Friday, Saturday, Sunday

Jeff:

As we made our way on foot--everything here is on foot--to the closest grocery store to pick up supplies for dinner, I had a couple of epiphanies about Italy and the fundamentally different lifestyle into which we have plunged ourselves.

First, everything takes longer here. And by everything, I mean that day to day life is just a longer process. Going to the store involves getting your bags, walking, choosing from among the usual options available to Italians but unfamiliar to me, walking back to the palazzo, and putting stuff away in our tiny kitchen. If you want medicine of any kind, you'll be making a second stop because the grocer does not even stock Advil. If you want fruit, you really must go to the fruit vendor because it's so much better, but that's an extra stop too.

Cooking involves multiple steps because we have only two burners, as many pans, and no oven. Washing up is it's own process with an odd corner sink into which nothing really fits, a drying rack in a cabinet over the sink, and a refrigerator that holds less than half of what most Americans are used to. Laundry is an all day affair, with a washing machine that takes two hours and a dryer that takes even longer and is so expensive that you are not supposed to even use it. Instead, we hang our clothes all over the room on racks and then wait days for them to dry hard and stiff. Convenience is decidedly not the guiding principle of product sales or anything else the way it is in the great USA. Italians have their own ways of doing things and seem determined to defy American influence, though there are signs that the resistance is fraying around the edges if only a bit.

My second epiphany is that the slowness is not only OK, I find myself wondering if it might be preferable. By trading in all day laundry, multi-stop shopping, challenging cooking and long cleaning for fast washes, Walmart, and drive-throughs in the name of convenience, we recover some free time to . . . surf Facebook, read the New Yorker, watch sports, and check our email. Somehow, the gained time, at least for me, seems to be at least in part an exchange of meaningful time for something less meaningful. This all feels epiphanic to me, but maybe everyone else figured this out a long time ago. It does seem as if the Tuscans did.

Friday consisted of our first test in Italian class--we get results tomorrow I hope--followed by my second Principles of Marketing class, and an afternoon of shopping and putting away and cooking a spaghetti dinner for the students. That was followed by a group watch of The English Patient, set in part in Florence (our destination next weekend). It all felt purposeful, somehow.

To get a sense of the random beauty that's everywhere, here's a picture I took on the way to the grocery.


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War memorial just outside the Sansepolcro bus station

Saturday began with an early alarm and bus ride to Anghiari, the castle city on the hill about 10 minutes ride from Sansepolcro. Like NC's own Boone, every building in town looks like it's clinging for dear life to the side of the hill, except for those at the top, which if not for all the stonework, would appear certain to blow away. It was pretty cold and windy in Anghiari when we arrived, but we were all bundled up and left the bus bubbling with anticipation of the day ahead. Anghiari is, in Italy at least, famous for its beauty and it didn't disappoint. Like every other Italian city I have been to, much of the wealth and art is housed in the numerous Catholic churches scattered all over the town.

The main town Piazza Garribaldi is not at the top of the hill, but instead about halfway up, featuring this statue of the man himself pointing theoretically toward Roma, but actually toward Florence.



Something about the aesthetics being better with him situated the way he is being more important than actually pointing toward Rome. That kind of sums up Italy in a nutshell--beauty trumping practicality, occasionally for worse, but mostly for better, and with zero doubt that it's the right approach to the world.

I took these next three photos without moving from my spot looking out over a wall, about two thirds of the way up the walled city, merely turning in place to capture the entire scene. As I said to my students: "It's a little bit pretty." And these phone pics don't begin to do justice to the place.









The churches were impressive too, but as if to distribute at least some of the beauty, they were not the most impressive of the day, though still worth a look. All of these next pics were taken in Anghiari, but I did not note the church or saint names.










After lots of hiking up and down the hills, we paused at a little overlook where we had some great views but also a close up chance to see these ubiquitous roofs and the way they interlock and are designed to last hundreds of years. Maybe not classically beautiful, but it would be great to think you'll never have to replace your roof again.



In this one, you can really see how they hook together and are almost impervious to leakage:


After Anghiari, we took the 11:20 bus to Arezzo, the closest train hub to Sansepolcro and altogether about an hour bus ride away. From Aghiari, it's about 50 minutes, getting us into town just in time for lunch.

Of course, in Arezzo, more churches, including this spectacular cathedrale that cannot be captured in pictures. For someone who is not religious, I am oddly impressed by old cathedrals, especially when I think about the sheer number of hours of human labor that went into these sometimes mammoth undertakings. Construction on this building began in 1278 and finished in 1511, a mere 233 years later. Here's a picture of the outside from Wikipedia, followed by my own snaps from the interior.

This is the grand piazza, near the top of Arezzo, just a bit down the hill from the Cathedrale

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Sunday was a sleep-in day and a chance to catch up on work before venturing out in the afternoon to catch the Carnevale parade. The big one in Italy is apparently in Venice, but we were content with Sansepolcro's homemade version.