11. The hills are alive with the sound of...

As we reach up into the hills of the Apennines, today’s sunglasses would reflect the need for higher altitude production and would be a mountainesque-type. However, technology and my abilities aren’t coinciding today, so you’ll have to imagine some kind of Sir Edmund Hillary affair with icicles forming on them and the like. But let’s move on from my inabilities.

So here we are in Benevento, far, far away. To be honest, the only things I knew about this place were gathered from the Lonely Planet guide book – a sometimes helpful and oftentimes dubious source of information. Experienced users of the guide will no doubt be used to reading between the lines when it describes a particular location. The Lonely Planet guide says:

“Despite the ring of drab modern housing that announces Benevento, the city, nestled in the green hills, boasts a lovely city peppered with remnants of its ancient past”

Reading between the lines, you get:

“It’s far away and difficult to negotiate without private transport. There are a few old city walls which haven’t been concreted over”

Lonely Planet goes onto say:

“The town was heavily bombed in WWII and the Romanesque cathedral had to be largely rebuilt”

Translate this into:

“All the old stuff has been destroyed, but there’s some new concrete stuff where the old used to be.”

The final line in the ever helpful guide tells me:

“The main church adjoins what was once an abbey but now houses a collection of 1st century remnants dedicated to the goddess Isis.”

Which means:

“There’s a church with a small museum which has some broken pottery plates in it.”

OK. That’s Benevento. But, to be fair, the surrounding hills are particularly picturesque, as can be seen and there’s an old Napoleonic arch, celebrating Italy’s invasion (is that right?). It may have taken 1 ½ hours to get here by train from Naples (although it wasn’t travelling very fast in case it might’ve hit something) but once you are here, the relief from the pollution of Naples is significant - I no longer feel as though I have to cough up the burnt rubbish I breathe when I stroll through the town – surely a boon.

And while I was thinking that nothing could happen here, just last night while taking a pre-bed stroll, I literally happened across an annual religious festival, complete with a huge array of monks, nuns and even a bishop or possibly a cardinal – tough to tell, although he was looking particularly pious. Either way, it’s certainly the greatest number of monks and nuns I’ve ever seen in a single place; there were monks in black, grey, white and brown and if that’s not worth writing about then surely nothing is. There’s got to be a joke about monks in there somewhere, but if there is, I’ve yet to work it out – look out in later blogs to see if a less drunken mind can piece a one together... Anyway, loads of folk were genuflecting before him but, not wishing to betray my British roots, I just took pictures of the spectacle.

Not sure what was going on, I asked the teacher liaison at today’s school. She wasn’t sure either. Apparently this kind of religious thing happens each year. She tells me she’s not very religious. And being Italian as well.

This information was about the most I got from the liaison (Marie) all day. She seemed to specialise in not saying very much, which doesn’t bode well for her students taking higher grades, where there have to converse readily with me. In a rare treat, this week, I’m being picked up each morning from the hotel to travel for 20 minutes buy car to a village on the side of a mountain. The views are tremendous, but the small talk leaves much to be desired.

As you can imagine, spending 20 minutes in a car requires some sort of conversation, especially from someone like me, and so I thought I’d start with a conversational gambit about the weather:

Ben: It’s a lovely day today!
Marie: Yes. [stop]

Waiting for more and getting nothing, I thought I’d try again, this time being more complimentary:

Ben: The countryside here is beautiful!
Marie: Yes, it is. [stop]

Enduring a few more minutes’ silence, I thought I’d try one more time, this time being a little more specific, trying to indicate particular interest and therefore particular comment about the local environment:

Ben: It seems to be quite agricultural round here...
Marie: Yes. [stop]

There were a few more attempts like this that also failed and also on the journey back to Benevento with equal success, or rather lack of it. There’s bound to be an ‘in’ somewhere, which will generate conversation but I have clearly yet to find it. This has no become my challenge to be overcome. I’ve three more days or journeys there are back again (totalling 120 minutes) and I feel I must be able to strike up a conversation somehow. I’m sure it’s never this difficult when I’m drunk and getting a dodgy minicab back from central London.

So, this is Benevento. There’s actually more to write about but as time is limited, that’s all for today’s instalment. Look out for some more tomorrow!