Castle in the clouds

Yesterday morning in Bergamo, I hiked to the top of the hill to see the old castle high above the town. It was quite a walk—longer than I had expected—and I had to be back to the hotel by 9.20 for Michael and the kids to call before their bedtime. I made it to the castle by 8.30, huffing and puffing from the climb. Alas, the castle opened at 9. I decided not to wait the 30 minutes and miss the call with the family, so trudged down again, disappointed.

Today, in Bellagio, I was not to be dissuaded from my pursuit of a real life (or, er, ruined) castle. The guide book had warned about the climb, and I had checked the hours, so I was ready to go. Up up up I went in the pouring rain. Clearly Italians don’t worry about lawsuits coming from falls on public thoroughfares, or maybe it’s just common sense that you take your life into your own hands when you climb up slippery ancient cobble stone paths.

The path was unmarked and totally empty. As I have had some history of tromping off briskly in the wrong direction on this trip, I had some moments of doubt about whether I was even headed toward anything good, but hey, there was not a soul to ask and it was just me and my calf muscles to consult about it, so up I went.

An aside about traveling alone. I know that there are lots of single people who travel alone routinely, and who are used to the rhythms and loveliness and pain of solo travel. I, who have been with Michael since I was 17, have little experience of what it’s like to backpack alone through Europe or to sit alone at a nice restaurant or to sleep in single beds. I’ve been a mom these last 10 years, and so I tend to know more about what it’s like to ask for children’s menus and mediate arguments about who is pushing whom in the bed next to me. This is a different kind of experience.

I love travelling with Michael and I love travelling with the whole family (and even with other peoples’ families as we discovered with Carolyn and Jim on the South Island). But it turns out I also love travelling alone. I am getting to understand my rhythms, understand exactly what I want and how I like to do things. The thing I like best is that I can be a little bolder, a little more experimental, because it won’t hurt anyone if I really mess up. I can get lost for longer, can turn down streets because they’re interesting and not because I think I know where I’m going, and can change on a dime, deciding to hop on that ferry and not the next one because actually I’m really wet and cold and who wants to walk another block in this little village anyway.

It was because I was alone that I could go and visit the castle. The climb was longer and steeper than I had imagined, and I, who had layered up fearing the cold, was shedding layers in the cold rain half way to the top. The path wove through trees and, more rarely, open spaces with knee high grasses that smelled fresh and green and sometimes faintly of onions. The only sounds were the soft patter of the rain on the leaves and the harder staccato thump of rain on my new umbrella.

Nearly at the top (I hoped), I stopped in at a tiny pottery shop and agonized over whether to buy myself a piece for my birthday. I chatted with the potter in her halting English and decided to buy a present for my mother instead (I think she’ll have a hard time returning this one!). As I was leaving, the potter made a dreadful announcement, “The castle is closed today” (pronouncing every letter, casTle and closED).

“It’s closed?” I asked in disbelief. I had checked the hours! I had walked all the way here!

“There is no roof and so it is closed in the rain so that people do not get wet.”

I looked down at me, dripping quietly on the cobblestone path. Very considerate of the Italian castle minders to not want me to get wet. I asked if I could get closer than this, could get a glimpse of it. Yes, she told me, I could get to the gate. So off I went to the closED casTle.

At nearly the top of the hill I stopped to look at a tiny cemetery, outside a tiny church. Here, so high on the hill, very few people lived or worshiped or died. Chilly again after the shop, I paused in the tiny vestibule to rerobe, then pushed open the door. The church smelt of furniture polish and burning candles. It was dark and lovely, much more ornate than I’d have guessed, with only tiny windows and no lights. I stood there, in this church built in the 1440s, decades before Columbus sailed to America, generations before Cook sailed around the world. People had worshiped and prayed and been christened, married, and mourned in this tiny space for half a millennium. Zowie.

I wandered up the hill to see some part of the ruins of the castle and to imagine the castle dwellers coming down these cobblestone paths on a Sunday morning and praying at this chapel (although the ancient castle predated the old chapel by at least 500 years--who knew how long it was occupied) .

I got to the top and there it was, ruined castle. I walked through the ghost town of a ticket centre: closed café, closed gift shop, only an orange cat watching me from the ticket booth. I passed through the deserted entry way, stepping over a couple of little children’s toys left behind—a toy car, a brightly coloured toy lizard—and made my way to the castle.

Talk about alone. The castle and I were shrouded in mist together in the often-pouring rain. I wandered along the outside of it, scrambling up the hill through high grasses that soaked my shoes and pants all the way past the knee. I tried to take pictures of the swirling clouds over the lake far below, but ended up with just grey fog. I walked through a stand of young olive trees and old palm trees. What was planted here a thousand years ago when the castle was built? I clambered up mounds to peer through the slits in the castle walls to look at the inside, crumbled thick stone walls climbing with ivy. I considered scaling the gate and getting inside, and pondered a week in Italian jails.

My dad tells stories of castles in Ireland and I’ve written a children’s book that’s set in a ghostly castle, but this was my first time with my hands on castle rock, my body taking in the scale and shape of them (much smaller than I’d have guessed, with far thicker walls). Finally sated, I took my soaking self and squishing shoes, and made my way back to the gate. There, eerily, I noticed that one of the children’s toys—the plastic lizard—was now gone. I called out to see if there was someone there, someone I might bribe to open the gate, but no one. Just slightly nervous now, I walked down the silent path towards the village, feeling eyes watching me from somewhere just out of sight.

On the way down I passed several groups of North Americans, and I gave them the bad news, each had come too far to go back, so up they went to the closED casTle. I warned them that I thought someone was up there, but that I hadn’t seen that person, and I made my way down down down the slippery hill.

And then, rounding a bend, I saw it, the plastic lizard right there in my path. I reached down to pick it up, and just as my fingers were about to grab it, it raced away. I squealed outloud in the pouring Italian rain, me and my ghostly non-plastic lizard. I slipped and slid down the cobblestone path laughing at myself the whole way down.

(Grey pictures today: of the little village of Varenna and the castle at the top of the hill shrouded in mist; the chapel, the castle, the lovely streets of Bellagio, a nearby fishing village that has been in constant use since Roman times, and, for good measure, my lizard friend.)