'Round the World with an Italian Supermodel

there's a decent lack of 1199 pictures on this page

Cool pics Dennis, you made me think about my Milano (sniff sniff) :..-{. If you have time and money, go to one of these bars at Navigli, they normally have good food an live music. Most of the Italian singers come from that place.

Enjoy Italia!

No longer in Navigli. Did enjoy Temakinho's Caipirinhas, though.

For a slight change of pace, I visited the a da Vinci museum that had wooden models of a lot of his drawings.



Pretty cool, but the unexpected exhibits were in the basement.

amazing pics Dennis...

There's a number of factors responsible for whether we like a city or not. Walkability scores, local taxes, schools and crime indexes may tell part of a cities story....but a part that is about as far divorced from the actuality as possible. It's a subjective and complicated experience. You simply can't rationalize yourself into liking or not liking whatever environment you find yourself in anymore than you can rationalize yourself into falling in love with a woman just because of her SAT scores. But up until now I've never visited a city that transforms so much between the day and the night as Milan. I guess, like women, some cities just look better in the dark.

AntiHero said:

Molte Grazie, mka. I'll look Varenna up....and I look forward to Ireland!

For a slight change of pace, I visited the a da Vinci museum that had wooden models of a lot of his drawings.

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in Lucca? that place is awesome with the wall around the old city center

A few last pics of Milan before I set off.















My last stop in Milan: Hangar Bicocca.









I've admired Anselm Kiefer's work since introduced to it. The installation is called The Seven Heavenly Palaces and walking into the hangar was almost like being sucked into a vacuum of silence. For the first five minutes I had it all to myself. It's strange and eerie, like a Cirque du Soleil stage frozen in time. I'm sure there's all kinds of allegory and symbolism, but I'm more of a formalist than anything else and believe that once something is put out into the world, the artist/writer/director/musician's intentions are usurped by individual reaction and interpretation. I don't get too cerebral with the justification of meaning in artwork (which I believe dilutes the impact instead of enhancing), but I do believe that an artist succeeds when a small portion of the world is transferred inside of another.

I failed to mention that when I arrived I asked if I could park my bike onsite. Alessandro, the cool dude in the pic below, obliged, and opened the castle gates. He happens to ride a GSXR--always cool to meet another motorcyclist--esp. when they understand the desire to walk back out to a parking lot and find your bike where you left it instead of finding only a broken lock.



Alessandra and Francesca were also super cool. Alessandro filled them in on my trip and for the first time in three weeks in Milan I'd met complete strangers who became instant friends.

When I left Milan I wasn't sure where I was headed. I took some signs for Genova because, hey--I do like Salami. (Still not quite clear why the English translation for Italian cities are spelled differently than the original in Italian. It's not like we can't pronounce "Firenze" or "Genova" or "Roma". But whatever.) Genoa was awful. Imagine if Blade Runner was filmed during the day with an orange filter. Then add a lot of traffic, no skin jobs with extraordinary stories of what happened off the shoulder of Orion. Then add more orange, remove the plot, turn the heat in the theater up to 11, add more traffic and there ya have it....Genoa.

Whenever I hit a city I don't like I just ride higher and higher. Gives me a good vantage point and removes a lot of the silt that clouds the lower stratosphere.



Only I didn't find anything up much higher. I definitely wasn't going to stay in Genoa for the night. If we go back to the 'some girls look better in the night' metaphor I arrived too early and didn't have enough to drink. I was sober, the sun was shining brightly and, though I admit I wanted to take off all my clothes, it was only because it was so ....... hot out.

So I parked my bike in a parking lot near an underpass and got on my phone to search for a city a couple hours away.



PISA! Yes, Pisa, why the hell not. Almost immediately it became a good decision:







Found a campsite (for a banana-in-the-butt price of 23 Euro) in Pisa and set up tent.



An ADVer here who also backpacks and rides decided to make a better mousetrap. We began talking six months ago while he was engineering his second prototype. What better way to do R&D than give something to me? If a product has a deficiency I'm the guy to find it, and then articulate the hell out of why it sucks so much.

Sprocket 67

https://www.facebook.com/Sprocket67

But I have to say, incredible. The tent compresses to a size of Pomelo (large grapefruit) and has some genius features, including:

Super crazy-light and waterproof material, allowing a ....... like myself to travel light without being ill-prepared;
Color coded tent-pole-hole-things which make it impossible to misalign your tent poles in the wrong holes;
A pocket on the inside (by your head) to store the kleenex that replace your girlfriend at night (or in my case, tissues to blow the sinus ebola out of my nose);
A top-of-the-tent ceiling net that:
A) turns your cell phone into a spotlight that lights up your life
B) keeps your valuables in an impossible to lose location
Light-speed zippers that don't snag.
Ducati Red Tent Fly that repels mosquitos and attracts hot Italian women (or so I'm told).

Because ya never test anything new come race day, I originally did a dry run of my camping gear while still in LA. I ended up in Malibu, which holds a special place in my heart of coal as the first place I stopped on my original C2C trip to take pics.



So while riding the road less traveled, I happened upon some property for sale guarded by a chain gate. There was, however, about 2' of space between the gate and the gorge on the right. Being that the Panigale is about the same width as one cylinder of a GS meant that not only would my accommodations be free, but the view for the night was mine and mine alone. ADV bike: 0. Panigale: 1.



Not such a big deal, you say. But keep in mind 4 acres in Malibu could run you 29 million dollars. Of course, for that price you'd also get a 5 bedroom house. Though my abode for the night was a mere studio, minimalism never goes out of style:



Did I mention the view?



Tent worked out in Italy as well as it did in Malibu.....only the view required a short walk.

Back in Pisa it was dinner time:



And then, with it sufficiently dark and cool, I set out to wander.


(Pisa--home of the X-Men or just a satellite campus for the School of Mutants?)



Through the Morlock Tunnels:

Lesson #153:
The destination may be alarmingly different than the road that took you there.

Rome next:

Phl said:

there's a decent lack of 1199 pictures on this page

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After all those WDW pics you want more pics of bikes?!?!?!

I was in Milan for 3 weeks waiting for my bike to clear customs. If there was a decent lack of 1199 in the pictures it's because it was in a crate.

If Panigale pics is what you want, look no further than Instagram below, amigo.

I feel like I've been to a few cities in Italy and back home.

As always, very thorough with your work and entertaining to say the least. Hope all troubles escape you in your current journey since the majority of us are tuned in to see what's more in store for the Italian supermodel....oh right...for you too man!

Photos are just pure bliss!

Thanks

Great pics Dennis!
I would have spent way more time on your way down (Cinque Terre and Tuscany - beautiful scenery and gorgeous food).
What are your travel plans (if any), after hitting Pompei?

Much respect to you Dennis. Thank you for all the pics.

AntiHero said:

After all those WDW pics you want more pics of bikes?!?!?!

I was in Milan for 3 weeks waiting for my bike to clear customs. If there was a decent lack of 1199 in the pictures it's because it was in a crate.

If Panigale pics is what you want, look no further than Instagram below, amigo.

Click to expand...

glad you made it through that time without too serious withdrawal symptoms!

is there such a thing as too many bike pics? keep 'em coming!

HotIce said:

Great pics Dennis!
I would have spent way more time on your way down (Cinque Terre and Tuscany - beautiful scenery and gorgeous food).
What are your travel plans (if any), after hitting Pompei?

Click to expand...

Pompei hasn't granted me access to film onsite, so I'll keep trying and perhaps get them to open the gates just for me when I'm back next year.

Did a lot of riding in Tuscany, just missed Cinque Terre. No complaints, pretty much every road has been a blast and the scenery everywhere is stunning.

Roma:


Booked a small apt. on a 500 year old property about 20 min. outside of Rome. The property embodied all the romantic notion of Italy those of us who live outside of Italy have. Confirmation: it does exist.











I had planned on going into Rome the first day. But I was so ....... aggravated by GPS (exit freeway, ride around an industrial park behind an airport, then ride around it again, then get back on the road I was on). My Garmin has the built in prank exit option I suppose). So instead of dealing with 'guess my route', I instead cooked up some of the fresh vegetables from the garden into an eggplant/bell pepper/ghost chili and tomato 'salsa' and devoured all of it. The place had two bedrooms, a living room, kitchen, etc. It was large enough to live in FOREVER. I think I'm getting back into the swing of a new house every few days because instantly I felt right at home. Kind of hard not to, I suppose.

Oh the stories if only these walls could talk:

Most people don't think of this when they think of the Coliseum, but it's an unfortunate reality:



An unfortunate reality made worse by the complete comfort Italians have with disorganization and inefficiency.



Yeah, 5 or 10 lines all smashed up together. No one ever thought, 'hey, where do the people who just got done paying go?"

Inspiration for the ticket counter must have come straight from the band scene at the end of animal house.



But once that horse pill makes it way down the esophagus, you enter the Colosseo!



It's massive--the largest Roman Coliseum built--but it's not quite as massive as most think it is. (Guess it just looks a lot bigger on TV). At 1945 years old, give or take, it still looks pretty good, despite the efforts to restore it.



Other than its size, I think most of us get a sickening kind of thrill when thinking about the battles of mortality, of both man an beast, that took place here.




Yes, yes, I know that killing for fun and entertainment is wrong, but it's still ....... bad ass, as awful as it is. And not everyone participating regretfully did so. The animals just did what animals did in the wild, sort of. But c'mon....think about the most excitement you've ever had while waiting for a movie to begin. Then multiply that by 100. Can you imagine what kind of thrill it would be to be sitting there watching 20 baboons pick fleas off of themselves in a corner until...drums roll and 2 hungry lions appear in the center of the amphitheater. And in the rare event that the cats are just feeling lazy, there's always 10 hyenas waiting to rock 'n roll!

Get to the gladiators and like it or not, the crowd then would roar no louder than they would today. And safe to say if it was purely voluntary you'd have no shortage of Gladiators signing up to battle to the death. They'd surely need a new design for the ticket counter, though.

And when they needed to wash up the blood, the entire Coliseum could be flooded for mock naval battles. Happy is the city which in time of peace thinks of war.




Sound disgusting? Regrettable? Horrific? Look around. Movies and television are dramatic, artificial mock-life-or-death struggles, sublimations of the 'darker' side of our psyche. Life-and-death struggles are core to our existence and because they were--and still are--an everyday part of our lives. It's too early in our history to eradicate this propensity for violence, too. Look at the wars ravaging on across the globe. And look at the people fighting them. Not all of them aren't not enjoying it.

But even in peace there are those who, without war, still have to exercise this primal need to dodge spears. Die Hard 6 sometimes just doesn't cut it. I suppose it's boredom on a life-or-death level. So we ride motorcycles, take chances, fight in MMA, or in bars or on the street, take our aggression out on those closest to us, jump from airplanes, race cars, push ourselves right up against the limits of what our bodies can do with mountain bikes, marathons, triathlons. Civilization isn't easy to adapt to. Coliseums were therapy. A place for people to witness (and participate in) the experiential hazards and dangers that we're still hardwired--and thirsty--for.