Yes, I lived in Italy for three years from 1968 – 1971, but I lived in Rome, which is only one of the many atmospheres that Italy offers. It’s a wonderful ambiance in Rome, with ruins at every turn and antiquity spilling over into modern Roman life with the hustle and bustle of Vespas and Cinquecentos roaring around the sights across cobblestone streets that never seem to show wear. My life in Rome was the life of a motorcycling teenager who’s focus was on anything but pastoral beauty. It was not until 1996 that I came and saw another important side of Italy. I had been in jury duty down on Centre Street in Manhattan and one of my jury pool mates was an elegant and stylish Italian woman who befriended me when she learned that I had lived in Rome. As we talked and lunched together, she showed me pictures from a copy of Ville & Casali, the Italian equivalent of House & Garden. In it were pictures of the Umbrian villa she had just renovated in the hill town of Todi. She called it La Pietraia. At the time I knew nothing of Umbrian or the Italian campagna. She convinced me to rent her villa, which was a renovated watchtower from the Quatrocento. It had been one of a series of watchtowers that ran along the Tiber river valley to send messages across the country in an era where modern communications consisted of the use of semaphore from one watchtower to the next in succession. I always think about the Count of Monte Cristo sending a message via watchtower semaphore about the collapse of the Spanish bond market to financially destroy his rival, Count Mondego. I took La Pietraia for two weeks and went over with all three kids and my niece, Nichole.
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Since 1996 I have visited Italy every few years. I have motorcycled from Milan through the Maritime Alps to the Piedmont. I have motorcycled from Venice through the Dolomites into Slovenia. I have motorcycled down through the Grossglockner Pass into the Dolomites. I have motorcycled all around Sicily. I have motored across Lake Como and sunned myself in Portofino. But the best times have been when we have rented villas like La Pietraia. We took another one in Todi a few yeas later (I needed something bigger than La Pietraia, given the addition of Kim’s family members). That solidified my love of the Umbrian countryside. We also then rented a villa just north of Rome in Lake Bracciano area. That gave us equal access to both Rome and the Umbrian countryside to enjoy the pleasures of a blend of urban and country Italian living.
This morning, while the rest of Villa Borro recuperates from last night’s festivities, I am awake and sitting our Villa Casetta looking out at the pool house and the rose garden climbing up the stacked stone garden terraces. It reminds me of sitting on the patio of La Pietraia in the early morning. Now, instead of writing stories on my laptop, I am writing stories on my iPad, so very little has actually changed. This morning’s visage is a Tuscan one, which is pretty much indistinguishable from an Umbrian one. In fact, over the next two days, Kim and I will be reigniting our love for Umbria by driving down to spend a night in Cortona (technically still in Tuscany, but right on the Umbrian border) and then a night in the center of Umbria outside of Orvieto. Both hotels are boutique hotels made from converted monasteries, so this should be an interesting experience for us. It will give us something to compare to Il Borro and will provide us a base of operation to revisit our favorite spots in Umbria. It’s actually a bit early in the season for sunflowers, but I’m sure there will be other spring flowers to adorn the roadsides.
Kim and I often talk about how wonderful Italy is and how much we like our visits here. By the same token, with an entire world out there to see, we also say that perhaps we have seen enough of Italy and revitalized my long Italian memories as much as we need to. Assuming I succeed in getting my Italian citizenship as I hope to in the next year, we will likely revert to the view that one can never have enough of Italy in one’s life. Listening to our villa mates talk about the other places in Italy where they are headed after this wedding, it is clear that there are still plenty of places in the country that we have not deep dived into as yet. Everybody talks about avoiding the summer crowds and coming to Italy during the shoulder seasons before and after the summer. I’m not sure you can get much closer to summer than the end of May, and yet I am compelled to mention that despite plenty of sunshine, this trip has been more brisk than warm in temperature, and I am thinking that a bit warmer would be better. The added advantage of coming perhaps in June would be a higher probability of seeing more of those sunflowers that I so admire.
Today, after leaving the outline Villa Casetta of Il Borro, we took a leisurely drive through Arezzo to Cortona. We are staying at Monastero di Cortona and as service oriented that they are, they have a garage (which needs to be reserved) and provide a video to help show you how to get to the garage through the tight hill town streets of Cortona. We got through the right Portal (Porta Colonia) in the City Walls and were immediately weirded out by the narrowness of the streets. I have a long history of getting stuck or scraped in Italian hill towns, so I am quite wary of them. Kim, who had not watched the video, waved me off the first left turn, which was where I was supposed to turn, though, God knows, it hardly looked inviting. Therefore, we had to spend 20 minutes wending our way through the nooks and crannies of the town on the old cobblestone streets. Luckily, the streets were dry, but even then I never had more than a few inches to spare on every turn or part every parked car…of which there were plenty. Amazingly, I made it through without a scratch and looped back around to the Porta Colonia to take that tight first turn and get myself to the Monastery’s garage.
We checked into what is a beautifully restored and elegant boutique hotel with unbelievable service. It makes Il Borro seem like a Howard Johnson‘s. We booked time in the grotto spa for later in the afternoon and took off into town. The downhill trek made our trip to Arezxo seem like child’s play. These are serious hills to scale going down and certainly going back up. In for a penny, in for a pound, so off we went to find lunch and some much needed shopping for Kim. I paid the price for my lasagna walking up the equivalent of 30 flights of steps. The grotto spa was my reward and it was very special.
We will eat in the hotel’s Osteria tonight and take our leave on a leisurely pace in the morning for the 90 minute countryside ride to Orvieto, where I hope to add another field of sunflowers to my thirty years of sunflowers.