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Warning: lots of prose
Today proved that even the most jaded traveler has fresh, unique experiences that make the trip memorable and wonderful. Today was like a travel experience sandwich, with two delicious pieces of artisinal whole grain bread cradling a cold piece of spam.
We started the day with breakfast on our deck.
And then rolled down to town to get some picnic supplies. The first wonderful thing happened then. I was walking back from the grocery store when a dapper older gentleman sweeping off the sidewalk in front of his store waved to me and said, "Do you remember me?" I must have looked confused, because he followed up with "I pushed you up the hill!"
Yes, it was my hero from the big hill on the ride the day before! We had a very nice five-minute conversation in which I thanked him profusely, did an Italian kiss kiss, and then were on our way. Only later did it occur to me to be slightly embarrassed that the guy who pushed himself and me up the hill for 10 minutes was well over 60...
Anyway, glowing with that experience we headed off on our route. And then the spam. Our route took us along the Italian equivalent Route 1 north of Boston. Anyone who thinks that the suburban big box shopping experience is unique to America needs to visit this part of Italy. Furthermore, it was Saturday, and there were lines and lines of traffic backed up. This was a bad combination of American-style retail and Italian style old roads.
Here's the only picture from the ride, itself a charming combination of American and Italian. Food trucks have made it to Italy, though not quite in the right order.
We made it up a final long climb into Varese, a city with not much to offer the tourist. It has a medieval center, although every piazza seems to be scarred with at least one of these buildings.
We did find some street art
And some traditional art, in the main church
That was it we thought. Then we opened Google Maps to try to find a restaurant and discovered this feature
It was Varese Pride, and that's the parade route! Varese appeared to be a town with a lot of older Italians and younger immigrants, neither group known to be particularly progressive, so I definitely wanted to see what the Pride parade would be like.
It took a while to find, but once we did it was more impressive than expected
It was particularly fun because, as it was a Saturday evening in an Italian town, there are a lot of people out for their passegeo who definitely didn't know what they had wandered into. It made for a much more diverse crowd than your typical pride parade.
The other half of the bread on the sandwich was our dinner spot, Così Com’è, a spare hip pizza joint. This place was an official sponsor of the parade. They were fully booked but let us come in as long as we promised to eat quickly and get out by 8:30 when their reservations started showing up. We obliged by putting away this giant plate of cured meat and cheese and a shared pizza.
On our way out we struck up a conversation with two young staffers of the parade who were picking up free pizzas for the workers. We congratulated them on the success of the parade. They rolled their eyes and said that Varese is "not a very open minded city, but attitudes are changing." When we told them that we are American and I told them that I have lived in San Francisco they were very excited.
It feels good after the last two horrible years in America that other people still look up to us for something. As an aside, except for one man, we have found that to be the case uniformly across Italy. Nobody ever guesses that we are American, but when they find out they are very excited and tell us how much they love America. Hopefully the next two years won't ruin that.
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