Sicily - late March

Emilia-Romagna - early April

Tuscany, Florence - April 8

Umbria - late April

Spoleto Introduction

Spoleto - A Modern Renaissance Success

The train trip from Ferrara to Spoleto took about five hours and was a little tricky. I had been shopping (remember the kilo of salt from Brisighella), so had more than I could carry in one load. And the rail stations in Italy almost always force you up and down the stairs when you have to change trains. Well, always, because even if you're leaving from the same platform, but maybe the other track (il binario) from where you arrived, you don't know it until you go into the station and check. So I had to schlep everything several times. But with a lot of help from the "kindness of strangers," I did okay. (And, as an aside, I would like to say thanks for Asian values, because even a very young man will stop to help someone with gray hair. Italians are polite, but they can't match a nice Asian boy.)

Spoleto was a very special part of the trip for me--partly because this was where Kyle, Carol and Sam joined me for a while, partly because my friend Katy had recommended it to me, but mostly because it really is special. This is the town Gian Carlo Menotti (composer of Amahl and the Night Visitors among many other things), chose in 1958 to establish what became a wildly successful summer music, theater and dance festival, the Festival of Two Worlds, i.e., of European and American cultures. Spoleto was chosen mostly because the city fathers were willing to help create the atmosphere where "...audience and performers could meet and mix" in a provincial setting, Menotti's vision for the three-week event. Also because it already had three venues with nice acoustics, one of them an ancient Roman theater. A parallel festival was established in Charleston North Carolina in 1977. (Katy is a musician, as is her husband, and they played music and courted in both Spoleto and Charleston in the heyday of the festivals. How romantic is that?)

The festival was extremely important to Spoleto, previously the capital of the Umbrian region for hundreds of years, because it had gone into a decline after the capital was moved to Perugia during one of the many wars for territory--many of them started by Napoleon--that raged in central Europe in the mid-19th century. The festival certainly appears to have done its job. Even though the festival itself has gone through some leadership changes and rough times, Spoleto has been providing the level of comfort and friendliness that Menotti hoped for ever since. They also have done, and continue to do, a tremendous amount of restoration. From our aerie in our second apartment (more about that later) we can see six construction cranes. And everything within the old town wall is clean and well-tended.

Our first place to stay here was a modern two bed-room apartment just across the park and the soccer field from two of the most charming of the town's piazzas. It is owned by Norma and Lorry (Lorenzo), ex-Londoners who have made their fortune in Spoleto in vacation rentals. And usually to much richer folks than we. They blithely admitted to knowing nothing about the train system or local mass transit. They've been here off and on for 25 years, permanently for the last twelve or thirteen. She is thin, glamorous, stylish, with hair dyed a gorgeous, unnatural, shiny black, beautifully done make-up, good legs, short skirt. He is good-looking, chatty, indulgent, jokey. It's hard to tell who does what in the relationship and in the business; he picked me (and a few days later, the family) up from the train station, for example, and congratulated me on getting such a good price out of Norma for the week (about $650 for 4 people). He did the shopping for the goodies that welcomed me to the apartment--wine, bread, cheese, pasta, sauce, fruit, olive oil, coffee, everything you need so you don't need to find a store right away when you arrive. And he claims Norma does everything and he's just along to support her. Anyway they're fun.

The apartment is called Il Parco and if you're at all curious, do check out the link, there are pictures of everything. You could do no better than to contact Norma if you're looking for a nice place in Umbria. Although it's not particularly better-furnished than others we had, the welcoming goodies were never surpassed. This is a good time to talk about a few idiosyncrasies of Italian rentals--at least in my experience, which is not hotels and guide book places. The kitchens all have a sort of draining cupboard above the sink with no bottom shelf, just a rack, where you put the dishes as you wash them. Depending on how big the kitchen is, they may get stored there, or there may be other cupboards to move them to. Every kitchen will be equipped with an espresso-maker and little espresso spoons, but there will be no teaspoon-sized spoons and there will be no percolator for "regular" coffee. The knives will be dull.

The bathroom will always have a bidet. The hot water heater will have a switch to turn it on and off. Most people will ask you to turn it off at night and when you go out for the day, running it just to shower and wash dishes. The toilet will contain very little water--a design that Sam declared inefficient, but it's meant to conserve. There will be a brush beside the toilet that you will each have to use at least once a day. There will often be a washing machine, but almost never a dryer. But there will be a rack of some sort for air-drying. The towels will be a little rough (air-dried, of course) and there will be no washcloths.

Clothes storage will likely be a wardrobe rather than a closet. At Il Parco, there was one additional European surprise -- a tall and narrow, elegant wooden cupboard in the hallway with tilt-out shelves, which turned out to be a shoe cabinet. I really can't imagine why they thought a tourist family would be carrying around 30 or so pairs of shoes. Perhaps Norma had it and got a better one.

The town itself is quite lovely and I did some rambling to the walls and gate, for example, and found the tourist office, the Internet point and the stores. And I had one lunch consisting entirely of meat (pork, of course), bread and wine. The proprietor said I had three salami--one I recognized, a pepper proscuitto. There also was a pork jerky, but very light, not too salty and the last one I'm tempted to compare to Canadian bacon, although I'm sure the comparison should go the other way. It was a lot of protein. And in this case, when I couldn't finish and asked for "da porta via," or takeaway, which I expected to be "to go" as it was in Sicily, the proprietor argued for a while and then took it away, never to return. Sad.

I was pretty tired after our active stay in Ferrara, so I didn't wander around too much. Mostly I took books down to the piazza and read away the afternoon, except when it was too cold and I had to read at the apartment. Things got more active when the family arrived.