Food of the day: Polenta - a common food in this area. Often presented in a pressed block about as big as a child's play block, it makes a pleasing if bland accompaniment to the main ingredients on the plate. It doesn't seem to have the personality to take centre stage itself.
Word of the day: Campanalismo - the affection for one's local bell tower. When in Italy, the way to see bell towers is this: find one and look at it, then turn your head less than 180d and you'll see another. Walk to that second one and repeat the procedure. You will be able to traverse the country this way! Campanilismo alludes to a provincial orientation which seems quite pervasive, and a source of pride and identify perhaps greater than the notion of being Italian.
After arriving late on Saturday following the Passo Gavia epic, we started our week-long guided cycling holiday with a short ride along the Brenta river valley with Elena. The Brenta hurtles down towards Florence through a valley that, at this point, is typically a few kilometres wide. It is very fertile, with farming taking up most of the space between the small towns. The river water is clear and, in the stiller sections, takes on a beautiful pale steely green.
It's a lovely place to ride. Sticking to the valley floor, it's pretty flat with a very quiet road linking all the towns and usually within sight of the river, which then meets a "bicycle road" (ie bike path) which you can follow all the way to Germany! Our hotel overlooked the road, and we saw tons of cyclists going to and fro every day. Some of them were obviously cyclo-tourists, with pannier bags and so on, who may well have come from Germany. In several cases, they spoke German.
The German influence is felt here. The main beer in restaurants is a German beer, Paulaner, and when businesses choose to promote their services in a second language it's just as often German as it is the usual choice of English. About 10 kilometres up river from our hotel are fortifications installed by the Italians against the Austro-Hungarians in WW1, as this was the location of the border.
On one of our later rides, our guide Samuele explained that the adjacent northern area of Trentino Alto Aldige was better off because they had retained a degree of financial autonomy as part of the post WW2 settlement which brought them under Italian governance. He made these comments in quite a polically aware way - interesting coming from an 18 yo. Everywhere you go, you are reminded of the strong regional identification that Italians have, and the way that they like to contrast the attributes and merits of different areas and discuss the equity of their treatment by the national government. Both provincial identification and wider political awareness seem higher than in Australia. One week later, in Verona, I participated in a mass bike ride. As we rode out the start gate, the announcer called out the names of the provinces represented by the riders.
PS - the official explanation of the autonomy of TAA, from their website, is introduced as follows.
The origin of our autonomy goes back many centuries, and is made up of complex events, traditions, civic customs and rules which the communities have developed over time and jealously guarded throughout the course of their many political and social upheavals. And it is this that explains the attitude of the people of Trentino to the question of self-rule, to doing things their own way: it is not a case of selfish isolation, far from it – as a matter of fact, they have always maintained a dialogue with the world beyond their frontiers, from the remote border regions to the Government in Rome, and indeed to the European Union.
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