Anniversario in Bellagio

Lovely Lake Como

Trofie Wife is frantically trying to catch up with blog posts before the calendar catches up with her, and the events herein described become a year old (almost doesn’t count!).

With our first marriage anniversary closing in, Martello and I decided to use the occasion to take a nice weekend trip, this time treating ourselves to the independence (though often when dealing with parking it can be imprisonment) provided by a car. Since neither of us drives stick and most European cars are outfitted with these tricky tools, we had to pay a premium for an automatic. We got some extra vroom vroom for our buck, though it presented itself in miniscule form. We got 36 hours with a Smart car!

Trofie Wife has had a vehicular crush on Smart cars since she first saw them cruising through the streets of Manhattan (actually probably before that, maybe on another European visit or in a magazine). Given Trofie Wife’s short stature it seemed like a match made in heaven, though there was no way on Earth that I planned to commandeer the vehicle (I don’t drive in this country—the roads are way too curvy and jagged and the drivers make New York cabbies seem like stalwarts of safety). Yet riding along en Smart on the autostrada en route to the Lakes sadly demonstrated that a Smart car would never become a permanent addition to our assets. You can feel the car move and shake as other vehicles whirl by you—clearly not a good sign.

Some of us are excited that we are the same size of the car!

And others of us like to burst that bubble by pointing out how much bigger than the car we are!

We arrived in Bellagio on Saturday afternoon, just early enough to enjoy some strolling and gorgeous lakeside views of the sunset. While our hotel room resembled a Manhattan SRO circa 1985, we had a lovely dinner, enjoying a red blend, Valcalepio (not to be confused with the Veneto's Valpolicella), that’s native to nearby Bergamo. The following day we loaded the little car onto the ferry to Varenna (between this trip and our sojourn up this way in December 2008, we can safely say that we've seen Lake Como from every possible angle). Varenna's also a lovely little town, and we enjoyed walking around and lazing on the shore—it was surprisingly warm enough that bathing suits would have been proper attire, had we packed them. All in all, not a bad way to celebrate 1 year in Italy and 8 years together (the whole wedding anniversary thing as a method of counting a relationship’s length always strikes me as a little odd, since said relationship did not begin at the altar—unless of course you had a really wild night in Vegas!).

To make the celebration even grander, the universe granted me and all womankind the ultimate present at the Autogrill stop on the way home—there was a line for the men’s room!

The one-handed Martello snap, giving professional photographers everywhere a run for their money.

Baci e gelato,
Martello e Trofie Wife