Day 13 – Wandering Innichen

Feb 17, 2023

Today’s Adventure

Today we took it easy for a change. We were both a bit tired after two weeks on the road, Cindy was still under the weather, and we needed to pack and get ready for the move to Castelrotto the next morning. Today was also going to be one of those uniquely Italian pre-announced bus and train strikes that would make any major excursion problematic due to a very limited transit schedule – we just couldn’t plan on the availability of buses or trains to get us where we wanted to go, or to get us back at the end of the day.

With all of that in mind we decided to simply stay local and wander around Innichen. After sleeping in we spent most of the morning cleaning up the apartment and packing for our travel the next day. The apartment was actually in very good shape to start with, but as usual we had moved some things (mostly furniture) to more logical locations and had stashed easily broken tchotchkes out of harm’s way. We needed to put everything back where we found it in order to keep our landlord happy (and ensure a refund on our security deposit).

We enjoyed a number of really great pizzas on our trip to this region in the fall of 2022. Unlike their American counterparts, we found the Italian pizzas to be freshly made with high quality ingredients, quickly served, and reasonably priced. We had not had any good opportunities for pizza so far this trip, so Cindy did some web research for local pizzerias. She found a highly-rated pizzeria called the Theatercafè Zentral (https://www.theatercafe-zentral.it/) that was quite literally just around the corner from our apartment.

As the name suggests this restaurant was located in an old theater. It was interesting to see how they had converted the existing spaces – the lobby was now a surprisingly large bar with a fair number of booths while the theater itself was now a large dining room. They were doing a surprisingly good business for what was an otherwise quiet weekday and (a good sign) many of the customers looked like locals. Cindy ordered the Pizza Inverno with tomato sauce, mozzarella, cherry tomatoes, spicy salami, parmesan, garlic, and basil. I ordered a simple Pizza Speck with tomato sauce, mozzarella, and lots of local speck. Naturally we dressed both pizzas with our new favorite condiment, red chile infused olive oil.

We found the rarest of things in the restaurant after we finished our lunch – other Americans, in this case part of a small tour group. It was hard to miss the two guys from Philadelphia, one of them a nurse and the other an Amtrak agent. They were finishing up a week based in Innichen and were heading to Venice the next day. We had originally planned an overnight excursion to Venice for this trip, but after watching a few ‘real world’ videos of the actual conditions we changed our minds – we found that there were far too many tourists and news reports indicated that low water levels due to the region’s sustained drought were causing some canals to run low or even dry.

After lunch we took a stroll down Innichen’s L-shaped pedestrian mall to enjoy the blue skies and sunshine. At the far end of the mall we made a quick stop at our favorite EuroSpar grocery store to pick up a few items before our trip the next day. We then headed back to the apartment for a quiet evening. Not the most dramatic day in terms of activities, but very Italian nonetheless!

For Innichen’s main page click here.

For Castelrotto’s main page click here.

For the entire trip’s main page click here.