Friday October 7th
Today started out very badly. We woke up to the sound of rain on the roof, which would in effect kill our day. We met Alessio completely by happenstance, but as is his motto nothing just happens. He is a friend of Paola’s and when we wrote her about staying in her guest house she told him about what we were doing. So he wrote me to see if we would be interested in having him and his 28 year old Vespa show us around the area. It turns out that he runs a company called ILEX which stands for Italian Landscape Exploration, and he figured that might fit well with our tour. So of course we took him up on it. However, as I just said it was raining when we woke up, and I thought we would have to call it off. We met Alessio in a café for breakfast, and while we were dining it cleared up a little. He said he was okay with going if we were, so we set out. First he showed us around Fontecchio and San Pio, explaining about how the houses used to be set up with livestock on the ground floor. He showed us the places where the town would bring their flour to be baked into bread, as there was only one oven like it in each town. We rode up an impossibly steep hillside to reach the “summer village” of the people from Fontecchio. Where in town all the houses are built right on top of each other mostly for defensive reasons, the summer houses were spread out over a nice stretch of flatland on top of a mountain. They are mostly abandoned but a couple have been restored. They don’t have electricity or running water, but people come up for a secluded weekend. I can’t guarantee that we were the first Americans to see this place, but I bet you could count them all on one hand. We were cruising around on these mountain roads that are barely big enough for a car, sometimes above the clouds, sometime in them, it was really something. We stopped in the middle of the road to hear about the ancient route the shepherds took over these mountains. Just by luck we happened to stop alongside a row of wild blackberry bushes. Gorged would probably be the best word for what we did. I can’t remember ever eating that many before, I kept wishing I could take a basket full of them back to my Mom’s house to make a cobbler with vanilla ice cream. We tried to explain the concept to our host and the others that had tagged along. They weren’t too sure about it, but I know they’d go crazy over it if they could taste it.
We continued on to another mostly abandoned village where they use an ancient wooden door locking system that is only found in this little village, in Egypt, and in Mali in Africa. And yet another where Pontius Pilate himself is reported to have been born. It was sort of depressing to see all these town just sitting there falling apart. There are so many people in this world that are without homes, and there are all these places that are perfectly inhabitable, I just don’t get it sometimes.
We had lunch in a little restaurant at the base of the mountain, I tried to explain the concept of “free refills” to our friend Sandro. You should have seen his eyes pop! That alone was reason enough for him to move to America.
After lunch we did a group refueling, and then headed out for the Gran Sasso National Park. It was much further away than I expected, but it was a beautiful ride. By the time we arrived the temperature was dropping, added to the fact that we were climbing ever higher, it was frigid. I haven’t been that cold in a while. Parts of the park are used as pasture land for sheep, horses, and cows that roam here in the summer, and are shifted south to Puglia in the winter. There were only a few left when we rode through, as most have already begun the journey.
We returned to Fontecchio and said our thank yous and goodbyes to our new friends, and then hit the road. I didn’t realize that with the curvy mountain roads it would take us 3 hours to reach our lodging for the night. So we rolled in at 11 and had to call the proprietor from the Piazza. He was nice enough to meet us and lead us to his place. By that point we were too tired to do anything else, so we just crashed.