20 Saturday Sep 2014
A word problem:
If the village has a 100+ residents in the summer time, but only 3 in the winter, then the temperature hovers around how many degrees Celsius in that season?
Solution Set:
123 – (123-3) = -20°C
20 Saturday Sep 2014
Lost on ways in between, all Spoleto feels non-Euclidean.
Castelluccio, best I can tell, encircles like Dante’s hell.
17 Wednesday Sep 2014
Break-in has occurred at 6th Canto:
Suspect-1 has overdosed on sale [salt]
Suspect-2 fast confirmed Insano [insane]
Plates filled and emptied, grazie. [thanks]
Only Defense appears in Photo: [Sole/Soul]
Never came close to caffè latte.
Ingredients, even names on occasion, should you ask Virgil upon waking.
17 Wednesday Sep 2014
Gluttony, as I seem to recall, can be found in the third circle of the Inferno (along with continuous rain and a junk-yard dog with a super-mean bite).
Look for us there tonight, as we journey to the home of Daniella and Luciano, among the finest cooks and hosts in all of Spoleto.
One night a week, they invite the guests of local apartment owners to feast on traditional Umbrian family fare.
And when their guests leave, hours later, they have had more than their fill of food and drink.
Whence they head back home, having made pigs of themselves, to lie down in the Inferno’s mud and go to sleep.
Object to the crude slop in Dante’s trope, if you wish. But check the news at 11:00 for the evening’s menu.
15 Monday Sep 2014
Posted in Bookstand
A repeat of the first of our full meals at home (a simple recipe, brought with us, that uses little more than pasta, cannellini beans, garlic, greens) leaves plenty of time for the first performance of La Commedia (I attempt to read the Italian, as Reb gamely provides a translation to be checked against Longfellow’s own).
With 3 cantiche (Inferno, Purgatorio, e Paradiso) each divided into 33 canti (with an introductory one to grow on), there’s really a pretty long row ahead to hoe. Especially when you consider that between the two of us, going at full bore, we make our way through four tercets (basically, 12 lines out of 14,233 in total).
For homework, vocabulary flash cards remain to be made. But if you stand far enough back from the alien tongue alone, there’s some mighty fine images to contemplate: dark woods, straight paths, slumber, and one’s being lost along the way in the middle of life’s journey. Nel mezzo del cammin nostra vita.
15 Monday Sep 2014
“So you are here to live,” Pa-mel-a explains it to herself and us, when she has learned the date of our departure, while finishing a fashion transaction today.
So simple, and so precise, her words. Not at all unlike the Movida piece of transformable clothing made in Italy by VagaMé. Elegant and intricate, too.
Is it extravagance, or arrogance, that prompts Thoreau to add “deliberately” to the common verb of human experience (to live)? If only to wake his neighbors!
Flipping my way through The Senses of Walden, I shall try to take up such impertinent questions in a fashion adapted for slow travel.
14 Sunday Sep 2014
Posted in Education
La chiesa, it has been standing for more than four hundred years, I believe. Time will tell if it’s still standing when (or if) we get there.
Whereas Il Mercatino dell’ Antico, Antiquariato, Collezionismo e Artigianato in town (aka, the “flee” market in my experience around some parts of the New World) only assembles a venerable audience on the second Sunday of each month.
So which won out? The church history or the true believer in the fine art of a bargain?
If anyone awaits the answer at 11:00, I have some relics I might be able to interest you in. Plus some photos of various and sundry direct assaults on the Euro stash I carried.
(Truth be told, of course, one prize has my name written all over it; another, only captioned in pictures, works historically beyond the facts of the matter; while for the last, next signpost points one way toward link, thanks to Earl, for a hoot of a U-tube video about the return to work of a “secretary” from long ago:)
Though as for that, all the items potentially on our tracker’s list today are held most dear by family and friends over the years:
Only fitting and proper, then, to end our outing by overlooking the place where we once began our travels here in Spoleto–the ancient site of Teatro Romana:
10 Wednesday Sep 2014
Posted in Education
Duh. Turn around, idiot, turn around.
In the first place, it would help with my Italian if the Agenda Eventi would print the whole name, “Fiera della Madonna di Loreto,” instead of the foreshortened “Fiera di Loreto.”
In the second place, it would help with my Italian if Google Translate had not at first returned “Proud of Loreto.” Time waits on no man to look up that “Loreto” (person, place, or thing), apparently, since the aforesaid pride is all-wrong to begin with.
In third place, it would help with my Italian (as my dear wife kindly tells me) if maybe I looked around for context clues at the fair, exhibition, or (even use your ancient French, if you must) fête. Like the one we’ve been passing on the street for two days straight.
In the fourth and last place, about the link she has told me (and told me again, even after I thought I had fixed it) didn’t work: it does function now, I think. Nice picture. Looks exactly like the one iPhone took, except for it being much better than mine (which itself doesn’t seem to want to reload itself exactly the way the others have, when you click on it. There will be time to learn the HTML hereafter, I suppose. Meanwhile, WordPress still mis-formats the expanded image. But I have learned, perhaps, in trying to solve that problem that the photo itself holds some promise if you crop more and more of it. Who knew?).
10 Wednesday Sep 2014
“I went to the woods” at Walden Pond, Thoreau never writes in his spiritual classic, “to write.”
Yet that half-truth is as much the plain fact of the matter as the one so well remembered–for many of us, indeed, by heart. (For those without familiarity or in need of a jog this morning, click here for the sidebar.)
10 Wednesday Sep 2014
Not much, since the rains of September finally came.
If Chaucer were writing his Canterbury Tales today, I suppose he’d frame them as independent blogs. Or, to keep up the social interaction between the multiple tellers and the tales, as a series of postings on “The facebook.”