Wednesday night was Nonno's 89th birthday party down at the pub. We were worried about arriving too early (we never know what time anything starts -- a cultural mystery) and so ended up arriving a little bit late. But we were greeted with affection and given instantaneous wine. 

There were probably 40 or 50 people there -- not only our familiar friends from our long afternoons in the shade on the terrace, but also a whole intertwined cabal of the Viviani family from Capezzano Monte -- cousins and in-laws and nieces and people whose multiple and over-lapping ties with Nonno were so dense and complex that is impossible to say who, exactly, they actually are.

It was lovely at the long table under the trees out back and the spontaneous singing of traditional drinking songs that burst out between courses of the meal were often hilarious (more so as the night and the wine went on) and always breathtaking. The clip below is a song about who is going to pay the tab for all this booze, but you would never know it if you didn't understand the words.

I felt very happy to be included in the crowd sitting at the big jolly table -- not a cousin, of course, but not so much a stranger any more, either.

The meal itself had course after course with the main dish finally being individual stuffed quails sitting in nests of roasted potatoes. I have seen Babette's Feast, so I know that I am supposed to crack open the skull with my teeth and eat the little brain, which is apparently a delicacy. But I myself am also quite delicate and blessed with a very vivid and visual imagination and once actually fainted out cold merely at the very thought of something particularly gruesome (long story), so I did not eat my brain. Now, days later, sitting safely in my house where the scariest foodstuff around is an elderly carrot in the back of the refrigerator, I am beginning to regret my timidity. But not much.