Memories of past journeys to faraway places
What is Gianluca Fiorentini doing nowadays? - a Report by Gianluca Fiorentini
Dear friends of Axel Gerstl and lovers of the legendary Fiat 500, my name is Gianluca Fiorentini, proud owner of a 1969 Fiat 500, traveller by nature and writer by chance. How are you all spending these pandemic months? I don't know about your feelings, but I'm starting to get annoyed with the current situation.
On January 30, 2020, the first two Italians tested positive for the SARS-CoV-2 virus in Rome. At that time, I had just returned from India, strengthened both physically and mentally by my work with children in an orphanage in Kerala. I had promised these children that we would meet again next year and open a “time capsule” together, a container to which we entrusted our wishes for the twelve months to come. And for the summer, I had planned to start the engine of my Fiat 500 and set off for Albania. I couldn't wait to feel the thin black steering wheel in my hands and explore new horizons with my two-cylinder car.
Then suddenly the world stood still. You could no longer do the things you used to do and even the desire to dream has suffered a severe blow. A year has passed since then. And finally, a light can be glimpsed at the end of the tunnel.
It was during the stay-at-home period that I first became involved in what is known as “Smart Working”. I read books, listened to music, slept more than usual, and my cooking has improved. I co-authored a book that was published during the pandemic, and I ventured into writing my third narrative. I took the time to reminisce, including my travels with my little Fiat 500. While doing so, I sifted through the album of my first ride with the two-cylinder car outside Italy and found a poor copy of a letter to my friends, which I had started with the following words:
“4,418 kilometres!!! Everything worked great so far, guys! An incredible experience and a great adventure just ended without a hitch!”
Together with a group of Fiat 500 enthusiasts I had just crossed France, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
In 2007, I covered 5,600 kilometres, distributed over Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, France and Switzerland. The city of Berlin was my destination and at the same time the turning point.
In one of my reports, I described the interminably long ride from Berlin to Bamberg, which put the nerves of all the riders to the test, as follows:
“The lack of any speed limit on German motorways allowed any wheeled object to pull into the fast lane at full speed, making us feel even slower than our 90 kilometres per hour were anyway.”
Trucks as big as palaces shot toward our little cars like trains at full speed. They approached us as if trying to caress our rear bumpers, forcing us to make sudden steering corrections during their overtaking manoeuvres to compensate for the air displacement that first sucked the little 500 into the middle of the lane and then blew it violently toward the crash barriers. On the lanes with no overtaking for heavy motor vehicles, it was impossible to keep even a minimum safety distance. These giants braked and accelerated, accelerated and braked, and we were tailgated so closely that just the slightest mistake would have been enough to provoke a dangerous contact with an uncertain outcome. We had no choice but to leave the lane to them and make do with the hard shoulder, hoping that they would accept our invitation to overtake us despite the ban. But the unquestioning Teutonic respect of the road traffic regulations, which would be appreciated elsewhere and could serve as an example to us Italians, who are cultivating an undisciplined steering behaviour, prolonged the risk and exhausted the mind. At the end of the day we let off steam in Bamberg with a loud chorus of hooting:
“Rauchbier per tutti, bitte!” (“Smoked beer per tutti, please!”)
In 2009, I took a trip to Tunisia together with a caravan of thirty other Fiat 500s from all over Italy to traverse the north of the country.
With each one of our four little wheels, we dug deep into the history, culture and traditions of the Tunisian Maghreb. From the enchanting Sidi Bou Said to the narrow alleys of the Medina of Sousse, from the archaeological sites of Carthage to the tourist Port el Kantaoui and past Hammamet.
We crossed villages with white houses and rural landscapes along the Sahel zone to El Djem, where we parked our two-cylinders in front of the huge amphitheatre. It was an unforgettable moment. Even the local press and television followed the tour, which could also count on the support of sponsors and the Tunisian authorities, as well as the skill and help of the mechanics and drivers of the accompanying service vehicles.
I returned to Tunisia the following year, this time in a dual role as a driver and reporter. With a dozen companions this time, I took to the south of the country, where the roads became increasingly sandy and challenging.
It was on this occasion that I realized that I was finally ready to go on a “solo tip” with my Fiat 500.
I was in Metameur, a Berber village not far from Medenine. I wolfed down my rabbit stew that had been cooked in some sort of terra-cotta amphora in an oven dug into the ground, and jumped into my Fiat 500 to explore the surroundings. I temporarily left my travel companions in a ghorfa (grain store) that had been converted into a restaurant for tourists. I took the road to Matmata, stepping on the gas as if I wanted to take off. All this with a wonderful feeling of well-being and freedom that even today, when I just think about it, gives me a tickle of pleasure that runs from my scalp all along my back until it gradually reaches all the little hairs of my body and gives me a big thrill. This fleeting “fling” was the “point of no return”. It was the moment that changed the way I travel with my Fiat 500.
In 2011, I spread my wings and started my first solo adventure across the Balkans with Istanbul as the final destination. I crossed Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Northern Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
In the Balkans, I was confronted with the extraordinary and at the same time dramatic complexity of this region, which is in constant turmoil. It is a place where the different cultures and religions clash and a scene of traditional hostilities between ethnic groups, which triggered fierce conflicts after the collapse of the Tito regime. I experienced the slow transition from the Occident into the Orient.
My beloved Orient ...
I already felt its essence in Novi Pazar, which is not much more than a small village in the deep south of Serbia in a region called Sandžak, where West meets East and people somehow manage to live together. Novi Pazar is a potentially explosive mix of ethnic groups, cultures and religions. Bosnians, Serbs, Turks, Kosovars, Macedonians, Sinti and Roma: All ingredients of a mixture gone wild, which is only slowly recovering under the doleful Balkan skies. The air smelled of roasted coffee and on every corner, you could find street vendors, money changers, and shady characters going in and out of small shops in the run-down streets of the Turkish quarter. Also the first sights of veiled women – and the first minarets rising into the sky. All this fired my senses and gave me the vibrant feeling that I had already reached Ottoman spheres.
Edirne turned out to be my personal gateway to the Orient, to faraway countries, mysteries, magic, and reveries. Istanbul was the turning point of a journey with a hundred stops. One photo shows me posing next to my Fiat 500, with the cascading domes of the impressive Sultan Ahmet Mosque in the background and the indescribable look on the face of someone who knew right from the start that he was going to make it.
2013 was then supposed to become my Iran year, but diplomats concerned for my safety denied me a visa to enter ancient Persia by land. This ruined months of effort and made all the papers and travel documents worthless that I had tediously (and for a lot of money) obtained in the weeks before. But a few days after this blow, I simply chose a different destination: Morocco.
Extract from my “Grand Tour du Maroc” diary:
“A steep climb, but with no jerking that would have required downshifting to the second gear, leads up the flank of the Jbel Hebri to an altitude of 1,965 metres. The sparkling blue sky contrasts magnificently with the cedar forests growing on a carpet of emerald green grass. The air is fresh and clean. On the pass in front of the stone fort I stop the engine for a souvenir photo and a chat with the gatekeeper. After that, the landscape becomes barren and stony, soothed only by a few yellow and red flowers showing up here and there.
The bare, rugged mountains look like being made of waste paper. I reduce my speed as I pass a nomadic caravan that slowly approaches the horizon across a steppe landscape – donkeys in single file, carrying goods and water containers. For dozens of kilometres, I drive at high altitude through remote villages that tell of the everyday life of people, goods, donkeys and carts, whose pace I follow respectfully and with patience. […]
The narrow strip of asphalt now winds through a desolate landscape without any vegetation between the earthy slopes of the mountains which seem to be covered by a thin, petrified veil. I drive on, right past Midelt, an oasis with cube-shaped huts on a plateau between the Middle and High Atlas. [...]
For a hundred kilometres, the road continues along barren heath, populated only by a sparse group of grazing dromedaries; I stop in Guelmin to fill the tank, and slip back between the two white lines that mark the roadway and converge in the infinite at the town of Tan Tan, drawing a perfectly straight line. A second of carelessness threatens the life of a small snake that crosses the road, tracing a repeating “S”. A few kilometres later I’m distracted myself when seeing the stiff carcass of a dromedary lying on the dusty red earth. A wooden plank under my wheels makes me skid dangerously. This little shock puts me into a gloomy mood and soon a certain tension seizes my nerves. The dreary and dusty landscape, interspersed with old and desolate bent lampposts as far as the eye can see, is whipped by fierce gusts of wind. To my right, the only artefact I encounter in a whole hour's drive: the rusty remains of a petrol station covered in sand.
Invisible clouds carry the foul smell of rotting animals. A strange formation of military trucks is followed by a line of ambulances escorted by off-road vehicles in camouflage. I give the engine a rest at a lay-by where diesel of unknown origin is sold for six dirhams per litre. Then I face the last stretch of road. The further I get, the more I feel that I’m heading for an outpost.”
Two years later, the launch of my “Baltic Experience” project was not optimal. The rattle of my Fiat 500 just three hundred kilometres before the starting point of a journey thirty times as long was not really encouraging. But the problem could be solved by pumping oil into the gear box. I fancied that this would pay my debt to fate for the way through Slovenia, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia.
I left Italy from Trieste, completed the crossing of Slovenia interrupted four years before in Ljubljana, stopped in Maribor and drove along the Southern shore of Lake Balaton to the unpronounceable town of Székesfehérvár. I almost made a fool of myself trying to sneak my Fiat 500 onto the Hungaroring circuit, three days before Vettel's fifth win in his Ferrari. In Košice, I washed away the fatigue of a nine hours’ drive and almost 400 kilometres on the roads with a swig of Urpín beer.
Continuing north along the Belarusan border I came first to Lublin and then to Białystok, the Polish city with a Prussian (until the end of the First World War), Belarusan, and Lithuanian past. Leaving Poland behind, I finally passed a large metal sign in Lithuania that read “Lietuvos Respublika” and then chased my Fiat 500 through Latvia and Estonia to Narva, a strange town on the Russian border facing the Russian city of Ivangorod.
For 2016, I had planned again to “conquer” the Iran, but ...
After the lifting of sanctions imposed by the US, the UN and the European Union in 2006, Iran experienced a significant period in its history. Together with my Fiat 500, I wanted to witness this moment, immerse in the day-to-day events while enjoying the millennial Iranian culture in all its facets. For me, Iran is above all synonymous with art, civilization and a thousands-of-years-old culture. Although it has a rather negative image in the Western world, Iran is a friendly and hospitable country.
Already in Eskişehir, which is located in the western part of Turkey, I sensed that the journey would be difficult. I was just having dinner when swarms of F16 fighter jets began thundering above me, heading for Syria. This lasted into the night and started again the next morning, albeit with less intensity.
After having been contacted by the Italian consulate, reading the latest news from ANSA (Italian news agency) that reported the number of casualties from the air raids of the past few days and wrote of two helicopters that had been shot down in the border area and bombs that had recently exploded there, I felt the need to seriously think again about everything. This was of course also due to the fact that everyone I met on the way advised me against driving overland across the Iranian border here. Therefore, I decided to bypass the danger zone, cross the Northern coast of Turkey on the Black Sea almost in its entire length from Amasra to Sarp, reach Georgia, and then enter Iran from Azerbaijan.
I don't know how much I would have paid for a 300-kilometre roller coaster ride as a kid. Along the Turkish Black Sea coast, this dream came true. From Amasra to Sinop the route was a dangerous sequence of utterly steep slopes both uphill and and downhill, sharp turns, blind curves, hairpin turns, switchbacks and slippery bottlenecks. Pure adrenaline! All spiced up with cold, rain, fog, lazy cows, aggressive dogs and immobile sheep. I got away with a flat tire, happy as after passing a test.
I stayed in Tbilisi for a few days to get an overview of the situation.
The “azerbaijani road” to Iran was supposed to take me through the narrow corridor in the Caucasus Mountains between Russia and Armenia. The route was very long and bumpy, but most importantly, it demanded an entrance visa and enormous expenses for the local bureaucracy that were beyond my means. But even aside from the the political tensions between the neighbouring countries, it seemed that cars owned by non-residents and registered before 2006 were readily prevented from entering. I therefore turned round and drove back to Turkey.
About 80 kilometres east of Erzurum there is a small village. It is called Horasan and was one of the crossing points into the “hot zone” on the border with Iran. Near the Mobil petrol station, the Jandarma (Turkish military police) kept a close eye on every passing traveller. They were absolutely aware of the situation – with the finger on the trigger – and when the Jandarma advised me not to continue, I followed suit. So I decided to stop at that point because it would been too big a risk. The “Iran Experience” thus ended in Horasan.
It was a pleasure to share with you, dear readers of this newsletter, my current state of mind and some of my travel memories with my Fiat 500, my inseparable companion. I hope I didn’t bore you too much. I'm sure we'll all be back driving our little cars and meeting up at rallies, fairs and picnics the “old fashioned” way soon!
I would like to thank all the staff at Axel Gerstl who supported me on many of my journeys and offered me the opportunity to tell my tale today. When I got to know your team, I also learned to appreciate the sincere passion you have for the little Fiat 500. And I want to emphasize that this is very important to me.
© Gianluca Fiorentini; Text and photos: Gianluca Fiorentini