To fetch a pail of vino.
& don’t forget the olio.
When the rain fell down,
Their shoots wouldn’t open,
Leaving them both in a long
Long free fall just hoping.
A Dash Up the Hill by Jack and Jill
20 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in Travel
Category Archives: Travel
All That Jazz This Morning
20 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in Travel
I missed the best part and also mis-framed the whole shot of the Corso.
Aside from that, it looks now as if I might have exceeded the file length.
So return to the title, a crucial element in the compound of my blog posts.
Imagine the sightline from a balcony, an iPhone video recording the sound.
Saving U the Spade Work
20 Thursday Sep 2018
Our story begins in rubble. La Basilica di San Benedetto di Norcia was destroyed by a second set of earthquakes, after our fall trip in 2016. It held one fresco of note, the Resurrection of Lazarus (1560), painted by Michelangelo Carducci.
What’s been discovered, during the removal of the debris inside the building, is an earlier fresco, depicting an “Enthroned Madonna with Child and Angels,” that is apparently “of refined execution by a skilled, but as yet unidentified, artist.”
They are set to restore the work. Under the scientific direction of the Institute for Conservation and Restoration, the plan entails “a superficial cleaning of the fresco with [some] partial consolidation and painting of the pictorial surface.”
I am amazed to think it could be done, just as I am curious to learn more about the way that frescoes go lost in a building or the plaster crumbles away in bits, water its enemy I suppose. In any case, I here draw a line in the sands of time.
Homework
20 Thursday Sep 2018
Especially when we’re not sitting outside, observing the people parade,
A copy of Corriere dell’Umbria or its attractive fellow in the tabloid trade
Will put us to work on our Italian lessons. Rebecca, more advanced than I am,
Need only use a pony for a word or two; whereas I put the piece on my iPhone.
Always after our parting, like today, I take it home to plod my way through it.
Tying sentence by sentence, most of them rather long, into Google Translate.
Apart from the virtual keyboard that amazingly escaped my attention hitherto,
I’m taken back to the Norcia-Castelluccio trip we arranged long ago with Carlo.
Sitting Still
20 Thursday Sep 2018
Posted in Travel
Stay in the same spot,
Thoreau wisely wrote,
And each face of the town
Will show itself by turns.
-
- An Acute Sense
-
- Of Time and Place
Over and Over, The Thunder Rolls
19 Wednesday Sep 2018
Posted in Travel
No one who stepped out at noon had any reason to expect the thunder roll.
Yet before we had returned from lunch the darkening sky had taken its toll.
Under the Weather
19 Wednesday Sep 2018
Posted in Travel
No one, least of all my Impatience, gladly suffers through an illness.
Yet when the gods of travel let it happen, that only makes it worse.
These Boots Are Made For Talking
19 Wednesday Sep 2018
While on the other hand, what Rebecca cannot help herself from noticing
Is that, in all this heat, these sharp boots are obviously made for talking.
-
- Keep talking boots
Easy Yet Pointless to Read
19 Wednesday Sep 2018
Italian T-shirts, so often spoken in English, are nothing to write home about.
Yet for the Red and Black one this morning I would open my bank account.
-
- Go Wild Cats!
I Smell Food
18 Tuesday Sep 2018
Sundays, with family and food as their centerpiece, most folks stay indoors.
Yet the tantalizing aromas of basic Italian fare climb with us up the stairs.
It scarcely takes a genius to capture the pollo cacciatore upon a serving plate.
Much less a rank impressionist to fill in the details of what else the family ate.