Bellissima

I’m intimated at the prospect before me: 89 photographs, seven reference illustrations, two videos, and not much time to stitch them all together with a scintillating and seamless narrative. But that never stopped me before, so here goes…

We spent the week in Lake Garda. Technically Lago di Garda in pre-Alpine northern Italy. (I had wanted to say “sub-Alpine,” but apparently the correct term is “pre-Alpine.”) Sherman, fire up Google Earth and show us where Lago di Garda is located.

The tip of that green arrow is just brushing the surface of Italy’s largest lake. You can’t even see the lake from this distance, but you can see the frosted peaks of the Alps arching over that “pre-Alpine” region.

The really unfortunate thing about Lago del Garda is its shape. I don’t generally pay much attention to geographical outlines, but when you’re visiting a country that’s famously familiar as a boot, you pay a little more attention. Here are some interesting satellite pictures filtering images of the lake in pretty ways whose significance escapes me.

You see it too, don’t you? It can’t just be me. And the horrible thing is—no, I’m not joking—the horrible thing is, all the tourist shops in Limone had shelf upon shelf stacked with lemon liqueurs in Garda-shaped bottles, pasta spices in Garda-shaped dispensers, towels and banners and scraves emblazoned with the Garda shape.

(I hope I’m not being too subtle—you do see the ridiculous silhouette of an upside-down elephant’s head, don’t you? Wait a minute—you saw what?)

Here’s a tourist-friendly map that makes it easy to see which cities and villages are where around the lake. We were in the happy little burg of Limone sul Garda, located on the upper left of the. . . er, trunk.

Here’s another map showing the same basic region—but I got this map by zooming in on the Google satellite image from above, so here we can see the big green arrow at actual size in the middle of the lake.

The lake, by the way, is divided between three provinces, but on account of the peculiar Italian geography I was never able to get a satisfactory explanation as to which three. Sniff around the web all you like, you will never see two maps with the same information. Venice, Lombardy, Trentino, and Brescia are among the most commonly cited.

We were all up at about 0215 the morning of our flight to Italy. We had to be at the airport by 0400 because the flight was supposed to leave at 0600. Everyone told us we had to be at the airport two hours before the flight. Nobody told us the check-in counter wouldn’t open until 430. So, planning ahead, we got there at 340 or so and had the pleasure of standing in a motionless line for fifty minutes with an excited three-year-old. It was our unusual good fortune that this marked the low point of our whole trip: it was the only dour moment we had.

Molli Malou had been looking forward to the taxi ride to the airport because Garfield: The Movie has a scene in which Garfield (Bill Murray) says demurely, “Oh, Taxi!” while hailing a bus. Molli Malou finds this inexplicably hilarious and is always rewinding to watch the scene over and over again. In the event, however, she was surprisingly unthrilled by our taxi ride even though her mother and I kept saying (demurely), “Oh, taxi!”

“It’s not a taxi,” she lamented, “It’s a car!”

She would come back with a variation on this line in Venice, when she really did exclaim of our gondola, which we had tried to explain as a kind of floating taxi, “it’s not a taxi, it’s a boat!” — but by then we knew she was milking her little joke so we ignored it.

Man, I’m never going to get through this thing.

About 90 minutes into our flight the Alps became visible below us. I was thrilled. I’m not being any of those things people always think I’m being when I express genuine enthusiasm (eg, cynical, sarcastic, ingenuous). I mean I was really thrilled. I took about a dozen pictures, but none of them even hint at the grandeur of those mountains and the historical and literary associations they carry for me.

See? I mean, how disappointing was that? Looking down on them they were anything but. They were a majestic display of the awesome majesticness of. . . well, they were something to see.

The “60-90” minute bus ride from Breschia International Airport (a terminal about the size of your average 7-Eleven, squatting beside two narrow strips of runway in the middle of an overgrown meadow) was our first experience with Italian chronography, which is every bit as peculiar as Italian geography. It was a three-and-a-half-our ride, when all was said and done, and we were assured every twenty minutes for the last two hours that it would really just be another twenty minutes. Trine has calculated the Italian minute at about four standard minutes: I worked it out to about five. Trine had a calculator handy so she may have been closer to the mark.

Molli Malou didn’t sleep a wink on the bus.

Her father tried, but as the pre-Alpine mountains of the Lago du Garda region opened up around us, he just couldn’t stop sitting up and taking pictures every few moments. (When I speak of time for the rest of this post I’ll be using standard rather than Italian measurements unless specifically noted otherwise.)

Here’s the closest I came to capturing Molli Malou’s sheer exuberance after we finally got to the hotel, checked in, changed clothes, and meandered the 100 (standard) meters down to the waterfront.

What’s to be so exuberant about? Here’s a glance northward from where we were standing on the beach.

For a sense of the view we were dealing with, here are a series of pictures that represent an interstitial pan (that I won’t bother instersticing because it simply wouldn’t fit in this narrow little blog) of the panorama from our hotel room terrace. The pictures pan from north-northeast to east-southeast.

Molli Malou was not insensible to the view.

Our hotel, the 4-star Hotel Berna (5-stars in the Italian ranking system, honestly), was part of a four- or five- hotel complex owned and operated by the same group, situated about half a kilometer (or fifty Italian meters) south of the bustling urban center of Limone sul Garda. It would be about a five-minute walk (a mere Italian momentito) for adults unaccompanied by a three-year-old: it generally took us about fifteen or twenty.

Here’s the town as you approach from our spot up the road.

The waterfront is spectacular and there are plenty of pictures of it below, but on our first visit we plunged up into the hinterlands of Limone: the narrow alleys and virtual canyons that twisted and wound their way up the mountainside.

I would defy anyone to find a single expanse of horizontal road anywhere west of the lakefront.

This shot looks nearly horizontal, but that’s only because Trine is holding the camera at an angle.

Here’s a more representative shot.

If the curves and rises and drops weren’t enough to throw off your bearings, the city was also laid out with narrow, stone-sided chasms that one could only hope led somewhere good. Mysterious doors were appeared now and then, always locked, sometimes sealed. Stairways led abruptly nowhere. It was like strolling through an Escher drawing.

Here you see Molli Malou, exasperated by her disorientation, made so claustrophobic by the unrelenting walls that she’s finally trying to climb out of the labyrinth altogether.

You’ll notice there haven’t been any vehicles in any of these shots. That’s not because there weren’t any. It’s because when they came, your first and only thought was to throw yourself immediately against the nearest wall and flatten yourself into it for fear of becoming roadkill. The streets were constantly aroar with mopeds, scooters, and little three-wheeled trucks that seemed specifically designed for navigating the narrow, winding little lanes. And all of these vehicles were driven by murderous drunken misanthropes.

We made it back to our hotel alive and were rewarded the following morning with a sunrise that could have justified nearly anything. (And probably has: Lago dela Garda was apparently a favored piece of real estate to Napoleon and Mussolini, among others.)

The flora and fauna didn’t seem that different from what you’d find in L.A. In fact, every now and then I got a rush of deja-vu— Italian isn’t all that different from Spanish, assuming you don’t speak either language reliably. It was only the lack of taco shacks, mariachi bands, and low-riders that brought me back. For what it’s worth, the bits of Italian television we caught would have been quite at home on Telemundo.

But I was talking about flora and fauna. With respect to the former, Molli Malou was thrilled by all the reptiles sunning themselves on every exposed surface in the glare of the midday sun. She saw her first wild lizard (gecko? salamander?) within a few moments of our arrival, and kept a keen eye out for them from that point forward.

As exciting as the lizards may have been, she was most thrilled by all the spaghetti. You may remember her first favorite food was pasta with pesto, but her love affair with Italian cuisine has waned since then. At least we’d thought it had waned: we knew she still liked pasta but had no idea of the extent of her enthusiasm. Given free reign to select her lunch every day, she went for the spaghets every time.

She had it for lunch every single day except our last day, when she insisted perversely on a hamburger with fries. Do not order hamburger with fries in Italy. Strike that: order the fries, but pass on the burger, unless you’re in the market for a pair of hockey pucks squatting naked on a plate.

I’d been talking about the flora and fauna. There were lemon trees everywhere but “Limone sul Garda” isn’t named for the ubiquitous citrus fruits. We were told it comes from the Latin word for “border,” although no one told us what Limone sul Garda (“the border on Garda,” by that reading) was bordering, other than a lake and a mountain. In which case every town around the northern end of the lake ought to have been called Limone. . .

Anyway, you couldn’t swing a lizard without knocking a few lemons from their boughs, although most of the fruits were so young and green during our visit they looked more like limes. Molli Malou loved it and we had to constantly remind her not to yank the lowest-hanging lemons from the trees. “They’re not grown up yet,” we explained. “They need time to grow up, like Molli Malou.”

Her perplexity was interesting. It’ll be fun to see how that lesson comes back to bite us in the ass.

Olive trees were also abundant, though they tended to be planted in clusters, even in parks. They’re ugly, scruffy looking trees, but for some reason I found them very appealling. Like the lemons, the olives clearly weren’t ripe yet—none of them had even begun to sprout pimentos—but they were certainly visible.

I tried to get an artsy shot of Trine through some olive boughs:

Then I gave up and went straight for the olives.

Italy is one of those Old World siesta countries. Maybe not so much in her big cities, but out in the sticks on an August afternoon when the sun is shining (as it reportedly always does despite its having neglected to do so on two of the seven days of our trip) —in such heat, under such a blazing furnace of a sky, siesta remains a very rational approach to a very formidable climate.

As tourists, rationality was the least of our concerns and we had no intention of honoring the quaint and unproductive custom. On the first full day of our visit, however, we were so wiped out after lunch that siesta imposed itself against our will. As you can see here, the strongest will gave out first.

Early Tuesday morning—too early, really, given that we were on vacation and not at boot camp—we boarded a bus that took us up the lake and loaded us into another bus that was would take us to Venice. Instead of swooping down the eastern shore of the lake down to the highway, the way we’d come from the airport, this bus nosed north into the mountains straight out of Riva del Garda, the northernmost city on the lake. We were advised by our guide to get pictures of Riva as it dropped away behind us, and I followed orders.

A couple of hours later. . .

Now hold on a second. Let’s get my boy Sherman back out here for some orientation. Here’s our green arrow again, pointing straight down into San Marcos square in the heart of Venice.

Zooming in a little closer, you can see the Gulf of Venice and what a fabulous mostly natural barrier it presents against the Adriatic (the arrow is still zeroed in on San Marcos square).

And lastly a drawing from sometime in the last 11-1200 years to give a sense of how the islands within the lagoon are laid out (or how they appear if you’re a fish-eyed halfwit with no sense of proportion). You can’t see Elton John’s honeymoon house in this drawing, but since I didn’t get a picture of the place anyway I’ll assume that won’t cause any confusion.

The tour guide spent the entire bus trip giving us the history of Venice in two languages, alternating between English and Danish (there were a bunch of British as well as Danish travelers on the packed excursion bus). For those of us who understood both languages it was a double whammy: the same unfunny jokes, the same wry asides, the same historical recitatives—twice.

What did we learn? Plenty. But why bore you about it here? You’re on the web. Look it up.

All that chatter was enough to get Molli Malou pretty intrigued. Up to this point she’d only heard of Venice as the city where the streets were made of water. I don’t think she’d believed a word of it. But on the mainland side of the lagoon we boarded a ferry and were soon sloshing through the placid waters toward Venice proper.

I think it would be safe to describe her reaction as awe.

. . .tinged with a little suspicion.

Of course I took a million shots as we sailed across the lagoon and through the little archipelago, and some of them are very nice. Here’s one, and we’ll leave it at that.

We made landfall at one of the many piers fronting the lagoon and no sooner disembarked than we realized we’d made a catastrophic error: we hadn’t put on any lotion, and the Venetian sun was absolutely scorching, reflecting as it was off the water and white stone. Our first order of business in Venice was going to have to be finding a store with some lotion, and that proved to be an exciting little challenge—mostly because we hadn’t yet mastered the art of converting from Italian to standard measurements, or become accustomed to the peculiar Italian compass.

I took a few shots as we passed through San Marcos Square, or San Marcos Place, or whatever it’s called. The tour guide had told us Venice had more pigeons than people, a unique distinction among the major metropolitan areas of the world, and I have no cause to doubt him. (Incidentalyl, the reason the guide had done so much talking on the bus was because it’s actually illegal to conduct tours of Venice unless you’re educated and trained as a guide in one of the city’s own institutions, then officially licensed. He was reduced to pantomime once we entered the city limits.)

I kept the camera out as we hustled our sizzling flesh through the winding alleys. . .

On my very first visit to Denmark I’d bought my parents what I thought were some playful Danish-design egg-cups. Later it turned out they were playful Italian-design egg-cups. Apparently they’re still popular and just as stylish as ever.

You just cannot walk from point A to point B in Venice. And I’m not saying that because half the streets are made of water, but because it is physically impossible to move about without being struck half numb but the sheer extraordariness of the place every few yards.

What you’re seeing here is nothing, absolutely nothing: these are just streets, and taxis, and cars, and intersections. We’re just walking around looking for a place to buy sun lotion, and this is what we’re seeing!

I don’t think I took any shots of Molli Malou running wild through the alleys of Chicago. But in Venice I took gobs.

And she didn’t even have to be running! Just standing there against some ancient, weathered wall. . .

Eventually we found our lotion, lathered ourselves completely, then caught a little snack at some crappy little pizza joint buried in the bowels of the city that had the gumption to charge us 25 euros, or nearly forty dollars, for a small pizza and three soft drinks. We swiftly returned to San Marcos Square, where Molli Malou resumed her assault on all things winged.

The pigeons were actually Molli Malou’s favorite part of Venice, if not all of Italy. They’re what she’ll remember. Whatever we did, whatever we gawped at, whatever astonishing spectacles presented themselves to our overawed senses, Molli Malou would tug urgently at our shirts and beg to go back to the pigeons.

She was surprisingly brave with them.

Here I’m feeding a few from my hand and it’s almost more than she can handle. If you click on the picture, you can download a video of the moment.

After our second tour of the pigeons it was finally time for our gondola ride. Here’s what seemed to be the Grand Central Terminal of the Venice gondoliers.

The following pictures aren’t great, but they’re some of the only ones where we appear as a family so I’m including them anyway.

That’s champagne we’re drinking. The other couple didn’t want any and Trine and I felt it would be a gross injustice to let the bottle run flat. Molli Malou looks like she’s had a few sips herself, but she didn’t. Not whole sips.

The next picture is the Rialto Bridge. It’s phenomenally important. Everyone knows about it, and everyone shoots dozens of pictures of it. I’m sure there’s a place on the web where you can find out why: I myself have no idea. I’m ashamed to admit I sometimes take pictures just because I see other people doing it and I’m afraid I might later find out I missed something really important.

Oh, hell. I went and looked it up anyway. Here.

The tour guide kept pointing out houses to us. It’s a kind of Italian affectation, the notion that every piece of real estate was once the property of some historical figure, legendary hero, or popular YouTube snippet. One of these houses was Mussolini’s house. Or Garibaldi’s. Or Cavour’s. I can’t remember any more. I only recall that it was across the Grand Canal from Casanova’s house, but this is a better picture than the shot of Casanova’s crib so I decided to include it.

The city is very literally steeped in history, and worse, but modernity sometimes leaped out at us from the most surprising places. This surveillance camera—what on earth is there to surveille?

I’m serious… the next picture shows the view down the alley that the video camera is pointing toward. Are they trying to cut down on drunken paddlers? Speeding gondoliers? Or what?

Molli Malou behaved so well on the gondola we chose to reward her with more pigeons.

If you shoot enough pictures, you’re bound to get some outspread wings eventually. I only had to knock off about forty frames to get these two.

From San Marcos Square we made our way around the Doge’s Palace and I was able to get this photograph of Trine and Molli Malou before the Bridge of Sighs—named not for husbands and fathers sighing at their good fortune while their lovely wives and daughters pose before it, but for the sighs of prisoners who’d been sentenced in the palace (right) being walked across the bridge into prison (left).

This isn’t a very good shot of the bridge, but it’s great of mother and child so I don’t care.

I’ve got to speed things up or this thing is never going to end.

We took a lagoon tour that nearly ended in disaster when the motor died just fifteen minutes (a few Italian moments) into the trip. The crew managed to grab hold of a piling and secure us to it, so we had the luxury of bobbing in the blistering sun for half an hour while the crew worked on the engine.

Yeah, that’s them.

They’re digging through their toolbox and you may not think that’s interesting enough to warrant a photograph, even from me. On its own, it wouldn’t be. But the engine work they were doing was back in the stern and the toolbox was up here in the fore “bridge”, and these guys must have run back and forth about eight times to change tools. It clearly never dawned on any of them that the toolbox could be brought aft. It was so representative of Italian efficiency that I had to have that shot.

For those of you don’t remember, I owned a Fiat in Los Angeles. Leased one, anyway. And from my experiences with the precision Italian engineering of that car, I’m guessing this boat was a Fiat.

Eventually another tour boat came and scooped us up, and we left our original vessel bobbing helplessly behind us, the crew finally free to run up and down its length to and from their toolbox without the inconvenience of outstretched limbs and backpacks cluttering the gangway.

The tour went on, but Molli Malou would see no more of Venice.

And since that’s all she saw, that’s all you see. (Actually to make up for lost time the tour boat took us directly to the mainland where we boarded our bus and left, so you’re not missing anything.)

When we got back to Limone, the weather was turning. At first it was just sprinkles now and then, just enough to gloss the ripening fruits with an attractive sheen of raindrops.

It certainly hadn’t yet gotten bad enough that we were going to let ourselves be caught again without lotion. Molli Malou had absorbed some of our Venice anxiety and decided to lotion herself up the next morning.

(I had urged her to pose modestly, and I thought she had, but on closer inspection when I saw the photograph at home I realized a little parental censorship was in line.)

There was a store beside our hotel where we did most of our daily shopping. We bought all our wine and snacks and little knick-knacks there. We bought Molli Malou her Croc knock-offs there. We bought our mineral water and Cola Light there. They sold everything from fresh parmesan to fine wines to leather shoes, fur coats, and alligator handbags. It had a name of its own, but it quickly became “The Don’t Touch Store” for reasons that should require no explanation.

I loved their tee-shirt display.

“I (HEART) AM NOT SAINT.”

I never get over the way English is mangled in Europe. It was very nearly as bad in Italy as it was in the UK.

Toward the end of the day Wednesday the weather really closed in on us.

But we didn’t care: a congratulatory phone-call from Nana and Pop-Pop reminded us that it was our anniversary! Our tenth year together, our fourth year of marriage! A mangled discussion with the concierge that afternoon even led to our being given a bottle of spumante to enjoy on our terrace that evening.

It couldn’t have been a lovelier night even if it had been our anniversary—which was actually the following night.

The rain continued to lash down on us Thursday, much harder than it had Wednesday.

We did nothing to speak of those days: just relaxed, ate, swam in the indoor pool, shopped. On Friday morning the sun was back. . . but for some strange reason, the stream beside our hotel that ran down the mountain to the lake had taken on a strange milkiness over night. That’s not rushing water you see in this shot: it’s just white water. Like flowing cream. I have no idea what could cause such a thing. Lime being brought to the soil’s surface from the rain? Run-off from a dairy up the mountain? Prankish elves?

I’m going to stop trying to maintain a chronological and smoothly flowing narrative. The truth is, I don’t know what night the next picture comes from. Every evening was the same for us: we got Molli Malou down to bed, then settled onto the terrace and shared a bottle of local wine—sometimes a little more—before turning in ourselves. The first few nights we noticed some strange birds buzzing around us. We couldn’t make out what sort of birds they were, on account of the darkness and their swiftness (and, perhaps, the wine). Trine suggested one night that I use the camera and take a zillion pictures to try and isolate one and see what it was. . . we could, after all, delete them immediately if we didn’t get an answer.

The very first picture I took had what appeared to be a little brown blob on the very edge of the frame, but when I zoomed in on the picture in the display it was quite obvious what we were looking at.

It became a kind of sport for us. Every night, usually after the first glass or two of wine (which were rarely in fact the first glass or two on account of the hotel’s liberal plan of endless free wine with dinner), the camera would come out and I’d try and get the Best Bat Shot ever. Weirdly enough, although I got a lot of pretty cool ones, some of them with as many as four bats in frame, none of them ever came out as clearly as the shot above—the very first shot I’d tried.

Although this one’s pretty cool, too. . .

Friday morning we decided to take the ferry up to Riva del Garda, the city at the tip of the—at the end of the elephant’s trunk.

We strolled into Limone proper to catch the ferry.

The ferry trip gave me a nice vantage point on Limone itself, which I’d only previously been able to photograph from land.

Molli Malou was kind enough to take an almost flattering shot of her parents on the boat.

And I tried to return the favor.

Lago di la Garda is apparently one of the world’s premiere windsurfing spots, especially on the northern end of the lake. There were hundreds of windsurfers out as we approached, maybe thousands. It was as impressive as Marblehead Race Week—all those thousands of colored sails cutting across the brilliant blue of the water. Unfortunately I never had the right angle and didn’t have the right lens to get the full herd, but this shot is kind of fun, even if it’s just a few stragglers.

We didn’t know what to do when we got into Riva. We hadn’t come with any particular agenda. Molli Malou wanted to run around a big statue in the middle of the square around the landing, and that seemed reasonable enough to us. It was the closest thing we had to a plan.

It’s a little out of focus and it could have been taken anywhere, but it’s one of my favorite shots of the whole trip:

The next one is a little more localized. (Click the picture for a video!)

Giuseppe Verdi! Joe Green! Did he live here? Visit here? Compose here? Of course he did. They all did. I mentioned this phenomenon before. You can’t walk down a street in Italy without someone telling you that this was the house where Mozart composed his greatest symphony, or that this was the bar that Hemingway drank in at the height of his career, or that this was the spot of turf where Paris Hilton. . . well, whatever. I specifically took this photograph, from some shrubbery in Riva, to remind myself of the scam—and to recommend it to everyone I know. Start telling people Eugene O’Neill lived in your house while he wrote Mourning Becomes Electra, or that Picasso had spent a month sketching the chestnut tree in your backyard, or that Jack Nicholson once rented your basement from the elderly couple that owned the house before you. Repeat it enough and people will believe you, or at least grow weary of doubting you, and eventually you’ll find a way to sell tickets, or get a monument built.

And look at that, we’re already pulling out of Riva on the afternoon ferry back to Limone.

It became strangely urgent for Molli Malou to photograph me on the boat, and this was actually passable enough that I’ll include it. (I like it because it almost looks like I have a tan.)

The scenery from our terrace was lovely, as you’ve seen, but nothing is so lovely it can’t be improved by the hand of man. . . or little girl. . .

Last full day in Italy. The only thing on our itinerary was to buy some shoes, some dried fruit, and some lemon cream liqueur. We made our way into town at a relaxed pace, pausing to cast stones into the lake.

. . .And noticed that the pedal-boats for rental were just 9 euros per hour. With Molli Malou’s eager assent we rented one and pedaled out into the depths. (That’s downtown Limone crouched at the foot of those cliffs in the distance.)

Molli Malou loved being out on the water, although she was a little frustrated that we wouldn’t let her pedal. We did allow her to steer for a while, and consequently spent at least a quarter of our hour making long, slow circles in the middle of Lago da Garda.

I got a shot of our hotel as seen from the water: lower your gaze from the big building on top of the hill in the center of the photo a little down and to the left, and you’ll see its top few stories rising above the pines and cypresses.

But if your eyes are as bad as mine, you’ll appreciate this closeup. Our bedroom is behind the big top window in the yellow wall, and our terrace is just to its left.

Back ashore, Molli Malou frolicked in the sparkling water.

Maybe Molli Malou ordered a hamburger for lunch that day because she knew she’d be getting spaghetti as the pasta dish with her dinner?

Our waitress, Margrethe, was wonderful, and took a strong liking to Molli Malou. Just as we finished dinner the last night, she scooped her off and ran off with her.

She was only joking, but it was disturbing nonetheless how very little Molli Malou seemed to mind the abduction.

But Molli Malou seemed to mind so very little down in Italy.

Was it the climate? The endless spaghetti? The ice cream? The wild lizards? The striking lack of clocks? Or was it merely Emil?

Emil was a fellow Dane of 14 years who was part of our “group.” He was great with all the younger kids and they all worshipped him as some kind of god. Molli Malou was head over heels in love with him, and was even grown up enough to try and hide it: we’d be sitting at dinner working on our salads and Molli Malou would be craning her neck to try and spot him, then act all nonchalant if we mentioned him. Yet the moment he appeared in the dining room (or swaggering toward us in the pool area, or popped up in town, or snuck up on Molli Malou in a hallway)—oh, the joy in her shining eyes! He could do no wrong where she was concerned, and she even once goaded him mercilessly to splash me and whack me with an inflatable crocodile in the pool. When I told her to tell him to stop, she did, but the minute I turned her back she cried out to him, “more! more!”

I don’t know if we would have got her on the plane home if she hadn’t known he was already on it. . .

I showed you my lousy Alpine pics from the way out. Here’s a (slightly) better one from the way home. Please realize that these mountaintops appeared merely a few thousand feet below us, while the narrow valleys at their feet were barely distinguishable.

We were surprised by Morfar at the airport, and he gave us a ride home. Molli Malou fell asleep in the car, and therefore missed the bittersweet sight of our arrival: our happy home, awaiting us patiently beneath the sullen gray sky of a Danish summer. . .

And only now that I’m done do I realize how many additional photos I ought to have included, and how very little video I took, and how many anecdotes I didn’t get around to rattling off.

I haven’t talked about the monumental independence Molli Malou achieved on the trip, running wildly about the hotel on her own, or how the day after we got home she figured out how to work the security lock to the courtyard downstairs, or how she’s suddenly dressing and undressing herself, and has fierce preferences as to what she will and won’t wear, and so much more. . . I haven’t mentioned her proficiency in Italian, how she picked up grazie and prego and ciao, bella—the latter being the words with which virtually everyone in Italy greeted Molli Malou, regardless of circumstance.

But for God’s sake, I’ve been three days editing this thing and I’m exhausted.

Ciao!