My last batch of trip photos just made it into my Flickr. Starts in [[Colletta]] on Saturday morning and ends on the road from Halifax to Charlottetown last night.

Okay, that wasn’t bad. Although I could do without the precious little glass “muggette.” I don’t want to see my coffee, I want to be teased by its pleasures.

The flight over the Atlantic was uneventful but for the extreme granola quotient of the vegetarian meal; I fail to understand why “vegetarian” must equate to “prefers tasteless sugar-free dessert.” Oh well. Had to get my luggage inspected in Halifax because I checked the olive box, but this only took a minute and they were very nice. The drive home to [[Charlottetown]] took me to the edge of my faculties; fortunately Johnny and Jodi prepared a tasty macaroni and cheese dinner for me. I expect I’ll be up before sunrise hunting for cappuccino.

As I type I’m here at Heathrow waiting for my flight on Air Canada home. Or at least to Halifax, which will be almost home.

When I learned how close Cannes was to Nice yesterday I scuttled my plans to spend the day in Nice and spent the day in Cannes instead. It’s a very pleasant city, similar in esprit to Montpelier (or maybe it’s just like all French cities — my experience is limited here!).

After visiting an Internet café to solve a temporary crisis in the Plazes-o-sphere (you can’t use Plazes by SMS when you enter a new country, it seems, until you use Plazer to establish your new nationality), I had a pain au chocolate, did some shopping, and then, because it’s the kind of thing I do, went to the movies. There was simply too much to the appeal of being able to say “oh yes, I saw that in Cannes” when conversation about The Departed comes up (it’s called Les Infiltrés in France).

The length of the movie (it’s over 2 hours) meant I had to make a quicker dash than expected back to the Nice airport (it’s only about 24km), something made slightly more challenging by the 10,000 other people trying to get out of Cannes after a day of holiday shopping.

But I made it, with plenty of time to spare. No problems returning my car to Alamo (the whole renting-at-Alamo through easyCar experience went very well), the automated British Airways check-in took 15 seconds, and I was the only one going through security. Even the fact that our flight was delayed by 45 minutes worked out, as somehow they “made it all up in the air” and we arrived only 5 minutes late.

The Ibis Hotel at Heathrow was predictably dreadful — dirty, ugly, smoky and with bathroom drains that didn’t. But I was only there overnight, and the bed was comfortable enough. The “Heathrow Security Experience” was, also predictably, awe-inspiring, with lines as long as the eye could see. They’re getting good at it, though, and I was in and through in about 30 minutes.

If all goes according to plan I’ll be back on Canadian soil at 2:00 p.m. today. My only decision now is to whether to check “yes” on the customs form where it says “have you been on a farm in the last 14 days.” Is an olive grove a farm?

I’ve reached the end of my time here in [[Colletta]]. As I type I’m packing things up here in the wee apartment and preparing to walk up the hill for a last cappuccino and to hand the keys back to Massimo before driving down the valley to the autostrada where I’ll head west to Nice, France. From Nice I’ll fly up to London tonight, overnight near Heathrow, and then fly back to Halifax in the morning. If all goes according to plan, I should be back in Charlottetown around supper time tomorrow.

Back in 2002 I read La Dolce Vita, Internet Style, an article in Fast Company magazine about Colletta di Castelbianco, a self-described “medieval hill-top village restored as an internet e-village.”

I was shopping around for a place to teleport with [[Oliver]] and [[Catherine]] for a longer-than-regular vacation where I could work part of the time and vacation part of the time. And because I work “on the Internet,” Colleta’s bandwidth, along with its architecture, its history and its location, was a selling point.

As things turned out, we ended up going to Spain, and then going to France and Colletta got moved to a corner in the back of my mind.

Until this fall.

With Catherine and Oliver heading west to visit family for two weeks, I was faced with the prospect of living by myself for two weeks in [[Charlottetown]] or living by myself for two weeks in Italy. After wrangling with air tickets and my conscience (Catherine gets Ontario, I get the Italian Alps), I decided that one only lives once, the last shirt has no pocket, etc. and I was booked.

As I write I’ve been here in Colletta, living in a little one-bedroom loft apartment called il Nido, for almost two weeks. A good time, in other words, to take a moment and assess how Colletta works in the real world as an “internet e-village” for visitors on a “working vacation” like me.

It’s important to note, to begin, that Colletta is not, in fact, primarily a “holiday community.” At least not in its conception of itself. Colletta is a condominium - a condominium with thirteenth century roots that’s more Carcassonne than Cancun, mind you, but a condominium nonetheless. The fundamental idea of Colletta was to restore the village into a living, breathing, modern-day community — one that “wouldn’t be some hive for home-working hermits, but a proper community,” Fast Company quotes the site architect Giancarlo De Carlo as saying.

In practice it seems that developing a “proper community” like this, especially in the off season, has been easier said than done. Many of the purchasers of the apartments in Colletta have been Italians looking for a holiday home in the mountains; many others are English, Irish, Scandinavians or Americans who only have an opportunity to visit for short stints over the year. So the number of full-time residents of Colletta is, relatively speaking, quite small. What you have, then, in place of a “proper community,” is a mixture of permanent and itinerant residents and vacationers.

From what I’ve been able to glean, at its best the makes for a diverse constantly churning community of interesting people; and at its worst it means that Colletta is home, in the true sense of the word, to only a precious few.

One of the upsides of this arrangement, however, is that many of the units at Colletta are available for rental to people like me.

And Colletta certainly has the whole online rental thing down: Colletta.it, the village website, has more information than you could ever possibly consume about the village, the apartments, the rental process, and the region. Once I decided to book it took only a few minutes to select my unit and dates, enter my details, and send in a deposit online.

And a month later, after flying across the Atlantic to London, then from London to Nice where I rented a car, I found myself speeding along the autostrada as night fell with Colletta as my destination.

While the village is easily reached from either Nice (France) or Genoa (Italy) airports, it’s not exactly a “centrally located” place. After you turn off the highway, you drive along a series of smaller and more rural roads, driving up the Pennavaire valley around twists and turns ever higher, until, after about 20 minutes, Colletta rears up out of nowhere.

While it’s possible to reach the village by bus, I can’t imagine how this would work in practice, as buying anything from bread to laundry soap means driving at least two or three villages down the way. So Colletta residency, permanent or temporary, almost certainly demands that you have a car. And if you’re hesitant about driving on tiny roads up into the mountains, where boisterous Italian drivers will come up behind you and pass on blind curves and sometimes the road narrows to one car-width, you might want to find someone else to drive! It’s not like driving to Colletta is otherwordly, but it’s not like driving on the I-95 or the 401, and it’s certainly not like driving around [[Charlottetown]].

Of course Colletta’s remoteness is part of its appeal. It is truly a stunning location, 300m up into the hills that eventually become the Italian Alps; the village appears almost as though it grew out of the rocks it’s perched on. No matter how much old European architecture you’ve seen, nothing can prepare you for the passageways and bridges and towers and subways and terraces that accreted over the years to form the present day village.

And while there are plenty of trails to explore, and nearby villages to visit, the seashore only 30 minutes away, and Nice and Genoa about 90 minutes in either direction, the remoteness also means that you feel that you’re far away from everywhere. And if part of your rationale for visiting is to get some work done, that feeling can be a tremendous stimulus to work: there are simply no distractions here.

Well, not exactly no distractions. There is the Internet, after all.

When I took my first trip to Europe with my parents in 1972, we still lived in a world where trans-Atlantic communication was some combination of slow, expensive and/or impossible. When you went to Europe you were going very far away and nobody expected to hear from you except via the occassional postcard.

Thirty-five years later, I walked into my apartment Italy, plugged my laptop into the wall, and my email started to roll in, my [[Plazes]] presence got updated, friends started to show up by IM and the effect was not unlike having walked 10 minutes to the office. In fact because I had my office phone call-forwarded to my phone here in Italy, even the telemarketers and the bill collectors could track me down (“okay Mr. Rukavina, do you want to call me back with the confirmation number?” — “well, I’m in Italy right now” — “oh, okay, I’m sorry, ah…”)

This new-fangled connectedness (if that’s what you want to call it) is, of course, the only reason it’s possible for me to relocate for two weeks and continue to run my small web business. I was able to plug my laptop in and start back working where I left off at home three days earlier. I did the monthly payroll, paid all my bills, kept in touch with clients, and actually did get a freaky amount of work done.

Oddly, given Colletta’s billing as a “internet e-village,” it doesn’t actually seem to be particularly well-suited, architecturally and ergonomically, to being a workplace. My apartment, for example, which is very well outfitted with kitchen gear, has a comfortable bed and a nice couch and a sumptuous marble bathroom, has its only Ethernet port beside the bed upstairs in the loft. What’s worse, there’s no desk, no desk chair, and thus not really any place to practically live out the “e” part of “e-village.”

So I spent the greater part of the first day here jury-rigging a temporary workspace: buying a 5m Ethernet cable to throw down into the living room, tying together a garden table so that it came out at right height for typing, and covering a wooden garden chair with a blanket to approximate a vaguely comfortable work chair.

I gather that my experiences are not necessarily reflective of all the units here — each unit is furnished by its owner to their particular taste — but there does seem to be a general consensus that Colleta in general isn’t presently the best place to get work done for the drop-in visitor.

One answer to this is the e-office complex, a new development, funded by the condo owners themselves, that’s slowly coming together under the parking lot at the edge of the village. One of those projects with a deadline forever in the future (it was supposed to open in July, the website now says “opening December 2006” but I can assure you that it won’t), when the e-office complex is finished it’s supposed to help solve this workplace problem by offering a sort of “Queen Street Commons in Italy:” meeting rooms, “hot desks” and other facilities to allow people to get work done.

While this does seem like a positive development, and something that might help to stanch the creeping “vacation condo” trend here — one resident was quoted as saying “The village was deserted, we have reconstructed it: but what of the future? Either we do something or it will become a holiday home place.” — I must say that one of the appeals of a “working vacation” for me is working and living in the same space. I like cooking a little pasta, hacking a little Javascript, cleaning the bathroom, rebooting the server: it’s a very sensible way to work. I’m not completely convinced that having “an office” to go would be the solution for me.

The other odd thing about the “e” in “e-village” is the actual Internet bandwidth itself. While there is a big honkin’ 155 megabit fibre connection down into civilization, the village has only contracted for 1 megabit of it. Which is less bandwidth than I’ve got running into my home in Charlottetown. There was much discussion over the olive-harvesting weekend about the need to renegotiate this contract, and even replacing fiber with copper. That said, with the exception of a few Internet failures, some explained and some mysterious and somehow related to a DHCP problem, the bandwidth served my purposes here well; the fact that I could suck up all of the available Internet with a couple of Bittorrents, however, suggests that as the village evolves, it will need more juice.

Speaking of the olive festival: as I blogged about at some length, this was an unexpected present on the weekend in the middle of my stay. After a week of hard solitary work where I seemed to be the only person in Colletta, all of a sudden people descended from all points — Dublin, San Diego, Brighton, Milan — to pick the village’s olives, watch them be turned into oil, and eat and drink well throughout.

This very plesant weekend not only got me out of my e-dungeon for a break, but I also got to meet some interesting people, eat some excellent food, and learn a lot about the people who actually own apartment here (I was, I must say, much less inclined to “trash” my unit after hearing some of the stories from owners about what their apartments have been like after being rented by ne’er-do-wells; my empathy kicked in).

Without the olive festival, I wouldn’t have understood nearly as much about what Colletta is, how it works and doesn’t, and what kind of community, faux or not, has developed here.

Another side-effect both of Colletta’s remoteness and of its part-time community is that it is lacking the sort of resources that, if you were to sketch your “ideal Italian cybervillage in the hills,” you would be sure to include. There’s no bakery, for example. To get groceries of any sort you need to get in the car and drive either into or towards Albenga. In this way, Colletta is not much of a real “village” at all.

And, of course, there aren’t any actual everyday Italians here either. That’s not entirely true, of course. There are actual everyday Italian residents, and actual everyday Italian staff. But it would be foolish to pretend that living in Colletta is anything but a removed approximation of what “living in a small Italian village” might be. That’s perfectly fine (I’m not convinced I would actually survive in an actual small Italian village), unless that’s what you’re looking to Colletta for.

The original plan for Colletta, back when it was going to be a vrai community, included two bars (one at either end of the village) and full-service restaurant. The restaurant was built, operated, and then closed (it’s being converted into an apartment for a couple from Pittsburgh); and only one of the bars was ever built.

It’s that bar — the Telecaffé La Colletta — that is the saving grace of the otherwise under-resourced village. The bar, and the piazza that extends out from it and overlooks the valley below — are obivously the heart of “public Colletta.” When the village filled up over the weekend, that’s where people gathered; it’s open early and late, you can get a drink or a light meal, it’s wifi hotspot, and it’s where you go to find Massimo, the go-to man for anything practical in the village (laundry tokens, directions, help with electricity, etc.).

I’ve been told that in the summer months, when the pool is open, the area that surrounds it is another community nexus.

For anything other than a drink, some people to drink it with, and a dip in the pool, however, you need to hop in the car. There are several good restaurants very nearby — one right at the bottom of the hill where the Colletta driveway meets the main road — and if you drive up the valley you find several interesting villages, each of which has a little store, a post office, and a view.

The main service centre for Colletta, however, is Albenga, a mildly post-apocalyptic town that’s 20 minutes down the road on the shore. Actually, Albenga isn’t all that bad: it has an excellent cooperative grocery store, a couple of movie theatres, a waterfront boardwalk and a public library. It’s just not the kind of place that you dream about when you dream about quaint Italian towns; for that, go just up the coast to the much more pleasant Alassio. And in just over an hour you can be in the big city of Genoa if you take the train one way, and the big city of Nice if you go the other.

So would I move here?

Probably not. Colletta is a beautiful village in a beautiful place, and has the bandwidth to tether me to the rest of the world. But I don’t think I could ever survive in what amounts to a rag-tag community of expats and vacationers. I like Charlottetown as a home, perversely, for its diversity: there are more people from more walks of life hailing from more countries within a mile of our house in PEI than there are within 100 miles of Colletta. And all of those neighbours actually live in Charlottetown. All the time. There’s something about that — a commitment to place, a sense of shared resistance against adversity, a community that, I’m surprised to find, is very important to me.

However, I’m quite likely to pay Colletta another visit. And next time I’m going to bring Catherine and Oliver; I can only withstand so much travel guilt, to say nothing of missing them dearly: despite its limitations and quirks, there is much to recommend Colletta as a place to temporarily relocate, whether to escape, work, vacation or some combination thereof. Perhaps we’ll all come back for next year’s olive harvest.

If you’re considering a visit to Colletta yourself, and have any practical questions, I’d be happy to help where I can; drop me a line.

A combination of overwork yesterday, and a sudden “oh no, I won’t be in Italy any more come tomorrow” prompted me to make a quick dart into the seaside town of Alassio today.

Getting to Alassio from [[Colletta]] is half the fun. Once you’ve completed the exciting ride down the twisty roads of the valley down to Albenga, you head west and immediately hit a series of tunnels, the longest of which is 2.3 km long and seems like it will never end. And then, suddenly, you’re in Alassio. The whole trip only takes 25 minutes.

Everyone I talked to about “what to see in the area” last weekend here in [[Colletta]] raved about Alassio, so it seemed like a good place to visit. I was not disappointed.

If Albenga is the gritty workaday Hamilton-like seaside town, then Alassio is its Niagara-on-the-Lake idyllic cousin up the shore. The Budello is a pedestrian-only shopping corridor, like Strøget in Copenhagen, that is the spine of the downtown, running between the main street and the sea. It is, oddly enough, an easy stretch to miss if you don’t know it’s there; I happened upon it completely by accident while looking for a place to eat.

As elsewhere in this region, the shops all close up for lunch at either 12:30 p.m. or 1:00 p.m.; I arrived at 11:30, so I had precious little time to fulfill my dual missions of gelato and coffee refueling and last-minute piccante olive purchasing.

One of the amazing things about the Budello is that it’s literally steps from the sea, and all along its length there are short tunnels that lead right out to the beach:

I have no idea what happens when the sea gets angry, but I imagine that global warming will not be kind to Alassio.

Reasoning that my shopping efficiency would be dramatically increased if I ate sooner than later, I stopped at La Pizza Al Volo, a small hole-in-the-wall, and got myself a simple slice to go:

Suitably energized, I made short work of my entire task set: I had a strong cup of espresso at Allevolte Caffé, picked up two jars of spicy olives at Terre Di Mare, bought a cool Italian car for [[Oliver]] at Pino Giocattoli, and finished it all off with a chocolate gelato at Gelateria A Cuvea. Along the way I got a got tour of the length of Alassio.

My parking ticket was set to expire at 1:28 p.m. and I arrived back at the car at 1:26 p.m. just in time. Almost as soon as I stepped inside the car the heavens opened up and a torrential downpour began. I couldn’t have timed it better.

Some practical suggestions. When you come off the highway from Albenga and follow the signs to “Centro” — downtown — you’ll eventually come to a place where the road appears to continue straight ahead, with a small tunnel off to the right heading under the train tracks: turn right at this point and you’ll end up right where you want to be. If you continue on, as I did, you’ll end up driving high into the hills wondering where on earth Alassio is. Although you can park on the main street, it’s hard to find a space. There’s a nice pay-parking lot right beside the train station; you simply buy a ticket for the amount of time you want to stay and leave the ticket in your windshield. Remember that shops shut down (although not bars, restaurants nor some tourist-oriented shops) at either 12:30 p.m. or 1:00 p.m. and the Budello becomes a ghost town; plan your trip for the morning or late afternoon if you want to be there for the action.

Island doctor Barry Ling on starting a course of chemotherapy and radiation next week:

It’s hard to describe the feeling that I have with regard to them. It’s kind of like eagerly awaiting to get the crap beat out me. Seriously though, I am very eager to start.

Dr. Ling has been blogging his cancer treatment. It’s a great gift, especially to experience this through the eyes of a physician. And a man of good humour.

I had an odd dream last night. Kevin “Boomer” Gallant rose up out of the sea, wearing hip-waders, and brought forth an ominous (although witty) message about the acidification of the world’s oceans. Bruce Rainnie was nowhere in sight.

As I have written in this space before, I have made it a habit to walk up to the Telecaffe La Colletta — an exhausting journey of some 15 seconds — for a morning cappuccino (spelling hint: all of the consonants inside cappuccino are doubled except the final n).

In our family it’s always been [[Catherine]] who has worn the coffee pants. I have been content to be a tea geek and leave all the bean grinding and brewing and milk steaming to Catherine. This is partly from habit, partly because I have a conception of myself as having an addictive personality and never wanted to get hooked, and partly, frankly, because the taste, smell and culture of coffee never appealed to me.

The first cup of coffee I ever had was served to me by Ron Gaskin. Ron has the distinction of being the heppest cat I ever met: put Ron in front of a radio microphone and what you hear positively sizzles with electric heppicosity. The man has style.

There was a brief period of time when it looked like [[Catherine]] and I were going to inherit title to Ron’s apartment, an apartment on the first floor of the building on Union Street where Bill Kimball and Martha Cockshutt lived, a building that was sort of a hipness nexus in Peterborough.

And so one morning I dropped over to Ron’s place and found him in the kitchen. On the stove — a 1950s era hip stove — was a pot of coffee. Ron welcomed me in and said “how bought a cup o’ joe?”

How could I refuse — it was like Mingus asking me to sit in.

Remembering that I had never ever had a cup of coffee in my life, you can imagine that said cup of joe hit accelerated my heart by about 200% and took me to a whole other level of consciousness.

I didn’t have another cup for many years.

It’s not that Ron’s coffee wasn’t good: I simply realized that I had uncovered a route to awesome super-powers, and I wasn’t sure of my ability of manage these powers for good.

My next significant cup of coffee wasn’t until 2003 when my [[Dad]] and I landed in Ancona, Italy after taking the night ferry from Croatia. After landing at 7:00 a.m., the first place we walked into was a dock-side bar and I got all caught up in first-time-Italy excitement and ordered “una cappuccino.”

Wow, was that ever a good cup of coffee.

Since then I’ve been flirting on the edges of coffee-drinkingness. When [[Cynthia]] and I “go for coffee” at Timothy’s I often find myself ordering some highfalutin $5 “molto bene latte supremo” drink. And often what I end up with is more like snappy hot chocolate that what I was served by Ron or on the docks.

As much as I’ve encouraged [[Catherine]]’s coffee fetish — it has provided a 15 year string of Christmas gift-giving opportunities after all — I’ve also felt that the coffee-obsessed culture, whether in its Starbucks or Tim Hortons incarnations, was a little too fey for me. I could never get my head around all the roasts and milks and cups brews and the like; it all seemed like so much effort for so little pleasure.

Well, I’ve tipped.

I’m now one of them: as much as I’m uncomfortable being branded a coffee geek, as much as I’m hesitant about honing in on Catherine’s terrain, the delights of my morning cappuccino have convinced me that there’s something to all this.

And I’m afraid that I’m going to turn out to be one of these really pretentious coffee geeks, flying in green beans from the coast and roasting them myself over a custom-built propane contraption that I construct in the back yard, refusing to lower myself into the world of the [[large double double]] and generally being a prick about it all.

You have been warned.

Oh, and here’s video of my walk home from the bar here at Colletta (4.3 MB MPEG4). Apologies for the wavy video: my [[Nokia N70]] could do with some image stabilization technology. The bar is the red door on the right as I swing around. If you listen carefully you can hear the noon bell ringing from up the hill.