Part 6: Getting played by road pirates, and meeting my cousin Remo from San Ginesio

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“Do you understand what just happened?” the greasy con man asked. “You got played”
I’d stopped at a fuel station10 km south of Pescara to take some headache medicine, and while I dug through my bag to find it, I saw three men who appeared to be playing a shell game along the side of the building. Having zero interest in gambling, I hardly made a note of it. Then, out of nowhere…
“Did you drive that Vespa all the way from London?”
I looked up to see a well-dressed Italian man in a fine outer coat speaking to me in English.
“Yes actually, I did.”
“That’s a really long way,” he said. “Yes, it is.”
“Do you see what they’re doing over there?” he asked. I said I did, but wasn’t interested at all. He repeatedly urged me to watch, but I resisted for lack of any interest in fixed gambling enterprises.
Upon his insistence, I humored him by watching a round, as he remarked how silly the stupid game was. He correctly predicted the winner of three consecutive rounds. Still uninterested, I commended him and began to walk back to my Vespa, eager to continue my journey.
At this point, my “friend” stepped up to the table, picked the correct bell and claimed a successful €500 bet for himself. When the dealer began to pay out his money, my friend turned to the dealer and said - “and 500 for my friend too.”
The dealer then laid out another €500 and began to hand them to me.
Then he stopped and turned to my friend - “hey, I didn’t see his money!” My friend looked to me and said, “he’s got it.” Then they both asked me to show my money to prove the bet they’d made for me was valid.
This odd situation raised certain alarms inside me, but I must give some history to explain my actions at this point. There have been several times during my life when, exactly at the moment when I needed a supernatural event to occur to solve a particular problem - something unpredictable and completely wonderful would happen to take care of it. An example was finding three one hundred dollar bills exactly when I noticed I would be three hundred dollars short paying my bills for the month. This incident, however, was not one of these life moments.
I found two hundred euros in my luggage and returned to the gamblers at the table. At the moment I approached, they had re-arranged and were playing another game. My “friend” saw me approaching, essentially pulled my finger onto one of the bells, and as soon as it was revealed to be the wrong bell - the dealer took my €200 and everyone scattered like the four winds.
The table was disassembled in an instant. One person walked around the building to the right. Another couple of guys went into the parking lot. Another guy around the building to the left. Another went into the mini-mart. One stayed next to me.
“Do you understand what just happened?” the greasy con man asked. “You got played”
I wanted to clap; it was amazing. It was so real. I immediately understood that the whole group there was a cast of characters, like an acting troupe, and I’d just starred in an elaborate performance.
I told the man there with me that I was an American Journalist, and pulled out my notepad. I started asking questions about the arrangement and how it was pulled off. Did they have special names for the different roles? How many people a day? How much did they bring in? Was this a full time gig at rotating venues, or just a part time thing for kicks?
The con man became guarded and started getting concerned about me contacting the police. I told him if he gave me back €100 (half my money), I’d call it even and be on my way. He thought about it for a second, called over a big goon, and handed me a €100 bill.
What I’d bought, at a fair price, was a more cautious view of the world. I’d made the mistake of assuming I knew what was happening at that table. I incorrectly assessed that they were playing a game amongst themselves, when they were really just playing a game with me - even when I was simply observing. It was a fair price for an important lesson.
Down the road a cold, aggravated 100km further, I arrived in a chilly Fermo town. I didn’t see much of this town except what I observed as I got myself lost and un-lost, and contacted my SERVAS hosts here. Anna Maria is the SERVAS host-list coordinator for Italy, and in our former correspondence she had invited me to come and stay with her family. Fermo was a convenient place for me to stop, and I readily agreed.
Anna Maria’s 16-year-old daughter, Lucina, led me back to their home, and kept me company until Anna Maria arrived from work. I honestly saw nothing of this town, but late at night, my distant cousin Remo came to visit from the village of San Ginesio, located about 40km away.
Remo is a medical doctor with a fervent appreciation for all things American.
Even though I was planning to visit San Ginesio the next day, Remo would be working in a distant city and unable to see me then. He and his wife raced over the snowy countryside to spend just a couple of hours talking with me.
He was impressed greatly with the technological advancements of western medicine in the United States, and strongly preferred it, along with a faster westernization in Italy. He was as fed up with the system he lived with in his country as I am in mine.
My objection with the American system revolves mostly around the fact that someone like my brother, for example, with full ownership of the American dream, could potentially lose everything he owned by the simple misfortune of having one of his children become ill with a rare disease through no fault of their own.
Remo hardly spoke any English, but our heated conversation employed the talents of two translators, hoping that further explanation would result in some sort of meeting of the minds. Though we both admired and appreciated each other for our individual accomplishments, any agreement on topics was very loose indeed.
In all my travels of Italy, Remo seems to be the only person I met who was not completely embarrassed by President Berlusconi.

San Ginesio: a snowy disaster

Nothing could have prepared me for the ride to San Ginesio. If I had any inclination of how terrible the frozen road was going to be, I wouldn’t have gone. It looked so close, so simple on the map. It was cold, and things got colder.
It began to snow hard and I took off my glasses. I had to keep brushing the snow from my visor and asking for directions. The worst thought to cross my mind as a traveler is a combination of fear for your safety, coupled with the confusion of whether or not you are headed in the right direction. Wondering if you are going to die on an unsafe road, heading toward somewhere you don’t even mean to be.
When I reached San Ginesio, it was a small town square with many buildings closed due to the impassable build-up of snow in every direction. There is an abbey in the town, but I didn’t see it. I was too cold to appreciate anything at all. I went into a café to warm myself up. Succeeding this, on the advice of the barmaid, I headed on down to the city park. I stomped about 30 meters across a snow marsh to where I was told I could take in a view of the entire region. All I saw was a curtain of snow about 100 meters in front of me.
Cutting my losses, I decided to get back to sea level as fast as possible. The weather improved as the altitude dropped, and soon I was speeding along the Adriatic shore again on SP2. But as nightfall crept onward and I headed back into the mountains to enter San Marino, the temperature continued to fall well below freezing.
By the time I entered San Marino, from a random and unpopulated gate, the brutal cold turned into a solid pain that racked up and down my body. I stopped my bike and hopped up and down, pacing and squatting, trying to force the blood to flow.
I called my Sammarinese host, Sara. “Sara, I’m here. I’m lost and I’m dying,” I said frantically.
All I heard was maniacal laughter on the other end of the phone.

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Photos

Road Pirates
Dead men tell no tales.

Comments

[Zoe]

Cliffhanger again! You cruel cruel man ;)

[anonymous]

LMFAO! Vespa in the snow, what a way to go, reminds me of some scene's from "Dumb & Dumber."