Day 17 – Miralaghi

Daily Wrap-Up

One Word

• Barb: Handwash
• Mike: Wind
• Jen: Blog

Two Words

• Barb: Guide books
• Mike: Planning day
• Jen: Memory jog

Three or Four Words

• Barb: A gale blew in
• Mike: Paper towel chinking
• Jen: What did we do?

One Sentence

• Barb: The towel bar above the heater in the bathroom makes a great clothes dryer.
• Mike: Sometimes when you can’t bring yourself to slow down and take a day off, the weather does it for you.
• Jen: It’s nice to sit and think about where we’ve been and what we’ve seen and done.

How would you like to hold this thing in your mouth for hundreds or thousands of years?

Low clouds, raging wind, pounding rain. Finally a day of rest, chores, catching up, planning, and contemplation.

Our 1800s stone farmhouse leaks. Mike used paper towels to chink around the three windows that have to stand up to the brutal wind. It helps reduce the breeze indoors and keeps us a bit warmer. We’re mopping the windowsill puddles up with towels and a tablecloth.

I’m on worm patrol. Worms escaping the drenched dirt crawl in under the front door. If they come too far in or stay too long, they get trapped, dry out, and die. They can also drown in soggy soil, so it’s a tough call, but I help them get back outside.

As we lounged about the house today, I asked Barb and Mike to help me record a list of things we’ve found odd about Italy. Some are good, some are bad, some just are.

Italy Oddities

• Chaotic driving.
• Odd, inconsistent open hours for business, particularly the long closure over lunch.
• The 50-cent, 1-euro, and 2-euro coins are surprisingly heavy. To carry many is uncomfortable. It’s inconvenient.
• Inefficient living.
• A paucity of clothes dryers. I understand the reason (energy consumption), but it makes for a third world-like landscape.
• “Chocolate” often means “Nutella.”
• The prevalence of the evidence of religion: small towns have numerous and prominent churches.


Saint Catherine’s Foot. A relic in the Basilica di San Giovanni e Paolo in Venice. We saw her head, too, somewhere else.

• Truck speed limits on the highway are so much lower than car speeds that they gum up the works.
• No one buys food in quantity. It’s not readily available.
• Motorbikes have the right of way and seeming immunity from all traffic laws.
• Brown recycling bins for organic waste are available everywhere. Public composting—cool!
• No seats on public toilets, but toilet brushes everywhere so individuals can clean the bowl as needed.
• 

  We saw several dioramas in Vietri sul Mare. This one has, among many other things, an amphitheater with a lion attacking a gladiator in a bloody battle (left side of pic); people, including what appears to be a wise man riding a camel, bringing gifts to a cave where I think Jesus has just been born (off the right side of this image)…

  

  …and, of course, a parade of donkeys playing musical instruments for both the gladiators and Jesus, I presume.

• Italians are not fat.
• They like the word “Jolly.” We’ve seen “Jolly Caffes” and other Jolly businesses. I wonder if it means something different in Italian.
• Drying racks for dishes are located in a cupboard above the sink so that water drips down into the sink.
• The signs indicating you’re leaving a town have a red line through the town name.
  

  Signs indicating you’re leaving a town look like this. We read that as “No Caccialupi.”
  If you pronounce the first A as in American English and pronounce the rest as in Italian, you get “Catch-a-loopy,” or, in this case, “No Catch-a-loopy.”