This Saturday, Jeremy and I ventured to the market to buy a few things for the apartment, and then in the afternoon, took a 15-minute train ride to Fabro, a neighboring town. At the station, we were met by some good family friends of mine who are generous and wonderful people. They have two children who are in their teens, who I hadn’t seen in more than a year and had just spent a month in the States at summer camp. I had warned Jeremy before about how amazing their family’s country home was, but I think he didn’t believe it until he saw it.

Just five minutes from the train station by car led us to a place that seemed far away from any city: three houses, an exercise room with a sauna, bocce court, small soccer field, laundry room, garage, hen house, pool. All of this is not to mention the dozens of fig trees surrounding the houses, the fruit from which we plucked and ate fresh from the tree.

Not to mention the grove of olive trees, from which they press and sell their own olive oil (which is truly delicious)! The home began as a simple second home for the grandfather twenty five years ago, and since then he bought surrounding land and converted what had been stables and other farm buildings into beautiful houses. He took up an interest in agriculture, and now they collect eggs from the hens in the hen house, raise rabbits (to eat), and have their own olive oil.

We tried to take a dip in the pool, despite the cloudy weather. The water was quite cold, so we didn’t swim for long. After a while, we went to the cinema in nearby Chiusi. Jeremy, another friend and I saw Ritratto d’amore (The Proposal) with Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds. It was a cute, predictable romantic comedy, but I always have a great time going to the movies in Italy. It’s always a mental challenge to see how much I can understand, and both Jeremy and I found that we understood most of the movie. We returned and ate dinner (almost at 11!), which was a yummy lasagne with mozzarella balls and fruit on the side. Everyone was pretty tired, so we all went to bed.

The next morning, we slept in and rose to fresh coffee and cornetti (croissants) and fruit for breakfast. It was a lazy day: we went to mass, which was basically unintelligible for me, especially because it was echo-y in the church. I understood part of the sermon when I tried to focus, but after awhile I zoned out, I have to admit. Some of us walked back up to the house, while the others drove and by the time we got back (25 minute walk almost all uphill) we were ready for some pool time. Luckily, the weather was warm and sunny, so we had fun in the pool and I even did some poolside yoga with their daughter.

Then, lunch. Oh, Italy. We ate freshly toasted bruschette; pici—a type of long pasta similar to umbrichelli, like a very fat spaghetti—with homemade tomato sauce; steak and sausage, also fresh off the grill; salad; fresh melon. It was funny to me when they told us how much weight their kids and niece and other friends had gained after staying in the States, because whenever Americans come to Italy, they gain weight, too! It really must be in the difference of eating habits, because while Americans have huge portions, we’re also not used to eating so much pasta or doing 3 courses for lunch.

The rest of the afternoon was lazy. We read (still working on The Daily Life of the Etruscans and Jeremy is finishing Word Freak, which I also read and is an interesting account of a guy who took time off his job as a Wall Street Journal sports reporter to become a competitive Scrabble player), we played with an odd contraption they had bought that is similar to tetherball—it’s a metal pole weighed down so it doesn’t go flying away, and you use a racket to hit a tennis ball attached to a long string. Eventually, it was time to go. Now, we’re home, so to speak. The weather turned cloudy around 3 or so, and the weather report claims it will rain this week. We’ll see.

This is the second time I’ve been out of the country for an anniversary of September 11th. Yesterday evening the Italian news stations began memorial coverage, and Jeremy and I got to talking about our thoughts.

Inevitably, the footage instills a sense of grief and horror at the events that transpired, even years later. I am grateful that I did not lose any loved ones on 9/11. Luckily, none of my family members who live(d) in New York worked in the Twin Towers. Jeremy wondered about the reactions of those who were not directly affected by the attack (he had a relative who was one of the “if this hadn’t happened in this way he would have died” stories, where this man got out only a short time before the building collapsed).

I guess the attack still stirs me for the reasons why the terrorists chose to target the Twin Towers at all; they were a symbol. The Pentagon was a symbol. And every time I think about that day, I think about the day itself rather than the aftermath. Yes, I am disgusted by how some people lashed out at middle Eastern Americans (or people they assumed were middle Eastern). Yes, the war that follows today was, in my opinion, misguided. However, on that day, we saw America as it can be: neighbors comforting neighbors, strangers uniting with strangers to grieve for our losses. We saw courage, too: the courage of the people aboard those planes, especially those who knew what would happen and, in their last moments, saved the lives of many others.

The Italian news anchor noted that we have a new generation of Americans that will never have lived without this as part of our history.

Summertime in Orvieto means lots of music. There are festivals of all sorts—strings, choral, classical, folk. One day a week or so ago, I noticed a poster for a choir coming to the duomo that advertised that they were going to sing some Bach and Palestrina. I’m a big fan of Palestrina, having sung his Sicut Cervus a million times at St. P’s, and I felt like it would be like a taste of home, so this Wednesday, the other 2 American girls and I went up to town for some pizza by the slice at my favorite pizza by the slice place, Il Capriccio.

The concert was nice; the choir was from Greenwich, and they did a Magnificat, a Stabat Mater, some Bach, a Brahms piece, an Ave, and then Harris, Klatzow and Holst. I was pleased to hear the Klatzow, since we had also done a little bit of his work in choir before, but I was disappointed they didn’t actually do any Palestrina.

It’s always nice to see a performance like that in the duomo. Last year we heard Mozart’s Requiem performed very well, making for quite a moving concert. In fact, last summer I wrote a poem about the concert. Here it is, if you’re interested:

August

Remember this:
Mozart’s requiem,
the kyrie’s crescendo rolling
dark and steady and long
like the Wyoming thunder
I heard when I was thirteen
in a field of blue and purple.

At twenty-one it is a Christe eleison
sighing like an abandoned lover,
an Ariadne waiting for her Theseus to
come to her. And (Christ, oh have mercy)
it is magical and fitting to end
such a thing with a farewell to the dead.

We dug them up, took them from their
stones, singing. We left our own
trail of dead—a temporary life of dirt
and terra cotta tiles and Etruscan red-figure.
They weren’t the dead we wanted,
but Christe eleison anyway.

We will only lose what we want
on that cold concrete floor of a cathedral
that took four hundred
years to build.
How many generations worked
so that their
children’s children’s children’s children
times almost infinity
could admire the INRI and the C major
chords that descend through the nave
and burst out of the heavy doors
into the piazza, where the four saints
stand guard and witness our lamentation
to our own dead,
to theirs.

This evening I learned a new hand gesture. Some of the students are from Le Marche, a region further south, near Puglia. (One told me that it was where the tourists began to go after the recession and Tuscany became too expensive.) Apparently, in the 19th century they had their share of witches who would make a horn sign (think Texas Longhorns or Rock On type of thing) and point both hands shaped as such at someone and curse them. Now, it’s used as a colloquial gesture that means a sort of joking “I’ll get you” type of thing.

I don’t even remember what I did yesterday. Oh yeah, Cerveteri. Amazing. Tons of tombs. It was eerie because I’d walk to the mouth of a tomb and because of the coolness of the tufo rock, there are a million gnats and flies, and all these flies would be buzzing like there were still bodies in the tombs, like it was a horror film or CSI, and that was grody, but then there would be a lot of butterflies outside, which reminded me of the ancient South American whoevers (Incans, maybe?) who believed that the soul was manifested as a butterfly after death. Or something, it’s very beautiful and poetic and I’m butchering it. Also, there were these 3 adorable kittens (I know, who is this, right? Im not a cat person!) and they were soooo cute and just hanging out in the slits of the rocks and near the tombs. We called them Etruscan kitties. Or even better, Etruskitties. Or Etruscats. I am just hilarious, aren’t I?

Today I went to Cortona. Very cute. I think it’s where they filmed Under the Tuscan Sun…it’s also very steep, as it is on a hill. A steep hill. I felt like I was trudging up the streets of San Francisco but with fewer cars and even fewer transvestites…The old people there are all super cute. They kind of just sit in the mornings, on their terraces or in the piazza. I didn’t notice all of them talking much, some of them just sat and were. I kind of like that.

Tomorrow I am going to Norchia (and Sovana again, but whatever, it was sweet) with a few folks and a prof from summer session. It’ll basically be four ridiculously nerdy Classics people going to our equivalent of Disneyland. Rad.

This morning we went to the Festival of St. John the Baptist (San Giovanni Batista) at San Lorenzo Nuovo. We parked near a chapel and walked down into the market, which was like a Thursday or Saturday market at Orvieto but on a much bigger scale. There were people of all ages buying things of all kinds. The first stand we stopped at was for Erika to buy some eel, which I did try later and did not care for much, but I tried it anyway. They had the sweets set out in big bins, licorice, candies, sweet dried fruits everywhere. There were porchetta vendors and bakers and tons of clothing stands, as well as garlic.
After buying cheese and bread and meat, Erika found the fried fish man. A small stand was set up under an umbrella where men stood around talking while they waited for the fresh batch of fish to come out of the frier. The vendor was pudgy and probably in his late thirties. He received a cell phone call while we were all waiting, and I watched him gesture in Italian even through the phone lines. When the fish came, it was hot, so hot he almost burned himself when he served it to the men ahead of us. A big bag full of tiny silver fish, about an inch to two inches long each, which he mixed with shrimp and breaded octopi. Everyone ate together in a cantina. The table we got was inside, luckily, and due to the stone walls, was very cool. We ate with our hands. I tried the fish; they were meant to be eaten whole, and when I heard this, Carol, one of the Americans, said to me in a slight Chicago accent: “Don’t think, just eat,” and she popped a few fish into her mouth. I followed suit, trying not to actually look at the fish, whose entire skeletons and eyes I was eating. They tasted pretty good, but I didn’t like the swallowing part, when the tail is just a tad too crunchy for me to pretend I’m eating something else.

Conversations floated around about politics, about the Civil War, about divorce rates, about vegetarianism. The wine was aleatico, a sweet red, one of my favorites from last semester. A family must have owned the cantina or bottled the wine; they stood by the entrance to the deeper part of the cantina tunnel, one of them with bright blue eyes. Satiated, we wandered back through the other part of the market, admiring the porcini mushrooms that seemed to come in all shapes and sizes. Strings of red garlic lay in a large heap next to two old gentlemen whose photos I tried to take without looking too conspicuous. I got a shot of my hand, instead.