Grand Tour
Stuck in Italy
You can fight Eyjafjallajokull, or you can go with the flow of the canal.
By Jason Wilson


“You can’t drive Nature,” the Amarone producer said. “Nature drives you.” She was talking about the wine, the way her family is only able to release vintages from certain vineyards in certain years, and how the grapes determine this, as well as if the wine will be aged for two or three or four years, and whether that aging will happen in large barrels or small. “We never know what Nature gives us.” Of course I hear some version of this trope every time I ever visit a winery, no matter where it is. But on this day, the idea that Nature drives the world took on special meaning.

That’s because, at that point, I’d been stranded in Italy for three days. As you may have heard, a volcano in Iceland with the unpronounceable name of Eyjafjallajokull has been spewing a little bit of ash, causing havoc with air travel. My visit was supposed to a be a four-day jaunt to visit wineries in the Veneto, focusing on prosecco. The plan: jet in; visit a dozen wineries in four days; jet out; return home; write article. Like millions of others, I hadn’t factored a volcano into my plans. So the airline canceled my Sunday morning flight from Venice, with the earliest possibility of return on Thursday.

Hahaha. That’s your comment on my plight, right? Stuck for four extra days in Italy! As you can imagine, there was very little sympathy forthcoming from family, friends, and co-workers when I text them the news. “Awwww,” texted my wife. “It must be SUCH a struggle to be stranded in that boutique hotel featured in Architectural Digest!”

“You can always get a boat home,” texted my friend Pete, an Italian-American pastamaker. “That’s how my family got over to the States.”

When I let one friend know of my predicament, she simply texted: “You suck.”

Indeed, folks, life can be a struggle. But perhaps this was not one of them. On Sunday, the first day of my exile, I accompanied a young winemaker to lunch at the restaurant his family just opened on an island off Venice. It was a warm, sunny day. There were these delicious soft shell crabs you can only eat in Venice. And also lots of prosecco.

“Everything ok?” my mother texted.

“Yes,” I wrote, “All is fine, I’m just boarding the vaporetto back from lunch, and Matteo is going to give me a tour of Venice’s wine bars.”

No further reply or concern from Mom.

At a certain point, I felt like the overprivileged son of a deposed dictator, one who lives in the lap of luxury, and yet will never go back to his homeland. The night before my flight was canceled, I’d had dinner in the beautiful hill town of Asolo. A famous exile, Catherina Cornaro, the Queen of Cyprus from 1474 to 1489, was sent to Asolo after she may or may not have poisoned her husband (perhaps he’d also been waylaid by volcano ash?). During Cornaro’s exile, the Italian verb asolare — meaning to pass time in a delightful but meaningless way — came into usage. Perhaps that’s how I can sum up my brief stranding in Italy. I visited some more wineries. Made some more friends. Ho asolato.

I’d love to tell you of a single hardship. That I paid $1,000 for a taxi to take me to an airport, where I had to sleep on a cot. That my boss was really upset with me. That my children forgot who I was. But no. Basically, I just spent four more days drinking wine and eating in Italy.

After I visited the Amarone producer, I had another sunny lunch at a restaurant facing Lago di Garda. This is the same region D.H. Lawrence wrote about in his classic 1916 travel book, Twilight in Italy. Lawrence uses the slow peasant existence of Lago di Garda as a metaphor for all that is good and pure in the world, setting it against what he calls the “purpose stinking in it all, the mechanising, the perfect mechanising of human life.”

“Yet what should become of the world?” Lawrence writes. “[T]he industrial countries spreading like a blackness over all the world, horrible, in the end destructive. And the Garda was so lovely under the sky of sunshine, it was intolerable.”

I was actually reading this book during my trip. And, nearly a hundred years later, I have to say to Mr. Lawrence: Relax, dude. You’re in Italy. Try not to think about it too much. • 23 April 2010

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Jason Wilson is editor of The Smart Set. He also edits The Best American Travel Writing series (Houghton Mifflin) and writes the Spirits column for the Washington Post.

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