215. Expecting the Unexpected

I’ve come to Italy enough times over the years that I don’t feel a need to have every moment preplanned and locked down, as I might going elsewhere. I’m headed to Milan today, for example, and made my hotel reservation three days ago. (I see people on Italy travel Facebook groups wondering if it’s too late to start planning a trip for 2026.) Last week, we headed off to Calabria with very little idea of what we would do when we got there.

And usually, things work out just fine. Except for when they don’t. I had my wallet nicked on a crowded bus in Bologna on Day 1, and we scraped up the rental car within three minutes of taking possession. But we had taken reasonable precautions beforehand: we learned from having been pickpocketed in Barcelona a few years ago to each carry different credit cards so we’re not stranded if we need to cancel some, and we always buy the maximum no-responsibility rental car insurance. Things happen, we shrug it off, and move on.

Most of the time, the unexpected works out great. The mountaintop Umbrian town of Narni, for example, near where I did my mosaics course, just happened to be holding its annual festival during the four days we were in town.

Each of the town’s four neighborhood created a program of traditional events and religious celebrations, and fielded a troupe of young drummers and flag tossers, dressed in medieval garb.

More remarkable was that each neighborhood opens a restaurant every year, only for the two and a half week period of the festival, serving local specialties and staffed by teenagers in costume. We managed to get a table at one of them.

We had not known about any of this; we saw a poster on a wall, and decided to pursue it, even though it meant walking straight uphill for a mile to get there and figuring out the local buses to get home at night.

We are big fans of Italian sagre, local festivals sponsored by towns or parishes to celebrate a feast day or a local specialty. They are often out in the countryside and challenging to find, so we were delighted to see that the town of Pizzo, about a half-hour away from where we were staying in Calabria, was sponsoring a one-day Sagra delle Fragole, strawberry festival, on a date that would work for us. Perfetto! Let’s do it!

And the Sagra delle Fragole did not disappoint. Its two main features, a stand selling platters of four different strawberry desserts and a stand selling fresh berries, were extremely popular, with scores of people patiently lining up awaiting their turn to buy.

These were clearly community events, for those waiting in the lines chatting with their neighbors and for those staffing the tables, working side-by-side to make the event a success. The strawberries were an added bonus.

Of course, the unexpected can sometimes be terrible: illness, injury, devastating news from home. But as a general rule, leaving room for the unexpected and seeing it as a positive removes stress, adds fun, and makes for better memories. I guarantee we’ll remember the strawberry sagra long after the museum trips and other must-dos are long forgotten.