I’m not entirely sure why, but Italy has always been a dream destination for me. Maybe it’s because Italy is where my parents went on their first vacation since starting our family and they came back so happy and relaxed that they didn’t even care I had won a five-day standoff against my poor grandmother over whether or not it was time for a bath. (This remains a standing record, folks.) Maybe it’s because I consider pasta and pizza wholly separate dishes and could eat the stuff enough times in a row to revitalize the local economies of dwindling Italian villages. Maybe it’s because I adored Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend. Whatever the reason, something about Italy stuck in my mind as a special place and I always wanted my first visit to be particularly memorable.
Fortunately, for better or worse, traveling is one of those things that is memorable by design (or, in this case, lack thereof): mon ami and I had talked about driving to Italy for some camping and hiking for weeks, but we were both worn out from July. So, when the time to leave rolled around, we simply rolled the windows down and blew any latent concerns out the window with them. Our first destination: “somewhere around Lago Iseo, Italy.” A day or two before our departure, I’d found an intriguing-looking route called the Antica Strada Valeriana aka Via Valeriana. At just under 25 kilometers (that’s 15.5 miles), we planned to take it easy and split the hike into two parts, departing in the afternoon, making camp for the evening, sharing a beautiful sunrise in the morning, and then finishing the hike.
Note to self: “Sharing a beautiful sunrise” is really code for “exchanging morning farts.”
Also, we weren’t entirely sure how to get to the village of Zone, a main point on the Valeriana route. The route from Pisogne was marked so enthusiastically with white and red blazes (some with numbers, others without) that it took us a full day to realize we’d unintentionally added several kilometers (though admittedly one of these was a gorgeous detour) to the hike and actually been circling a collection of residences that was indeed Zone for some time.
To be completely honest, our difficulties probably would have been nearly nonexistent if I’d simply done what every elementary teacher chided me for on every report card ever and read the directions more carefully. Alas, both the starting and ending points of the hike were in towns beginning with the letter “P” and in my brisk skimming, I’d read the listed end point as the starting point.
Fortunately, my partner’s vacation last year involved a solo trip bumbling around the Spanish and Portuguese coastline with only a small backpack, so when I realized my mistake while we were struggling to find the first trail marker from Pisogne and casually mentioned that we *might* actually be trying to do the route backwards and oh also, we’ll have to remember to follow the directions in reverse order, he was completely unfazed. Sweaty, after hiking up a mountain we should have come down from, but still unfazed.
Fortunately, I was only in charge of choosing that first hike. We cobbled together our other hikes with a combination of local maps and an app called Ubitrek, using small mountain villages as a home base where we left the progressively more and more irked Fiat. (Recent repairs and mountain roads do not a cheerful car make.)
All in all, we completed three gorgeous hikes in northern Italy, the first around Lago Iseo in the Lombardy region, the second and third in the South Tyrol region, around Oberbozen and Ortisei (Urtijëi). We were surprised to learn that Italy has pyramids and perplexed as to what Italian tourist official had signed off on decidedly difficult hikes officially marked as “easy” or “medium.”
In between hikes, we had opportunities to explore the pretty, local villages and were continuously surprised by the different dialects and foods we encountered. Northern Italy is truly a blend of Italian and German cultures—we even stumbled upon a festival in Oberbozen called Ferragosto! A local band played near the food tent, men and women enjoyed the sunny afternoon dressed in traditional suspenders and flouncy dresses, adorable children scrambled around with the glee one expects of a subject who escaped a portrait-sitting, and the fare consisted of beer, sausages, fries, and enough mayonnaise to constitute its own food group. Unfortunately, a storm rolled through and cut off the crescendoing evening energy with thunderclaps that reverberated against the mountain, but this brief glimpse into one of the biggest parties of the year for a small village in the mountain was an unforgettable highlight.
The Dolomites, our main reason for traveling to northern Italy in the first place, were pretty incredible, too. Although we could see the famed mountains from our second hike in Oberbozen, local Italians rebuked us for saying we were hiking the Dolomites. Apparently, the Dolomites are so-called because they have a particular geological formation that the mountain Oberbozen is situated on does not.
In any case, our third and final hike was indisputably in the Dolomites—and indisputably our most ill-advised. After taking a cable car from Ortisei to Seceda, we arrived at 10AM, shared a quick coffee, and had literally just exited the building when a dense, white fog rolled through. This, I assure you, made it impossible to do anything for three hours except drink beer and order a massive rack of ribs and plate of homemade tagliatelle pasta served in venison sauce.
When the fog eventually cleared, we cheerfully tottered outside and down a softly sloping hill that rolled us through valleys for about an hour before we arrived at a crucial decision: should we finish the loop and ease our way back down to Ortisei or were we feeling “energetic”? As this was our last hike before heading back to Strasbourg, there really was only one answer.
After scaling the peak, we zig-zagged back down every hiker’s least favorite terrain: loose scree. Fortunately, swearing is tied for eating with Things I’m Best At, and we made it to Selva, just two towns away from Ortisei, in one piece just after night had fallen. In Selva, we were assured by two different Italians (one of whom was a bus driver!) that there was indeed a night bus, so we proceeded to huddle at the bus stop for an hour before a third Italian informed us that she wasn’t sure, she’d seen the night bus a few times, but she didn’t think it was coming tonight, but like she said, she wasn’t sure. By this point, we were shivering in our dried sweat and our only option left was to hitch, something that sounds badass but is actually as desperate as it sounds; Italians drive more aggressively than bulls in rutting season and given that we always seemed to end up with an incensed black Land Rover behind us in the Fiat, neither of us was keen on the idea of walking for an hour along narrow mountain roads to get back to Ortisei.
In a supreme stroke of luck, we landed a ride on our second attempt—a little red car with a middle-aged guy behind the wheel gave us a lift most of the way there, leaving us with a pleasant, ten-minute walk downhill to our penultimate destination: Pizzeria Erica.
Tired as we were, I’d been steadfast in my commitment to finding a pizza place post-hike, and Pizzeria Erica didn’t disappoint. Our host seated us at a back both in a back room and we both collapsed into the cushy benches before mumbling our orders to the waitress who, after my particularly incoherent speech, all but sprinted to bring us pints of Forst beer.
Somewhat revived following the meal but fighting the sleeps, we began the 40-minute trudge up a nearby mountain to where we’d parked the car [for free]. After seriously lagging for the first fifteen minutes, my partner attempted to push me by the backpack, and, that failing, played “I’m Not Afraid” by Eminem from his phone, unknowingly triggering my automated robot response to workout music that was programmed back in college thanks to hundreds of indoor track workouts done to playlists that sometimes featured—you guessed it—Eminem. Within five minutes, our zombie workout pace had caused one of us (not me) to cramp and we slowed to a more even pace before arriving to our reliable little Fiat waiting right where we’d left her. With the weariness that comes from feeling like you’ve lived multiple days since the last time you’ve slept, we huddled into sleeping bags in the front and passenger seats, leaned the seats back, and promptly fell asleep.
The next morning, we were seen off by two adorable kittens who came up to investigate from the farm one switchback road below. The cable line we’d taken the day before creaked above us, the red cars bright against the light gray sky. We slipped down the mountain beneath a summer rain that ebbed and flowed in intensity as we made our way north, passing into Austria and then Germany before finally finding a watery sunset in France.
Italy was and remains an alluring mystery to me, and as so often happens when I visit a new country, I’m reminded of just how big and small the world is. Northern Italy was a robust and hearty experience full of rugged beauty, manicured villages, and unexpected lessons. Now that I’ve wandered through its mountains a bit, I’d love to spend more time in the cities that I’ve seen or heard of only fleetingly—Brescia, Bergamo, Rovereto, Trento, Bolzano…just to name a few. For now though, I’m content to sift through this latest archive of travel memories I’ve been fortunate enough to collect just before the summer season ends.
What about you? Where’s one place that you’ve always wanted to visit, and have you been able to go yet?
