(I’m including examples of songs I heard while in Europe in 1985. I’d like to say that I recall music of local origin, but alas, my brain wasn’t always trained for this…yet.)
Previously: Euro Pilgrimage ’85, Ch. 5: A critical Mass in Rome — and the famous Pecetto bus incident.
Having overcome a transport-related mishap fully worthy of the Keystone Kops at their slapstick cinematic apex, in early June of 1985 I managed to reach Pecetto Torinese, a village set amid the rolling northern Italian foothills of the Alps.
I used my own two feet to get there, and the ramble was unexpectedly grand. In retrospect, I sometimes reflect that it would have been better had I embraced walking from the very beginning as a primary mode of European exploratory transportation. Of course, my level of consciousness hadn’t yet developed to such a stage. I was a neophyte; the stroll to Pecetto was a fluke, and my brain barely accommodated trains, much less bicycles or hiking boots.
At a later stage of my development there’d be European beercycling, and some of the best times ever, but it would take a good while. By then, I was ready for it. Those of us who are slow learners and a late bloomers accept the incremental nature of progress.
My week in Pecetto with cousin Don Barry and our host Scott Bennett, a former student and friend of Don’s, provided the perfect chance to stop, relax, and enjoy a slice of easygoing small-town Europe in temperate summer weather, as well as to take stock of what still lay ahead on my first visit to the continent. As you’ll see, there was an unexpected urban excursion as part of the bargain, as well as degreasing.
That’s because in hindsight, it can be stated with absolute certainty that the Pecetto stopover provided access to an amenity far more valuable than quasi-philosophical introspection ― namely, Scott’s washing machine. It was the first one I’d had the opportunity to use in almost a month on the road.
Not that I was filthy, mind you. I bathed as often as possible, and obeyed the advice of the budget travel guidebooks, packing a big plastic bottle of Woolite along with a universal rubber sink stopper. Sure enough, laundry done by hand in the hostel washroom usually would dry overnight even without a clothesline, so long as it was completed early enough in the day.
If my clothes were still damp, and I had to run along to catch a train, no problem; garbage bags packed in case of emergency kept other possessions dry until the chance came to re-expose the wet ones to the open air (plastic freezer bags concurrently enabled artful buffet food pilferage; more on that later in the series).
If there was no choice except wearing damp clothes, the inevitable chafing proved a powerful enticement to prioritize the wash cycle over beer drinking, and when needed, to trust in the recuperative magic of baby powder.
A steadfast routine was established: housekeeping tasks always come first, sightseeing later. I referred to this priority as setting up my perimeter, and the regimen thus established has stuck with me during all my subsequent trips.
Meanwhile, Scott’s washer and the bright Italian sun combined to successfully restore my sole pair of jeans to foldable status, and I felt clean again. It would be another month before machinery again augmented cold water detergent. After all, who really wants to spend precious food and drink money at a laundromat?
The morning after my arrival in Pecetto, Don and I hopped the bus back into Turin, this time successfully purchasing and validating the required fares. My bags needed liberatiing from the train station’s left luggage window, but first came an orientation hike around the central city, with a requisite gorging on pastries and espresso. After only a short time in Italy, I was quickly learning to like the Italian way of doing coffee and nibbles, another preference that has remained fixed in place after four decades.
Upon our return to Pecetto, an inspection was conducted of the mom ‘n’ pop merchants clustered along the town’s compact shopping street. We found a cluttered small family grocer’s shop and amassed a considerable supply of bottled, half-liter, Italian-brewed Birra Dreher, surely enough serviceable golden lager to last the entire week, and of course just as surely depleted in fewer than three days.
Consequently there was a return visit to the shop to haul back the bottles for deposit and acquire liquid reinforcements, eliciting the patron’s wry smile as he accepted another thick wad of Italian lire and began plotting his forthcoming holiday destination. Shouldn’t we have been drinking the inexpensive local wine? I suppose. Remember: always buy the cheapest bottles of local wine that aren’t dusty.
More than once we trundled halfway down the hill from Scott’s to the quiet town’s primary restaurant, a jam-packed traditional community nerve center presided over by a jovial, mustachioed, Italian mirror image of Lech Walesa, then-prominent leader of Solidarity, the Polish trade union.
The indefatigable maestro of the house offered a fixed price, all-you-can-eat “pasta carousel”, a much anticipated culinary event that involved a bottle of cheap house red wine, crunchy baked bread sticks, and portions of a dozen different pastas awash in cream sauces, garlic oil, marinara and pesto, each ladled onto our waiting plates until exhaustion set in, more wine arrived, the kitchen closed, or Don began licking his plate.
(The restaurant might have been Pilone del Lupo, in business since 1918, and seemingly a fixture in Pecetto.)
One afternoon we happened upon a small distillery of some sort, and later asked our new restaurateur friend what type of spirits it produced. He pulled a bottle from behind the counter and poured samples. It was my first taste of grappa ― Italian moonshine, fashioned from the pomace (skin, pulp, seeds and skins) left over from winemaking. The grappa was hot, fragrant and intriguing.
It should come as no surprise that as these experiences multiplied, European travel began to encroach on my DNA. Concurrently, Don reveled in the chance to delve into history and share travel advice with me. At 40 in 1985, he was 15 years my senior, a grizzled veteran of a Euro wanderer, as contrasted with my wide-eyed innocent abroad.
We’d talked enough about travel over beers back home, and now, together for the first time abroad, our chats extended far into the night as we sat outside the villa and smoked cigars.
In 1985, Don was an adjunct faculty member at Florida State University, teaching European history. Shortly thereafter came the opportunity for him to take a tenured position at Tallahassee Community College, from which he eventually retired. His academic specialization was France, his cultural milieu was French, and the place he liked to be, above all others, was Paris. Ask my cousin about Napoleon Bonaparte, and be prepared for several beers’ worth of commentary (just don’t mention the recent film with Joaquin Phoenix, or it might get ugly).
As we relaxed in Pecetto, only a short distance from the French border as birds fly, discussions began about our prospects for meeting again later in the summer. Munich looked solid as a meeting point roughly two weeks later, with Don lamenting that there’d be no way for us to coordinate schedules and meet in Paris.
Then suddenly he brightened, asking Scott whether he had train schedules handy; amazingly, during the pre-internet era of recent human history information like this was published on actual paper, bound, and made available at shops and newsstands.
Scott promptly produced them, and Don proceeded to hatch the craziest road trip of my life up to that point, and maybe since. We’d spend a day in Paris via our Eurailpasses, departing Pecetto on the earliest bus to Turin’s rail station, then taking a normal daytime express to Lyon in France before transferring to the TGV high-speed train to be whisked to the City of Light, so named because it was the first European city to install gas street lighting.
And make no mistake: the itinerary certainly was crazy, because Turin is not particularly close to Paris. In 1985, the ride was in excess of four hours from Turin to Lyon, and another two-and-a-half to Paris. We’d arrive in early afternoon with maybe six or seven hours to roam the streets before boarding an overnight train back to Turin, on which we’d save money by refraining from purchasing couchettes or a sleepers, and instead napping in our seats. The overnight train home was direct from Paris, without changes, but far slower.
If fortunate, we’d be feeling little pain by then. Given fundamentally bibulous proclivities, the odds seemed solidly in our favor, and so the plan was duly executed. Arising painfully early on a dark, warm Pecetto summer’s morning, we brushed past an outdoor patio table still reeking from the previous evening’s residue of cigar ashes, Dreher empties gathered smartly to one side for return, and found the bus, making the rail connections without incident, and arriving on time at Gare Lyon in Paris.
Obviously I was not in Kansas (or Kentucky) anymore.
Using Metro tickets Don had thoughtfully hoarded from a previous trip, we hopped onto the underground straight to the Cité stop for Notre-Dame Cathedral. Don immediately seized the opportunity to introduce his protégé to the sensory delights of the French capital, and my cousin was in peak form, leading an exhaustive (and exhausting) three-hour walking tour, professorially highlighting the historical events and architectural wonders of one of the world’s great cities, including frequent glimpses of compellingly unique and fascinating café interiors, where “une bière pression, s’il vous plait” became my first words of French committed to active memory.
—
Kindly allow a digression about this key phrase in French, prompted by 40 subsequent years in beer: “une bière pression, s’il vous plait,” or a draft beer, please.
In 1985, it was considered good manners while traveling overseas to make an effort, however fumbling and ineffectual, to speak a few words in the local language before bowing humbly to the inevitability that natives tend to speak English far more convincingly than Americans.
Hence, learning in advance a few basic numbers, like 1 through 10; how to say please and thank you; “where is the toilet”; and of course, the way to request “a draft beer, please.”
The pre-digital simplicity of this request, whether expressed in French or Finnish, is stunning in light of 2025 standards, as expanded: ”Hi, I’ll have a draft beer, and any draft beer will do, just so long as it’s wet and contains alcohol.”
I consider these words a nostalgic vestige of lost beer worlds, recalling a time when we genuinely believed in the power of pocket-sized books entitled “Speak French Just Like a Native in One Week,” and were sure that if a beer (any beer) was European, it simply had to be better than Old Swillwaukee.
(Usually it was, though not necessarily).
Given that today’s beer drinkers are blithely accustomed to a post-craft explosion of seemingly unlimited choice, it’s almost ludicrous to imagine any of them walking into a bar, anywhere in the world, and asking for “a draft beer, please,” then settling meekly for whatever materializes, absent all the standard expected explanations of brewery origin, hop varieties and choice of freshly dumped spirits barrels for aging ― not to mention the now familiar checklist, a litany of qualifications with reference to gluten, pesticides, peanuts, fish bladder, and could you make sure the tofu cream on the pastry stout’s whipped topping is low-fat?
Une bière pression, s’il vous plait. It’s like returning to kindergarten.
Obviously the point of knowing these words was to politely facilitate a fundamental task, not intricately analyze a philosophical treatise. Indeed, there were many times when knowing how to ask for red wine in French, Italian or Spanish felt much better for one’s ego than gesturing theatrically at the empty bottle atop a neighbor’s table.
I’m quite positive there are vast tracts of the planet today where not “everyone” speaks English, although in contemporary Europe you’d be forgiven for imagining they all do, especially younger people and those folks working in the hospitality and tourism businesses.
Likely this is true in present-day France as well, although in a previous epoch it was assumed that the French would be the least likely of people to shift effortlessly into English; they’re like that, don’t you know? During my first visit to Paris on the daytrip with Don, I didn’t notice it; he spoke French well, and I contented myself with riding his coattails and drinking whatever I was served, without complaint.
Actually I never experienced any major issues with language in France. It’s a big country, and scattered locales I’ve visited since 1985m such as Normandy, the French Alps, Tresserre (a village near Spain) or Revin (a northern area quite reminiscent of West Virginia) were a delight.
Most of the time if my behavior stayed low-key, my demeanor respectful, I smiled a lot and displayed curiosity about my surroundings, people in France (anywhere, really) were great in spite of language barriers. Sometimes they’d become exasperated at the way Americans act in public, but then again, so do I.
I’d stand up straight and say no, not me.
American? Ha ha. I’m actually from Liverpool.
—
Don’s Paris 101 was an invaluable orientation for my return visit alone in July; for this June daytrip, I didn’t even take the camera.
But in truth, seven hours encompassing one bus, two trains and several Metro rides had collectively been endured for one fundamental objective above all the rest: eating and drinking. Specifically, it was Don’s aim to find a North African joint and introduce me to couscous ― strictly speaking, tagine (stew) ladled atop couscous (granules of pasta).
Consequently, our brief dip into Paris culminated with a reverential pilgrimage to the claustrophobic Rue Xavier Privas, a Left Bank shoebox lane named for an early 20th-century French poet and songwriter.
Budget travel guru Arthur Frommer called it “couscous street” in his Europe on $25-a-Day guidebook, a place where mysterious North African immigrants sipped pitch-black coffee and travelers in the know joked about which hand should be used for eating, and which held in reserve for a later stage of the digestive process.
“Way back when, in the days of my first trips to Paris,” wrote Frommer, “couscous was a relatively rare food item, served only one or two days a week in tense Algerian restaurants, catering to an almost exclusively Algerian clientele. One evening, on my once-a-week visit to eat couscous, I arrived at one of these spots just minutes after the chef had been machine-gunned by fellow Algerian nationalists for some political misdeed.”
Couscous, tagine, merguez … these were not staples of the diet in somnolent Georgetown, Indiana. I was about to experience another cultural sonic boom.
The exact couscous dispensary we chose is lost to me now. However, I recall the décor being simple, the patrons atmospheric, and Don’s suggested choice of communal meal absolutely outstanding. We ordered the least expensive menu option, which yielded a mound of granule-sized couscous pasta accompanied by an urn of rich tagine and harissa, the latter a thick hot sauce. We chose a liter bottle of house red wine and got down to it.
When the couscous ran out, it was replenished. The tagine seemed destined for an early exit, but proved more filling than it first appeared, and every last drop was absorbed with the help of a plate stacked with crusty bread.
The wine was depleted and repeated, and even while constituting a budgetary splurge, my share still came to roughly $15 dollars. I’d chosen an excellent year for European travel, as the dollar was very strong against European currencies in 1985. The largesse also led to sticker shock in 1987, when the exchange rates had deteriorated for American tourists.
Filled to bulging with beer, wine and tagine, we departed Couscous Street and went into the Parisian night. The languidly paced overnight train back to Turin was the scene of random dozing subject to bouts of flatulence borne of so many house-made merguez sausages. Emerging the following morning for pastries and coffee at the train station buffet, we finally making it back to Pecetto in the afternoon, roughly 32 hours after beginning the journey, and after a splash of water to the face and a couple of restorative Drehers, we adjourned to the town restaurant for another spin of the pasta carousel.
—
At the conclusion of a recuperative week in bucolic Pecetto, my belly was fuller than it had been at any point during the trip, but my newly clean clothes still seemed to be hanging on me. By the time I returned stateside in August of 1985, the net poundage drop was 25, all the way down to 200.
Speaking from the current vantage point of 2025, I haven’t seen 200 pounds since 1987. As a high school senior playing basketball in 1978, my weight was 175 lbs. These days, at 64 years of age, I’m managing to hold at around 250 lbs. And the struggle? You can bet it is real.
Eating had been a feast or famine proposition during the opening weeks of the journey. Sit-down meals were the rarer option, even in inexpensive Greece and Turkey, so bakery breakfasts and street food offered affordable subsistence. There were fewer supermarkets and more small family groceries, the latter requiring the suppression of my innate shyness so as to successfully navigate prices and portions.
But real difference when it came to shedding bulk was regular exercise. If it was a mile to the hostel and I couldn’t dope out tickets for the streetcar, I walked. My bag didn’t have wheels, so I carried it. Few of the places I stayed had elevators, so there was no alternative to climbing stairs. Budget travel implied greater exertion, and in all honesty, I enjoyed getting up close and personal with the landscape.
The same went for cathedrals and towers in virtually every city, where the best view came only after a few hundred vertical steps, which tended to be carved of stone and intended for tiny medieval human feet, not my elongated size 16 sneakers.
As the weather became hotter, I finally noticed the ubiquitous plastic two-liter PET bottles of water. It’s not like we didn’t have them at home, except at home I drank tap water. One day in the Peloponnese I noticed thousands of discarded plastic bottles washed up on a beach, which helps explain why they presently comprise a Texas-sized island in the Pacific.
Soon I was carrying a disposable water bottle at all times, refilling it from reliable water sources, and choosing not once to discard it into nearby water courses. As an aside, in this era prior to standardization, one couldn’t always expect translations on product labels. Truncated vocabularies in indigenous tongues became an acquired skill. Was the water still or carbonated? For many travelers, water “with gas” was a deal-breaker. In later years when finances allowed, I grew to prefer it.
Pecetto had been a blast. I thanked Scott profusely for the nightly use of his floor and spare mattress, and consulted with Don about our projected meeting in Munich two weeks hence. Then it was back to the train station, and the heavily traveled Northern Italian rail network from Turin to Milan.
I’d passed through Milan previously in route to Greece, with no opportunity to explore save for the neighborhood around the youth hostel. The second time became a literal charm, and I had most of a whole day to poke around, investigate the city, peek into La Scala, and climb the steps to the roof of the Duomo (main cathedral).
I even managed a bus going in the direction of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, home of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting “The Last Supper,” but the refectory was closed amid a lengthy restoration that lasted from 1978 to 1999. Pausing only for a sandwich, I boarded a night train and pressed on to Venice, arriving there at 5:30 a.m. the next morning.
A pattern was beginning to emerge. Fixed periods of relative calm, as in Pecetto, and Rome before it, would leave me restless and eager to be put into motion. Every day was a mysterious, bewildering and rewarding adventure. There’d be time later for sleep. Exhaustion would come after a few days, when a lengthier stay somewhere offered time to recoup.
Perhaps more importantly, lodgings allowed bathing ― and summer was starting to be felt as well as smelled.
The train to Venice made its mainland stop in Mestre, then crossed the causeway to its final destination. A steady, cool rain was falling on the darkened plaza outside the station. Beyond it, the lapping of canal water could be heard. I joined an inexplicably huge, strange-tongued throng huddled inside the main hall. With genial politeness, they ignored the half-hearted entreaties of local policemen to disperse.
The cops shrugged and melted away. Eventually an English speaker among them revealed that yet again, the paths of the Hoosier Hick and Pope John Paul II had crossed. You’ll recall that while in Rome, the Holy Father had appeared at the very same Sunday Mass that this inveterate pagan chose to attend at St. Peter’s, inciting feverish adulation among nuns and priests, who seemed ready to resort to physical violence to secure the best camera-ready access to the rock star Pontiff.
Now the Pope had just concluded a visit to Venice, and although his person, Popemobile and cadre of professional souvenir hawkers were long gone, thousands of pilgrims, many from the countryside of the mountainous Alto Adige and exotic neighboring Slovenia (a component of socialist Yugoslavia) had not yet melted away, hence the mass of humanity choking the corridors of the rail station.
The practical implications of the Pope’s tour schedule were about to be revealed to me. Placing my bag in safekeeping at the crammed-tight left luggage office, I rushed out into the strange labyrinth of pavement and water, determined as usual to secure inexpensive lodgings as early as possible in a city where cheap rooms were scant in the leanest of seasons. But I hadn’t reckoned with the many pilgrims who weren’t ready to relinquish their beds. By ten a.m., it was clear that budget accommodations simply were not to be.
Then, as now, confusing times call for studied reflection, preferably on a quiet street-side bench, with a slice of pizza and a bottle of beer for company. One option was to check back throughout the day to see if beds were available, a task complicated by my timidity over token-operated public phones, and the difficulties of finding ones that even worked.
Conversely, it was still early in the day. The rain was clearing, and the sun threatening to shine. There’d be ample time to ride the boats, view the art, contemplate the city’s erstwhile maritime empire, recall Ernest Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees and feel a chill at the memory of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.
With a modicum of parsimony, there’d be enough Lira left over to avoid a Venice sleepover entirely, by booking space in a relatively cheap six-berth couchette compartment for the overnight rail journey to Vienna, capital of Austria, which was the next planned stop on the tour. So it went. Venice became a day trip, and I kept moving.
There was time to find a copy of USA Today and sneak a peek at the baseball standings (the Oakland A’s were playing .500 ball), and to board a vaporetto for a sightseeing ride through the canals of a strange city erected on millions of wooden pilings (yes, millions) driven centuries ago through sandbars dotting an ocean lagoon. In its heyday, Venice was one of the most tolerant, multicultural and egalitarian of cities destined to be folded into the Kingdom of Italy. The reason might have been the hardships of its locale, tenuously hugging dots of land, even before climate change and rising ocean levels.
Frommer had the usual budget restaurant recommendation, and so I closed my Venetian chapter with an actual sit-down meal. I was seated at a table adjacent to an elderly British lady, who struck up a conversation. Well-informed and witty, she was traveling alone at the age of 75, her husband having died the previous winter.
The woman was delightful company, and I can recall speculating as to how many 75-year-olds I knew back home in Indiana would dare embark on a solo journey to a foreign country, on the cheap, with no language skills. Four decades later, I’m obviously much closer to her age than mine on that night in Venice when we dined together and conversed.
Exhausted, but at ease, I picked my way through the remaining pilgrims, boarded the train, and permitted my thoughts to begin drifting to the Blue Danube.
Why couldn’t I do this the rest of my life?
Next: Euro Pilgrimage ’85, Ch. 7: Vienna and the dawning of a Habsburg fixation.
