It’s true what they say: Spring really is the only time to bicycle in Tuscany. Between mid-April and June, the weather is nothing short of perfect; warm but not hot, sunny but not dry. Today Cliff and I took a long ride across the hills on the coast, with a brief stop at the Santuario di Montenero to hear the Benedictine monks chant the vespers in procession. It’s almost 2am now, but I can’t sleep; the air is too crisp with Mediterranean energy. When we travel, we try to pack 10 or 15 DVD’s that remind us of our good old home town and ward off the jetlag blues, and what could be more cheerful than a 1950’s rom-com romp with our favorite vaguely European nymph (and the mascot of this site!), Audrey Hepburn? That’s right, we pulled Funny Face out of our little grab-bag – read on for our bleary-eyed thoughts.

Olive: Pizzazz! Its a word you keep hearing in this movie, uttered by the formidable Kay Thompson as fashion mag editrix Maggie Prescott, and it’s what Funny Face is all about. Thompson’s real claim to fame, of course, was as the creator of the incomparable pizzazz-possessor ELOISE, who was an inspiration to me as a little girl growing up in the big lonely city, and continues to influence me to this day (I absolutely can’t live without planked medallions of beef tenderloin, passé as it may be). With her flamboyance and comic timing, Thompson manages to upstage not only Audrey, gorgeous as a bookish intellectual type (yaaawn) turned fashion model (pizzazz!), but also Fred Astaire as Dick Avery, a heterosexual fashion photographer with a penchant for musical theater. Apparently based on celebrity portraitist Richard (Dick) Avedon, Dick falls for the girl while photographing her in a wedding dress, which leads to an utterly bizarre courtship punctuated by equally surreal musical numbers. But no matter! Audrey flits around Paris in gorgeous dresses, rebuffs a French philosopher lech by clocking him with a rare statue (pizzazz!), and ultimately ditches her dreary intellect for fashion and romance! Bonjour Paris!

Cliff: We were riding along the coast, where the hills were like great swollen green sweaters. About midday we became hungry for lunch, and we decided to stop at the first town we came across.

Piombino appeared down below us, perched on a cliff overlooking the water. As we approached, we spied the central piazza and a statue of a topless mermaid asleep on a rock. Children climbed on her without concern, pulling themselves up by her dangling fingertips and green copper hair. We wheeled our bicycles past them, helmet straps unfastened, and chose the only restaurant that had tables set up outside.

I got a Campari with a nastro dell’arancio, and Olive ordered by pointing to what was on the chalk menu under pesce. It ended up being a single lobster tail charred black and dripping with spicy green oil, served on a bare tin plate.

Every few minutes, a different person came over to the table, offering to take us to Island of Elba, where Napolean lived out his final days. The island was directly across from the town. It could be seen clearly without binoculars, and on a boat it couldn’t have taken more than twenty minutes. No, no, we said, shaking our heads, smiling. Otherwise we didn’t say much. Bicycling is hard work, and the sun was very bright. Campari is good to drink in the sun.