Saturday and Sunday - February 3 and 4

Jeff:

For a weekend, it was a busy couple of days.

Our Saturday started late as we ambled out of bed around 11AM and made our way to the remnants of Sansepolcro's street market. When I was here in March, the only market day I saw was on a Tuesday when the streets were lined from the palazzo to the piazza (about 500 yards) with an array of vendors of every conceivable stripe, selling everything from fish to fruit, houseware to silverware, jackets to jeggings. I expected today to be even bigger, being a Saturday market and all, but the only thing we found was a lonely fruit vendor peddling a pretty sad slate of fare. The steadily drizzling rain and brief snow forecast may have driven the other vendors away, but given that we were in search of jackets, we quickly retreated to the warm palazzo.

Around one, my colleague Betty Webb led us on a tour of town churches, starting just about a block away. Sansepolcro has a population of about 16,000, but has 16 churches inside the city walls, many of which are hundreds of years old. The church count is especially high when you consider that, unlike many U.S. southern small towns with a similar or higher ratio of sanctuaries to population with Baptists and Lutherans and Presbyterians all competing with each other for the devout, in Sansepolcro, all the churches are Catholic. Though we have seen quite a diverse population since our arrival in terms of apparent ethnicity, the worship choices seem to be remarkably limited. That said, the Catholic Church's near monopoly here has enabled it to build some pretty amazing things, starting with the chieses (churches) where all these eclectic parishioners come to worship and pray and confess their sins. (The confession part is real and active. I remember Catholics sometimes going to confession when I was a kid, but here there are lines.)


Here's the first church we visited, the Church of Santa Rita da Cascia, with a beautiful blue pastel roof and some old statuary, including Santa Rita herself.



Santa Rita is apparently the saint for women with troubled men in their lives. Though we saw lots of candles "lit" under her alter, there was not a line of women out the door like you might expect . . .



The church ceiling was really impressive, and these phone pics don't really do it justice


Next we moved on to the largest church in town, the Cathedrale (pronounced ka te drah lay), where we returned for mass this morning.



Many of the paintings around the exterior dated from the 15th century, and one as old as 1350. Below are a couple of the ones that had been restored, and it is easy to see how much more vibrant and colorful they are than the ones the church has been able to bring back to life yet.



The old church across the street was much smaller, but had some very cool features including this dome or cupola, almost hidden down an "alley off to the side of the altar end:

It also had a picture of this guy, apparently someone other than Jesus who was also crucified:



After the churches, we went to the Museo Civvico, the town's art museum which houses several famous works including several by Piero Della Francesca, probably the most famous Sansepolcran in history. His contributions to perspective in art changed the way that painters understood the mathematics of painting, and you can see in the museum how painting perspective changed in the years before and after Della Francesca worked and wrote: Here's his most faous painting, The resurrection of the Christ:



And here's Piero himself:


Do you think he did some sparing on the side? That's not in the official guidebooks.


Just outside the museum is a statue of Luca Pacioli. To accountants, he is probably the most famous Sansepolcran, having invented double entry bookkeeping and worked on several mathematical treatises with both Della Francesca and Leonardo da Vinci.




We capped off the evening with a fabulous dinner at a small restaurant that is closing at the end of the month. Since they have announced the end, it has been pretty busy, but we were able to squeeze in. I ordered stinco, a shank of pork shin that is roasted and very delicious. I don't take pictures of my food, but this internet photo is a pretty good representation of what I was served. Any southern barbecue aficionado would have felt right at home sitting down to a plate that looks like this:




All in all, a great day, and a nice chance to begin to get a feel for life in small town Tuscany and get a sense of the pulse of things here. Though we are far from settled or at home, this town has a very welcoming feel to it, and I think we will find our place, if only briefly, among this culturally rich town and its inhabitants.

_______________________________________________________________________________

Sunday was about more cultural immersion, as we headed first to mass in the aforementioned Cathedrale and then to the street market, this time with many more wares to choose from.

The cathedral was pretty full by the middle of of the service, but remarkably empty at the start. The priest didn't begin on time and the parishioners seemed to expect it, rolling in for the published 10:30 service at about 10:45, just in time for things to really get underway. We sat in the back in the most upright pews ever constructed--the molding on the back actually forced you to lean forward a bit--and just next to all the families with their kids, running, yelling, coloring, and fighting throughout the blessings. The mass, led by an African priest who many of us were surprised to find in small town Italy, was quite a cultural experience and offered an interesting perspective into the practices and habits of the population. It was also amazingly short by my Catholic youth standards, clocking in at just over 45 minutes. That gave us plenty of time to peruse the market for jackets and score one each for Jake and Susan.


Susan and the kids wrapped the day with a walk into the countryside, while I spent time preparing for class, an obligation to which I have given too little attention with all the house stuff going on. Thankfully, our house renovation is done, for better or for worse, and I can now turn my attention to teaching marketing and learning Italian, both of which I am going to savor.