Monday, October 22 Cold, wet and cloudy

The weather continues to be miserable - brutto tempo as they say in Italian - but Verdiana tells me they say it will warm up by the weekend. Thank heavens, as this weather is limiting to what I can do. I’m staying inside too much in order to keep warm and my watercolour painting will have to done be at the kitchen table instead of on a field in the sunshine. After my lesson, (where I found out Italians have four tenses in the subjunctive and two in the conditional) I did some grocery shopping to make a true Tuscan ribollita soup: many vegetables cooked with white and herbs poured over grilled Tuscan bread. That should keep us warm for a couple of days.

I’m beginning to worry about how I’m going to get to the little town of Pomaia where Karen is located. I plan to leave on Friday 26th. It looks like I’ll have to take a rather long, circuitous train ride and then a taxi. Ah well, it might be the prettiest part of my trip. I’ll ask Samuele to help me to find a route via the Internet when he returns home this afternoon from visiting his girlfriend (ragazza) up north.

Cooked the ribollita this afternoon but I think I overdid it- it was enough for at least 10 people and it turned out Ottavio wasn’t too fond of it - after eating a bowl he cooked himself some pasta instead of having more. Well- I like it! Good news is with the help of Samuele and the Internet I found a train to the west coast of Tuscany, booked it and paid for it. It’s apparently a four hour train ride that has me changing only once and it costs me only $10! From where I end up, Rosignano, it’s a 20 Euro/30 minute taxi ride to Karen’s Buddhist centre. Yippee.

Tuesday, October 23 but a bit warmer

The high point of this day was the family dinner we were invited to: Verdiana cooked a wild boar (cingale) stew and invited Ottavio and me as well as Claudio Serafini, the manager of the school and Ottavio’s instructor. We were joined by Pietro, Verdiana’s husband, and her son Samuele. Everyone chattered away in Italian, drank the vino rosso della casa (home made wine) and consumed vast quantities of food including bruschetta using the last of her tomatoes, spaghetti with prosciutto and parmesan cheese, cingale, and a desert that resembled ladies fingers, with Nutella inside and coconut sprinkled on top. The latter was washed down with vino santo - a home-made sweet wine that takes 3 years to mature. The wild board had been killed by Pietro a few years ago during a hunting party and taken out of the freezer to cook over a whole day. Another world, another life; god people, good conversation. Fortunately, I was hungry as I had gone on a long walk that afternoon along a tractor road across and on top of hills overlooking ploughed farmers’ fields that curved on for miles in all directions. I could have been a pilgrim in the 14th century.

Wednesday, October 24 grey, wet, cool

This morning, bright and early, Verdiana drove me to a factory where they squeeze the olives to make oil so I could have a look. The millions of olives the farmers have shaken from the trees have been put into hundreds of baskets and brought to the small factory to go through a long process. To begin with, the olives are first shaken of all their leaves and stems, washed. They are first put through an enormous mill or grinder when the olives are turned into a brown mush. This mush is then fed into another machine where the oil is squeezed out of it and transformed into the greed-gold liquid ready for eating. (The stuff that is discarded is dried and used as land fill.) The oil is then poured into 5 litre jugs and taken home by the maker or distributed in some other way. The olives grown in this region are meant to be used for oil; other forms of olives are grown to be eaten whole.

Today I had my last Italian lesson with Elisa. I wanted to free up Thursday, so we combined the two lessons into one: two hours at the school and then we went to Pienza where we had lunch and then later coffee and talked in Italian about her studies, my work and things in general, she patiently correcting me as I made mistake after mistake. It must be painful to hear her beautiful language being massacred by my foreign tongue. After waiting for me while I used the Internet Café, she kindly drove me back to Castelmuzio (it was raining seriously by then) where we said good by and promised to keep in touch. Her last name is Angelini and Claudio’s last name is Serafini - I said they had created some form of heaven at the school.

I’ve begun to paint my little post cards, using as my subject matter the fruit and foliage of the oak and olive trees around me. I’m enjoying it, though I doubt whether the cards will arrive in Canada before I do.

Thursday, October 25 cloudy but bits of blue, a beautiful sun rise (uh oh)

Today I went into Montepulciano on the 7:30AM bus with Samuele. He goes to college there most mornings and returns on the 1:30PM bus. I decided to do the same. The road was windy and made me feel a little dizzy as the bus took the curves at 60k/hr, but the landscape was so beautiful it almost didn’t matter. By the time I got into this old walled hill town it was only a little after 8AM , the place was just waking up and the streets were relatively quiet and free of tourists. I wandered up to the top of the town and the Piazza Grande surrounded by its large Renaissance buildings and found a café where I drank a head-clearing cappuccino and talked to an Australian couple at the table next to me. When I walked out and said “good by” to the proprietor and told him how beautiful his town was, he said I was beautiful too. It’s nice to be in Italy when one’s almost 63.

I spent the rest of the morning visiting the Duomo, the very well designed Museum (Etruscan ceramic and funerary urns, many paintings of crucifixes, the virgin Mary, and a wide variety of saints), shops selling cheeses (especially pecorino), local wines, woven goods, & ceramics that all began to look the same after a while. I bought a piece of pizza with mushrooms and was happy with that. I find I‘m not drawn to buying stuff as much as I was the last time I was here, perhaps because I have no room in my suitcases.

After returning to the bus station at the bottom of the town, and found a little market from which I bought cheese and bread for my train trip tomorrow and flowers for Verdiana. I returned home (more winding curving roads) to my lovely peaceful little room at Il Colombaiolo. This will be the last time I write from here - I’ll begin again when I’m with Karen in Pomaia. Ciao!