I’ve decided to share a blog post I wrote about my first day in Italy. I’ll share it here so you can get a feel for my writing style for real:
After our first travel day ‘from hell’ we had collapsed into a deep sleep at around midnight. The sleep abandoned me around 5am. I pulled myself out of bed to look out the glass sliding doors leading to our hotel patio.
And there it was! Stunned at the beauty, and unable to move I gazed down at the valley where Lake Como was tucked into. The foothill mountains of the mighty snow peaked Alps towered massively over Bellagio and Varenna, and other little villages were clustered into tiny masses like beehives hugging rocks. I could sense the awakening busy-ness from the flickering lights of their day beginning.
It was the moment in the day where it’s not quite night anymore, nor has dawn fully declared herself. There were the soft muted tones of a gray sky with a lavender mist. Speckles of brilliant lights reminding me of lightening bugs in my front yard back home. The sun had not yet risen enough to outshine the specks of light from windows below. The valley below was still asleep except for the smattering of flickering evidence of early risers.
There are those who say Bellagio, Italy is the old-world cobbled street charm of long ago. The nooks and crannies of passage ways and sharp turns that make you soak in the wonder of times past and bustling shops. The delightful surprise of a hidden shop in a crooked alley or the aroma of the garlic that mingles with the smiles of vacationing Europeans walking past restaurants and gazing hungrily at the menus.
But, as I sit here on my patio in Visgonla and gaze at the site below, I say that Bellagio is the hum of life in the valley who’s sounds make their way up into the hills. It’s the breath of cotton that slowly floats along the mountain and hugs the terra cotta rooftops. It’s the steam of His breath that conceals the sigh of cars I can barely hear making their way into the waiting valley below where commerce and tourists await to grab hold of the day. It’s the white peaks of the southern Alps that roll towards the massive Lake Como and tower over the valley. And it’s the small buildings and homes nestled into its hills overlooking the lake.
Larry and I pulled ourselves together like two sleepy kids on Christmas morning. We made our way down a cobbled stoned passageway adjacent to our hotel to an establishment called the Corner Bar. It was the only place in this tiny hamlet to have something savory for breakfast. We were starving from our seemingly endless transatlantic travelling the day before and decided the one bakery in Visgnola could wait until later in the day. We had our first true Italian expressos! Larry enjoyed a ‘breakfast’ pizza and I had a hard-crusted prosciutto panini.
A little girl met my eyes and flirted with me. I played ‘hide and seek’ behind Larry’s broad shoulder with her. We lingered in this little bar/café for over an hour waiting for a morning shower to stop. Once it did, we took our first of numerous hikes down into the valley below. The beginning of what was the promise of adventure, deliciousness and wonder that we would share together for 3 whole weeks. Children on Christmas morning? We felt like children yes, but maybe it was more like we had died and gone to heaven.
