Rome-Istanbul-Rome - with a Fiat 500!
Gianluca Fiorentini, an Italian editor and keen Fiat 500 owner, accompanied the SaharaTour of the Fiat 500 Club Italy already in 2010 as an official reporter of the famous Italian Oldtimer magazine AUTO D'EPOCA. He seemed to be the right man for us to support at his adventure. Fiorentini started at 30th/31th of July 2011 and drew attention to the partly forgotten and partly unsolved problems of the children and orphans after the breakup of Yugoslavia with his journey again.
Gianluca Fiorentini starts his journey in Rome. The first route are some few "test kilometers" through the historic center of Rome.
The next country of the journey ist Slovenia. Beech forests, grassy dunes and resting cows are gracing the countryside. The emerald green river Krka, villages and country houses, hardly any traffic...
The Fiat 500 easily floats over the asphalt, driven by an engine, that is overflowing with strength and is cheerfully singing the first thousand kilometers.
Vukovar, Croatia is the next stop. In Slavonia County the traces of the war are still visible. Amazement, disbelief and fright are catching Fiorentini when he is driving through the streets of Vukovar. On the way to Ilok the asphalt shows up in very different shades of grey, the street is crossing cultivated fields. The air, swirling in his small Fiat 500, has the moist taste of the fresh rain together with the flavor of the freshly mowed grass. It is mixing with the aroma of recently burning and now wet bushes in the end.
Serbia is the next aim of his journey. Novi Pazar, a city with a crazy mix of all ethnic groups, cultures and religions. Flavor of roasted coffee, moneychangers and veiled women everywhere... Passing the first minaret and then the first moaning of the small engine. Like honey for the bees, the Fiat 500 is arousing attention of the people of every traversed country, magnetizing glances, inspiring photos, excited questions and conversations...
In Bulgaria Gianluca is finally reaching the greatest monastery of the country, that is sitting in a forested valley, built up on the massif of Rila. It is a beautiful feeling to have still the aim of the journey kept in sight, already smelling the flavor of the east... and Europe ends now, although the journey only just had begun.
Arrival in Turkey...
An immaculate white mosque materializes it from the nothing as soon as you put wheel into the Turkish territory. Strategically built after a light fold of the road that hides it to the sight, it appears only when you have dispatched the customs formalities out of Bulgaria but you have not left the area of frontier yet. During the last three thousand kilometres, Latin culture has gradually left the place top the Greek-Byzantine first and the Ottoman one later. The border is few dozens of kilometres behind but Bulgaria seems to be light years far. Edine is into East: and it is definitely another world.
Suddenly I got sucked into the infernal flow of the traffic of cars, trucks, buses and notorious minibuses that swarm all of them at 70 km/h inside a gut of asphalt protected by guardrail that penetrates for dozens of kilometres through the conurbation of Istanbul.
At every junction in entrance, other cars, trucks, buses and minibuses flow into the torrent in flood as formula 1 cars return into the track after the pit-stop. He had to maintain the concentration high, aware that the least hesitation could be fatal.
The 500 and Sultanahmet: photographic souvenir of a concrete dream. Gianluca took the compliments and the slaps on the back of the people walking by, he was shaking hands and he receive many gestures of approval. Sated on the shores of the Bosphorus, after an iskender, he sipped a clandestine Efes. Allah was wanted.
From the coast of the Bosphorus to the Greek waters, after having ploughed the soft asphalt of one day that has just liquefied. One hundred and fifty kilometres of blind curves, hairpin curves, dark galleries dug in the rock, precipices, breathtaking landscapes, impetuous torrents, the Crna Glava at 2134 meters high; and then the very steep descent, toward the sea and the bay of Kotor and the sunset.
Back in Rome, Gianluca sent us a picture of his Fiat 500 in front of the Castel Sant'Angelo.
