This is another you've definitely never heard of. During the trip to Innsbruck, I mentioned that we passed lots of towns and areas that just looked lovely - places we thought we'd fancy a visit to at a later point, but didn't know when. Avio was one of the towns I'd written down as a possibility. It had a castle, it had bike paths on the river, and it was nestled between mountains in the Italian Alps.
Avio is a classic "blink and you'll miss it" town, and actually staying there made it seem all the more, well, tiny. We booked a BnB that offered breakfast and free bikes, which meant we could ride up and down the valley as long as our butts could handle it, and that's precisely what we did.
We got in early in the afternoon and figured we'd find a place to get something to eat or get some bread or...something, and then we'd check in later in the afternoon. Or maybe we'd go see the castle.
Good thing we had the castle as an option, because virtually everything in this town was closed. And I mean everything. The wiki page for Avio lists its population around 4,000, but that includes the nearby town of Sabbionara and maybe one other. Avio is bite-sized. It's actually too small to even really be adorable. If ever there was a sleepy little town, it was named Avio. In fact, if you google Avio and Italy, the town of Avio won't even be the first result.
OK, I've painted the picture enough. You get it, it's small. The whole town fits in this picture.
The castle was lovely, as you might imagine a castle to be. It was truly the only building doing business in the town, and we were delighted to discover that part of the castle is private property as someone apparently still lives in it. Very cool.
The views, of course, were phenomenal, but so was just walking up to see it.
We fought through the hunger of not finding a single place to eat in the town and checked into our BnB, where we were informed that the next town over - about a kilometer off, only - should have a supermarket that was still open. Sabbionara was basically a metropolis.
We excitedly hopped on our bikes and rode over, grabbing delicious junk food and snacks for our bike-ride, and we set off through the vineyards and mountains. Sounds like I could be joking, right?
Wrong.
And so it went for a few hours. We returned to our room in the evening, knowing that the owners of the BnB also owned the restaurant nextdoor, and it was surely the only place we could get dinner. The rub, of course, we was that the owner spoke no English, and I hadn't even had a chance to test out my tourist-Italian yet.
We received no menu, just efforts to choose between options while speaking two different languages - both our hostess and I were excitedly playing along with each other throughout. We ended up having a three-course meal where each course was at least partly a surprise. We thought we'd opted for a certain thing only to find out that we'd ordered both things. Then when I thought I'd ordered something simple - like a fried cheese and something sandwich - we were presented with a 3x4 inch block of cheese, freshly fried.
The kicker to all of this is that it was one of the most delicious meals of our lives. And reasonably priced, all things considered.
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The next morning we got our breakfast and spoke with our hostess again. It seemed that she'd given our receipt and said that, when we returned from using the bikes in the afternoon, she'd be nextdoor at the restaurant.
And so we carried on much like the previous day, biking around vineyards between the mountains.
Around 3:00 p.m. we returned the bikes, had no need for anything from the restaurant, and caught our train back to Milan. I woke up the next morning to an email (which had gone through Google Translate) stating that I had completely lied to our hostess and skipped out on the bill. She had waited all day and evening for me to return to settle the check at the restaurant nextdoor, as we had agreed upon.
Whoops.
I mailed her an extra few euros to make up for it. I guess I don't speak Italian.
Next trip: Cinque Terre!
Avio is a classic "blink and you'll miss it" town, and actually staying there made it seem all the more, well, tiny. We booked a BnB that offered breakfast and free bikes, which meant we could ride up and down the valley as long as our butts could handle it, and that's precisely what we did.
We got in early in the afternoon and figured we'd find a place to get something to eat or get some bread or...something, and then we'd check in later in the afternoon. Or maybe we'd go see the castle.
Good thing we had the castle as an option, because virtually everything in this town was closed. And I mean everything. The wiki page for Avio lists its population around 4,000, but that includes the nearby town of Sabbionara and maybe one other. Avio is bite-sized. It's actually too small to even really be adorable. If ever there was a sleepy little town, it was named Avio. In fact, if you google Avio and Italy, the town of Avio won't even be the first result.
OK, I've painted the picture enough. You get it, it's small. The whole town fits in this picture.
The castle was lovely, as you might imagine a castle to be. It was truly the only building doing business in the town, and we were delighted to discover that part of the castle is private property as someone apparently still lives in it. Very cool.
The views, of course, were phenomenal, but so was just walking up to see it.
We fought through the hunger of not finding a single place to eat in the town and checked into our BnB, where we were informed that the next town over - about a kilometer off, only - should have a supermarket that was still open. Sabbionara was basically a metropolis.
We excitedly hopped on our bikes and rode over, grabbing delicious junk food and snacks for our bike-ride, and we set off through the vineyards and mountains. Sounds like I could be joking, right?
Wrong.
And so it went for a few hours. We returned to our room in the evening, knowing that the owners of the BnB also owned the restaurant nextdoor, and it was surely the only place we could get dinner. The rub, of course, we was that the owner spoke no English, and I hadn't even had a chance to test out my tourist-Italian yet.
We received no menu, just efforts to choose between options while speaking two different languages - both our hostess and I were excitedly playing along with each other throughout. We ended up having a three-course meal where each course was at least partly a surprise. We thought we'd opted for a certain thing only to find out that we'd ordered both things. Then when I thought I'd ordered something simple - like a fried cheese and something sandwich - we were presented with a 3x4 inch block of cheese, freshly fried.
The kicker to all of this is that it was one of the most delicious meals of our lives. And reasonably priced, all things considered.
(view of sunset from our room)
And so we carried on much like the previous day, biking around vineyards between the mountains.
Around 3:00 p.m. we returned the bikes, had no need for anything from the restaurant, and caught our train back to Milan. I woke up the next morning to an email (which had gone through Google Translate) stating that I had completely lied to our hostess and skipped out on the bill. She had waited all day and evening for me to return to settle the check at the restaurant nextdoor, as we had agreed upon.
Whoops.
I mailed her an extra few euros to make up for it. I guess I don't speak Italian.
Next trip: Cinque Terre!
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