Instead, when you jet into this cosmopolitan city you land at a cute, harmonic place called Bergamo in North Italy. And the reason is, you are guaranteed the proverbial icing of rock music that oozes with confidence, satisfaction and class. Flying in from Manchester in early spring you step onto Italian tarmac and breathe in the much like Manchester chilly March air. Stretching my limbs after the two-hour flight, feeling perky and pumped up ready, once again, to experience more great adventure and absorb everything, every sound around me β I was here to enjoy.
The airport looks like any other I have landed at, concrete and stone and glass walls. Controllers busy waving and signalling in their lime green fluorescent waist-coats. Passport control in dark blue uniform and matching hats. They are at work while I am on a short break. And so, I arrived a day prior to the show. This is it. Cute though. A taxi to my hotel rumbles me along the half-repaired cobblestone avenues of Bergamo.
Gracie mille. Checking into hotels is always a favourite part of arriving; settling down after a thousand miles of travel. Unzip your travel bag, spread out your clothes on the spare bed and get cleaned up. Ambling out lazily onto the balcony, ahead of me the centrepiece of the view is a Cenotaph, a ninety-foot reminder of the sacrificed Bergamo soldiers of World War I. I have a smoke and admire the view. Sipping a bottle of beer I wandered back into my room, laid down smiling satisfied that it was only another twenty-four hours before the best rock band ever were about to take over the Datch Forum Arena and I have a good seat.
Following RUSH has taken me to places both ordinary and exotic β this trip is somewhere in the middle of that scale. All these places have many things in common; they all serve funny-tasting food, few speak English and everyone of them drives on the wrong side.
These hotel rooms often have their own little fridges stacked high with goodies. Down in the lobby there is a Gipsy band who tune out romantic melodies, but that makes no impression on a RUSH fan, and two, without your girlfriend the romantic aspect goes to waste. The kind of place you would expect Humphrey Bogart to appear in his white blazer and black tie, but instead the guests were businessmen, there to attend a Conference or a Trade Fair.
