Days 45 to 47 - Santa Margherita Ligure

Day 47 – Santa Margherita Ligure

Another morning lost to preparing a large blog post. The primary time spent involves selecting from the too many photos I’ve taken and threading the narrative around them. Then, actually integrating the photos into the blog post on Blogger.com is not as simple as I would prefer because I have views about how to present my blogs that don’t seem to resonate with Blogger. I’ve made these rods for my own back, I know. However, I’ve learned that I value the detailed journalling when I look back on the blogs years later.

Today I decided that I would do some exploring in SML to see parts of the town that I’ve not already seen. It was a simple as turning right at the end of the lane leading up to the apartment building rather than my customary left-turn. In doing that the day before, I’d discovered a few things that kind of shamed me. First, the rubbish/recycling depot that Paola’s apartment is registered with is not the one that I’ve had frustrated attempts to use before. When I visited it today, everything worked exactly as it was supposed to. Furthermore, the depot includes more options for recycling and disposal than the other ones I’ve seen. A small matter in the scheme of things but humbling to me that I just didn’t think to look both ways on my earliest scouting, weeks ago. Also, literally less than 100 m from the right-turn I now make, is a Farmacia (chemist) and a Carrefours (supermarket). Both considerably closer than the ones I’ve been relying on to date. Across the road from the Carrefours, a quite nice bar that looks out over the piazza in front of the church. This part of town is also too far up for tourists to routinely show up. It’s really got an enormous amount going for it and I’ve been blissfully unaware for weeks.

The view from lunch

I chose to have lunch in the bar, and it was completely satisfactory, in spite of there being me and one other couple as its lunch rush. Having finished lunch, I pressed on up Corso Matteotti away from the harbour. The road was narrower here, lined with residential buildings, and ended abruptly. Just beside the termination point was an open fence adjacent to a large water channel. I’m pretty sure that this is the original creek/river that carved the gorge that SML nestles in, controlled to allow the town to be built over it.

Looking down the corso from its end

Looking up the creek that’s been channelled

Looking down the channel as it disappears under the town

I walked down the corso a short way and turned up the hill to investigate some of the hillside residential area. You quickly gain some height, and the residences quickly become standalone homes, often on quite large, but dangerously steeply sloping blocks. It is clearly the terrain of wealthier residents. The housing is kept in good repair (mostly) and the blocks are usually heavily terraced and often productive in either olive orchards, or food gardens.

Big residence with elaborate garden on Corso Matteotti	Posh residence not far up the hill	An empty block, heavily terraced, where new construction is about to start
The view back over town from about halfway up my climb	Looking across the valley over SML; more rural	Soon enough the steep road turned into a staircase

My wandering had turned into more European mountain climbing. To be fair, I knew it would; the geography is blindingly obvious. I kept climbing steadily, periodically reviewing the increasing view. I was aiming for one of the roads that led into town from the main coastal highway.

The view from someone’s parking spot, above their house	SML from a bit further along the entry road	Santa Margherita Ligure, from above
A layby high up over SML; perfect place to put a bar, I thought, though no parking nearby	Looking down onto the apartment where I’m staying The light beige/yellow building immediately behind the orange building with a red roof	You can tell they’re well-to-do up here – several houses had pools perched on the steep slopes

I turned down the hill again as soon as a walkway presented itself. I wasn’t wearing shoes that are great for long walks so I wasn’t too keen to do a few kilometres to get back home. As I dropped down off the hill (the walkway was steep and straight down) I kept checking on the view across the town, and trying to spot interesting architecture. I was also looking for a home that Tracy had once photographed in SML that she said that she’d like to live in. Finding that would have been serendipitous, but also unbelievably random. There are some quite unique places in SML. The castle-like building obviously caught my eye! And I found a fixer-upper that presents an exciting challenge for the renovator that was calling to me as I walked (slowly) by it. As I walked back home having descended the hill, I was very satisfied with my little adventure. I have really enjoyed my time in SML and this walk offered more discoveries and perspectives to make me like it even more.

The top of the staircase leading down into town	Another look from afar at the apartment building I’m staying in Yellow/beige building in centre frame, partly obscured by pine trees	The castle on the hill
The castle again, with more context	A fixer-upper’s delight – that scaffolding looks like it’s been there for years, decades	The fixer-upper from below – it’s the big vine-covered lump

Dinner – perfetto!

After my little adventure, I spent time relaxing and reading. At 7 pm, I headed down to L’insolita Zuppa to have my promised-to-myself posh dinner. When I got there, I discovered that they were full-up with a private function. Devo! So, I headed off into town to find somewhere else. The town was very quiet, much more so than when I walked into town on a Friday night last week. The tourist season has clearly finished. More and more shopfronts have “Chuiso per fiere” (closed for holidays) signs on their shutters. Even in the heart of the tourist area, not many restaurants were open. Part of the quiet look was that there weren’t many tables set up outside, with the evening being quiet overcast and cooling down fast. I stopped at a couple of restaurants to see what they were offering and eventually chose Il patio. Excellent choice, sir! The menu is really enticing (which is what got me in the door), the restaurant was very luxe (and mercifully quiet), the service was excellent and the food divine. Expensive, of course, but that was part of the point and the meal was worth every penny.

Daily facts: Location: Santa Margherita Ligure Temp: 15 Weather: Overcast; light showers in the evening

Day 46 – Santa Margherita Ligure

Today was planned to be a very low-key day, partly to recover from my busy Naples trip, and partly to make the distinction between touring and holidaying. A late, slow start, and composition of a long blog entry pushed my to lunchtime without noticing the passing time. I headed out into town to find a cafe at which to have a light lunch. The town is noticeably quieter, fewer people on the streets, and shops and restaurants, closing ‘for holidays’. I stopped in a pizza restaurant at the top of the tourist district and chose a calzone for lunch. I thought that would be a light lunch. When the pictured calzone showed up, I was dumb-struck. Then the guys beside me received their pizza each, and you can see that they were clearly made on a cart wheel. Undaunted, I set to the calzone, thinking that I could take the leftovers home for dinner. Turns out, I managed it all. It was really nice!

A calzone as big as my head

The ‘standard’ pizzas served

A food garden

On the walk home, I discovered an ‘Aladdin’s Cave’ shop in SML. While browsing around, I acquired a multi-bit screwdriver, which I needed to address an outstanding repair I wanted to undertake in the apartment. With this and other trivial necessaries in hand, I deliberately went up one of the back streets to see stuff I’d not seen already of SML. I came across a small food garden between the apartment buildings. That’s not particularly remarkable in itself, but it’s the first food garden I’ve seen in the towns that I’ve visited, and one of the few private gardens I’ve seen. There is very little green space in Italian (European, really) towns and cities, especially near the centre. Some ornamental parks, but the urban areas are all pretty austere, ‘concrete jungle’ affairs (well, stone and brick jungles, to be fair). I feel sure that’s down to the relatively limited space available to accommodate all the many people who live in Europe and the consequent culture of building closely ranked, vertical cities. Unlike Australia, where we always feel that we’ve got more space than we can possibly use, so we spread out, a lot.

The fixed shutter, open at last

At home, I bravely took on the job of disassembling the shutter cord mechanism of one of the windows in the kitchen. Unlike all the other shutters, this one refused to retract the cord you use to raise the shutter (it winds onto a spring-driven spool in the wall). I had figured that the spring was probably broken, or partially unwound, or similar and I would have to replace it. The first step to that was to remove it from the wall so that I could take the old mechanism down to the local hardware store and see if they had a replacement. The courage I’ve claimed is because I could imagine a few things not working in my favour that might require expert tradesman assistance to rectify after my amateurish attempts at repair. Anyway, I pressed on. The spool mechanism came out of the wall slot that houses it easily. The cord was removed from the spool easily too (the variety of screwdriver bits that I have bought immediately proved itself). As I was holding the spool steady to remove the screw that fixed the cord to the mechanism, I realised that I was closing the mechanism up; it was a circular clam-shell type thing. As I put pressure on the spool to hold the cord attachment steady, it definitely clicked closed. I closed some more of it and realised that the tension was coming back into the mechanism. Ultimately, I made sure the whole spool was properly closed and could feel the tension in the mechanism from holding it still (resisting it’s tendency to release the spring tension by rotating). I re-secured the cord and sort of tested the retraction by letting the mechanism climb the cord by rotating. Satisfied that this was working better than before, I reinstalled the mechanism in its hole to test the thing properly. It worked perfectly. Job done! That could certainly have gone much worse (I’d imagined scenarios that included having to replace the whole shutter!). I took way more satisfaction out of that simple task than I might have imagined going in.

The rest of the day passed completing another huge blog post, then reading.

Daily facts: Location: Santa Margherita Ligure Temp: 16 Weather: Partly cloudy

Day 45 – (Travelling to) Santa Margherita Ligure

Up early, again, to get to the train that was scheduled to leave at 7:31 am. By now, this walk was almost a routine for me, as the two tours had started near to and past the central train station. I got there quite early (the anxious traveller wanted to be sure we made it) and then watched as the train I was on was delayed incrementally to be ~30 minutes late departing. The frustrating thing was not wanting to leave the platforms to get something to eat for breakfast, which could have been comfortably achieved if I’d known about the delay at the outset. This was compounded because the train I was on – an older Intercity train – only had a vending machine cafeteria, which meant that I couldn’t really eat until I got home.

Ultimately, the trip passed uneventfully. I watched carefully out the window as we went through Pisa, but I didn’t get a glimpse of the famous tower. I’m running out of days in which to make day-trips to famous places that I ought to visit in Italy. I’m developing a list for next time!

When I did get home, I picked up a foccacia from one of the bakeries between the station and the apartment for lunch. When I got home, I started the process of washing everything and finally lodging a (now late) blog entry. I had planned to treat myself to another dinner at L’insolita Zuppa, but when I went down there, they were closed, until Friday night. As I walked down the corso looking for an alternative, several of the restaurants were closed. I decided that I would buy a ready-meal from the supermarket instead of keep hunting for a place to eat, suspecting that there might be some holiday or something in effect.

Daily facts: Location: (Travelling to) Santa Margherita Ligure Temp: 17 Weather: Sunny, patches of cloud