On My Way

It is a beautiful July 4th in New York, warm, sunny and practically deserted. Everyone has taken off and later today I will be doing the same. In Italy it is hot (over 80F), and the forecast is for some rain almost everyday from now until at least Friday. Do I care? Not a whit.

Checking Umbria Online for the most updated listing of festivals and events in Umbria reveals a host of food "sagras" (sacred feast) ranging from the mouthwatering to the totally absurd. Every nook and cranny borgo in Italy serves up it's specialty at some point and summer is a popular time to get the locals together to push their delicacies on the public and on each other. Lisciano has a bringoli festival (some kind of pasta); San Guistino has a frog fest; Dunarobba has a hare sagra. I've never heard of any of these places, but obviously they've got a PR agent feeding listings to the Umbria Online website. Typically, these small towns set up tables outside and everyone in the town cooks something based on a theme. There are fragolini (strawberry) sagras, porchetta (pork) sagras, snail sagras; you name it. There is not a place on earth that is prouder of their cuisine or more eager to celebrate it than Italy.

Todi will be hosting its annual Hot Air Balloon festival while I'm there, and Umbria Jazz is in full swing, as well as the Spoleto Festival. And Deruta has a summer long program of classes, exhibitions, lectures and other events centered around the art of Majolica or painted pottery. Although the theme is artistic and visual, there will no doubt be copious amounts of Sagrantino wine, cured meats and truffled products available at every turn.

Having a home in Italy is just like having a weekend house anywhere else, except it takes much longer to get there and costs more to visit. I have appointments for deliveries, for someone to come and measure for the stairs and I must buy a lot of practical things this trip - an iron, some pots to cook with, a lounge chair for outside.....and, of course, lots of wine and food to fill my empty refrigerator. A corkscrew I already have. As last minute preparation for this trip, I've printed out some NY Times articles - a recent one on renting a summer villa in Umbria, and a ten-year old article by Barry Unsworth, the Booker Prize-winning British author who has lived in Umbria for many years, and who wrote the very brilliant "After Hannibal", a cautionary tale about foreigners purchasing property in Italy. I read it for the first time before I had even heard of Umbria, and found it charming and evocative, beautifully written and insightful. Had I even had a thought of buying in Italy, this novel would have been a strong deterrant, filled as it is with stories of insane and frustrating Italian legal customs and unsuspecting foreigners being fed to the conniving locals.

Second time around, I was already a homeowner, wanting to kick myself for not having studied the book more carefully before I wrote the check. But here I am, living the story, and finding it altogether true and yet, not quite as bad as I imagined. Yes, with the inequitable exchange rate I lose a small fortune everytime I send money over to Italy; yes, my neighbors have shown their true colors by hooking into my electric box, and using the cucina of the large house (unrestored) to dry their laundry; and each time I'm there one of the neighbors' sons reminds me that I owe him 200 euro for garden work that I never asked him to do. And yes, its been frustrating doing the restoration work so slowly that eight years later I have yet to spend a night in the house. But lack of money and long distance have dictated this and the result has been the adoption of a philosophical, almost Zen attitude about the process and the conviction that the restoration of the house is a kind of metaphor for life. The point of it really does seem to be the process and not the result. Every small achievement - the installation of the kitchen, the clearing out of the overgrown garden, the purchase of a toilet - has been something to celebrate. And in true Italian fashion, that usually means a bottle of wine, delicious food and some friends to share them with.

I am on my way to becoming the Umbrianista I have decided I want to be.