Sutri!!

Ok. this entry needs a ton of work...but I will show off what I have now!! I read a book for class called Pasquale's Nose. It centers around an American and his family who moves to a small village about an hour outside of Rome called Sutri. It's really quirky and cute so I decided to venture out on my own and try to find the town. For the book report I wrote for it, I began by telling the story of my adventure to Sutri. I can't find the rest of the report (and honestly, it was boring and kind of sucked so be happy you don't have to read it), but I thought this was an amusing happening.

Let me tell you about Sutri, or rather, the Capranica–Sutri train station. It’s fairly small, with only four “binarios” (station platforms). The brown water tower may say “Capranica–Sutri” in bright yellow letters, but rest assured, Sutri is nowhere to be found, and busses to the town are sparse. I arrived at the station at 3:17 PM, and promptly looked for any sign of Michael Rips’ beloved Sutri. Not seeing anything resembling the map of the town in the front of his book, Pasquale’s Nose, I found only a lonely train station and hour and a half away from Rome dotted only by one other sign of inhabitation: the Snack Bar–Pizzeria across the street. I asked the station attendant about Sutri, and after fumbling through Italian (for he spoke not a word of English), I pieced together something about a bus arriving across the street at “sei-dici,” which I hoped my two months of Italian told me was four in the afternoon. Being as that it was now 3:30; I bought a coke from the Snack Bar and then waited on a cement blockade on the side of the road and listened to Coheed & Cambria’s “Blood Red Summer” on repeat. I got a few offers for a ride, but because they all happened to be creepy middle aged men and none of them were going in what I assumed to be the right direction, I declined their invitations. Finally, the four o’clock hour arrived, and to my excitement, not one but two busses drove into the train station parking lot. Running over to the first small, blue bus, I asked “Sutri?” and he quickly pointed to the larger, green bus driving past me. Yes, driving past me. In my hopes that the blue bus would be mine, the green assumed no one needed to take it and drove off. The bus driver must have seen me try to chase his bus, bouncing my messenger bag against my side awkwardly as I ran, but he was apparently not willing to stop, so I went back to the blue bus and asked how many kilometers it was to Sutri. I wasn’t able to distinguish whether he said “twenty” or “trenta” (sometimes Italians answer me in English when they realize how horrendous my Italian is), but I figured that either distance would be too far for me to walk in the limited amount of time I had available. Hanging my head in shame and fighting off frustrated tears, I walked back to the train station man and his two friends, who must have thought I was mad. “No Sutri?” train station man asked, and I shook my head and tried to explain to him that I missed it, but not remembering the verb for “to miss,” I waved my hands wildly in the hopes that he and his friends would get the picture, although I’m not sure that they did. As they stood there looking confused, one man looked at me and said something to his other friend to Italian, which I’m glad I don’t understand because it was probably something along the lines of “idiot.” “Il prossimo bus?” I asked, and the train station man told me to look at the schedule inside the lounge. 17.55. At that point, I doubted whether another bus would be available to take me back to the train station in time to meet my family later that evening at Roma Termini, so I had to admit defeat. “Va bene, vorrai ritornare a Roma” I sighed to the man, and giving me that “I pity you but you’re a dumb American” look, he gave me a 3.60 euro train ticket back to Rome and told me to wait at “binario due.”