Another day, another early morning. Checkout of our apartment is at a painfully early 10:00. Breakfast, on the other hand, turned out to be a lot easier than expected. We went back to Ditta Artigianale caffè because they advertised “breakfast and brunch,” and they offered delicious coffee.
Karine had a cheese, bacon and egg bagel, all three ingredients mixed in a cheesy scrambled egg on top of a bagel, and I had avocado toast topped with shredded turkey (an extra 3€). Both delicious and well executed. Once again confirming that hipsters know their coffee and their food. They even surprised us with what, by Italian standards, was lightning-fast service. We originally budgeted 90 minutes for the whole affair and managed to get breakfast and a second round of cappuccinos within 60 minutes.
The extra time granted to us was the opportunity for a last gelato from yesterday’s discovery, Gelateria Edoardo, with no line in front of the store (an oddity by yesterday’s standard). Gelato for breakfast is a bit of an oddity, but no worse than pancakes when you think of it. Also, for something well-crafted and delicious, the time of day becomes irrelevant to all but the most diet-challenged.
With the line gone, we again got our gelato and ate it in record time. I swear we weren’t trying to win a race or anything, but what we expected to take us all morning ended up leaving us with almost an hour to spare. As any good Italian should do, we plucked ourselves at a terrasse for a “quick” (40 minutes) coffee.
I might be getting a bit capricious about my coffee. After finding two great specialty coffee stores in Florence, I stopped for coffee on Piazza di Santa Maria Novella, the city's central train station. I expected better coffee for a lot less. We ended up with slightly over-extracted coffee at twice the price of a single-origin coffee at our now-favourite coffee places in the city. I should have known what we were in for when we had to confirm three times that by our order of “due caffé” we really wanted two single-shot espressos. Based on the location, it’s unsurprising that they see a vast majority of tourists and very few locals. If you’re going to make Americanized coffee, extraction quality isn’t a big deal for your single-shot espresso. In any case, I’m now even more of a princess when it comes to coffee, and I’ve either disproved the adage I’ve often repeated: “You cannot get bad coffee in Italy,” or I’ve proven that every adage has its exception. I have the rest of the trip to figure out which it is.
The train ride to Monterosso was nothing special. Under social distancing protocols, every other seat is left free on Intercity trains, and Regional trains are limited to 80% capacity. It made the ride less crowded and more comfortable.
As of September 1, the Green Pass is required to travel on Intercity trains. We were controlled twice and had to explain we’re Canadian each time. They also read our vaccination history carefully—a very different approach to what we’ve lived so far. In any case, nobody batted an eye at us being outside the norm, and we were waved through each time without any problems, confirming our choice to come to Italy.
Arriving in Monterosso is familiar to us. We can navigate the village without our phones' maps. Very little has changed. Google Maps remains a trusted friend, with notes on places we’ve been and new ones we want to discover.
First stop is our apartment for the next 3 nights. Our Airbnb host took great care to introduce us to each of her two turtles individually. Not named after famous painters, without any radioactive spill in sight, and without any rats to guide their instructions, they lacked Ninja skills. One of them did break out of its pen and came to inspect us while we were in the courtyard. We dubbed it the guard turtle. Thieves and ne'er-do-wells keep out unless you like your toes bitten by the guard turtle. A promising sign for the heat-seeking travellers if turtles can be kept outside for most of the season.
The carry-on life comes with the need to do regular laundry after all, and that was our first duty coming in. Another occasion to learn more laundry-related Italian words. Not seeing anything related to “delicate,” I went with “Easy Care.” If the laundry machine is to be believed, “Easy Care” translates to “Easy Care” in Italian. What a coincidence! One useless piece of knowledge about laundry in Europe (France and Italy, at least) is that they love hot-water washes. The coolest setting I’ve seen for laundry is 30°C. In a country where electricity is orders of magnitude more expensive than what I’m used to, I would have expected them to take a page from our book and switch to cold-water washing.
With the cleaning duties done, we headed out to Enoteca Da Eliseo. They taught us about Lemon Spritz so many years ago. For the uninitiated, a Lemon Spritz is essentially an Aperol Spritz, but with Aperol replaced by Lemmoncino. An excellent drink popular in the region. We’re so grateful to them for helping us out of our pool of ignorance on the subject that they’ve earned our patronage every time we visit the city.
Our top restaurant spot closed for the day we had to go on an adventure and discover another restaurant in Monterosso. San Martino Gastronomia seemed like the spot to be. It had gastronomy right in the name. Turned out that it managed an average plate of seafood pasta, and the same for a plate of pesto pasta. No starters, no dessert. Wine was passable. We were so disappointed that we ended up at the first open takeaway pizza joint we came across on our way.
Tomorrow is hiking day, with what the weather forecast says should be beautiful weather.