Day 19: Pietrasanta-Sesto Calende

Another beautiful day in Pietrasanta….we take our last walk around town stopping to buy a piece of parmigiano-reggiano that our friends in Sweden requested.

We say goodbye to the people at the hotel and thank them for their hospitality.

We are going to Sesto Calende, a town near Malpensa Airport, because we are flying to Copenhagen tomorrow and visiting friends in southern Sweden. We will leave most of our luggage at the Hotel 3 Re because we don't want to have to carry it all to Sweden and because we are flying on EasyJet, a European budget airline (our first experience) and they have strict weight limits for checked baggage. This hotel was the first hotel we stayed in on our first trip to Italy in 1993. We have stayed there since and I use it for clients from time to time. The women who run the hotel–Silvia and Raffaela–have agreed to store our excess bags for the four nights we are gone - we'll be back for one more night on our return.

The drive from Pietrasanta is uneventful except for a drama with the traffic reports that pop up on our GPS. All of a sudden the estimated time of arrival jumps by more than an hour. There are reports of accidents on the autostrada causing long backups. We consider getting off and taking alternate routes but I get suspicious because the autostrada alert signs show no indications of any problems. We ignore the warnings and find no backups…..the GPS system is not reliable.

When we stop for lunch at an Autogrill, we are surprised by their newest specialty–a bagel–

but resist the temptation to try one.

Sesto Calende is a small town about 10 miles north of Malpensa, on the banks of the Ticino River at the bottom of Lago Maggiore. Everytime we come back to Sesto Calende, I'm reminded of what a nice town it is–not historic but very typical. And the location on the river with the waterfront promenade is a very pleasant spot. The river is wide and the houses on the far side are very grand with–unusual for Italy–broad expanses of manicured lawns.

We are greeted warmly by the sisters who run the hotel and we get settled into our room. The hotel is doing very well–they have a lot of international guests who come to learn about helicopter maintenance at a local facility–and they have made a lot of improvements since our first visit in 1993. Rooms are much bigger, the furniture is quite attractive and the bathrooms are modern and roomy.

http://www.hotel3re.it/eng/Default.asp

After an exploratory walk–where I am surprised to find that even Sesto Calende now has a self-service laundromat–

we get in the car to go to the local equivalent of Walmart (Bennett's)–a gigantic store on a busy commercial strip–to buy an umbrella (the one we brought has died). We experience a bit of culture shock but we do buy an umbrella. Hopefully we won't need it.

We have dinner at the hotel restaurant. When we first stayed at the hotel, I had a dish called gnocchi alla romana–disks of semolina flour, butter and eggs baked in the oven and topped with parmigiano. I thought they were delicious but never found them anywhere in all our Italian travels. So I asked the sisters if they might make them for us…and they did.

They were delicious–so simple but so good. They explained that this is more of a dish made at home - not one found in restaurants - but we think they'd be a hit on restaurant menus. We had a very good grilled branzino as well and a nice Muller-Thurgau from the Alto-Adige, but the highlight was the gnocchi.

One interesting thing about the dining room is that the helicopter trainees all eat there and they are a very international lot….so there are Americans, English, Asians and Arabs all in the dining room.

Tomorrow we head for the unknown–Sweden.