Postscript: Italy, tourist style

Our last few days in Italy were spent with our friend Valerie in Orvieto, an Umbrian town set atop a massive piece of volcanic rock and famous for its beauty and, in particular, its spectacular cathedral. Valerie's house, while more modest than the Duomo, is spectacular in its own way, full of local ceramics and antiques and other pretty things and with gorgeous views from every window of the countryside below.

The view from one of Valerie's windows

And here's the view from a little way down the street

Orvieto evokes the Under the Tuscan Sun fantasy that Americans have about living in Italy, and it's almost oppressively beautiful. No wonder it has a sizable community of Americans, Brits, and other English speakers. In fact foreigners make up fully 10 percent of the city's population, which totals about 20,000.

In addition to enjoying the charms of Orvieto itself, we drove to some other local beauty spots. You can't go more than a few kilometers in that part of the world without bumping into yet another beautiful, ancient hilltop town. We visited several of them, each with its own claim to distinction.

The first was Pitigliano, nicknamed la piccola Gerusalemme (Little Jerusalem) because it had a relatively large Jewish population (as much as 20 percent of the total) starting as early as the 14th century. Although many Christian Pitigliani hid their Jewish neighbors during World War II, several families were sent off to the death camps and today the town has few, if any, Jewish residents. But the ghetto district is now a popular place for visitors, centered on the pretty 17th-century synagogue and its associated facilities--a ritual bath, a bakery for matzoh, a wine cellar--dug into the volcanic rock below.

My biggest regret about that day's visit was that we didn't go to the restaurant offering "The cuisine of the goyim."

It seemed like too obvious a gimmick for attracting tourists, but now I wish I'd gotten a chance to taste the spleen pate and ricotta soup, neither of which I've ever seen on an Italian menu before.

A couple of days later Valerie drove us to the Tuscan town of Pienza. It's named after Pope Pius II, whose aristo family owned the place and who rebuilt the town center as an "ideal city," Renaissance style. The main piazza is supposed to exemplify Pius's humanist ideals, and certainly the Duomo, with its sober, symmetrical facade and its light-filled, spare interior, lives up to that aspiration. The rest of the buildings around the little piazza, though, seem way too big for the space, dwarfing the piazza itself. That includes Pius's palace, although in itself it's a lovely building. Parts of Zeffirelli's 1968 Romeo and Juliet were filmed there.

 This is the back of the palace, facing the gardens, which look out over the valley. As you may notice, I didn't take any photos of the piazza or make any effort to capture the character of either Pienza or Pitigliano. That was in part because swarms of people with large cameras were already hard at work every place where a good shot was possible, and mostly because keeping track of yet another Italian hill town seemed--like so much else these days--sort of pointless. Mi dispiace. (I'm sorry.)

We briefly stopped into San Quirico d'Orcia, another very pretty town, this one named after a three-year-old (also known as St. Cyricus and, in French, St.-Cyr), who was killed in the third century C.E. for declaring himself a Christian. When I realized that the town cathedral offered neither a depiction nor relics of this infant religious prodigy, I lost interest. I should have taken some photos of the surrounding countryside, though. With its rows of cypress and solitary farmhouses it all looks just like a kitsch landscape painting.

However, our last stop, Bagno Vignoni, was genuinely exciting. Another ancient, lovely hill town, but this one has natural hot springs, and in the 16th century some enterprising lord or other turned the town's piazza into a gigantic hot-water bathing pool.

Sadly, bathing in the pool is no longer allowed, for reasons which aren't explained. The water bubbles up from a sulfurous spring that, back in the day, also powered several flour mills, whose excavated ruins are spread out along a cliff at the edge of town.

I'm frankly shocked at how few photos I have to offer of any of this. Maybe it's blog fatigue. Or perhaps all these gem-like little towns are so quaint, so storybook, so perfectly picturesque that actually taking pictures of them seems redundant.

Seeing all these lovely places, perversely, reminded me that one reason I like Fidenza so much is that it's not so excessively adorable. In fact, Italians in beautiful Orvieto who heard we have a place in Fidenza were baffled. "Fidenza? Why?" they inevitably asked. I guess it was like hearing someone from Italy say they're realizing a lifelong dream and buying a house in romantic Schenectady or a little place in the countryside outside Cleveland. Nothing against those towns, about which I know nothing, but no one has sold millions of copies of A House in Schenectady or Under the Cleveland Sun.

In truth Fidenza is merely an Italian town, set on a plain, with no dramatic views and a lot of post-war buildings (including the one our apartment is in). But that's one reason I like it. In Orvieto or these other breathtaking hill towns you're always aware that thousands of people over many centuries have oohed and ahhed over the same things you and all the other visitors are sighing over right now. Fidenza I feel like I have all to myself.

Another door closes

On Saturday we closed up our apartment in Fidenza and headed to the train station.

Danny and the suitcases head out the door.

We were not quite done with Italy yet; we were on our way to Orvieto, to visit our friend Valerie for a few days before heading to Rome and catching a flight back to California. But we won't see Fidenza again until April.

The Fidenza railway station, with departing American.

I am again surprised at how sad this makes me. It's not like we won't be back; it's not as if I'm not very happy to be returning to my friends and activities in California, to the comfortable feeling of knowing how to do things and what words to use in almost all situations. But every time we leave Italy is an ending, and endings are becoming a little harder for me these days.

A note about Halloween

One of my faithful readers asks what the status of Halloween is here in Italy. I've noticed that the local tabachi in Fidenza is selling Dracula teeth and witch makeup, and that the little Chinese store in town has devil horns and witch hats in its window.

More Halloween in an Orvieto tabachi's window.

The holiday certainly hasn't reached the level that it has in the U.S., where it is rivaling Christmas when it comes to things like outdoor light displays and even cards. And jack-o-lanterns aren't part of the local culture. The only pumpkins I've ever seen in the markets here are the big green ones with thick orange flesh, the zucca used to make tortelli filling and soup.

But global commercial forces are on the move, it seems. Romano sent me this photo from the local supermarket.

The box reads: "The Halloween pumpkin! Contains 1 pumpkin, 1 little knife, 1 tealight, and instructions for preparation. Product not edible."

Romano's comment: "Halloween for dummies."

More superficial insights

We just spent a week in London, visiting various friends and relatives, which gave me a new opportunity to come up with some grand generalizations about national character based on hardly any evidence.

I couldn't resist comparing Fidenza to London, because both of them are foreign and unfamiliar enough to seem easy to summarize. True, one is a small town (population 27,000) and one is a sprawling metropolis (population close to 9 million), but London is as much an aggregation of villages as it is a city, and the part we were staying in, Crouch End, had a definite village feel.

The Crouch End clocktower

I don't know what adjectives characterize this sort of architecture, but there was a lot of it in the area, and I noticed that I had a visceral "Ooh, how pretty" response to all of it. Italian buildings of the same vintage are more austere, less cosy looking, more guarded.

Fidenza's old hospital

I love the way Fidenza looks, but it doesn't instantly make me think of Christmas and Mary Poppins and my childhood amid the fake Tudors in Westchester County, New York.

Maybe that's part of its charm.

Another thing that struck me is how Italians' rabid sociability shapes urban space. Maybe small British towns are as chatty as Fidenza, but I doubt it. Morning and evening--though not during lunchtime--Fidenza's streets are full of people blabbing away to each other, and even though I can't understand most of what they're saying, it almost always seems very friendly. People sit on benches and around tables at cafes or stand in the street and yak away. In London people talk to each other, but it seems to happen by appointment. London didn't feel unfriendly, but it didn't have the radiant social warmth that Italy seems to give off.

On the other hand, I have to give the Brits high marks for their green spaces. There are big, beautiful parks all over the place, and they feel like pockets of wild nature tucked into the city. Hampstead Heath, which we visited one day, is a particularly spectacular example.

Fidenza has parks, too, but they're small and very firmly domesticated, tidily symmetrical and tending toward lawns, benches, and play equipment. In my mind this is associated with the fact (it is a fact, isn't it?) that Italians tend to think that it's silly to put effort into growing things you can't use or eat. To rural people who had to labor hard for every bite of food they wrenched out of the earth, cultivating nature for its own sake must have seemed ridiculous, and Italy was until the 1950s an almost entirely rural nation.

Then there's the difference in food. I can remember when the only good food you could find in an inexpensive London restaurant was Indian, when English food meant canned beans on toast and greasy fish and chips. In the rapidly gentrifying precincts of Crouch End and vicinity there's now an abundance of "artisanal" eateries serving delicious updates of classic English food, like the extremely tasty version of beans on toast I had for breakfast one morning.

The beans came with two perfectly poached eggs and a dollop of avocado mashed with lemon. Lovely!

Where British cooking really shines is stodge. If I had to pick one cuisine to eat for the rest of my life, it would be Italian. But I have to admit that Italians are relatively weak in the sweets department. A few nice cookies, jam crostatas, and variants of tiramisu and English trifle are pretty much all there is. Every cafe in our London neighborhood, on the other hand, had dozens of different cakes, fruit tarts, chocolate confections, iced cookies, scones, buns, and on and on. (I'm really sorry I didn't take photos.) Pam thinks this is because Brits pretty much lived on tea and sweets for much of their history. In Britain high tea is, after all, regarded as a meal.

It's not only sweet stodge where Brits excel. We were lucky enough to be treated to a real English Sunday roast by a very gifted and sort of English cook, and it was spectacular. 

The roast lamb was perfectly cooked but it was really just the pretext for the rest of the plate: buttery mashed potatoes; roasted parsnips, potatoes, and carrots; heart-stoppingly rich cauliflower cheese...

  ...and--of course!--Yorkshire pudding. It was a fantastic meal but a bit like a full Thanksgiving dinner, something you enjoy but wonder if you'll ever recover from. (I'm not sure I have, and neither is my bathroom scale.)

Italians like starch, too. Who doesn't, after all, aside from keto-obsessed hipsters? But Italians would never dream of having a meal of spaghetti, polenta, bread, and potato gnocchi, which is what I imagine the Italian equivalent of that roast dinner would be.

We had a lovely time in London, but when we got back to Fidenza the buzz and clamor of our street was truly music to my ears. I was equally happy to be eating Italian food again, which seems like cuisine minceur after our roast dinner blow-out. My pleasure was tinged with sadness, though, because I knew we had only a few days--which would mostly be spent in packing and cleaning and saying good-bye--before it was time to head back to California.      

Odds and ends

Here are a few things I've been meaning to add to my catalog of observations about the goings-on here in Fidenza.

A tale of three hospitals. A while ago I described our visit to the Pronto Soccorso, the emergency room, at the local hospital. (Danny is just fine, thanks.) There are in fact at least two other hospitals in town, aside from the modern one we went to, but neither of the others functions as a hospital anymore.

Before the modern hospital was built fourteen years ago, on the outskirts of town, Fidenza depended on a hospital down the street from us. Now it stands empty and partly demolished. We hear it's eventually going to be turned into housing, but at the moment it's a sinister hulk surrounded by fences.

Not far away is the town's first municipal hospital, which dates back to the end of the 18th century, when a wealthy couple left their palazzo to the town for that purpose. Later the building became a movie theater. Nowadays it's a bingo hall, that I swear I am going to go into one of these days, if only to see whether the interior architecture is as elegant as the outside.

Edible antiquities. Fall is harvest time and a season for food nostalgia. In Fidenza, that means that old-fashioned taste treats I hadn't noticed before are now being spotlighted by local vendors.

One is sugo d'uva, grape sauce, which the Latteria 55 downstairs started advertising a couple of weeks ago. It's actually more like a pudding, as you can see.

Another is a chestnut cake that Danny noticed being sold in a couple of the stalls during the San Donnino fair. He'd walked by, wondering how this delicacy tastes, and the next day decided he had to have some. But by then the vendors had moved their stalls or left, and he spent several days wandering around town looking for the chestnut cake. He was thrilled when he finally found one of the vendors and brought home a big slice.

Unfortunately, it turned out that both these delicacies are pretty uninteresting. The grape pudding tasted just like what it was, grape juice cooked with a little flour. And the chestnut cake, also rather pudding-like, was just a big slab of cooked chestnut, with maybe a little sugar added. It didn't help that, as Danny pointed out, the inside looked a lot like underdone liver.

Maybe if we'd eaten these as children they'd have the added savor of memories of our sainted nonna. But to our jaded palates both these things seemed like they'd taste exciting only if you'd been eating nothing but pasta for months and hadn't ever experienced the thrill of refined sugar.

Speaking of refined sugar... Are Pop-Tarts a kind of ravioli? This was the provocative question put to me by our son during his visit a few weeks ago. He was struck by the variety of filled pastas in this part of Italy--tortelli, which is what they call ravioli around here, plus anolini, agnolotti, cappelletti--and wondered if anything with dough outside and filling inside would qualify. Why not Pop-Tarts, a childhood favorite of his? It was just this kind of outside-the-box, irritatingly logical thinking that made his years in middle school such a joy.

No, I assured him, Pop-Tarts use another kind of dough. They're obviously an entirely different sort of thing.

No sooner had he left town when I noticed that our local market sells jam-filled cookies that are a lot like Pop Tarts, albeit I imagine they're considerably tastier.,,

..and that they are called "baked tortelli."

Apparently our son understands the way Italians think better than I do.

The San Donnino Fair

October 9 is the feast day of San Donnino, the famously headless patron saint of Fidenza, and every year the town marks the occasion with a multi-day fair that Pam says is much bigger than the town's festivities at Christmas. 

What's a fair wihout balloons?

Starting on Thursday, October 4, streets all over the downtown began filling up with tents that for the next five days housed vendors selling everything from beer and ham and pizza to scarves and paintings and tablecloths. 

The saint himself, rendered on the street in colored sawdust as part of the festivities.

I got back to town on Saturday morning, and by then the party was in full swing. Day and night the streets were crammed with people, and loud pop music--including some Italian pop, and not just golden U.S. oldies--bounced off the buildings.

Anolini, the round filled pasta of this area, are the special food for this holiday, and cups of anolini in broth were on sale in several of the tents. A commemorative T-shirt for the fair shows a headless man holding a head-sized anolino in one hand and, instead of a martyr's palm, a slotted spoon.

This booth was right outside our front door. We got a cupful one evening, but they were underdone and over-salted. That's a shame, when you can get such good anolini at a lot of places around here.

One night a famous comedian, Gianpaolo Cantoni, stood in the center of Piazza Garibaldi and told jokes for an hour and a half.

Sometimes I was able to understand the set-up--there was the one about Jesus and a parrot, and one about the guy who wins three nights with Miss India, and a joke about the woman who grated Viagra into her husband's spaghetti con vongole--but when the punchline arrived I could never once grasp what everyone else was roaring with laughter about. All this time with my family, here and in New York, has not helped my Italian one bit.

Everywhere you turned there was food.

A display in a local shop.

For the occasion, the town installed raised beds full of fennel, celery, lettuces, tomatoes, and other vegetables, and big pots with olive and fruit trees all along a stretch of the main street. 

But that end of town had few tents and therefore less traffic. Things were livelier in the main squares, such as the one whose stalls were devoted to feeding "carnivores."

The smell in this area was divine.

There was also a lot of drink, both beer and wine, for 2 or 3 euros a glass. But I didn't see anyone who got sloppy.The crowds were noisy--though not as noisy as the amplified music--but very good-natured. Italians apparently know how to hold their liquor. Or maybe I didn't stay up late enough to see the worst of it.

In some ways it was reminiscent of a county fair in the States. On Monday and Tuesday, for example, they set up an exhibition space for cattle down by Ristorante Ugolini. The animals were shiny clean and beautifully groomed, like porn stars.

I saw one man carefully blow-drying a cow, but what really made me understand the effort that went into this was when one of the cows began to urinate. A minder leaped up and held a bucket to catch the flow. Now that is animal husbandry. 

A lot more than a drop in the bucket.

On another day Fidenza's mycological society put up an amazing display of fresh funghi, both edible and toxic, under a portico on one side of Piazza Garibaldi.

It turns out that those red mushrooms with the white spots that you always see in storybooks, usually with a gnome or fairy perched on top, are poisonous.

Yesterday, the saint's feast day, was also the last day of the fair. After five days of crowds and late-night noise we weren't sorry to see it wrap up, but I also felt an all too predictable twinge of regret for what I'd missed--the calf judging, for instance, the amusement park rides at the far end of town that we didn't find out about until the fair was almost over, some of the live music that I heard through our (closed) windows but was too lazy to go down and see. I wonder if I should have bought one of those anolini T-shirts. 

By late last night the street downstairs had cleared out, although the music continued in the piazza till after midnight. This morning most of the tents were gone.

As if on cue, tonight it seemed to get dark much earlier. The fair is over and now winter is coming on.

Back from New York

I made another trip to New York last week to see my mom and the rest of the family, including my daughter, who also flew in for a visit. It's hard to see Dot so weakened, but she hasn't lost her spirit or her sense of humor, and she remains my best audience when it comes to being interested in the minutia of my life.

It was a visit full of laughter and incident. The retirement place she's living held a "staff appreciation week" while I was there, with a New York City theme, which required said staff to dress in different costumes every day. One day the Phantom of the Opera greeted me when I came in.
That's actually Dawn, a friendly presence at the front desk, but her outfit that day gave me a bit of a turn.

One highlight of my visit was going out to my brother's place on Fire Island for a night.

There's something very sweet about the beach off season. The afternoon I arrived it was kind of gray, but still beautiful.

The next morning the sun came out and we even had a little swim in the ocean.

On another day I went to the Sarah Lucas exhibition at the New Museum with my sister. Not perhaps the most profound show I've ever seen, but highly entertaining. Lucas is really into smoking.

Shortly after my sister had just been regaling me with details about the new season of The Walking Dead, I came walking down Broadway and discovered a group of zombies threatening passersby in front of Lincoln Center. The passersby responded by whipping out their phones and taking pictures. Nevertheless, the young people who'd been hired to play the zombies were really putting their hearts into it.

In retrospect, this all seems a bit more thematic than I'd intended.

Banking follies

Even though I'm now an Italian citizen, I'm not a resident of Italy. That's partly for tax reasons and mostly because we aren't here more than six months a year. But being a non-resident complicates some aspects of our lives.

For example, this week we finally sat down with a member of the Unicredit bank staff who spoke a little English and was willing to take the 45 minutes required to figure out and then explain to us how our checking account worked. We already knew there were a lot of fees. It turns out that, since we're required to have a non-resident account, and since such accounts are restricted in various ways (to discourage money-laundering and other "dangerous" activities, I gather), we were paying close to $300 annually for the privilege of letting Unicredit hold our money.

The fellow who explained this to us seemed surprised himself that the bank was charging us so much and sincerely regretted that there wasn't any way to reduce the fees. Not only was he as nice as pie, but his name is Fiore, "flower," which apparently is not an unusual name for Italian males. How cute is that?

Almost $300 was enough to overcome my usual inertia, and I went online to see what other banks charged. As usual, this took a ridiculously long time and very heavy use of Google Translate as I tried to make sense of various bank web sites. Considering how many expats-in-Italy sites there are, I was disheartened when I couldn't find any that gave specifics on this issue. Nor were the bank sites very forthcoming. I ended up visiting a couple of them in person, since that seemed to be the only way to get the information I wanted.

One of them was Carisbo, a bank that Pam had heard was somewhat less rapacious. It turned out a woman who works there speaks excellent English and was happy to give me all the information I asked for. Even better, the fees for a non-resident account are something like a third of what we've been paying. So the next day Danny and I came in to sign up for a new account.

Like Unicredit, this bank makes you come in through a kind of airlock that makes sure people can only enter and exit one at a time. It's a bit like an upright MRI. I presume this is to deter robbers, but in the case of Carisbo this seems a bit ridiculous, since a large sign in front announces that there is no cash in the bank itself. If you want actual money, you go to the ATM at the front entrance. But if you want to talk to bank staff, you have to go through the security door.

I don't think they irradiate you when you go through. That seems like an oversight.

It appears that what this security system is protecting is vast amounts of paper. Setting up our new account required not only photocopies of our passports and tax ID documents, but also something like 25 signatures each on reams of documents covered wtih fine print. When the paperwork was finally all done, Debora, our lovely and helpful banker, proudly posed with our set of copies.

It's more than an inch thick, and I have no idea what any of it says. But whatever we've agreed to, Debora assures us that it's going to cost us a lot less.

Open eyes

For some of us, every trip to an Italian supermarket is a revelation.

"Habits are undeniably useful tools, relieving us of the need to run a complex mental operation every time we're confronted with a new task or situation. Yet they also relieve us of the need to stay awake to the world. ... If you need to be reminded how completely mental habit blinds us to experience, just take a trip to an unfamiliar country. Suddenly you wake up! And the algorithms of everyday life all but start over, as if from scratch."

This is from Michael Pollan's book about psychedelics, How to Change Your Mind, which I cannot get enough of.

In our next post, the adventure of opening a new bank account--something I doubt I'd be moved to write about were I back in California.

Varieties of religious experience

Friends from California, Mark and Barbara, recently visited us in Fidenza for a few days, bearing a ridiculous amount of gifts, most of them edible or drinkable, and providing a pretext for quite a few excellent meals. Their visit also spurred us to stop by a few notable sights in the area, 

The first was the weekly Saturday street market, where I mostly managed to restrain them from buying still more things to feed us. However, Mark did discover a vendor who makes delicious bread, a commodity in short supply around here, as well as some very nice goat cheese. He has the hunting instincts of a bloodhound when it comes to good things to eat. 

On our way home from the market we encountered a large crowd in front of Fidenza's historic theater in Piazza Giuseppe Verdi, cheering and sending geysers of rice and confetti into the air. There'd been a wedding in the theater, and the bride and groom had just emerged into the piazza. 

Barbara claims the rice was carnaroli.

I tried to unobtrusively get some pictures of the men in the party, many of whom were extremely elegant in the Italian style, but I have neither the eye nor the courage to be a good street photographer. 

I thought these guys were interesting, though I imagine that the little pink handbag is not a man-purse (an item that many, many Italian men carry) but an accessory belonging to the little girl on the left. Apologies to my reader who is hankering for pix of Italian manhood; this seems to be the best I can do.

The theater is usually locked up when there isn't a performance, but it was still open so Mark, Barbara, and I were able to go in and have a look. Built in the mid-19th century, it's a 425-seat jewel box whose interior decor was the handiwork of a contemporary of Verdi's who designed sets for many of the maestro's operas. 

They were already taking down the Italian and EU flags that shared the stage with the happy couple. I wonder if those are standard fixtures at every wedding here, or if it was a political statement.

The theater ceiling is particularly spectacular. 

We were less fortunate later that day when we tried to take our friends to the Fidenza Duomo, to see the bones of the town's patron saint, San Donnino. (You can read more about him here.) Some kind of religious event was going on inside and the place was jammed. We never found out what drew such a big crowd.

So no visit to San Donnino's relics that day.

Subsequent adventures included a visit to one of our favorite sites of devotion, the Parma branch of Ikea, where we were able to pick up a new living-room chair and bring it home in our friends' rental car. Mark even put the chair together, a truly amazing act of friendship. 

We also toured the historic Jewish synagogue in the nearby town of Soragna. The Jewish community of Parma, the nearest big city, maintains the pretty little Soragna synagogue as a museum, a reminder of the relatively large Jewish community that once lived in this area in the 18th and 19th centuries, unburdened by many of the restrictions that kept Jews out of other parts of Europe. But Soragna's last Jewish resident died in 1971, and today the synagogue rarely can get enough people together to form a minyan. 

In order to enter, the men in our party had to put on yarmulkes. Despite how aggressively secular both these fellows are, they were good sports about it.

As was standard practice, women and children had to sit in the upstairs balcony, behind a screen. In the women's section was a display of Jewish marriage contracts, including one dating from the time of Italy's unification. 

Whoever commissioned the contract was apparently very excited about the new Italian state, because it's decorated with portraits of the leaders of the movement for Italian unification: at the top, Victor Emmanuel, named king of the new country; at right the revolutionary leader Garibaldi, whose military prowess and wide popularity made unification possible; and, at left, Count Cavour, the statesmen whose wheeling-and-dealing diplomacy also played a crucial role. (Our guide speculated that another revolutionary leader, Mazzini, was depicted on the bottom part of the contract that's now missing.)

In just about every Italian town the Risorgimento, as it's known, is memorialized with piazzas, streets, and parks named after these four worthies. In our own Fidenza, the main piazza is named after Garibaldi (the first Piazza Garibaldi in Italy, I've heard) and the main street cutting through the downtown, the one we live on, is named in honor of Count Cavour. Here's a close-up of him:

From what I've read, he was clever but not particularly admirable--and not as nice-looking as he's depicted here, either.

When we emerged from the synagogue, we saw a group of nuns in full habit who had been selling jam and liqueurs in front of a church a few doors down and were starting to close up shop. Unlike most habit-wearing nuns I've seen in Italy, these were young and Western. Mark broke the ice by buying some of their jam and soon we were all chatting away--in English, which most of them spoke. They were a jolly lot.

The order they belong to, the Sisters of Mary Morning Star, was founded just a few years ago, in Spain, and these sisters hailed variously from the U.S., France, and Austria. (The name sounds better in Italian--Sorelle di Maria Stella di Mattina--as well as less reminiscent of the Herman Wouk novel.) 

Once it became clear that a couple jars of jam was all we were willing to purchase, the nuns bid us adieu and climbed into a little white van. The order has 250 members in small communities around the world, including a convent in another nearby town, Fontanellato, that these nuns call home and where I presume they were headed.

I am such a social being that I feel a momentary urge to join virtually any group I encounter, even when they don't wear the kind of outfit that struck me as the height of glamour when I was a prepubescent fan of The Nun's Story. (Audrey Hepburn can make anything look glamorous.) Doesn't the nun-mobile look like fun?

I was curious enough to look them up online later. They are a contemplative but not cloistered order that believes in manual labor and physical fitness, which latter strikes me as very 21st-century spiritual aspiration. They live on charity and what they earn by making jam, sandals, and the like, so perhaps their lunch depended on Mark's jam purchase.

They maintain silence except during one meal a week, but evidently that rule isn't in force when they're selling their wares to the public. Indeed, their eager friendliness--Barbara dubbed one who was particularly insistent "the marketing sister"-- took me back to the days when the Moonies and the Hare Krishnas were glad-handing every young person they met on the street.

That is unfair to these nuns, I'm sure. And becoming a Morning Star sister undoubtedly entails a lot more than spending a weekend being love-bombed and handing over your trust fund. Which is perhaps lucky for me.

Later I reflected that there was really nothing all that exotic or even interesting about this series of little incidents--the wedding, the crowd in the cathedral, the nuns and their jam. The same encounters in California probably wouldn't have me reaching for my camera and thinking about writing it all down. I am reading Michael Pollan's book about psychedelics and he talks about how these drugs make even mundane things--a flower, a rain shower, ambient New Age music--seem brand-new, awe-inspiring, magical. Being in Italy makes me feel a bit that way quite a bit of the time. I hope I can hold onto that for a while longer.