OK, Where’s the Party? My place?
PANICALE, Umbria— That’s what they say today’s holiday is. Festa Nazionale. Off to a funny non-typical start for a holiday in Umbria. Well, at least one in June. Its dark and chilly, but the clouds parted a bit late in the afternoon and sure enough a tent went up in the piazza. They were selling local olive oil. Wiley says Katia’s family’s oil is part of the brand that gets sold with the town logo on it (the painting by Perugino of St Stephen). We got a tin of it for our Italian American neighbor Carlo, back in Maine. Always take presents that are heavy and/or breakable. Our one firm, unbendable Vreeland Family Travel Rule.
We are so slow on the uptake. The festive carved watermelons in town might have been a hint? It appeared to us that the one tent in the piazza was the sad sum total of the Festa. But some patient person took pity on us, took us strangers in a strange land, by the hand and pointed out there were galleries and cantinas open down every alley in town. How did we miss that? Always surprises us when these fun places open up. Day in and day out they present blank, ancient wooden faces to their alleys and we mindlessly walk by. Nope nothing there. Nothing to see here folks. Keep moving. Then, a couple times a year they unbar those doors, swing them open and start slinging wine and bruschetta at you in one and olive oil and local fagiolini (broad beans) in another and so on right around the town. Some are old wine storage places with ancient wine presses or wooden casks left behind for ambience. Some are proper pastel painted galleries with modernistic Italian lighting in their arched ceilings and views over gardens. Totally changes the feel of the town in the Where Are We sense. Once the light bulb went on in our tiny brains we knew where all these cantinas often are and passed ourselves from one to the next buying bottles of wine, jars of saffron, more wine. One place had a fish-based bruschetta which sounds rather odd but tasted rather divine. Benefits of an open mind and, in this case, open mouth. We came, we tried, we liked!
What a fun and revealing trip around town. Can we really be this blissfully unobservant? Our house sits between two tiny stone streets. We get use to using our top street. Its where our main doors are, its just the logical path of least resistance and makes the smoothest, easiest entry. But we do have an entry on the lower back street, our back alley in Panic Alley, Umbria. The trip we took through our lower street today to see all the local products on display was a real eye opener. Something has happened here. Can’t fool me. We looked away for a minute and What the Heck, we done got gentrified down there. I’d heard that Patrizia (of elegant restaurant Lillo Tattini, right on the piazza) had a rental place in town, just didn’t know where it was. Today the massive doors that close it off from the world are open and it is chic, chic, chic. But what am I talking about, the whole street is looking great. Che shock. I think it is our downstairs Roman neighbors relentless application of flowers and more flowers followed by liberal application of lace curtains and polished wood doors. We have one double set of doors there and we are polished wood and lace curtains and our garden looks ok from that angle too now that I look up at it. But Massimo and Stefania da Roma really put us to shame with red geraniums spilling out of every door and window opening. When we bought our house our “door” on that street was a mangled mess of old wood sort of shielding a dirt floored stack of moldy junk from view. Sort of. A place where soft hearted neighbors slipped in plates of food for the wildcat swatter residents of Casa Margherita. Not now. Less Cat. More Chic. The things you can find. Right in your own back alley.
WATCHING THE HOME FIRES BURN
Anyway, what with all this activity we shill-ied and shall-ied a bit too long and Masolino’s was fully booked so we decided to stay in and nosh. Salads, cheeses, bread and the Wiley Traveler’s outrageously fine escargot. So successful and tasty and unusual that, since it has been raining off and on all day, we went out in the garden and scooped up several dozen more latent escargots candidates (lumache) to start the next slow food event! Our garden isn’t big but it is like a game preserve for the local lumache. Big honkers too. See typical Garden Variety Big Game next to euro bill in photo for size. They are all that big. Luckily this game is somewhat slow moving, so hunting and tracking them is about my speed. The preparation is the really amazingly slow part of the process. Six days from snail to snack! Wiley is writing the story of the preparation, but now that I think of it she’s being slow too, isn’? Hmm. The ultimate Slow Food, indeed?
We settled down for a fine night by the woodstove, playing Scopa!, teaching my brother and his wife the fine points of this fun Italian card game. And somehow . . . it made us a bit thirsty and we sampled all the wines we had carried around from the festa until oh no. All gone. How did that happen?
As early sixties writer, H. Allen Smith might say “These photos illustrate the type of work the Vreeland brothers do”
Until next time,
See you in Italy!
Stew
Part of our company’s welcome was finding a bouquet of our neighbors’ roses on the dining room table. It is interesting to me how this works out. Our neighbor’s garden is right in our face, we don’t have to do a thing and our windows stay full of flowers. And don’t they reflect nicely on the glass table.? The funny thing is that looking out the windows on the other side of the house, it is five stories down to the tiny street below. And on this side of the house, we have roses – above us. That, right there, is when you know you are on a HILL. 
From our perch on Masolino’s balcony we could see another in a string of outrageous sunsets over Lago Trasimeno and Villa LeMura. And we could hear totally different kind of music coming from the Villa. Less church. More modern, jazz-ish music. Perfect dinner music to complement the balmy night breeze there on the balcony. Andrea says it is some rich foreigners’ wedding and that there are people from all over the English speaking world for the event, England, New Zealand, America, South Africa etc. The villa is maybe a half an hour walk away but the night is so still and bright and clear that the sound travels well and the music is gently all around us and occasionally you can hear hints of laughing happy voices mixed in with the music. 
LA GIOCONDA DA GIOIELLA
Introductions over, I ordered a cappuccino and sat down with some English people we had just met the night before. The Danes finished their coffee and let the terrier on his leash propel them towards the door, waving back at us over their shoulders. When All Animal Hell broke loose in Georgia. Tigre the massive, uncontested, king of the jungle here must have been dozing in the sun under a chair by the door. And the new puppy must have thought, Hey what is this? And that is when POW! BANG! YIPE! YIIIIIIPE! HELP! Cat, Dog, Danes, and multiple Baristas all blew out through the glass doors, into the piazza. In an unreal scrambled, screaming mass. It was really very like the Popeye Blutto fight scenes where you would see this big ball of blur and an arm poking out here and a head there. 
Oh, I have to share this. No, this is not a photo taken on a back road of Umbria. But just something designed to give me quantum nostalgia for the back roads of Umbria. A perfect little purple Ape, separated at birth from its homeland and somehow, someway transported to an apple orchard in northern Maine? I slowed down, shook my head and turned right around on a side street in Portland, Maine when I saw this beauty. Vintage 1969. And who knows why they call these Apes and their cousins, the motor scooters, Vespas? You in the back. That is correct. It is because of the sound they make. Like Bees and Wasps, those Apes and Vespas buzz up and down the streets of Italy. And at least one street in Portland. 
As daughter Wiley prepares to spend an extended period of time here — more than any of us ever have at one time, there is always something new to consider. Will the supplies we have work well, or will she find a million little things she needs? Well, the first thing we got for her is an Aldo Bar charge card! That way I know she will head to Aldo’s for her daily caffeine and meet all the neighbors! Today we saw Jurgen who said we “had some work to do on our garden&rdquo . . . ! Wiley and I came back to look, but it looks great to us. Wonder what Stew would do?