Natural beauty is great but I find it can often get pretty dull, and there’s a limit to how many times you can drive round the Abruzzo Apennines and still be awed by the same mountains again and again, even though the things on them like snow, trees, flowers – and even grass – are in constant change.
There’s no chutzpah or dopamine fix involved in watching the grass grow, that’s for sure ( I prefer to think of myself more as the Maserati and Greenwich Village type ), but I suppose you do get the odd wolf or hawk to liven things up a bit at times.
Meeting someone like Marco, here in his shop in the tiny hamlet of Collimento, away up in the middle of nowhere, also adds some zest to these beautiful but repetitive mountain drives.
As he was carefully scooping maize flour into glossy bags ‘for the Roman tourists at this time of year, they come to ski, ‘ Marco told me that his business has its roots in Ethiopia, which I liked as another quirky and incongruous little scoop to round off the day.
Out There & In Here 