Day 70 Italian Pizza on route to France

After a wonderful 6 days in Rome we departed on Day 70 for Nice, on the French Riviera. This was to involve two long train journeys. Our first leg, on yet another fairly ordinary Italian train, allowed us to view the beautiful Italian coast all the way to the port city of Genoa.

Genoa is of interest to us for several reasons one being that we had been told that one of the main streets carries the name via Quadrio Corso. Upon arrival, we placed our big packs in the luggage storage area at the train station and headed off to spend three hours exploring Genoa before we needed to catch another train to Nice. After exploring the harbour we stopped for some lunch at an attractive seaside restaurant as the temperature once again climbed to at least 35 degrees. It was very hot!

It is worth a comment here, about Italian pizza. We had expected that pizza in Italy might be better than at home but we were surprised at how much better and how different it was. There are a number of features that make Italian pizza better than any pizza we have ever eaten anywhere in the world:

1. All pizzas are the same size and designed for one person to eat.

2. All pizzas are cooked on the bricks in wood-fired ovens without the use of pizza trays. This means that they are less oily and they all have a wonderful smoky taste.

3. All pizzas have very little cheese and tomato paste compared to the ones we eat at home. Also they usually only have one or two toppings- sometimes with tomato but not always. The common ‘pizza topper’ type herb used in Australia is absent.

4. All bases are the same, neither ‘thin and crispy’ nor ‘thick and chewy’. In Italy they are all thin, crusty, chewy and delicious. In fact the base is really a meal in itself

5. All pizzas are served whole, they do not cut the pizza into slices but deliver it to the table with a knife and fork for you to cut yourself.

Genoa’s pizzas were as good as any that we had tasted anywhere else in Italy!

Once back on the very full train we hugged the coastline as we passed through, first the Italian Riviera before arriving at the French Riviera. We were amazed to see rocky outcrops on which people were relaxing and sunbaking just as we enjoy doing on our sandy Australian beaches. We continued along this stunning Mediterranean coastline before arriving at Nice at about 8pm. After about 14 hours of travelling our journey was not over yet. We then had a 15 minute tram ride and at the end of that we were picked up by a van from the hostel which is located on top of a very steep hill.

We chose this particular hostel because it sounded interesting … it was once a monastery, but also because it was described in the guidebooks as being ‘One of the best in Europe’. It is an interesting place but our room with double bunks really looks like a monk’s cell – it is tiny.

We have exchanged “grazie” for “merci” and we can now look forward to exploring the beautiful French Riviera.