Everything is fine

I really enjoy planning for travel.  Someone told me once that you get nearly the same mental benefit in the months before a vacation than you do during the trip itself (since we generally are excited to take them and all that) and I buy into that theory.  Even though it can be stressful, like many people, I enjoy searching around for the most interesting (for us) location to stay, the best deal, the best food, etc.  Sometimes this is done a few days before a trip, sometimes a year, but I think there is always a moment after making a booking for an apartment or house when I feel unsure if I made the right choice.  You can look at a million pictures of a place, get on Google Maps and virtually walk around the neighborhood, but ultimately, you can't get the complete picture until you actually get there.

So it was with Padova.  I booked our apartment over a year ago.  When I made the reservation, Andrea (our landlord) thought that I was asking for a reservation in 2018.  Yeah, I booked way early.  The place that I found was the place that I wanted (!), and I didn't want to take any chances that it would disappear for any amount of time during our stay.  But still, I didn't really know anything about Padova other than that a few people I knew had some nice things to say about it.  I had no idea what the neighborhood was like even though Google led me to believe it would work for us.


It wasn't until I was driving the 10 passenger Fiat Ducato that we rented with our friends Lynne and Tyler (and Oscar and Alma) for the first part of our trip into Padova that I realized how nervous I was about this.  Padova is a decent sized city, maybe twice as large as Ann Arbor, surrounded by some suburbs with some industrial activity.  Parts of the outskirts of the city are nice, some are, just, industrial.  So I was still unsure about what we were getting into as we got to the city walls on the west side of the city.  The walls were built over a few centuries starting in 1200.  They aren't towering or particularly imposing.  But they are a reminder that we are far from home.  The roads that follow the walls are generally pretty busy, with many cafes and supermarkets and other businesses.  Making it to the walls was the point at which I started to feel better about where we were going to end up.  Of course, I didn't know how nervous I was about this until that point.  As we passed the walls and made our way closer to il Prato della Valle, the large piazza that is near our apartment, I got less and less anxious and more and more excited.

After a few minutes, we were circling il Prato.  We arrived in Padova on January 5, the day before one of the major holidays in Italy: the feast of the epiphany.  I don't know much about the Catholic roots surrounding this holiday, but I did quickly learn about the traditions.  Minus the details, according to legend, there was a witch-like woman that rode around on a broom who refused to visit the baby Jesus with the wise men.  Eventually La Befana regrets this decision and tries to bring gifts to the baby.  She is too late and instead brings the gifts to children around the world.

In Padova, they celebrate the epiphany by constructing a gigantic (~30 foot tall) Befana that is subsequently burned on the evening of the 6th (which you can see an image of in Ben's post below).  This is quite the spectacle and it seemed like everyone within a 100 km radius came to town to see it.  I was walking around town just after the celebration and it felt like Ann Arbor after a Michigan football win.

La Befana before her big night
(from the car on the way into town for the first time)

Anyway, we are circling il Prato in the Ducato and there is this giant Befana waiting to be burned in this huge public square filled with a massive market (the market happens every Saturday) filled with people out and about enjoying their day.  This is when I really started to feel like we made the right choice.  When I thought about doing sabbatical in Italy 10 years ago or whatever, this is about what I imagined.  A city steeped in tradition, with Italian cafés on every corner where I can get a cornetto (basically a croissant filled with jam, custard, apples, etc) in the morning and a glass of wine in the evening.  Centuries old buildings with wifi.  Beautiful streets to get lost on with modern public transportation.  Every time that I left the apartment during the first two days of this trip I found something that made me more excited about the city that we find ourselves in and the particular spot that we are living.  My walk to work is ½ a mile from the apartment.  My office is in an extension of a castle that was built 1000 years ago.  Il Prato is less than half a block from our front door.  There's an enormous 700 year old basilica one block in the opposite direction.  There are miles and miles of maze like streets to get lost on lined with small markets, wine shops, knife stores, toy stores, pizzerias, restaurants, and everything else that I could imagine spending a lifetime investigating.

Il Prato post burning.  Just like after Michigan beats Michigan State.

So yeah, everything is fine.  Like I am before every trip that I take, I was nervous.  But every minute  that we are here, we feel more comfortable.  There are still things to get used to for sure.  Among other things, I no longer have a 25 ft² shower to spread out in.  But in all the years that I've been looking forward to making this sabbatical happen, I'm not sure that I could have found a better location in a better city for this particular trip.  We are happy.  Everything is fine.

It is unlikely that I will get tired of walking by this place