day 1 Torino. exploring

Two days quartering my neighborhood. Today, south half.

First, 2 blocks to storied Po River

Brick support towers I liked on an apartment building 

Church 

Food market, not on any map or tourist site, 2.5 blocks away. Maybe only Saturday? 

The least confusing on street parking pay machine I've yet seen. Good luck figuring out times, zones, if you're A B or C, etc. I'll take the minor confusion of buses! 

grabbed olive oil, salt, water at my store only a long block away. (Yay!) And back home before heat gets too bad. 29C and 60% humidity now. 

I'm writing in hot afternoons. 

in Turin (Torino)

Long hot day of travel. Vegging out tonight.

Because I'll be here so long, I'm starting slow, just wandering neighborhood the first 2 mornings. Lucky to have a grocery store on the block with reasonable prices. So close I can buy bottled water every day. And a little deli counter. I saw 6 new kinds of DOP cheese. Can't wait to try them!

Buses and trams drop off 1 block from my apt, which is great. 

a moment recalled

I had a moment with an Italian woman on the bus.

An Australian couple and kid get on. He has a body-sized suitcase on rollers, two wheels have broken, she has one reasonable sized one, a little kid has a backpack. 

He's bitching up a storm. "I don't think we had to take two trains. There was one we could have taken instead. Why did he tell us that?" (me, thinking he probably told you to take 2 regionales rather than the pricier Frecciarossa, seeing your not nice t- shirt, shorts, and broken suitcase.) Wife, soothing: I'm sure he was trying to help.

Guy keeps bitching. "Tries" to fix a wheel, but not in any serious way. Girl says, "Oh look at the little train!" Guy doesn't notice his child is delighted by the views out the window of a new place. The wife catches sight of the arena. "Are we supposed to get off here?" "No," he snarls, like his wife is the stupidest person ever. The 8 year old girl takes a look at the wheel, with a better engineering eye than her father's.

At this point, happy I'm invisible as "an Italian" i look at the woman across from me. We don't quite roll our eyes at each other, but I felt we were communicating: What a dick. Or these people are inept at traveling

Now, just to insert a picture, Italian toaster and Italian coffee pods.

Escape to the alps: Trento

Or at least the edge of them, in Trento. 18 degrees cooler than Verona. Walked all over town, but spent little beond the $18 round trip train ticket. As always, am exhausted!

Here's Dante, three circles of hell, and he's pointing maybe at the Visitors Center. Background, some Alps/Dolomites 

rock pigeons. Ubiquitous in northern Italy. I'll hear them cooing for months after I return 

Clock spire, but blow it up and what I'm shooting is a whirling bunch of common swifts. The fly all the time in summer. They sleep when they fly. They have sex in the air.

a Trento street. Pretty touristy. Nice. Pricey. German and Italian restaurants.

I was arrested here for hugging the meat. 😉

This shot of Deutsch Bank is to remind me to mention Trento is at the edge of German-speaking Italy. Everyone thought I was German. Somehow, I've developed a German accent in Italian. 🤷‍♀️

Another castle. i didn't go in.

finally, more Dolomites.

Between the train tracks and the Adige river, there's a great bike path. It goes from Verona into Austria, but the section from Verona to Trento is 100 pretty flat kilometers. It goes through more vinyards laid end to end than I've ever seen. Some are terraced up the slopes of a mountain. Most little towns have a picturesque castle. It's all very pretty.

bird watching/nature day, verona 'burbs

Waiting for bus, I appreciated oleanders in bloom

and this European only tree, London Plane Tree. (Platanus × acerifolia.)

Got on the bus to Montorio. North, a little higher than Verona proper.  A small lake near the source of the Fiumicello. 

I wandered. And tried to get pix of birds, but with the camera on phone only, they'll be small.

Garden variety mallards.

pretty sure this is an avocet. White thing in middle of shot.

Swifts too fast to photograph or even ID. 

Heat drove me home at 11:00

moving day, Verona

With a three hour window between check out and check in time at the next, more suburban, apartment, I decided to walk and hunt for a shaded place to sit out of 90 degree heat for 2.5 hours. 

I found it 2/3 of the way there, and I've been sitting and listening to crickets and reading. What a pleasant interlude, when I worried I'd be stuck in the grass in the sun. 

And that's more Medieval brick fortress wall  behind me. 

Verona Day 6

There's a big cemetery/columbarium near me, and as I'm museumed out, I'm just exploring the city. Off I went in that direction.

A typical family interment indoors 

bunch of burials

no writing if the sort in older US cemeteries for the most part. (With the angels, or that sort of thing). Surname first. Name. Date. 98% of burials are well tended.

Nuns' burials. Birth name, Suor (nun name), and Madre (mother superior name). Oldest nun I noticed was 103 years. Which is what physical work, plain food, and an absence of men can get you.

Pricey monuments like this in loggia, or collonades. You're impressed until you look up the person and no newspaper confirms any of the claims, and you realize this guy probably called himself all these complementary things! I looked up several people, had AI try it too, and no claim could be verified. (A warning to genealogical researchers who believe obituaries). 

text: musician and incomparable conductor. Profound philosopher. A spirit mild and incorruptible. (Irony overload!! 😂) Newspaper references, zero. 

Walked through part of the university to get there and back. Profs dress better than I ever did. It's a new university. Bologna's goes back to 1088.