Day Six – Goodbye Ocean, Hello Mountains

We got up this morning for the last time in Manarola. It was actually quite overcast for the first time, and we packed our bags feeling almost as gloomy as the weather. We’d loved our five days in the Cinque Terre and didn’t really want to leave.

We rolled our suitcase down to our little cafe for breakfast and had a leisurely cappuccino and pastry – we didn’t have to be at the train until noon so had a bit of time to kill. We spent about as much time as we could nursing our coffees before deciding to sit on the seats down at the harbour and read our books for a while until it was time to go.

The train ride was, other than being full of high school students, uneventful and fairly fast. We got to Genoa and despite having a little map to the car hire shop, couldn’t figure out which way to go from the train station. Fortunately, my very little amount of Italian was just enough to ask a bus driver who was on a break, and even more amazing that than, to understand (sort of) what he meant – the international language of pointing saved the day I think.

Our hire car turned out to be a Lancia Muso which we’ve named “Francesca” (we have a tradition of naming all of our hire cars – our first and still favourite was a Fiat Stilo named “Florianne”, named after the girl at the Quick Burger at the Dijon train station that served us our lunch just before we picked up that hire car. Our sat-nav is called Tracy). Despite driving on the wrong side of the road, and bizarre Italian traffic (how do those scooter drivers not all die?), we made it to the seemingly endless series of tunnels leading up in to the mountains and away from the Mediterranean.

As usual, our hire car was slightly underpowered for hills, and while I managed to keep to 120km/hr, the extra 10km/hr to hit the Autostrada speed limit seemed a bridge too far for poor Francesca. The tunnels did get a bit tiring after a while – sunglasses on, sunglasses off, sunglasses on...and so on and so on. Even Tracy the satnav got tired of it and kept dropping the satellite signal.

We finally made it to the outskirts of Asti and had a major decision to make – trust in Tracy, who didn’t really know where Villa Sampaguita was, or rely on the instructions Jamie had gotten from Google Maps, which has had a history of being vastly wrong for us in the past. As Google at least had an idea of where we were supposed to be, we went with that, which turned out to be a good thing, as Tracy was trying to point us in entirely the wrong direction. After a long drive up possibly the narrowest road in all of Italy, we found it.

Rina came out to meet us and showed us to our room. They were in the middle of a business meeting, so we were left to our own devices. We quickly decided that a run into Asti to pick up a bottle of wine for the evening and dinner was in order.

Parking turned out to be a bit of a mission – the first lot we tried was full as full can be, and after circling for a bit, we thought that we’d try one a bit further out of centre. We were in luck – as we pulled in, someone was pulling out. €2 later we were set for the evening.

The B&B had a list of recommended local restaurants, and Osteria Tacabanda was the one we picked (it seemed easiest to find. As we sat down, we noticed that our waiter appeared to have Down’s Syndrome. Not an issue at all, but a bit unusual. It turns out that Tacabanda is part of a school for people with disabilities where they can learn to work in a restaurant/hotel and gain some independence – almost all of the staff, including the kitchen staff, have a disability of some sort.

We were impressed with the mission of the school, and even more impressed with the quality of the food. I started with a pepper timbale with a bagna caoda (a garlic and anchovy sauce) which was delicious, and Jamie had a lovely little package of cheese and white truffle wrapped in a savoy cabbage – completely delicious. For mains, I went with the roasted rabbit with stuffing, and Jamie had pasta with a parmesan and truffle gelato in top – mine was good, but Jamie’s was fantastic, despite the gelato making the pasta go cold (possibly a bit too clever for its own good).

By the time we finished dinner, we were both absolutely stuffed. We rolled back to the car (Jamie more so than me – as I had to drive, I only had one glass of the barbera that the waiter recommended).

We found our way back to the B&B with surprisingly little drama given the darkness and the tiny road, and have cracked a fresh bottle of wine and are currently sitting on our little balcony, looking at the Piedmontese stars and listening to crickets. Not the sound of the Mediterranean surf, but it’ll do.