More Wows & Vows on a Saturday in Italy

Woke up in Florence and had breakfast. The boys had already come and gone from the breakfast room before Fred and I even got there. Got out the door by 10:30, the time when the garage guys told us we would have our car, but when we got there, no sign of our car. They had told us we can pick a time and the car will be there, but if we change our mind, just call and they’ll have it there in ten minutes. We got there and they looked at us like they’d never seen us before (but I remembered the guy because he looked more like an American dad than an Italian guy) and he asked, Did you call?  oy…. Fred went to a bookstore down the street and got back just in time for our car. Off to Arezzo!  We were dying to get there because we wanted to see the sights and be at our Villa as soon as check-in at 3:00. But much to the great annoyance of Owen, there was a wedding about to happen as we were getting to the car, so we stayed an additional 45 minutes. It was amazing! We usually see or partially see two or three weddings most Saturdays in July, so we’re a little used to it, but still, it’s always a hoot, and this one was awesome. This post will be all about the wedding, and the next one will be more about Arezzo.

Babies are always welcome at an Italian wedding.

Love this guy. I think he's the grandfather of baby Gabriele. 

Onlookers from the wine bar across the street.
Onlookers are totally accepted and expected.

Fantastic fashions on these guys.

Two funny things here: the two girls in front were just passing by, not wedding guests.
And the couple in the back, same. Just watching & judging.

Boys & girls.

And......

the lovely bride!

And her mother adjusting her train.

Weekend in Tuscany

<sup>Seems silly to be blogging about Italy from Squam Lake, but I will do that for the sake of documentation. I wrote blog posts for the last week of our trip, but was too busy to post.  So forgive the "present tense" nature of the rest of my posts for this year's trip.

Off to Florence today. Up and out by 10—not as early as we meant to, but…We managed to sleep till 8:15, even though it was glass day. Glass day is when they pick up the glass recyclables. The crashing sounds of breaking glass starting at 6:30 am is really something one can’t imagine until living through it. We got to the hotel at 1:00. The boys got stuck in the elevator briefly, which gave me a bit of a scare, but it soon resolved itself. It was scary when the hotel clerk said, “Oh, God” several times. We also had a little snafu due to my forgetting to tell Adam to bring his passport, but Jayne emailed it and all was fine.</sup> 

The view from our hotel. Check out that patio!

^{The boys soon set out for a long walk, following by the Uffizi, then back to the room for a short rest. Florence is pretty small and Owen knows it well at this point. Fred and I walked around, shopped, had a nice lunch of pesto pasta (him) and caprese salad (me), walked more, and stopped for a spritz near the hotel.}

A very nice and leisurely day—the kind I like because we’ve already seen so many of the sights and we can just hang, guilt free. It rained BIG raindrops today! We were all really tired from all the walking, so lucky for us, the dinner restaurant (Il Contandina) was just a few blocks away. We had not been there in eight years, not since the boys were little and the chef made them special simple pasta dishes. It did not disappoint!

Pirates, Parties & Pasta

^{Today, Owen had to go to a ten-minute meeting about a paper for his class. And I went out to take Erin & Frank’s family Christmas card photo, so we regrouped at about noon.} 

This might not be the card choice, but here they are!

^{The boys and I then drove to Marta (a lake town where a great deal of Italy's fishing industry is) and lunched at Il Pirata, a great seafood place on the lake that has a "pirate-like" owner.} 

^{Again, it was 97, so hanging around Viterbo was just not a very attractive option. The boys had shrimp sauce over gnocchi, a favorite, and shared a coregone (lake fish). I had the coregone and salad.} 

^{The pirate was there : ) I must translate the menu/story about him that I took a photo of… it must be interesting. Not only does the owner have an eye patch like a pirate, but a big dent in his forehead!} 

^{After lunch, the boys swam again at Capodimonte. We came back around 5, showered and went to the school for the final show. Great show by the artists, great readings by the writers.} 

Awesome piece by Annalisa Sheldahl.

The group.

Then dinner at L’Archetto, an outdoor place that is always very good to us. A great night all around.

L'Archetto

Caroline & Fred

Carlotta & Caroline

Carlotta got us a cake!

 Adam carried a fan the whole time because
Kelly left the next day and gave it to us :)

Everything Old Is New Again

^{It’s always fun to have visitors to our second home here in Viterbo because it makes us see things new again, through their eyes. Our latest guest is Adam, Owen’s friend from home. He is of Italian descent and is apparently very good in their Italian class.}

^{Owen and I left around 1:00 for the 1 1/2- to 2-hour drive to Fiumicino (where the airport is). We had an hour to kill once we got to the airport, but we wanted to be safe. We would have had more time to kill had we driven the way we meant to drive. Instead, we crawled up the coast, town by town. It was stress free, though, because we knew we’d be there in time.}

Waiting is always better with cappuccino, even though coffee
with milk after noon is a dead giveaway tourist move.

^{He came out of the doors and we were united. It’s funny that a world-class tourist destination city can have an airport that you can stand at and look at every single face that comes out of the gates. Leonardo da Vinci airport is somehow small. No frills. The antithesis of slick.}

^{On the way home, we took an exit at Civitavecchia, the port town where all the cruise ships come in, grabbed a parking spot and were on a beach in about 90 seconds. Now Adam can say he’s been in the Mediterranean.}  

Funny how these last two seem to be panoramas. Life is an adventure when you're
over 50 living in a new world of technology! You never know what you're gonna get!

Back on the highway in ten minutes, we were home by 7. The boys had a snack and chilled on the balcony, while I joined Fred at the school buffet and artist talk. The boys then went to Piazza Gesu for pizza, came home and fell asleep for 12 hours.

Sweet neighbor dog. His owner is a Fred Mertz stunt double.

Sad bizarre guy who wears a million coats and sits on a stoop nearby
and smiles all day. At least he smiles. That's a leopard fur coat. :(

^{Adam’s First Full Day in Italy}

^{The next day, Owen had a short class in Bagnaia, two towns over, in their sculptured gardens, called Villa Lante. I took him over and did some work in the café there, drove him home, and soon took off with the boys for Lake Bolsena in Capodimonte. We stopped at the terme on the way—a terme being a hot, smelly, sulphur spring where people go for the curative powers of the water. At Capodimonte, the boys rented a paddle boat with a slide (the five-seater!) and spent an hour and a half peddling/paddling and diving or sliding off the top. After they turned that in, they swam another hour and a half. I kept scanning the water for their heads—one pale, one darker—while I worked from a café on the beach. Cafés line the beach. Tons of German tourists. One guy with a Wharton school t-shirt. Maybe American, but I couldn’t hear.}

^{The sky began to darken and the wind picked up. Before you knew it, we were getting to the car as fast as we could. Pieces of bark and huge leaves from these weird trees were whipping at our faces—flying debris really putting our eyelashes to the test. Aren’t they supposed to keep stuff out of your eyes?}  

This is one of the trees. I said to Owen, Doesn't it look like camouflage?
And he said, Yeah, I didn't even see it!  Hahaha....

^{I was pretty nervous on the way home because of the intense wind, and the fact that Venice had a damaging tornedo two weeks ago, which prompted a Google search on my part, where I learned these are not at all uncommon in Italy. Lots of big lightning on the 30- to 40-minute drive home. We stopped at the mall for Adam to get a chip for his phone so he can be on line less expensively. (We’ll be back there today because, naturally, it didn’t work. Never does on the first try. It will take up to four men, several phone calls, several scans of some documents, moving from one computer to another, much head shaking and joking, to get it working.) Then we picked up dinner supplies at this same mall because it has a big supermarket. Got home before any rain, and it never really did rain after all!}

Owen & Adam at the supermarket inspecting the melons.
 I'm not sure they've ever had their picture taken at the supermarket before!
Everything's fun in a foreign country. Or at least an adventure.

^{Kelley came to dinner, which is always fun. We had drinks and cheese and crackers on the balcony, dinner in the kitchen, followed by ice cream cones back on the balcony (from Kelly).}

^{The first full day for Adam was a good one!}

^{Post script:  When we went back to the phone store the next day, the two guys working there saw me. One said to the other, “Yeah, she’s back because the chip we sold her yesterday doesn’t work because she has too many cell phones associated with her passport.”  Who knew this could be an issue? And why didn’t they use one of the many ways they have of reaching me to tell me? Long story short, I put this “chiavetta” wifi thing into my laptop, both of which I had WITH me for God knows what reason, emailed them a photocopy of Owen’s passport, and they used that to register Adam’s phone. It was working in under an hour.}