To celebrate Aryeh’s birthday, we’re spending about 30 hours in Venice. it’s crazy. We just went from Turin to Florence yesterday. But dude wanted to be in Venice on his birthday, and I found some nutso cheap tickets for the family (in a premium class car, no less!) on Trainline- an app I heartily recommend for travel around Europe, along with Omio. Anyway, we’re tilting along in misty, rainy weather between Ferrara and Padua. This little country at the bottom of Europe- and I know it’s not little, but when you’ve been traveling in Spanish-, French- and English-speaking countries and then are doing your Duolingo to be able to communicate in this ONE country that doesn’t have quite the colonial linguistic footprint the others have, you’re really aware of how small it is, competitively- is so interesting. I grew up with a deep love of Italian design, because the cabin my parents bought in the Catskills had been made and lived in by an Italophile architect with loads of Italian design magazines and catalogs that he left there. The country’s awareness of that legacy, along with its history of only actually uniting and becoming a country 160ish years ago, plus the physical realities of just occupying the most beautiful strip of land in Europe, from the alps we could see in Turin to the sun-drenched everything else… I’m not sure where I was going with that sentence, but I guess I’m trying to say we love it here. The first week was spent in a rural town outside of Turin, where I was playing chamber music with two lovely friends from different parts of my life who are now expats living here, one in Belgium, one here in Italy. Absolutely fantastic week, though it wasn’t great for the boys, as our Airbnb was a bit more remote than the host had described it. But she, the host, was herself such a bubbly, friendly character, and she had the most beautiful, red (!) German shepherd, named Tai, or Tata for short/long, we still had a good week on average I’d say. And we liked the area so much we decided to cancel our week on a farm that I’d booked on WWOOF, to have another week in Turin itself. We saw almost no other Americans, except for the one time we went to the pizza place around the corner from our place, which, to be fair, was the best pizza I’d ever had, so it must have been on some kind of Google Review matrix. Oh yeah, I’m eating gluten now. Not bothering me in Italy!!!
On the train, this is what has been making me surreptitiously conduct a little 4-pattern in my seat. This song breaks my brain!!
Also, happy birthday, Aryeh!!!
