BFT23 - In and Around Trani

 

You see a lot when you drive through a place, especially if you get off the main roads, and we did a lot of driving on some very small roads in the five days we were in southern Italy.

It’s lovely country in an austere sort of way – brown and green rolling hills under a relentless summer sun, olive groves popping up here and there, abandoned buildings dotting the landscape. Google Maps takes you through some fairly narrow roads where you can feel like you’re just going through someone’s neighborhood, and then you pass bigger towns in the distance as you speed down the highway.

When you go through the towns the architecture always looks defensive, like it’s hunkering down in the face of impending assault, and after a while you realize that it is. It’s a constant battle between comfort and the sun, and the buildings reflect this.

Our first journey out from Irsina was to go to Trani to see the cathedral there. We headed down the steep hairpin curves that lead out of Irsina and through the hilly roads of southern Italy. Somewhere along the way we realized that we’d forgotten our International Drivers Licenses back at the apartment and you have to carry those with you because they will fine you a hefty pile of euros if they pull you over and you don’t have it, so we were very careful to avoid any hint of impropriety. This likely annoyed the other drivers no end and probably would have gotten us pulled over sooner if we had ever seen a cop on the way because who does that? But the polizia had other things to do that day and the speed cameras just send you tickets in the mail without pulling you over at all, so no dire consequences were had. We made sure to pack them after that.

It's been three weeks since we got home and no speeding tickets have arrived so far, so maybe we did manage to stay within the law the whole time. We tried.

Another interesting fact about driving in Italy is that in most cities certain areas are designated as a “ZTL” – Zona Trafico Limitato, or as is probably fairly obvious even to non-Italian speakers, a Limited Traffic Zone. You’re not allowed to drive in a ZTL unless you have the proper permit, which comes in the form of a sticker that you display on the vehicle or a registry with your license plate, or both. The reasons for this are obvious – Italian cities are crowded, the streets are narrow, and they need some way to cut down on traffic so these places remain viable.

But be forewarned: they take these ZTLs very seriously in Italy.

Violations come with a fine of up to €500, and the authorities really don’t care whether you strayed across the border by accident or were on some deliberate ZTL-violating tour. You will be fined either way. They put up signs to let you know where the ZTLs are so you do have a sporting chance of avoiding them, though these are all, of course, in Italian, which as someone driving around in Italy you are expected to understand. I KNOW! Also, some ZTLs have electronic signs that can be changed to declare that the ZTL is not in operation – non attivo – at a given point, and then anyone can drive there. In Testaccio, for example, the ZTL is not enforced in the month of August, probably because everyone is on vacation then – a fact that did not affect us at all, as we left on July 31 – and there were certain hours of the day when it was also not enforced even in months that didn’t start with an “August.”

Every time we entered a new city we had to be careful about where the ZTLs were. ZTLs are monitored by cameras and apparently it can take up to a year for the authorities to send you a bill if you stray into one, so I suppose we’ll see how well we did. Again, we did try.

Trani has a fair number of ZTLs, it turns out, or maybe just one big one that we kept bumping into from different angles, but Google Maps is mostly aware of them and tends to route you around them, at least in our experience. We also got pretty good at finding the signs.

We squeezed our way into the city and through some of the narrowest roads I have ever been on. When you’re worried about whether your Fiat Speck can get through a road, you’ve reached a new standard of narrow. Some of these roads had stone arches overhead as well, which only added to the Luke Skywalker experience. But eventually we found some public parking in a more or less rectangular piazza by the harbor – Trani is on the Adriatic Sea – and, with the aid of the two young British men I mentioned in a previous post, managed to pay for parking successfully and then put the little receipt on the dashboard like we were supposed to do.

The cathedral at Trani sits on the waterfront, a short walk from where we parked, and it faces the sea rather than the city. It was built over the course of the 12th century and dedicated to St. Nicholas the Pilgrim and you can find the relics of the saint there if that is the sort of thing that appeals to you. It’s a pleasant walk through the city to get there and the cathedral sort of pops up suddenly as you get close.

Oddly enough, you walk in through the lower arch, which is something of a basement level, and if you want to see the actual cathedral part you have to climb up a set of stairs.

The cathedral itself is rather spare – the result, apparently, of a restoration that was done in the late 1930s that removed everything but the medieval stuff – but it has its charm. It’s bright and airy, and you get the sense that it was meant to be noisy and humane rather than distant and overwhelming the way some of the more ornate cathedrals feel.

The more interesting sights are underground, though. For one thing, there is the crypt of St. Nicholas, which is in a many-columned chapel. This is where they keep the saint’s relics and you can see them in their ornate box.

And for another, there is a side area where there are still a few of the old medieval frescos on the wall.

We spent about an hour there, maybe more, and enjoyed our visit.

Getting out of Trani was a bit of a trick, as it meant maneuvering around the ZTLs that ringed the parking area – which was right next to the police station, so no pressure at all really – and then winding our way back through the narrow streets until we hit the city limits. Eventually we found open space again. One of the biggest differences between European cities and American cities in my experience – I mean beyond the fact that European cities have narrower streets, actual pedestrian culture, and far superior public transportation systems – is that you can really tell when you leave. It’s not the gradual fade-off from urban to rural that you usually get in the US, where the urban sprawl just slowly dissipates until you find cows. The European cities I’ve been to all seem to have very sharply defined borders and it’s very clear when you are in the city and when you should expect to see livestock. It’s a pretty abrupt transition, in fact. So it was pretty obvious when we’d succeeded in leaving Trani.

That only left us with the question of the next destination. Kim and Lauren had wanted to go to a beach while we were in Italy, and since we were more or less on the Adriatic anyway it seemed like a fairly obvious time to do that. We’d even packed our swimmies just in case.

Our first attempt was blocked by a street festival. I don’t know what town we were in by that point, but between where we were and where wanted to be was an entire event dedicated to the very same St. Nicholas whose relics we’d seen in Trani. It was a much livelier sort of thing than the cathedral, as you would expect, but not really conducive to us finding a beach or parking anywhere near same.

So we fired up the Google Maps Machine again and after a decently long drive on ever smaller and more empty roads we found ourselves at a dead end by salt water. Carefully obeying the little sign that said not to block the driveway that led off to someone’s home on the right, we turned around and parked alongside the road next to a few other cars that had done the same thing, and began walking down the path.

About halfway to the beach there were trulli. A trullo is a dry-stone hut with a conical roof, and they’re all over the Puglia region where Trani sits. Apparently they became popular in the 19th century, and there is a big concentration of them in Alberobello – which we went to see later – but you can find them pretty much wherever you look in that part of Italy. We’d pass them on the highway. These were empty, but people do still live in them here and there.

On the way back to the car there were a bunch of kids playing on them – the group on the ground was throwing rocks at the group that had climbed up on top of them, and they all seemed to be having a grand time.

The beach was lovely – about 70 yards (65 meters) of palm-sized white rocks in a little cove where there were maybe two dozen other people, some of them families and some of them a bunch of young adults who were manhandling a boat into the water. The water was calm and warm, and it was a quiet place to splash about for those who wished to do so. You could go out a ways, and on the right hand side was a rock formation to climb around.

We stayed for about an hour as the sun slowly began to set.

The one down side to this was that Kim had very carefully taken everything out of her pockets before going into the water but had by force of habit put her phone back in, which is why it received an unintended salt-water rinse. It was never quite the same after that – it worked, kind of, for a couple of minutes at a time, enough to take a picture or, occasionally, show a gate agent a boarding pass, but in the end there was no saving it. Poor little phone. You served well.

We walked back to the car, passed another trulli, and decided that we were hungry enough to get dinner before we got back to Irsina.

Once we agreed that pizza was our goal, we went to Google Maps and searched for “pizza near me,” which is perhaps the most useful search term in the entire internet. It spit back a bunch of places that Lauren – the navigator for this leg of the trip – sorted through before deciding that there was a place called Mes Amis that had good reviews. It was in Corato, not too far away. We drove through a web of tiny roads in the dark to get there and eventually found not only the restaurant but a semi-legal parking place on a small piazza about two hundred meters up the road.

Mes Amis is a take-out place. You step up the counter and place your order, and they send you on your way with tasty food. They’re also really nice about food allergies. We showed the cashier our allergy card and she eventually brought everyone in the restaurant into the conversation – the cook, the manager, the other cashier, everyone – and they worked out what Oliver could eat safely, and we were deeply grateful for the care that they showed. We took our food back to the little piazza and found an open bench – it was crowded with families, even at that hour – and ate there. There is something about eating in a little park in a busy city that is its own experience, and if the food is excellent well then so much the better.