Siamo arrivati!
And everything was clicking like clockwork. We breezed through the Milan airport ( the new fingerprinting process that is causing hours-long delays in Rome seems not to arrived here yet) and hopped right onto a train to Milano Centrale station. Our favorite Milanese bakery, Princi, has opened an outpost at the train station, so we had a wonderful lunch to kill the hour until our train to Torino, which was only five minutes late. We even managed to be charmed by the 97 degree heat and lack of AC at the train station.
When we arrived in Torino an hour later, our hotel was right across the street from the station, as promised, so we were able to dump our stuff without dragging it across miles of cobblestones. Pure ecstasy when everything works out just right.
We were right on time for a meet-up with author Andrea Lee, an expat who is married to an Italian and has lived in a gorgeous 600-year-old villa in the hills of Torino since 1992. (Ben is a Facebook friend of hers, so when he realized we would be stopping in her town, reached out to see if we could get together, and she graciously invited us over.)
I have long admired her work in the New Yorker, and knowing I was about to meet her, spent an enjoyable week rereading her memoir about spending a year in the Soviet Union as a student, and her novel Lost Hearts in Italy. Imagine my surprise when we walked into her house, and she exclaimed, “I think I know you!” Turns out, she had grown up just a few miles from where we live, her son and brother had attended Swarthmore College where I work, and she herself had taught there for a year in 2022, living right in the heart of our little town. Of course, we were all in semi-lockdown and wearing masks that year, so not an ideal time to make new friends.
Andrea drove us back to town, and warned us several times about pickpockets. Does she think we’re a couple of rubes, I wondered. Turns out, that’s exactly what we are, because within a few hours, Ben’s wallet was stolen, the second time we were pickpocketed in our two most recent trips here. I guess we now appear to be elderly easy marks, which is apparently true. Thus began the agony of being interminably on hold with the credit card company, being told over and over by a recorded voice that we would be served within 15 minutes, a bald-faced lie, while the overseas charges ticked up.
All told, though, the scale tips towards the ecstasy side. It’s not even close. As Americans, it seems that there will always somehow be systems in place, annoying though they may be, to assist with problems that arise. And eventually, he was able to cancel the cards and have new ones sent. Plus, we still had our passports, which would have truly been a nightmare to replace. Really, it was just a blip in an otherwise perfect day.
Most important, we have two weeks of new adventures in Italy ahead. Can’t beat that for ecstasy.
Gigi's Italia 