Day 1: Bari, Italy - Blue Horseshoe loves Mussolini

So I had to take the overnight train from Roma Termini to Bari because all the trains on Sunday were sold out. Fairly pleasant. Met a Japanese couple who were, unsurprisingly, quiet and polite. I arrived in Bari at 06:35, the day ahead yawning like the mouth of a hungry beast. My foot was killing me. Still is. I could barely walk and I had until 23:00 before the ferry left. What to do?

Well, the first thing I did was find the ferry terminal and dump my bags. Then I limped my sorry ass to the nearest snack bar and sat the fuck down. Little did I know that the owner of the snack bar was both a "wit" and "a" fascist. The name of the bar was Titti Tuister, which makes sense if you know how the Italians pronounce words. When I went in to get a sandwich, surprise surprise, the place was plastered with Mussolini memorabilia. I mean plastered. The guy had Mussolini calendars!

The thing is, I didn't find the Mussolini shrine weird or offensive, I was just baffled by nagging questions:

Who prints Mussolini calendars?
Do they print anything else?
Do they make calendars of kittens or cute babies and the Mussolini line is one of their "speciality items"?
Do enough people buy Mussolini calendars to justify their mass production?
Who selects the pictures?
Where do they get them from?
Do they license photographs for the sole purpose of compiling calendars?
Who sells those photographs?
Where did they get them?
Did the guy who owned the bar make the calendars himself?
Is he secretly the head of some fascist stationers outfit?
Maybe he makes his real money from the calendars and the bar is a front.
Is the bar a front?
Is he under surveillance?

Thus did my mind spin at the sight of five years worth of Mussolini calendars (2003 - 2008). Then something else occurred to me:

Why does he only have five years worth of calendars?
Did he just recently "get into" Mussolini like some people get into Pink Floyd?
If so, how? Was there a Mussolini appreciation gig he attended that blew his mind?
If he has more calendars, where are they?
Does his wife mind?
Does he have a wife?

Anyway, so I eats my sandwich and went on my merry way. I managed to get a severe sunburn from sitting in the sun for too long. I played ukulele by the waterfront until the fishermen smashing octopus on the rocks started giving me funny looks, so I left them alone. They were quite leathery and muscular.

My day in Bari ended with me drinking with a couple of Albanians going home, one of whom was a bricklayer and one of whom was a bricklayer turned economist, a career switch that unfortunately my Italian was not good enough to comprehend the provenance of.

I made it through an excruciating 14 hours in Bari before getting on the ferry.

The ferry was huge but the cabins were tiny and the toilet floors were mysteriously wet, never a good thing. I shared my cabin with an Albanian student going home to see his family. From the limited exploration I conducted, I believe that I was the only non-Albanian on the boat. I felt very special.

In the morning, the coastal town of Durres hove into view. I was very excited.