Biking in Puglia: Day 7

Out from our trulli room to a glorious Sunday. Breakfast with fresh orange juice (!) and homemade yogurt in little glass bottles. Then out to a park, Karen sketching, me writing in my journal and what looked like preparations for a festival below. Which turned out to be a fast-walking race and the tranquility of a lazy Sunday morning was bombarded by constant fast DJ-like blathering over loudspeakers. Oh well. 

 

Made our way out of town threading our way through the last walkers, ended up on a highway of sorts, came over a peak and lo and behold, there was a stunning view with the Adriatic Sea spread out before us. Coasted down a long hill with traffic and motorcycle groups speeding by and got off at a blessed un-trafficked path with stone walls on either side. A few hundred yards into it, we saw a lovely lunch spot in an ancient olive grove and unpacked our bread and cheese, figs and nuts for a tranquil lunch in the peaceful countryside sitting on stones and tree roots. Once on our bikes, we passed another Italian family off the road, but they had a table set with plates and silverware on a tablecloth and chairs and wine, the classic scene you’ve seen it movies— and it really happens.

 

On we went through the olive groves and I was struck by these thick-trunked ancient trees, some perhaps a thousand years old and now twisted and turned and growing over stone walls and split in two, but still producing olives. Some deep metaphor for us elder humans, which I’ll save for another post. 

We continued on this idyllic road a while before realizing that perhaps we took a wrong turn a few miles back and decided to ignore the directions, follow our noses and ask everyone we passed. It's good to have a map with directions, occasionally a GPS, but when we get lost and have to ask directions, we realize the deep dependence we have on each other and the pleasure of having an excuse to begin conversation. 

It eventually worked out and we entered the seaside town of Monopoli,  a hopping, touristed, youthful place similar to Trani. Our hotel wasn’t ready yet, so I watched the bikes while others got their afternoon gelati. While waiting, I noticed a couple sitting on a bench some 20 feet away talking to teach other. I couldn’t hear them, but watched they way gestures accompanied their conversation. It’s an Italian cliché, but it’s true. What linguist Walter Ong called “the verbo-motor” response, alive in both young children, spirited adults and southern Mediterranean cultures (amongst others).

 

Our hotel rooms were separate and four of us where around the corner. We began ascending the stairs with our heavy luggage and heavy batteries to be charged and groaned a bit faced with the 35-stair winding staircase. But it’s all just more good exercise and up we went. 

An afternoon walk along the beach front, dipping our toes in the predictably cold Adriatic Sea, late-afternoon outdoor café appetizers and then an indoor dinner discussing the origin of International Labor Day (see yesterday’s post). I also asked around the table who could imagine continuing traveling like this for another week or even two and some of us—including me—absolutely could. 

 

And so ended Day 7.  

International Labor Day

I spent International Labor Day biking to Monopoli. Italy. A bit ironic as this day is to commemorate resistance to big bosses buying up Park Place and Broadway in the real capitalistic game of Monopoly! But no surprise that it’s a story that few Americans know.

 

The short version is that in 1886, workers across America organized  a general strike to insist on an 8-hour work day. The police backed the bosses and a riot ensued in Haymarket Square in Chicago, causing the deaths of both protestors and police. The government hung four protesters with no evidence against them and the outrage provoked international interest. Across the world, May 1^st became known as International Labor Day to commemorate the fight for worker’s rights and is celebrated as such in countries worldwide with one notable exception— the United States. Worried that proposals for a U.S. Labor Day on that date would call attention to the event, President Grover Cleveland suggested a day in September which Americans would remember forever as— the day after which (at least up until recently) school would begin in September. 

 

Hmm. I wonder why. When in doubt, follow the money. For much of the 20^th century, labor-management conflicts were handled through the creation of unions. By 1955, 33% of American workers belonged to a union. Today it’s 6%. Back in the day, anti-trust laws were put in place to put a ceiling on —well, monopolies— and rich people payed taxes, giving back to the economy like the rest of us. Now the dogs of greed are unleashed— the top 1% earn more money than the entire middle class! And thanks to Trump’s gift to his cronies, ain’t none of them paying taxes. Amazon workers are suffering from overwork while CEO Jeff Bezos decides he needs a $500 million dollar yacht and hey, why not fly into space? Is anybody noticing?

 

Michael Moore is. In a piece titled “May Day Every Day,” he notes that there is a gradual awakening amongst young people who are gathering to say “Enough.” While the billionaires got richer during Covid (one statistic said 62% richer!) there has been an underground rumbling in the form of “a 57% increase in the number of workers and labor groups demanding to be recognized as a union, demanding better wages, benefits, time off and safety protection.” Starbuck employees, Amazon workers, REI, Apple, the Art Institute of Chicago and others have created, or are in the process of creating, unions that allow for a more humane working environment. 

 

It’s in the interest of those driven by excessive and unapologetic greed, those willing to profit from the country’s crisis, those whose driving mission statement is “More. More. And yet more,” to keep us all in the dark. Economy is the last conversation we need to be having, the one we keep ignoring, the one Florida’s Governor De Santis would ban immediately from schools if we started having it and heaven forbid, teach the children about the real history of May Day. They might learn about the motto of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) coined by labor activist Joe Hill in response to his coming execution: “Don’t mourn. Organize!”

 

And so this little look at Monopoly in the town of Monopoli.

Farewell to April

Tonight is the last night of what has been a most extraordinary month. Certainly the most varied of the last two years and equally, most groundbreaking on many levels, most of which is documented in this blog. Before turning to May, a quick look back.

 

• Taught kids at the Children’s Day School

• Played piano at the Jewish Home of the Aged and Mercy Housing.

• Read excerpts from my new book to the kids at the SF School.

• Watched the rough cut of a film about my work that has been 2 ½ years in the making.

• Watched the above with my wife, daughters, son-in-law and grandkids.

• Had my 2-years-deferred retirement party with music, slides and my farewell speech. 

• Went from i-Phone 6 to 13 and closed out our faithful landline.

• Went to a movie theater (to see CODA)

• Went to a David Whyte poetry retreat.

• Flew across the ocean and got my passport stamped for the first time in two years. 

• Spent three delightful days in Lecce, Italy with my wife and a friend.

• Rode six days through Puglia, each day like a small lifetime in itself. 

 

Why should anyone —you, the reader, for example— care about this? It’s simple— you shouldn’t. But if any universal thought can be plucked from these details, it’s simply these two truths:

 

1) The brain thrives on repetition. My sheltered life of routines ranging from piano practice to writing to cooking to walking in the park to jigsaw puzzles had its own pleasure in the rhythm and the routine.

 

2) The brain thrives on novelty. This month of varied activity in different places with different people has created a different sense of time and offered multiple delights, new notes in familiar songs.

I love both the routine and the novelty. 

 

Let us see what May will bring. Hares and rabbit. 

Biking in Puglia: Day 6

“Back in the saddle again, back where a friend is a friend…” 

 

I began singing this old cowboy song as we once again mounted our bikes after a two-day rest. Farewell to Matera and out again into the countryside. Some of it a bit too trafficked for our taste, but then a long section with stone walls on both sides and only occasional cars. We passed a herd of cows, each with the large melodious bells hung from their necks as they do in Spain, so that when they wander to graze, a John Cage-style composition emerges. Adding to my list of minor regrets that I didn’t stop to record it.

 

Stopped to lunch in the town of Gioia del Colle, but the main square had no benches and no trees and we found some church steps instead. While I wax rhapsodic about the wonders of Italy and/or the pleasure of Europe, good to remind myself that not every place is extraordinary and not every town memorable. Just as life and music has its peaks and valleys, so does geography have its memorable convocation of elements that we perceive as beauty— and the rest is filler.

 

From Gioia del Colle another 12 miles to the more attractive town of Noci, with our main objective to find a gelateria. We did and I am proud to report that I resisted. Giving in to pleasure has its place, but so is resisting it occasional, especially in deference to the bulging belly. While the others enjoyed their cones, I notice a public bulletin board with funeral notices, much as they do in Ghana. Of course, we have our newspaper obituaries, but I wonder what it would be like for neighborhoods to have such public announcements of fellow citizens who passed on. 

 

Now there was some 9 more miles to go to our destination of Alberobello— and yes, they use kilometers here, but I’m saving you the trouble of conversion. Today was our longest day, some 70 kilometers (42 miles), but it was a bit longer for me. I got out ahead of the others and while zooming down a long hill, thought I should stop and wait for them. Five minutes later, none appeared and so I doubled back to meet them. A half mile back, no sign of them, a mile back, no sign, now probably two miles back and they were nowhere in sight. 

Now I began to worry, wondering if one of them had had an accident. I re-read all the directions to make sure I didn’t miss a turn-off, but didn’t see anything I did wrong. The one vague possibility was an Abbey that the directions suggested we stop at, but when I entered what might have been it (it was not well-marked), again, no sign of them and a passing car told me it was a farm. 

 

Trying to keep calm and collected, I decided to follow the directions to our next hotel and hope for the best. Now my battery started to give out and my handlebars kept slipping and my mind was not wholly unchained with worst-case-scenarios, but definitely wondering how I could have missed them and where the heck they could be. I turned at the correct sign, struggled uphill with my faltering battery and at some point, came around the bend and there they were riding ahead!

 

I caught up with them and came up next to the last person, she said, “Oh, there you are.” Quite casually. It seems they assumed I went on ahead and none of them seemed particularly worried about me! So much for the big drama of it all from my side of the matter. And what happened? Apparently, they had gone to that Abbey and had left long before I finally turned off there. 

 

So here we arrived in the town of Alberobello and it is somewhat astounding how each of the places we’ve spent the night is memorable, but in a different way. Bari, Lecce, Trani, the farmhouse in la Bagniola, Gravina, Matera and now this town made distinct by its Trulli buildings used for hotels (we’re staying in one!), restaurants, cafes, houses and such. I feel like I’ve arrived in Hobbitown or some other fantasy place! Now at 5:30 pm, about to go out and explore and I promise I’ll come back with the photos. Stick around.

 

Cruised the town amidst a few hundred other tourists with my camera out and so, photos below. A pleasant dinner, but Italy, like Spain, begins late, starting around 8:00 pm. So keeping our normal 10:30 bedtimes means there’s not much post-dinner evening— and going to sleep with a full stomach. When in Rome…

And so ends the last day in April, with two more biking days awaiting…

Biking in Puglia: Day 5

A rare early morning awakening and four of us out on a trail by 8:00 am. Down the ravine, across the swinging bridge and up the slope on the dusty, rocky path. Chilled air, a San Francisco spring breeze and no other hikers on the path. Up to the plateau, peaking into caves with frescoes from ancient monks carving makeshift churches in the caves. Looking across the ravine back at the city. Looking down the ravine past the city at far distant fields. On the return trip, a brief walk along the stream and the sound (and then sight) of frogs.

Back to meet the others and a simple lunch on our hotel terrace, the wind still unrelenting and not much sun in sight. While some were off to nap, I returned to the Piazza where yesterday’s singer was playing and brought my recorder in hopes of a little jam session. Alas, he had left! So instead wandered around the remarkable mix of rock and building we had been looking at from all different angles. Now up close through its nooks and crannies, taking dozens of photos, playing recorder in a little carved out area and thinking about the marvel of this architecture, how it follows the natural curves and rises and fall of the original structure created by that master architect, Nature and then the human counterparts decided to work with it, around it, inside of it instead of bringing out the bulldozers and flattening it all for a Costco. 

I imagine a future blogpost relating the above to education. The children come to us in their extraordinary selves, full of their unique twists and turns and rises and falls and recesses and outcroppings and what do we do? Try to flatten them out with a one-size-fits-all education, make them conform to our adult fantasy of a blueprint someone else handed to us that we received without question. Why can’t we build on what they bring to us? To be continued.

 

Back to the hotel and out to the Castle on the edge of town. It was closed, but a good excuse for more walking, followed by a trip to an outdoor market and a delightful purchase from a man selling almonds, cashews, hazelnuts, figs and salted roasted fava beans. By now, we had walked some 8 miles, keeping up our biking daily exercise quota, so why not finally take a shower, finish the last of the laundry, listen to the end of my Audible book and catch up on journal writing. 

Tomorrow we’re on the move again, three more days and then the next phase of a four-week trip. Happy to see tidbits of news from e-mails and such that I don’t care to follow, to ignore a few business requests, to work really hard to remember what day it is and simply to be more wholly present in this adventure than the world, with all its grabbing and yelling and pulling and shouting for attention, usually allows. Or rather, new voices have spoken up that don’t demand anything from me but genuine attention and extra-credit praise for what they’re offering. The feasts of the eyes and the tongue, the music of the language and evening swallows, the feel of the bikes on bumpy roads and the wind on smooth ones. Dinner awaits at “Soul Kitchen,” and probably post-dinner packing to prepare for the next leg.

 

Viva Italia!

Biking in Puglia: Day 4

Today the bikes stayed in their racks, like the horses in the stables getting a rest. We set out on foot, happy for another locomotor movement, different pace and freedom to walk hither and thither on and off the beaten track. 

 

Leaving our hotel, a family passed by and greeted us. The man was contagiously affable and when I found out they were from the Netherlands, I sang  Fietsie Foetsie, a Dutch song about a stolen bicycle I learned some 30 years ago. My repertoire of songs from around the world is proving to be useful as an instant and delightful connecting device. No sooner had we walked for 10 minutes when we ran into a street musician singing songs with his guitar. I requested a song I had heard some 45 years ago called Il Partigiano and he knew it and I sang along on parts of it. Fun!

 

On we went to the cathedral and were treated to paintings and sculptures from the Medieval to the Baroque and the highlight was a bagpipe player. (For those who know me, they’re nodding their head thinking “Of course it was.”) Lunch with our “stolen” breakfast snacks on the church steps and on we went, threading through the winding, twisty streets, treated to view after view of this extraordinary town made of stone. Stopped at a museum that gave a film history of it and learned that all the charm had once been dire poverty and squalor with people living in the caves without any bathrooms, much food or even much air. Much as Dorothy Lange and Walker Evans made public the poverty of the Dust Bowl folks and people in Appalachia, an author named Carlos Levi shone the light on the situation with a book he published and in the 1960’s, people were moved into public housing. Two films, the Mel Gibson “Passion of Christ” and the James Bond “Live or Let Die” were filmed here, the city was declared a Unesco Heritage Sight and in 2019, won an Italian prize as a place of note and the tourist industry grew, though at the moment, less invasive than in other places. 

Working our way to the town square, I wrote a poem describing our experience (though in actuality, we did go left and didn’t take a bus):

Three roads diverged

In a Medieval town.

Eight tourists deciding,

Which one to go down.

 

“I want the left!”

“I want the right!”

“Let’s just decide or

We’ll be here all night!”

 

“This one is good.”

“But this one is great!”

“I think the best 

Is the one that goes straight!

 

Who gets to choose?

Who will decide?

“Here comes the bus!

Let’s get a ride!”

 

A stop for coffee and there I recognized the couple who shared my pleasure in the singer we had met. I started talking to them and the women sang in a folk song group and gave me fascinating background on the Il Partigiano song (to be saved for a later post).  A delightful conversation and surprised at how easily and happily I can talk with strangers, me who never starts conversations on airplanes. Soon after, I hear two couples speaking Spanish and starved to talk in another language I knew, I began chatting with them, ten minutes of sheer pleasure. A few minutes later, a car came by and the driver honked and waved and it was Vincente, the man from yesterday who recognized me because he thought I looked like “the Fonz” from the TV show Happy Days. My second day here and I feel  as if I know people!

 

In the square, there was a public piano and I rushed to it and played The Maple Leaf Rag and when kids came around, variations on Twinkle Little Star. Ah, music. Such a wonderful traveling companion and takes up no space or weight in the luggage I bring with me.

 

Back to the hotel late afternoon to do some handwashed laundry. Laundry is always an issue in European travel, not many laundramats and the people who will take your laundry charge by the piece. So into the sink it goes and hung on the heated towel rack or patio. A bit on the labor-intensive side, but satisfying.

 

The day ended at a lovely restauarant with no background music and the pleasure of actually being able to talk to each other at the table. My wife tried a new dish with an unappetizing name— crapiatta (I kid you not!)— but a delicious stew with barley, beans and vegetables. Midway through the meal, two musicians come into the restaurant and it was almost delightful except that they carried a boombox playing most of the music while they accompanied on washboard and a friction drum. And not very rhythmically precise at that. Still better than the recorded pounding disco beat!

 

And so we finished Day 4 without ever mounting our bikes. There are rides to do from here and back, but tomorrow I believe most of us will be out walking again. Simply too much to see and do in this wonderful town. 

 

Biking in Puglia: Day 3

 May I praise these bike tour companies? Perhaps in my youth, I would have packed some saddlebags with everything I needed and biked through the country camping my way on routes that I figured out ahead of time. But I never did and can’t quite imagine it now.

 

But these bike tours are the perfect solution. They choose the route and give you detailed directions to follow (interesting that it’s still on paper and no GPS), arrange the hotels, provide the bikes and helmet and tool kit and water bottle, take the bags you leave at one hotel and bring them to the other. All you have to do is the actual riding. Perfect! 

 

So we breakfasted in Gravina, did our customary hoarding of the breakfast spread— some bread, cheese, hard-boiled egg, a banana or apple, etc. wrapped in napkins and put into a precious plastic bag and set off  for another romp out on open roads with occasional cars whipping by, increasingly larger fennel plants on the side of the road, past fields of just-beginning wheat growing and surprisingly, still that morning sense of newness, a child’s sense of time and a young adult’s sense of the world spread out before us. Our actual 70+ year-old body-minds cast off behind us as we rode. 

 

We arrived at the town of Altamura for lunch, found a little park with benches and as we cracked open our hard-boiled eggs, a group of five high school boys and one girl came over and started practicing their English with us. “Where are you from?” “Ah, California! Golden State Warriors!” And so conversation proceeded from basketball to music to “Do you like Altamura?” and beyond. So sweet and I would just hope that someday a group of American high schoolers would start a conversation with Italian tourists to practice their Italian with that level of warmth, courage and sweetness. 

The riding in the countryside is heaven, long stretches without having to stop to look at directions, but things get much more complicated as we come into towns. The directions to the hotel in Matera were complicated and for the first time, the inevitable impatience and slight bickering with each other came to the forefront as each of us in turn was convinced we knew the way and each of us in turn turned out to be wrong. But we persevered and finally found the Hotel Belvedere. Still complaining having to take our heavy bikes down some 30 stairs, we instantly stopped in amazement at the view outside the back of the hotel.  

I had certainly known of iconic sights like the Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu, Yosemite, Venice, Santerini and such before I eventually arrived at them, but never in my life—including preparing for this trip— had I ever heard of this town of Matera. And yet it looks to be one of the most extraordinary places on the planet. How could this be?

 

After a welcome afternoon rest, each tucked away in their rooms with some needed solitude, we set off for dinner and started walking along the edge of the town. The awe was still fresh as we feasted on both the far and near marvels. Looking for a particular restaurant, we chatted with a man watering his plants and it soon grew to an outdoor class about the history of human civilization from a spirited and enthusiastic teacher. Topics ranged from the shift from hunting to agriculture, the rise of private property, the way neighbors are tied together and need to help each other, the water transport system (including showing us how it worked in his house) and more. This morning, we met out bike tour organizer and described the man and he said, “A chatterbox? That’s Vincente.”

 

On to dinner and here in this town where people lived in caves up through the 1950’s, the waitress came over to give us our menu— a tiny square of paper with a QR code. Aargh! Of course, our phones were not hooked into wi-fi and when with her help, we got one to work, we had to pass it around one at a time to read the tiny 10-page menu. Horrible! They claimed it came from Covid, but we’ve known for a long time that touching paper someone else has touched has nothing to do with the disease transmission. Hopefully, they will return to the paper menu.

 

This day would have been my Mom’s 101^stbirthday (though she passed on eight years ago) and I vowed to live this day on her behalf. I think she would have been happy with it.