Duck Girl and Boss Man

We were awakened in the early morning light by doves, pseudo-cuckoos, roosters and cheery twittering birds.  The laundry was mostly dry.  We had breakfast on the patio with roses, little white butterflies, birdsong and views, the green hills rolling away to a villa settled on a hill with Italian trees on the ridgeline.

After we left Il Pozzo, we nosed around very local roads looking for points of interest that don’t exist past the sign, then found the place we had been directed to yesterday to buy an Italian SIM card for my phone, the Studio Foto Video in Monteroni.  How hard could this be?  But we stood in the tiny shop for over an hour to sign me up for the Italian SIM.  While the shopkeeper worked assiduously at his computer and made phone calls for further support, his assistant (who was wearing a shirt that said “determined feisty friendly duck”) sat on a stool next to him chatting with a visiting neighbor, answering her phone, looking at her fingernails but not helping the four other customers who had gathered by the time we left.  Eventually Duck Girl picked up her purse and hastened out of the store.  Is the Italian economy in trouble?  Do we wonder why?  I suppose all the purchases and tech stuff have to be done on the one computer, but then why does the boss have an assistant?  We left with instructions to insert the SIM card at 1400. Keep reading

Our room in Il Pozzo di Radi

It never gets easier to pack for these trips.  I was up late and early every night and day to finish things and get ready to go.  You’d think I could sleep on the plane but there’s hardly room to exhale.  The seat in front of me tilted back past the plumb of my seat.  How can the greedy airlines, squeezing ever more bodies into their flying machines, pretend they are at your service?  I just read in The Week that the 23 largest American airlines made $15.5 billion profit last year, about half from baggage and change fees.  I bet their CEOs don’t sit in economy. Keep reading

in Vallo di Nera

        For our last day in Umbria Maurice had agreed to a brief walk on the Spoleto-Norcia rail trail, a hiking path I read about online.  He had even looked it up himself and picked a starting point, Sant’Anatolia di Narco, just on the other side of a 4000-meter highway galleria.  The weather was perfect as we parked near the old train station, tightened our hiking poles, checked out the map on the signboard and headed up the road in the direction of Borgo Cerreto at 10:45.

As we neared the village of Castel San Felice, perched picturesquely on a hilltop, we turned right at a sign for the 12th century church of San Felice, a short way off the road between the hill of the town and the river.  Keep reading

On Thursday morning Maurice and I headed to la Bruna to do some errands.  As we passed La Bruna’s fortress-church I noticed its door was open so we stopped in for a look.  A half-dozen people were at work dusting, vacuuming, polishing, taking a drill to the hem of Mary’s gown, chatting.  “Buongiorno!” said a smiling young man.  “Buongiorno!” I replied.  I looked like such a tourist with my orchid rain jacket and camera in hand.  Another man waved toward the balcony and said something.  I looked.  He waved again and smiled.  I should go up to the balcony?  Si, si.  I climbed the curving wrought iron staircase, barely wide enough for me and so spare of frame that I felt like I was hanging in midair.  An ancient organ took up most of the small balcony and there was music sitting on the wall so I suppose it is still used (it occurred to me later that I should have asked to play it).  I went back downstairs, looked around and sat in a pew.  The balcony man came over and handed me a card with a picture of Mary and Jesus (the one painted at the front of their church) and a prayer on the back.  Soon Maurice wandered in.  Naturally he wanted to talk to the workers, meaning he wanted me to talk to the workers.  I don’t make small talk in English, much less Italian.  “Pulito,” I said, looking at the Mary statue, tall and shining.  “Per una festa?”  Between all of us and the young guy they brought over who knew about three words of English, we understood they were preparing for the upcoming celebration of their Madonna della Bruna on Monday night, with the service at 9 pm (!) and a short procession through town with the statue at 9:45 pm.  There would be food to buy outside and we were invited.  Sounded like fun.  Maurice put it right in his phone to remind us.  Keep reading

Ponte delle Torri, Spoleto

Christina at the bridge

Christina and I planned to hike what, from my research, seemed to be a popular trail to one of St. Francis’ hermitages, yet specifics were pretty vague.  Maurice took us into Spoleto and we managed to find the tourist office.  The woman there gave us a tourist map, which a writer of one of the articles I had found said was perfectly adequate for the walk.  (And yet, with the HQ of the CAI in Spoleto, you’d think we could have managed to get a real topo map….)  We set off about 10:15 from the tourist office toward the bridge.  The bridge!  The Ponte delle Torri (elevation 396 m) is a soaring medieval aqueduct, perhaps on Roman foundations, crossing the deep gorge of the Tessino River.  As breathtaking as it looks on approach, only one side of the pedestrian walkway is open, with a high enough wall on the other side that it wasn’t scary to traverse. Keep reading

Terry and Maurice

Jerry had made reservations for the group for dinner at a place they had stumbled onto years ago, Gaspare Restaurant e Rifugio, a nondescript building high in the mountains above Giano dell’Umbria. We sat at an L-shaped table arranged along two of the stone walls and were immediately served pitchers of wine.  Opposite the door was a fireplace, maybe ten feet wide, on a hearth about two feet above the floor.  There was a roaring fire but it was obscured by two round discs propped against a metal frame in the front.  Pizza stones?  After a while a cook at the counter in front of the fireplace caught my attention when he lifted a circle of dough.  He wielded tongs to grab the heated discs (large stones) and laid them flat on the hearth then eased circles of dough onto them.  Two more flat stones were placed on top of the dough circles.  Then, with a long-handled shovel, the cook lifted burning coals from the fire and arranged them on top of the stones.  After a while he lifted the top rock for a progress check, shoveled more hot coals on top, and soon the flat bread was done.  The cook lifted the top rock, grabbed the bread with one hand and tossed it onto the counter, where a waitress quickly sliced it into little squares, dumped them into a basket and served it to us immediately with thin slices of salami, prosciutto crudo and pecorino cheese.  We split the bread and made everything into tasty little sandwiches.  Jerry warned us not to overdo it because there was more to come. Keep reading

Perugia

We were packed into our tiny bus by nine, and by ten we were chugging up a mountain road outside of Perugia lined with vines and cisto and ginestra, our driver blowing his horn at every curve. Shortly we were at the farm where our energetic and talkative hostess Raffaella lives with her saxophonist husband, children and mother-in-law Alberta. We did not meet Alberta but she seems as energetic and hardworking as Raffaella; Alberta planted 780 of the farm’s 850 olive trees and she still produces the farm’s supplies of olive oil, wine, vegetables and jam. Raffaella runs the cooking school, operates the B&B, takes care of the chickens and who knows what other perpetual motion activities. Her mission for the day was to guide eighteen of us in cooking a four-course Umbrian special occasion meal using traditional recipes, methods, ingredients and plenty of garlic and olive oil. In the main room of her farmhouse we donned red aprons and, since she said she’d never had such a big group before, posed for a picture for her Facebook page (check it out and let me know, Facebook people, as I am not one of the in crowd).  Keep reading

While Maurice set up near the top of Spello’s old town to paint, I went down the hill to visit Pintoricchio in Santa Maria Maggiore. Two small paintings of Mary and Jesus, and a faded angel, were hidden in a back chapel, but the main attraction was the Baglioni chapel off the nave. Richly-colored scenes of great beauty and captivating detail displayed gospel personages and stories: the annunciation by a Renaissance angel to Mary in her Renaissance bedroom, the nativity with everyone arrayed on the green grass under a floating platform of brightly-robed angels singing from the same songsheet, and more, all with backdrops of dreamy Italian hill towns. No pictures allowed, and the bureaucrat collecting money was keeping a keen eye on all of us suspicious characters who wandered in. Keep reading

All was quiet when we ascended upon San Gemini, una citta’ slow.  The town had also been infiorata the day before, but only bits of tape stuck to the street and a few stray petals were left.  The broad welcoming central plaza, smoothly paved, was ringed by a cheerful white municipal building, a gelateria, an archway into the medieval city, the 13th-century church of San Francesco with some relatively recently uncovered frescoes, several businesses and a wide walkway going higher up into the town.  Naturally the tourist office was closed, but my hiking pal Christina and I were directed to a nearby travel agency, a cubbyhole of a shop where the helpful young woman did her best to assist us, in her limited English and our very limited Italian, in accessing a hiking trail (and a WC in the equally pleasant Albergo Duomo).  Back in the piazza as we tried to figure out exactly how to leave town, Jerry offered to take us to find the start of the trail, which was a very good thing, because it turned out to be miles away on shoulderless Italian back roads.  Just at the entrance to Cesi I spotted the sign to Sant’Erasmo, hidden behind ragged brush in typical Italian fashion. Keep reading

Big doings were afoot in a number of Umbrian hill towns and one was Spello, right up the road.  It was the weekend of the flower festival. Actually, “flower festival” is a poor translation of infiorata.  Perhaps “beflowered Spello” is better.  Streets of the old town were being decorated with intricate designs all made of dried flower petals and other plant parts (but no wood) to provide festive and colorful carpet for the Corpus Christi procession bearing aloft through the streets the body and blood of Jesus.  Huge industrial metal-framed tents had been erected in the streets, each covering a complex design whose segments were numbered paint-by-number style.  Stacks of boxes of dried flowers surrounded teams of workers who had been carefully filling in the designs since 6 am Saturday.  We arrived about 7 am Sunday, in time to park nearby and peer through tent flaps to watch the artistry being completed.  By eight it was so crowded our group of four could hardly stay together, though Maurice was a helpful focal point with his red Italia hat.  As the designs were completed the teams disassembled the tents in a flash, displaying their art fully to admirers. The flower pictures were breathtaking to behold.  Here was Noah’s ark askew on the sea with God’s strong hand under the waves.  There was Paul stretching out to encompass the churches of his missionary travels.  And David with shepherd’s crook and slingshot, and the Roman centurion bowing before the dead savior–most of the art we saw had Biblical themes.  Of course I wanted to stay and see every single picture (over 100) and then watch the procession, plus see the town’s highlights while I was there, but I had another appointment at 9 am.  Keep reading