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Market Day in Paris
9. Shopping at Campo Fiori (Rome)
While a lot of these moments I'm writing up are about peace and quiet and a sense of a place, this one is all about the riot of color and sound and life that is Rome's largest outdoor food and flower market.
The morning before Sid arrived to meet me in Rome, my official job was to put together the makings of a picnic lunch so that we could go sack out in the park for most of the afternoon. On my list: good bread, wine, olives, fruit, tomatoes, a hunk of cheese, a knife, and two glasses. Made my way over to the market and successfully bargained for all of it, even getting people to let me try out different olives and cheeses to decide which one I wanted. My only real difficulty was that I wasn't very good with Italian quantities so we ended up with almost a kilo of everything. Details, details.
Felt mighty capable and had a lot of fun doing it. Nice moment.
Entrance to a tomb outside Chiusi
10. Etruscan Tombs By Accident (Chiusi)
All year long, Sid and I have been talking about wanting to see some Etruscan tombs while we were in Italy. There are tombs all over Italy. Or so they claim. We couldn't find a one. We tried. With hand-drawn maps from our very helpful hotel lady, we managed to get to a small sign in the middle of a wheat field that said "Parking for tomb." So we parked. And walked for miles in every conceivable direction looking for another sign or, lo and behold, a tomb itself. We asked the local folks who scratched their heads and looked puzzled. (The Italians don't really get why people want to look at this kind of thing, we were told later.) Finally, after hours of this, we gave up and left, a little disheartened.
Several days later, foiled from seeing something in the town we were in by the ever-present siesta, we decided to hoof it over to a nearby town to see an Etruscan museum. Five minutes after we arrived, we were somehow caught up in a whirlwind expedition out into the middle of nowhere to see three tombs. We hopped in the back of a teeny car belong to two nice folks from Norway and went along for the ride. Right place, right time.
And we're pretty sure we never would have found those on our own either.
Sid and Eija
11. Dinner in Cortona (Tuscany)
One evening in Cortona, a sudden rainshower led us to strike up a conversation with the woman sitting next to us at the outdoor cafe. Should we huddle at her table, which had a strip of overhang to protect it, or all head inside? We finally went in and decided to eat together. What followed was one of the nicest evenings of the whole trip. Eija, an older woman from Finland, was an intrepid traveler who travels the world alone and almost never has dinner alone, she claims. Not hard to believe. She was open and fascinating and told us the most interesting stories, then took us back to see a real Cortona apartment and have vin santo in her living room. We exchanged pictures and email addresses and promises to show her around if she ever got to Seattle.
A nun feeding pigeons outside the church
12. St. Peters, Again (Rome)
There's a quote of Emily Dickinson's that says "If I feel physically that the top of my head were taken off, I know that's poetry." Never really understood that very well, but I come close to it every time I'm in St. Peters. Religious or not, there's something about the space - it's spareness, it's grandeur - that moves you and gives you that hair-standing-on-end feeling that seems like what she might have been describing.
Wandered around in here for a good hour, easily, just looking it over and discovering new things. Found an incorrupt pope or two that I missed the last time. But mostly I just wanted to be in here for a while again. We saw a lot of churches on this trip - dozens by easy estimate. Some of them were beautiful, and some were just awful. But there's something here that's different from everywhere else.