A visit to our closest neighbors- our first Servas experience

A VISIT TO OUR CLOSEST NEIGHBORS – OUR FIRST SERVAS EXPERIENCE

I’ve always thought travelling was my deepest and authentic dream, a way to expand my soul and get in touch with new challenging situations that can change your beliefs and knock down your stereotypes. And talking about stereotypes there are plenty of them between Italian and French people, always looking to each others to try to be the best: there is a competition in every aspect of life! Who has the better cuisine, which one has the best heritage, who is better? Sometimes it looks like there is still a rivalry between our countries, but I think there has always been an invisible thread linking people, a special relationship that clarifies the reason why we feel like “cousins”.

I chose France for my very first Servas experience with Arianna, my life and travelling partner, who shared this travel expierence with me. We were so excited to discover French culture in a new way, to try a completely new concept of travelling! But there was not just excitement in our hearts, there were also fear and unease of being hosted by strangers that don’t speak our language and a lot of other concerns that we found being without reasons, just the result of our prejudices.

We started our journey from Vicenza at the end of May and we have done something like 4000 kilometers in 20 days by car, being hosted in 6 Servas homes. We enjoyed Haute Savoie, Brittany(BREIZH in local language!)and we came back to Italy passing through Loire Chateaux. Now that I am writing I simply cannot report how touching and funny each of our stays with French Servas hosts were, the time spent together is worth more than gold! We had the opportunity of trying a lot of cultural and everyday customs that we’d never have had without this amazing community of people. Servas is truly the real essence of multiculturalism, it’s what a social network should be! We have tasted new flavours, found sights and wonderful places that no guide reported, created connections, sang songs, hiked and of course talked about peace and why it’s so difficult living together respectfully. We found new hopes for the future, it has been a positive time above all the bad news we daily listen to on the TV. This trip taught us not to be suspicious of people we don’t know and to listen carefully to what they say because our English was very rusty so we had to pay a lot of attention.

We will keep the memories we gathered from this trip in a special place of our hearts… The genuine and fresh villages of Savoie, the rural French countryside that inspired the impressionistic painters, the hard cliffs and the alternation of the tide in Brittany, the wild and tough nature you can feel there, the astonishment you experience in front of the magnificent castles in the Loire Valley. We have wandered all these beauties feeling loved and protected by our hosts, and it made the difference. Here is just a brief tribute of the best places we visited, hoping they could inspire someone:

-SUSA AND MONCENISIO PASS: our first stage was actually an Italian city we never saw before, it’s a city with a lot of archeological remains from roman and celtic times,we were surprised the amount of almost intact historical testimonies we found. Moncenisio pass is the best path to reach France if you have time, you can feel yourself definitely part of the creation there and finally breath fresh and really healty air.

-MONTGAREN: we’d never ever would have found this fabulous village if we hadn’t joined Servas, all surrounded by Alps and medieval castles of the Savoy dukes. A real place of meditation where every house and wall gives you the idea of human sense of grace and beauty. The cuisine you can find in this area is superb, with tartiflette at its top.

-ANNECY: it could be seen like a fancy place but it has plenty of history and it’s surrounded by many natural wonders like Bourget lake where you can find pile-dwelling sites and paleolithic remains… Just another occasion of feeling yourself part of something bigger.

-DINARD: I can say it was definitely my favorite discovery of the whole trip, a magic place where you can get in touch with nature in all its impetuous and astonishing wildness. It’s maybe the best place I found to see the power of the tides, and where you can have a delightful landscape of the English Channel with a lot of rocks coming out from the sea. Of course you can take a boat trip to Saint Malo, another must see place, the city of Surcouf’s corsairs, but you can enjoy your time just walking along the seafront searching for  shells(they are actually very big!)or crubs coming out from everywhere!

-MONT SAINT MICHEL: i am truly convinced that neither Chateubriand could describe the shivers you feel in front of this iconic place, you just have to go there to understand… I couldn’t forget to mention it!

-POINTE DU GROUIN AND POINTE DE LA PLOUHA: two of the best natural places we have seen, these two capes can offer unforgettable sights and you can feel yourself miles away from your struggles just breathing the fresh air and watching the slow movement of the tides.

-PERROS GUIREC-PLOUMANAC’H: there are celtic remains all around you in these two villages, but you must do the path linking them. It’s like 10 kilometers walking through pink granite rocks, a very imaginative and fairy like place! If you are lucky as we have been, you could immerge yourselves in the magic atmosphere of their typical “pardon”, the celebration of the city patron saint. You can’t go away without eating oysters and drinking some cider!

HUELGOAT: another wonderful discovery, thanks to our Servas host! It’s a quiet small city but there is everything that makes you feel out of this world: a small lake with swans, a magic forest, a lot of dolmen and menhirs scattered everywhere.

-CARNAC: everyone knows Stonehenge, but everyone should know Carnac and its allignments. Hundreds of stones and menhirs set by paleolithical men in circles and lines, a very evocative and meditational place

-NANTES: a very big city, a cosmopolitan one, always turning itself into something different, it’s so full of life, arts and culture! We walked like 20 kilometers the day we visited it, every corner of the city was a real surprise… You can also find a mechanical real size elephant walking through the street beside you! This city had to change its vocation because of the crisis of the harbor industry, so a lot of blocks have been converted into museums, art spaces, gardens...Don’t miss a visit to Trentemoult, an original fishing village.

-ANGERS: the ancient Anjou’s capital city, it’s the perfect place to stay if you want to discover Loire Valley and its castles. It gave us the impression of being an old building city with a modern mind. Even if it’s a big city you have the feeling of being in an intimate and cozy town.

-LOCHES: this city is really full of history! It was the place where the famous Joan of Arc convinced the french king Charles 7th to be crowned in Reims cathedral and to claim the Country back from England. All the city is in white tuff, and it gives to it an elegance I can’t compare with any other cities. The high castle is a real masterpiece.

-CHATEUX DE LOIRE: it’s nearly impossible to choose the best one we have seen: all of them deserve a visit for their historical furniture, the glory of their gardens, the landscapes you can enjoy walking through their patrol walk, the impressive amount of wildlife and plantlife you can discover just wandering close to them. I can just make a list of the ones we liked the most, but of course we hadn’t seen them all(there are more than 300!). From west to east, we liked Tremoilles’ chateau Serrant especially for its interiors(wonderful tapestries, kitchens’ rooms, a very rare rudimentary elevator, monumental fireplaces), chateau Brissac(maybe the gardens we liked the most, you can easily imagine being in Middle Ages thanks to the architectural structure of it, the highest castle of the valley, the caves and stables puts you in a history book. Chateau d’Ussè,if you love the fairytale “sleeping beauty”, this castle is really worth the visit. It welcomes you with its monumental entrance all surrounded by towers and its white tuff looks so bright! You can walk through its patrol and admire the installations of Charles Perrault’s story moments. You can also delight yourself with some of the best ebony and ivory desks we have ever seen, oriental weapons and much more. Chateau Chenonceaux,one of the best known castles of the valley, its breathtaking and shapely architecture will shock you, but not more than its interior, well groomed thanks to the women’s touch. The castle was the king’s favorite residence.  Chateau Chambord, maybe the most iconical castle of all France, a perfect mix of Italian and French Reinassance and gothic architecture looks like a flower blossomed in the middle of the woods! This castle, strongly desired by king Francois I of France, in all likelihood with the help of his most esteemed subject, Leonardo da Vinci, is like the definitive treaty of art. There are more than 400 rooms connected by a central monumental double stair with spiral shape full of masterpieces like paintings, furniture, tapestries… if you go there you can’t miss it. I finish my list Chateau de Valencay the Talleyrand family’s castle, is very different from all the others we visited because it’s more recent and its internals have very odd things gathered from Napoleon's foreign ministry during his very long reign. Also the gardens have plenty of marvellous beauties like a labyrinth, peacocks and deers living outside, tuff caves and much more.

Now that I have returned to my daily routine I really miss the places I visited,  much like everytime I used to return home in the past, but this time it’s something different. I really miss the people I met, especially their “diversity” that enriched me a lot! I miss all the conversations I have had with people I considerd strangers at first, but now I consider them a part of me. As Jorge Luis Borges said, “we are our memory, we are that chimerical museum of shifting shapes, that pile of broken mirrors”, we really need to give an order to our memories, to fix the mirrors we always bring with us... And to achieve this we actually need to feel ourselves part of something bigger than our identity, otherwise the risk is wandering through far different memories feeling yourself confused and disoriented, perceiving us torn and slip.

Servas community indeed gave me back hope, the hope for a better and safer place to live, where people from all the countries can meet and cooperate despite of their different culture and mentality to preserve our planet for the next generations, working together for a sustainable and peaceful world.

I really thank Servas community, particularly Servas France for the growth opportunities I received and, of course, for the pecious memories I got during this travel, hoping it has just been the first of a long series!

Raffaele Aquilanti, member of Servas Italy