Cervia

The 08h35 train from Pesaro to Cervia was nice and quiet. It is a coastal train that heads to Ravenna, and hit many towns familiar from my war readings: Cattolica, three stops in Rimini, Cesenatica, ... On the train I read Dad's Sinews of Steel pages about the Ravenna battles. The station at Cervia is quite small, and only one other person got off the train with me. I stood in line at the train info window for 30 minutes before getting directions to a tourist desk, which pointed me towards the tourist bureau closer to the beach.

Cervia is very very quiet. It was nice, 14 degrees and cloudy, just slightly foggy at the beach. Cervia is a busy tourist resort for mainly Italians in the summer, and does modest business during weekends on the off-season apparently. This Monday in late November it was pretty dead. Cervia has a large wide beach, and many hotels that were closed for the season. The sidewalks were covered in maple leaves, just like Vienna and Pesaro (which makes we wonder why we put the leaf on our flag, since it doesn't seem uniquely Canadian after all!).

Today was great fun because I could pull out my printed copies of Grandpa's two photos of Cervia to show the locals. First at the tourist bureau, where I wanted to meet my helpful e-mail correspondent Dolores, I showed their staff. Then, because Dolores would not arrive for 30-45 minutes, I went to a cafe and had great fun there. The owner, who looked older than his stated age of 56, spoke passable English and told me a story he'd heard, that a Canadian soldier was shot and killed right on that very street corner, by Germans who were stationed in Milano Marittimo on the other side of the canal and would come in on sniper missions. Then he took me and my photos over to describe to an elderly, kind, blind man, maybe 80 or so, describing the photos to him, and translating a brief conversation. The blind gentleman asked my age, and shook my hand and kissed it and thanked me (mucho grazie). A young Albanian-Italian was the other guy in the cafe who spoke english, rather good english, and he was pretty friendly and also helped with translations. The elderly man said that the Canadian soldiers were noted for their generosity. The shopowner told another story about how one of his relatives housed a Canadian soldier in a town further south, while another member of his family in Cervia had housed a German soldier. The cafe itself was quite pretty, had Christmas decorations up, and most of my time there it was playing 50's oldies music, which I thought was pretty close to the 40's theme that I was running with on this trip.

Daniel, the Albanian-Italian, walked me back to Dolores at the tourist centre and then to my hotel; as he put it, "I have nothing else to do on this slow slow day." He said he has a girlfriend on Vancouver Island, and that she says they just got a large dump of snow! I never expected a weather report about Victoria from someone in Cervia!!!

Dolores and I exchanged big smiles as I thanked her for her help in identifying the photos and describing Cervia. She apologized and felt bad that she couldn't devote any more time to showing me around town that day. So what she did, was, she called my hotel in midafternoon, leaving a message saying that her 29-year-old son was willing to take me to dinner! I felt I had to say yes. So after taking some pictures of Cervia, I had a nice evening of chat and food with Andrea (his name). He took me to a country inn type place for a country-style meal, pasta first and meat and vegetables later, half litre of wine drunk from small thick glasses, people seated on long tables rather like picnic tables.

To my (and Dolores') surprise, the Grand Hotel Cervia was closed! This is the building in Grandpa's photo. So I couldn't give my photos to anyone there. I took photos of it, and the beach. I did get a photo of me standing in the spot where Grandpa stood, with the fountain. My poor photographer was an old gentleman, who spoke no English, who first tried to say no by pointing to his eyes and saying "diabetese", and I made him stand between a bush and a hedge to get the same angle as in the 1944 photo. But he did it for me. The brick building from where the far photo was taken is long gone; the small hotels and apartments in that area are no bigger than 3 floors and look like they date from the late 50's or early 60's.