Italy is incredibly beautiful - at least where we've
traveled throughout Tuscany and Umbria, the hilltop towns are backdrops to vineyards and olive groves (which luckily for us are being harvested as we speak.) The skies are bluer than blue and we've enjoyed brilliant sun everyday. The flowers still in bloom this late in October are brilliant in doorways and balconies, and the caregivers tidying their yards are evident as we drive through the small towns.
Children seem absent unless we manage to be where they are as the afternoon break occurs. One day a large group descended upon our "castle" for the afternoon and managed to leave us with a teen-age fix for two weeks. Other than that our "children" appear with their parents for overnights and weekends and generally are smaller than school-age. There's a chestnut tree threatening to bop us on the bean pretty regularly
and one group of kids entertained themselves unceasingly by collecting the nuts and carrying them to the picnic table and arranging them. One morning we found that in the night, one of them had fashioned their name, "ANTONIA" and a
smiley face out of the nuts.
No one seems to speak any English, so we settle for "Buon giorno, Buona sera, Buona notte, tutto bene, and Grazie." It is so weird that we are the strangers; in my life I've never felt so much like the outsider.
At Mass on Sunday, in a positively gorgeous cathedral in Orvieto (which had taken 300 years to build), we were completely excluded by our lack
of Italian. Not an announcement; not an inkling of the reading's meaning; no "Welcome to non-Italian speaking worshipers;" So we were satisfied with the fact that the Allies chose to spare this church from their bombings and that the faithful chose to visit by the busloads. Pretty heady stuff.
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