On leaving Italy

Leaving Piano di Sorrento on Thursday it was raining, something of a relief after the heat of the previous days. We’d had five days camping in the lemon orchard, Oasi Verde, with the company of two other motorhomes for the last couple of days. It had been a great place to stay, in spite of our ant invasion and in spite of the difficulties getting around the area. The campsite owners had kindly brought us little homemade curd cheeses in the morning and some delicious pastries one afternoon. Gareth enjoyed a couple of hours taking photos of their rustic lifestyle and when we were leaving they gave us a huge bag of lemons! 

We were touched by the gift, though I couldn’t think what to do with so many lemons while travelling around in a motorhome (“when life gives you lemons make lemonade”??), and then, when they gave us our bill it was significantly more than we were expecting! And this is what we don’t ‘get’ about Italy. So many things turn out to be more than the price quoted. Wrong footed by the gift we paid the bill and left feeling stung and bemused. Our time in Italy needed to be curtailed for the sake of our bank balance, so we set off, using the toll roads for the sake of speed, Hymer’s sake and our own.

Now I have been told by my family that I am painting a very one sided, negative picture of Italy, and that I should say more about the highlights. However, it’s not my style to gloss over things. For anyone thinking of travelling into Italy like we have done it’s good to be warned. Our experience of unexpected charges and costs is not unique as confirmed by other motorhomers we’ve met along the way. A British couple who have been travelling around Italy since April (also with a dog), like us had endeavoured not to use tolls and to use ‘free’ or at least cheap camping aires. Like us they were heading home, having munched through their funds much more quickly as a result of having to resort in the end to tolls, and unexpected charges everywhere. They told us that in Florence they were charged 17 Euro for two ice creams! Italians know how to make delicious ice cream and Gellateria are everywhere, but that’s extortion! 

Italy is a staggeringly beautiful country. It’s more mountainous than we expected, and we have been amazed by how towns and villages have developed in what look to us to be totally inaccessible places. We have wandered into some delightful towns (those on flatter territory), like Lucca, famous for its completely intact town wall, and where a choir practising added to the tranquil, sunset-and-lamp-lit evening. Or Fontanellato where a beautiful old castle forms the centre point of the town and a Sunday market flowed all around and into every street. Fontanellato also had an ingenious aire. Motorhomes are provided with shade under the cover of solar panels which presumably supply the town and the aire with electricity. It felt good, knowing that the few euros we paid for our electricity that night was coming from the sun rather than fossil fuel.

Our impression is, though, that Italy is a country in trouble. We saw lots of unfinished and abandoned projects, like one of their amazing, curled suspended road bridges, hanging, incomplete with its steel reinforcing ragged and rusting. I’d had a very long and interesting chat with one of the young women who had joined us at Oasi Verde. She is Swiss, married to an Italian, but they have chosen to live and raise a family in Switzerland. That’s a no brainer, it seems, after she explained how everyone in Italy has to pay 40% tax and how the suicide rate is high for that reason. She said that so much of the country’s taxes is creamed off that projects are often not completed. Having lived in Italy and married to an Italian hasn’t made her immune to being treated as a foreigner, she explained. Apparently Italians have one set of rules for themselves and another for foreigners. This was her own experience, of course, and maybe her anti-establishment views were heavily influenced by the fact that her husband, originally from the poorer south, Puglia, is a singer of old rebellious country folk songs which are apparently having a revival. There is a strong push, too, in the selling of “Solo Italiano” goods (Italian made) and we haven’t seen any imported French wines in the supermarkets, for example.

So, we made it out of the Sorrento Peninsular and headed north, on the autostrade. Just past Rome we stopped in a services to make coffee and for Gareth to check our rear lights (we’d had a rear end bump some days earlier). Still wondering what to do with my sack of lemons and Gareth insisting we bin them (he was still smarting from the campsite bill), I offered them to another (Italian) motorhomer walking by with his dog. He accepted them with delight, but maybe he then felt obliged to help us somehow, and he got involved with the light-checking. His help was totally unnecessary and from Gareth’s point of view, an intrusion, but it shows another side of Italy; the keen-to-help side that we have come across a few times. Our encounters have for the most part been really friendly, and our dogs get lots of attention. We have never felt unsafe, even in Lucca where there were reports of motorhome break-ins.

Later on that day we developed an electrical problem. It proved to be a tricky one as in spite of Gareth’s scouring of the handbook and replacement of some fuses we had to call the breakdown service. After ages waiting to get through on the phone and another hour and a half of waiting, a breakdown truck arrived. The guy was not a mechanic and he spoke no English. He put us on to his boss whose English was good enough to tell us that we could manage without windscreen wipers and fan and that we should carry on! In spite of the fact that we’d come through rain and that more black clouds were threatening he told Gareth that no rain was forecast and as it was too late in the day to have anyone fix us we may as well continue on our way. We were not having that! So, after a lot of arguing and rain, which the pick-up driver confirmed to his boss on the phone, we were loaded up and taken back the way we had come, parked up in a noisy lay-by and waited until we could be fixed next morning.

Friday morning and we were at the appointed garage. We enjoyed an amble around the sleepy little town before getting our van back, fixed. We were told it was a fuse. Gareth was puzzled because he thought he’d checked all of the associated fuses. Off we set again and less than 250m along the road, the problem reappeared. Back to the garage where they grudgingly investigated, told us to get it fixed at home and in the meantime to keep replacing the fuse each time it goes. They generously gave us two fuses and sent us on our way. Gareth took us back to the lay-by and set about his own investigation. Noticing that the fuse blew each time we went into reverse he eventually discovered that the bump we’d had had slightly bent the reversing light holder and it was causing a short circuit. So, 60 Euros down and memories of a scary ride on the back of a low loader as a souvenir, we set off north again.

We finally arrived in France on Sunday evening having stopped over in Lucca, taking a look at Cinque Terre and then Fontanellato with the solar panel aire. It was a fabulously scenic journey punctuated with lots of tunnels that are a feature of driving around Italy’s mountains. The final tunnel, getting us into France through the Col di Susa was 13km long! Such tunnels are amazing feats of engineering. This one had taken six years to build and the feeling of there being a whole Alp above our heads as we drove through, boggled our brains. What other creature is capable of burrowing that deep? It’s best not to suffer from claustrophobia going into such tunnels, though they are spacious and punctuated with escape tunnels. Being given as we entered a “What to do in case of emergency” card illustrated with people running perks ones adrenaline for sure! 

We learned that there is also a physics laboratory within that tunnel system. They are looking for neutrinos - tiny particles so small that can apparently pass through the earth without touching anything!

Sunday’s exit from Italy cost us 96.4 Euro, including the toll for the tunnel - a shock at 59.60 Euro. Italy gave us that one last punch in the stomach having already slapped us in the face at the last service station where we had to pay 10 Euro per litre for diesel.

So, it’s goodbye Italy and hello France.