Rough Road in Italy

I have taken many an adventure with my wonderful wife Ursula, but the last one was to Rome and Vatican City. It was magical, the sights and attending mass at St Peter’s was a highlight of my life and while we were there the Pope spoke to the crowd and said a blessing for us all.

We walked all over Rome and took the train and cabs to all our destinations. I must say that we never felt unsafe at all. The price of the trains were very reasonable compared to other places where we have been.

We went to all the sights we had time for. The Coliseum built in AD 72 to AD 80, the Forum and the ruins at the Palatine Hill, the Castle St. Angelo and the Trevi Fountain. Yes, we threw a coin in the fountain so we will return to Rome.

The thing that made it magical had more to do with a chance encounter with a road that had a sign in Italian that said rough road, as we went to a restaurant that Ursula’s father had a picture taken at the end of the Second World War. The road that I am speaking of, as I said had a sign in Italian that I could not read and it was only blocking half the road, so like any good American tourist I went around it and, as Shirley Temple used to say, “oh my goodness”! It was, first of all, in the middle of nowhere and I must say if there is a middle of nowhere it was that road in Italy.

Back to the road now, the conditions of the road were really rough at first and, like any thing that I do, it was destined to get even rougher. The sides of the road had collapsed in places and the bridges also looked as if chunks had fallen out of them. I kept moving forward as my poor wife Ursula melted into a nervous pool of Jell-O. We finally got up to the very top of this mountain road and it didn’t look any more pleasing to the eye than the rest of the road had before. There were at least 1000 foot drops or more on the right side of the car which made Ursula’s nerves of Jell-O at this point even more shaky. I, however, had all the confidence in the world that we were going to be safe “after they pulled our mangled bodies from the Fiat we had rented”. At least then you wouldn’t have to be listening to this story. Yes, I was starting to get a little bit worried, “yeah like I was already sweating bullets”, the road actually seemed just a little bit better, “but you had to drive around the big huge holes in the road for it to be better by the way”. We finally got to the end of our rough road and came to what we would’ve called an expressway that also seemed to be closed. Luckily, we saw a couple workers on a part of the expressway that was closest to us, so we asked them in our very best interpretation of an American tourist trying to make someone understand what they are asking that doesn’t understand English. Somehow he understood us and pointed to go back down the road and take the right but before the closed sign. We were to turn across the medium and turn left and it would take us to our destination. Luckily for us it did and no mishaps or rough roads on the rest of our trip to the town of Bornio in Rovigo and the restaurant called Trattoria al Ponte.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                              We also went to Sienna, Lake Como and Milan.