Bolzano, Italy

On the 1st November, I moved to my new venue for the month of November, in the town of Bolzano in the north of Italy (not far from the Austrian border and close to to the Dolomite Mountains).

I am playing and living at the Parkhotel Laurin, which is considered one of the nicest hotels in town.

This move and gig, however, seemed fraught with problems from the start. As Rita was still travelling with me, I had phoned the hotel in advance to organise a trundle bed for her to stay in the hotel with me (which my contract said was allowed with the permission of the hotel management). Unfortunately my room is quite small and the staff said it would be impossible to fit a trundle bed in here, so we had to find a different hotel for Rita. (In my opinion, it would be quite easy to fit a trundle bed in here, but the staff basically refused, which was really quite irritating)

The second big frustration came when I met with the entertainment manager of the hotel who told me that I was required to play all jazz music (her example of music that wasn't really acceptable unless requested was Elton John... how hardcore! Lucky I didn't mention that I can play AC/DC, Metallica, Bohemian Rhapsody and Stairway to Heaven...). While I do have some jazz music in my repertoire, it really isn't my strong point (especially not as a piano player) and there really wasn't enough to make sure I wasn't playing the same songs every night. So I've had to change my repertoire quite a lot here and am really finding it very boring. It's just not my thing to be playing jazz 6 nights a week. She also told me that I had to make a list of every song I play each night... no other country in the world requires this!!! Only in Italy...

So far, I haven't been very impressed with this country. It has some beautiful things in it, but in many ways it just makes me realise all of the good things about Germany and Austria and the Germanic people. In general, everything here is much dirtier and I find people quite rude, uncooperative and aggressive. Everything is accompanied by lots of unnecessary beauracracy (I had to take my passport with me to buy a prepaid SIM card for my phone) and there are more police than I have seen anywhere else (though they don't seem to do much about many of the problems). Shops and offices close for a long lunch break, not all at the same time, meaning that there is a large chunk in the middle of the day when it is not possible to do anything at all. I am really looking forward to heading back to Dresden at the end of the month!