Italy 2016 I

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‘What are you stopped for?’

‘The gum tree looks good now that its grown back a bit.’

‘He mauled it, didn’t he?’

‘Look! You’ve got a white rose.’

‘Come on Marina, we’ll miss the plane.’

‘I’m looking at the garden. Shouldn’t you cut the ivy off the wall? Doesn’t it cause it to crack?’

‘No. The roots of all the trees that were growing in there caused all the damage. Come on. Lets go.’

The front garden is a forest of stumps - stately trees cut off in their prime. The Arbour Wars - Oscar was George Bush. There was an enormous Mexican pine - a former Christmas tree, put out to pasture that grew too big for it’s boots, now reduced to a three-foot-stump. Oscar thoughtfully repurposed it as a bird-bath by means of a hand-held router and some blue paint. Then there was the statuesque liquid amber that I purchased at a scout-fête for 20c many many years ago. Neighbours trees that drop foliage into the swimming pool, or roots that lift up the skirts of boundary fences, letting in bandicoots and rabbits, are not safe either - Oscar patrols his borders ruthlessly, with copper nails and Round-Up.

The scribbly gum - outside what used to be my bedroom - was spared, but only just. This beautiful tree, which the house was originally designed around, was hacked back to two stumped arms, like Lavinia after her brutal rape and mutilation, hands cut off at the wrists with twigs protruding from bare flesh. Oscar argued that the gum deposited too much rubbish on the roof, to collect under the tiles and let the monsoonal rains in. He was right of course. But does that justify such brutality?

In the garden now there are a few relatively meek little olive trees, a fig tree, some roses. The sun is setting on Oscar’s days as fearsome part-time lumberjack. He is returning to his Mediterranean roots, in a manner of speaking. Well, Adriatic roots, to be more precise.

East of Venice, perched upon the Adriatic coastline, there lies a city - modest, yet quietly proud - that is the very definition of liminal. Easternmost city of Italy, on the border of Slovenia and Croatia, existing at sea level before climbing steeply up into the karstic hills that flank her, her language and cuisine are an anomaly - a product of her distinct history and geography.

Inhabited since the second millennium B.C, Trieste has existed at a crossroad for Latin, German and Slavic cultures, all of which are appreciable today. The explanation for Trieste’s modern visage as a Habsburgian / Austrian city arises from the time when Trieste and Venice vied for maritime dominance during the 13th and 14th centuries. Arising from the swamp with expansionism on her mind, Venice began plundering the nearby coastline for building materials. I sometimes think that Oscar should have been Venetian rather than Triestino - he would have had a marvellous time felling the mighty oak forests, denuding the karstic landscape of the mighty quercus that supplied the huge bearers, joists and ceiling beams that built the great houses of Venice, not to mention the ships that sailed from her ports.

Trieste, not content to be Venice’s bitch, looked to the land-locked Austro-Hungarian Empire for protection, and an agreement of voluntary submission was signed in 1382, which marked the beginning of a long and complex relationship with Austria and the Habsburgs, culminating in the declaration of Trieste as a free port in 1719.

I have been fortunate to travel to this city several times now. The first time I was only five years old; my family embarked on their very own European Vacation. It may well have been the first and the last time that we travelled together as a complete unit. Recollections are mostly distant, but a few details remain vividly distinct. Waking up in a Pensione in Rome in the afternoon - it seemed as though we were all recovering from jet-lag, I the only one awake. I remember sitting up, watching the sleeping members of my family in wonderment, uncannily aware of the premonition of death which sleep is symbolic of. I barely breathed, not wanting to wake them in this weird state. The ancient afternoon light burnished everything - it seemed that we were inside a gilded tomb.

I remember too the Alpha Sud that Oscar bought to travel the Continent. Dad driving, mum nervously in the passenger seat, my brother, sister and myself in the back seat wreaking mad havoc. I, the smallest, the youngest, bore the brunt of the older siblings’ beastliness. One favourite game was to hold me down, sit on my head and fart on me. This act of chemical warfare was not carried out in silence - there was a great deal of ruckus involved. So when we ground to a halt and investigations commenced as to what in god’s name was going on back there, I had two choices; be a whiny dibber-dobber or try to outsmart the monsters. I thought quickly; how could I foil their fun, poop on their party? I triumphantly declared that I actually enjoyed it, waiting for their faces to fall in crushed disappointment. It was not to be, and I was thereafter set upon with ever more gassy gusto.

The last laugh was on them, however, when I blacked out in the back seat. It was poisoning not by methane but carbon monoxide. Turns out the Alpha Sud had an exhaust leak that returned into the cabin and I, being the smallest and weakest, was the first one to fall off my perch. Thereafter, the farting games ceased.

From Abu Dhabi to the Adriatic, we fly through blinding white. The first sight of land comes as we descend into Venice, skimming the lagoon, but due to the hazy diffuse light, it’s difficult to make out what is land, what is water. In this ethereal way, we float to earth, bumping gently on the tarmac. Its 06:45 and 36 degrees.

We make our way to Venice Mestre Station, the ticket office is not yet open so I commence negotiations with a vending machine. I learn that the next train to Trieste is in four minutes, the following in two hours. The machine doesn’t want to sell me a ticket. There is an official gentleman of whom we ask for help - he explains that there is a strike on today - how quaintly European - so we should just get on the train and the conductor will sell us a ticket. We make the train, and soon we are zooming past fields of corn, of grapes, of wheat, little farm houses, a milky blue river, industrial zones, red and white road signs straight out of Jeffrey Smart paintings, poppies growing wild in the fields, stands of birches and copses of pines forming tight little phalanxes.

The landscape changes after Monfalcone, a major industrial centre with an enormous ship yard where some of the world’s biggest luxury liners are manufactured. This marks the beginning of the Gulf of Trieste, a seemingly infinite expanse of brilliant blue water, punctuated with little sailing boats, mussel beds and oil tankers. Oscar gets up and switches to the other side of the train, staring out the window with the view to the sea like a small boy seeing it for the first time. After a time, I join him.

‘That’s my beautiful gulf. I was fishing all over there. Sardone, sardelle, sgombri, calamari, guatti…’

The day is a hot blur. We pick up the car, get some lunch, drive to my uncle’s place where Oscar will stay, then I make contact with my cousin Mauro where I shall be staying. This arrangement is par for the course. What is not par for the course is a quarrel that has been ongoing for some years now between the breathtakingly stubborn members of this family.

Over dinner, Mauro lets me know in no uncertain terms that he is very glad that I am staying with him. This is a relief, considering what a ratbag I have been on previous visits, and how many things of his that I’ve accidentally broken in the course of my staying with him. He tells me that he remains very disappointed from Oscar’s previous visit last year, where he found out that he was in town only two weeks before he was due to leave, and with such little forewarning and such a busy schedule, Mauro was unable to free up much time to meet with him. He went on to tell me of his intention to arrange a barca vela - a sail boat - so that we can spend a few days fishing. I told Mauro about Oscar on the train in all his excitement at seeing his old ‘hood. Mauro was on the money. Suddenly the penny dropped - this is why Oscar wanted so badly for me to join him on this trip, as a kind of connection or mediator between the disputing factions.

Well, I’ll be.

Its my first morning in Italy and I’m awake at 5:30am. I decide to go for a run. Now we all make poor life decisions from time to time, and it’s dawning on me that this is one of them. I’ve brought my trainers with me, for fuck’s sake. I think this idea was motivated by an awareness that I would be around a lot of nice food and booze for the coming month, and a lot of buffalo mozzarella. So I’m out on the street in my running attire and its already 25 degrees and it hits me - I don’t run. And particularly I do not run in the heat. So I walk.

I walk into the city. Its uncharacteristically quiet. I walk to the Canale Grande, where there are people setting up for a market. Passing a parked truck full of fresh fruit and vegetables, I am hit by an incredible profumo - ripe peaches, rockmelons, strawberries. Its a beautiful thing.

I walk all the way to the Eastern side of the town, to the New Port, just before the Autostrada to Croatia begins. I’ve never ventured this far before. Its a strange, semi-dilapidated part of town. I walk past a building that turns out to be a wholesale fruit and vegetable market, and that smell again! As I move through various parts of town, the fruittivendoli are opening - the greengrocers - and I notice that even when I am three meters away from the door of the shop, this heady scent wafts out, so that it becomes second nature to draw in deep breaths to enjoy the scent.

Am I right in saying that this is experience is not so common back in Australia? Our greengrocers are a disappearing breed and the sterile conditions under which we're mostly forced to shop doesn’t allow for such tactile and sensual pleasures. When was the last time you walked into a greengrocer and could smell the delicate flesh of a peach, or the gently bruised skin of citrus?

I’m pretty sure that people get sick of hearing about how bloody marvellous Italy is. I know that I did, growing up in Australia and listening to Uncle Danilo. ‘Retarded Colonials’ he would call Australians, although this was largely a comment on our political ignorance. But other comments about a more general approach to life also rankled me.

If it’s so bloody good, why don’t you go back there? I thought to myself on more than one occasion.

And now the worm has done a full 180, and I find that I’m usually the one banging-on about the simplest of pleasures that Italy offers effortlessly. And it’s not only about the produce, good lord. Booze, cigarettes, coffee, mineral water - the staples of a civilised society - all dirt cheap.

But its easy to wax lyrical about a place when you don’t live there.

Something I really love about this city is, despite her grandiosity, her massive and stupendous fin de siècle palazzi, you’re never very far away from shabbiness - the dilapidated, the decayed, the down-at-heel. This exists everywhere of course, but cities such as Rome, Florence, Venice have large enough citte vechie - old quarters - that tourists need only see one face of their destination, the face that makes people feel warm and fuzzy about ‘La Dolce Vita’. I have travelled with people in Italy who have refused to acknowledge that there is a crummy side to their Italy fantasy - that there are literally millions of people struggling, if not living in abject poverty. Naples doesn’t let you get away with this delusion, and neither does Trieste.

When I first returned to Trieste as an adult in the summer of 2000, the old part of the city was a slum. There may well have been a few people living in these crumbling dwellings, with collapsed roofs and boarded-up windows, but it was the felines and the pigeons who were the visible caretakers of the ghetto. I would often stray into these places while on my adventures poking around the antiquarian district, and Oscar told me stories of Old Trieste, the bars and the brothels. That was a natural marriage of course, in a city of sailors and seamen. It didn’t take much to gauge the transgressive pulse of the place.

Not long after, the inevitable gentrification commenced. What I saw in the ensuing years had me worried. The tradesmen were doing good work, but they were wringing the life out of the place. I’m happy to report today that what I’ve noticed on my early-morning passeggiate is that there is still plenty of the decrepit left to keep things interesting. Indeed, I've found myself so deeply lost, wandering onto the wrong side of the tracks, that I’ve experienced at once a panicked - but at the same time thrilling - feeling of knowing that I’m really not supposed to be where I am. Mauro has threatened to microchip me.

I am seconded for lunch on Saturday by Oscar. Uncle Mirko and his partner Anna go to Slovenia every Saturday - ostensibly for lunch but actually to stock up on cheap cigarettes. Yes, darts are appreciably less expensive over the border.

Once not so long ago, it was necessary to pack your passport for such an excursion. There were real guards with real AK-47’s protecting the border and it was all a little bit exciting. The deserted, defaced check-point buildings are all that remain. Little family-run restaurants abound in the towns across the border, but we always end up going to the same places. There is a restaurant that specialises in seafood, where the regular clientele are occasionally offered under-the-table specials of certain delicious protected species. There is a restaurant specialising in meat, and I mean ‘specialising’ - for the flip side to the business is a butchery and it would be wrong not to have their Steak Tartare, a benchmark example of the dish. Another restaurant with a particularly beautiful al fresco dining area serves a wonderful Jota - a very distinctly Triestine dish of sauerkraut soup. Despite not sounding terribly appetising is in fact delicious. Also, they do a fantastic porchetta, and in winter-time, game - usually deer and sometimes bear - is served as a special.

Oscar, Mirko and Anna are all speaking fluent Slovene. I have no fucking idea what’s going on. I’m offered a choice between lamb and rabbit. I take lamb, even though I know the rabbit will be delicious, I’m still not emotionally ready for bunny. Over lunch, Brexit is discussed. The Brits have made a big mistake. There are no dissenting viewpoints.

It leads into a somewhat predictable but always rather entertaining political discussion. They talk about local hero Tito. The best communist - the very best benevolent dictator ever there was. The discussion covers Stalin, turns to Mussolini and inevitably to Hitler. Anna seems to be on-board with everything the old boys are saying, but it strikes me as fascinating to see how both Oscar and Mirko, who both lived through the second world war, whose family were persecuted by the fascists for being communist, whose father and elder brother were taken to Germany to work in labour camps, who fought on the side of the Partigianni - the Resistance - against both Germans and Fascists, who lost a sister in one of those fierce battles, even after all of this and more, they are able to have reasonably balanced and rational views about what happened.

The modern political world has been divided into the ‘for-us-or-against-us’ mentality, fuelled by ignorance and fear. I suspect that in the past, people were not bred or encouraged to be as stupid as they are today. Brexit is a product of this, I’m certain. This is the result of the current capitalist-ruled democracy. Who am I kidding, its not even democracy anymore. Its simply a global capitalist dictatorship, a not very benevolent one at that.

Deep breath. Rant over. For now. 

My cousin Mauro and I have a wonderful relationship. Its something that I suspect I once took for granted, but now marvel at. Relationships can be extraordinarily mysterious things, and try as I may to seek reason and explication, they generally remain elusive and beyond my understanding. At this point, I shrug my shoulders and give over to gratitude.

Mauro is deeply involved in the plant world, is a professor at Trieste University, is a biologist specialising in lichens. He has a garden that he calls his campagna - a word that translates as ‘countryside’, although I would be more inclined to describe it as an orto - a vegetable garden.

All gardens are a labour of love, but this garden is singularly difficult work. It seems to me that it’s approaching a form of self-flagellation. The patch of land is remote, located on the strada costiera, the very busy coast road leading to Trieste. After parking the car, you ascend a precipitous set of ancient stone steps, before scrambling up a densely forested slope. There is an old dry stone retaining wall on the left, and on the right a high fence to keep out deer and wild boar. A rusty wire mattress-frame marks the access point into ‘il giardino di Mauro’.

Mauro has been working this parcel of land for perhaps thirty years. I am guessing that he is nearly fifty, so that’s quite a commitment. Aside from growing much of what he consumes, it is also for him a way to de-frazzle from work and life. All that matters in the garden is water and daylight. Currently he has a very impressive collection of citrus, including bergamot, pink lemons, Sicilian lemons, the biggest grapefruit I’ve ever seen, and a very thorny Australian finger lime. There are olives from which he makes his own oil, grapes, and all kinds of vegetables, but it’s the sight of a cosseted Agapanthus - a South African native turned rampant invasive species in Australia, transposed into a frail organism here on a hillside outside of Trieste, that has me thinking of Mauro as The Little Prince, caring for his delicate rose under her glass cloche.

Mauro makes his own jams, preserves his own lemons, pickles his own olives. One time I stayed he had even made his own ‘nutella’ out of hazelnuts. Every morning we take breakfast together, in a very civilised manner, but this time the jams haven’t been made, so we are eating local honey instead. I tell him about the lamentable current situation in Australia - how our honey is full of poisons - pesticides and fertilizers. He tells me that this is not a problem in the Carso - this being the local name for the karstic hinterland, the vast limestone-based geology of the region. He explains;

‘Here, as well as the Carnic alps and the Apennini, the agriculture is too impoverished to use such things [as pesticides].’

How fucked up is that? Too impoverished to have poisons polluting your food supply. Sometimes its a good thing to be deprived.

Mauro has the most fascinating health conditions, and let me just add a little caveat - I don’t really enjoy ‘health problems’ as a topic per se. Its generally a thinly-veiled excuse for miserable people to talk about themselves. Mauro on the other hand is an anomaly, because I find his various conditions eminently interesting.

I heard about his first major issue many years ago. I think he was in his early 20’s. He had to have a pacemaker installed to regulate his heartbeat, due to contracting Lyme’s Disease. It was carried as a pathogen by a tick. Because he spent a lot of time in the field, he was always going to be a prime candidate. Thankfully the problem was diagnosed early and treated successfully.

I discovered on one of my early visits that Mauro was lactose intolerant. Or something. He eats goat cheese and drinks goat milk, and also eats a little butter. But he is not sure of how sheep milk might effect him, saying that he would need to refer to an encyclopaedia of milk, which gives the precise breakdown of every imaginable type of milk and its molecular constituents. His theory is that it’s lactic acid specifically that is his problem, not lactose as such. It’s head-spinningly confusing, but I respect that he has given much thought to the problem, and is qualified to do so, as opposed to all the pseudo-scientific simpletons who declare themselves celiac or fructose intolerant as a ploy for attention.

Some years back I sent a whole lot of Aesop products as gifts over with Oscar, thinking that they would be appreciated by the botanist, due to the company’s emphasis on plant-based products. When next I visited personally, I found that the goods had been passed off to Mauro’s little niece Anna. Turns out that Mauro has a bizarre reaction to citrus - during daylight, if his skin comes in contact with citrus or citrus by-product, he comes out in hives. He is not affected if he ingests citrus, and he is not affected once the sun goes down. I rather like the vampiric undertones of this particular ailment.

The icing on the cake occurred when I told him I had been for lunch at an establishment called Champagneria Trieste, where the focus is on fresh seafood - primarily oysters - and champagne. It’s a wonderfully bourgeois concept. The other day I went there with Oscar and we had oysters from Brittany and Prosecco. Mauro expressed interest in going sometime, adding;

‘I’m glad that the oysters come from Brittany, because the local oysters contain an algae that doesn’t agree with me’

Unless you have this depth of understanding about your dietary issues, I find it difficult to take your dietary requirements seriously.

I’ve put my hand up to cook dinner tonight. In the past, I’ve usually offered to cook as a parting gesture, towards the end of my stay. It inevitably turns into a production of which Leo Schofield would be envious. I had this absurd idea that I wanted to make twice-cooked Peking duck, with little pancakes, spring onions, pickled cucumber, hoisin sauce - everything, everything!

Back then, I didn’t have a very good grasp of the concept of seasonality. We bang on about it a lot in the world of restaurants and cook books and fine-dining, but the fact remains that in Australia we can get pretty much whatever we want, whenever we want it. Its a product of our diverse climate, our interconnectedness with the global market and our diverse multiculturalism.

An enduring memory of mine, the one that sparked off the duck idea, came from spending a winter in Europe in 2006. I was fortunate enough to be staying in an apartment in Venice, near the Rialto Bridge. OK, I won’t beat around the bush here - what actually happened was that Mauro was sick of me overstaying my welcome at his place, so he bundled me off to Venice for a bit of peace and quiet. The apartment happened to be located in the market district - right next to the open-air fresh fish and vegetable market. In the bitter cold of winter, women would come to the market wearing full-length furs and would proceed to rudely elbow you out of the way to get what they wanted. It was thrillingly cutthroat.

Around the corner was a macelleria - a butcher - specialising in poultry. The window display - oh my god. Suddenly, there and then, I understood the allure of the European Christmas. Ducks, geese, guinea fowl, pigeons, pheasants - all whole, with their necks and heads still intact, composing an exquisite still-life, all happily sleeping the big sleep. You go inside, select your fowl, and the butcher proceeds expertly to dress the bird exactly the way that you want it, according to the recipe that you intend to follow.

So this is what I was romanticising about, when I proposed cooking Peking duck in the middle of Summer. Let’s not even mention Hoisin sauce - it doesn’t exist.

I’ve got to hand it to myself, I made it happen. Well, I made something happen. I managed to source a duck that had been suspended in the permafrost in some deep-freeze chest in some obscure macelleria in Trieste since the last ice age. The stakes increased dramatically when Mauro informed me that he was inviting a dozen of his closest friends over to partake in the feast. My duck became a mere canapé, and we all ended up getting drunk on martinis. It was a terrific night, until Oscar turned up at 5am the following morning to pick me up to go to the airport.

Incredibly, Mauro informs me that he has attempted my recipe twice - only the duck was subbed for chicken.

Mauro and I go out for dinner after a wine tasting to a favourite local restaurant, and conversation reverts to experimental cuisine. As an entree we have involtini di sgombro - mackerel spring rolls. They’re very good - and it makes me wonder about what other regional specialities could be adapted or fused. Mauro suggests the most Triestine dish of all; Jota, and I think Xiaolongbao - soup dumplings - could make a logical pairing. I’ve had a crack at making dumplings on a few occasions - both Chinese and German varieties - and my conclusion is that you have to be a Chinese or German for whom making dumplings is second nature to really nail them, otherwise you’re just mucking around and occasionally fluking-it. I felt vindication for this theory on a number of occasions at work, when I’ve asked diners of Chinese origin what they thought of the dumplings that we serve. The answer invariably comes back that they’re ok, but they’re not Chinese dumplings.

Lack of skill notwithstanding, an awareness of my limitations is not about to stop the Jota Xiaolongbao project.

Oscar and I go to Sistiana for a swim on Wednesday. The weather is perfect - 29 degrees. He picks me up at 11am.

Sistiana is a little harbour and a popular place to swim. It costs 9 Euros to enter with a car. I half expect Oscar to start grizzling about the entry fee, but instead he sings the praises of the place and the wonderful facilities provided. We find a spot to park and decide that lunch is in order. There’s a nice little restaurant right by the water, but they don’t open for forty-five minutes, so we go and get a beer. Couple of pints of draught beer, 8 Euros. We go and sit at a bench in the shade of some big pine trees.

Everywhere around us there are calm, happy people having a nice time. The general tenor of the place is friendly - people look you in the eye, smile and say buongiorno. Nobody seems to be judging, not harshly anyway. There are elderly couples at other tables playing cards with each other, having little picnics and generally enjoying each other’s company. They're all getting around in their speedos, all shapes and sizes, and not giving a fuck. You can bring to the park whatever you want - there’s nobody searching your beach-bag or car boot to see if you’re sneaking in an esky full of coldies. The overarching philosophy seems to be ‘do what you want’. And people are. Its liberating.

I tell Oscar that I think it’s the first time I’ve been to Italy and actually enjoyed speaking Italian. I haven't so much as thought about Italian language now for a good three years, as the focus of my studies has shifted. So I was half expecting to be greeted sympathetically by my relatives as the mentally-challenged mute who spent years learning the language with very little to show for it. But that’s not how things panned out. This time I haven’t wasted a second worrying about stupid things - what is the suitable verb form to use in this sentence, the correct tense, the concordant gender, am I saying ‘peach’ or ‘fish’, am I saying ‘meat’ or ‘dog’, am I saying 'Casino' or 'brothel' etc. I would tie myself up in knots to the point where nothing would come out. I’d be standing outside a shop wondering how I was going to go in and negotiate to buy a pair of shoes, working myself into a tizzy and hating myself. This time its been; no fucks given. It’s served me surprisingly well.

Over lunch Oscar reminisces.

‘This harbour, we would sail up here from Santa Croce. Back then, there was not one sail boat; only fishing boats. Now, there is not one fishing boat; only sail boats.’

As I understand it, Oscar’s family owned a fishing fleet when he was a small boy. They lived in the tiny village of Santa Croce which, despite it’s location at the top of the Carso, was known primarily as a fishing village. Oscar’s family was apparently once quite well-off, owning quite a lot of land as well as the fleet, but the tide turned when his father returned a broken man from the labour camps of Germany, drinking the wealth away until most of the land was sold to pay off debts.

Oscar would sail with the fleet as a young boy, but that all changed in 1943, when Germany occupied Trieste and established their ‘Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral’. Oscar’s father and eldest brother Vittorio were taken to Germany. Oscar was eleven years old at this point, so he stayed at home with his grandfather. Mirko and their sister Ida escaped and joined the Partizans - the local resistance. This is all generally accepted fact in family history, but its the first time that I’ve stopped to consider how young they all were. Mirko, the ninety year old with a dozen lives, was only seventeen when he took up arms.

Back to Oscar’s trip down memory lane.

‘The harbours all along this coast were built by Austria. As a fisherman, you could stop in at any one of them. You would fish either with gill nets or drag nets. You’d have to stop to pull the fish out of the nets and put them in boxes, sometimes you’d have to wash the nets - because they were made of natural fibres back then. Now they’re all synthetic, so you don’t need to wash them anymore. Or, sometimes you would have to stop to repair them. During the war, I would go fishing with my grandfather’s nephew. We would go out with a sail boat at night, in the middle of winter. I would be wearing three of four pairs of pants - it was so cold.

The boat was about nine meters long, a sail boat. We would have to row out of the harbour of Santa Croce - big oars, like you see on the Roman slave ships - then once we were out of the harbour, we would put up the mainsail. We would sail, with a dragnet, all the way to Barcola, then we would bring in the net, turn around and sail back here [Sistiana]’

‘He would say to me, and you can ask Mirko this, he’ll tell you; “We’ll take the best fish, then we’ll sell the rest.” This was during the war. We would make….more than a tradesman’s wage for a month…in one night.

‘The Germans permitted us, because we were primary producers. Most people were taken off to the war, but some people had to stay - particularly the farmers and other primary producers. This guy had a limp anyway, so he wasn’t much use to them.’

‘The harbour at Santa Croce was the biggest - in the volume of fish it was selling at the market in Trieste. It had the biggest fleet; the biggest number of people interested in fishing back then. When the tuna came, each harbour had a number of officially designated points where people would stand up on the clifftop to call directions to the boats on the water below. Most harbours had one or two - Duino had one, Sistiana had one. Santa Croce had four.’

‘The prince in the castle at Duino used to encroach on the fishing spots down the coast. He thought that because he was a prince he could do what he wanted. But eventually the people got sick of him, and they appealed back to Austria, and Austria reigned him in.

On the way back from Sistiana we pass through Santa Croce. Oscar has one nephew - the son of his oldest brother - who still lives in the village. He says to me;

‘Let’s see if Zarco’s at the bar.’

We do a casual drive-by, Zarco isn’t there but Oscar has been spotted. We have to stop and make chiacchierare - chit chat - with the old boys. They’re speaking Slovene, but switch once Oscar tells them that I speak Italian. Of the four whom we join, three are Oscar’s vintage and one is markedly older. He is cranky and mouthy, so I like him best. There’s one bloke doing most of the talking - he’s sitting next to Oscar - another with a big, bloodshot nose and red watery eyes who occasionally interjects, and another with aviators on who says absolutely nothing. Its all pretty pleasant and the beer is going down nicely. They switch back to Slovene - it’s a completely foreign language, I can’t make head nor tail of it. Then I realise that they’re talking about me and I start to squirm. There’s mention of Mirko, Mauro - so they’re talking about where we’re staying. My mind bounces away and I’m suddenly distant. A memory has surfaced and caught me by surprise.

The circumstances were almost identical - Oscar and I having beers with some of the old boys of the village. At the mention of Mirko, there was a readily perceived shift in the dynamics of the conversation. It would have been noticeable in any language. I sought an explanation afterwards form Oscar. What followed was the rather extraordinary story of Mirko, who after the war worked his way up in the merchant navy to the position of chief engineer. It was during this tenure that one of the ships for which he was responsible sank off the waters of Sicily. Mirko was charged with negligence and sent to prison. In the mean time, two sailors from the ship were investigated and ended up confessing that it was an inside job organised by the ship’s captain, whereupon Mirko was acquitted and released. In spite of this, it would seem that inculpability is impossible to regain in a small village.

I am bothered that this man I have only ever known as gentle and ever so softly spoken can raise so much ire. But I guess you never know. I ask Mauro about it over dinner one evening and he ratifies Oscar’s version of events. But he adds that the issue is likely to be cloudier than it seems. Mirko he reminds me, has had during his lifetime four wives. He has outlived two of them and currently remains with one. This fact alone could be too much for some people. And of the sinking of the ship, he says;

‘Well, prison is prison. And losing your ship in the Mediterranean is one thing. But even this was not as dramatic as the time his ship went down in the middle of the Indian ocean. He was adrift for days…’

Mirko himself is pretty low-key about all this, by which I mean that he’s not boastful, but he’ll tell you a jolly good story if he’s in the mood. And he doesn’t seem like the kind of person who lets other’s negative opinions of him trouble him. He is self-contained, self-possessed.

At this point in his life, he’s earns the right to give zero fucks.

On Saturday evening Marcello - an old friend of Mauro’s - comes over for dinner. It’s obvious why these two have had such an enduring friendship - they are both, as Nabokov would say; ‘experts in obscure subjects’. Marcello, a proud Italian from Arezzo, opens with this show-stopper;

‘You know, Italy has 1,400 different grape varieties. France has 140. There are 7,000 varieties of edible plants in Italy. We have a very high biodiversity - the highest in the European Union.’

I am suitably impressed. Nonetheless I turn to Mauro for authentication. What’s the reason for this? The Romans were highly interested in, well, lets just say everything, but viniculture and horticulture were considered extremely important subjects. As rampant colonists, Rome’s influence spread far and wide, but after the sack of Rome and the decline of the Roman Empire, the ideas that had been exported so ruthlessly shrank back to within the boundaries of the Italian peninsula. Evidently the Barbarians did not share the Roman interest in plant cultivation, so the flourishing of this branch of science ceased widely through Europe at this point.

With trepidation I turn to the internet to verify some of these claims. There are volume upon volume of excellent books on the subject which I should really be referring to, as ‘Google is not a scholarly resource’, so my lecturers at uni keep telling me. However my Italian is not good enough to extract this kind of information, so I go about it the slightly lazy, slightly dodgy way. Every site I browse has wildly varying figures on the subject. ‘Tar and Roses - the Italian Wine Resource’ claims that there are three thousand registered grape varieties in Italy. ‘Italian Wine Central’ cites the ‘official Italian survey of vineyards [that] lists about 440 different grape varieties’. This is qualified by counting varieties with ‘more than 400 hectares (1,000 acres) planted’. Wikipedia is probably the most accurate when it says that Italy has ‘a large array of native grape varieties’. On the question of French grape diversity, Wikipedia says; ‘numerous grape varieties are cultivated in France’, with ‘many of France’s regions dating their wine-making history to Roman times’.

So I haven’t been able to nail down exact figures, but the point is clear. The Romans were pretty damn clever, and their legacy remains present and relevant in modern Italy.

Marcello, Mauro, Oscar and I go to Gorizia on Sunday to see an exhibition of table settings at Palazzo Coronini Cronberg.

We stop for a coffee before arriving at the palazzo.

‘This place was once known as the “Austrian Nice”.’ Mauro informs me.

I look around, a bit bewildered. Amongst the occasional stately edifice, and with the exception of a very beautiful post office built in the Fascist-style - clean of line and in it’s own way starkly modern, a ghastly preponderance of soulless 60’s and 70’s structures abounds. Sure, we are not yet in centro - the historic centre of the town, but something is not quite right here. The Gorizia that I see is nothing like Nice - the fact of it’s being located one hundred kilometres inland is only one inconvenient part of the problem.

Mauro explains;

‘Gorizia was the scene of extremely heavy conflict in WWI. There were eleven seperate battles here, in which the both the Italian and Austro-Hungarian armies lost around 600,000 soldiers respectively over the course of about a year. The city was almost completely destroyed. Gorizia had been very wealthy. It had been part of the Austrian Empire which was governed from Vienna, and many of the Viennese nobility owned huge palazzi here.

Palazzo Coronini Cronberg was one of these. The exhibition that we attend is titled A Tavola Con I Conti Coronini - Dining with the Coronini Counts.

‘We have a guided tour at 5pm, but there is also a display in the horse-hole.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘The horse-hole’

‘I’m not sure what it is that you’re trying to say’

‘The place that you put the horses’

‘Aah, the stable.’

What is most remarkable about this collection is the majority of the pieces - there are hundreds - belong to the private collection of the palace. So all these incredibly elaborate silver cutlery and dining settings, coffee, tea and chocolate services, cookware, wine service, table centrepieces - everything - were all augmented and embellished as part of the extremely tactical marriages that were engineered to maintain power amongst the governing elite. In room after room they showed us the difference between French, Viennese and Russian-styles of table setting that were the fashion amongst the Viennese nobility before the twentieth century came marching through the front door to put an end to their way of life.

I most enjoyed learning that for many hundreds of years, the powers-that-be in the Catholic Church frowned upon the use of the humble fork because of it’s symbolic connection to the devil.

We walk up to the castle after a few glasses of wine, where Mauro briefly explains the difference between the governing systems of the medieval hilltop towns of the central Italian peninsula, and how they diverge from the locally practiced feudal system. If things start to make any sense, just give it a few minutes and you will be comfortably back in the dark. I’m just coming to grips with Medieval land ownership laws when Mauro points out the massive stone plaque depicting the winged lion of St Mark that has been installed above the gateway to the castle. This symbol is to Venice what the eagle is to Rome; it represents power.

‘But Gorizia never had anything to do with Venice, so this is completely out of place. It’s an example of ‘Italianization’’

As mentioned, this region was hotly contested in WWI between the Italians and the Austrians, before being what is politely referred to as ‘annexed’ by Il Duce during WWII. The people who lived on these border lands, whether they considered themselves Austrian, Slovenian or Croatian, were made to reimagine themselves as ‘Italian’. It happened to the people of Sud-Tyrol also. Annexation would have been incomplete without Italianization to get everyone on the same page. It’s basically story-telling from the top down, re-arranging history so that it conforms with an imagined, perceived or embellished mythology. Mussolini drew much of his myth-making ideologue and aesthetic from the glory days of Rome, tapping-into the conceits of power, control, dominance and ascendancy. For example, just about every Fascist-style building that you encounter, from Gorizia to Pescara to Rome itself, is clad either partially or completely in travertine stone; the very same stone that the Colosseum was once resplendent in. The Colosseum of course is a highly evocative structure, emblematic of Rome and suggestive of uncompromising brutality; perfect allegorical fodder for Fascism.

But it can get confusing. Because history is not linear; it’s slippery, and it bleeds, and is re-appropriated - usually by the victor, who gets to write the narrative. It is no coincidence that the Italian word for ‘story’ or ‘tale’ and ‘history’ are the same - storia.

Consider too the many ways that the Italian language deals with the past. There is passato prossimo - the simple past - that describes something that happened at a particular point in the past. Then there is l’imperfetto - the imperfect past - used to describe an ongoing action in the past (quando ero piccola - when I was little). Then there is the passato remoto - the remote past, used mostly in written Italian, but also spoken in some parts of the south. And finally there is the trapassato prossimo - the past perfect tense. As a student of the language, all of this makes you want to tear your hair out, but looking at it in a more esoteric way, I suppose it makes sense to be specific to this degree when you have so much bloody history to deal with on a day-to-day basis. There’s Etruscan, Greek, Mesopotamian, Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Risorgimento, Unification, World War and diaspora or displacement histories, just to list a few of the most obvious ones.

Which reminds me of a terrible joke that my flatulent brother told in the back of the Alpha-Sud all those years ago. ‘Why is Italy shaped like a boot? Because you can’t fit that much shit in a shoe.’

Dinner has been organised for Tuesday night. Mauro and I got a little drunk and excitable a week or so back and booked a table at one of the region’s top restaurants, a place named Agli Amici in the tiny town of Godita, a few miles from Udine. Mauro has a meeting for work in Udine, so Oscar and I are to catch the train from Trieste and meet him there. We sit on the gulf side of the carriage to admire the tantalisingly elusive view of the water, but Oscar’s mood is not as misty-eyed as it had been the last time we passed this way.

‘Somebody should cut these bloody trees!’

Udine, the historical capital of the Friuli region, is a stately and elegant city. Peoplewatching is a popular spectator sport, with everybody furiously checking each other out from vantage points at the many cafes lining the old market square. But for some stunning Liberty-era dazzle, Caffe Contarena is the perfect place to take a spritz.

‘You know, the spritz originated in Trieste.’ Claims Oscar. ‘It was an Austrian thing. They found the local wines too strong, so they watered them down with soda.’

He’s right - kind of. Wikipedia cites the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg influence, but says that the drink originated in Venice.

Regardless, it’s a North-East Italian invention. We make it our barometer on our travels through Italy.

To chose a standard drink like the ubiquitous spritz can tell you a lot about a place. For example, I’ve been getting stuck into them in the afternoons in Trieste, around Mauro’s neighbourhood. In the Viale - the street that is perfect to a stroll into town due to it’s being closed to traffic - my regular spritz costs 3.50 Euros, and it comes served with crisps and salted peanuts - stuzzichini, or snacks. However, a smaller bar where I sometimes take a morning coffee and pastry, run by two older women - who could be sisters or could be a lesbian couple who look very alike - serve spritz with crisps, peanuts and crackers with soft cheese for 3.00 Euros.

The perceived poshness of a venue often has surprisingly little bearing on price, So, for example, the cafes on the market square as well as the beautiful Cafe Contarena were at all not inflated in price. But let’s not forget that we are in Udine. This rule of thumb is dangerous to follow when in heavily-touristed places - I once paid 60 Euros for two hot chocolates in Piazza St Marco in Venice, because a little orchestra had been playing at the time. Places such as Trieste or Udine will not charge any extra to serve you coffee seated at a table, but locals everywhere know to take their coffees standing at the bar. Otherwise, in Rome or Venice, you can be charged an extra 10 Euros to sit. Traps for young players - anyway, back to the spritz.

I’m a bit of a traditionalist, so I was sticking to Aperol Spritz. Oscar likes to fuck with things, so he was ordering Spritz Bianco - essentially still white wine with soda water. This was all well and good until we departed the North-East region and headed South through Emilia Romagnia into Marche and Abruzzo. Things still were looking promising in Chioggia where we stopped for lunch, and spritz was on the menu for the rock-bottom price of 2.50 Euros. Mind you, Chioggia is still in the Veneto region. We hit our first spritz-related issue in Ravenna, Emilia-Romagnia, where they a) weren’t terribly familiar with the spritz concept, before b) charging us 7 Euros per spritz. It was a definite low-point in the spritz story.

It occurred to me that when travelling that you are constantly trying to decipher the unspoken language of ‘what exactly is going on in this particular part of the world, and how does it differ from where I have just recently been, whose ways I have become somewhat familiar with.’

Shortly thereafter, Oscar hopped onboard the Aperol train. One less thing to have to explain.

Oscar and I, generally speaking, ate too much during our mini excursion, but we would still arc-up when stuzzichini were not served with our spritz, as we had become so used to the certain manner in which things are done the way we like them, never mind the fact that we absolutely didn’t need them as we were inevitably on our way out to dinner.

And it was a very special dinner that we were on our way to that night after several spritzes in Udine. Running late and slightly stressed, we arrived at Agli Amici around 22:15, just as the evening was beginning to take over the day.

The all-important greeting was warm and generous. Out table was ready, but we were offered the choice of aperitifs in the garden, inside at our table, or, alternatively we were welcome to spend our entire evening in the garden. The garden was beautiful - an immaculate lawn, edged with a wonderful planted border framed by larger shade trees. A proper foreground, middle-ground and backdrop had been considered, lit by a combination of soft feature lighting and naked flame torches. The oversized outdoor wine bucket, containing magnums of sparkling wines offered for aperitifs, was constructed in a soft-finished roto-moulded plastic, lit internally, so that it became a practical background feature.

I felt like I had died and gone to heaven, and I was being served drinks on arrival.

The service was extraordinary. Everyone smiled a genuine smile, everyone looked good in their uniforms. They all worked together as a team, and nobody was stressed. Mind you, there were only four tables in as far as I could see.

The approach of both the menu and the wine list is very accomodating. As well as offering an à la carte menu, there are two degustation options; one offering what’s ‘new and unforgettable’ the other with more traditional offerings, from the local land and waters. Similarly with wine, you can match according to the best that the local producers have to offer (and we are talking about the Collio here, Friuli Venezia-Giulia’s justly famous wine producing region, with wines of extremely high quality) the best of Italy and France, or rare wines and magnums. All glassware was Zalto. All of the cutlery and crockery was beautiful. The attention to detail extended to absolutely everything.

And the food? Clean, precise and incredibly intense flavours. I had to go double whammy on the foie gras - the first dish was ganache of foie gras with sweet and sour rhubarb - pieces of, with a rhubarb jus and a delicate little ring of crumble around the plate. My next course was fried gnochetti with cavolo nero, smoked eel and a foie gras sauce. The smoked eel was particularly wonderful, and as well as reminding me of Lake House, it has at once sparked an eel obsession, and made me angry that this is such an under-utilised ingredient in Australia generally. It is such a bloody good fish, or whatever it is. This dish was also served with one of the standout wines of the evening - a locally-produced picolit, the sweetness of which played perfectly with the foie gras in a way that sauternes would be similarly matched.

My main course was the veal, but I won’t describe it because it was verging on obscene.

The cheese chariot, the sweets, the petite fours - by this stage we were all in the dark in the garden in a blissful woozy state - a state that you don’t want ever to end. But midnight was approaching, the incantations and imbibeations had ceased, Puck had spoken his epilogue and the Midsummer Night’s Dream was over.

The morning that Oscar and I are due to leave for a little sojourn South, Mauro is busy over breakfast telling me all the places that he thinks are worth a visit. I take notes on my phone as best I can, listing towns and their highlights as well as plenty of recommended places to eat. I am travelling at the behest of Oscar, who likes to do things on the fly, and fortunately for him he can afford to do things this way. My preference on the other hand is to be a little more prepared, while leaving the door open for spontaneity. I am very glad of Mauro’s suggestions.

While the prospect of exploring an unfamiliar part of the world should be - without reservation - thoroughly appealing, I find that I’m experiencing some reservation. I have been very happy this past week revelling in the mundane - something that find I don’t get to enjoy enough of when I’m at home, time always being fractured between work and study. Further to that there is the issue of travelling with Oscar, which can be a heavy and unrelenting experience for a variety of reasons.

Mauro raises one of them over breakfast;

‘But Natasha, when you return back to Australia, you must have Oscar’s hearing seen to. It is really very bad, and he is isolating himself by not attending to the matter.’

He is completely right. But he doesn’t know that my brother Michael has done everything possible to address the issue, driven by dual motivators concern and intense frustration. I was extremely surprised when, around this time last year, Michael managed to talk him into having bespoke hearing aids made, which were then loaned to him for a period of six weeks to ensure that he was happy, before any payment changed hands. Now this was in fact the second such exercise that Oscar had allowed himself to be subject to - the first time he swore; ‘never again - I’ll never wear one of those things.’

Since then, technology has improved, devices have become smaller. But Oscar stood firm. It wasn’t about the money - he didn't like the idea of wearing them, putting them in, taking them out, changing the batteries once a week, fiddly bloody things. As a result, the rest of us have to work around the problem. And with a problem like this, you never know where the next misunderstanding is coming from.

It goes without saying that the nice thing about travelling with somebody is the shared experience of taking the piss out of what - and who - is immediately around you. It also goes without saying that this should at all times be executed with some subtlety - difficult to achieve with a nearly-deaf old codger whose hearing comes and goes like Italian wi-fi.

We were only two days into the trip when my the cause of my fears emerged and threatened to derail the excursion. We had stumbled upon a lovely restaurant in San Severino Marche that was clearly the business from the moment we sat down and a complimentary glass of bubbles was poured. The owner and maître’d of the establishment was kind enough to explain as much of the menu as he could in English. We ordered and relaxed, content that all was well in the world.

The restaurant was not hugely busy - two tables of four and a bigger party of seven besides ourselves. The entrées arrived - steak tartare with a mustard ‘gelato’. We got stuck in, and before long Oscar announces (loudly);

‘Gee, that fatso really explained the dish well!’

‘Dad….’ I hissed. ‘that’s really rude.’

‘What?! He didn’t hear me. He doesn’t even speak English! I’m not being rude. Im making a joke. Aah, look forget about it’

And of course ‘forget about it’ means exactly the opposite. It means; ‘I’m going to stew over this, and it isn’t going away any time soon’.

Naturally the bomb squad had to come in and defuse the situation, otherwise Oscar would have had to be content with his own stubbornness for company for the remainder of the trip. A disaster of that excruciating, prolonged nature happened to my brother - it’s a story that’s retold on a semi-regular basis when the topic of travelling with Oscar comes up.

Fortunately, Oscar behaves himself (more or less) for the rest of the trip.

What’s proving to be the real fly-in-the-ointment is ferragosto. Traditionally, this has meant that the entire country is on holiday for the month of August, which can cause havoc if you happen to be a tourist travelling at this time. When I first arrived in Trieste in late June, I noticed that the city was unusually quiet. Mauro explained that many people were already on holiday, deciding to take their summer holidays earlier and in effect, stagger ferragosto. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

In actuality, what we were finding as we moved South along the coast was that everyone - everyone - had the same idea and had essentially fucked off to the beach, leaving entire towns deserted. We first encountered this in a little hilltop town recommended by Mauro called Iesi. We had the foresight to arrive at our intended destination right on lunchtime, with the idea of finding a nice little osteria in which to sample some local cuisine. Thing with these quaint little hilltop towns is that you generally have to park the car outside the city walls before making your way up to the old town centre where you should stumble across bars, cafes, osterie - whatever your heart desires. Now the only other factor in this particular equation was the relentless heat - and I know that all of you freezing your asses off back in Australia are not going to offer the slightest scrap of sympathy. That’s fine because I don’t want any - but let me just explain that when you are walking the streets of these walled towns at midday there is no shade to be had, and as it turns out, no sustenance on offer. After a while of scratching around in our bag of tricks and coming up empty-handed - head to the main square, follow a sign indicating a restaurant down this small street etc etc - things started to become a bit desperate. I began to feel like an ant under a magnifying glass, and I started to see mirages way off in the heat-haze before me.

Staggering along feebly like a disoriented Burke and Wills, I suddenly find myself flat on my face on the pavement. Seems my footwear wasn’t cutting the mustard on the marble kerbs, polished to mirror-slickness by hundreds of years of thong-wearers before me. To her credit, the sole occupant of Iesi who hadn’t scurried off to the seaside that day came to my aid.

Oscar and I were desperate and emotional by the time we found 0737 Ristopizza Cafeteria Piadineria. Every wretched soul in the district that shared our plight was also in this place, so the poor bloke who ran the joint (solo) was frantically busy. As suggested by the title, pizza was their speciality. They were actually very good pizze, although truth be told I would have been happy gnawing on an old sock by that stage, but Oscar is not a fan of pizza, in a similar way that he is not a fan of hearing-aids - his dislike is extreme and a little irrational.

Whether by bad luck or bad management, we didn't get to eat in a single Mauro-sanctioned restaurant on our travels, which for me was pretty devastating because Mauro knows his shit. Oscar was not that emotionally invested in this side of things, so he didn’t seem to care all that much.

When we hit Pescara I decided that it was time to do something semi-fancy. I found a place that was in the near vicinity that was rated on trip advisor, Michelin guide, Slow Food, the lot. Located in the historic city centre, it is with some surprise and relief that we arrive to find Tavola 58 open and doing business. Now at this point, both Oscar and I are a little glutted - we’re after something light for dinner, preferably fish. So it’s surprising to find that Tavola 58 has not a single fish dish on the menu. A city called Pescara - Piscaria, an early variant of the city’s name from the twelfth century meant ‘abounding with fish’. So where were the fish? We checked out another restaurant across the way that was decorated in blue and white - internationally symbolic of beachy, seaside things. Indeed, it was a seafood restaurant but I shit you not, the entire menu consisted of baccalà. Its the strangest thing - here we are in a city with a huge fishing industry, and this restaurant is specialising in a preserved fish from the North Sea.

We end up back at Tavola 58. Greeted and seated by a friendly, professional, old-school maître’d, who knows how to manage people confidently and with aplomb. Its such a nice feeling to be welcomed in this way. A short while after being seated, along comes the blip on the radar - a young vested waiter with a pencil-thin moustache - more ‘John Waters sleazy’ than ‘Clarke Gable dashing’. He establishes that I’m speaking English and Oscar is speaking Italian, gives me an indecent look and disappears. I look over at Oscar whose wi-fi has dropped out.

The wine dude is old-school great as well - I’ve no idea what I’m ordering, only that its a rosé. 2015 Praesidium Rosato Terre Aquilane. Geesus Christ their reds are big down here! Just as well they plunge them straight into an ice bucket.

Oscar and I share the suggestively named fellata d’Abruzzo, featuring slices of local prosciutto from Torano, salami from Teramo, a spicy soft salami (in the style of ‘ndjua) called ventricina from Vasto, the famous spiedini - ‘little roasts’, of lamb on skewers, duck liver pâté and a mind-blowing raw sheep’s milk cheese from Rivisondoli called pecorino marcetto. Everything was exquisite - you know how you order tasting plates and there’s a lot of filler and not a lot of killer? This fellata was all killer, and that cheese, which had the spiciness and punch of a Gorgonzola picante, is one of those things that is very securely locked in my taste-vault - I only have to think about it and I can immediately recall the incredible punchy flavour, like nothing else I’ve ever tasted.

This would have been enough, but both of us felt compelled to order primi piatti - Oscar a vegetable soup, which was frankly a disappointment, and I a silly pasta of crispy pancetta, chilli and dark chocolate. I know what a lot of you are thinking; yuk. But go with me on this, there is logic behind such a seemingly absurd selection.

Back in 2013 in Siena, I had a life-changing experience with a local, ancient recipe of chinghiale - wild boar - with pine nuts and a bitter dark chocolate sauce. The sauce was not as you might expect - cloying and thick - but instead savoury and meaty with just the lightest touch of bitter chocolate to round it out with a little softness and richness. God it was wonderful.

So this is where I’m coming from when I order this hot mess, which is silver-served by the questionable young waiter already mentioned. He sidles up to me, evidently noting Oscar’s intermittent auditory faculties and says in English, as he twirls pasta onto a serving fork and onto my plate;

‘This is a dish for bad girls’

Table manners, indeed!

There is a place in Trieste called The Risiera at San Sabbia, which I have read about but have never been to. On this trip, during my morning wanderings, I decide that it’s time to go.

The Risiera is a place that one must steal oneself to visit. I always had the impression that it was within the reaches of the city and that I would one day stumble across it, but that isn’t the case. It’s located in an industrial part of town, surrounded by a large, unremarkable carpark. Constructed in 1913 as a rice-husking facility, it was re-purposed during the German occupation as a concentration / extermination camp - the only place of it’s kind on Italian soil. It was here that captured members of Tito’s partizans were brought, together with the local jewish population, homosexuals and other miscellaneous ‘undesirables’.

The audio guide which I hire is melodramatically voiced by a (male) marble-gargler, who wrings every drop of emotion out of his material. I feel as though I’m being bludgeoned - it’s all a bit much. In contrast, it’s the presence of the structures - the presence and absence - that speak loudly of what happened here, through silence.

The new architectural additions that transform the place into a civic monument are largely symbolic. The death chamber, autoclave and chimney were all destroyed by the fleeing German military, in an effort to annihilate the evidence of the crimes committed. 

What remains of the facility where atrocities of war were committed is accentuated with dramatic architectural additions that elicit despair and desolation. Huge concrete walls eleven meters high enclose the courtyard, and a sculpture of steel beams represents the location where the chimney stack once stood. But it’s the voids that are most haunting. The structure in which people were put to death is marked only by a footprint of polished metal plates on the floor of the courtyard, and a ghosting on the wall of the Risiera outlining where the roof once attached. The most authentic remains in the old building are a series of prisoner cells - tiny rooms barely two meters tall, and barely large enough for two adults, where up to six people were crammed in together while they awaited their miserable fates.

There is not a great deal of certainty about exactly what went on inside the Risiera, as not many who were incarcerated made it out to freedom. It’s estimated that more than three thousand people were killed there, while many thousands more were sent on to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Fresh flowers on the breakfast table from Mauro’s garden. Presently there’s a flowering artichoke, an Agapanthus, and some pink thing. I ask the name of the little pom-pom flower thats been on the table since I arrived.

Echinops ritro.

‘It is of the same family as the one, you know; “he loves me, he loves me not”.’

‘Daisy’

‘Right. It is a huge and diverse family of plants. And you know, the daisy is not one single flower, but it is comprised of hundreds of small flowers.’

‘What?’

‘All of my students make exactly the same face when I tell them this. So, the flat petals around the outside are there just to say; “look at me, come here!”. And when the bee arrives, it finds hundreds of tiny flowers in the centre full of nectar. As with this flower. [the Echinops ritro, otherwise known as the blue hedgehog or globe flower]’ It is actually a very complex organism - see all the individual flowers? And it is almost perfectly spherical.’

‘This too [indicating the flowering artichoke] is a composite structure of many seperate flowers, it is just organised in a different configuration, with only the sexual parts [the stamen] on display.’

‘I remember being told this fact by my professor at university. He was this old man, this biologist, and he had been taken to San Sabbia. I don’t remember the details now, but he was one of the few to come out alive. Anyway, it was noted that he would be inside the courtyard of the prison, taking notes about the plants growing within the walls. Can you imagine; you are in the middle of some sort of nightmare, and you see this man examining flowers. I suppose it was a way to cope.’

Another couple of perspectives on local history.

Over breakfast with Mauro, he mentions a publication released by the local newspaper - Il Piccolo. It’s protagonist was a fictional character called Druse Mirko.

‘It is Mirko’. Says Mauro, referring to his father. ‘I don’t know if Oscar is familiar with it, but I think he would die. The satire can be really offensive. It gives you an idea that things once were not as they are now - they could be very tense. Even now, up on the Carso, people will tie red flags up on poles, and then other people will write to Il Piccolo and say ‘they’re not allowed to do that’.’

‘The last local government before this recent election was communist, he was from Slovenia, and he announced that it was the partisans who won the war [in this region]. This claim was really offensive for certain parts of the town, and I’m sure it cost him a lot of votes.’

‘After WWII, a lot of people came here from Istria [the peninsula of land to the East of Trieste, in present day Croatia]. It was a huge immigration, but it also was the start of a huge emmigration, because people were competing for jobs. So the Istrians were encouraged to come here with incentives - they got work in the public service and there were settlements built for them. Vilaggio Pescatore - the ‘Fisherman’s Village’ - - was one of them, there was a settlement around Santa Croce, all with street names that refer to Istria.’

‘And that hideous big church up on the hill - Oscar always says; “that was built for the newcomers”.’

‘Right, that was the Istrians. It was very tactical, because they were ‘installed’ in areas to counter the left-leaning supporters, the communists. And still today the people follow these patterns of support - the Istrians supporting the right and the Slovenians leaning left.’

‘There were 300,000 people who came from the Istrian peninsula - not all of them here to Trieste. You find today pockets of people in Abruzzo, outside of Rome and also in the Veneto who speak a kind of Venetian dialect.’

‘And its incredible, because until quite recently, you would go to Istria and you couldn’t find any fish. The Istrians were traditionally fishermen, and because they all left, the fishing industry collapsed. The people who came and filled the void - the Serbians - they had to learn how to fish. And its taken them about 60 years. The same with the agriculture of the area - there were olive trees and vineyards - a very mediterranean agriculture, and these were all abandoned, for years. Only now is it becoming re-utilised.’

‘This movement - although it involved huge numbers of people, and changed entire socio-economic structures, was largely ignored in history, because it pales in insignificance next to what happened in Germany, Poland, Russia, Palestine, Israel, India, Bangladesh etc.’

Lunch with Oscar. I ask him for his perspective.

‘Druse Mirko. Yeah I remember that. I knew about it. I wasn’t very well acquainted with it. I would read about it occasionally, but it wasn’t my cuppa tea. I knew where it was coming from and I didn't like it.’

How did the conversation start? When did Tito come to power? (I know I should have done my homework)

‘Tito created the partisans. He was just an ordinary bloke - didn’t have any political affiliations before the war.’

‘Weren’t the partisans around previously? Prior to WWII? (what was I thinking - Garibaldi?)’

‘No. WWI was completely different to WWII.’

‘Tito mobilised the Partisans. At the end of the war - which the Russians won - England and America had to recognise him, because he fought against the Germans. But he was communist.’

‘Churchill, at the end of the war, wanted to invade Russia, but America was against it. Lets not forget that Russia won the war. Because Hitler would never have defeated Russia.’

Clearly in this conversation we’re not taking into account what was going on in the Pacific.This is Europe, where Mussolini had been allied to the Nazis up until the final moments, when it was clear that they had lost, whereupon Italy swapped sides and ceded to the Allies.

Right. So I follow up until this point. Trieste is then occupied territories, with England directly in charge, following orders from America.

‘Italy had lost territory in former Yugoslavia - Pola and Lubliana were both under Italian rule back then. But Yugoslavia was now under the governance of Tito [the benevolent dictator], to whom the Allies had to pay their dues for their efforts against Germany, before proceeding to pit themselves against him mercilessly.

And here is where Oscar throws me, with his summation of the greater powers. I always assumed that it was a simple case of the U.S. as fiercely anti-communist, who would do anything to flush out the ‘reds’. According to Oscar, it was Churchill who wanted to invade Russia directly after the war, when they were at their weakest, and the U.S. who forbade it.

‘I’m sure that America regretted their decision afterwards. But it was Churchill who was the criminal. At the time, America had that bloke in power - he wasn’t too much of a nut.’

Truman? Eisenhower? Fuck, I’m struggling to keep up here. And I don’t know my WWII history all that well but I know that we’re all supposed to see Churchill as a hero.

But all of this popularly accepted version of events doesn’t apply around the edges.

So what happened then, according to Oscar? What were the ‘little stories’, and how were the people affected?

‘So the people were encouraged to flee the communist state of Yugoslavia. They were told; ‘come here’, we have democracy, we have televisions, we have coca-cola. And at the time, it was very difficult to get jobs. Everyone wanted a job with some security. I had a job as a joiner, but I must have been a very good tradesman because I was never told to ‘piss off’, they always let me know with plenty of warning when there was a period of no work coming up, so that I could go off and find other work.’

‘But there in Santa Croce, down the hill from where Zarco lives is a villa, and there was a colonel living there, very high up - he virtually ran Trieste at the time. The bloke who ran Trieste actually lived at Miramare Castle. Anyway, the Colonel who lived in Trieste was very good friends with Toio'

‘Vittorio?’

‘Yes, Zarco’s father. They would go fishing together and they were very good friends. And the colonel said to him; if theres anything I can do for you, let me know.’

‘And Vittorio said; well I would really like a job with the electricity commission. So the colonel wrote him a letter - he wrote a letter for him, and also for Mirko. Vittorio went along and he got himself a job, but they said to him; you have to sign up to the Christian Democrats (the right wing party) - it was a condition of employment. It was very political.’

‘But when Mirko went along with his letter, they said to him; we’re sorry, but we have to give these jobs to the people who come here with nothing.’

‘Of course, Mirko had been a partisan, a card-carrying communist, so there was no way that he was going to get a cushy-job now that Trieste was under the governance of Allied forces, even though a high-ranking colonel had vouched for him.’

‘Thats when Mirko went and got work in the merchant navy.’

Oscar decided that he didn’t want to beg for a job, which is why he left - not because there were no jobs - because as he said, he always managed to get work - but because he didn’t want to have to go around and beg. As it happened, the job market started to become stimulated towards the end of the 50’s, and there was plenty of work for everyone.

And Danilo - Uncle Danny? He was in the police force, but he didn’t enjoy it, because although Trieste was ostensibly run by the British, and the police wore the uniforms of the bobbies and rode English Matchless motorbikes, the overarching theme was of the Fascist Italian police force, and that didn’t sit well with Danny. There were protests constantly, clashes in public places, and the police were told that they should favour the Italians and always repress the others - Slovenians, whoever wasn’t on board with the right-wing side of politics. Danny wasn’t up for this.

‘There was a very big protest…’

‘I know what you’re going to say, and actually its on You tube, that big uprising. I’ve seen the footage.’

‘Well, Danny had his motorbike pushed over by this bloke, and Danny grabbed hold of him and beat him up. It was a bit of a scandal - there was an inquiry. Danny said; “Well I’m a policeman. What do you expect me to do, if someone attacks my bike?”’

‘After that, he transferred to a squad car with another policeman, who was British, but afterwards, there was the opportunity to either stay in the police force - in whatever capacity you wanted - carabinieri or police or whatever, or go overseas. To South America or Canada or Australia. And they (the Italian police force) would assist you in every way - they paid your fare, sorted out your visa, everything. So Danny decided to go to Australia.’

(as far away as possible, I noted)

‘And at that time I was doing alright - I was pretty well paid. But Australia was at the time taking police and tradespeople.’

‘So that suited both Danny and yourself.’

‘Yes. I was a joiner, but I came over to Australia as a chippie, and we were paid a lot more money. Which is fair if you think about it, because we had harder working conditions - we were working outside in the heat, it was heavier work.’

‘And Danny had more experience of Australia, so he said to me; “Either you can work with the companies that pay overtime, and they’re full of Italians, or you can work with the foreign companies who don’t pay overtime, but you’ll learn English much quicker.’

‘And Danny then was driving the tournapulls up in the Snowy Mountains - huge excavation machines.’

I remember going to the 50th anniversary celebrations and watching footage of people driving these monstrous machines. ‘Widow-Makers’ they called them. I reminded Oscar of this.

‘Yeah, but you weren’t driving those things with a steering-wheel. They were operated with buttons. And it was mainly the American companies where the fatalities happened, because they used to push the workers so hard. They used to work all around the clock - shift-work - because everyone was working underground, and they used to have tunnel-digging competitions, to see who could tunnel the quickest and farthest. They got the work done the quickest, but they also had the highest mortality rate. And when somebody died, everyone kept on working. The French companies would stop, they would take time to pay respects.’

‘And then when pay-day came, out came the gambling tables. And everyone would blow all their money playing poker and cards and whatever else. Danny used to run the tables down there. Not in Sydney, he never tried to run tables in Sydney, but in the Mountains he did.’

‘And those times, the girls would come down from Sydney - not from Cooma, they would bring them all the way from Sydney, and they would make a fortune.’

‘Once, Danny was in a den in Sydney, and if the owner wasn’t paying his dues to Rogerson, there would be a bust. So Rogerson came in one night and busted everybody. Danny was locked up for the night, and then they would all have to go to the magistrate the next morning to appeal. Danny said that he was just there ‘having a look’ - he wasn’t playing. So he got off.’

Signs for the Parco Regionale del Delta del Po begin to appear heading South along the SS309 just after Chioggia, and continue for the next 100km until Ravenna. It’s not on our itinerary, but somewhere around Rovigo I’m gripped by a combination of frustration over the state of the traffic on the SS and curiosity regarding the Po River Delta.

Il grande fiume, Italy’s longest river, springs from near the French border and cuts a swathe across the North of Italy, through some of the most densely populated, heavily industrialised and intensely cultivated areas of Europe, to eventually discharge into the Adriatic sea South of Venice. With no expectations and no destination in mind, I set off in the direction indicated by the signs.

We agree that we should find a hotel with a swimming pool. We imagine ourselves lying by the pool sipping Mojitos. Its an appealing thought. We drive for what seems like ages. Ages and ages. Its incredibly confusing, the signage makes no sense. We drive along what seems to be a major tributary of the river. The water level appears to be higher than the level of the road, and I’m finding it disorienting. Its 35 degrees, and the heat is intense.

We find an Agriturismo. It doesn’t have a pool, but its an opportunity to cease travelling. Its a big, traditional farmhouse near the river, surrounded by fields. I imagine the mosquitos are ferocious.

There’s nobody around. Anywhere. We go inside. It’s deserted. We wait. Nothing. Nobody. I help myself to a lot of pamphlets with maps. This should help us find accomodation and restaurants - whatever the place has to offer - although its looking more and more as though this region is difficult to access for the casual traveller, and that a little research beforehand might have been wise.

Eventually we stumble across Hotel Bussana. There are several cars in the carpark towing trailers with recreational fishing boats, jet skis etc. They have accommodation. They have a swimming pool. They have a restaurant. They have a bar. We are weary and tired of travelling.

I sleep for an hour, then get up and do some writing. Oscar has spent hours poolside. He convinces me to go for a swim. The pool is surrounded by cropping fields - corn mostly, and despite being close to the road, its peaceful. The abundance of birdlife is evidenced by the diversity of song close by. The water in the pool is bath-like and relaxing. Oscar informs me they have eel at the restaurant. Reckon the restaurant is any good? We vacillate about it. We get a spritz in the bar. Its made without love, but its only 2.50 Euros.

People are arriving in droves to go to the restaurant. We peruse the menu. Anguilla with polenta - 10 Euros. Reckon it would be OK? We venture inside, get hip and shouldered by the waitress, who tells us that theres no tables free and we would have to wait for the next sitting. So there you go. We thought the food might have been beneath us, but they aren’t sweating on our business.

We get back in the car and go looking for dinner. I’ve no idea which direction I’m heading, as though my internal compass has been scrambled by a peculiar magnetic force-field. The natural disorientation reminds me of Venice, just up the road. At least this time I’m in a car with the air-con on.

We find another restaurant. Its 9pm. We’re informed there’s a 45 minute wait. We decide to go back to the hotel restaurant. We drive for an eternity. Endless, bendless roads for kilometre after kilometre. It’s less like Italy - which naturally undulates and deviates - and more like the great flat expanses of Australia, her country roads without end. we see signs to Ristorante Marina 70. This takes us in a completely different direction.

Abruptly and without warning I come upon a T-intersection. Before me the land melts into water, hazy blue-grey, a dreamy out-of-focus impressionist painting. The restaurant, set amongst the ubiquitous Stone pines of the Mediterranean shimmers on the water’s edge. We’ve arrived at the end of the delta, where the river opens out to the Adriatic, in the sanctified light of dusk. This vague and indefinable luminosity transforms the expanse of sea and sky into one by a kind of osmosis, playing tricks on the spectator, opening portals into other worlds just briefly, before the moon rises and washes the world silver.

Satiated, and with the day’s magic done, we stagger from the restaurant and return to the Fiat. Annulling the Orphic nature of the night, I open the car window to take a photo of the moon. Suddenly the car is full of hitch-hiking insects. We drive. Ten thousand insects a second hit the windscreen. Sizeable frogs flop across the road in front of me. There are cat’s eyes shining from the tall grasses on the verge. Water voles, like terrifyingly large rats, lurk just beyond the beams of my headlights. A hare leaps gracefully over the road and away into the field. This languid, mystical dreamscape teems with life.

I’m finding the last days in Trieste emotionally tumultuous. I remember before I left Australia thinking to myself; ‘a month is a long time to be gone’ but now the time is up and my loyalties are divided. I have to wrench myself away. Sleep is agitated and disturbed. It’s more than the usual upheaval that you would expect before a departure.

We have a two-night stopover in Abu Dhabi arranged, to de-compress and fortify ourselves for the fifteen hour flight back to Australia. Part of me wishes that we would fly straight through - just get it over and done with and get home - but my reticence is mitigated when I find that we are staying at the Intercontinental Hotel. We arrive - hot and bothered, looking and feeling like a couple of sweaty ball-bags. Everyone else looks as though they’ve just stepped out of a Ralph Lauren photo-shoot.

We arrive on a Thursday night, and discover that nothing is open on Friday, this being the Islamic holy day. The most interesting activity on offer appears to be the Desert Safari. Now I have serious reservations about doing this. It seems like a trashy touristy thing to do, and neither Oscar or myself are big fans of being dragged around by the nose by tour guides while simultaneously being made to have fun. I have the added morbid fear of being stuck in a group of loud, annoying, silly people, and if we all happen to be crammed into a 4WD in the desert for six hours, I may end up committing multiple homicide.

Fortunately, all my fears are ill-founded. Oscar and I are joined by three guests from our hotel - a lovely group of friends from Düsseldorf - and a young Texan staying in another hotel who has been working in Abu Dhabi as a mechanical engineer for an oil company. They’re all educated and worldly, consequently the conversation is engaging, funny and interesting. Frankly they were a delight to enjoy our trashy touristy experience with.

As we returned to the city from the desert that evening, the Texan and I were discussing other sights of interest that we intended to check-out before leaving. The Grand Mosque he recommended, saying that it was one of the most incredible buildings he had ever been into. We also talked about wanting to see an authentic market, and it just so happened that we both intended to visit the fish market in Port Zayed the following day. He gave me a ‘heads up’; we will be the only foreigners there, and I will be the only foreign female there, so be prepared.

Oscar and I cabbed it out to the Grand Mosque after breakfast. I observed what I thought was the correct dress-code - trousers, a t-shirt and a wrap to cover my head and arms. Nonetheless, we were corralled into a room where men and women not suitably attired would be given robes with which to cover themselves from head to toe. I didn’t have a problem with this, per se. What I did have a problem with was the synthetic nature of the garments.

Get comfortable; I’m going to have a whinge.

So while I was in Trieste, I did a little bit of shopping. Shoes mainly. I did have a look at clothes, but there was nothing that I thought was worth spending Oscar’s hard-earned on. Trieste has some great high-end clothing, but much of it is very conservative in nature. Mauro and I had a lengthy discussion on just this subject. The Triestini wear their clothing immaculately tailored, but understated. This is in contrast to, for example Cividale just up the road, where the women were colourful and had their assets firmly on display. The men too were quite flashy. So there’s definitely subtle yet distinguishable regional variations in couture style - not only in dialect - and this is strongly reflected in Trieste’s clothing outlets.

At the less expensive end - the (even more) mass produced end of the spectrum, I was increasingly distressed to find that garments were made predominantly of synthetic materials. Now, when every day is 35 degrees, the thought of getting around in anything that is not cotton or linen or silk or some other natural fibre I find upsetting. And it’s for this reason that my wardrobe was not augmented with any new exotic additions whilst in Italy.

So we get to the UAE, where temperatures are between five and ten degrees hotter than Italy. We arrive at the Grand Mosque, on another day of intense desert heat, and I am made to put a hooded floor-length robe over what I’m already wearing. This hooded robe is entirely synthetic.

I exit the dressing room, and regroup with Oscar, who finds my attire hilarious.

‘Gee, It’s good to be a man in this country’ Comes the inevitable annoying comment.

Already overheating, I start to fume as well. I walk quickly, to get the experience over and done with. I’m very glad we didn’t book a guided tour - this time I’d be up for patricide.

I have seen the Grand Mosque several times already from taxis - at night, after arriving from the airport it’s unavoidable - but in close proximity to the huge pristine white domes against a powder blue sky, its resemblance to the Taj Mahal strikes me. Not that I’ve seen the Taj Mahal in real life. For me, the connection is more about the obvious shapes, and about the dramatic impact of the building.

We walk toward the main prayer hall, along a colonnaded walkway. The marble columns are inlaid with tracery, coloured stonework of fine creeping vines and flowers, that combine with the columns themselves - capped with golden palm motifs - to form a petrified forest. Its very beautiful, but I am about to suffocate, imprisoned in man-made fibres.

We remove our shoes before entering the vestibule to the main prayer hall. Polished marble floors, inlaid with more delicate plants and flowers - the botanical detail is really impressive, with readily-identifiable flora in abundance. The vestibule opens out to an enormous, carpeted space - a room large enough to accomodate 40,000 worshippers. It is breathtaking. People everywhere are taking photos, selfies, selfies with rabbit appendages, all kinds of nonsense. It is cool inside the main prayer hall, to my huge relief.

Of The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, Wikipedia has this to say; ‘His Highness Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan wanted to establish a structure which unites the cultural diversity of the Islamic world, and the historical and modern values of architecture and art.’ This has been achieved both practically and symbolically through the use of both artisans and materials from dozens of countries.

Its pretty easy to see why people are impressed, but - fussy bitch that I am - am finding after the initial ‘wow’ moment that I’m left responding coldly towards the building. All of the detail - all of the carved marble columns, the mother-of-pearl and marble inlays, the plaster relief detailing - is all machine finished, perfect. Granted, it is a wonder of modern architecture. I’m not questioning or doubting that. But I derive so much pleasure out of being in an old building and seeing the hand of the craftsman still in evidence. Wondering how on earth these wonders were conceived and then achieved hundreds if not thousands of years before iPhones is to me nothing short of miraculous.

I probably should have taken a guided tour to address my ungrateful ignorance. There’s certainly much that I would have learnt. As it was, I grabbed my shoes and headed for the change rooms, tearing off my hermetically-sealed robe at the top of the escalator, immediately past the exit.

From the grand Mosque, we caught a taxi directly to the Fish Market. We walked in off the street and initially it seemed like a pretty regular fish market. Then the bothering started.

‘Hello how are you, what you want? Sea bream, red mullet, local shrimps, jumbo shrimps, Gulf sole, hello where you from, you want fish? Hello hello. Calamari. Shark, you want shark? Cobia, coral trout, sherry. You buy fish, take over there, they cook it for you. Tell me what you want.’

Blimey. They were very nice, very friendly, but it was impossible to simply stop and have a look at the produce, despite repeatedly telling them that we were just looking. Despite the friendliness, I’m very aware that I’m being strenuously checked-out. I’m walking along down one of the main aisles towards the rear of the building when I see a line of men - six abreast - all dressed in red overalls just staring. Its quite a disarming scene to face.

‘Where you from where you from?’

Tex was right - its all locals - not a single gawker like us. There are a few women present. They’re haggling fiercely, really getting amongst it, but they’re covered from head to toe in black abayas. We wanted an authentic experience and we got one.

We get the hell out of there.