the mighty minestrone: postcard from Italy

Holiday’s start the moment you leave home, not when you reach your destination. Airports are the surreal, strip-lit environment where bleary eyed travellers are thrust together in long queues to begin the transition from the every day to something, they hope, will be extraordinary. Leaning on our luggage at an unfeasibly early our, gazing into the middle distance, wondering whether we dared nip to the loo or risk losing our check-in position, Mr Sangue and I began the process of summoning the mental where-with-all to feel like explorers and not refugees.

In the car, on the way to the airport, I recalled Rachel North’s book about the July bombings; she described the moment when she emerged at Russell Square nursing a minor injury, waiting to get her bearings, to do something and she saw a woman covered in blood, wondering about, angry, repeating over and over, “But I’m supposed to be going on holiday today…” I didn’t share this with Mr Sangue, I didn’t want to jinx the trip (not that I believe in this stuff) but I thought about how we can’t travel now without thinking about terrorism, bombs, disaster…I hate them for that.

Mr Sangue and I huddled over our coffees in the café at East Midlands; I’d resisted the impulse to buy out the perfume counter and, still a little guilty from buying an entire new wardrobe before we left, I whimpered internally at the assault of inappropriate music canned from all directions; 5.30am, under an aggressive tannoy, assaulting us with Andy Williams and Doris Day, it was like a medley for suicide

The posters demanded we ‘Free the Latin within’; beautiful people who hadn’t been forced to rise earlier than the birds, laughed at the camera, their fillings air-brushed out, women leaning towards the camera, revealing slight, tasteful cleavage, men laughed with them, gave them actual eye-contact – how different the reality would be! First of all, where are the cigarettes? How I’d love to interfere with these images and insert my brothers in their vests eating spaghetti glowering like Jake Lamotta and the bearded aunt’s I was forced to kiss as a child. And who ever in Italy sat down for a coffee?

I scrutinized other passengers’ carry on luggage; happy to generalise and judge how well a person organised their life, how much money they had, how streamlined or high-maintenance their needs were; – little square bags label you as a practical and unfussy traveller while the enormous, Accessorise holdall in classy jungle leaf pattern, (an item I’ve coveted for some time) I was thrilled to see doesn’t look quite so bloody cool when it’s full of stuff and weighs a ton and you actually have to lift the darn thing. My own carry on was a large, leather man bag that I simply couldn’t leave behind at TK Maxx; it performed quite well despite the lack of inner pockets which meant I couldn’t find anything small in it - this bag spoke of a person with no will power who always crumples when confronted with the dilemma of style over substance.

Security was very stringent with cops bearing heavy weight guns and staring stony eyed at people who went ping through the metal detector. We couldn’t see why one guy’s had gone off,

“Probably wearing a cock ring…” I whispered to Mr Sangue.

At Ciampino airport, Rome, we collected our hire-car; mortified when it turned out to be some class of Ford when we’d wanted a zippy Fiat; when did you ever get what you asked for from car rental? Once Mr Sangue had adjusted to driving on the right and breathing at the same time, we cruised South to Amalfi, a three or four hour drive made unnecessarily longer by the Blackberry sat-nav just disappearing. Poof! as they say in pantomime. Mamma Sangue’s voice ringing in my ears, I bitched along the lines of what-do-you-expect-in-this-corrupt-country-someone-must-have-hijacked-the-frequency...We never did find out why it refused to work here when we actually needed it while everywhere else in Italy we were guided by the dulcet tones of a computerised English voice.

For now, we had the immediate problem of navigating to our hotel using just the complementary Hertz map. And we couldn’t get the bloody iPod to work. One through-town was an endless wasteland of litter, swirled around by the oven-hot wind and closed shutters as people slept through the heat of the day. The area around Naples is very poor and crime is rife and I worried about asking for directions, breaking down and also running out of water – all the shops were shut too! Camels and Bedouin robes would have been more in keeping.

When we finally reached our destination we couldn’t find the hotel. You shoot past a turning in Italy and the roads are either too narrow to turn round in or you risk life and limb through hesitation. The secret of Italian driving seems to be to never catch another driver’s eye – shove your sunglasses on your face, your elbow out of the window and follow your instincts. Driver’s bear the calm expressions of hardened assassin’s as they barge onto the autostrada; no one ever pull’s over for you or slows down to let you in but somehow it all works. The secret is to not feel intimidated – this is why I leave the driving abroad to Mr Sangue: firstly, I can’t forget that we are soft little objects strapped to bullets and secondly, I can’t even parallel park if a cat watches me from a garden wall:

“Bastard mog’s licking its arse – I’d like to see him park a Beetle – the visibility’s terrible.”

Eventually we found our hotel situated in a glorious bay straight out of The Talented Mr Ripley, with air-conditioned rooms, its own beach, an outdoor swimming pool and most importantly, a bar. Our first two Peroni’s were medicinal.

Mr Sangue for all his road-trip mentality, needed to lay off the driving for a couple of days. We stayed put in Vico Equensa for two nights, took the local bus up to the main village to buy supplies (wine, beer and razors), ate heartily, drank heaps, swam and sunbathed and didn’t miss home in the slightest.