SCENIC RAILWAYS (photos)
MONTAGNANA (photos)

It's 5th Of September at quarter to twelve and I,m sitting under the Arcades of MONTAGNANA's central square sipping a nice cool beer.
That's the first more or less pleasant thing of the day.
If Padova provided me with an early surprise wake-up due to the bakery, Este woke me up at half past six with somebody emptying what sounded like a gigantic bottle bank, which I hadn't seen wandering round upon arrival yesterday. As some of you might know, I?m quite partial to bottle banks. I think they are great things and I visit them very regularly, but at this time of the morning I consider they should be left to have their rest.
The plan for the day was to go ?train station hunting?, by which I mean I was going to transfer myself down to the Po River by stopping in all the stations to make some photo reportage of northern Italian small stations. I reached Este station at about 9.35 to find out that the train just left at 9.22 and , more importantly, that the next one was to pass through here in about five hours.
Let?s try for a bus, then. Walking I didn?t really fancy, because it was still raining and the way would have been along rather busy roads.
On the way back to the centre of Este, I passed a poster announcing the election of Miss Este on the coming Saturday and wondered whether I shouldn?t stay a bit longer to find out what that was like?
I located the bus station and a timetable, but I have to explain in more detail how you get a bus ticket. I don?t know whether this is particular to these region, or whether I just couldn?t remember from previous visits, but you have to purchase your bus ticket from a licensed tobacco shop (Sali & Tabacchi). This might seem funny this is duly explained on the timetable at the bus stops (for those who care to read the small print and speak Italian). The bus company will even indicate the three closest tobacco shops with their addresses. This is obviously not very useful to the casual traveller, because why should he know where via G. Garibaldi is located in this particular town. So, what you do is head for the nearest Tabacchi sign and push your luck.
And so I did to be told that, no they didn?t actually sell them, but the Bar Perretin, a hundred and fifty metres down the road DID.
(While you do all this, you just pray that the bus didn?t decide to pay his hourly visit to the stop.)
The bar did sell tickets and more importantly had the timetable stating the bus was leaving in about 20 minutes. To be precise, it said 10:49 fF and you just have to presume that fF stand for something nice in this context.
When I first went to the stop there was just one person hanging about, but when I came back, there was quite a gathering, which one has to take as a positive sign. And the bus turned up on time (not on the side of the road I was expecting?.as usual)
So it?s all really straightforward, really, isn't it?
As the bus driver couldn?t explain to me how and when I could travel on to my final destination of today, I decided to have a walk around MONTAGNANA , which is a very pleasant old walled town. With a cathedral of beautiful proportions.
I set up my computer at a table of the main bar on the piazza and started writing a few updates. The train was at about 14.30 so I also had time for a bite of lunch:
Bigoli (that's the worm size fresh spaghetti) with Donkey sauce and rabbit Raost with toasted slices of polenta at a very old trattoria, where mum was in the kitchen in the backyard with cages full of birds everywhere and son was serving.
It took the whole afternoon and three trains to make it to OSTAGLIO (about 15km), where I was supposed to check into a hotel arranged for me by the CENTRALE gang in Este. I have to admit that net-working has it's limits and I skipped this hotel, because it was bang on the main road with an uninterrupted caravanserai of noisy and smelly lorries: both ways. And it looked expensive.
I walked back into the tiny town and booked into the other available lodgings: a sort of grotty skyscraper that was completely at odds with the rest of the place. It looked a bit like Beyrouth on telly back in the 80's.

But it was very nice and clean rooms, reasonable and very nice owners that provided me with a light dinner of fruit and raw ham that night and organised my transport to the river next morning.

CIOE (has hockney ever been here panoramics)



What else: the photos of the bar, are at the railway stop of I can't remember what railway station, where I had a beer with a guy hanging around, looking for work, which he lost when he had a heart transplant. He was in engineering and asked what sort of companies there were in Switzerland and whether I had their telephone numbers?..it would have been great to plug in the computer and give him some help?..but, no line available!!