Italy Part 5: Pasquetta

Pasquetta is the popular name given to Easter Monday. It is the day that remembers the angel who met the women visiting Jesus' tomb. It is a public holiday and in Italy, it is a day of celebration that is spent with family and friends often involving picnics or outings.

A family outing is how Anna's family celebrates Pasquetta. I'm not sure if they travel as far as we did every year or if this particular trip was for our benefit but it was lovely to spend the day with her family and to be able to see different parts of Italy.

Our day started at the extremely early time of 7am (you mustn't forget that, as students, we don't wake up before 11am ever). Although I woke up to a text from McPake saying he'd set his alarm wrong and had been up since half six that morning. I'll admit I laughed for a little too long at that...

We were in the cars and leaving by 20 past 8. We stopped at a coffee shop/bakery/shop thing for breakfast. I had my standard croissant and cappuccino and Gigi was sweet enough to pay for all of us (this became a recurring part of the day, despite our protests - they were already housing us for free, this was too nice!). We drove to her Aunty's flat to collect them for the convoy and our journey began.

The car journey was a lot of fun. Meryn, Anna and I were being driven by Dominica (Anna's sister) so there was a lot of bad singing to good songs. It turns out that Italian radio stations play songs that are almost 10 years old and it was great fun to sing along to them.

Our first stop was Lecce, a city about 130 miles south of Barletta. We had our lunch in a quaint all-you-can-eat restaurant, sat at a large wooden table in the basement of the building. On our way to the restaurant, we passed the Basilica di Santa Croce. By passed I mean we stopped and stared at it, absolutely mesmerised. A sweet little Italian man stood with us and told Anna's family all about the history of the church (roughly translated for us by Anna). He even pointed out some of the hidden faces to us. Even the fact that it was slightly covered by scaffolding didn't make it any less beautiful.

We spent a couple of hours in Lecce before piling back in the cars and driving 28 miles further south to Ontranto. Time for the beach! Even though no one but Ainsley and McPake brought anything beach suitable! Woooooo!

Before we reached the beach, I successfully managed to ask the price of and buy myself a giant marshmallow. I officially became Italian. It was a long walk from the car to the sea front but a very short walk (and a hop over a wall) from the sweet stand to the beach.

We cheered Ainsley in to the water and even sang him a little song: We like to swim with Ainsley cause Ainsley is our mate, and when we swim with Ainsley he goes under in 8...7...6...5...4...3...2...1... WOOOOOOOO! (Inspired lyrics, right?) We attracted a lot of attention, either because of how loud we were or how non-Italian we all were.

Once the weather was too cloudy/cold for more beach fun, we all walked to meet Anna's family. They were in a church and as we had a look around, we discovered that part of the church was full of human bones. Which was, as I'm sure you can imagine, rather unsettling. After looking it up on Wikipedia, I've discovered these are the relics of the "Holy Matyrs of Ontranto", 800 inhabitants who were massacred and beheaded for refusing to renounce Christianity. Even without knowing this, it was incredibly humbling to be in that nave.

We had a quick look around the shops but it was too busy for us to really be able to have a good look around. The boys (who I'm sure would disagree with that "quick" part) waited for us as out of the way as they could although we still found them looking like amongst a sea of people.

We stopped for desserts on the way back to the car (I still crave the sugar and syrup covered doughnut) which was lucky as it took us 4 and a half hours to get back home. Since we were still hungry, we walked to a restaurant a couple of minutes from Anna's apartment and had slices of pizza. It was a very sleepy kind of meal; all 5 of us sat in a closing restaurant absolutely shattered from all of our travelling. No rest for the wicked though as our next day was going to be just as busy (more on that tomorrow!)