It’s about 1am and I’m in Dubai waiting for a connecting flight. Aside from the temples of material excess which are the duty free stores, there is even a Hard Rock Cafe in the terminal, and some guy with a guitar doing a performance not too far from that. This is way over the top and a little surreal. All I want is to get home.

Why, with over a million people of Italian background in Australia, doesn’t Qantas introduce a long haul non stop flight to Rome? That would shave many hours off my ordeal. This return journey also stops at Singapore, and I am unable to sleep sitting up so it will be quite an ordeal for me.

During the past month of rail travel between cities, I often heard announcements about whether the train I was on was running on time or late (the announcement usually said it was running on time) and that was so unusual to my ears that it reminded me of the infamous saying about Mussolini making the trains run on time.

The origin of the myth about Mussolini and the trains running on time was recounted in Martin Gilbert’s History of the 20th Century. When, after the match on Rome, the king summoned Mussolini to form a new government, the train wanted to wait. He insisted that it leave immediately, and said something along the lines of “From now on, the trains run on time.” He was overheard by the wife of the British ambassador, who then shared this anecdote.

There you have it. I expect that myth is why there are all these announcements about whether the train is on time. Italians can’t help but play up to it.

I’m about 28 hours from the start of my journey home and I am feeling pretty homesick now. There are a lot of things I miss. Aside from the obvious – ie my family, friends and my own home, here are some of the less obvious things that I take for granted:

Speaking English: after my first week, which was partly spent at a cultural conference in Cosenza with some other Australians, I have been speaking Italian constantly to the point where sometimes I am thinking in Italian.

The Night Sky: in Bologna I looked up at the stars and they were unfamiliar and I felt the first pangs of homesickness.

Doing Laundry at Home: I’ve been doing laundry in my hotel room, using a bottle of unfamiliar lavender scented washing detergent I bought in my first week here. I am sick of the unfamiliar scent and can hardly wait to get back to using cheap Aldi laundry detergent in my own washing machine.

Supermarkets: I really miss Coles and Woolworths and even Aldi, the supermarkets here just seem so different with different brands and names in Italian.

Thai food: I’m a regular at my local Thai restaurant and I miss eating there a whole lot right now.

Usual TV programming: I don’t own a TV anymore, but I do stream some stuff on my iMac when I can be bothered. In my hotel I can enjoy either Italian news or dubbed versions of NCIS or CSI constantly- shows I don’t bother watching in English.

Myki: I have been taking a lot of public transport in the cities I have visited and I miss using my myki to hop on the bus or tram or train in Melbourne.

The Herald Sun: ever since childhood I’ve been a reader of the herald and the sun, and their successor paper rather than the more highbrow Age. I don’t buy it that often anymore, but almost a month away reminds me how much I enjoy its shallow dogmatic reporting.

Gardening: I need to get out there and plant my tomatoes and do a whole lot of urgent digging and mowing when I get home.

On the other hand, I don’t miss work – except for all my friends in the office. I could quite happily retire right now and not feel the slightest pang about the rat race.

When I get back to my home after this long away, it will seem a little different and unfamiliar and that will make it seem a little more interesting for a while.

One conspiracy theory I will not entertain, even in jest, is the Shakespeare authorship question. The original advocate for someone else being the author died in a lunatic asylum (Delia Bacon) and an early advocate for the Earl of Oxford was an eccentric unfortunately but perhaps approximately named Looney.

What saddens and appalls me is that some of the greatest Shakespearean actors of the past half century have subscribed to such theories. Among them is Sir Kenneth Branagh, whose Henry V thirty years ago was just the first of at least 5 films of the plays he was involved with.

http://www.to-be-or-not-to-be.com/william-shakespeare-authorship-2.htm

On the plane over to Italy, unable to sleep, I saw a lot of films. One of them, All Is True, stars Sir Kenneth Branagh as Shakespeare on his retirement and uneasy resumption of family life in Stratford. The film addresses various questions about the life of Shakespeare and Elizabethan theatre in a way which asserts Shakespeare to undoubtedly be the author.

Branagh is an actor, and actors deal in make believe. But does this depiction mean he has abandoned the Oxford authorship tomfoolery? I hope so.

I like to stir people up by being provocative. I get ample ammunition from my frequent purchases of ‘alternative news’ publications (ie the looney conspiracy stuff about UFOs, vaccinations, Chem trails, 9/11, Obama’s citizenship etc).

For example, this past July during the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, I was calling it the ‘moon hoax’. And I don’t like needles so I am quite comfortable being irresponsible and saying that I am an anti-vaxxer, although I think most of my shots, flu aside, are up to date. (You can tell I am not a parent.)

But I think I have an irrefutable argument that the moon landings were real and that there is no Roswell UFO stashed away in Area 51, and that argument is Donald Trump’s twitter account.

Donald Trump has generally exhibited the discretion of a parrot, and you would expect that if there was any truth to a moon hoax or Roswell cover up, he would have told us.

You might argue that whilst he is President, the US government is not going to tell him all its secrets for fear that he will do exactly that. Good point. However, Trump has never let the facts get in the way of a good story or tweet, so if he believes or suspects something, he will say so anyway. Hence his recent retweet about the Clinton body count when Epstein died in gaol, and his early advocacy of the Birther theory.

Same goes for 9/11 inside job. Trump would say so if he thought it was the case. JFK assassination… I’m kind of waiting for him to add it to the Clinton body count conspiracy theory.

Vaccinations causing autism etc? I don’t think Trump will prove or disprove that one. It’s a hippy theory and the only thing he likes about hippies is free love. Plus I doubt the US surgeon general is in a position to keep secrets from the public on vaccinations, unless it is somehow tied to the moon hoax….

The Emperor Vespasian was the son of a tax collector. This explains a lot.

As a form of revenue collection, he introduced a urinal tax. When his son Titus objected, according to his biographer Suetonius, Vespasian grabbed a coin from the pile of revenue from this tax and held it under his son’s nose, exclaiming ‘Doesn’t this money smell good’.

Titus got the point. He didn’t repeal the urinal tax when he became emperor.

Fast forward some 1950 years to now. Italy has very few public toilets. And those that it does have, mostly at railway stations, are pay toilets.

This, more even than the Colosseum, is the Flavian dynasty’s lasting legacy to Italian tourism.

Perhaps the toilets are kept in a better state this way. And if I am caught short after drinking a litre of mineral water or a couple of ‘calici’ of wine over lunch, I am not going to mind paying a euro to make my personal comment on the economy.

But what I do mind is that I do like being able to wander on foot far from my hotel, and to eat and drink whenever I feel like it. The remarkable lack of public toilets can make for a very uncomfortable time during such touristy meanderings.

I think this is my main grumble about Italy, as I near the end of my trip. To put it crudely, there are not even that many lemon trees to water, although I get a sneaking suspicion as to why there are so many lime trees in central Rome….

Crepuscolo is the Italian word for twilight or dusk. I never knew that til I asked google translate just now. Just like ‘calice’, it’s not a word in my Italian vocabulary.

Right now I’m sitting out the front of my hotel in Treviso enjoying the crepuscolo. You need to be a certain distance away from the equator to experience twilight- we get it in Melbourne but not in Brisbane, nor in Sydney or Perth. I’m sinking a beer whilst I wait for the hotel buffet to open and thinking that my work here is done, soon I will be home enjoying the dusk on my front porch in Avondale Heights.

At moments like this, I am reminded that life is good.

I’ve now been abroad and on the road for over three weeks and I am starting to feel pretty tired and homesick. Not counting day trips to Asti and Magenta, Treviso is my ninth stop on this trip. I’ve seen as much new stuff as I can handle for a while and I am getting tired of all the pasta and pizza, and need some old fashioned Australian junk food.

After walking around great distances each day I am footsore and weary. I still have a day left on my euro rail pass but I can’t find the energy to use it to hop on a train to Venice from Treviso station.

Two more sleeps and I’m on a plane home. I find I’m looking forward to it.

As an aside, I brought eight books over with me in my luggage to read on the train or in those hours when my legs will not carry me any further and it is still too early for dinner (that is, the restaurants are yet to open). I’ve read and jettisoned all eight, so today, just when my weariness means I need books more, I have had to go and buy from the limited English language selection at the bookshop at Treviso station (I’m not going to bother making the effort to read in Italian unless it’s Moravia or Calvino).

Last night I did dinner with a legion of my cousins and their families at Charlott, a Charlie Chaplin themed pizza restaurant which is in the centre of Cusignana, my father’s home village (and therefore my own ancestral home).

Great to see my cousins again, and to meet one of the latest additions to the extended family.

What impressed me about Charlott is that it has the largest pizza menu, in terms of different pizzas to choose, I have ever seen anywhere. I was too busy catching up with the kinfolk to count them, but there surely were over a hundred options on the menu. Like wow, and in my own village too!

The province of Treviso is my ancestral homeland, on my father’s side. The medieval city with its walls, moat and canals has a unique charm. I spent three hours this morning walking through the city.

The Gate of St Thomas on the north side of the city was completed in 1518, and the cathedral is the latest version of something going back to late Roman times. The restaurant I lunched in yesterday is in a building from the 1400s. And for a while there, Treviso was an independent city state before it voluntarily chose to join the Venetian republic.

This really is a world away from Melbourne suburbia, where finding a horseshoe from a milk cart buried under 50 years of bitumen is the most historically significant encounter you are likely to have.