The Good, the Bad and the Immaculately Dressed

Italians are immaculately dressed, unlike the French who prefer to be immaculately undressed. Style is everything in Italy: from the Piazzas through to the Palazzos through to the leopard skin pill-box hats. What was jarringly unstylish, however, were the trains in Rome. The train we caught each day looked like it had come directly from the Mad Max set. It was all rusted iron and graffiti. Just because you have ancient ruins doesn’t mean you need a train system from a similar era.

A Roman train

Italians make me laugh. One evening in Rome, an old lady managed to get everyone on our train carriage to close the windows because the wind was messing up her hair. Again, I think it comes down to style. Nothing is more important than a signora’s hair. In Italy this fact is universally understood and acknowledged. It didn’t matter that it was 35 degrees and we were packed in the carriage like sardines.

Posing beside some pretty spectacular ruins

Italians do style and they also do food – stylish food. The food is so simple. It is all about the quality and the combination of ingredients, not the quantity. (The only thing that comes in large quantities is red wine, litre or half litre, they are often your only options if you drink the rocket fuel - house red - when eating out). A typical pasta dish is three or four ingredients that complement each other like Jagger and Richards or Lennon and McCarthy – take your pick.

I love Italian supermarkets – shelves of wine, olive oil, pesto and pastas. Here’s a little recipe, inspired by Italian markets, for the masterchefs out there. It’s called Tortellini di Bruce. It takes about 5 minutes to prepare and you can even cook it on a slow burning metho camp stove (but add an extra 10 minutes to the cooking time!)

• Proscuitto Tortellini 
• Pesto 
• Cherry tomatoes 
• Roasted/grilled capsicum (red ‘cause it’s sweeter) 
• If you’re a real carnivore you could throw in some crispy bacon 
• If you’re drinking pretty average red wine whilst cooking (no need to waste the good stuff) you may as well swill a bit in the mix as well 

Serve with a glass (or litre) of Chianti Classico and a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese.

Now the problem with Italy… It’s a filthy country that in many places seems to be falling into disrepair. The sidewalks are the rubbish dumps and rabid mongrels, pigeons (vermin of the sky), and handbag hawkers prowl the alleyways. In the Naples suburbs decrepit concrete apartment houses stretch for as far as the eye can see. Maybe people are just too concerned about their Gucci handbags and Armani suits to care about anything else.

Italians are also the worst drivers I have ever seen. When you combine this with the state of some of the roads, it’s like a grim reaper apparition, a blood pressure rising bloody nightmare. There are no road rules as far as I could tell, definitely no need for indicators. Every corner is a leap of faith and every intersection is like jumping off a cliff. Taking on the Amalfi coast road in a VW camper was, in hindsight, a pretty stupid idea. A number of scooters and motorbikes almost met their end tangled up in the VW’s front grill. There were more death-wish overtakes than I could count. Scooters weaved in and out around cars and buses into oncoming traffic. Incensed drivers jumped on the horn well before they even contemplated jumping on the brakes. Chaos reigned.

A drive-by of the Amalfi coast 

But the views were amazing and that road half way up a cliff above the ocean was something I couldn’t even comprehend. I guess that’s the thing with Italy, like any place you take the good with the bad, and when things go horribly wrong you just shrug and play the dumb tourist card (any one of the following catchphrases):

• I didn’t know this was a one way street… 
• I only speak Cantonese... 
• Ich ook… 
• Am I doing something wrong? 
• Spreken ze Deutsche?

The mighty Bruce in the dunes

For all those battling through a Tasmanian winter: sunset on a beach in Tuscany