61. Italy: From Castle Top to Hedgerow Bottom: My 1958-1960 Gap Years (5)

The most spectacularly located youth hostel I stayed in - the Castle at Lerici, Liguria

[For the four previous blogs about my gap years, see blogs 55, 58, 59 and 60]

By April 1960 I had saved almost a hundred pounds so took off on my long planned trip to Italy. I still have the map of Europe that I carried with me in my backpack and on which I circled the places where I stayed. The photos are now stored on my computer.

I hitch-hiked down through France to Italy and back through Switzerland, Germany, Luxembourg and Belgium. The furthest south I travelled was to Amalfi on the Sorrento peninsula. There were too many highlights to record them all here.

My ability to pick up rides took a big leap forward after Florence where I purchased a traditional student hat, in a style dating from the sixteenth century, and decorated it with badges of the places I visited.

Throughout my trip I stayed in youth hostels, with four exceptions - Cannes, Florence, Siena and on the road from Siena to Arezzo.

I arrived in Cannes late in the evening with a Canadian who gave me a lift in his Porsche and then treated me to my own room in a fancy hotel. There, after an embarrassing misconception of its purpose, I unravelled the mystery of the bidet in my bathroom. [Not as embarrassing as later when staying in a German youth hostel and, misunderstanding the German signage, I wandered into the women's shower and toilet block.]

View from Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, 20th April 1960

In Florence I lodged for around three weeks in a central city pensione run by a lady called Signora Baldacci. There were a few other young people staying there including two American girls around my age. One of these was a blonde who, Italian boys and men being what they are, could not go out without being constantly harassed so I played chaperone to the two of them (and learnt a number of Italian chat up lines in the process!) [In 1988 I was in Italy with Kate and Harriet who were in their late teens and were chatted up by boys who looked about ten or eleven years old!] Later in Como I met up with two New Zealand nurses who were on a cycling tour together and also needed a little help staving off unwanted attention. I caught up with them again on the crossing from Ostend to Dover and when we all arrived into London by train they invited me to a party that evening. Party pooper that I was I went home instead.

Lane in Settignano, near Florence, 20th April 1960.

After Florence I stayed with friends of my Uncle Joe who had a beautiful property in the hills outside Sienna. They had a cook and other servants, and two daughters around my age who carted me around on the back of their Vespas. After all the backpacking it was lovely to enjoy a bit of luxury (and to have all my laundry done). However, on the evening I left there to travel to Perugia, I was stranded out in the countryside on the road to Arezzo unable to get a lift, so I slept under the hedge, which was a bit of a swift return to reality.

 Among the most memorable parts of my trip were the interesting people and experiences thrown up by hitch-hiking everywhere. My Italian was sufficient not just to get me around but to have conversations with a variety of those who gave me lifts. There was much discussion at that time about the French atmospheric tests of atom bombs in the Sahara desert, the first of which had taken place in February 1960, and also about the United States U2 spy plane shot down over Russian territory in May 1960, part of the prelude to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's famous banging of his shoe on the table at the UN later in the year.

I was often treated very generously by those who gave me lifts, such treats ranging from coffee or tea breaks to a lunch in a Paris restaurant. I was driven into Rome by a communist party member who lived in EUR, a district of the city nearing completion prior to the 1960 Olympics. He invited me to dinner at home with his family. [The EUR development had an interesting history. Designed in 1938 as a world fair - EUR, Esposizione Universale di Roma - to celebrate the twentieth anniversary (in 1942) of the fascists coming to power in Italy, it was to be a new business and residential development on a grand scale. But work stopped in 1942 until the 1950s. It was nearing completion when I visited as were the stadiums and facilities for the 1960 Rome Olympics which I also visited.]

Assisi, 21st May 1960

Street in Assisi, 21st May 1960

San Marino, May 24th 1960

On another occasion Vittorio Vigi, who gave me a lift in his Alfa Romeo Giulietta, took me into the countryside to visit his grandmother; he and I corresponded briefly after I returned home. And during a lift in Switzerland I was joined in a Citreon deux chevaux by a Swiss lady who yodelled in the back of the car all the way along by Lake Lucerne. Less successful was a lift through Liege when we had a collision at a city crossroads. The young driver asked me to disappear since he was driving his father's car and had promised his father he would not pick up hitchhikers.

Among the special treats: tea with lemon; hot calzone straight from the street pizza ovens in Rome after they reopened at 4pm; sitting in St Mark's Square at the base of the campanile spitting cherry pips at the pigeons; the light, such a treat after years of grey British daylight; watching the day's catch of fish and octopus being offloaded at Lerici, still an active fishing village, and a boy fishing in Lake Garda at Riva - I swam in the lake there but it was freezing cold.


Doge's Palace, Campanile and pigeons, St Mark's Square Venice, 30th May 1960




 Riva, Lake Garda, 4th June 1960







Lugano Youth Hostel, 8th June 1960.

I arrived back in the UK in time for my 20th birthday on June 23rd. Later that summer I worked for a spell in the catering department of the London Zoo. I was employed in one of the kiosks dotted around the Zoo serving drinks and snacks, clearing tables and sweeping the water off the forecourt after it had rained. I quickly recognised that the animals in their enclosures were much tidier eaters than the public at large. One particularly showery day I was told to sweep the rainwater away when another shower was clearly imminent, so I told the supervisor how stupid and pointless such an instruction was. He sacked me with 24 hours notice, which I worked out in the restaurant kitchen washing up dishes and kitchen utensils. That was an interesting place to be since Arnold Wesker's 1957 play The Kitchen, set in a restaurant kitchen, had recently helped popularise a theatre of everyday working class life and contributed to the development of the social realism of 'kitchen sink' dramas.

Also that summer I worked for W.S. Atkins and Partners, Consulting Engineers, on a traffic survey helping plan the route of the proposed M11 motorway into London from the north east. This involved being picked up by van from home around 5.30am and deposited with others to set up places for stopping motorists to ask them about their regular commuting routes and times in and out of the city. I soon discovered the correlation between the quality of workers' cars and the times they travelled to work, the dungers going through early and the flash saloons swanning by at 10am or later.

One other benefit of my two gap years was the opportunity to read widely, free of the constraints of any particular syllabus or looming exams. I was a voracious reader in those two years and in my diary made notes on some of the books I had particularly enjoyed. These included philosophical pieces - Jean Paul Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism, Bertrand Russell's The Conquest of Happiness - and books on astronomy, architecture, alchemy, Greek and Sumerian civilisations and other brainy matter. Plus novels and plays.

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Sunday, 7 September 2014

110. Mislaid Dreams, My Gap Year Souvenirs. The Archaeology of a Box (16) 

Checking through the souvenirs I had collected together over the years and boxed up carefully I came across some souvenirs of this 1960 gap year trip to Italy. The first is the map of Europe I took in my backpack. On it I marked each overnight spot where I stayed in a Youth Hostel while hitch-hiking to Florence: Rouen, Fontainebleu, Macon, Valence, (Cannes), Ventimiglia, Lerici, Pisa, Florence. I stayed in Florence for a number of weeks before setting out south to Rome, Naples and the Amalfi Peninsula.

On my way back north I stayed in Viterbo, then to Siena for a few nights with friends of my Uncle Joe. Unfortunately it wasn't the time of the Palio but I collected the brochures anyway in anticipation of returning another year. (I did return to Italy on holiday three times in later years but never did go back to Siena.)

From Siena I hitch-hiked on to Perugia where I visited the Italian University for Foreigners and collected some information about their programmes to add to the ones I had picked up from the University of Florence's Centre of Culture for Foreigners.


Cultural studies was still in its infancy in the UK and the Perugia programmes looked fascinating. I had a vague intention to study there at some later date, but again it never happened.

From Perugia I went to Assisi (staying in Foligno) then to Rimini where all the seaside bars were blaring out Volare, the popular song that summer. Released in 1958 Volare won the Grammy for song of the year. Multiple cover versions were recorded in subsequent years including versions from artists as diverse as Dean Martin, David Bowie and Pavarotti.

From Rimini I took a short detour to San Marino and then on to Ravenna via Vittorio Vigi's grandmother's place.

Postcard of  Byzantine mosaic from Basilica of Sant'Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna, and letter from Vittorio Vigi

I have no other souvenirs of my trip. I returned to England via stops in Venice, Riva di Garda, Como and Lugano, then through the St. Gotthard Pass and tunnel to Lucerne, Switzerland, and on to Mulhouse and Saarbrucken (in what was then West Germany), Luxembourg, Brussels and London.