Southern Tuscany (Piombino)

Spiagge Bianche Rosignano

After spending the afternoon designing an emblem to go on the shirts for my brother’s new golfing clan (Shanks & Big Putt), we left the van to visit Spiagge Bianche, an amazing beach in Rosignano, just south of Livorno.

‘Spiagge Bianche’ means ‘White Beach’ and it wasn’t hard to see why it had been given this title. It was unbelievable; smooth white sands and blue green water, more like the Caribbean than southern Europe. I looked it up. Turns out factory discharge from a nearby power plant is what causes the idyllic appearance. Erm...

There were loads of comments online surrounding the controversy of the area; about how people probably shouldn’t swim there, despite the official rules allowing it. Did we have a swim? 'Cooourse we diiiiiid. From a distance the water looked magnificent. It was only when you got in it that you realised what a milky swamp it was. You could’ve eaten your cereal out of it. If you like your cereal salty and dangerous. Snap, Crackle and Mutate.

Marina di castagneto carducci

We’re seeing plenty of beaches as we make our way down the west coast of Italy. We enjoyed another at Marina di Castagneto Carducci, where we had a couple of drinks at a great little beach bar, before spending the next four hours getting burnt like one of my dad’s drunken frozen pizzas. We stayed at a massive camper park up about twenty minutes walk from the beach. It had a free water tap which blasted the water out at a 180 degree angle. That didn’t stop the woman in the motorhome next to us from showering happily in the nude. Rach accidentally copped an eyeful, the unintentional pervert.

Naughty flip flop

Better than both of the above though was the little pebble beach we found at Piombino, a great little town that sits on a rump of land that juts out on the coast, about an hour further south of Livorno.

The drive there had been eventful. Five minutes in, as we turned left onto a main highway, Rach turned to me and asked, ‘’what is one of your flip flops doing there?’’ I looked up. Bollocks! It was on the bonnet. I’d forgotten I’d left them on there to dry off after the beach. They’re spongy as fuck which makes them really comfortable but also capable of holding about two gallons of water. We quickly noticed that we could see only one flip flop on the bonnet, which prompted Rach to recall something black falling off the van a few hundred metres earlier. Double bollocks.

We turned around at the next roundabout and headed back down the highway in the opposite direction, trying to see where the other flip flop had landed. Couldn’t see anything. We turned the van around at the end and decided to park it up at the side of the road, then I’d get out and start walking up the highway to find it. All of a sudden, as we were pulling up, the right side of the van jolted violently upwards, causing all the cupboards to fly open and clothes to eject themselves onto the floor behind us. We hadn’t noticed the state of the road’s edge - completely torn up and bumpy, as if the roots of the nearby tree were bulging underneath. Italian roads are the worst in Europe. Bar none. They are all the same - cracked and potholed disasters the lot of them (unless you take the tolls). It’s as if everywhere has recently suffered a mini earthquake. Seriously, it’s ridiculous. If I could make my enemy perform one task in order to destroy their will to live, I’d make them drive a three-tonne van on Italian roads, alongside Italian drivers, who are, by the way, the absolute elite of European driving incompetence. More on that in future blogs, I’m sure.

Where was I? Ah, the flip flop. So Rach had parked the van up, which was still swaying as I started walking up the main road to find my rubber sandal. When I finally found it, lying there at the side of the road, I felt a mixture of relief and anger. I told the flip flop how we’d been worried sick and made it promise to never run off like that again. I’d already lost one perfectly good shoe on this trip, in Spain, and the trauma of having to throw the other one away was horrible. The thought of having to go through that again is unbearable.

On the outskirts of Piombino we stopped for a McDonalds. As we sat in the restaurant (and it is a restaurant) eating our burgers, I noticed that the beeping of the... whatever the hell it is that beeps in McDonalds was exactly in time with the generic pop song they were blasting through the speakers, which I thoroughly enjoyed. I swear, Ronalds never lets me down. Sure, Rach’s burger had a bit of blue plastic in it and she had to return it, but that's just nitpicking.

Piombino

When we arrived in Piombino we really liked what we saw. The camper stop looked superb too: right on the edge of the town, quiet, with stunning views of the sea and a beautiful pebble beach immediately under the park up, about a twenty second walk away.

Unfortunately/annoyingly (unfornnoyingly), there was no spot available. We toyed with the idea of parking in the nearby car park which was strictly reserved for cars, not campers, before deciding to stay in the camper zone and park up on the end of one of the rows. We weren’t in a painted slot, but there was plenty of room, so we just went with it. It was fine for one night, then, in the morning, Rach jumped up when she heard the camper next to us leaving and we got in the space.

I also jumped up in the morning, but out of irritation rather than opportunity. Flies. Bloody flies. I try to ignore them as they land and take off on my face like it’s Gatwick fucking airport, but it’s impossible. Without fail, I always end up snapping out of bed and grabbing the mozzy spray, which is pretty lethal to them but also nose hair-desolvingly horrible for us. When Rach hears me grab it, she squeals in her half awake state and completely submerges herself under the duvet for protection while I go crazy on the multi-eyed bastards.

We went for a stroll into Piombino’s old town. It was lovely - very quaint. Perhaps. I’m not 100% sure what that word means to be honest. We had a drink at a beautiful spot on the edge of the water and, as usual, enjoyed a massive bowl of complimentary plain-flavoured crisps. There’d been no other customers in the bar when we arrived, and the girl working behind the bar was blasting trap music. She immediately turned the volume down when she noticed us enter, before switching to a calmer genre, which I found to be outrageously rude.

Back in the old town, we ate a couple of cheap and horrible pizzas (they exist even in Italy) whilst watching a man in a full Mickey Mouse costume walk up and down the main street. It was 32 degrees. He eventually seemed to find who he was looking for - a guy exiting a nearby bar. Mickey put his arm around him, then they strutted off together.

It was Saturday and the town market was on. We wandered the full length of it, which stretched right out into the edge of town. Everyone was fucking asleep. It was mental. We didn’t even know Italy had siestas. Stall after stall was the same, with its owner reclined back in a chair, arms folded, chin buried in chest, one leg stretched out over the other. A choir of snores. It’s a good job it was all mostly tat on offer*, we couldn’t have bought anything if we’d wanted.

*apart from some hanging dried fish that looked like mutant men.

Later that evening, we spent the twilight down on the pebble beach with a fat G&T, trying to listen to the sound of the waves over the inappropriately heavy techno that some twat* was playing.

*me.

After a great few days and nights in Piombino, we decided to get back on the road. I was a bit reluctant to move on as I loved it so much there, but of course there was still so much more of Italy to see, so we packed everything up and got ready to go.

Leaving Piombino

I was stood at the edge of the camper area taking one last photo of the beach below when the police turned up. They’d asked Rach for our documents and one of them was on the radio to someone with our passports in his hand when I got back to the van. I asked Rach what it was about but she didn’t know.

We stood around on the van for probably about five minutes waiting for them to finish whatever checks they were performing. These situations are always a bit stressful when you have no clue what the issue is. My mind went back to the incident in Monterosso, where I forced a barrier up to escape a car park after our ticket got swallowed by the ticket machine. Could this be about that? I decided not to vocalise that thought to Rach, who was already clearly worried enough.

Eventually, the policeman who’d been on the radio strolled over, handed over our passports with a smile and said ‘’thank you’’, then got in his car with his mate and drove off. I mean, a relief, sure, but what the hell? What had it been about? We had no idea. It was typical that this had happened literally seconds before we were leaving anyway, so now it looked like we were leaving because we were guilty of something. As we got ready to pull off, the guy in the camper next to us, who’d been talking with the police as they did their checks, came over to our window and started up a friendly chat, asking where we were heading off to.

‘’Naples!’’, Rach said.

‘’Ahhhh bene!’’, the bloke replied.

‘’It was probably him who called the police’’, I speculated cynically as we left the camper stop and drove out of Piombino.

A couple of hours later we arrived at a place next to yet another beach. We had a couple of top class, quench-thirsting (that’s right) Moscow Mules at a beach bar while sitting on some incredibly uncomfortable but aesthetically pleasing wooden stools. They reminded me of the back-breaking ‘chairs’ my dad had made for his kitchen a few years back. When we got back to the van the air was heaving with tiger mosquitoes, gigantic and stripey. They were so big I actually mistook one for a fly. And you know how much I hate them. I reached for the mozzy spray.

Rach squealed.

Recommended park up for Piombino:

http://park4night.com/lieu/15155/