Each year, we take a family vacation to Italy. We usually visit in the summer and use the trip to catch up with family and friends and have our kids spend time with their grandparents. This summer we got away twice, once on a cruise to celebrate a birthday in the Northern Mediterranean, and a family vacation that included about a week in Sardinia. I started sharing my observations from these trips when I was working on an institutional trading desk during the Great Financial Crisis. I was always surprised by how closely these messages were read. Feel welcome to hit delete. What follows is mostly nonsense.

Flying from Rome to Olbia, Sardinia. On our flight the attendant let us know that in her 20-year career, this was her first flight to or from Sardinia that took off and landed on time. Europe’s equivalent of Air Canada flights between YYZ to LGA?

The Airport in Olbia might be the most Italian airport I have ever visited in my life.  When we arrived, stepping off the ramp and turning right would put you in a small waiting area for departing passengers.  Turning left immediately put you into a market where you could acquire fish, cold cuts, cheese, or wine without taking more than twenty steps. Walking through the airport, we saw university students repacking carry-on bags stuffed with nothing but premade meals—care packages straight from their nonninas.

Dinner at Le Terrazze Ritual near Porto Cervo was excellent. A pleasant surprise since the ruined castle is also a dance club and Instagram hot spot. I’m an old curmudgeon (technical term), so I feel uncomfortable when influencers show up and spend hours taking pictures. I feel bad for the service staff that’s trying to get them to order so they can turn their tables. The silver lining was that the meal was fantastic, and hopefully it is many years before I forget how my girls looked that evening.

Cruising. Despite having been on several cruises, I’m not a fan of large cruise ships so a trip on a smaller ship was more my speed. Positively, I do enjoy that cruising allows us to visit a number of cities that it’s unlikely I would visit otherwise.

The French Riviera. Nice is nice! The highlight was getting to spend a weekend with friends from England. I was also pleasantly surprised to find Nice, Saint Tropez and Corsica to be more Italian than I expected; Nice hasn’t been Italian since 1860. I heard and read more Italian while walking the streets of Nice than I did visiting beaches and ports in Sardinia. A highlight was a late lunch at Le Plongeoir, which sits on a rocky spire, overlooking the bay, with excellent food and a diving inspired theme throughout the open-air restaurant. El Caminito in Palma di Mallorca was another favorite.

Cultural Appropriation. One of my favorite scenes from the HBO show The Sopranos is when Pauly, fails to shakedown the twenty-something manager of what looks like a Starbucks for protection money.  The scene ends with Pauly stealing a coffee maker as payback for the appropriation of the Italian culture by the coffee chain. My wife gets upset at the French-ification of Leonardo da Vinci’s name. It was fun to watch her react to statements like Christopher Columbus was French – he was born in Genoa, Italy. Napoleon was born in Ajaccio, Corsica in 1769, the year that Corsica became part of France; a few months earlier and he’d also be Genoese.  

Lightning Round

• Sardinia has some excellent Vermentino white wines. Capichera was one producer that stood out as we wandered into a horizontal tasting over dinner.
• It’s not just water, soda bottles now have caps that stay attached. It’s been three years since we first noticed the water bottles, I think it will take at least two more years before this ‘innovation’ makes its way to North America.
• I might write an entire post on airport and aircraft etiquette; it feels like both are getting worse over time.
• While driving in Sardinia’s undulating and twisty roads the center line seems to be suggestion.
• I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to people smoking on patios. It always reminds me of when airports would paint rectangles on the floor (I’m old) and call it a designated smoking area. A friend commented that this practice was like having a peeing area in a pool.  
• Zombie walking – that slow meandering shuffle while staring at a phone and scrolling mind numbing social media content – seems to be becoming more common. I generally walk with intention, so rather than let it frustrate me, I watch for near misses with street signs, security gates, glass doors, and other objects.  
• I’ve used the automated passport control system in Europe a half dozen times and I’ve generally found it to be a welcome upgrade.  While leaving Rome for Toronto the system wasn’t working, it couldn’t read passports (from anywhere but Japan!) and needed to be rebooted a number of times. What should have taken fifteen minutes took about two hours.
• The audiobooks on my Wish List always seems to be on sale when I travel abroad.  
  • I added brief book reviews of House of Fidelity and Risk and Reward while I was away.
• Should you ever book a week-long trip (in June) that starts in Nice and ends in Barcellona, you may want to check if there are F1 races in Monaco and Barcelona on the bookend weekends ;-)

 

I hope you've enjoyed my nonsense. If you'd like to read observations from previous years, you can find them here. I'm a very guilty vacationer, so I welcome you to reach out to catch up.

I hope summer is treating you well.

All the best.

Delli 416-594-8990

 

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