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Notes from Abruzzo
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DIARI DI VIAGGIO, DI IERI E DI OGGI
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The Vespa Diaries in Abruzzo
Appunti per il viaggiatore in Abruzzo
settembre 2008
Friday October 7th
Today started out very badly. We woke up to the sound of rain on the roof,
which would in effect kill our day. We met Alessio completely by happenstance,
but as is his motto nothing just happens. He is a friend of Paola’s
and when we wrote her about staying in her guest house she told him about
what we were doing. So he wrote me to see if we would be interested in having
him and his 28 year old Vespa show us around the area. It turns out that
he runs a company called ILEX which stands for Italian Landscape Exploration,
and he figured that might fit well with our tour. So of course we took him
up on it. However, as I just said it was raining when we woke up, and I thought
we would have to call it off. We met Alessio in a café for breakfast,
and while we were dining it cleared up a little. He said he was okay with
going if we were, so we set out. First he showed us around Fontecchio (l'Aquila)
and San Pio, explaining about how the houses used to be set up with livestock
on the ground floor. He showed us the places where the town would bring their
flour to be baked into bread, as there was only one oven like it in each
town. We rode up an impossibly steep hillside to reach the “summer
village” of the people from Fontecchio. Where in town all the houses
are built right on top of each other mostly for defensive reasons, the summer
houses were spread out over a nice stretch of flatland on top of a mountain.
