Getting There From Here, a Mid-Day Adventure

One, if by car . . . an easy way to get yourself killed.

Two, if by foot . . . a sure bet on the same fate, since between the church and our place falls the shadow of N. 3 Flaminia . . .

Only a closer look at our trusty map seems to reveal a path beneath the roadway.  And so we are off . . . on our mid-day adventure . . . News at 11:00pm . . .

. . . Little News: Sun’s hot.  Doors lock.

Great Views: olive grove / treasure trove.

Pictures: The grave’s a fine but private place.

A High-Tone, High-Fashion Entrance

6 Via Porta Fuga.  Quite a fancy address, for our modest digs.  Whole load of historical resonance.  Think of it this (linguistic) way:

Fuga: escape / flight / break / getaway / fugitive.  Italian: fuggitivio m (feminine fuggitiva)

Put them all together and you get a low-down, old-fashioned exit:

After marching victoriously across central Italy, in 217 BC Hannibal passes by our place in retreat.  (Tradition says.)

Attributed to Cicero: Hannibal ante portas (“Hannibal is at the gates!”).  Advice to the old boy, should he scamper home after ten: “Jiggle the key.”

Nightstand, Emeritus

In these days of camera phones and iBooks, it’s quite hard to picture the backlog of books (both great and small) on a retired professor’s MacBook Air.  Should I secure permission from my old roommate on 3rd Belk, I’ll publish his magazines and hardbacks instead.  Far more neatly stacked, sharply shot, the image captured here calls out to me still.

iBook Library that I stashed away, many at the last moment, must be of interest to me of course.  How often, or in what way, I’ll be able to deliver to U a return on my investment remains to be one seen in the posts ahead.  “Quick scripts,” I can assure.  “Slow going,” yet, they may well prove to be.  Hey, ‘re: tired profs’ usually involve poor students (in the puns of Walden) that way.

La Cucina

Kitchen, cuisine.  And other good stuff.

With these words, I begin the slow food movement that has given my blog its subtitle. Cooking, for us, surely will move at a snail’s pace in our cucinino.

On our first night in Spoleto, fat chance of that, even with a steady rain warning us to stay home. 

The menu at Nove Cento (Nine Hundred), casual fare, looked just right on the website: nice and light.

So of course the corner windows were dark as pitch. Turn back to the left, toward a more familial-looking haunt, brightly lit.

No way I can put dinner into words (way too much pasta in my mouth for that to work!).

And no chance of posting Reb’s photos (at best every other course gets snapped, on average, in a doomed epic contest to remember).

In their stead, a great link. Story and pics are both on the blogpost menu–as tough a choice between them as the one we faced over dessert.