Italian Vacation, 1966

I’ve returned but it’s this one that still sticks in my mind

The summer that followed our family’s move from the château into our new house in the next town in Belgium, my parents decided that we would take a vacation and go on a camping trip to Italy. My father seemed quite excited about the possibilities and, looking on it as an educational experience, suggested we learn some Italian. For several months before our departure, when we gathered around the evening supper table, he would open a box of Italian vocabulary flash cards, pull one or two cards, read the words, have us repeat them, and then the cards would be passed around the table. The only noun that I remember from those nights is “acqua”, the word for water.

By August, we had gathered tents, a stove, a table, chairs, sleeping bags, camp beds, air mattresses and a lantern. With my father’s expert packing, we managed to fit all of these things along with food and clothing and the six of us, into and on top of our small European Ford. My father drove, my mother at his side, and the third front seat passenger spot rotated between my brothers. My sister and I sat in the back with the brother who wasn’t in the front. Thus, we made our way from Belgium to France to Italy.

On this trip, my father’s knowledge and curiosity were at work. If we were going to travel, we were also going to learn something.

We experienced our first learning opportunity when we crossed the 7 ¼ mile Mont Blanc Tunnel, built under the mountain of the same name, that links France to Italy. Later we stopped by Lake Como, and had our first official camping setup. Everything went smoothly until the lantern fell from its post and caught on fire. My father and brothers managed to put it out before it did any damage. From then on, we were more careful.

Many sunny snapshots flash by as I remember that trip: In Rome, Signora Conti goes out to her backyard, plucks lemons from her lemon tree and, in a glass pitcher, makes us the best lemonade we’ve ever had. She also cooks us individual omelettes in olive oil in a tiny frying pan and my mother purchases a similar pan to take home.

In Florence, my 8 year old eyes take in Michelangelo’s nude David. My parents each buy themselves a straw hat on the Ponte Vecchio. Later, my dad is wearing the straw baseball cap and my mother puts on the elegant floppy straw sun hat and they sit side by side in the Mediterranean sunshine. With their sunglasses on, and my father’s six o’clock stubble, to me they look like movie stars.

In Sorrento, we camp among the lemon trees and take the winding path down to the large white pebbled beach that glows beside the deep turquoise water of the Mediterranean Sea. When we get home, my mother sometimes buys bubble bath that will turn our bath water that same color.

And, of course, Pompeii’s ruins, where bodies coated with ash lay where the volcano overtook them back in 79 A.D. and where it was so hot, my brothers soaked their shirts in the fountain and put them around their heads to cool off. The catacombs in Rome with their skeletal remains, the Via Appia, with its chariot worn grooves, the leaning tower of Pisa that we climbed, St Peter’s where my brother was not allowed because of his bermudas, the ever present olive and cypress trees. That first camping trip started me on a lifelong love of travel and discovery. It reinforced what I had already learned, that there are other worlds and ways of doing and living, and it unleashed a never ending curiosity. My world continued to broaden.