In Montagna, part one

If you ask Italians (or maybe it's just Emiliani, I'm not sure) about their weekend plans, they will frequently tell you that they're going "in montagna". I never really understood this, and I also never really understood the point of the question "do you prefer the mountains or the sea?" with regards to vacationing, because the area in America where I grew up is pretty similar to what some Italians mean when they say "mountains". (They seem to use "montagna" to refer to both actual mountains (e.g. the Dolomiti) and just kind of hilly areas (e.g. the parts of the province of Reggio near to the Appennini, where it isn't quite so flat). I grew up in a kind of hilly, forest-y area, and running around in the trees and fresh air was an every-day-after-school kind of thing, not a take-all-your-camping-stuff-up-to-the-mountains kind of thing. So I've always said "sea" in answer to the preference question, and never really gave the "montagna" or even the very possessive "nostre colline" (hills) any further thought.

I don't even have a very specific idea of what it is that Italians do up there in the mountains. Have picnics? (Probably not - I can't imagine eating out of doors and not at a table would be considered good for digestion.) Wear fancy Moncler* jackets and sip mulled wine while watching the snow fall? Play some sort of vertically-oriented soccer? I do know that some of them go hunting, and others go mushroom picking, but surely not all of them? And not all year round? Boh. I always thought it was too stupid a question to ask anyone. (Probably this is one thing I was actually right about, come to think of it.)

It transpires that some of them go hiking. (Probably this was obvious, but since when have I ever been observant enough for the obvious?) Adorably, they call it going "camminare" (walking), as in "io cammino da quando avevo 10 anni" - I've been walking (hiking) since I was 10.

And this is how I was introduced to it. Or, should I say, to the official version. (In my backyard, hiking involved grabbing a granola bar and some water and seeing if you've got your shoes tied, and then wandering down the hill and up the other hill and trying not to get wet in the river, and if you come out the other side of the forest in a part of town you know, so much the better! If not, just come back the way you came. In retrospect, I have no idea how this was considered safe, unless the forest is actually a lot smaller than I thought and you couldn't possibly have come out wrong... hm... something to ask the parents...)

Anyway, my friend and I are sitting in a cafe in Reggio enjoying a delightful insalata di farro and catching one fine Sunday when she remembers that she had something cool to tell me. It is that she has discovered a hiking group through some other friends of hers, and that they are planning a very cool weekend trip to Portovenere to hike around the island opposite (name: Palmaria) in the moonilght and then another hike to Riomaggiore the next morning. I nod. Portovenere, the beginning of the Cinque Terre (where I have somehow never been yet) and some hiking around an island thrown in? Yes. Good plan.

"So, d'you want to do it?" she asks.

"Yeah, why not?" I say.

We go to get some more information in the hiking shop sponsoring the trip.

The man is speaking dialect, which makes things tricky, but I somehow more or less manage to grasp that we will need hiking shoes. I can't tell if he is just trying to sell us hiking shoes or if we will really need hiking shoes, but whatever. Hiking shoes are probably good to have, and also they can double as snow boots. Win. We allow him to plop us down onto benches and start putting enormous boots onto our feet. (Note to women who wish they had dainty feet: there is nothing that makes you feel like your feet are small and dainty than looking at them next to huge hiking boots. Just don't look at them once you actually have the shoes on.)

"So, is it a difficult hike, then?" I ask casually. I am standing rather precariously on a weird slanty thing which seems to be meant to pitch you forward, flat onto your face, but apparently is really meant to allow you test whether your toes touch the front of the shoes when you're going downhill. Apparently that is not favorable. I am trying to appear carefree and confident, but really I am mostly focused on not falling off the weird slanty thing.

"No, no," the man reassures us, "it'll be easy, even for beginners! The island, for one, is practically flat!" I do not notice that he has not commented on the other part of the hike. The Portovenere to Riomaggiore one. I am not very slick, clearly.

The man hands me a pair of socks that seem thick enough that you practically wouldn't even need actual shoes, and tells me that they will protect my wimpy amateur feet from blisters and moisture and rocks and god knows what else. Excellent.

"Right then, you're all set," he says (I think - he's switched back to dialect, so it's hard to be sure). "Unless... you've got some sort of light, right?" he asks us. My friend and I look at each other. I re-adjust my grip on the huge cardboard box containing my huge new hiking shoes in it.

"Well, a flashlight," she says.

"You sure you don't want a headlamp?" he asks, raising his eyebrows.

"Oh. Um..." I say graciously. It seems my brain is unable to both conceive of myself with a headlamp on and speak coherent Italian at the same time.

"Why - is it better to have a headlamp?" my friend clearly does not have similar difficulties. (I want to be a little defensive and say this might be because she is actually Italian, but really it is probably because I don't actually speak that coherently under normal circumstances anyway...)

"Well," says the man, "yeah, because then you can have both hands free."

We both nod, and say we'll take headlamps as well, and it doesn't occur to me until we're outside of the store to ask why, if the island is so flat and the hike is so easy, we would need both hands free.


*Just fyi I had to google "Moncler" to check that I was spelling it right (it seems like there would be a 't' in there, but apparently not) and the website describes them as French and the quintessence of down jackets. Quintessence is an excellent word, definitely, but.... really? The quintessence of down jackets?