The milk tastes better here. I’m a firm believer in no cookie without a big, cold glass of milk, and I’ve eaten a LOT of cookies here. All of Europe is proud of each country selling its own milk, even when the supermarket chains (Carrefour, Spar, etc) are the same everywhere . Why is Italian milk more delicious?
Also, while I think it’s safe to assume that the US’s global superpower role has been waning since Trump, we see SO many NY Yankees logos everywhere we go. Other sports teams, too. In Mexico it was US football. Here it’s more NBA. I haven’t had a lot of political conversations on this trip, but the one night at the hostel in Madrid, the boys and I had the “family dinner” with some other guests- from South Korea, Portugal and the UK. The British lady started her sentence with, “I can’t believe you guys are about to nominate…” and I thought she was going to say “Trump,” but instead she said “a guy with one foot in the grave.”
We’re in Rome, in our last Airbnb of the trip. When we started in Italy, up north in Pino Torinese, my friend Mary Ann told a story about a masterclass given by the great cellist Amber Bylsma. One of the kids was playing Boccherini. Bylsma asked him if he’d been to Italy. The kid said no. Bylsma said, “you have to go to Italy to see the light there to understand Boccherini’s music.” It’s true! The light here is different! I saw it most clearly in Florence, but also in Venice and Sicily. I don’t know what it is about this long, boot-shaped strip of land in the middle of the water. Just golden and warm.
Today we took a day trip to Ostia, the beach town that was Rome’s ancient port. The smell of the flowering trees was intoxicating, just as the smell of the lemon and orange flowers in Sicily had been. We stopped in a church after the beach, on the way back to the train, and these paintings really brought home for me how Christianity is at its pure, uncorrupted soul, about the poor and downtrodden. There’s obviously a lot on top of it, and centuries of personalities and abuse and money. But these images really got to me.
