Day 4- Wednesday 6-1

Up early to get on the road for Cremona. Donna, Jack and Lynn have a last magnificent Jeanette breakfast… I have… you guessed it! CAFFE DOPPIO!!

We start by staging the suitcases in the hallway at Jeanette’s and I head down the hill to the parking lot to bring the car up to the piazza so we don’t have to carry everything down the 150 steps and the stone ramps which, not thinking very clearly, we didn’t do when we arrived therefore carrying everything UP the stone ramps and 150 steps from the parking lot to the piazza and down the street Jeanette’s. Ugh.

Sean the GPS tries to take us down that same tractor path as yesterday but ha! We saw that coming and he doesn’t say anything else until we get to the point where we head off in the direction of the A1 Autostrada… Now we would normally go a wee bit south to get on the northbound A1 quicker but noooo, not Sean, apparently if your destination is north, you will only go north. So we go through some pretty countryside, again, on some really tiny roads, again, and finally the A1 northbound. (Sean is kind enough to warn us that the route has a “congestion charge”. ?!?!? We all blow our noses and shrug our shoulders and carry on. It turns out it just means the A1 is a toll road. Sean is weird.)

The Renault is a diesel. It has pretty good acceleration, (for a diesel), it is very comfortable and it gets very good mileage. In 3 days, including the drive from Rome to Tuscany, we used about ½ a tank. About half way through the 4 hour drive to Cremona, with a little less than ¼ tank left we pull in to a self serve (no attendant of any kind) station. Easy enough. We find the diesel option, we watch the guy who got there before us put his money in the kiosk thing, get his gas and drive away. We approach the machine. For some unknown reason the machine does not like any of the 3 credit cards we try to use. As we stand there studying the instructions on how to pay cash at this particular machine (WARNING… self serve gas station kiosks are happy to take your cash but they do not give change. If you fill up before you have used up the amount you put in the machine. HA! You just tipped the gas company. Thppt.) a lovely young lady in a bright yellow tiny car pulls in and in very good English (learned in Texas as a Rotary exchange student) asks if we need help and without waiting for the answer proceeds to explain the procedures. We thanked her very much and put 40 Euros in… about 5/8ths of a tank. Good enough for now. Off again.

Sean was pretty accurate and got us to the center of Cremona without incident… mostly. We did end up at the end of a dead end road that we couldn’t turn around in and had to back up about a block (but that wasn’t Sean’s fault really. Then we kind of drove through the middle of the main piazza looking for the street the hotel is on. We ask a couple of people who don’t know and then realize that we are about 100 yards from the front door. There are 3 cafes on the same street as the hotel, including one that belongs to the hotel and they all have tables and chairs set up well into the street… at least half way across. We pull in at the end of the street and walk our bags to the hotel to check in. The girl at the desk gives us a map to find the parking area which is basically at the other end of the street and around the corner… I ask if we can just pull through instead of going around and she says “It’s possible…” I took that for a yes and as Jack and I went to go move the car, one of the bellboys trotted up to go with us and show us where the parking was. (This was good… it was not as simple as the map led us to believe.) Now there were people sitting at some of the tables in these cafes but hey… she said it was possible right?? As we began to inch forward waiters scurried out and moved the outer most tables and chairs in towards their respective doors, someone angled the bikes at one end of the bike rack so they didn’t stick so far into the street and diners stared in disbelief… disapproval… despair… as we motored through their lunches. She was right, it was possible. I think Sean the GPS was too embarrassed to comment.

A quick lunch in the hotel cafe, yup, that one, and off to the Museo del Violino. I went to The Chicago School of Violin Making in the early 1980s. I have wanted to see Cremona for a very long time. Standing in front of a room full of instruments made by the Amatis, Guarneris and Antonio Stradivari was inspiring to say the least. Seeing the very tools that Stradivari used and the templates he made and his sketches and notes was humbling. But…. it was also reassuring. I looked long and hard at those instruments and they were not perfect… they were made by men, not gods, they had quirks and they weren’t, any individual one of them, the distilled perfection of all of them together that has become the goal and definition of what an instrument should be. It was something of an epiphany… I can’t wait to get back into my own shop.

No photos were allowed. Mrmph. except Donna’s iced coffee…

The duomo in Cremona is an odd combination of over the top baroque and dark and ominous. It is large for a town of only 60,000. I have an odd appreciation for annunciations. This one for some reason really appealed to me. (“Do you mind? I’m reading here.”)

Dinner at Ristorante Il Violino (of course). Interesting menu… risotto with asparagus and frog legs? Nope. Pigeon and snails? Nope. King crab gnocchi? YES! Lemon sorbet? YES! Happy? You betcha.