Lorena are both economists and have trained overseas and speak English quite well. After a few minutes, Davide excuses himself as he has a meeting to attend, leaving me with my hosts. The reason I have been invited to dine with them is because Francesco will be an exchange student in Canberra soon and they are curious about Australia. We exchange a lot of information about Italian and Australian culture. I mention that balsamic vinegar seems plentiful in Emilia Romagna. They say but you know, if it's really top quality stuff, the host will offer you only a teaspoonful, so high is the price. I guess most of us have to make do with the standard quality product.
Luigi has to take the dog, Hugo, for an evening walk so we continue our conversation in the park. Unfortunately Luigi has never quite warmed to Hugo and Hugo knows it. So he refuses to leave the house, perhaps suspecting that Luigi will do away with him or something like that. So Luigi has to get Nicolo to accompany us to placate the dog. Luigi is impressed that I know so much about Italian films. I explain that we get a lot of great world films in our arthouse cinemas, and we also have SBS. When I mention that I admired Nanni Moretti's recent opus La Stanza del Figlio (The Son's Room), Luigi put his hand on his heart and said, that story really gets you here.
We talked late into the evening and Luigi gave me a lift back to the hostel because the buses had stopped running by that time.
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