Ah... Como. Italia. The stuff of legend.
Wood-hulled speed boats plying the sun dappled water. Mountains plummeting out of the sky to the shoreline. Palatial lakeside villas for tech bros and other villians.
George Clooney hangs out here, which is good enough for me. I try to model both my looks and my overall style after GC.
It's one of those places where you have seen it before you've actually seen it, because so many scenes from movies, television and books are shot and set there.
We based ourselves in the comely little town of Menaggio. Our apartment had a small balcony perched over the lake where we took our morning coffee and evening cocktails. Menaggio is also notable as the place where Mussolini spent his last night on earth. He and his mistress were on the run by this point and they hid out with some Nazi sympathizers in Menaggio. In the morning, they continued on toward the mountains and the Swiss border. They didn't make it. They were caught and executed the following day.
Live by the sword... as they say.
We began our tour of the lake in the fairy tale towns of Varenna, Bellano and Bellagio (the latter named after a famous American casino).
What’s fun about all this, besides the obvious, is that you do your sightseeing by boat. Ferries crisscross the lake all day long taking you wherever you need to go.
We also toured the famous Villa de Balbianello, featured in films like Casino Royale and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.
We rewatched the scenes from both films after our visit. Bond gently teases Vesper with characteristically playful innuendo as they relax on the astonishly manicured grounds (the gardeners at Balbianello seem to possess super powers of some sort). As for Star Wars, we didn’t even make it all the way through the 5-minute clip. George Lucas’s dialogue may be more wooden than all the boats on Lake Como put together. Life is too short.
It came as something of a surprise to us both to recall that this was our first visit to Itally in over 30 years (despite us being so continental). Where does the time go? But in some significant ways, Italy hasn't changed all that much. While their cars, ski lifts and espresso machines are marvels of 21st Century engineering; and the fashion world flocks to Milan every year to bask in their designer's glow—much else seems to feel a lot like the 19th Century.
As one American ex-pat recently put it: "Italy is great if you want to exprience amazing food, wine, gorgeous scenery or meet a beautiful woman, but don’t try to mail a letter."
This anachronistic tendency can be endearing and amusing. For example: to buy vegetables at the grocery store in Menaggio, you need to ask the young gal stationed in the produce section to go pick your items out and weigh them for you (like at a farm stand) or you risk a scolding. To unlock our apartment, we used a skeleton key. Charming, if not highly efficient.
In other cases, however, this determination to be just extremely Italian can be downright infuriating. And nowhere is that more true that at an Italian rental car counter; where it seems that the idea is not to rent cars but to find ways to prevent you from renting a car.
Have you have seen this parody? Is it even a parody? Or is it real life? It's only 1-minute long, please watch before continuing with the post.
Funny, right? Yes, until it’s actually happening to you.
After arriving at midnight our time in Milan, on 2-hours airplane seat sleep, we stumbled to the car rental counter and politely queued up in the completely empty line. We then sufferred the perfunctory punishment wait while the two bored, unoccupied agents chatted with one another a few minutes, before one of them finally summoned us forward for an audience with her Grace.
After presenting my passport, my U.S. driver’s license, my International Driver’s license and my credit card, she simply said:
“There is a problem.”
“Oh...?”
“Yes, you see your name on the reservation is spelled ‘Tom’ but your passport reads ‘Thomas’ so we cannot rent you the car.”
“Right, that's true, but they are both actually my names. Better still, I’m standing right here with about 18 forms of ID. Why don’t you just change the reservation name to match?”
“We cannot do zees. You will have to call the company you made the reservation with and have them change.”
This was delivered without a single note of empathy or concern. Not only was she unwilling to make the slightest effort to assist us in our plight—she seemed to take quiet satisfaction in it. Maybe it is her great cause—to prevent the McDonaldization of her homeland, one pitiful American tourist at a time?
What followed was a protracted, but wholy one-sided argument lasting an hour. She ignored us while we spent the tiime in a panic sweat trying to use the non-functioning airport wi-fi and my just initiated phone eSim card to reach a human being that would help us. I might as well have been trying to get Prince Harry on the phone from outer space. I had hoped that seeing our desperation, some small grain of pity would emerge and she would do what we both knew was easily in her power to do. But no. We ended up renting a new car from another agency at over 3X the original cost (which had been pre-paid, and thus already gone).*
It wasn't a great start. But within a few hours, we were seated at a table on Lake Como as the sun set, drinking wine and eating delicious Italian food (something they haven't changed much either, and thank the good Lord for that).
We spent a very blissful four days wining, dining and boating our way around the lake.
Nota Bene: Italians are NOT mean and obstinent. I'm merely telling a story (and taking the piss, as the Brits would say). We have been in Itally for a week and a half since the rental car counter and have interfaced with well over one hundred Italians in restaurants, bars, hotels, ticket windows, and on the hiking trail. All have been unfailingly lovely.
*Ramble On Travel Tip (ROTT)
Never book travel through a 3rd party travel consolidator or agency. It's a good place to shop but when you find the flight, hotel or car you want—book it direct. With airlines, there is never a reason to use a consolidator because you can always get the same price directly with the airline and often other benefits. Hotels will frequently cost a bit more when going direct than with something like Booking.com and it might also have a more restrictive cancellation policy. And the booking engine on the hotel's website might also be kind of crappy. So it's harder, but at least try. Or maybe just phone them up and tell them the price on Booking.com to see if they will match it. Cars will nearly always cost you more when you book direct. I'm really not sure why. But I'm inclined to advise that you just pay it anyway, because when shit goes sideways, you don't want to be dealing with the consolidator. Trust me on that.
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