April 27

This week was Stefano's Festa Romana, with the usual suspects invited. He packed about 15 people into his cozy home and did all the cooking - fagioli with sausage, coratella (a sauté of liver, heart, etc.), chicken. All in all, a real man meal - meat, meat and more meat. I made a ricotta cheesecake with strawberries. How girlie.

Festa Romana reminded me of the film Roman Holiday for some reason, so I decided to dress a la Audrey Hepburn in a simple black sheath with black heels and a seafoam blue scarf draped around my neck. Accessorizing with a new bag -- deep blue raffia straw with bright fabric flowers on one side -- my green pave fish earrings and a smidge of lipstick, I was the drama girl.

There was a lot of wine and festive conversation. Mark Wholey was just back from a 7 week long vacation in the US, filled with tales of the eastern seaboard and reunions with long lost family. Mike Simpson regaled Mark and I with his passionate insistence that Spam is a taste treat. Sharon told about her upcoming vacation diving in the Grand Caymans. My Italian is improving. I can actually dive into the conversation (if everyone is patient).

April 19

Picked up my leased car in Milan this week. Jan is back so I had to let the little red car go home... sigh. That means a 6 month lease at $3000. But if you factor in the free car for the first 6 months, it's a good deal.

But what a comic adventure. I had planned to leave on Tuesday, taking the train in the morning from Perugia, getting the car in the afternoon from the Milan airport, then driving a short way to Parma, staying overnight and meandering my way home the next day. But this is Italy and the best laid plans of mice and men...

Monday, I find out that the Italians have called a nationwide strike for Tuesday to protest changes in labor laws. (Italians often call strikes. Le scopere. They publicize them in advance - very civil - and they usually last a half a day. Strikes are to make a point, not paralyze the system.) This meant no train service and many shops shut. So I shift everything over by one day. Easy, right? Yeah.

Wednesday, the city of Parma is sold out of hotel rooms because of a radiologist's conference. No problem. I'll just look in another town. I end up booking a room in Faenza, estimating about an hour further along the track. Faenza is reputed to have a very good museum for ceramics -- from ancient examples to modern day. Sounds good to me.

Wednesday morning arrives, I set out with butterflies in my stomach to return my short term rental car and hop on the train. It's 20 minutes from my house to the Perugia station. I promptly get lost, knowing full well that I need to be below where I am, but seeing no road that goes down, just up and around, down and back up, crowded with drivers and pedestrians, a maze of walls and buildings. (Note: I am driving a stick shift. I have never in my life driven or contemplated driving a stick, let alone in an ancient stone hill town with narrow, winding streets.) I finally stumble on the right road to the station, only to realize I am in the wrong lane to make the turn. Va bene. I am now Italian. I cut across the piazza at speed ignoring all traffic rules to get where I need to be... the mythical "over there". Settled.

My adventure causes me to miss my intended train, which sets me back an hour. Killing time in the coffee bar, a soap-challenged man with a gold tooth spends that hour trying to pick me up. Never mind that he speaks no English and I speak little Italian (pretending even less for him). Never mind that I bury my nose in a book and answer all questions with one and two words. Ahmed is very fond of me. He keeps watching me through smoke-tinted lenses, flashing that gold tooth and wheedling me to ride to Milan with him. Joy. I have visions of dodging him from train car to train car for the entire ride. I manage to dampen his spirits long enough to get on the train alone. Then a change in Terontola, and another in Florence. I get into Milan 2 hours later than planned.

My car lessors are waiting at the airport, with my car, in terminal one by the information desk... waiting very patiently, thankfully. I am thrilled to see a sporty, gray Peugot (automatic, thank you) with all kinds of gadgets to be figured out. (And a CD player.) Its now 5pm and there are 2 1/2 hours of light left max. I am so far behind schedule I will have to stay on the autostrada the entire time, instead of meandering on the smaller roads. For the uninitiated, the autostrada is 6 lanes of some of the most aggressive driving ever seen... crazy people moving very fast. I have never owned a car... am not a seasoned driver by any stretch of the imagination. In the 20 years I lived in SF, I think I drove 7 times in various rentals for a day or two, at most, muttering to myself the entire time.

Fifteen minutes on the road and I hit a huge traffic jam, bumper to bumper for about an hour. (At least it's slow.) When it thinned, the fun began... 6 lanes of speed. Trucks stick to the right lane. But it's no slow lane. The middle is for the wimps who are afraid of the trucks. The left is for Mario Andretti and all his kin. The speed limit in Italy is... well, non existent, for the most part. The trucks on the right were doing 80 to 90 mph and the demons on the left were jetting by doing upwards of 100 mph. I white knuckled it at 70 in the middle lane getting to Parma at sunset.

Now, by my calculations... bolstered by a hotel desk clerk in Faenza... Faenza is 2-3 hours from Milan. The desk clerk and I need to go back and study metric distances. If it is really only 2 ½ maybe 3 hours, then it must be as the crow, or the Andretti, flies (180 kph in lane 3). The autostrada splits into multiple choices around Bologna... its dark, I am tired and surrounded by cars. Heaven knows how far Faenza really is, if I pick the right road, that is. By now, I am talking loudly to myself (thank god it was dark), keening over the signage, unsure of which offshoot I should be on, and knowing that Faenza, a bed and a meal were somewhere far ahead. Here I've hurtling along the autostrada, where it's the Indy 500 every day, since 5:30ish. The trucks are cutting in and out of lanes, cars riding your bumper, flashing their lights to tell you to move out of the way. For a non-driver, it was an experience. I reached Faenza around 10pm. Too tired to find a restaurant, but too keyed up to sleep, I walk for about 10 minutes in the old town to shift from 130kph to a walk. Thankfully, I'd pulled into a rest area on the highway earlier and fortified myself with a bottle of water, cheese crackers and salami. The hotel has no room service, so I collapse into bed for a fabulous night's sleep -- no cats, no phones, no worries. The next day I planned a route home that avoided the autostrada, meandering through the mountains on a 4 lane highway with little traffic. I am now prepared to drive anywhere, under any conditions - except ice.

April 18

There is something contemplative about watching the world zip by from a train window... catching snippets of life, musing over the bits of people's lives. On the way to Milan, I caught sight of a long farmhouse table piled high with bright yellow plucked chickens. Three ladies were working systematically at the table cleaning the birds, and puffs of feathers floated in the air. In a field along Lake Trasimeno there was a scarecrow perched in a fruit tree wearing a military uniform with epaulets. The people across from me, between Florence and Milan, were all color coordinated. The woman and the man (a couple) were in shades of blues. The young woman behind them (sisters?) were in reds. It was like a costume designer had dressed them. Did you know that a trick of the theater is to dress related people in a play in similar colors so the audience subtly doesn't lose track of who is who? Example... In Romeo and Juliet, the Montagues may all have clothes in various shades and tones of blue, while the Capulets are in yellows and golds.

I've decided that the person who named the crayon colors in the Crayola extended box of 64 had been on a journey through central Italy. Remember Burnt Umber and Burnt Sienna? Take a train through the Italian central valleys in late winter, early spring -- those colors surround you.

April 15

I have a new... I don't know what to call him... yard-mate? Neighbor? Martha has rented the apartment to a young guy the Baglioni's (the farmers who own the surrounding land) are sponsoring for citizenship. Actually, he works for the Baglioni's cutting wood and will work around the grounds here, weed-whacking, pruning the olives, etc., in lieu of rent. His name is Matti and he is from Albania. Very sweet, very polite... has been in Italy for 3 years. Speaks good Italian but all in dialect so I have a hard time understanding him. (The dialect here reminds me of local New Jerseyese. The last syllable of each word is swallowed so, grazie, which is pronounced gratzee-ay in formal Italian, becomes gratz. So words I actually know are unintelligible.) Yesterday Matti invited me in for a drink...a sort of a thank you, nice to meet you neighbor. My first reaction was of how silent the drink would be, since we don't understand each other. But it was such a lovely gesture. So, we had a short, quiet drink punctuated with a few simple questions

"You are from Albania?"

"Yes."

"From in the mountains?"

"Yes. You are from the US?"

"Yes, San Francisco."

"Ah, the U.S. is beautiful."

"Yes, it is..."

"Your family is in SF?"

(You get the picture.)

April 12, 2002

April is bringing long awaited rains. There has been no significant rain for a year or more now, with just enough moisture falling to keep the hardiest plants alive. Everyone is worried about their wells and the communal reservoirs. Levels are perilously low and in superheated July and August that will cause trouble. These hills were beginning to take on the grey undertones of the California hills at the height of the drought. But now we've had a week of light rains and intermittent showers. Hope for summer is lifting.

Today feels like summer, warm and muggy, with quick mega-raindrop showers headed south. How nice to be as resilient as nature. A little bit of rain, a little bit of sun and all is new again. Signs of life are everywhere -- greening trees, pheasants in the fields, a covey of quail on my road... and my favorite spring sound, the cuckoo. It is such a familiar sound -- from cartoons, from old carved clocks in relatives homes -- coo-coo, coo-coo. Our cuckoos are cuckooing up and down the hillsides. It's a silly, whimsical sound as if the woods are planted with ornately carved Bavarian clocks going off on random schedules. The cuckoos will call until late May or early June when the last holdouts have found mates and settled down. Cuckoos are odd birds with an unpleasant tradition of laying their eggs in other birds' nests, pushing rival eggs overboard. A sneaky kind of avian foster care.

Went to a small dinner party at Pancesi last night -- a welcome back for Jan. In attendance were Katherine, Jan, Elizabeth and Lois Martin, a local woman who runs a lovely B&B in the countryside. Lois puts together interesting courses and tours, like a week of watercolor or cooking classes in the country. She is quite the entrepreneur. She taught in Libya for 12 years or so. (Her husband was a geologist for an oil company.) Conversation was quite lively with 5 adventuresome women in the room. Lots of laughter. My contribution to dinner was a bruschetta of fresh ricotta and young fave beans. Really simple. Toast some thick slices of bread, rub with garlic, drizzle with good oil, heap on some fresh ricotta and a spoonful of fave, salt, pepper and go. I also made Melchiorre's red peppers as an alternative topping. So the platter looked like an Italian flag -- fresh ricotta with bright green baby fave and sautéed red peppers.

Fave have the most amazing pods. The outside is an unremarkable large, green pod. But split them open, and inside is a downy, white lining molded to fit each bean. Like nature's jeweler designed the perfect padded case for these delicate vegetables. If they would hold up more than a day or two I'd be tempted to use them for my jewelry.

We went on a nice walk today, the critters and I. Through the fields and the olive groves, looking for new wildflowers. Well, I was looking for flowers. The animals are checking new smells and signs, rolling in muck, chasing each other up trees. Along our trail is a wheat field, knee high in brilliant green winter wheat. The dogs have taken a delight in it. All I see are fuzzy dog bodies skimming along heads down, tails wagging, entire bodies vibrating with the delight of whatever it is they see or smell there. Big fat white ships sailing across the sea of green. I call and their heads shoot up but they show no sign of leaving the field. Suddenly Mentuccia begins leaping through the wheat, after something. I think there may be mice that they are flushing out and chasing. Doesn't seem sporting, as the dogs are so large but then they don't seem intent upon killing them, just enjoying the chase.

Speaking of mice, the cats are doing their job of keeping the house and grounds mice free. Today I was filling the dogs outdoor bowl with water and noticed the perfect little mouse face, ears and teeth and all just squashed into the stone like a little mouse mask. One of the cats is a budding Hannibal Lechter.

I don't know if I've ever mentioned the Dog School across from my house. The farming family who own the land all around me have a plot of woods set out for hunters who bring their dogs to teach them the intricacies of the boar hunt. Beyond the baying of the hounds with their many voices and tones, I am fascinated by the hunters. There seem to be a series of standard guttural noises that one uses to call or encourage the dogs. The hills resound with oo-ooo-oo, ho-ho-hoooo and a lip vibrating bbbbbrrrrrrr. Sometimes it sounds like a chorus of big men have just gotten out of the shower and are shaking themselves dry.

A Chinese dinner party for 14 is planned for Sunday. I must go shop and prepare. I've never prepared a full Chinese dinner so I'm a little nervous. Which means lists... lists of attendees, lists of food to buy, lists of preparation thoughts and timing. I shouldn't be nervous. It's a group effort with folks coming early to chop and prep. And these are friends, appreciative of effort and forgiving of mistakes. But its in my nature to want it to be perfect... so I'll stress a little before giving in and just accepting whatever happens. I don't have 14 chairs.

April 3

Market day. The piazza in Umbertide brims with fruits, vegetables and plants for sale. (I really should take a picture.) Now that the weather is warmer, the families come out in droves to shop and catch up with acquaintances. Melchiorre has just returned from the US. Evidently he loved the States... loved the Italo-Americans he met... loved the non-traditional (by Italian standards) approach to life. We are all pleased he is home because Umbertide is not quite Umbertide without him. Jan returns next week after her 6-month hiatus. Even though it means giving up the car and the waffle iron, I will be glad to see her.

My house is surrounded by the fragrance and colors of lilacs. It makes me think of Sally all the time. Sally is 6 1/2 months pregnant, and if the picture she sent is any indication, she is as resplendent as my lilacs.