Dreaming of slumber

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This was published 15 years ago

Dreaming of slumber

To sleep, perchance to dream. One thing's for certain, Shakespeare wasn't trying to snooze in a Tuscan hill town when he wrote those words.

Castellated walls, marbled duomos, fading frescoes, wizened faces peering from green shuttered windows. Bah! It's all idyllic imagery.

We, as travellers, need realistic audio-visual information, then we'd be prepared for just how noisy medieval towns are. It's the ancient architects' fault. They designed the narrow, stone-walled alleys, where concert hall acoustics carry whispers for kilometres.

My hotel manager has locked in all the air-conditioners to his optimum summer temperature of 25 degrees. The night is stifling and I have to choose between the noisy alleyway beneath my first floor "open" window or a toss-turning claustrophobic night at 25 degrees. I opt for any breeze I can get.

In the wee hours of the morning, when the last revellers are weaving around the last bend to the fading strains of O Sole Mio, I sigh back into my pillow. After a hefty day's walking, I've earned my sleep.

But the town's garbage has to be collected before the tourist hordes begin their morning pilgrimage. With closed eyes, I recount the lines of black garbage bags dumped outside all the doors leading to my hotel.

And it's 21st-century garbage, with a 21st-century garbage truck to collect it, not a 12th-century horse and cart trundling along the 12th-century designed alleys. I hear it grind its three-point turns around all the narrow bends. At 4am.

Just as my head hits the pillow after this second blip on my sleep horizon, I think everyone in this idyllic town must be asleep. Until the floor starts to rumble. Sleep-deprived, I stumble to the window. I'm naked because of the heat but forget this little detail as I hang onto the shutters and lean out into the dark where an intergalactic machine, driven by Mad Max, is hovering along the alleyway.

Giant bristles swivel and rotate. Water sprays out the front as its headlights pick up the yellow fog and my naked form. It lumbers beneath me, spraying and sweeping the day's leftovers into its cavernous mouth.

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But there's still an hour before the church bells are due to chime. Just enough time for the tavern keeper next door to chuck the night's grog bottles into the dumpster. Each smash sends me into spasm.

At 5.30am, I plead with my brain to give in but the local rev-head bikie is setting off to work and practices his racing skills as he zigzags out of town.

I wouldn't have minded if Michelangelo was chipping away at David at 5.45am but it's not him making all the racket, it's the renovators downstairs. They've just started up the cement mixer and are crash banging the new pipes through the narrow entrance door.

It's 6am. The bells dong from the local campanile, waking man, woman, child and beast. And to top it off, two doves start cooing on my rustic Tuscan window sill.

I'm so over it.

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