Breaking into a Convent

Before coming to Italy, I was under the impression that cycling was the biggest popular sport in the country. While cycling is much more followed here than in the U.S., football (soccer) is, without a doubt, the biggest sport in Italy.

Late last night I was in my hotel room and kept hearing the sounds of a football match from the field about 2 blocks down the street. I decided that watching some football needed to be part of my Italian experience, so I walked downstairs and headed (no pun intended) over.

There were a series of city league games going on, so I paid my 3 Euros toward their pizza fund and went in to watch. The quality of play was very good. They were not professional, but they were post-collegiate players who obviously had been playing all of their lives. I stayed until the end of the last game, which ended a little past midnight.

The hotel where I am staying is a converted 19th century convent in a very quiet neighborhood, except for the football field. By midnight, the streets are fully deserted.

When I got back to the hotel, I found the 10-foot gate in front of the parking lot closed and locked. A substantial gate with pointed spines from the old days as a convent, in fact, surrounded the entire hotel. The gate was too far away from the building for the night watchman to hear me rattling it, so I needed to find another solution.

A phone number for the hotel was posted on the gate, but I did not have my cell phone with me. There was a side door with an access code keypad and a telephone, but the phone didn't work and they had not given me the access code when I checked in.

Another piece of information that is necessary for this story to make sense is that Finale Ligure is a tourist destination, but it is almost entirely European tourists. In my 3 days here, I have only encountered 2 people who speak English and not a single person (tourist or otherwise) who speak it as a primary language. This made stopping people and asking for help getting access to my hotel fairly complicated. I stopped a couple of people passing by from the recently ended football game, but none of them had a phone or understood what I was asking.

I found a public phone down the street, but it only took phone cards – no coins. Next, I went back to the football field and managed to get one of the players to loan me his cell phone. I had memorized the number posted on the gate, so I called the hotel and reached the night watchman, who spoke no English. I said who I was and my room number and he seemed to understand that I was locked out, but I didn’t have nearly enough Italian in my 12-word vocabulary to say that I was two blocks down the street and would meet him at the gate in 5 minutes. I think he assumed that I was calling from the gate and would go outside to let me in while I held on the phone. When I figured out that while I was holding I was missing my opportunity to meet him, I hung up the phone and gave it back to the football player.

By the time I sprinted back from the field to the hotel, there was no sign of anyone at the gate. I waited for 10 minutes, but no activity. I went between the front gate and the side door a couple of times, but no sign of life either place. I felt like the watchman could have been a little more resourceful if he knew that a guest was locked out and was not at the gate – like try a second time. There was no sign, however, that he was doing any follow-up after his first attempt failed.

I eventually decided that my only two options were to somehow climb the gate or sleep on the sidewalk outside the hotel. I assessed whether or not I could safely get over the gate, and decided it was worth a try.

I successfully climbed up and over, assuming that would be the end of this mis-adventure. When I got to the hotel door, it was also locked and the night watchman was not at the front desk. I figured that he was not a desk attendant, just a watchman who slept in the basement and answered the phone if it rang. I pounded on the door for a while, but no one answered. Checking every door yielded no joy.

Just as I was becoming reconciled to sleeping on a deck chair next to the pool, the watchman appeared. He didn’t seem very happy, in fact, I think he literally growled at me. As far as I could tell, he never even questioned how it was that I got inside the gate. I gave him a grunt of acknowledgement and went to my room.

I’m not sure if this place was built to keep people in or out, but convents are tough places to break into.