Stone upon stone: an Italian sojourn: By the waterfront

We have taken time throughout our stay to explore our immediate surroundings. We are just a short walk from our early morning coffee bar, and that is always fun. Given that our morning coffee is now such a fixed routine in our day any future move we ever make would require a coffee shop within easy walking distance, I fear. We love shutting the house door and walking there in just a couple of minutes.

Barely a block down our back lane, we have found another phenomenal find: a home grown pasta factory. So many great businesses are thriving down this lane, which is amazing to us. In a lane? I don't believe we will find one of those in any of our back lanes at home, but this clean, neat, sterile factory sells many different kinds of freshly made pasta, and sauces to go with them if you need them, along with complete dishes like Lasagna-to-go. All just needing heat to serve. Fresh pasta is sublimely silky. We have fallen in love with it all over again on mainland Italy, and are going to have to pull out our never-yet-used pasta maker that someone gave us for Christmas one year and learn how to use it properly. A mix of flours is the secret so our factory folk tell us. We think. It is all Italian here, and we may have it wrong, but we are on a mission to master the mix when we get home.

We are well on the way to mastered foraging, too, down our local lanes. Between there and here we can harvest wild nettles, leaves from great bushes of sage leaves, and long healthy needles of rosemary and fine fragrant thyme, all poking through grassy patches or fence wires along our great lane. We just char-roast some pumpkin cubes with sliced sweet caramelised leeks, crisp hand-pulled wild sage leaves in melted butter, and mix with soft slippery ricotta over hot fresh pasta, topping the lot with freshly grated parmigiana. Yum! Some toasted seeds on the side if we have any. Another firm favourite are the little squares of ricotta and spinach ravioli fresh from our factory, topped with ricotta cream and chopped walnuts. To. Die. For.

Between coffee and pasta we explore. Odd things appeal to us now. We have done much of the traditional tourist stuff so often we now allow our curiosity free rein. Everywhere mandarine and orange trees are dropping fresh fruit over the footpaths. I have yet to see a single person take one of these fruits. Mayhap they all have citrus trees in their own gardens. A local church enroute to the waterfront is gilt and gorgeous its artwork captivating our camera.

Then we happened upon a large Italian villa, currently running an art exhibition, that is open to explore. Sadly for the artist, we practically ignored the art display, and focussed instead on the architecture and the decor which spanned some 6o years all up from the time Villa Argentina was built in the mid 1800s until it acquired some of its more exotic enhancements in the Art Nouveau period in the 1920s.

This villa is in a side street in the stylish beach side town of Viareggio, just a couple of kilometres south of us, on the way to Pisa. It has the most gorgeous facade of cupids, fruits and flowers crafted in ceramic tiles by Galileo Chini at a factory in Florence. I love the Art Nouveau staircase spiralling up to the private rooms and the detail and craftsmanship of the wrought iron balustrading is eye-catching, too. Not to mention the paint colour. In several rooms there are the most amazing chandeliers, accentuating the ornate cornices and ceiling detail. The floors are marble aggregate, but of different and stylish patterns in each main room, though using similar colours. The finish is like polished concrete. But the pièce de résistance is the ballroom with its extravagant Persian wedding theme and highly decorative ceiling and wall panels. Very pretty. The waterfront in Viareggio, barely a block away from the villa, is of the era and has delightful character buildings stretching along the beach road, south and north. Long, long miles of it.

Though the big disappointment about the Italian waterfront, like the American waterfront, is that most of it is private. For nine months of the year these buildings for miles and miles north of here, even to La Spezia, occupy prime viewing of the sea--along with the rights to the sea front. You cannot even see the sea unless you have a coffee, a drink, or find a public beach and they are few and far between and not easily signposted. And they are usually barricaded off from the privately run sections of the beach by boardwalks or fencing, making it all a bit of an eyesore, really. All such a shame. The beauty of this natural flat sandy beach--and it could be beautiful--is completely lost with all the private franchises operating bars, cafes, boutiques, and restaurants along its frontage. Even more tragically they are only in business for about four to five months of the year. The rest of the time they seem to be locked up and lonely. As is the beach. And sightseers are padlocked out.

On the other side of the beach road are mainly hotels. These, too, operate similar opening times. Even now, after Easter, very few hotels are open, though they are all starting to spruce up their paint work, gardens, and ready themselves to open soon, so it is possible May is the beginning of the season while September likely closes it. At other times of the year the waterfront is almost eerily silent. Economically that makes no sense to me having things virtually closed for dozens of kilometres for so much of the year.

We took time to visit one of the many starred restaurants for lunch. We have discovered the regional seafood soup that is to our taste, and have been testing it in many restaurants all around the coast to date. Today's seafood dishes came highly recommended, but, in truth, we have had similar dishes as nice, if not better, further up the coast when our friend from the Netherland was with us. But we are still taste testing. And will be until we leave in about a week. So judging is ongoing.