Italia

[flexagon]

We're back from our time in Italy... delicious, sleepy time spent mostly hanging out at the Palazzo Massarucci in Macerino with the friends & family of our friends T&M who were getting married. You won't have heard of Macerino, because there's nothing there: or to be more accurate, there are two large rental properties, one tiny coffee shop / grocery store, and about 20 little apartments behind the palazzo that form the rest of the town. Getting anywhere at all involved dirt roads and required energy, so we mostly didn't; small exceptions were made for Spoleto and for Amelia, two nearby hill towns that were sleepy and devoid of fancy shoe stores.

We flew with Lufthansa, whose logo looks unfortunately like a fork sticking out of a fountain pen.



And I did indeed read a guilty pleasure book and leave it there; that plus minimalism plus the utter lack of shopping opportunities meant my bag was lighter on the way back than on the way overseas. We played Boggle with our friends' friends, went running twice on the country roads, had vacation sex, ate an incredible amount of white bread and pasta because there weren't any other options, helped make fresh pasta during a lesson from a chef, slept a lot, took the obligatory yoga photos and vacation-y photos.



Language barriers were not a problem, given all the hanging out with other Americans. I used one Italian phrase very often and that was: due cappucino?. You say that, and they give you coffee. Easy! :-)

I also went sprawling on an unseen stone step in the dark (ow! bruises!), suggested a very successful game of dirty Pictionary at the low-key bachelorette party, and got many bug bites. Sigh, vacation is never terribly kind to my body. At least I fully reaped whatever health benefits you get from drinking red wine every day... and a big dollop of oatmeal every morning kept that white bread movin' on through.

Although it felt decadent and jaded, we ultimately skipped Rome entirely. We flew in and out of Rome, but the 3-hour drive made it a bit farther than we wanted to go for a day trip, and the frenetic tourism there didn't seem to fit with the slower pace of our visit. I would probably have felt differently if not for our trip to Venice in 2003, but we did take that trip; so I've seen a major Italian city, and wasn't too attracted to the Big Attractions in Rome anyway, and (here is the decadent, jaded part) if I ever really want to see those things, whatever. I'll go another time.

Finally, the wedding. Right! Our friends are now married! They had a lovely handfasting as part of their ceremony, and since they asked for no gifts I decided to knit them a fine-gauge ribbon out of white silk yarn. I worked on that a lot while I was there. In the end they had an astonishing collection of ribbons: the one I knit, an audio cable, a chain, a wrapped and knotted length of horsehair from a pony's tail, a thin strip from a felt science fair display T made when he was young, and many more tokens of friendship. I don't think it would have worked well with a wedding of over about 40 guests, but this one had 20 and it worked beautifully.

So happy to see that New York legalized gay marriage while I was away! And as icing on the cake, the toddlers who lived on the floor below us have moved out.

Comments

[dr-alycat.livejournal.com]

What a cool trip!