BFT23 - Irsina

 

Irsina is a lovely place, though we didn’t see a whole lot of it as we mostly used it as a home base to explore the rest of southern Italy. Our apartment was right on the border between the new part of town and the old part and we did get to the old part a couple of times just to walk around and run errands – it is a functioning town, after all – but the new part we mostly just went through to get elsewhere. It looked like a pretty active place full of people and life, and perhaps we’ll get back there someday and settle in for a bit.

The one thing we managed to do in the new part of town was get gas. Gas stations in Italy are full-service, and as someone who has lived near and traveled through New Jersey I much appreciated this as it meant I didn’t have to figure out what the etiquette was for this sort of thing in Italy. We would pull up and a guy (always a guy) would come over to see what needed to be done. We would, by gestures or a few words of Italian, convey that we’d like the car filled up with gas and he would do that, and then he’d come around for the credit card to pay for it all, which I would usually pass up from the back of the Speck as I had easier access to one than anyone else. Win!

The first time we did this was on the way into Ruoti, and I was pleasantly surprised at how smoothly it went. We hit the one gas station on the way out of town in Irsina a couple of times – we did a lot of driving – and that was also easy. We like easy. Easy is good.

The old part of Irsina was maybe a ten minute walk away from our second-floor apartment. To get there we had to walk out to the road and turn left, and then head up the hill about a hundred meters or so to the main road. The view, it has to be said, was lovely.

From there you turned right at the corner where Rocco’s grocery was – he’d always wave, and we would buy fruit on the way back sometimes – and walked down the narrow road for until you got to the entry to the old city, which was a tunnel through the old city wall that was exactly one car-width wide and had no sidewalks whatsoever. Fortunately, as noted earlier, all roads in Italy are pedestrian roads and cars just have to accept their subordinate role and get by whenever they can, so it was never a problem.

We went into the old town a couple of times just to explore – once with me, Kim, and Lauren when Oliver stayed home and rested a bit, and once just me and Oliver so he could see the place. It’s much less polished than some of the more tourist-oriented (read: affluent) places we visited, but lovely for its rough surfaces. Again, you get the sense that people actually live there, in a way you sometimes don’t elsewhere, and that has its own appeal.

We walked through the streets, taking it all in.

There’s not a whole lot of green in this part of Irsina – the photo below shows almost all of it, actually. Like much of southern Italy, the greenery is outside of the municipal limits and the old town is made of stone, which does absorb the heat and radiate it back to you as you walk by.

This was a particular concern for us during the heat wave that gripped the country this summer. Our time in Italy was marked by temperatures in the upper 30s C (mid-upper 90s F), which was significantly cooler than the week before we got there and also the week after we left but still hot enough. And except for about ten minutes in Ruoti we saw no rain whatsoever the whole time we were in Italy – the sky was almost always a brilliant cloudless blue, open to the glare of the sun.

Our apartment had no air conditioning, but it got a nice breeze up the valley at night and we had fans to move the air around. During the day we’d lower the heavy steel window coverings to keep the hot air out and when we got back we’d open them up again for the cooler evening air and it worked surprisingly well.

The heat is why very little actually happens during the middle of the day in Italy, at least that we could see. Things happen in the morning and they happen in the evening but if you’re out there in the middle of the day you are clearly not a local and should probably be carefully watched so you don’t hurt yourself. I spent a surprising amount of time in Italy with old Noël Coward lyrics running through my mind: “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.” This was something my dad – descended in part from Englishmen – used to say a lot, generally with the sort of resigned air one gets from being confronted by willful stupidity. But when you are on vacation time is limited so you pack your water bottles, make good use of every drinking fountain that you can find, visit shops and other places that might be air conditioned or at least not open to the sky, and stick to the shade as much as you can because you are, in fact, going to go out in the midday sun.

I say, my good man. Grrr.

Fortunately, old Irsina is full of arches and tunnels where you can escape some of the direct glare, and when all else fails there is always the more portable option of an umbrella.

It also has very nice piazzas and some interesting public art as well, so you do get rewarded should you choose to venture out like we did.

Also, cats.

And while most of the buildings are made of the same light brown stone, sometimes you do see them painted with bright sun-reflecting colors. We found a few yellow houses that we particularly liked, for example.

The other thing about walking around old Irsina is that you are way up on top of a pretty steep hill, which means that you get some spectacular views. The city goes right up to the walls and from there you can look out over the valleys below, and if you can do that without being deeply impressed by it you’re missing out, really.

We managed to have one meal in the old town, at a place recommended by our host. We walked past Rocco’s and through the tunnel and then turned right to get to La Contessa, a family restaurant that was fairly empty when we got there at 9pm. We sat outside in the little courtyard and other than a table of ten-year-old boys – clearly well known to the proprietors – and another table with a couple who seemed to be mostly ignoring each other so they could play loud videos on their phones, we were the only ones there. By 10pm the couple had left and in their place the courtyard was full of people, though the boys had long since finished their meals and were actively engaged in a running game of tag that took them through the courtyard, into the neighboring courtyard, and occasionally through the restaurant itself. Nobody saw anything unusual or out of line with this at all. We ate our pizzas and had a lovely time.

Irsina is a living town and there are normal businesses there too. We found a deli and got meats and cheeses to go with the Ruoti bread for our breakfasts. And for long and complicated reasons that I will skip over lightly here, at one point I needed wood glue so I walked over to the old town and found the World’s Smallest Hardware Store – a place that was maybe twelve feet (four meters) square and so crammed with goods that at first I missed the guy standing behind the cash register completely. Didn’t even see the cash register, to be honest. I showed him my phone, where I had typed “wood glue” into Google Translate, and two euros later I was heading back to the apartment. It was good glue.

We did a lot of just sitting on the balcony and porch in the evenings, enjoying the view and relaxing from the day’s adventures. It was a lovely place that way.