Knock knock

Who's there?
Puglia.
Puglia who?
Puglia wallet out and buy some plane tickets to Italy!

We reluctantly left Capri and took a train to Bari. Well, it was supposed to be a train trip. However, a landslide on the tracks between Benevento and Foggia required us to take a bus around the site. The landslide is five months old; they are just now beginning to clear it.

We left the lushness and insanity of Naples and arrived in a more arid region of the country, just below the spur on Italy's boot. We tried not to, but ended up renting yet another Fiat Punto. We are destined to drive only Fiat Puntos in Italy. It's okay, I suppose, since that's what everyone drives over there. But I don't understand their popularity, because as I've mentioned before, Puntos have no ground clearance and Italy is a country of rutted dirt roads.

We made it to our villa, which incidentally sits at the end of the most rutted, stony dirt road we've yet encountered, unless you count the super duper shortcut I liked to take to school when Paul wasn't around. It was worth the drive; Masseria Il Trappeto sits amidst vigorous, 1000-year-old olive trees, in the flats that slope down from Ostuni to the Adriatic, seven kilometers away. The olive trees in Puglia are nothing like the 98-pound weaklings in Florence. Here, they all look like big, twisted, tortured men with bad backs caught in the middle of their morning calisthenics.

At night, we could look up and see the city perched high on the only hill for miles around, as the whitewashed outer walls were floodlit from below. During the day, we looked north to the Adriatic. Once, we thought we could see Albania through the haze from Iceland's volcano, but probably not.

We rented bikes, and rode the Via Traiana one day along the coast. It runs past miles of robust olive trees with millions of red poppies at their feet. Several times we were stopped by herds of sheep, which forced me to lie on the landing card upon entering the U.S., where it asks if you've been in close contact with livestock. Shhh.

The Via Traiana was built by the Emperor Trajan (well, he had help) to improve communication with Brindisi and the east. It parallels the Appian Way, which makes you wonder why they didn't just apply for some Stimulus money and improve the Via Appia instead. I'm glad they didn't, even if it was a shovel-ready project, because the Via Traiana is lovely. There are places along it where you can still see the wheel ruts in the original limestone surface.

There are ruined towers every few miles along the Adriatic coast. They were built to give inhabitants fair warning upon the arrival of Saracen invaders, Greek invaders, Roman invaders, Carthaginian invaders, Normans, Angevins, Aragonese, Venetians, Turks or anyone else with a dinghy and a hankering for pasta. The towers are no longer necessary, but the culture bears the marks of so many influences: homes in Greek and African style; names and places with Arab and Spanish roots; trulli (who knows where they came from); a funny accent; Albanian enclaves; and different dishes in the kitchen.

Somehow, miraculously, Puglia remains thoroughly Italian.

Italian phrase of the day: "Toc toc. Chi e? Puglia. Puglia chi? Puglia soldi e fare un giro in Italia!" (Knock knock. Who's there? Puglia. Puglia who? Puglia money and take a trip to Italy!)

Trulli Madly Deeply

No matter where we are, long drives in the car find us playing the ABC game, in which occupants take turns finding signs or locations or things that begin with the letters of the alphabet. There are always some sticking points; H is a toughie in Italy. Also K. But not in Puglia; Greeks have been packing their Kappas in their luggage and visiting the heel of Italy's boot for for thousands of years. Along with ancient pottery and the occasional temple, they left a few Ks behind. They show up here in the names of bakeries, bars, and beach resorts.

We came to Puglia for several reasons: we'd never been; the food is wonderful and a little different; and  we felt it would be unhealthy to spend all three weeks in Florence, driving around from former haunt to former haunt, hoping everyone remembered us.

The countryside in this part of Puglia (that's "Pool-ya," not "P-ugly-a" for you dumb Americans) is littered with ancient dwellings called Trulli. They all look like something Shrek would live in, and are found nowhere else in the world. There are entire towns of these excruciatingly cute piles of stone with little balls on top, in which toothless women knit shawls and sell fine linen and crappy souvenirs.

We feel pretty comfortable in Florence, but we don't have to go far before things start feeling foreign. Every region has its customs and attitudes, and we've managed to offend both here in Puglia.

I went out to the Saturday market in Ostuni wearing a shortish skirt and converse sneakers. I am traveling; I have about 5 outfits from which to choose, and most of them are dirty anyway or hanging on a line outside the villa hoping to dry before the next rainstorm. I haven't owned a pair of panty hose since they stopped selling them in big plastic eggs. And I refused to pack thick tights because it's springtime in Italy, damnit, and I was hoping for some sun. So I wore my skirt and shoved on my sneakers and walked out the door feeling quite put-together.

I didn't notice at first that women and men, old and young, were looking at my legs and pointing and nudging each other. But it wasn't long until I could no longer pretend that they were admiring my tan (don't have one). Some laughed outright. Men in purple pants and yellow sweaters with green shirts beneath were laughing at ME. Women poured into cheap Dolce & Gabbana leopard-print knockoffs were craning their necks to get a backward glance at ME.

I told Paul about it and he didn't believe me until the evening passeggiata in Martina Franca, a nearby hill town. The residents all emerge for an evening stroll at 8-ish before they settle down to dinner at 10-ish. Paul walked behind me and watched the reactions of passers-by, giving me a play-by-play and getting a big kick out of my public humiliation. It's not like the skirt is up at crotch level. It's not as if my shoes are glow-in-the-dark. Just a black skirt and dark, flat shoes. But I may as well have been dressed as Lady Gaga, because the reaction was the same.

Turns out, you just don't bare your legs before July in these parts. Clearly we need to spend another year or so mining the depths of Italy's varied cultures.

Italian phrase of the day:  "Ora, tengo i miei gamberi sicuramente sotto i pantaloni." (I keep my legs safely under pants now).

They had me at "Funicular"

I've had every intention of loving Capri since I found out it was filled with stylish people and teak runabouts and Italian movie stars. I was filled with anticipation when we boarded the boat (and not only because I was eager to leave Crazytown -er, Naples).

We arrived at Marina Grande, and there, at the foot of a steep hill, was a funicular.That's the funny little steep train thingamy you take to the top of the island from the Marina Grande, where the ferries dock.

I love a funicular. And I really love a funicular that takes you to a sunny piazza with a view of the Bay of Naples. But I wouldn't be a discerning traveler if I allowed a funicular to inform my opinion of a place; I'd be over the moon about Dogpatch, Arkansas (look it up). So I waited until we disembarked from the funicular and eyed the piazza and tasted the gelato and smelled the oranges, saw the ruins and the grottoes and the crystal-clear water, and then declared Capri to be everything I'd decided it was years ago.

It's definitely not a penny-pincher's destination, but nobody ever accused me of being a skinflint. Cappuccinos are not the normal .90 euro; here they are 1.30. Gelato's pricey, too. But, really, what price paradise? I'm not the first person to decide Capri is a nice place; several Roman emperors built enormous villas here, and one, Tiberius, moved the capital from Rome to Capri so he could rule the empire from the comfort of his own seaside resort. (This is also the man who threw servants off a nearby cliff just to see what they looked like when they fell, so not all of his ideas were so hot.)

The island has fallen in and out of favor with the smart set over the centuries, but it has remained resolutely in vogue since August 1826, when German writer August Kopisch rediscovered the Blue Grotto. The Blue Grotto is a cave at the water's edge whose low entrance should make it a dark, creepy place. But sunlight passing through an underwater cavity permeates the place with an ethereal blue glow. Once known and used by the Romans as a nymphaeum, the geological marvel was forgotten until the enterprising Kopisch stumbled on it. He sent word of his discovery to the rest of Europe and thrill-seekers have been paying to see the sight ever since.

We were not among them; our guide, who early-on decided I was to be our group's translator and peppered my morning with 'Vendy! Vendy!', told us the cost wasn't worth it at this time of year. It is a marvel in July, however, when the sun is at the right angle and masses of tourists risk nose scabs and pay good money to lay on their backs in little boats and squeeze under the cave's low entrance.

Eliminating the Blue Grotto gave us more time to skirt the rest of the island. It's not hard, when you're on a little wooden boat with a sun-ripened skipper at the helm, drifting slowly past the uninhabited parts of Capri, to imagine you're Odysseus lashed to a mast to avoid the lure of the Sirens, or a Roman noble looking for the stone steps that will take you up to your villa. The Sirens are gone, but the remains of Roman staircases still rise out of the blue depths and disappear halfway up white cliffs.

The omission also gave our eggplant-tinted friend extra time to show us the other, less famous grottoes: The Emerald Grotto, the White Grotto, the Grotto of Love, the Marvelous Grotto, and a dozen others. There's more absence of rock here than rock itself. He pointed out former Saracen castles that now house Mariah Carey and the Swarovski family (well, not together, though that would make for a good reality show). Mind you, he only pointed these things out to me, saying, 'Vendy! Vendy!' I would turn my head to the left, listen to his Italian, then translate for the rest of the party, who were no doubt extremely annoyed that he assumed they didn't understand (they didn't, but don't tell them I said that). If it makes them feel better, I developed a stiff neck on the left side that I brought home along with some nice soaps. Still have both.

Italian phrase of the day: "E stracciatella sul suo naso? No? Eh, hai visitato la Grotta Azzura." (Is that chocolate chip gelato on your nose? No? You must have visited the Blue Grotto)

Itchhiker

We left Florence the day after Easter. We'd been at a friend's party for Easter, eating fabulous food and reconnecting with people who barely remembered us. The kids ran around outside in the olive groves for hours on end.

The next day, we headed south to Naples, checking into the Palazzo Decumani and then heading out for Neapolitan pizza. At bedtime, William came across the hall and asked me to take a look at his back. "Mom, what's this? Petey said I have something on my back." He lifted up his pajama top.

I apologize, because, in about 10 seconds, you're going to start itching. I wish I could arrange for you all to read this simultaneously, because then you'd all itch at exactly the same time, and that would be kind of cool. If it makes you feel better, I'm itching, too, as I write that there, in the middle of his back, was the butt-end of a gluttonous tick. Done itching? Okay.

Apparently, William had picked up more than eggs in the fields the day before. He took it pretty well, considering. I'd read somewhere that if you roll a tick around and around in a circle for a few minutes, it will get dizzy and back out of its own accord. Apparently, Italian ticks are made of hearty stuff, because when I stopped, it just sat there with its head firmly dug into my son's flesh as if it rides the Tilt-a-Whirl every day.

So then I remembered reading that you should grab a tick firmly with tweezers and pull slowly and gently, so you don't separate the head from the body (though decapitation was too good for it, in my opinion).

Five minutes later, the tweezers were in the garbage along with half of a tick.

Luckily, a friend's husband is a cardiologist in Naples. She told us to go to a specific, distant pharmacy and drop his name. So the next morning, we took a long taxi ride to the farmacia (pharmacy, dummy), rushed in, and breathlessly dropped the name that would deliver us from the buzz-kill in William's back. The blank, disdainful look on the pharmacist's face said it all: She'd never heard of any Dario Leosco, and she was not going to pull a tick out of William's back. In any case, she told us we had to go to Loreto Crispi, a small clinic nearby. We did, in the same taxi, as the driver had become deeply involved in our drama and was waiting for us outside the farmacia.

Three doctors (or one and two nurses, or three nurses, or three guys who came in for some shade; they all wore white and smoked) confabbed about the removal of a zecca from a little boy's back. All three of them worked over William, and as far as I can tell, the only difference between the clinic and our hotel room the night before was a swab of alcohol and the velocity of the Italian spoken.

First they dug in with tweezers, then they broke the needle off a syringe and used that to pick it out. William was a trooper, but did whimper a bit. We have it on video for his rehearsal dinner.

The most doctor-like of the bunch wrote a prescription for a cream, then another, grudgingly, for an internal antibiotic. He told me that one should never pull out a tick, but pour a little alcohol on it. One of the nurse-doctors added his own pantomime of a drunk tick stumbling out of the Williamville saloon. Then he called us two taxis (there were seven of us). When William got up off the table, the nursemen game him a high five and a "bravo."

After some "grazie mille's" and no payment of any kind, we headed down to the port to catch the hydrofoil to Capri. It was a surreal transition from "My son has a tick in his back and three Italian men are pulling it out - I think" to "I'm wandering the narrow streets of Capri in sandals and a jaunty scarf," but I quickly got my mind around it.

Italian phrase of the day: "Cerca di non fare un prurito quando dico: Zecca." (Try not to itch when I say: Tick.)

Psych!

I had this idea that I'd come home and be done blogging. That life was interesting and worth writing about in Italy (very true), but mundane and meaningless at home (jury's out). Banality at home gives you plenty of time to blog, however, so here I am. And don't pretend you didn't miss me; there's nothing else to do right now since you're all out of work.

Here it is: I like America. Not the eagles 'n guns part, but the fresh-faced, smoke-free, perky, can-do gestalt that you just don't get anywhere else. Something's different, though. I don't just mean different from Europe (duh; coffee's better there), I mean different from what it was when we left. Mortgages, for example, could be had in 2007. Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling were the only executives regularly vilified in the press. There was a press.

Seems just yesterday we all thought we needed second homes in Bar Harbor or Friday Harbor. Now most of us would be happy with a decent mortgage on a split-level in Oak Harbor. The American Dream has gone retro: All victory gardens and making-do and hard work and burlap.

But call me a Leading Indicator and scroll me across the bottom of the tv screen, because I see an end to this, soon, based on what I call the Frequency of Inquiries by Lucky Bastards planning to Live In Europe Index. And the FILBLIE Index is skyrocketing these days. Seems like everyone is trying to live somewhere else. And of those, roughly half have asked me for advice. So I'm going to put it down for posterity and wish I'd charged for it later.

1. GO ABROAD. Don't come up with reasons why you can't. You will always find excuses not to go. Here's a little added incentive for those on the fence: Your children are almost grown up and if you don't go now they'll drift away from you and they won't get that all-important global perspective and they'll never get into college and you'd better just go.

2. UNPLUG YOUR DRYER NOW. That way, when you get to wherever it is you're going, you'll be used to the idea of clotheslines and can focus on learning the language and getting a cellphone.
3. DON'T RUSH OUT AND GET A CELLPHONE. Ask around and get several opinions first. It was two, three weeks into our sojourn that we swapped stories with locals and other expats and realized we'd spent twice as much as we needed to on our plans and phones.

4. GET A VISA. (You don't really need one. But if anyone asks, I told you to GET A VISA.)

5. YOUR KIDS ARE THE PERFECT AGE. They're not too old. Funny thing about dragging unwilling teens out of their element and forcing them to live in permissive, worldly places with topless sunbathing: They love it. They don't want to leave. Also, they're not too young. What's the worst thing that will happen if you take your two-year-old? Fluency in two languages? Quelle horreur!

6. THE ELITE 4-AND-UNDER WATER POLO TEAM WILL BE HERE WHEN YOU GET BACK, IF INDEED YOU STILL CARE. If little Jimmy is destined for greatness, taking him to Europe will not hurt his chances, and may even boost them. And if he isn't, taking him to Europe will give him skills to fall back on, like perspective and stuff.

7. TAKE THE DOGS. But try to bring them with you on the plane, either below decks or, if Snuggles is drop-kickable, in one of those ridiculous carry-ons. Because sending them cargo is pricey, and retrieving anything from a European loading dock is never simple. Get an airline-approved kennel in which your dog can stand up comfortably, then call ahead and make sure the cargo doors in your plane will accommodate a kennel that size. Or just take your private jet so the little tiger can play fetch at 40,000 feet, and can I get a ride?

8. GORGE ON CHEDDAR CHEESE JUST BEFORE YOU LEAVE. That way, when you can't get it anywhere, you won't care because you'll be sick of it already. Or, just move to Britain. They're lousy with it over there.

More gems to come. If I laid them all out at once, there might be a mass exodus and who would be left to support the farmers' markets and wear the Petit Bateau and buy high-threadcount bedding?

Phrase of the day: Come? Non c'e formaggio cheddar? Il cibo qui deve essere terribile! (What? No cheddar? The food here must be terrible!)