Marchela What’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear Italy? Rome, Milano, food, fashion etc, yes? And have you ever heard of the city of Lanciano? No? Well a lot of Italians haven’t heard of it either, so don’t worry. I will tell you a bit more about Lanciano in this article. It’s a small old city in the region of Abruzzo and is located near Pescara. It takes around 3 hours to get there with a bus from Rome and less with a car of course. However it’s not a touristic place and in terms of transport it’s not easy to go around the city. Best option would be to rent a car from Rome, because otherwise you are in trouble. There is only one taxi in the city and if you need to get a taxi for a distance that’s more than 5 km it will cost you the same price (or even more) as getting a bus from Rome to Lanciano. The Italian taxi sagas don’t stop there though. After spending few days in a city with one taxi only, I went back to Rome with my friends. Because time is an illusion that moves relative to an observer (Albert Einstein’s theory of special relativity) for the locals we missed the bus we needed to get to the city centre, so we had to catch a taxi. It is never advisable to grab a random taxi on the street no matter which country you are in, so we ordered a taxi via an app. The driver arrived and asked us to cancel the order as it would be cheaper (or something like this). I found it weird at first, but didn’t think too much until the moment he said he needed to pass by a gas station for some fuel and we noticed we are going in an opposite direction. We decided to check what would be the price as in the app it was showing around 20€ and he told us it would be twice the price. We wanted to leave the car so my friend asked him in Italian to stop the car, but he pretended he didn’t hear. That’s when I yelled at him “Signore!” and wanted to continue with “stop the car”, but my 5 days self taught Italian wasn’t that good. Luckily my friend said it in Italian, but louder this time and the driver stopped. So one tip I would give you is learn to speak loud and learn how to say “Stop the car!” In Italian (Fermi la macchina!) and you will be good to go.
Let’s get back to Lanciano and the self taught Italian I mentioned. After the second day of listening Italian conversations all around me I started to understand quite a lot through Portuguese and Spanish. On the third day I even started speaking Italian after drinking some wine. The waiter was in shock when I suddenly turned around and ordered in Italian. The last days I was able to get around without help with translation. Duolingo + Espaliano + hand gestures were pretty much enough. Only exception would be the taxi saga in Rome, but I will be prepared for next time. One of the days we went to the seaside in Fossacesia Marina and had seafood for lunch. As someone who is not a fan of seafood I actually liked the meals. Only problem was that from all the turns on the road I felt carsick and I advice you to bring something for motion sickness if you decide to dive into an adventures around these sides of Italy. Pescara is also a nice option as a city to visit while in Abruzzo. It takes half an hour with the train to get there and you have plenty of restaurants next to the seaside. There was only some small confusion with buying train tickets, because you can buy them inside the train too, but pay 5 bucks more. You can buy them at the station too. On the way back we wanted to get tickets from the station, but the ticket machine wouldn’t let us. We went to the cashier and got redirected to the newspapers shop and that’s where we bought tickets. 🤷🏻♀️
That was my first experience of Italy and apparently a different one from what others experienced there, so time to conquer Italian in Duolingo and see the other faces of Italy too.
