Driving Over My Mountains And A Tribute To A Monument To Victor Emmanuel II

I totally nearly died a few weekends ago when we hired a car for the weekend and I drove over a snowy mountain on the wrong side of the road in the pitch dark behind a drunk driver. It was well scarey, made more toe-curlingly terrifying by the fact that I kept forgetting they do it in Km per hour over here not miles, so made my self jump every time i looked at the speed dial and saw I was driving down a mountain at 80mph.... But it did make for great amusement whilst I was on the autostrada earlier on in the day, trying to overtake everything in sight. Every half an hour it was:
"Han, Natalie, check it out! I'm doing 150 mile per hour!! Rrrraaaahhhh!! Yeah baby! Outta my way, SUCKERS"
"No kate, you're doing 150 kilometres ph"
"Oh yeah, ah well, still feels fast"
Of course I stopped this reckless speeding as soon as we got off the autostrada, but the reckless driving continued through the tiny cobbled alleyways of L'Aquila, the city we were visiting for the night, which is the capital of the region. The Italians have absolutely no respect for road rules, and I've found that, given the choice, neither have I ... well, when in rome an' all that. Took to the Italian way of driving like a duck to dirty water. I also have to stop giving evils to Italian drivers who rev their engines and try to edge over my feet as I cross at stoppings now, on account of the fact that I was doing exactly the same thing when I was driving through towns... Well, come on! ... pedestrians and cyclists just annoy the hell outta me now when I'm in a car, especially the old ones who go slowly...it's like, 'Come ON! I've got people to cut up and a horn to beep and wild gestures to make at other drivers who cut me up, move it, move it, MOVE IT, GRANDMA!' Really grips you it does, I've now completely lost the rural english driving composure, and instead of "'After you, no really, after you, oh please, i couldn't, well alright then I'll go, but here's a hand gesture to show my appreciation' or 'here's a flash of the lights to say thank-you for waiting for me to pass'", na, screw that, now it's just "Fuck off that's my space move over now or loose your wing mirror". And there's only one gesture worth making.

So anyway after a breathtaking visit to the top of the clouds of Mount Sasso in L'Aquila - the highest mountain in Italy and what seemed to be the top of the world - we set off for home thanking hannah's student for his guided tour of L'Aquila and his detailed directions back to Sulmona. However, feeling slightly (understatement) hungover from the night before's Jeigermeister, I was paying scant attention as he said:
"The left tunnel, make sure you take the left tunnel, don't take the right tunnel, Indy, stay on the left" "Yeah yeah, thanks Massimo, got any water we can take?". So we took the right tunnel and ended up not on the Autostrada which goes straight around the mountains leading to Sulmona, but on a small road which goes straight up and over My Mountains. And there are no street lights on the mountain, which I found odd and vaguely annoying... Surely the time you need illumination most is when there's a 1000 foot ravine to fall into and snow and ice on the side of the road and rocks and deer and mousses and bears falling from above head? Whatever, it was petrifying, didn't help that the driver infront appeared to be drunk and was going all over the place and I daren't pass him cos he might have gone into the back of me, although curse him as I did when he was infront of me, I did regret his absence tremendously when he pulled off and left me alone with no rear lights to follow... just cats eyes jumping up at me giving me a moments notice to either turn or descend into the blackness of the mountain beneath....

And then last week we went to an old ruined castle and nearly got eaten by a rabid white wolf....
There are packs of wild dogs here that wander the street with no owners, they're well cute, like, totally different breeds of big and small dogs and all colours, and they wander the streets of the towns together looking for food! You'll see them jog past together like a big group of disparate mates... Anyway, one of my students drove us to this ruined castle, no one else around and the road to it was well steep, a completely eerily deserted town below it with all the windows broken in the houses, and we were filming a sketch a la Monty Python's french soldier with my video when the distant barking that sounded vaguely wolfish started to get closer and closer, and suddenly there's a massive white wild laborador coming towards us barking like hell. Well, I completely had an eppy and legged it back to the car, as did the others... actually, to be more precise, the student who'd brought us to the castle ran off ahead (with absolutley no regard for my safety, which I found most ungentlemanly) and so did han, leaving me climbing down from the ruinous walls and running after them, cursing the fact I'd insisted on playing Cleese and climbing up the old ruins. I never thought I'd feel safe in a car again after my experience driving on the mountain, but it felt surprisingly good to be encased in impenetrable metal with a hungry, rabid, mental wolf-dog outside.

Then last weekend we went to Rome, I'll make no bones about it, it wasn't for the rugby, couldn't really give an arse about that, but for the post-rugby drinking sesh, yeah baby! We paid for a tacky pub crawl round Rome which was organised by the hostel, and ended up accompanied around Rome by a lot of, like, all-american, like architecture students, who are, like, studying in like, Rome. They tended to punctuate every event during the night with shouts of "YEAH!". Which was amusing, for a while.

Saturday day was better tho cos we went to see the statue by Bernini in Santa Maria Della Vittoria church where a certain St. Teresa is having a mighty fine time with a seraphin and his very phallic golden shaft. Beautiful it was, and amazing to see after seeing it and reading about it in books. I can not get over the churches in Roma. They are just GORJUS, they are. So much art work, all free, and they're not bothered if you go in solely to oggle the free eye candy, even in the middle of a church service! They rely on the revenue (I allers buy summat when I go in there, it's worth the price of a postcard), so you can poke around behind the priest as he's giving his service, and I honestly don't think they'd mind if you went up and posed with thumbs up behind the priest as he was talking. (Haven't had the guts for that one yet... am also determined to climb up on the big horse on the right in Trevi fountain and get snapped riding it before I leave Rome, there's no guards there or owt, it's just having the guts to do something so bold infront of the constant stream of tourists taking snaps).

We rounded off the weekend with a visit to my favourite building in the whole wide world (didn't know I actually had one of these til i saw this one). It's got fuck-off big horses (yes, I'm sorry if that offends your sensibilities, but that particular little-used but effective adverb is totally needed to enhance the inadequate adjective"big" here... "big" is so much not enough) on the roof pulling winged angels along on a cart, and it seriously looks like, at any minute, they're gonna gallop down off the building towards you, crash like thunder into the street past you, and whoosh off into the sky on some magnificent celestial adventure... very moving it is!... for a building. And you can see the building and the angels from everywhere in Rome, much like you can see the Verne prison from every view point on Portland... (which pisses a lot of Romans off apparently, but I think it's a great way to ruin a skyline meself). Like, every photo, from the Colosseum, from St Peters, from everywhere, you can get these magnificent colossal angels in the background... literally awesome it is! AND you can go inside, AND there's a free museum inside it!

Spanking.