A small walled city in northern
Italy.
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12 July 1998
After church, we went over to the old wall to take some pictures and walk around. As we were leaving, George suggested we follow the wall and drive all the way around the old city, as there was hardly anyone on the roads that afternoon. It wasn’t more than a mile across, so we started down the street along the outside of the wall. We were fine for a while, then when we couldn’t see the wall anymore, George turned toward it and we found ourselves driving beside it again. That worked a couple of times, but then on the far side of town we filt like we had gone too far, and that the street was angling out away from town. So I suggested he turn in toward town again, and then he decided to turn in again. Next thing we knew we zipped right in past the wall into the middle of the old town. “Old town” means tall buildings, narrow one-way streets, and cobble-stone streets. I started laughing and offering “helpful suggestions” and George started turning down every street we passed, while the streets got narrower and more crooked. The map didn’t show one-way streets, and many of the streets didn’t have signs. I kept telling him to turn on streets that seemed to head west, since that was the way to our hotel, and he kept trying to go east since that was the side of town we had entered on. I made a photo-record of the whole hilarious adventure. We ended up on the inside of the wall at the gate where we had first decided to drive around the old town, only we were on a one-way street headed the wrong direction!
16th century walls & gate tower every deco individually made
part of the old wall in use 16th century wall & moat main gate & bridge
main gate, bridge & moat wall damaged in World War II wall & moat with park
note how the wall curves no buses allowed here driving in Padova
one of the old gates a nice wide street
how much to rent the apartment in the sky? attending church in the new part of town
We decided to go somewhere else for dinner, as we had passed a pizzeria on our walk and were still craving a good Italian pizza. In this place no one spoke English, so the waitress took us back by the kitchen and showed us the ingredients, so we could decide what to order. She also wanted to know the English word for every ingredient. We thoroughly enjoyed the experience. We ended up ordering the same thing we had the night before, but we all know the same thing tastes different in different places. It looked and tasted identical! Served un-sliced, and with a knife and fork.
All the grocery carts we saw in Europe were alike. They had a lock on the handle that you had to put the equivalent of a quarter into. Then when you returned it to the racks and locked it back in, it would return your money. We first ran into it in Italy and the lady who stopped to help us spoke no English. She showed us how it worked, but we didn’t have one of the right coins, so she gave us one. When we left, we made it a point to wait for her to come out of the store, so we could return her money. I’m sure she didn’t expect it, but we figured she would always remember that some Americans returned her money and thanked her.