You Get What You Pay For

Friday. September 19, 2014

     Knowing the Scots decisively rejected independence in yesterday's vote, I can't help thinking that for all the polls said the Scots would break away, their legendary thriftiness caused many to conclude the game of independence wasn't worth the candle.  There's no "free ride" would be another way of putting it.

      Sayings about the relationship between offer and exchange are on my mind this morning, the start of my first full day in San Remo.  I drove out of Grasse, after two lovely days there, stopping at the Villa Ephrussi-Rothschild and Gardens in Saint Jean-Cap Ferrat around lunch time.  The villa that Beatrice Ephrussi-Rothschild created is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen, located on one of the most beautiful places on earth, a peak overlooking the harbor of Saint Jean-Cap Ferrat.

     Beatrice beat out Emperor Leopold I, king of the Belgians for the property.  He ended up building his villa on Cap Ferrat elsewhere: a waterside villa, which is no museum, but a private residence.  (The Rolling Stones recorded "Exile On Main Street" there, living as tax exiles.)  Beatrice, on the other hand, willed her villa and gardens to France.  Her taste for the exquisite furniture of the ancient régime is set off against the villa's enormous sunlit windows, looking out onto the Mediterranean and Cap Ferrat.  The gardens --Spanish, French, Florentine, Japanese, Provençal and others-- are laid out along the edge of the peak on which the villa was built, the grouping of house, gardens and outbuildings  shaped like Manhattan Island, longer than it is wide.  My third visit yesterday was as delightful as the first, and a lovely goodbye to France for the week.

     Italy has been a bit of a let down.  Bordighera, which I thought must be lovely, as Monet painted so many lovely landscapes there, seems to have lost the charm that drew the painter.  The main street I drove past was hemmed in with cheap stores, one side blocking the view to the ocean, the only sign of the sea signs nailed to the alleys off the main street  --A Mare. 

     San Remo is not the elegant resort I thought it would be, but a town of 57,000 people, dirty, noisy and chaotic.  I am housed in the warren of streets that make up the old town, La Pigna.  My airbnb hostess, Anna Cuneo, lives a few houses away and has been welcoming, her sun Yari helping me up the old steps of the cobbled street with my suitcase, Anna making every effort to set me up comfortably.  Coincidentally, a middle-aged Australian couple from Melbourne, Michael and Wendy, are staying in Anna's other airbnb apartment in the same building.  I am in a tiny studio in this casbah, my bed up a flight of vertiginous steps, the bath up another four on the other side of the kitchen.  It is lightless, as the ground floor window looks out onto the covered street, and the shutters are drawn for privacy.

     As no cars can traverse this network of streets, I have parked my car in a garage at 18 Euros a day.  This seems to me to be a wise decision, as looking at the locks on my front door and the gate that leads to it precautions must be taken. To underscore the point, Yari made a point of telling me to always lock the gate from the inside when I came in.

     "Is it unsafe here?" I had to ask him as he fiddled with the gate.

      "No.  --But this is Italy: It's safe, until it's unsafe."

       At sixty-five dollars a night, you get what you pay for, even on airbnb, I am concluding.

       I came here to explore a 19th century resort that attracted the nobility of Europe and the rich.  Alfred Nobel built a villa here, there is a casino and a seaside promenade.  I have also learned that nearby begins the path uphill to the Santuario Madonna della Costa, which has magnificent views of Old San Remo's gardens.

        I brought a beach chair with me, thinking I would be able to luxuriate on a quiet beach and spend my San Remesque holiday reading and luxuriating.  Perhaps not.  Did someone say something about "the romance of travel"?