Lerici

In the garden below our apartment, jasmine vines cover the stairway railings. The sea breeze brings waves of perfume to our second floor. The entire town smells like jasmine, because walls of jasmine bloom everywhere, overloading our noses in the same way our eyes and ears are overloaded.

There are many beautiful seaside villages in Liguria, so it's hard to say this is the most beautiful. After all, the competition is stiff with the Cinque Terre just a few miles to the northwest. However, the castle that anchors Lerici at one end and the long promenade to Lerici's sister village, San Terenzo, make this place particularly scenic. The tourists flock here for the seashore, but the coastline here is rocky and only small pockets of sand allow for a few crowded beaches. In addition to the sun worshipers, the town attracts mariners.

There is a little port here that is protected by a breakwater, which I spend a lot of time on, because it is the only place where I can comfortably let Bella and Boomer off leash. The entire breakwater and all of the shoreline protection consists of piles of huge marble blocks. The world famous Carrara marble mines are just east of here and marble is used everywhere. Marble steps, marble floors, marble baseboards, marble sinks, marble tables, marble windowsills.

Saturday is market day in Lerici, and it's prime season for strawberries, asparagus, young artichokes, and small squash with blossoms. The market is small, but bustling and offers everything from regional cheeses and meats to swimsuits and perfume. Liguria is famous for seafood. Calamari, shrimp, mussels, and octopus are common ingredients. Genova, just an hour away, is the birthplace of pesto. Even though the food isn't so different from the offerings in the Pacific Northwest, I'm a little lost when I shop. I need to meet a nonna, who can share her Italian cooking secrets with me!

Primo giorno di lavoro

After a short break between jobs, Jim is back to work again. This time for NATO Underwater Research Center in La Spezia. As you can see, Jim got dressed up for the occasion.

If Jim looks Italian, it's because he is. Jim's father, Albert Osse, was born in New Jersey to Italian immigrants. His father's family came from a small village in the Dolomites in northern Italy: San Vito de Cadore. The family name was originally "Ossi" but his father changed the name in WWII, because of the unpopularity of Mussolini. Apparently, it was difficult to get a job in the states during this time if your name ended in "i." Jim is wearing a tie clip that was his father's. Al would be so proud of Jim's new job in Italy.

A Slow Week

We took life slowly last week to recover from our moving preparations and to give Jim a little downtime before he started work. We are anxious to find a place to live and a car to buy, but we have to be patient. I don't know if things happen more slowly in Italy, but I do know that we can't make assumptions about how things are done. For example, we learned that there is no real estate multiple listing in Italy. Each agency has exclusive rights to rent or sell a property. This means that to fully survey a market, you have to go to every agency in the area. We also need to learn how to buy a car. NATO personnel have certain tax priveleges, but the car must be licensed in a particular way. The person who knows how this works is on vacation for two weeks. Patience. In the meantime, we are living without a car. Jim is taking the bus to and from work, and I'm walking to the grocery. The picture to the right shows part of my route to the grocery store.

We spent the week looking around the area. Jim's job is in La Spezia, which is a military, ship building town of about 100,000 people. The town we are staying in, Lerici, is about 4 miles south of NATO. It's a seaside tourist town of perhaps 1,000 people. On the other side of La Spezia is the Cinque Terre, a famous destination for travellers to Italy. (More about that area in another post.) Inland is the town of Sarzana, which is maybe 20,000 to 30,000 people. Many NATO employees live in Lerici, but accommodations are expensive and limited, so many people choose to live in Sarzana, which has a beautiful old town with a large pedestrian-only area. The land all around here is quite steep, so there are a seemingly endless number of quaint hilltowns. Jim and I are torn between living out in the country for the tranquility and scenery versus finding a place in town that would give us good access to services and transportation. With the dogs, we are leaning toward country living. (More about apartment living with two young springer spaniels in another post.)


In addition to looking around the area, we also watched a small bit of the Giro d'Italia. The Giro is Italy's Tour de France. It is equally arduous and draws the best bicycle riders in the world, but it is not well known in the U.S. This year's route included a leg along the Cinque Terre. Without really knowing what we were going to see, we loaded up the dogs in the rental car and drove as far as we could before we had to hike to the race course finish line. We were able to see the racers come across the line as they finished their time trial (riders race against the clock and set out independently every 3 minutes). In this photo, the rider has bridged the 3-minute gap, hence his smile. We didn't stick around to see the top racers, including Lance Armstrong, because it was scorchingly hot and we had brought Bella and Boomer. But we were able to stand right along the fence at the finish line and watch a number of these tough athletes give it their all.

Buongiorno!

We're in Italy with all of our dogs and luggage and, after a few days of rest, most of our senses! We had a couple of minor hiccups in our trip (rerouted because plane from Paris to Pisa was too small for the dog crates; two pieces of lost luggage), but overall we can't complain. The dogs made the trip without any problems; no one ever bothered to look at the paperwork we had painstakingly prepared to get them through customs!


We spent our first night in a hotel in Pisa, southeast of La Spezia, and then Sunday moved into our new apartment in Lerici. Our landlords, Bruno and Nelly, are wonderful people and thankfully speak English since our Italian is crude, at best. Lerici is a picturesque seaside village that draws tons of tourists. We happen to live on one of the busiest streets in town, which prompted my first realization about Europe: a village of 1,000 people can be as densely populated and bustling as a major city in the U.S. I could be sitting in Manhattan right now for all of the noise outside our apartment!! We will look for permanent housing that is piu tranquillo, but for now this is a convenient place for us to be: 3.5 miles to Jim's work and a 2-minute walk to groceries, real estate agencies, and the waterfront.