1966 Hitch Hiking in Italy

 

In the summer vacation following my first year at university I spent a month hitch hiking to Italy and back. My travelling companion, with whom I had a chaste relationship, had a name so unusual that it is unknown to Google so I shan’t name her. I don’t know if she is still alive: she probably escaped her unique name through marriage but since her original surname does not google there is no way to link from the past to any future. But the shorts she wore did much more to secure us lifts than my long hair.

We came in over the Brenner pass and then travelled down the east coast of Italy and into the heel – Bari and Lecce. On a rocky beach one day, I watched a brown as a berry old man, shirtless in tattered shorts, head down to the sea carrying a plastic bucket in each hand. He filled the buckets with water and then made his way slowly back up the beach until he reached a rock pool, where he emptied the buckets. Then he repeated the trip and I continued to watch. Eventually, he broke off from his work and came over to us. He looked at me and laughed, pointed at my long curly hair, pulled at the ends. His first hippy, though I was no hippy - just a boy with long hair.

He was evaporating water in the rock pools to make sea salt. Maybe he made a living from it. I had some Italian then (I had taken an “O” level at school) but I don’t recall if I asked him about his work or tried to justify my long hair.

We crossed over to Napoli and then made our way up to Firenze where I spent my nineteenth birthday in the Uffizi gallery, buying an illustrated guide and recording the date inside, 19 July 1966.