On the way from Dobbiaco to Cortina


Serendipity

Have you ever started cooking some particularly fancy dish using a recipe from a book, and found that you were missing some ingredients? As a result, you had to improvise, making substitutions for the unavailable constituents? And have you noticed that sometimes, the improvised version actually tastes better than if you had used the exact formula given in the recipe?

This has happened to me a couple of times, and it is rather gratifying to find myself able to improve on the book. Right now, however, I’d like to tell you about a different and perhaps more significant serendipitous event in our lives (mine and Linda’s).

In June 2015, we celebrated our silver wedding anniversary by taking a cycling holiday, starting high up in the Italian Tyrol and cycling to Venice over a period of six days. We used a company who specialised in this sort of holiday. The company booked the hotels on the way, supplied bicycles, maps and instructions, and took our luggage from hotel to hotel. We would spend most of each day cycling to our next destination, sometimes fifty miles in one day, and as a consequence would feel no guilt about eating and drinking whatever we felt like in the evening. For the most part, the cycling was downhill as we started at an elevation of four thousand odd feet, and ended at sea level.

                                           Wrecked Olympic ski jump at Cortina d'Ampezzo


The actual date of the anniversary was Tuesday the 30th of June, 2015. Our starting point was a small town with two names, one German, Toblach, and one Italian, Dobbiaco. It’s in that part of the Tyrol which has changed hands between Italy and Austria several times over the centuries. Since the end of the first world war, it has been part of Italy. We had to take a four-hour bus journey to get there from Marco Polo Airport on the 27th June. The town, and in particular the hotel in which we stayed, had an old-fashioned Central European feel, an air of mystery and intrigue, reminding us of the 1938 Hitchcock film, The Lady Vanishes.

Our itinerary was as follows:

Saturday 27th June: Toblach/Dobbiaco

Sunday 28th June: Cortina d’Ampezzo

Monday 29th June: Belluno

Tuesday 30th June: Feltre

Wednesday 1st July: Bassano del Grappa

Thursday 2nd July: Treviso

Friday 3rd July: Mestre

 

We followed this up with two nights on the island of Venice, since Mestre is not particularly exciting, but never mind that now. You will note from the above that we spent the actual anniversary in Feltre. Feltre is undistinguished but a nice enough town. However, we had the bad luck to be staying there on a Tuesday, which seemed to be the day of chiusura settimanale, the one day in the week when most of the restaurants close. This is quite a common phenomenon in European towns, a day of rest, not on the weekend, for the hospitality industry. In French, it is known as fermeture hebdomadaire.

Anyway, we could only find one restaurant open. The menu in the window looked good to us. Once inside we found that although it was a small establishment, its ambience was institutional rather than intimate. Further, we were informed by the waitress that due to the restaurant being in the process of revamping its menu, many items on the menu displayed in the window were not available. This included all the alluring fish and seafood dishes which Linda had been looking forward to. However, we had a reasonable meal, nothing to write home about.

At first, we were the only customers there, but after about twenty minutes, a family arrived, clearly friends of the staff. They were greeted with some enthusiasm, and then served up the most lavish seafood banquet, with denizens of the deep which I hadn’t known existed up until then. Linda looked on with amazement and some indignation at this as we tucked into the Italian equivalent of bangers and mash. However, we decided that it was all part of life’s rich tapestry, finished up our disappointing dinner and returned to the hotel.

The following day we cycled along a surprisingly bleak route to Bassano del Grappa, although the latter is a very pleasant town. The day after that involved a long cycle to Treviso, made longer by the fact that we lost our way twice. I estimate that we cycled fifty-five miles that day. With each day, our elevation above sea level got lower and the temperature increased correspondingly. The long cycle to Treviso took place in temperatures between 25 and 30 degrees Celsius.

                                                Enormous seabird in Venice


Treviso is a lovely city with a small central area protected by medieval city walls. Our hotel was on the northern side of town, perhaps fifteen minutes’ walk to the walled centre. Fortunately, the hotel had a lovely outdoor swimming pool, in which we cooled off after our gruelling cycle.

That evening, we walked into the historic centre and found a restaurant called All’Antica Torre. The restaurant had a tasting menu at 50 Euros per head, 75 if you had the wines to go with each dish. Even for 2015, this was good value, and we went for the full works. It was a marvellous experience. The seven small courses were delicious, and the wines complemented them both in taste and in ‘pitting fine ideas in oor heids’, as my dad would have said. We were dining early in the evening and for a while were the only customers there. Consequently, the staff loved us and were assiduous in making sure we were well lubricated with each course. They also fed us some bizarre liquorice flavoured drink with our coffees.

There were two results of this: first, we always remember this as our silver wedding celebration, not the school dinner in Feltre of two days before; secondly, we got completely plastered. Round about the third course and the third wine, we started toasting people who had supported or enriched our marriage: the kids, of course; our families, including those no longer with us; various friends; Kevin Connelly and Linda Jackson, who were the witnesses at our wedding, and so on.

Around the time of the coffee and liquorice liqueur, we started texting some of those we had toasted and telling them how much we loved them. The rather garbled messages caused considerable amusement to our friends and relations, and some embarrassment to ourselves the next morning.

But we had a great time that night, two days after the anniversary proper. If ever you are in Treviso, have a meal in All’Antica Torre. The food is delicious and the people are lovely. Or at least they were ten years ago.

                                            Linda on the way back from All'Antica Torre


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
Real Life Can’t Compete                              In  Atlanta Botanic Gardens, when we visited our dear friends Bob and Irina last year Before I get started, here are two popular music quiz questions. Don’t Google them, the answers will appear at the bottom of this piece. 1.        By what name is Ellen Naomi Cohen better known? 2.        Which Neil Young song provided a hit for the Dave Clark Five? **************************** Morag Styles, a much-loved friend and neighbour, died just after Christmas. She was a lovely person and a terrific character, first ever Professor of Children’s Poetry at Cambridge. She was a stalwart of our street’s book group and provided impressive hospitality on the occasions when she hosted it. I always went home plastered on those nights. Here is her obituary in The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.c...
Read more
Image
                                                        Freiburg Not All Ghosts are of Dead People Have you ever heard footsteps on the stairs in a house in which you thought you were alone? It is a very unnerving experience. Whenever it has happened to me, I have been in a terraced or semi-detached house, so there was always the possibility that the sound came from next door. The New Jersey thriller writer Harlan Coben tells how at a get-together of writers of page-turners, the question arose: what is the scariest noise in the world? Is it a man being tortured? Is it a woman screaming? Is it a baby crying? Then someone said, ‘No. The scariest noise in the world is: you’re all alone in a cabin in the woods; you know you’re all alone; no one else is out in the woods; you’re downstairs alone, and from upstairs you hear the t...
Read more
Image
  What Sends Shivers Down Your Spine? I don’t mean literally, what makes you shiver? I use the expression ‘that sends shivers down my spine’ quite frequently, but I am usually referring to a work of art, a snatch of poetry or prose or music, that speaks almost painfully directly to me. It is as if it is reaching down inside me, touching something vital which responds with the speed of a snake striking its prey. You will all have your own examples, what moves one person may leave another cold, but anyway, here are some of mine. Strangely, although I am not a believer, two of the prime examples are of a religious nature. I have already mentioned in a previous blog how in a television production of Arnold Wesker’s play, Chips with Everything , an aircraftman recites the Lyke-Wake Dirge, as I recall in a Scottish accent, and with none of the stylised Yorkshire-speak: This aye night, this aye night. Every night and all. Fire and fleet and candlelight, And Christ receive thy ...
Read more