Italia

Brian came back from Orlando on Sunday night, and Monday morning we got on another plane (he'd already taken 3, so why not keep them coming?) to Italy. Most people go to Italy to see the Colosseum in Rome or to ride a gondola in Venice. We went to watch baseball in Tirrenia.

Tirrenia is a small beach town past its prime on the Mediterranean, outside of Pisa. It is also home to a sports facility where the Italian national baseball team plays. This Easter week that field is the site of a tournament for all the European baseball teams. Our baseball scout friends, Tom and Andy, were coming to work and suggested we come to hang out and watch a few games. There are 20 MLB teams represented here by their international scouts. It's a bunch of middle aged guys in khaki pants with radar guns, watching teenage boys play a game on the outskirts of a small town in Italy. A little bizarre, but interesting.

The ballpark is part of a national sports training facility, complete with housing so the kids can train every day and go to school in the nearest town. The sports facility is much like the rest of Tirrenia. At one time, someone invested a lot of money in it and it was really, really nice. Since then, the colors on the track have faded, there is rust on the bleachers, and the weight rooms are dusty. Our hotel is a little like that too. It was furnished around 1972 and it was the best place in town. The hotel must have been so great that nothing has really been updated in 40 years.

The whole area has character. There are several abandoned buildings around, a few half-finished hotels, and lots of peeling paint. It's like the Florida Panhandle of Italy. But things move slowly here, the food is good, and the people are nice, so we like it. The place is really only busy in the summer, so now there are just baseball people, a few families, and a handful of elderly German tourists in our hotel.

Yesterday all the games got rained out (this area has gotten record amounts of rainfall this year), so we went to Pisa with Tom to see the leaning tower. We ended up parking on the opposite side of town, so we had a nice wander as we went toward the cathedral and the tower. I promise to post some photos when we get home. I tried to get one of Brian pushing the tower up straight, but somehow he was not into that idea.

Today the sun is shining. We went to watch some baseball, had lunch, then went to the beach (not to swim, just to sit). There are no gondolas or Roman ruins here, but you can hear the waves from our hotel room and it's a pleasant, easy place to be.