Step right up!

A 10-story, 13th century stone clock tower dominates the main plaza of Riva del Garda. But we forgot to photograph the tower itself, distracted as we were by the sign at the tower's entrance:

At a euro per head (a buck twenty, for anyone who's counting), and with driving rain making us desperate for indoor amusements, how could we resist? (Tobias had tried to make the ascent the previous evening, but was turned away for want of a legal guardian willing to scale those 165 steps with him right after dinner.)

At the entrance we encountered a bored and surly attendant in her box office--literally, a fully enclosed glass box, like a cage. She looked at us and said, "Zwei?" (German for two). I held up four fingers and said "quattro," thinking nothing of the discrepancy--which would come back to bite us later. We forked over our four euros and began our exciting ascent.

Please observe our dizzying emotion (not to mention our posture) upon reaching the summit:

Hannah announced that enough was enough after taking in the surprisingly breath-taking view for all of 11 seconds. I reminded her of the king's ransom I had forked over to get her into the tower, for crying out loud, and I expected her to get my money's worth. She ignored me as she hit the staircase. Michelle gave it the benefit of the doubt for an additional 90 seconds, give or take:

Tobias stayed until he was drenched, waiting to shout his salutations from ten stories up--the peace and quiet of another quaint Italian village be damned--as Michelle and Hannah walked out onto the plaza. But Michelle and Hannah never emerged. And why would they? It was pouring rain. They were waiting in the bottom of the tower for us.

When we finally joined them, Michelle informed me that we had overpaid for our pleasure: kids under 18 are admitted to the tower free-of-charge, according to a sign we failed to notice on the way in. She had raised the point with the attendant, who was refusing to give a refund. "See if you can reason with her," Michelle said to me.

I'm in no position to argue in Italian, but nobody ever said that being the man of the family would be easy. So I looked at the attendant, who did me the favor of going on the offensive, carping and gesticulating from insider her cage. As best I understood it, she couldn't refund any money for the "bambini" because she couldn't re-sell the tickets she'd already torn off her ticket pad and handed to us. So if she gave us a refund, her cash drawer would be short two euros and how would she ever explain that to the boss? No end of trouble would crash down upon her head, all because we didn't read the sign, which made it our problem, not hers.

I only regret not knowing enough Italian to fully participate in my close encounter with the convoluted and maddening universe of Italian bureaucracy. It might have been fun to goad the spitfire of Torre Apponale a little bit. (I was going to photograph her while she was working me over, but unfortunately I lost my nerve.) Instead I just looked at Michelle and said, "This is gonna be too much work for two euros." So we left the attendant to resume smoking her cigarette in peace, right there under the tower's "No Smoking" sign, while we retreated to a cafe for the salutary effects of yet another cappuccino.