Ariano nel Polesine

12/3/10

We drive North again and East towards the coast. For hours after it gets dark we weave our way down narrow roads drenched in fog and smelling of the sea. The headlights refract dull yellow light off the heavy moisture in the air and each turn seems to portend a cliffs edge. We can barely see three feet ahead of the van. Finally we rumble past a heavy gate into a small town and it feels as though we are being swallowed by the creaking, ancient pulse of another time. It is chilly and damp and the fog lies still in the corners of the road. Cigarette smoke is absorbed by the night as we stand outside of the bar and listen to the thrum of the silence around us. An old woman in a long mink coat and a scarf tied under her chin rattles by on a heavy black bicycle and disappears into the fog. 

The owner of the venue lives above the bar with his mother and his grandmother, and he offers us espresso as soon as we step through the door. He is gracious and handsome and says that in the summer they have bands play in the street and that the whole town stays up for days. Luke says the bar reminds him of a British pub and he waxes nostalgic for England and the beer that he made when he worked at a bar in Nottingham. We load in and sound check and before we know it we are seated around a booth in the bar and fresh homemade pasta is paraded out of the kitchen with several bottles of wine, followed by a meat course followed by salad followed by more wine and the mother's and grandmother's insistence that we all keep eating! I tell the owner that Italian hospitality is like American Southern hospitality insofar as the idea that there is nothing that more food cannot fix. 

The whole town seems to turn up for the show and even though everyone talks through the performance they buy a lot of merch and enthuse drunkenly to Kate and I for hours after we play. We sleep upstairs in the grandmother's apartment and are served cappuccinos and chocolate croissants in the damp of the grey morning before we load the van and leave for Switzerland.