Shake it Up: Enjoying the Small Moments in Umbria and Beyond

My mom had a theory that she had the power to create disasters in countries just by visiting. After a lovely trip to Florence in the mid-1960's, the city was devastated by a flood of biblical proportions in 1966. A trip the next year- in 1967 - to Israel resulted in the Six-Day War. This way of looking at world history gives you quite a grand sense of all you can accomplish, no? I'm happy to say I don't seem to have inherited this genetic ability to wreak havoc just by visiting a country. In fact, the recent series of earthquakes in the Umbrian region of Italy all came before we visited, so I'm not taking any of the blame. We planned this trip - or rather our friend Seanette did - months and months ago, before a major earthquake shook the region In August, killing nearly 300 hundred people. Lightning doesn't strike twice, we thought. Then another one struck just a week before our trip. This time, there were (miraculously) no casualties. In a world in which terrorist attacks have become so common, we weren't going to let something as comparatively understandable as an earthquake interfere with our plans.  Little did we know how fortunate we would feel to have this four-day escape in early November to sustain us when news of an earthquake of an even greater magnitude shocked the U.S. and rocked our world. More on that later. I think we could all use a respite from election news and views, at least until the end of this post. I have found myself - after the election - retreating into the world of books for comfort. So I now offer you the chance to travel with me - both inside those books - and outside them - to Umbria. 

Sorry, I couldn't resist. This was the very first album I owned. I also had the piano book, which I played religiously. I would have given anything just to be Carole King. 

You may recall that in July, we overcame our fear of group travel and visited Switzerland with a few other couples. This time around, we felt like seasoned pros. We knew the steps of the delicate dance you need to perform in order to incorporate the peculiar likes and dislikes of eight different people into a single, successful vacation experience. Spoiler alert: we managed beautifully. The moral of the story is that delicious food, wine, and someone outside the group doing the driving and the guiding all certainly help the group travel story have a happily-ever-after ending.

We began the long weekend with a speed-dating fast tour of Florence led by a tour-guide named Nicholas who turned out to be from Amsterdam. That may explain his endearing but somewhat exhausting style of tour-guiding, which involved talking a mile a minute for three straight hours. I looked at my travel mates, pictured below, and wondered why I was the only one who seemed overwhelmed at times. I thought back to a time when Ben was about two years old; while I was chatting with a friend, he interrupted with the astute observation, "So many words, mom." Later, when our Amsterdam travel group debriefed about the tour guide, everyone admitted that the information - although fascinating - was also delivered with just, "so many words". I felt instantly better when we all admitted this and I knew that it wasn't just my poor tired brain letting me down. Part of the successful group travel experience involves owning up to your weaknesses, so we were off to a good start. 

So behind their sunglasses, they were really just taking a little nap.

Here's the famous Duomo, built in the 12th century, with the dome that has puzzled architects since Brunelleschi added it onto the cathedral in the 15th century. Recently, National Geographic documented a modern architect's attempt to solve the puzzle of how it didn't immediately, or ever after, come crashing down. See, I did learn something from our tour. Maybe one reason I had a hard time concentrating was because of the color of the sky. Just incredible.

Here it is: the room with a view from E.M. Forster's novel A Room With a View. It's the one with the little terrace. Can't you just picture Helena Bonham Carter throwing the windows open and looking out? I'll have to wait until my next trip to Florence to test our the view for myself.

The light in Italy is fabulous even in early November. That is particularly important when you are photographing baby-boomers.

Imagine a world in which Florence isn't the main attraction, or even the place where you will rest your bones. Hours after arriving, we were on the road again, heading to "our" farm just outside Perugia. I wondered what our host would look like. In my head, I pictured Strega Nona from one of my favorite children's books. Instead, we were greeted by Raffaella, a petite, friendly, and welcoming wife and mother who runs a B&B - or agriturismo - called La Volpe e l'Uva. The agriturismi  are family farms that take in guests. The name of Raffaella's olive farm translates into The Fox and the Grapes, which just happens to be one of my favorite of Aesop's fables and the source of the truly perfect phrase, "sour grapes". While you are staying at the farm, you can take cooking classes, like we did. Like Strega Nona, Raffaella helps you keep the pasta (and the torta al testo, guinea fowl, chicken-proscuiutto roulades, zucchini involtini, tiramisu, and much more) coming. If you're interested, I can send you recipes. 

Our first day at the farm was supposed to have been taken up with olive-picking. Unfortunately, Raffaella told us there was an infestation of mosquitoes and that the entire olive crop was ruined. We later googled this and found out that what she called mosquitoes were really fruit flies. Apparently, this year's infestation wasn't as bad as the one in 2014, which this article said would require a "Hanukkah miracle" in order to make the precious tiny supply of olive oil last. I was really looking forward to olive picking, but that will have to wait for another trip. Of course, I imagined the scene from I Love Lucy, in which Lucy stomps grapes. Lucy gave me my first introduction to Italy, and what better way to learn than from her. 

Second only to the chocolate factory episode, right?

So instead of picking olives, the gals went into Perugia to visit two small museums, and the gentlemen prepared our lunch. We first visited a weaving workshop, run by Giuditta Brozzetti, a tiny slip of a woman with enough energy and charm to fill her cavernous 13th century church-turned-workshop.  Her great-grandparents bought the church, and she and her brother played soccer and tennis inside it's empty interior until her great-grandmother restored the family weaving business and set up shop inside the church. The business has been shared among four generations of women in her family and is now among the last hand-weaving businesses left in Italy. She showed us how the process works; it's not all that different from the medieval methods. It's extremely labor intensive, but also clearly a labor of love for Giuditta. 

Here's another example of the Italian way of talking with your hands. So expressive!

She explained that we would now look at medieval paintings in a different way because we would understand how much intense work went into creating the fabrics.

Our next stop was the Museo Laboratorio Moretti Caselli. This was also a workshop run by generations of a hard-working, devoted family. Entering the building was like walking through the armoire in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: we walked through the unassuming entrance into rooms that led into rooms. Each room was filled with paintings literally stained into the glass, examples of stained glass unlike any we had ever seen. If you are curious and aren't going to make it to Perugia anytime soon, you can see an example at a cemetery in L.A. and also pay your respects to many celebrities, including Michael Jackson and Elizabeth Taylor. 

The first stained glass master in the Moretti family learned how to create colored glass from ground glass powder. He then painted onto the colored glass. This method has been passed from generation to generation in the Moretti family. In my family we pass on skills like knowing a lot of T.V. trivia. 

The building alone inspires creativity. 

It's hard to believe, but this is not a painting. It's stained glass. Moretti cleverly hides the lines of lead within the painting, in the folds of the dress, the wallpaper, and the drapes.

This was one of the more modern examples of stained glass. I love it.

After all of that learning, we had worked up quite an appetite and were ready for our first home-cooked meal, this one by the men. In addition to the comfort food we learned to cook and eat, we got to listen to the comforting voice of Raffaella, which sounded like this, "You put-ah a little flour on the table, and you do-ah like this." I could listen to her talk forever, but there was work to be done. First she explained, then we did. And finally, we ate. I saw lots of books on the shelves at Raffaella's home, but no cookbooks. Does she somehow store all of those recipes in her head? The following photos are selected from three days of cooking. Each meal was a feast, and on the last night, we treated ourselves to the most spectacular combination of leftovers ever assembled. 

Just getting our marching orders before getting started on the cooking.

We found this pasta-making-gadget when we returned to the Netherlands, and Peter and Rob have already given it a whirl. 

Lauren concentrates on getting those egg whites perfectly whipped. After all, the stakes were very high. There was dark chocolate waiting to be lifted up.

I love this photo of Seanette celebrating her birthday - two days early - with us. Notice how adoringly her husband Richard is looking at her. Also notice the lemon-glazed carrot cake that we made. I was looking at it just as adoringly as Richard did at Seanette. This was just lunch, mind you. There was also dinner to adore later on.

Italy is a perfect destination for adult-style bonding. What better socially-connective glue could you find than pasta, wine, and olive oil? In addition to our cooking lessons, we also toured a winery and an olive oil factory. Both tours were of course accompanied by generous tastings. The olive oil "tasting" consisted of a fully-set table with several varieties of bruschetta, lentil soup, and, of course, bottles of olive oil and wine. We all claimed to be full from lunch, but managed to polish off what we were served. Just to be polite, of course. The winery tour brought back long ago memories of my friend Pam's first post-college dream job working at a small winery in the Napa Valley outside San Francisco. Actually, the gig may have started as a dream, but it quickly turned mundane for Pam, after she had to recite for the umpteeenth time how the wine was created. If my memory serves me correctly, Pam served herself (and me, if I was up visiting) more than a tiny serving's taste of wine, leading her to claim as the afternoon wore on that the wine was made from eggs grown in the Napa Valley. That was my first lesson into how any job, no matter how glamorous on paper, can grow tiresome before you know it.  

Here's the winery where we tasted some delicious red wine. I swirled it around and around in my glass, too, just to fit in with the crowd.

Later that day, we wandered around the outdoor markets in Perugia. When it got chilly, we sought refuge in a medieval-era church, where we had the good fortune of stumbling into a concert featuring opera's greatest hits. The mosaics on the walls were as gorgeous as the music. Even the dog in the audience, pictured in the front right, thoroughly enjoyed himself and at one point, tried to join the singers on stage. 

Another ingredient that leads to group bonding on a trip is a series of car rides. Our travel package included the driving services of Paolo, our driver who spoke no English and had a lead foot. We promptly dubbed the front row of the van, "The Seat of Death" and took turns risking our lives there. I love listening to music in the car, and since I had a captive audience, I could make them play Name That Tune with my Motown-heavy playlist. It was really fun...for me.

Another big advantage of having a car in Italy is you are able to get to places tucked away from big cities. We loved poking around Assisi and Montefalco. Actually, Assisi is not really an undiscovered place; it's a popular spot with Americans and Brits. Assisi attracts both religious folks interested in seeing the birthplace of St. Francis, and others eager to come for the charm of its mountain-top location. We loved finding the city completely empty. Our guide suspected that many people were frightened off by the recent spate of earthquakes and aftershocks. We found that same emptiness in Montefalco, but this time there was another possible explanation: it was windy and pouring that day. Our guide explained that, unlike the Dutch, the Italians don't go out in weather like that. 

Assisi: you could find religion there in the clouds.

And Montefalco: more evidence of a higher power in those clouds?

As I mentioned earlier, I've found some post-election pasta-style comfort in the world of books. I have travelled to Italy twice in the past four months. It may be no accident that I've also travelled there twice in my books. Like many of my reader friends, I have been pulled in and become a part of life in Naples through Elena Ferrante's four-part series beginning with My Brilliant Friend. The reading love-affair with Italy continued when my U.S. book group read - and I read along with them - Elsa Morante's History. It's a 600-page book which Elena Ferrante called her inspiration, and Nancy, a member of my beloved U.S. book group, likened to War and Peace. It was not an easy read, but when it was over I felt like I had walked through years of Italian history through the lives of the characters. After all, it was probably time to move beyond the Tomie dePaola series of picture books featuring Strega Nona - wonderful though they are (and pictured next to our Umbrian cooking teacher earlier in this post) - and into some more grown-up Italian literature.

As part and parcel of my reading/cocoon-strategy for dealing with the election, a few weeks ago, I went to hear the author Zadie Smith speak in Amsterdam. No, she's not Italian, she's British, but she writes wonderful books. She now teaches at NYU and lives in the U.S. I suppose that's why the first question the Dutch interviewer posed to her was about her impressions of the election and not about her new book Swingtime. I wanted so much for her to say she wanted just to talk about books, and she mostly did explain that she's not a political person.  She is more interested in people and relationships. "I'm the kind of writer who wants to look at what's right in front of your face," she explained. Nevertheless, she shared her election night story (which may sadly be our generation's version of where you were the night Kennedy was shot). It turns out that Smith is connected to this post in another way: she wrote about A Room With a View and its characters' "moral muddles". Maybe she would have been as excited as I was to see the room-with-a-view while wandering through Florence. 

Many of you turned to songs to deal with your post-election blues. Leonard Cohen's somber Hallelujah fit many a somber post-election mood. Since you may have listened to that song recently, I thought I'd add another Cohen song, a personal favorite called Suzanne. Growing up, I didn't know any other songs with my name in them, so the song was important for that reason alone. But I also liked the fact that the words were hard to grasp, and they made you think. In this video clip, Cohen starts by explaining that he never earned any money from the song, despite its popularity, because he signed away the rights to it. He says it was "stolen" from him, and that's how I guess how I felt after the election, like something I assumed was mine, was taken (suddenly) away. 

It's amazing how quickly the election results drained me of that post-travel-comfort-glow I was sporting after we returned from the trip to Umbria. We set our alarms for 4 a.m. and planned to watch the results and celebrate together. We gathered in front of CNN to warm ourselves with our connection to the U.S., despite the distance and the six-hour time difference. Lauren had even bought some Vin Santo, a sweet wine that our cooking teacher-host had introduced us to on her farm. And there was champagne chilling. Instead, we sat in stunned silence and then plodded home by 8 a.m. We felt unmoored and exhausted, but Darlene and I decided to head to our favorite spin class, just to have somewhere to go and something to do. The T.V. at the gym showed Donald Trump giving his acceptance speech, but I couldn't bear to look. The entire room of heads in the spin class turned towards us - the Americans - as if to ask, "How on earth?" The song Don't Wake Me Up came on during the class, and I thought the same thing: Don't wake me up! I just wanted to go to sleep and forget it all. I'm sure many of you had the same thoughts. The Dutch are so curious about how Trump managed to pull the election off. One of my neighbors stopped me later in the day, with the understated, "So you have a new president". I think she was trying to feel me out, to make sure I wasn't one of the millions who voted for him. As if to make me feel better when I explained how disappointed I was, she reminded me that the Netherlands has a Donald Trump of its own: Geert Wilders. He is currently on trial for leading supporters in anti-Moroccan chants. He even looks like our newly-elected leader. The election here is in March, so stay tuned. 

This is Lauren's dog Buddy. He pretty well sums up our feelings that morning.

I realize that retreating into a world of books isn't really a productive strategy for dealing with the current state of affairs in the U.S. I'm so proud of all of you who are digging in with phone calls to Congressman, and plans for marches in New York and D.C. It's a little harder to know how to get involved from so far away. During the campaign season, I was grateful for that distance. From far away, I guess Hillary's imperfections seemed like a little less of a problem. But one lingering problem is I can remember the faces of my 4th graders so clearly when we watched Obama's inauguration eight years ago. The world was full of new possibilities if a black man could be elected president. I wanted to imagine the same faces on those kids, now seniors in high school, when they saw the first woman elected president. And I wanted that for my 85-year-old mom. What would I find when we came back to the U.S. for our whirlwind Thanksgiving visit? Thankfully, the trip last week gave me the chance to see that the U.S. isn't crumbling. I appreciated the chance to hunker down with family and friends, reminding myself that there is, in fact, a reason to move back someday. 

Rachel Drucker for President!

So I'll close with some advice for myself: reading isn't a bad strategy for curing what ails you. In case you need another recommendation, I recently finished a collection of quirky stories called Can't and Won't, by Lydia Davis. In yet another example of how connections and coincidences are everywhere, I came upon an article about Davis entitled Long Story Short. And that just happens to be the name of a drinking game some members of our travel group created. Whenever Seanette says, "Long story short" (which she does quite a lot), you take a big gulp. That's just one of the small moments I'll sustain myself with until the election blues subside. I would suggest: As Peter and I often do when we are searching for wisdom, I'll turn to Woody Allen, yet another deeply flawed character who nevertheless wrote some brilliant movie scripts, including Manhattan. I don't want to presume you have all seen it over and over the way we have, but if you don't know the movie, it ends with the character played by Woody Allen lamenting the fact that he didn't appreciate his now-18-year-old girlfriend (yikes) while they were together. He starts reciting a list of things that make life worth living. It's a darn good list, including Willie Mays, Frank Sinatra, and, "those incredible apples and pears by Cezanne". So here, inspired by our trip, is the start of my list of the small moments/things that make life worth living:

1. The autumn colors in Umbria.

2. Raffaella's cooking instructions: "You stirruh. You mixuh."

3. The homemade Vin Santo made by Raffaella's mom.

4. Friends who invite you along to travel to Umbria and beyond. 

There are so many more things that make life worth living, not just from the trip to Umbria, of course. There's Peter's laugh-until-he-cries, Rachel's laugh when she has to leave the table to recover, and Ben's laugh when he tilts his head back to let it out when someone in the Vine family says something especially ridiculous. And Casey's eyes when he looks at me like I'm some combination of Grace Kelly, Mother Teresa, and Julia Child. I guess this means laughter is another post-election survival-strategy I can rely on. And writing, of course. 

"It's like I got this music in my mind saying it's gonna be alright." From your mouth to god's ears, Taylor.

Salute! Proost! L'chaim! Here's to a healthy and a happy post-election recovery to all.