Last Of The Summer Vino - The New Generation

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The new generation of resident is alien, not from this part of town anyhow, they talk in forked tongue, they have a liking for the local cheese and wine, and can bee seen taking long walks wearing full dressed khaki uniform, steel toe capped boots and very pointed walking sticks.

To boldly go where no man has gone before, to discover cheap wines, cold beers, remote goat’s cheese and large pots of local honey. Yes the tourist season has arrived. Lets take a closer look, who are these aliens?

The I have Italian genes Tourist is a very interesting species, they can nearly speak the local dialect, they lodge with distant relatives and when introduced are very surprised when NOT asked to repeat or spell their last name.

The traditional tourist can be spotted easily, very white legs, new khaki shorts, floppy hat and wonders around drinking a cappuccino between midday and four (locals only drink cappuccino for breakfast)

In the evening new arrivals can be spotted from long distances because of their red glowing faces. The English among them are very easy to identify, around 10pm when the Duomo bell rings out across the valley they all frantically rush to the bar and order two rounds of drink, old habits die hard.

The Holiday Home tourist is rather harder to spot from just looks alone, over the years they have learned how to camouflage themselves well. On arrival they spend a lot of time at the local DIY, Garden Centre and Estate Agents, they also seem to know lots of local residents who own an APE (man with a van)

This class of tourist is sometimes confused with the newer spices “The sitting tourist” or “The permanently here on Holiday tourist”, this evolution usually take on long term projects, like mowing 1000 acre fields, converting barns, producing enough paintings to fill up the newly converted barn, rewriting War and Peace, researching local eating and drinking traditions, setting up internet sites to advertise their properties or otherwise just laze around and slowly become fat, old and red faced.

The Internet Tourist found the town via the Internet, often pops into the local library to check for emails, visits most of the public toilets and then pops back to the local library to vote for the best one, has had a guided tour of the webmasters office and conversation often entails moaning about how slow connections and long downloading times have meant wasting half of their holiday on booking and organising the next half.

The Artistic Tourist has usually been invited here by previous “Artistic Tourists” who have now become “resident Artists” but haven’t quite managed to fill up their barns yet, and therefore still have space for a bed or two. They are fairly habitual and never stray very far from the hosts nest. A very good source of income for the local wine industry and their unusual behaviour and lack of dress sense is usually justified by the words “Artistic Temperament”.

Another but much rarer type of Tourist is the – we’re all here for my mates stag night tourist. They arrive in groups of 25 or more on cheap 99 pence return tickets, although by the time they land they have already spent more than a transatlantic first class ticket on drinks. They are easily identified, they travel in groups, they all wear a tee-shirt with words like “Fred’s 2004 European stag night tour” and very late at night can be seen wondering around the old town looking for Vindaloo Pizza.


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