Making the bridge
Sunday Espresso V.
Buona domenica!
We drove to Torino this weekend and we were almost the only car going north. Every other car was heading the other way, toward Liguria, toward the sea. The autostrada south of us was bumper to bumper at nine in the morning on a Saturday, families with bikes on the roof rack, dogs in the back seat, the windows down. The road north was empty. We had it to ourselves for most of three hours.
Torino, when we arrived, was almost empty too. Republic Day falls on Tuesday this year, June 2, and the country had already left.
In Italy, when a national holiday lands on a Tuesday or a Thursday, the Monday or Friday between it and the weekend becomes a holiday by default. The Italians call it fare il ponte. Making the bridge. The French say faire le pont. The Spanish hacer puente. The Germans, more pragmatic, obviously, say Brückentag. The whole Catholic-Latin core of Europe shares the metaphor and the move. The country closes for four days because the country has decided the date is more important than the schedule. And before you wonder, yes, most people take the remaining days off too on the expense of their paid leave allowances, which is around 25-40 days per year anyway, depending on your work history and contract. Yeah… Europe. Did I mention free healthcare too? :)
The Americans and the British engineered this out of their calendars. Most US federal holidays were quietly relocated to Mondays, so workers would not be tempted to take the bridge themselves. Memorial Day used to fall on the 30th of May, every year, fixed, the day the Civil War graves were decorated. Now it falls on the last Monday of May. Most Americans cannot tell you what the 30th was originally for. The date got sacrificed to the schedule, and the meaning went with it. It would be a sacrilege if people would have actual holidays, who would work then?!
This is the difference. A country that still lets its calendar tell the week what to do, versus a country that lets the week tell the calendar what to do. The ponte is the visible artifact of the first arrangement. Italians honor the date by refusing to be at work near it, and the rest of the week bends to accommodate. The Americans honor the schedule, and the date bends to accommodate, and eventually disappears.
We will drive home on Tuesday evening, against the tide again, while the rest of Italy comes back from the sea. The autostrada will be packed going south to north this time, full of sunburned families and damp towels and tired children, and we will pass them quietly going the other way, the way we came.
Torino on Tuesday afternoon will still be quiet.
Alla prossima,
Peter
Torino, 31 May 2026
What’s new on our site: Livorno, a love letter
As much as I love glamorous cities like Firenze, I have a weird affection towards cities with grit. I love Napoli, and, of course, I love Livorno as well. My love letter to Livorno:
As promised last week, I am quietly launching our site, towns. Anywhere Italy is about slow travel and the 1,000 hidden Italian towns that most travelers skip. I wanted us to be accountable, so I collected the 1,000 towns and put it up on a searchable database.
Currently, the site copy is AI-written, because of the scale of it. However, selection was fully manual, based on certain factors and public Italian quality classifications. As Anywhere Italy grows this year, we will change the towns’ content to our own Features. I can’t promise we will write and visit all these towns, but hey, this is an ongoing project.
Until then, feel free to browse the site. We also have a lovely travel planner app inside, totally free, based on our insanely detailed mega-database. If you spot a bug or an issue, let me know, we will fix it. Since this is a vibecoded site, it is in forever beta.