623 - Gardenia Pass
Today I discovered the fallacy of Italian pizza.
Defined as the belief that pizza from Italy would be superior to all pizza, in every category, today this theory was completely and utterly dismantled.
It was almost as if the idea of Italian pizza had reached another plane of existence in my mind. One bite, I envisioned, had the power to unlock a sort of utopian future. It would stimulate me in ways I never even thought possible, allowing me to transcend life through the sheer brute force of mozzarella.
But moments into that first bite, a pit began to form in my stomach. And it grew slowly and steadily with each ensuing bite, until that dreadful moment when I swallowed. And then, in perfect synchronicity, the dough hit my stomach as an imaginary baseball bat hit me in the face.
I fell to my knees and it took another swing at me, splintering my jaw like Bobby Thompson’s infamous 1951 “Shot Heard ‘Round the World” homerun. I slumped over to my side, and it turned around and kicked me in the teeth while blood pooled out like a fresh jar of marinara.
And then I laid there, staring into the ground, as the realization came over me that everything I thought the world was, wasn’t.
“You alright?” Alara interjected as I was whisked back to reality.
We were in the room at an Ortisei hotel, finishing a pizza before leaving to drive up Gardenia Pass. I tried to pull myself together. Italian pizza is just pizza. Ordinary, commonplace, pizza.
I shivered and pulled out Google Maps. Gardenia Pass, if you’ve never heard of it, is a picturesque road neatly nestled in the Italian Dolomites. Our plan was to drive up it for sunset, pull over at every pit stop, and snag a bunch of pics.
Our first adventure in Italy was officially upon us, and I couldn’t be more excited after a wicked three days of food poisoning in Turkey. The only problem was that pizza, of all things, had managed to get me down.
As we weaved and winded up that never ending road to the summit, my mind felt scattered with feelings of betrayal. I was desperately grasping at straws to justify the powerhouse branding that Italy had somehow managed to impart on me. What else was fake? Was the spaghetti average too? Were the mountains actually here? Was Italy even a country?
Lord only knows.
As we creeped up the mountainside, the sun followed suit and began to do its work. I took out my camera and began to snap:
Not a bad warm up shot, despite being just ever so slightly out of focus. (I was driving, give me a brake.)
We kept going up, and as we got higher, my fears of Sicilian deceit slowly began to fade away. The scenes were getting BIG:
I’m talking absolutely MASSIVE. Maybe the Italian sun suddenly decided to put on its A game, or it heard me talking shit, or something, because things were starting to heat up.
We arrived at the top of the summit, got out, and I managed to capture this shot:
Fun fact, that little glisten in the middle is actually a ski lodge’s reflection caught in the sun.
And for the grand finale, I snagged this puppy:
You know, there’s a chance I may have managed to misjudge this lavish land of lasagna. Either that or this is the push and pull seduction that Italy is known for.
The bar going into this place was high, and I’m saying that as a Colorado native. But after this show, I might be back on board- even if the pizza got me rattled.
What’s next? Time will only tell. But Italy, we’re coming for you.
