A Short Drive in Montalchino

I learned the meaning of an Italian traffic sign today. It looks like a horizontal bar of red with a short vertical bar of white attached below the midpoint, making it a wide, two-toned T. It means the road ends, and I learned this, you might say, the hard way.

Deb and I had just finished walking around our fourth Italian hill town of the day, feeling a little saturated. It was five p.m. or as they say here seventeen. We might have stayed in Montalchino a little longer, but our parking had expired and we needed to move the car anyway—or at least feed the meter. We couldn’t be sure since there was no English on any of the pertinent signage where we parked. I thought I had performed a minor miracle just making sure we hadn’t been towed.

Next stop was Buonoconvento where the hostess of our villa assured us we would find a good dinner. We climbed into our Fiat hatchback, took a few minutes to assess the possible routes. I remarked to Debbie that I was glad we were leaving before dark, as it had been a somewhat serpentine route up to this village. I saw on the map that we could get there by the S2 highway or by a smaller more direct road.

I backed out of the diagonal parking space and headed down Via Spahni in the direction I had taken to arrive at this spot. Only a few meters ahead was an intersection which due to the subsequent trauma I can only vaguely recall. From the vantage of hind sight it makes me recall a Rilke poem that describes everything directly in front of the author’s face as stone. As I looked ahead I saw the aforementioned red and white T-shaped sign. It was only one of numerous glyphs I had encountered and struggled to comprehend throughout my now day-and-a-half of driving in Italy. Slowly I was coming to see the pattern language among them so I led myself to believe. “This T must mean I can turn either left or right.” I thought. I didn’t really stop to examine the flaw in that logic when intuitively something told me that left was not really an option. There was more road to the left but I think there may have been a small barrier or something to suggest that it was not for automobile use. Seeing a van a few meters down to the right parked at an angle to the left side of the road again, intuitively, I believed a right turn was in order. (So much for intuition.) The only challenge it seemed was squeezing between the tail of the van and the wall of the building that flanked the right of this small downwardly sloped lane. I weaved past, not wanting to do damage to either vehicle. The short piece of road that remained until its end, maybe ten meters, ahead was clear.

More than halfway down—whether it was Debbie or me who noticed it first I can’t say—I suddenly slammed on the brakes when we both realized the end of the road met the intersection of the cross road ahead with a precipitous drop of a meter or two! No barrier. No sign other than the one I had now clearly misinterpreted. Just a short cliff.

Whew! Glad we saw that in time. Now I was really glad we had left with some daylight left or there is no question we would have driven unceremoniously off this short cliff.

Now the fun began. All I had to do was put the stick shift car in reverse up a steep hill and squeeze it through the narrow passage between the van and the wall. Piece of torte.

I stepped on the brake, set the gear in reverse, lifted up on the clutch, the car lurched forward even closer to the stone ledge. My God this is hard to do! The force of gravity and my inexperience was sending the car in exactly the wrong direction. I had few such attempts available to me before disaster would ensue. Now I reasoned that the hand brake would have to participate in this. I had to ensure I was fully engaged in reverse before moving.

I pulled up the hand brake, carefully set the gear, revved the motor, released the brake to an elephants’ squeal, the smell of burning clutch, and crookedly jerked the vehicle up the stone lane heading toward the narrow gap. “Stop!!!” Debbie cried out, keeping me from smacking into the wall—or so she perceived and believe me I didn’t know any better. How am I going to thread this needle?

I eased the car back down the hill a little bit to improve the angle of attack when as if sent by one of the arch angels the owner of the van appeared and removed what was now the greatest impediment. I had only to engage the elephants and burning clutch one more time to successfully extricate ourselves from what only a few moments earlier was certain doom.

Just another instance of a phenomenon we had been tracking throughout the trip. In travel as in life—so many grand themes of survival and relationship seem to play out daily. Perseverance. Focus. Trust. Hope. Courage. Confidence. Communication. Team work. Delight. Disappointment. Flexibility. Salvation.

The coda to this little tale—tame by comparison, but telling nonetheless—was only minutes away. As I drove our little chariot in circles around the town unable to connect to the road that had led us in, I decided that “down” was all we really needed to concern ourselves with. I took the next available road that headed in that direction. How could that fail? The answer came gradually as the road narrowed into a single lane dirt path going perhaps somewhere, perhaps not. As our confidence faded with the afternoon sky, I saw a car poking out of a perpendicular road ahead. I stopped our car in front of the other, giving us the opportunity to ask the way to Buonoconvento of this farmer who spoke no English. Saint Christopher was still looking out for us as the man indicated that all we needed to do was follow him.

And we did. Grazie mille!