In the heart of the city, an oasis

We left a cold New York City on Tuesday, a gray day more in keeping with February than late March. And landed in Rome, where it was sunny and approaching 20 degrees C, or 68 Fahrenheit. The weather wasn’t the only incredible thing. If you’ve ever arrived in Rome’s Fiumicino airport, you know what a hell it can be. Not now–spotless, modern, fun to look at. EU citizens can scan their passports and avoid the bored agents. We were through passport control in a few seconds, and got our bags a few minutes after that.( I’m scarred; I’ve seen grownups sit in the old baggage claim area crying.)

I honestly don’t remember much of the drive from there to Perugia; I was so jet-lagged and started to lose it about 25 miles from our destination. Somehow I managed to pilot the Renault Clio close enough to our place, and we survived.

They call Umbria “the green heart of Italy,” and it’s true. Really true, right now. It’s green. How green is it? It’s as though someone turned the color saturation on an old color TV way up. I thought it was my green-lensed sunglasses upping the color, but no. Green. Verde. Vert. Grün. And bright red poppies. It’s really spring here.

Walking around today, I was into another kind of green—green spaces in the middle of the city. In any Italian city, there are lots of hidden spaces: courtyards, cloisters, gardens. In Perugia, because of the hills, these hidden places aren’t that hidden. You just have to walk around, and in between the terraced buildings, you can see patches of green. A beach chair here and there, a trampoline for the kids, a table under a tree.

I’m really trying to take a break from the all-Trump, all-the-time U.S. news, but I did see the headlines about El Cheeto Loco’s rollback of environmental regs. And it’s just weird, because climate change is a big deal in Europe. And so is some degree of awareness of energy use. You see solar panels everywhere. My favorite application is for the car ports you see at the highway rest stops.

Perugia, like lots of European cities, limits traffic in its core. It can be a pain. We live in the historic center, and we literally can’t drive up our street with our rental unless we want to be fined. So we have to come up the back way and park outside the city gate—but it’s not such a big deal. We can manage.

Another thing we’re starting to see are electric car charge points. Right now, the only electric cars you see are Smart cars and Renaults, but there will be more in the next few years. And they’re doing bike sharing here, which made me laugh—it’s seriously hilly here—until I realized that the bikes have little electric motors to help you get up these hills.

My first flight was on July 4, 1971, to Rome on Alitalia. It was on a new Boeing 747. I was headed to Italy with my family, and it was my father’s first trip back to the land of his birth since he left in 1955. It was the summer between my freshman and sophomore years at Brooklyn Tech.

Back then, flying was exciting and even fun.In coach, they gave us slippers and eyeshades, and dinner centered on a filet mignon with some sort of wine-mushroom sauce. It was all served on real china with real silverware. I’m sure my parents had drinks and wine. When my sister and I got up to wander around the plane, I saw the spiral staircase leading up to the first-class lounge. “Maria, come here,” I said. “No, go there,” said a flight attendant, pointing back toward the coach seats.

I took a lot of Alitalia flights over the years. The meals got less elaborate, the seats got more cramped. The drinks got less lavish, but there was always wine and beer.

I’ve been thinking of Alitalia, because in a way, it symbolizes what’s changed in the global economy generally, and what’s gone down in the Italian economy and the country in particular. Back then, in the golden age of aviation, countries had national carriers—Air France, Alitalia, BOAC, etc. They were the pride of the country, and often were publicly owned. (The U.S. had flagship carriers like Pan Am and TWA, but they were privately owned.)

These national carriers were, over the years, privatized. Why? A combination of European Community (now European Union) rules barring public ownership of companies like these, and the unwillingness of governments to support what often were companies operating with heavy losses.

Alitalia has been a real casualty of these trends. The Italian government(s) sold off chunks of the company over the decades, and it set off rounds of layoffs, strikes, cuts which led to more layoffs, strikes and cuts. Alitalia entered an alliance with Air France, and the two were close to a merger, but the French got cold feet.

If you look today at the Italian economy, you’ll see that a lot of it has been hollowed out. Big companies like the automaker Fiat don’t make nearly as many cars in Italy as they used to. Others, like Telecom Italia, the privatized phone company, have such complex ownership structures (with big shareholders based out of Italy) that you’ll have a hard time figuring who the true owners are.

But big companies aren’t, or weren’t, where Italy’s strengths lie—but that’s been problematic, too. Most of the industrial companies are small and medium-sized enterprises that are family owned. (While the strong food sector is basically owned by small producers and cooperatives, with the obvious exception of companies like Barilla. Formerly regional companies, like Buitoni are now owned by foreigners—Buitoni is now a subsidiary of the Swiss giant Nestlé.) These small companies have come under extreme pressure from, among other things, Chinese competitors that don’t have that nasty baggage of, you know, paying their employees decent wages and having them work reasonable hours.

But back to Alitalia. I’ll be boarding a flight bound for Rome in a little while. I’m hoping that I’ll get an upgrade that I bid on (it’s complicated, but you can’t upgrade using points for certain flights, but you can place a bet). I’d love to avoid flying coach again. Until a few years ago, Alitalia’s Boeing 777s had decent seats but the new Airbuses appear to have seats made of padded cardboard.. After a stressful flight, you get to land in Rome’s Fiumicino Airport, with long waits for bags and for non-EU citizens, long passport control lines. The company, now 49 percent owned by Etihad, is basically a low-cost carrier that charges nearly as much as the prestige carriers. And its owners are getting restless. Perhaps the latest industrial plan might restore some stability to the operation. But what it won’t do is restore that old swagger and pride of a bygone era.

A couple of summers ago, our younger daughter came with us to Perugia and took a friend along. Another friend joined them there. We have one bedroom, a living room, and a kitchen. You do the math. If you want it expressed like kids are supposed to do these days with math sentences, it could look something like this: Apartment+3 guests=no living room.

The city apartment is fine if it’s just the two of us. When we’re feeling claustrophobic, we take a walk. Perugia has tons of places to hang out, especially when the weather’s nice. For a few euros, you get a table and a drink for as long as you want it. But I’ve been there when the rain is relentless, and I got a little antsy. It doesn’t help that the apartment looks out on an alley way and a neighbor’s patio. On one trip, the Internet was not cooperating, and I hate TV. Drinking my way through the week didn’t appeal, so to relieve the boredom I went out in the rain and bought a cheap but decent guitar.

So when The Spartan Woman started looking at real estate ads for a place in the country, I didn’t immediately go to my default “you’re nuts” reaction. (She has a thing for real estate, possibly a hangover from when she and her sister and parents lived in a four-room apartment. “Very large rooms,” she’s shouting to me from the next room, but I think the experience led to this obsession.)

What helped was an unfortunate thing, a bad economy. Italy’s been suffering from economic stagnation for years. The regime of Silvio Berlusconi (a successful businessman! He loves Putin! Has to be surrounded by women much younger than himself! Sound familiar? Thankfully, it ended a few years ago) didn’t help; the guy basically wanted to be in office to shield himself from prosecution. So real estate prices in Italy have crashed, and houses stay on the market for months.

We did a reality check, and floated the idea of buying a country place at dinner with friends. No one thought we were insane; Laura said it was a good idea since there were lots of good bargains on the market.

I didn’t reckon on The Spartan Woman’s determination and speed. I thought she meant sometime in the future. But a few months of research and a whirlwind tour of some properties and we were making an offer on a house perched on a mountain above the town of Valfabbrica, about a half hour outside of Perugia. A few months later, paperwork and financials done, we’re the owners.

I’ll go into more detail later, but the house is big enough for guests. We have lots of outdoor space, and it’s right near the Sentiero Francescano, a set of hiking trails that follow the Assisi-to-Gubbio walk of the Umbrian saint.

We’re heading there soon. I’ll post more about the Valfabbrica house and our plans; we’re pretty much caught up now. We still have the apartment, and we aren’t planning on getting rid of it (those low prices make it a stupid thing to do). So we’ll have a city/country life, but in Italian, at some point.

So I misspoke. More travelogues and adventures will come after this, notwithstanding the above shot of the 1962 cult movie Il Sorpasso (courtesy of Wikipedia italiano; this is in the public domain). For the uninitiated, it’s a buddy/road trip movie that evokes a lost world, when Italy was La Dolce Vita and enjoying the economic miracolo.

A former editor after reading the earlier entries here told me, basically, “dig deeper.” Why do I even bother, why should anyone care about why I’m writing about living in our alternative universe?

I ask myself this a lot. I was born in New York; I carry a U.S. passport. My parents wanted me and my siblings to be American kids, and unlike the case with some of my cousins, they didn’t speak Italian to us.

But I have to. Being here and there speaks to a part of my personality that I can’t control. Growing up as an Italian kid on an immigrant block in New York City, and then going out into the non-immigrant world was bound to have an effect on me and people like me. Trust me, I’ve talked to other kids of immigrants about this; it’s a common obsession.

As if falling between two stools feeling weren’t enough, being a kid in the 1960s and ’70s was a good way to become ambivalent about almost everything anyway. If you’re of a certain bent, you had license to cast aside every tradition, every way of doing things, just because you could. In my case, it helped that I had tolerant, sometimes puzzled parents who just let a strange kid be himself. I had incredible freedom to pick and choose what I wanted to believe. Or not.

So it was like a checklist. Church? No. Food? Mostly Sicilian, but I loved peanut butter and Twinkies. Ethnic traditions? Here’s where it gets complicated.

My parents were both Sicilians, to different degrees, and there was a sort of class war going on in our house. My mother, born on the Lower East Side, was the daughter of tenant farmers who came during and after World War I. My father is a more recent immigrant, from 1955. He’s a city kid, raised in Palermo, and from a middle-class family. We even had two non-English languages going on, the Italian of my father’s side, and Sicilian on the maternal side. We were Italian-American on one side, and Italian-Italian on the other, and that seemed so exotic. Think of ’60s Italian movies like Il Sorpasso (the screenshot up at the top, with a very young Jean-Louis Trintignant and Vittorio Gassman) and you’ll get the idea.

Left, my mother’s family getting together in East New York in Brooklyn. The little baby in the middle is me, and that’s Angie, my mom. On the right, my dad with my Aunt Kitty and my mother, Piazza della Rebubblica in Rome, in 1955.

Identity politics was creeping somewhere in here. To combat the stereotypes of Mafia dons, pizza makers and grandmas stirring spaghetti sauce for hours, magazines started to pop up with the aim of making being Italian something to be proud of. One was a glossy affair called Attenzione (“Attention”) and featured travel stories, profiles of people like Luciano Pavarotti, the onetime patron saint of PBS fundraising drives.

My trips as a teenager to Italy—mostly in Sicily, in and around Palermo—made me feel good about myself, at least culturally. I loved being there, all the pleasures that a teenage boy can enjoy under fairly close adult supervision. (My cousin Giorgio and I would wander around Palermo and when we got back our grandfather gave us a pretty good summary of our route. He had spies.) I didn’t have to run away from my heritage, like a lot of people of my mother’s generation did.

But I didn’t have to take it all if I didn’t want to. As a kid growing up and coming of age in New York in the 1970s, I realized that I could just take what I wanted from the Italian bit, and the American bit. A lot of writers talk about conflict and confusion; what I felt was a liberation. I could be a hippie/punk/whatever in one way, and enjoy what I wanted from my family background. I could learn to cook and play guitar. David Bowie and caponata, coexisting in my psyche, no problem.The one problem, and this is pretty common among us dual-identity types, is that sometimes you’re not entirely occupying either identity. It’s a virtue, if you’re a journalist, or, maybe, a spy. But I can see how some people mind find it unnerving.

And so that brings us—or at least me, my wife and kids—to Perugia now and the Umbrian countryside soon. The region and city are definitely Italian, but there’s an efficiency and civic spirit that is lacking in some other places. Part of it is history; we’re talking about an insular region of under a million. There never was any mass migration to the U.S. or Canada from Umbria. Most people stayed.

I think I’ve set the stage pretty well. Kathy (a/k/a The Spartan Woman) and I leave in a couple of weeks to check out the new place, armed with tape measures and a credit card for furniture. Somehow we’ve got to get the utilities hooked up in our name and get an all-important Internet connection. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Here’s a shot of an extraordinary couple doing a normal thing. It’s the summer of 1996, and I’m with them having lunch in a little restaurant in the town of Norcia in Umbria. It takes about two hours to get there from Perugia, down a highway then up through the mountains on switchbacks and hairpin curves. Franco drove, I rode shotgun, while Giovanna sat across the back seat of her husband’s Mini, chain smoking most of the way.

I’d come calling on these two, my surrogate Umbrian parents, after spending an intense week with my real family, the extended Paonita clan, in Palermo. After a week with my parents, uncles, cousins, and grandmother, I needed a refuge, and these sweet people always provided one, whenever I was in Italy, whether alone or with my wife and kids.

I wouldn’t have known them except for Kathy’s yearlong stay in Perugia attending vet school. And without them, and their family, Kathy probably would have just returned to the States and we would’ve done touristy things, or stayed with my people in Sicily on our Italian vacations.

But Kathy, and then I, were sort of adopted by them. It’s a long story, but friends of Kathy jogged past their house on a hot day. Their daughter saw the two guys looking like death warmed over (they live on a hill. Wait, everyone lives on a hill in Perugia…) and gave them water. One thing led to another and soon Kathy was a regular at their dinner table and a regular passenger with Franco as he wandered the countryside reading electric meters and shopping for food in obscure shops that only insiders like himself knew.

They came to the U.S. and we showed them around New York, we’d drop in on them over the years. We got to know their big family, with brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews. Italians like to visit each other during the aperitivo hours, between 6 and 8 pm, and Giovanna’s kitchen and garden were where they met most of the time. They’d play cards, have a coffee or beer, gossip, tell jokes. Neighbors dropped in.

Left, the guys pose on a chilly day in August 1983: me, Federico, Antonio (aka Toto), and Franco.

We’re not especially Catholic despite our upbringing, but we cemented the relationship when we baptized our younger daughter in their neighborhood church, the Tempietto di Sant’Angelo, an amazing Romanesque temple built in the fifth century on the site of a Roman structure, using the original columns.

After all these years, we feel, I don’t know, privileged to have been part of their lives. Perugians are friendly, but they’re also guarded, and it can take awhile to be part of their lives. Franco, Giovanna, and whole crew have opened their arms and their homes to us, and we now have a circle of friends that kept, and keep us coming back.

Time doesn’t stand still, so the cliché goes. Franco and Giovanna are gone now, taken away too soon. But Giovanna was part of a big family, the Santucci clan, and  down through the years we’ve grown close to her baby brother Antonio and his family. Antonio is my big Perugian brother. He inspected our place and told me to buy it. He doggedly chased down the evil gas company to get us a connection. He looks in on the place, tells me what to do when domestic disaster happens (a busted drain, electrical weirdness). And when I’m there by myself, his sweet wife Rita feeds me and once, when I was sick with the flu, checked in on me to make sure I was still alive.

There’s a newer generation, and they’ve become our pals. Rita and Antonio’s son Federico comes to New York every couple of years to run the marathon, and last year was no exception. He and their friends did an AirBnB in Brooklyn, but we got together one night for a raucous dinner at Ribalta, one of my favorite authentic pizzerias in New York. (Go there; it’s right near the Strand bookstore, which is an added bonus.) And Franco and Giovanna’s daughters are around our age; we’re growing old together. Simona lives nearby, and Franca is in Malaga, which means we have a winter escape.

Here, Toto inspects what eventually became our apartment in Perugia, with its own, real, actual gas main connection.

We’ve been asked more than once, why Umbria/Perugia? A lot of American friends assume it’s where our families come from, and a lot of Italians, knowing that it’s not where our families come from, ask why there. To the second part, it’s nothing personal, people, it’s all about accessibility. Well, a lot of it is.

My father’s Sicilian, born and raised in Palermo. It’s a fantastic city, full of art, life, great food, a beautiful setting, and tons of my cousins, aunts, and uncles. I love to go there and I’m sure that when we live an EasyJet or Ryanair flight away, we’ll do it more often.

Palermo, as seen from the town of Monreale

But it’s a port city—done that, being a New York City boy. And it’s in Sicily, which is wonderful, but it’s far. To get anywhere else in Italy and Europe is a bit of a schlep and at our age, we want to get in the car, or hop on a train, and be somewhere else.

Then there are the charms of Umbria, the only landlocked region on the boot. Italians often call it the “cuore verde,” or green heart, of Italy. It’s relatively uncrowded, with a population of under 900,000. Its capital city of Perugia has only about 170,000 inhabitants, but it’s a pretty sophisticated place, being a college town and possessing a long, proud, and often bloody history. The countryside for the most part is rolling hills, and is very, very green, from blindingly bright kelly green to the silver green of olive groves.

I sometimes compare it to Vermont, which is also landlocked, green, and full of rolling hills. Vermont’s got even fewer people, 626,000 and its biggest city has only 42,000, so you can’t go strictly by population as a comparison. But you when in terms of being highly agricultural, mountainous, green and, last but not least, being progressive politically.

But enough of these facts and descriptions. There are other reasons we’re there, the people we know, love, and have met along the way, for one thing. But a dog-walking friend of mine asked for more pictures this morning, so here goes.

Here’s Perugia, from the roof of the Mercato Coperto (covered market). Until the recent construction, it was a great place for an aperitivo. New Yorkers, eat your hearts out: Aperol spritzes for €5, or about $5.25.

Lago Trasimeno, the largest lake on the peninsula. Towns on the lake, islands in it, ferries to take you to them. There’s great hiking on the islands; one, Isola Maggiore, is really hilly and gives you a great workout, not to mention views and restaurants for decadent post-hike lunches; the other one, Isola Polvese,  is a working environmental research center.

 

And the mountains… This is up in the Apennines, past the renowned gustatory center of Norcia, above the Piano Grande di Castelluccio. A sad note: This area was severely damaged by last year’s earthquakes, so we were lucky to get up there a couple of times last year, when the wildflowers on the plain were on full display in a riot of colors (I never thought that I would ever write that).

 

Can’t forget the sagre. This may look like a fast food court, but it’s a big town gathering place, outside of Perugia. The feast is ostensibly to celebrate the frog, but most of the attendees were there to eat the Umbrian specialty umbricelli. It’s a thick hand rolled pasta with, usually, a sauce strong enough to go with it.

We do like our festivals in Perugia. The biggest of the Big Three is Umbria Jazz in July. (The organizers have a pretty loose idea of “jazz,” suffice it to say it’s mostly jazz with a lot of other good stuff thrown in). Mid-spring brings the International Journalism Festival (above, Amazon’s Jay Carney and Mario Calabrese, editor of the Italian daily/site La Repubblica, last year). I’m plugging this because I’m doing a session there next month, with my pal Fabio Bertoni of the New Yorker, and Richard Samborn, a British journalism prof. And October brings Eurochocolate. I haven’t been yet, but it sounds insane. Why chocolate? Because Perugia is the home of the Bacio, the Italian version of the Hershey Kiss. Being Perugian, the Bacio is a lot more decadent.

Next: But it’s really about the people.

Can I take a break from the travelogue? One of the issues I said I’d tackle is what we can learn from others. In my case, it’s two halves of my brain trying to live together. Maybe they can figure something out.

I’ll get the stereotypes out of the way first: Americans are brash, individualistic yet friendly (have a nice day!), swaggering, big, loud. But efficient. Italians are passionate, family-oriented, clever, chaotic to the point of anarchy, happy.

Even if we say that we don’t believe in the stereotypes, they linger in the back of the brain somewhere, and, like it or not, they inform how we approach certain situations.

So I’ll dissect some of these. First, Italians and chaos. No—it just looks that way. When an American, or indeed, any North American or Northern European lands in Rome, he or she can be forgiven for thinking that the place is a mess run by lunatics. But look closer. Go to the bar—what Italians call a café. Watch the choreography at work. Someone takes your order. Another, the barista, is juggling a dozen coffee orders, and produces an array of drinks in seconds.

Every day in Italy, baristas serve up about 70 million espressos. And most of the bars are not chains. There’s no Six Sigma espresso academy, no corporate efficiency expert timing every move that every barista makes, or should make.

Another example? Go to an Italian gathering, say, a large dinner party among family and friends. People will gather and stand around and chat, and maybe get a drink. They’ll talk about where to sit, perhaps, but the whole arrival thing is just the preliminary it’s-nice-to-see-you-again ritual. Then at some point, everyone will sit, seemingly at prearranged spots. They’ll give their orders to the waiters, if the meal hasn’t been preordered, and the whole thing will proceed smoothly and efficiently.

On the other side of things, Italians have this fascination with, if not jealousy toward,  Anglo-Saxon countries. They think they’re organized. They’ll even say they’re “normal,” in contrast to their own street-level chaos—you know, the buzzing Vespas, the animated conversations. To a lot of the colder European types, Italy seems loud and like a big beehive.

But look at the boarding ritual at New York’s Penn Station or Washington, D.C.’s Union Station. Efficient? “Northern,” to use an adjective Latins use frequently to apply to the Anglo-Saxon and Germanic tribes? No.

First of all, for these premium, fast (not really) trains, there are no assigned seats, which injects no small amount of anxiety into the wait. People line up waiting for the train to arrive and for boarding to happen. They start to complain. Some may try to get ahead. Some ask the Amtrak person when can they board. At some point, the passengers on the incoming run troop out of the door. Then those waiting start to move, getting their tickets checked as they go slowly and obediently through the door, then there’s a mad scramble for a seat. So much for efficiency.

In Italy, land of supposed chaos, you get an assigned seat on the fast trains. The train’s track shows up on a board in time for you to walk there, and the platforms have signs telling you which car stops where, so you can just hop on board and find your reserved seat.

Of course, both Italians and Americans think the others have it better. Americans think life in Italy is a series of golden sunsets and Chianti. (But not always: There’s that meme about economic chaos abetted by revolving door governments.) And Italians think living in the U.S. is a dream. I’m pushing it a bit, not all of them do. But they see the wide streets, the absence of graffiti in most places, the wood-frame suburban houses, or the heritage of Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac and Patti Smith and think that Americans have it made.

Italians complain all the time; Americans seem to take daily annoyances in stride. Commuting gives us good examples. If a bus or train is late in Italy (this is not unusual), people will commiserate, and probably will launch into a denunciation of the government, ending with a shrug and the comment “Questa è l’Italia” (this is Italy). Americans will just stand there mute looking at their phones. You can look at it two ways—either Americans are sheeplike or just more realistic about how things work. And Italians just like to generate noise; it’s part of the landscape. I once wrote a piece for National Geographic Online about Perugia’s policy of limiting cars and its then-new mini metro system. The comments were blistering. I’m happy that the editors there deleted most of them (I had to resist mightily from responding).

Point is, they both have their virtues and demerits. Americans are less tribal, less bound by familial ties. That can be liberating—or alienating. Maybe that explains why they find comfort in identical suburbs, with the same malls, gas stations and shops. It’s what James Howard Kunstler calls “the geography of nowhere.” Italians, if they haven’t emigrated, usually for economic reasons, tend to live near their birthplaces. They have a greater sense of belonging, but for some, that can be oppressive.

In any event, we’ve seen enough of both places to know to look beyond the stereotypes. They might help organize your thinking at first, but they’re woefully inadequate once you get to know a place. So…hmm, where is this going? I was just having fun thinking about this stuff.

Used to be, I couldn’t just sit and do nothing. I had no patience for waiting. I’d always want things done, like, yesterday. Or if I had to wait for something, I made damn sure that I had something else to do while I sat around, something that I wanted to do.

Living in Italy, even part-time, cured me of the impatience bug. Bigly, as a certain orange government official might say.

The apartment was still not completely finished when we closed on it. I guess we were naive. So we issued ultimatums to the builder. And finally, we told him we were coming over to set the place up.

It was a chilly February when we got there. We had hardly any furniture, so we still had to sleep and eat at Giovanna’s place. But we’d spend days in the apartment—we did have a kitchen table and chairs. And power, so we could play music.

So what did we do? We waited for hours. We waited for days. The builder didn’t quite finish on time. So we had tacky (literally, sticky) newly varnished wooden floors, no real lighting fixtures, just suspended light bulbs. And a shower without any kind of enclosure. One of the first things we demanded of him was a “cabina doccia,” or shower enclosure. It took a few days, but a plumber showed up and we had one. (The builder, bless his black soul, tried to charge us for something we should’ve had from the start.)

The apartment was a new space, so old utility accounts couldn’t be carried over. So that meant getting an account for electricity, telephone/Internet and gas. And gas. Did I say gas? That one took, wait for it, a year and a half. Why? The builder didn’t file the right kind of filing, missed appointments, pipes that were too short, you name it. For the first year or so, we had an arrangement with our downstairs neighbor and tapped into her account. At one point after another delay, my Perugian friend Antonio said “this is war.” Happily, that last step involved a short war and in a month we had our very own gas meter and connection.

Then, shopping. We needed furniture. We needed household stuff. You usually accumulate stuff over the years. We did a crash course. At that point, I was still in a relatively romantic phase, and I was still impatient to get on with life there. Who wanted to go shopping for cooking utensils and a TV? So a trip to the IperCoop, a huge supermarket/everything store in the suburbs in, of all things, a shopping mall.

After that, bliss. We spent big chunks of the next summers in Italy. Sometimes we’d take advantage of cheap European flights and go off the Barcelona, Paris, Greece. But most of the time, we’d hang out in Perugia and Umbria, rent a car, wander, visit friends, sleep, read all night. If we wanted to swim, there’s a big municipal pool in Perugia. Or we’d drive an hour and a half or two and go to the Adriatic coast.

Nicer than the cave, right? This was early on, before nightstands and a desk and the seemingly zillions of chargers so necessary to daily life. And we had a mantle for the fireplace. It looks so clean and unused now…we still don’t use it for fires, because it’s a handy place for potatoes, bottles of wine and mineral water, various implements, stuff like that. Plus I, er, broke the flue chain.

Next: Umbria: Think of it as Italy’s Vermont, but not as cold