Nov 21-23, Friday - Sunday -- the K-ovs in town

S, M, and their daughter Masha with Leva and Vanya arrived late on Friday, "tired but happy" after touring Rome, Naples, Pompei. Unfortunately, on Saturday S and Masha had to go back to Rome, to put Leva on the plane -- alone! -- back to Moscow. He didn't want to miss a week of school. This turned into a long trip, but they got back unharmed, around 3 pm. Meanwhile, we slept pretty late, except Vanya, who woke up early and engaged in energetic reading of "The Diamond Thieves" or something like that.





After breakfast, a tour of our market at Piazza Faustino...



... tasting and purchasing porchetta, insalata di mare...



and some fruit and veggies:



In the afternoon, after the family reunification (minus Leva), a "Viterbo by night" tour, including the olive oil "festa" -- two or three oil tasting tents set up around the town center. Here we ran into a "renaissance" travelling band performance by the fountain on Piazza della Morte, next to one of the tents:



Olives on a tree...



... olives on bruschetta:



From there, through the medieval quarter, on to wine tasting -- they had one at the place where we usually buy wine.



They had all kinds of tasty snacks, including pecorino cheese with honey and...



... "typical Viterbese," they said -- pancakes with grated pecorino and sugar. M also liked the honey dispensing gadget, but unfortunately they didn't sell those at the place, so it went on a shopping list. Primitivo di Puglia tasted good to all...





... so we bought a liter... and went home for supper: that seafood salad, couscous with lamb, etc. What a nice way to spend a depressingly-big-number birthday eve.

Nov 23, Sunday morning, Ferento

The ruins of the ancient Roman town of Ferento are only 10 minutes away from Viterbo. Naturally, it is closed "for technical reasons, until further notice."



Naturally, there is a hole in the fence next to the sign.



A very nice and relaxed way to see the sights on a sunny day: no crowds, no lines, no tickets. (Eventually an Italian family joined us there.)







Here S, our railroad engineering expert, explains how the grooves in ancient Roman roads carved by the wheels eventually forced standardization of the distances between the wheels in carriages and later determined the distance between the rails in railroads (and why, according to a popular "MIIT" legend, this distance is a few centimeters wider in Russia).

Nov 23, Orvieto, Sunday 2 pm

Orvieto is in Umbria, near the Lazio border, about 50 km north of Viterbo. We picked a "scenic" route which gave S a chance to practice his shift-driving skills, tested our GPS, which kept mumbling something incomprehensible about recalculations and u-turns, and made Masha a little car sick (the latter mostly due to her own condition). A series of escalators in tunnels dug through the rock take you from the parking lot to the town streets above.



The first stop was at a little trattoria Da Carlo on a side street -- the kind of place that does not have a "menu turistico," in fact, doesn't have any written menu at all. It was run by a family (father, mother, son, daughter) and was pretty packed -- the end of the lunch time on a Sunday afternoon. The mother said to us, apologetically, "Siamo stanchi..." Took a while, but we didn't mind much: I guess it was our own contribution to the Slow Food movement (and a chance to raise a birthday toast for me, too).

Nov 23, Orvieto, Sunday 4 pm

Orvieto has a very lovely cathedral in the Italian gothic style.






The door is modern, though.



Next to the cathedral is a small park with a vista of the valley and a castle below.

Nov 23, Orvieto, Sunday 5 pm

The town center seems to be populated mostly by artists, with whole streets of arts and crafts workshops and gift shops.



Lots of colorful (kitchy?) ceramics, fake faience and majolica.



There was also a make-shift crafts market where M picked a small dish and the honey dispenser gadget made of olive wood.

More olive oil

Meanwhile, my language and culture exchange with Elisabetta rose to a new level: I gave her an Andover sweatshirt and a T-shirt for her daughter; she gave me a little bottle (5 liters) of olive oil made by her father. He is 80, takes care of about 100 trees.



Now we are all set for a couple of years. If you come to visit, bring empty bottles.

Olives

When we got off the bus from Torino, our boss was there to meet the group. He immediately invited us to come to his house next day to help him harvest olives. You can't say no to a request like this... His wife picked us up at 11 on Sunday morning ("after church"). T & H (the English teacher and his wife) were invited, too.

They have a fairly small house, but it is on about an acre, and they have 58 olive trees. The trees are over 100 years old! We spread the nets under the trees and went at it with plastic combs.







I felt the trees rather liked my gentle touch...



After lunch (pasta, sausages with fried potatoes, quiche, wine, tiramisu, coffee) we worked a little more, but less energetically. By sunset we had 5 bags of olives, about 150 kg total -- enough to make about 15 liters of oil. We took our crop to the press operator nearby, but it's the height of the olive season and everyone finished at the same time. The line was a mile long, no chance for us to get our oil. (We were promised some, as "pay.")

But we got a glimpse of the big olive press (four huge vertical stone wheels rotating in a big basin...



... and the centrifuge that separates oil from water:



Our little olive farmers union:



Empty cans ready for the finished product:

School trip to Turin, Nov 12-15, Day 4

Basically all day on the bus. We left Torino at 8:30 and got back to the Viterbo area around 5:30, too early for the agreed return of 7:00. Thus an unscheduled stop in the dark, cold Tuscania, a night view of a couple of churches, a glimpse of the ancient Roman road, back on the bus, back home.

It seems the kids have finally bonded in a nice way and started acting like a group, not like chain gang. (Maybe the brief toga party at the hotel helped.) There were several drinking incidents before the trip with discipline consequences, which took a lot of everyone's time. I believe they should subside now in favor of healthier fun.

School trip to Turin, Nov 12-15, Day 3

In the morning, a tour of the royal palace. Italy became a republic after the 1946 referendum; the Savoy house tolerated Mussolini and had to go. The Italian guides are pretty formal, don't allow time for questions.

After the palace, a detour that we didn't think through carefully. The art history teacher is a "crunchy," and she proposed to go on an "urban archeology" tour and see an old Fiat factory converted into a food exhibit sponsored by the Slow Food movement. Slow Food's mission is to preserve traditional cooking from the onslaught of fast food. So we agreed to go to this place, called Eataly. To get there, we took a tram, then a bus, 45 minutes each way.

Eataly turned out to be a red concrete and glass building...



...with a sketchy Vermouth Museum on the second floor...



... and a pretentious health food store/food court on the first floor. (The converted Fiat factory turned out to be the huge building across the street, which is now an enormous shopping mall and a movie theater.) It was lunch time, and the place was packed. I am not sure about slow food, but there was some very expensive food on display. The prices for these truffles are for one etto (100 grams):



To be fair, the bakery was not bad, and I ended up with a sandwich and a bottle of milk.



It seems the commercial "health food" business, places like Eataly, are rapidly invading and destroying the traditional Italian food culture. The only redeeming feature for me was free fast Internet access. But the students just loved the place!

After the Eataly lunch adventure we got back to town for a tour of the cinema museum. It is housed in the building called La Mole, which is an emblem of Turin (it is on one of the coins). The building started modestly, as a synagogue, but was never finished as such. Then it grew in height and became the tallest "traditional brick building." In fact at some point it was deemed unsafe and massive concrete reinforcements were built parallel to the original walls, basically a building within a building. The building is all open inside with the spiral gallery along the wall. Probably nobody knew what to make of it, until some genius proposed to put a cinema museum in it. Then a glass elevator was added at the center to take tourists up and down. It is sometimes called Torin's "Eiffel Tower." Here is Fellini's hat and scarf:



Turin had a street art week; one of the displays was lit Fibonacci numbers floating around la Mole in the night sky... Didn't get to see it. Another display, planets and stuff floating above one of the central streets:



I am telling you, a little self-conscious for Italy.

"Tired but happy," back to the hotel.