Spend Your Touros Wisely

Peggy here. We continue to convert Euros to Dollars like it’s a prayer. We continue to visit mediaval courtyards and to be offered neon green authentic souvenirs. We resist. If I remember correctly, at home we have a dignified mantle above a beautiful fireplace and I think placing a Smerf from Italy on the mantle would cut the look and represent us as even more goofball than we are. I now call Euros “touros” and am becoming fiscally conservative. We’ve had *quite* a past couple of days but I’ll leave it to Kathy tell you about the car thing and the alabaster thing but let me say this: when we left the alabaster turning workshop, Kathy said that that was what she came to Italy to see. When the alabaster turner handed her a piece of alabaster and said, “for home” I said let’s head over to his retail shop and we did and there was not a neon Smerf in sight. We proferred our Euros and happily purchased alabaster turned by a pro.

I continue to see tall beautiful boots and never find them for sale. I lack the Italian language skills to run up to the wearers, take them by the shoulders and yell, “Where did you get those boots?!” I am sentenced to Keens, flat black rowboats. My short nubuck boots, which are cool and would look cool here, prove not wearable on the cobblestone.

I had a private yoga lesson yesterday. The instructor does not speak English and I do not speak Italian so we spoke in Sanskrit. I feel better, stretched and oxygenated. The yoga instructor has the deepest breath that I have ever heard and she gave me a “trick” for learning to do the deep breathing.

We are near enough to Florence so that we see busts of Michelangelo’s David everywhere. Or we see miniatures. David David everywhere but not on a smerf doll yet. I like Rick Steve’s description of the statue as representing how Europe felt about the Renaissance – the hope and excitement, the feeling that they could beat everything. Kathy, always the renegade herself, accidently took a picture in the Sistine Chapel (forbidden) of Michelangelo’s depiction of the final judgement, one of his final works, and “one” can see the big emotional dive from young hopeful sculptor to artistic old guy who’s seen everything and is willing to share his bummed-outedness with you.

We’ve had a glitch in our plans that has worked out just fine. We’re on to Cinque Terre the day after tomorrow but were told last night that our seaview rooms would not work for us because the elevator is broken The repair would be days away. Rosemary and I both love a water view. As it turns out, the owner of the building has Parkinsons and has demanded that the lift be fixed. So, the Mediterranean Sea will be a stone’s throw away. Today is our second to the last in Tuscany and I love Tuscany. The grasses are as green as green gets, the accommodation at Montestigliano is perfect, and even the crumbling castles where the Smerfs lived for all of those centuries are different from town to town. Susan Pennington, who owns and operates Montestigliano, has written a book called “A Tuscan Farm” and even if you can’t get here right now, you have to see and enjoy the book.

I keep wondering if I came to Italy to figure out what to do with the last half of my book, which is not working. You may recall that the book is ultimately about the year (1964) that my mother and my two brothers spent in Holly Park Housing Project. The book is about everyone involved in that and the only person I have left out is me. But how do I write about the experience of a teenager thrust into a world that I did not know existed? I keep thinking of Rafael’s School of Athens, a fresco that the artist managed to put himself in. He’s the guy wearing the black beret whose eyes followed us around the room.