Without a Traceroute

I had originally planned on hitchhiking north out of Italy to Berlin. However, every Italian I discussed the idea with thought it would either take forever or not work at all. Hitchhiking, or “autostop” as it’s known, has a bad reputation and is looked on quite suspiciously in Italy. I gather there were several high-profile hitchhiker murders in the 1970s. Many people suggested I take a train to the Austrian border and hitch from there. However, looking at train tickets, the cost of a train to Austria was almost the same as the price of a flight from Milan to Berlin, so I wussed out and bought a plane ticket instead.

Train along the Italian coast, somewhere between Pisa and Genoa

Monday afternoon I caught the train out of Pisa bound for Milan, changing trains in Genoa. The trenitalia computer kiosk had helpfully sold me an impossible itinerary: my first train arrived in Genoa after the train I was supposed to transfer to had already departed. While killing time waiting for the next train, I chanced upon a used bookstore that had a fairly good English-language selection at cheap prices. I went on a bit of a book-buying binge.

I got JD Salinger’s “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters”/”Seymour: An Introduction” (I read this one already and it kind of sucked), “Sons and Lovers” by DH Lawrence, and “One no, many yeses” by Paul Kingsnorth, on the theory that it would be obliquely relevant to my project. I almost bought a fat history of Garibaldi on the basis that it was only €4 for about 1200 pages, but then decided that buying literature on the Costco principle would likely not make for pleasant reading.

I also played around with a machine that claimed to print stickers from various digital camera media. However, all it did with the xD card from my camera was corrupt the partition table, effectively erasing everything on the card. Thanks, Geneoese train station sticker machine. The lesson: be careful what slot you shove your memory sticks into. Luckily, some Linux hacker had already written “PhotoRec,” an absolutely wonderful application designed specifically to recover digital photos from camera media. It took a couple hours, but worked perfectly, recovering all the .jpg’s and even the .mov’s from the corrupted memory card.

Since my flight was early in the morning, I slept at the Milan-Malpensa airport, which was fine except for being very cold.

Boarding the flight was rather interesting. As previously discussed, the Italians don’t really ever see the need for a line. The Germans, on the other hand, are *exceptional* line-standers. Rivaled in Europe only by the British, who treat proper queue ettiqutte with a reverence reserved in most cultures for national war heroes. The flight looked to be about half Germans and half Italians, and except for segmenting the entire passenger manifest into either an A or B group, it was open boarding. The meant that the Germans for the most part lined up orderly along the wall, and the Italians exploited their northern neighbors’ line-standing impulses to merciless advantage, crowding by, cutting, wandering away from the line and then re-entering it. I saw many a stern disapproving look or head-shake, but nobody broke decorum to actually object. As for me, I decided to split the difference; half-cutting, but then courteously letting several old ladies go in front of me.

Blue skies over a threatened university

After the critical mass, Stefania headed back to Florence, and I went to back to the social center. They were having some sort of special benefit event to pay for the fines levied after a group of antifascist activists disrupted a speech by a right-wing, anti-immigrant Italian politician named Borghezio.

There was a very nice communal dinner that included a pasta course, a meat course, a desert, and an aperitif. I ran into Angelo, one of the guys I’d met at the hackmeeting in Palermo. It turns out he lives in Pisa and studies mathematics at the University of Pisa. He generously volunteered to let me stay with him.
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