Alea iacta est

07.11.2019 - 07.11.2019
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San Marino is a fantastic little country but there wasn’t much to detain me for more than two nights. I had to keep exploring the world, so I had a buffet breakfast at the Hotel Joli, checked out, and walked up to the bus interchange to wait for the 10:30 bus back to Rimini on the brilliantly sunny morning of Thursday 7 November 2019.

San Marino’s sole public transport link to the rest of the world is a single bus route that runs between the City of San Marino and Rimini on Italy’s Adriatic coast ten times a day. I boarded the comfortable modern bus – this time the driver put my five-euro note in the cash tray and gave me a ticket, what refreshing honesty – and the bus almost rolled downhill along the hairpin bends like a pinball in a waterslide all the way to Rimini. It entered the city (not much traffic this time), went past the Augustus Arch which was once the main gate to the city on the road from Rome and is still used by pedestrians two millennia later, and then to the nearby railway station where I disembarked.

Rimini is a mid-sized city on Italy’s eastern Adriatic seaboard and is best known for its immense length of beach lined with resort hotels; Italy’s Gold Coast. However, unlike the Gold Coast, Rimini actually has history and culture. Rimini has a historically significant old town. I had some two hours until my train so I went for a stroll.

First, I walked along the waterfront of Rimini’s ancient port to the Tiberius Bridge, a gleaming white span of stone arches. I walked across it. This is more amazing than it sounds. The Tiberius Bridge is two thousand years old, dating from the time when, well, Tiberius was Emperor of Rome. It is still in use and not just by Australian backpackers. Cars, trucks, Vespas, cyclists and pedestrians all use this two-millennia structure to get between Rimini’s city centre and its northern neighbourhoods. I smiled as I crossed it. In the Sydney suburb of Parramatta there is a sandstone arch bridge from the 1830s built by convicts, the Lennox Bridge is seen as a historic treasure and especially ancient. Ha. I learned about the Roman Empire at school, but learning about antiquity in history lessons is only in the abstract. When I walked on a structure built by a glorious long-dead empire that I have only ever known from textbooks – what a magnificent sentiment that experience aroused.

I headed back across the river to the historic centre following ancient city walls and then into the Piazza Cavour, Rimini’s main square, with its fifteenth-century church and Arabesque town hall. A short walk away through narrow, cosy shopping thoroughfares is the Malatesta Temple. This fifteenth-century church was built by Sigismondo Malatesta, a local nobleman, in honour of his mistress. God damn it, Italy!

I went back to the station. There was a left luggage office in there. When I arrived in Rimini I had intended to store my backpack there, but it was closed with a sign on the door that said in Italian “Back in 5 minutes”. I had waited five minutes and there was no sign of the attendant so I explored Rimini with my backpack on. When I returned to the station the office was still closed and there was an American couple standing in front of it waiting for it to open. They had been waiting twenty minutes. I told them of my experiences and advised them not to bother. God damn it, Italy!

After a yummy lasagne for lunch at the station restaurant, my first of two trains of the day arrived, the all-stations Regionale 6464 scheduled to depart at 13:15. It was a very nice train, an Alstom Pop, a brand-new sleek and shiny three-car electric train with USB chargers and comfortable high-back seats. I was impressed. Except for the annoying habit of only showing the next train on the platform displays several minutes before the train is due and not showing arrivals and departures in different colours on the displays in the booking hall, I have no complaints about Italian trains so far. They are reasonably frequent, comfortable, and (by European standards, not Australian standards) rather cheap. My fare to Florence was €13.95, hardly extortionate for a 163 kilometre journey.

The Alstom Pop took off from Rimini on the ruler-straight dead flat main line that runs along the very southernmost edge of the Po Valley plain where it meets the Apennine mountains. It stopped at every town, the service was well used and in parts it was standing room only. At one point I crossed the Rubicon. Yes, I did. A short distance north of Rimini the train crossed the Rubicon, a small muddy stream. It was hard to believe that such a puny river is of such historical importance. I said “alea iacta est” as the train went over the river – blink and you’ll miss it – even though I was crossing in the opposite direction to Julius Caesar who illegally led his army the other way back into the territory of the Roman Republic.

About forty-five minutes later I got off at the town of Faenza where I had only a few minutes to change to a small three-car diesel train along the minor branch line from Faenza to Florence. This mountainous line crosses the Apennines, following a vineyard-lined valley through tunnels and viaducts and the kind of ramshackle villages you see in television advertisements for pasta sauce. The terrain got steeper with forested mountains cleft by rushing rivers and scattered farms. After passing through a long tunnel the line descended the other side of the Apennines and into the grimy suburbs of Florence, a landscape of neglected apartment buildings and desolate railway stations where every surface was covered in graffiti.

At about four o’clock the train terminated at Firenze Santa Maria Novella station, Florence’s main railway terminus. I took a photo of my train. I guess you could call it Florence and the Machine.

Santa Maria Novella station is not what I was expecting from Florence. The station was built in the Fascist era and is a bland, utilitarian, modernist brick warehouse. Surely Italy’s greatest jewel of the Renaissance deserves a railway station more in keeping with the city’s aesthetic ethos?

It was about a fifteen minute walk to my room in my Airbnb host’s apartment. After climbing four stories – very high stories – a lovely young woman, Tina, welcomed me into her apartment. I do have ethical qualms about Airbnb, I do not think it is fair that tourists push locals out of their city’s rental market. But this is a spare bedroom in an apartment owned by Tina, a setup I am OK with.

Tina showed me around her gorgeously decorated apartment. Tina is a fashion designer of Serbian origin who moved to Florence to pursue her career. She showed me how to use her Bialetti Moka Pot – believe me, it takes practice. I couldn’t manage to brew anything except burnt charcoal toxic sludge or weak light-brown piss. I think I will stick with my trusty coffee plunger (what Australians call French presses) at home.

After dumping my luggage I kept exploring because there was something that was about to close soon. Only a few blocks away was the Galleria dell’Accademia. There is a statue in there you may have heard of. For some reason, I got free admission – I don’t know why, perhaps because it was close to closing time, but the front desk waved me through. I stepped in and then I saw it. Michelangelo’s David.

There is a psychiatric disorder called Stendhal’s Syndrome. It is caused by people seeing an immensely beautiful work of art and then descending into hysteric delirium so severe that staff have to call the police who haul the unfortunate sufferer off to the nearest lunatic asylum for a lengthy stay, presumably involving a frontal lobotomy, electro-convulsive therapy and a hundred different pills. I almost fell victim to Stendhal’s Syndrome. That is how beautiful David is.

How do I describe it? It’s like all the photographs you’ve seen, only better. The detail, man, the detail! The bulging veins on David’s wrist. The subtle definition of all the muscles. The determination in his face. The tinea on his left foot. No human being could possibly have made a sculpture so perfect; David must have been divinely inspired. There is no alternative rational explanation.

Though the Galleria dell’Accademia is smaller and not as well known as the Uffizi, it still has plenty of other artworks, some of them quite notable – The Rape of the Sabines, mediaeval triptychs, Renaissance portraits of Florentine nobles. They just can’t compare to Michelangelo’s David so I don’t really remember them.

I went on an evening ramble through Florence’s astounding historic old town. The centrepiece is the Duomo, the city’s cathedral. This is an unusual church – from afar it has a whimsical look, almost like it is a dollhouse constructed of coloured cardboard. When you look at the walls up close, you see that it is made of the most exquisite marble in multiple colours – white, green, pink. The pride in work of the artisans who built this thing was extraordinary.

Tina had given me plenty of restaurant recommendations all neatly written in a notebook left on the desk in my room. I chose a pasta restaurant. Pasta restaurants aren’t uncommon in Italy, but this one was special – the pasta was fresh. By “fresh”, I mean “the pasta does not even exist when you order it and a grinning Nonna makes it right there in front of your eyes”. Back home I buy expensive Italian pasta from the deli section of a greengrocer’s shop near my place, but now that I have eaten freshly made pasta, nothing I can buy in Australia could possibly compare. I’ve been spoilt.

My post-prandial perambulations led me through the Piazza della Repubblica, a large nineteenth-century square where a merry-go-round, ice cream stand and con artists were doing a roaring trade, and along the buzzing streets of Florence. I love European cities at night. So much life, so much spirit, so many things to do and see and eat and drink and buy, without any of the violence and bad attitude you see in Australian cities on weekend nights. Why does Australia have to be so … so … so bogan?

Mount Titano from the highway leaving San Marino