Italy del Giorno

This was a momentous week for Brian and me. The August issue of Condé Nast Traveler hit the stands and Concierge in Umbria is included on the list of Top Travel Specialists for 2006! We are of course ecstatic! This distinction really is a career goal for travel specialists and we are thrilled and honored to have made the list so quickly.  In addition to our subscription copy, Brian has, of course, purchased several copies. I have not yet seen the magazine, but my sister promises to bring one to me when she and her family visit next week. I’m really looking forward to seeing this in print! Maybe then I will really believe it!

After hitting the weekly ceramics market on the steps of San Lorenzo in Perugia, I stopped in to say hello to the proprietor of a restaurant near the Fontana Maggiore. He said that I was on tv singing from the Sala dei Notari last Sunday – I really must watch the local news more often! Ok, so the weather. The Umbrians have been complaining a lot about the heat, but after spending June and half of July in New York City, I think it’s paradise – hardly any humidity as a rule.

This week however, we have been experiencing a strange phenomenon of daily heat and sunshine, followed by late afternoon thunderstorms. The storms have been brief, but a bit violent, wreaking havoc on the Cyprus trees and electricity. The thing about these Umbrian hill towns is that they get hit by lightening – a lot! Anything electric must be unplugged, especially computers. The minute I hear the thunder, I race around like a mad woman, unplugging modems, routers, my laptop, the television, etc. My neighbor’s hard drive was fried last Sunday while he was away. These storms are sudden, so I’ve taken to unplugging everything whenever I leave for more than an hour – a bit of a pain, but well worth the effort.

View of afternoon storm from our apartment

The Università per Stranieri di Perugia is celebrating its 80th anniversary and in addition to many other celebrations and initiatives, they are establishing an Alumni Association. This weekend is the Primo Raduno Alunni or the First Meeting of the Alumni.  Conferences and meetings in Italy can be generally characterized by dawn to dusk lectures and meals with a long list of honorees, speakers and mix of laissez-faire with tradition and formality. 

The festivities began at 9:00am (ok, maybe not dawn, but pretty early for a Saturday morning!) with remarks from Il Magnifico Rettore (the highest ranking university official, the Rector, is always addressed as Il Magnifo – the Magnificent) the singing of the Italian national anthem by the school’s chorus, the conferring of an honorary degree to the Turkish filmmaker Ferzan Ozpetek, various remembrances and remarks from distinguished alumni from around the world, an address by the Canadian Governor General, Michaelle Jean, and the playing of Leoncavallo’s Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana by our friend and pianist, Stefano Ragni. 

This was another day where the thermometer hovered around 100 degrees and the discomfort of the academic glitterati, sporting their ermine and velvet robes in the un-air conditioned room was obvious.  The University had brought in some very large and awkward looking machine with a sprawl of enormous tubes – some sort of cooling system that could have come right out of the Wily Wonka Chocolate Factory.  It produced zero effect.  After over 3 hours of ceremony, all of the attendees were invited to go outside to Perugia’s famed Etruscan Arch for a group photo, taken by a man in a crane looming above the arch.  After lunch (delicious buffet of porchetta, pasta and prosciutto), there was a break for a couple of hours, during which Stefano, his wife, Maria, and I enjoyed a café in the shade of the Café Grifo.  Maria is Swedish and is also an alumna of the University, so she and I returned for our afternoon regional breakout sessions while Stefano took a brief afternoon nap – routine for many who live in this region during the heat of summer.  As Brian often remarks, it’s just too hot to do anything else! 

At 9:00pm, we all reconvened at the Cloister of Santa Giuliana for a gala dinner.  The setting in the ancient cloister among the gardens, archways and remnants of frescoes was beautiful.  The tables were covered in elegant creamy linen, with centerpieces of roses and candles in silver settings.  The food was delicious and I felt very sorry for the waiters laboring in tuxedos in the unrelenting heat.  In customary Italian fashion, we finished the antipasti, primi and secondi just before midnight.  After the dessert – a refreshing chocolate semifreddo, the power point presentations were fired up and the speeches and presentation of awards began!  After brief remarks by Il Magnifico Rettore, plaques housed in boxes of dark blue velvet and wood were distributed to one representative from each country present.   “Ambasciatore della cultura italiana nel mondo”  (Ambassador of Italian culture in the world) was printed on each and guess who was called for the United States of America – yours truly!  Fortunately, I had been warned a few minutes in advance by Il Magnifico Rettore’s secretary, so I was able to discreetly put my shoes back on under the table in time to walk to the center of the courtyard for my award and photo-op with Il Magnifico Rettore!  With their characteristic kindness and generosity, Stefano and Maria drove me home at 2:30 in the morning.

Early to rise and out under the Umbrian sun to plant the herbs, roses, geraniums, jasmine and other things for which I don’t know the name in English or Italian.  What a big difference it makes to have terracotta pots in bloom!  Beautiful!!  I do fear, however, that I may have already irrevocably harmed the rose bush.  I think the extreme empathy and attentiveness that I lavish upon animals somehow backfires with plants.  I don’t always succeed in my horticultural endeavors, but I acquit myself admirably enough and am very pleased with today’s efforts. 

I then warmed up the voice a bit as I have to sing a short program of American music (old standards and Summertime from Porgy and Bess) in the Piazza IV Novembre , Perugia’s main square, next Sunday evening. 
On Friday, one of the first things that I had done was to plug in computers, routers, etc. in our place.  Everything came up fine and I was able to catch up on email and generally stay abreast of things – for a couple of days anyway.   Just as I began taking my speedy ADSL connection for granted, it disappeared.  After hours of troubleshooting my laptop, the router, the modem, electricity, cables, connections, etc., Brian found an advisory on our ADSL provider’s web site announcing a service outage in Perugia.  Well, it really wouldn’t be Italy if there weren’t some inexplicable technical malfunction with no indication as to when a resolution might be attained.  Since this outage corresponded exactly with the end of the Umbria Jazz festival, Brian is convinced that one of the roadies for the concerts inadvertently packed up the ADSL “server” for Perugia with his own equipment! 
So for the next 48 hours, I was offline and by Tuesday I checked myself into our back up internet post in town.  It is very inconvenient, but serviceable in a pinch.  I had resigned myself to a schedule of going into town to work twice a day, but Tuesday evening, after rebooting our boxes once again, the New York Times home page sprang to life on my laptop screen and I am now back in business!

Having retired at 9:00pm the night before, I was reasonably well rested and ready to attend a friend’s wedding in Perugia on this day, although 10:30am did feel a bit like dawn.  It was an intimate, low key affair with only a small gathering of friends present.   After a lovely civil ceremony in Perugia, our party dined on seafood at a restaurant in town.  Seafood in Umbria is always a bit of a surprise, but as it turns out, this restaurant is run by Sicilians.  Landlocked Umbrians seem reassured and happy to eat seafood if the establishment is run by Sicilians.  

 
Shrimp, Squid Ink Risotto, and Saffron Sauce — made by a Sicilian!

I was thrilled to be able to attend the celebration. Brian had been called in at the last minute to sing the Star Spangled Banner and God Save the Queen at the Greenwich Polo Club so we exchanged a few calls to catch each other up on our various activities. 
After the wedding luncheon, I stopped by a local garden store to order some plants for our terrace.  Despite my neighbor’s promises, I had been greeted upon arrival yesterday with the distressing site of parched brown plants and bushes outside of our apartment.  I had expected some of them to go, but I had hoped that the perennials and rosemary would be in good form.  Something must have been lost in translation, maybe our neighbor thought that when she offered to water the plants, I had said, ‘no way, don’t step foot on our terrace” instead of “thank you, that’s so thoughtful, we would really appreciate it, etc.”  
Anyway, I then walked by my hair dresser’s shop and seeing the proprietor and my stylist, Gianni Crispo upstairs in the window, I called up to him.  He summoned me upstairs and of course I found our friend Fabiola, getting her usual Saturday treatments.  We had rented our first apartment in Perugia from a close friend of Fabiola 6 years ago and she was the person who recommended Gianni to me.  Like many Italian women, she spends a few hours every week at the “parruchiere” getting blown out, color touched up, etc.  That is one thing that I love about Italy – Italian women are generally very well coiffed – from the noblest signora to the women who work as household domestics – everyone gets their hair done!