Having passed the Italian language exam, I am now entering into the REAL test of fortitude and skill that will determine if I get Italian citizenship -- the Bureaucracy Challenge. This consists of: filing the appropriate paperwork. We have an immigration attorney who has years of expertise in this process. I have a husband who is an Italian citizen. I have an advanced degree. I have Italian heritage. I have grit and persistence and a real desire to be a part of this country. I may yet be defeated.

So, the last time I was in the US, I got fingerprinted and sent my fingerprints off to the FBI to get a copy of my criminal record -- a piece of paper that says I have no criminal record. You have to do this in the US because the FBI will not accept fingerprints made outside the US. There is a six month deadline for filing this piece of paper along with your citizenship request before it expires and you have to do it all over again. (And the current dipshit in the White House has made a complete mess of the government and is threatening to eliminate the FBI, so it may be that it becomes impossible to get this piece of paper at all going forward.) Mine will expire in just a few weeks.

I also got a copy of my birth certificate and the "Apostille" for it -- which is a piece of paper required by the Italian government when you are submitting official forms from outside Italy. The piece of paper says that the form you are submitting is, in fact, the form that you are submitting. It is literally a piece of paper that says "the attached birth certificate is a birth certificate." It is issued by the same office that issues the birth certificate. OK, Italian government -- you do you.

We then had to have these forms officially translated into Italian by an official translator who translates them and then has to go before a judge in person and swear that her translation is a translation. The judge then gives her another piece of paper that says she swore her translation was a translation. Then we pick up all that up from her in Lucca and take it to our attorney.

I then took the Italian language test for citizenship (which is only offered three times a year) at the next available opportunity. The results were released two months later -- which was 8 days ago. As you know, I was quite surprised to find that I had passed and immediately set up an appointment with our attorney.

At that appointment, the attorney tells us we have a problem because some of the documents say that a person with my exact name and Social Security number was born on my birthday in "Fort Smith, Arkansas", and some say that a person with my exact name and Social Security number was born on my birthday in "Arkansas" and some say blah blah blah "Arkansas, Fort Smith." So we had to make an appointment with the American Consulate in Firenze to go there to get a piece of paper that says that these three people are all me.

So yesterday, we woke up at 6:45 and drove to Firenze to make it in time for our 10:30 appointment. (We stopped on the way at a Tobacco Store -- yes -- because that is the place that you buy a 16 euro stamp called a Marca da Bollo that will be needed later.) Going into the U.S. Consulate is like going into a war zone. The heavily armed guards search you and confiscate your phone, your keys, a tiny little flashlight that I had in my purse, my umbrella. OK, American government -- you do you. Then I paid $100 (you have to pay in dollars, not euros, because the American Consulate in Firenze is technically in America) for two signatures on this piece of paper. 

Then we stand in line to get all our confiscated stuff back before we high-tail it to Lucca (the provincial capital) to make it to the office of the Questura, where they will "legalize" the signature we got in Firenze by stamping it with the 16 euro Marca da Bollo that we got in the Tobacco Store earlier and signing it. The office was only open until 1:00 and then not open again until next week, when we will be in Ireland eating nothing but pub food and getting scurvy.

So we sped to Lucca, arriving just after 12:00 and trying to find a parking place in a city famous for not having any parking places. But we finally got one and headed to the Questura, which was all locked up with a big sign on the door saying that yesterday, for no announced reason, they were closed and that if there was some emergency, go to the Prefettura instead, which would also close at 1:00, not to re-open again until next week. So we found the Prefetture on the map, ran there and wandered around trying to find the office that would "legalize" the signatures, but all of the doors seemed to be locked. (These government offices are both grand Renaissance palazzos with stone walls and giant wooden doors that can clearly withstand battering rams and 40-foot ceilings, which means that running up the lovely marble stairs to the third floor is like going up to the tenth floor of a modern building. It doesn't make exploring around to find the right office something to be undertaken lightly.) We finally got into a third-floor hallway by going in a door when someone else came out and we were able to slip in before the door slammed shut and locked behind him. We wandered around some more and finally found the right office. The lady was very nice (everyone is always very nice) and told us to wait in the hall. There was no one else in sight anywhere. 

Then there were lots of paper rustling sounds in her office and other strange noises and she came out and went into another office where we could hear voices arguing for a while. But finally, she came out and gave us the piece of paper with the 16 euro Marca da Bollo on it and a signature. This signature signified that the other signature was a signature.

Then we drove back to Pietrasanta to our attorney's office where we spent an entertaining forty-five minutes trying to log onto the automatic document system that I had previously had to set up an account for, at which point the attorney said, "Why doesn't your criminal record have an Apostille with it?"

The answer is that no one ever told me that I needed an Apostille for the criminal record and I myself had never heard of an Apostille in my first 60 years of being alive on earth and so have no clue when you need one and when you don't. An Apostille seems insane to me.

But now -- immediately -- I need it. I need it before the criminal record expires in a few weeks. And the only place to get it is in Washington, D.C. where I have to present the original piece of paper saying I have no criminal record (a piece of paper that was at that moment with me in Italy) and then wait two weeks and go pick up the piece of paper with the Apostille now attached. Then they will both have to be re-translated by the official translator who will go swear in front of the judge that her translation is a translation and then uploaded into the fun electronic system.

So we went to the DHL pick-up point (which is a computer store on the edge of town) and overnighted the letter to my brother in Washington (and by "overnighted" I mean that it will hopefully arrive someday in the not too distant future). The lady at the computer store had a tremendous amount of difficulty filling out the DHS form because my brother's cell phone has an area code which is not in Washington, D.C. where his address is (because he got the cellphone before he moved to Washington and the DHL system seemed to find this utterly incomprehensible to the point of it being just completely unacceptable), so at one point she kind of handed over the computer to Jonathan and he worked on it a while to try to get it to believe that a sane person would have an address in Washington and a cell phone that he got in Pennsylvania. So we will see if the package ever actually arrives. I doubt it. But if it does, my brother will then take the piece of paper to the U.S. State Department between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m. M-F (the only time they are open) and drop it off and then go back to get it in two weeks and send it by DHL directly to the translator in Lucca who will translate, swear, etc.

I emphasize that all that is just the stuff that happened YESTERDAY. I await my next challenges in the So-You-Think-You-Can-Be-Italian sweepstakes with a mixture of awe (at the wonders of the best bureaucratic system in the world) and dread. Today I am resting up and carbo-loading to be prepared.

 

I finally got the results back from my Italian Language Test for Citizenship and it seems, in contrast to all reasonable expectations, that I passed. So we have made an appointment with our immigration attorney and I am now beginning the formal process to become an Italian citizen. This would have shocked all my ancestors who fled from Italy for the bright dream of America, the land of milk and honey. They lived in a very different world.

So I am looking forward to the bureaucracy of the citizenship process. It should be epic, given the red tape we have encountered so far. Even as I write this, in fact, Jonathan is down in town in class taking driving lessons because, two years in to the process, we have been so soundly defeated by the red tape and bureaucracy of the Italian DMV that it finally seemed that the only option was to just start at the beginning. He is the oldest person in class and the only one, he says, who takes notes.

But to counter-balance the good news, a wild boar got into the garden last week and dug up a huge amount of ground in the olive grove. It is difficult to even photograph because the area is so big. Jonathan is sad that we apparently slept quite peacefully though all the excitement. Jonathan would like to see a wild boar in action. Jonathan is nuts.

But in other pork-related news, Monday and Tuesday were the festival for San Biagio. We went early Monday morning and stopped in to the Duomo to get Jonathan's throat blessed. Our friends at the pub assured us that it was happening all day long. But we were such eager little beavers that we arrived too early and wound up being there right at the beginning of the early morning mass. So we backed out as unobtrusively as possible and instead enjoyed all the booths for the fair. Roast pork sandwiches called "porchetta" are the big thing for the fair and it is never too early around here for roast pork. There were whole pigs laid out everywhere we turned. There were also plenty of roast pig heads arranged to appear so as to be calling out to passersby, proving that the porchetta sellers of Pietrasanta know how to have a good time.

We bought some wild-rose-infused oil and dried citrus slices from our friend Manuela at her booth and then a big bunch of yellow mimosa -- the first I've seen this year -- from a flower seller. Then we went to see the animals that were waiting for the Blessing of the Animals in the piazza by the Uffizi di Commune and the mimosa flowers made me very popular with the horses. 

Barbara assure us that, having missed the official activities at the church, I can bless Jonathan's throat myself up at the house as well as any priest could. Yesterday we blessed it with celebratory champagne because of my language exam results. But it was French champagne, so the blessing may not have taken. We will bless it again with the boys down at the pub with good, cheap local red wine. That will do the trick.

Sometimes, lately, the sea turns burnished orange at sunset and sometimes it is deep ink blue. Last night Jupiter and Venus and Mars were all lined up with the moon in a bright band across the sky and Jonathan and I stood out in the yard to look at them and at our shadows on the drive cast by the moonlight. "Let's always remember this moment," we said to each other.

 

Jonathan and I have (at last!) won a prize in one of the numerous raffles we have entered in support of various organizations and charities over the past two and a half years. We won second prize (a two-liter jug of German beer) in the pre-Christmas raffle at the pub. I suspect that these raffles are fixed, given the never-failing appropriateness of the winners. It is always suspiciously the exact person who should win who does win -- as if by magic.

So Jonathan and I may not seem to be the right people to win a giant flask of beer given that Jonathan doesn't really drink at all and I much prefer wine to beer. But we were the right people, in fact, because we did exactly what should have been done with the beer, which was to ask that it be put somewhere to get cool and then go down on a quiet winter evening, when the crowds and the noise had subsided, when only about a dozen of the regular habitues were there -- four playing cards at a table in the corner and the rest sitting together and the big table near the wood-burning stove, keeping warm and talking -- to open the flask and share it all around. These are my favorite nights. The big news of the day was that Nonno had convinced Daniele and Alice to re-arrange the shelves with jams and pickles so that similar items were grouped together for easier sale. We admired it orderliness while we drank the beer.

Then today, we went to the big grocery store on the edge of town and our groceries were free. We didn't exactly understand why -- something about points expiring on our membership card. We didn't know that we earned points or that they translated into free groceries, but, in any case, we didn't have to pay for our laundry detergent and breakfast yogurt. Then I asked about the bollini (we are collecting them to win a big nonstick frying pan), but the cashier explained that we didn't get bollini today because of the points expiring on the membership card. "Oh," I said, not having any clue what was going on. "But, here," she said, "have them anyway" and gave us twice as many as we actually would have gotten if everything had been as usual.

On the drive home, we figured out the whole chain of events (in the moment we had no idea) leading to free groceries and double bollini. "Well," I said Jonathan, "that was nice of her." "Yes," he said, "it's sort of like Italy is a continuous bewildering Christmas -- we have no idea what is going on or how or why or what we should do, but people just give us gifts anyway."

So maybe the raffles aren't rigged after all. Maybe we just live in a land of abundant gifts.

 I worry.

I know that it doesn't do any good, but I worry anyway. One of my big worries about moving to Italy, where I don't know the systems and don't understand the logic behind the processes by which things happen (and I am not alone in this, btw) is what would happen if we had a medical emergency.

Now I know.

Some friends from the US came to stay with us for a couple of days and one of them had a medical emergency their first day here -- not life-threatening, but incredibly painful and needing real medical attention.

So we went down to the little hospital at the very foot of Via Capriglia, where there is an after-hours walk-in clinic. The doctor warned us that since we are not Italian, we would have to pay upfront for the care. Being Americans, of course, we are used to astronomical medical bills. I once had to pay upfront at the emergency room in Colorado Springs when one of the boys had broken his arm, even though I have medical insurance, because the other boy had broken his leg (jesus!) the weekend before and my insurance payment had not made its way through the system yet. If I had not been able to instantly cough up several hundred dollars, they would not have treated my child because his injury wasn't life-threatening.

This is the reality of US health care and so we were prepared for the worst -- especially because we were so carefully warned. The doctor there treated my friend and then the bill came.

Twenty bucks. The entire, uninsured cost of the visit was twenty bucks.

We went to the all-night pharmacy to get his prescription filled thinking, "Ah, now -- here it comes! Prescription medicine with no insurance -- this will certainly cost a pretty penny!" Once again, we were carefully warned that because we are not Italian, we would have to pay.

Thirteen bucks. Entire, uninsured cost -- thirteen bucks.

The whole process took less than an hour. There was no waiting anywhere. The total cost was 33 euros. My friend is doing well. We dropped them at the Pisa train station yesterday to continue their trip.

Jonathan pointed out that the reason for all of the careful warnings about payments was because an Italian would have paid nothing. Ever. So that is what happens when you have a medical emergency in a country with socialized medicine. Just fyi.

We also discovered that in the duomo down in Pietrasanta, you can take communion, should you wish, with the gluten-free version of the Body of Christ. Again, just fyi.

And I have tried out egg tempera painting using the pigments that I got from Zecchi and a traditional recipe from the early Renaissance for mixing up the paint using egg yolks and white wine. It just takes a splash of wine, but since you then have an open bottle, you can have quite the relaxing time while painting. I painted a tiny artichoke. I think I'm in love (with both the paint and the produce.)

We have made reservations for Easter lunch this Sunday at the pub. They are holding a raffle to win the big chocolate egg that didn't get sat on. We are number 49 -- our hopes are high!

For his birthday, I took Jonathan to Positano on the Amalfi Coast south of Naples for four days. It was, of course, gorgeous. And surprisingly aerobic.

My father's grandfather came to New York from a little village near Positano at the end of the 19th century. He left under what might be called a "cloud," although the more accurate term would be a "plume" -- as in "plume of smoke rising from the smoldering embers of the family home that he burned to the ground in an act of patricidal vengeance." Long story. Obviously. Let's just say that his departure was precipitous and that I didn't spread the details of my family history around while we were in the neighborhood.

Our hotel was up on the hillside overlooking the town and the cathedral dome and the bay. The view from the bathtub (actually all the rooms, but the bathroom was the most hilarious) was spectacular during the day, but at night, with the lights twinkling on the slope across from us, it was breathtaking -- probably one of the most gorgeous bathtub views in the world. Certainly in my experience.

And the famous Amalfi lemons were going gangbusters. I did not know anything about these beforehand and had to be gently calmed down at my first sight of them. So giant! So yellow! So mutant! But it was important for me, especially, to be calmed because I was actually driving our car at the time of the first sighting of them and even someone inured to the hair-raising Via Capriglia, with its fourteen blind hairpin switchbacks, is hard put to handle the road into Positano. Via Capriglia may be equally narrow and equally twisting, but there aren't giant double-decker tour buses going both ways down it. Truly, the Positanesi must have nerves of steel.

And thighs of steel, too. The streets are mostly steep staircases going precipitously up and down the hillside and, going up, just when you think you are getting to the landing place at the top, you turn the corner only to discover that the "landing" place is actually only a "pausing" place to give you a chance to catch your breath and make your peace with God before continuing on your journey to the heights. I would have done (more) whining about it, but I was shamed by the elderly Positanesi going trippingly about their business like fleet (and very well-dressed) mountain goats. We even saw some construction workers carrying loads of construction material up a stair-street on their backs. Not trippingly, perhaps, but still. Being passed by a guy carrying a 200-pound marble countertop on his back going up five hundred steps has a dampening effects on complaining about the walk.

So we ate tentacles and one of the best pizzas I ever had in my life (roasted winter squash, gorgonzola, bacon and rosemary), drank limoncello and prosecco for Jonathan's birthday, took a bubblebath looking out over the nighttime view, bought four real lemons and a ceramic one, and generally had a lovely time.

But it was good to come back to lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea where the wildflowers are coming out now in profusion and our own bathroom has a view down to the sea that is not to be sniffed at. I sliced our four Amalfi lemons and made candied lemon slices with them for want of anything else to do with so much mutant citrus. Should the apocalypse come now, we can hunker down for months with no fear of scurvy. So that's a relief.

And a giant spider had moved into the kitchen while we were away -- a big, bulbous thing that you know was just filled with blood and guts from its victims. Lots and lots of victims, by the looks of it. Jonathan, emboldened after our recent flirtation with death on the roads of Positano and feeling immortal, captured it and took it far away from the house to release it. But I know now that it is out there lurking somewhere and I know that it is not alone. I'm glad that something is around to keep the insect population at bay, but knowing that the spider and its ilk are near does make putting on a pair of closed-toe shoes more death-defying than would normally be my preference.

Jonathan is down in town this morning -- third day in a row -- trying to renew his Italian passport. He is having an extremely Italian experience in that everyone is being really lovely and friendly and kind (and well-groomed) and he still doesn't have his passport.

The shortest version is that on Wednesday morning he went to the closest passport office (in Forte dei Marmi), was told he didn't need an appointment to be seen, was told that he did after all need an appointment, was told that he could only make an appointment by telephoning during the lunch break, tried calling but no one was there to answer the phone during the lunch break (because they were all at lunch), was taken in very kindly even without an appointment, and then was told that he can't renew his passport without first getting an Italian Carta Identita, which is not available in that office. He was told he could get it at the Commune Offices in Pietrasanta.

On Thursday, he went to the Commune Offices in Pietrasanta to get the Carta Identita and was told he could not get his Carta Identita in Pietrasanta but would have to go to Rome to get it (since that is where his Italian citizenship papers were issued 30 years ago) and then they very kindly said that they would do it here in town if it was OK with the boss, Maurizio. Maurizio was not in the office. "Where is Maurizio?" the office workers asked each other. "The usual place where he always is," they sighed and said to each other. This was not further explained, leaving Jonathan with increasingly alarming speculations. Where is Maurizio hanging out these days when he should be in the office and what is he doing there?

But Maurizio eventually showed up, had a stunningly well-groomed beard (according to Jonathan -- I am sorry that I was not there to see it, but we are keeping me out of the picture at the moment so as not to -- any further - complicate things) and agreed that they could issue the card here in town. But first they would need to see some Italian proof of identity, such as an Italian passport.

Then there was a longish period of time where everyone enjoyed the bureaucratic beauty of needing a Carta Identita to get a passport but needing a passport to get a Carta Identita. 

They were quite nice about it, commiserating even, and eventually decided that since Jonathan's American passport had been accepted and stamped at the border when we entered the country (by, as I recall, the world's most uninterested and blasé border official) that it would be accepted as valid proof of Italian identity. Then Jonathan had to pay the fee, which is not, of course, paid in that office, but is, naturally, paid in a tobacco shop.

This may seem baffling to Americans, but is absolutely true and is a regular feature of Italian life. It's like being sent to the nearest 7-11 to post bail or pay your telephone bill (another thing that we do in the tobacco shop.) So Jonathan hopped off the the nearest cigarette store, coughed up the dough, was given a series of official stamps (actual paper stamps with glue on the back) and went back to the Commune Offices were the printer fucked up twice printing out his card, a discussion was had about whether or not to call in Andrea, who knows how to fix the printer but who was apparently also in his "usual place," meaning that Maurizio got the chance to really show his skills by expertly peeling off all the official stamps and Jonathan's photo from the old version of the form and putting them on the new version of the form, perfectly lined up with the overlapping printing. Jonathan now suspects that Maurizio's "usual place" is not the brothel that he had originally imagined, but is instead a high-end art forger's workshop. This is why he is the boss.

By the time Jonathan left, they were all on a first name basis and using the informal with each other.

So today he is back at the Passport Office in Forte dei Marmi (stopping in first at the Post Office to pay the fee, which is not taken at either the passport office itself or at the tobacco shop, for some reason, and also to inquire if they have any mail for us that they are willing to release. I'm not holding my breath.) He has been gone a couple of hours now, which is probably a good sign.

(Oops! Jonathan is just back. They were out of the forms he needed at the Post Office and told him to go to another office. "Any other Post Office?" he asked. They stared at him and just said "another office" and made vague waving gestures with their hands. Apparently any type of office will do, but not the one he was currently in. Naturally. He went to a Pak-n-Ship Store and got the forms there. Then he spent a good long while waiting in line at the offices in Forte dei Marmi, only to be eventually told that the passport office is closed and he should come back Monday. Also, there was no mail for us at the Post Office.)

We have been away for a week -- first in Venice and then in Portugal -- seeing loved ones. And the point of seeing loved ones, of course, is to see them and not necessarily the background scenery, which is properly inconsequential.

But.

Having said that, if you are in fact seeing loved ones, you might just as well see them standing in front of crashing waves on the Portuguese shoreline or sitting next to the filigreed palaces of Venice.

Going on a boat through the Grand Canal one night, with the moon almost full and the lights glittering on the water and fleeting glimpses inside gold and red and crystal-chandeliered rooms, holding Jonathan's hand in the sway of lapping waves, Venice seemed like a fairyland -- like we had finally found our way through that small hidden door usually kept locked with a golden key.

It is impossible to photograph this (at least for me) because a flat image of darkness with specks of yellow light, though accurate, is not truthful. There are things that are never like the pictures of themselves. The pictures are only markers to help us remember what we saw with other eyes than merely the ones in our heads.

And so the best picture of our nighttime boat ride through the Grand Canal that I could think of is James Abbott McNeill Whistler's painting, Nocturne in Black and Gold -- The Falling Rocket, which is currently held in the Detroit Institute of Arts. Because I am apparently still in middle school, naturally this reminds me of "The Detroit Rule" for food, which is that putting any place name in front of it makes everything sound more delicious -- "Tuscan Sun-dried Tomatoes," "Viennese Pastry," "Maine Lobsters" -- with one exception.

It was all lies!

We had so many financial worries about blowing up our lives in the US and moving to a villa on a hillside in Tuscany! The big question looming over everything was how we would ever be able to afford to live this life. We thought very carefully about our budget, trying to imagine what we would need to spend money on and what we would have to abandon -- what pleasures we would just have to learn to live without. The propaganda everywhere in America, interwoven with every thought of European life, was that a life of beauty, of olive groves, art lessons, cobbled streets, views of the sea, tagliatelle ai funghi, red tile roofs and wine and roses blooming in November -- all of that would cost a pretty penny and leave us, sooner or later, destitute and regretting our profligate grasshopper ways. Better to work until you die -- it's the American way. But it was all lies!

Here is a very boring post about prices:

Our internet service costs almost exactly one-tenth of what it did in the US. Our cell phone bill is a little less than $15 a month (and we have the Deluxe Plan). Gas costs about $7 a gallon, but the tiny cars are incredibly fuel-efficient. The rent for our car (insurance included) is less than just the cost of just our car insurance back in Colorado. Trash and recycling pick-up is free. A bottle of wine costs about $2 -- or you can go super-expensive and spend $10. An entire basket filled with really fresh and delicious fruit and veg (spinach, eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, onions, peppers, grapes, plums, oranges) usually runs about $4. Yes -- only about $4 for all of it. We pay for loaves of bread at the bakery -- still warm from the oven -- with pocket change. We don't eat much meat, but a week's worth -- chicken, sausages, fish, prosciutto -- usually runs us about $10-15. Espresso is a dollar a cup. When we go down to the pub in our village for a glass of wine before dinner, we get a half-liter of the house wine and a bottle of fizzy water and are given free snacks -- sometimes so many that we are too full for dinner later. Total cost is $5. The rent on the rustic farm house (trusted gardener included) is less than we could have rented out our house for in Colorado Springs.

The whole idea that life must be a grim treadmill of unceasing labor just to stave off destitution is a lie that capitalism uses to scare us into submission. It's all lies.

And I think it is related that the big thing we have noticed is the lack of anger around here. That violence always bubbling under the surface in the US just doesn't exist here. I think it's because there is no feeling of dog-eat-dog in this world. The dogs eat homemade lasagna with fresh pasta and a glass of the house red just like everyone else.

Chestnut season, you will be relieved to hear, seems to be ending here in Capriglia-by-the-Sea. We still get some nuts crashing down through the leaves, sounding much bigger than they are, but it is handfuls a day now rather than hundreds and we feel that we can once again go outside without fear or protective headwear.

On Wednesday, we drove into Firenze and bought an annual pass to the Uffizi. Now we can go in whenever we want without waiting in line or paying. On future visits we will perhaps stay longer, perhaps look at more. But this time we hightailed it straight to my favorite piece in the museum -- a Botticelli Madonna that no one ever pays any attention to because it is in the same room as The Birth of Venus, on the wall opposite so that the crowds are facing the other way, busy taking pictures of the goddess on the half-shell with their phones, and I have the already heart-broken Madonna to myself. She seems to know, even with the chubby baby still on her lap, the whole bloody story of what is yet to become of her child.

I cried, of course, standing there at the back of the sea of I-Phones. Jonathan and I stayed so long looking at her that a few people in the crowd even noticed us and wandered over to take a phone picture before walking off. Then we went to see the Caravaggios and then to lunch.

Firenze is filled with people speaking English, which sounds startling now when we encounter it in the wild. Many of them looked hot or tired or slightly annoyed and I suspect that many of them were not having a very good time. I remember the first time I came to Italy, when I was a teenager here with my family, not having a very good time and at one point -- in Venice -- finally rebelling and refusing to go on yet another tour-group excursion to see yet another required marvel that I didn't understand. I claimed not to feel well, demanded to be left to sleep in the hotel, and when I was sure the coast was clear, went out by myself into the streets near the Piazza San Marco and bought a basket of fresh cherries and ate them. I still remember those cherries fondly.

I also remember thinking that Italy might be a fun place if I wasn't with my parents on a forced march of tourist sites with the crowds and the heat, so perhaps I am projecting my own remembered feelings onto the beleaguered Americans snapping photos of Venus in the Uffizi to look at later, I guess, somewhere cool and quiet where they could sit down.

Back at home, we went down to the pub, where Daniele dished out helpings of risotto for all the usual reprobates on the terrace. Daniele and Alice give away so much free food there out under the tree leaves that I don't see how they possibly manage to stay in business. The risotto was made with gorgonzola and prosciutto and was one of the best things I have ever put in my mouth.

We are in our house now, perched all topsy-turvy on the vertiginous side of the mountain with the ground dropping away hundreds of feet below us into the blue Ligurian Sea where Percy Shelley met his death.

The chestnuts and green persimmons clustered in the trees all around us are simultaneously very close and very far away. I could almost reach out and touch them from where I sit on the porch, but could never climb so high up into the tree. There are old stone steps everywhere with geraniums in pots and lizards sunning themselves and outbuildings scattered haphazardly at different levels and rosemary in profusion and olive trees and grapes called "strawberry grapes" and the sound of church bells in the distance throughout the day. The stairways seem to have been designed by M.C. Escher to maximize the feeling of being in a dream.

On Monday we arrived here with all of our luggage to be greeted by the Signora and her daughter and the rental agent, all of whom showed us everything around the place and explained how everything works and with whom we signed many forms. They spoke very quickly and very simultaneously and although Jonathan says that he got almost all of it, I only really understood that if we leave the gas on and blow up the house, we will be in trouble. Which seems fair.

The Signora's daughter asked Jonathan about our house in Colorado and he told her it was built in 1895. "Yes," she said. "I had heard that all the buildings there are very new." (This is not the usual response that we get. Perspectives shift.) She had seen a documentary about tornados in the US and wondered if that might explain why there is nothing really old in the States. Could be.

Then we went down to the town to open up a local bank account. Again, it was a long process involving much rapid speech with technical banking terms of which I understood only that I should not use my birthday as my PIN and that at some point I would be asked three security questions. I have not been asked them yet, although that was now three days ago. Or if I have, it happened in such rapid Italian that I did not notice. As the afternoons wear on, I have a tendency to simply start saying "si, si, si" to everything and smiling a lot. So far, so good.

Then we went to do a big shopping at the HyperMarket out on the road to the beach while we still had the rental car to carry things home. It turns out that the organizational grouping of groceries is highly culturally specific so that whereas, say, flour and salt and sugar all all grouped together in American grocery stores, they are not in Italian ones. Also, it turns out to be harder to tell the difference between dishwasher detergent, laundry detergent, shower gel, dish soap, toilet cleaner, and shampoo just by reading the labels than you would think. There are possibilities here for making mistakes that you really do not want to make. We were so confused that we ended up with pre-packaged octopus salad and screw-top 3-Euro wine and called it a day. We will live on love. And, I guess, octopus.

Tuesday, we drove to the airport at Pisa to return the rental car and took the train back to Pietrasanta. Then we took a taxi 95 percent of the way back up the mountain and walked the rest because the taxi driver was worried that if she took us all the way to our house, she would never be able to get back. So we are marooned here in paradise now as if we have fallen off the edge of the world.

Emily Dickinson wrote, "what indeed is Earth but a Nest from whose rim we are all falling?"

The important thing is not to panic.

We have arrived, at long last, in Pietrasanta. Our last days at "home" are a blur -- the final packing, the final garbage run (goodbye, futon!) , the final cleaning -- all made more challenging by the roofers showing up unexpectedly on Monday morning to begin removing all the layers of old roof that had piled up over the decades -- layers which delighted the local fauna, no doubt, but displeased the house inspector. So our last days of leave-taking had a soundtrack of splintering wood and crowbars. Metaphorically appropriate, but hard on the nerves.

Our last night was spent sleeping on the floor. Never before in all my years at the house has the floor ever seemed so unyieldingly solid. No structural problems there!

I sobbed as we left, of course -- partly for the place itself, which I loved, but mostly for the time in my life that it represented, a time when I was a mother with my beloved little boys at home and a professor who spent long hours talking about Ideas with generations of students who cared about them. When I was turning in the rental car at the Colorado Springs airport, the booth attendant asked me, "Heading home?" -- which seems like a simple "yes/no" question. I told him some lie because the real answer would have been too emotionally difficult to explain: "I don't know."

And so it began -- lines, cramped seats, cramped legs, execrable airplane food, the peculiar stink of airplane bathrooms, and our second mostly sleepless night in a row while the tiny icon of an airplane on the seatback screens inched its way across a map of the ocean.

And then, in the early afternoon, we finally touched down in Milan.

I had worried a bit about Customs (so much luggage!) and about Immigration Control (no extended-stay visa!), which just shows how long it's been since I was in Italy. Not a word was said to either of us -- just another middle-aged tourist couple off a plane-ful of them. We were blithely released into the afternoon sun, where our rental car waited.

We only got lost twice on the drive to Pietrasanta, which is pretty good -- especially since it was Thursday and we hadn't really slept since Monday night. Jonathan drove and I promised things to God. This is our customary division of labor.

Pietrasanta has changed, of course, in the last forty years. It is still lovely, but now it is filled with art galleries and restaurants in the places where the marble workshops and bronze foundries and stores selling chisels and power grinders used to be. We went to the place that used to be my regular bar, the Bar Igea -- always filled in those days with artists, sometimes still wearing their blue overalls sprinkled with marble dust or gesso or blood -- but it is now an upscale "Cocktail Lounge" open only at night. The important thing, in moments like this, is not to panic.

Our new best friend Lorenzo, an old punk who runs the hotel where we are staying until our house is ready for us on Monday, tells us that there are still many working artists here, just that they have been pushed out of the very center of town. And, indeed, I saw two men at lunch on Friday with the telltale pencils and ruined shoes of people who have spent the morning working in the studio.

Later, we drove up the mountainside for a peek at our village, even though we couldn't go to our house. And by "mountainside," I mean "sheer cliff with dozens of narrow switchbacks pretending to be a road." I had not remembered it as being quite so death-defying, which only confirms that I was 20-years-old and therefore clearly thought I was immortal when I lived here before. Jonathan drove our little standard-transmission car all the way up in first gear and did not tell me (while I was saying "Ooo! Look at the sea! Jonathan, look at the sea!") how close we came to stalling out a couple of times on practically vertical switchback turns. This would have been disastrous as the car has no real emergency brake, thus raising the possibility of us spending that always tense moment between "stopped" and "first gear" rolling precipitously backwards down a very steep roadway before plunging to our deaths over the side of the cliff. Of all the times not to panic, this is probably the most important.

But the village seemed magical, as things do when one has risked death to see them, and the sea was very blue (with what may or may not have been Corsica just visible in the distance) and the fig trees were heavy with green figs. It was so quiet that we found ourselves whispering.

Our first night, we had pizza and wine at a table in the street. Jonathan is speaking Italian like a pro. I am speaking Italian like someone who speaks only Spanish -- and only a little of that and only badly. We are, so far, very dazed and very happy.

I do not believe that I am moving to Italy. No really. Not in my heart.

I am, at the moment, very much here -- thinking hard about the house, my house, because it has been requiring so much attention lately. And the car. And the utility bill. And the rest of the long list of things that must be done in the next five days. Italy has not seemed real for many weeks now. Or, if it has, only fleetingly, in waves.

We made a reservation at a hotel in Pietrasanta for our first few days in country, before the Rustic Farmhouse With Trusted Gardener is ready for us. The online picture of its lobby puts me in mind not of Italy, but of our very own kitchen floor here at our house, whose checkerboard tiles we installed ourselves one winter, the boys and Jonathan and I.

But then Jonathan got an email from Lorenzo at the hotel asking about our expected arrival time and for one minute, Italy seemed like it was really happening.

We were caught off-guard by the house inspectors, who surprised us by coming over without warning first thing early Wednesday morning. Despite our discomfiture at this, we were fortunate that the bed did happen to be made and that Jonathan was in fact wearing pants. This is not always the case.

We wait now to hear the report -- Jonathan nonchalantly, me with loathing in my heart for our judges. If they can't see that the beauty of the house makes all the tiny quirks (solid roofs are vastly overrated, in my opinion, and really just separate us from nature and our animal kin in a way that is surely detrimental to our very souls) that come with living in such a unique (experience the wilderness!) place worth it, then they do not deserve this house (the elements are our friends -- welcome them with open arms!)

Driving down Union Boulevard last week, we were caught in a sudden deluge when the heavens opened up and it seemed like the sky itself was, at long last, as predicted, falling. Any rain at all is an event around here and we have been known to go out and stand on our porch to stare open-mouthed at a light drizzle, but this was really an astounding downpour.

"You know," Jonathan said to me while bravely navigating between the sudden-onset lagoons that had appeared in the road, "in Italy, we will have to get used to rain." And for just one minute, Italy was real.

 

On a sudden whim this afternoon, we booked our non-refundable, one-way airline tickets to Milan. In nine weeks, we will fly out of the airport in Colorado Springs, where I have flown out so many times. And in nine weeks and one day, we will land in Milan. I am already anticipating the tears in my heart when I close the door to this house for the last time.

But also I am anticipating arriving in Italy and beginning a whole new life there, Jonathan and I together. Jonathan's friend Jennryn said to him the other day, "Ah, soon you will be sitting there with a glass of wine and a fistful of prosciutto!" We laughed and now hold that image as a beacon in our heads while we take camping gear and cookware to donate to the ARC in heavy boxes and bags.

And so I lead a schizophrenic life -- half of me trying to savor every last feeling and sound and smell and image from this world where I have lived so long and half of me lost in daydreams and visions of a new life far away. I can't wait to leave; I don't want to say good-bye.

And so without ever planning to do so today, we have bought our tickets. When torn or in doubt, I have always chosen to act rashly. I have no regrets.

We are having cauliflower with dinner tonight for the second time this week. We are tired of cauliflower, but we are even more tired of broccoli. It's just the tail-end-of-winter blues (still cold and grey here) and we will get over it, but in the meantime, while eating our cauliflower, we sit around and dream of Italy.

Last night, we looked deeply into the restaurant that is closest to our rustic farmhouse -- easy walking distance, open today until midnight. "What," we asked ourselves, "will be on the menu of the place where we are destined to become regulars?"

This:

This is also true right here at our house in Colorado, but it seems more charming when it happens in Italy.

It turns out that if you obsessively google around about something, bringing to bear all of the internet skills that you have honed over the entire lifetime of the internet itself, you can find things out. This morning, I found out that our rustic farmhouse in Italy has an outdoor wood-fired oven. Here is a picture of it:

Jonathan and I keep looking at each other, all goggly-eyed every time we discover a new wonderful feature of the rustic farmhouse, and squealing.

We know we cannot live there forever -- the senora who owns it has been very clear that our tenancy is temporary only. But we will have almost a year in the rustic farmhouse, eating wood-fire pizza and drinking beauty.

Tris's first year of college -- our first year of empty nesting -- I was on sabbatical and Jonathan took a year-long leave of absence so that we could be together all the time, all day, every day, just the two of us. We called it The Year of Love. We told people that it was because we were taking a year to do only what we loved, but that was not the real reason.

So we are going to have almost a year in the rustic farmhouse on a hillside in Tuscany. We have decided to call it The Year of Farming.

 

After three weeks of email and telephone conversations during which I understood about ten percent (generous estimate, counting things like "buon giorno") of what was being said and, in passing, learned the Italian phrase for the equivalent of a US social security number ("codice fiscale"), today we got the rental agreement contract. We are officially renting the rustic farmhouse of our Italian dreams.

I am so excited that I actually feel sick. This is, however, a good omen (despite the very real possibility of vomit.) The most amazing things I've ever done in my life -- give birth to my children, touch down in an airplane on Rarotonga, marry Jonathan -- have all been immediately preceded by this terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach (the result, obviously, of my own chicken-hearted cowardice and fear.)

The night before Aiden was born, the first contractions woke me up a little after midnight. I lay there in bed by myself, timing them by the light of the clock-radio and saying goodbye to my life as it had been. I kept thinking, "This is the last night I will spend by myself for who knows how long?" Then I started throwing up.

I puked my way through the next eleven hours until he was born. It is pretty safe to say that I am not at my most attractive (or fragrant) during these big life-transition moments.

But these things that have terrified me have all, in the end, been worth it -- all, in the end, the best experiences of my life. I have learned the truth of that over the years. But it doesn't change the fact that I need a nice cup of ginger tea and perhaps a cool compress on my forehead right now.

 

I am stupid. 

I had forgotten that things do not rush forward in Italy. There is no unseemly hurry. There is no frenetic scurrying about. There is, instead, a gracious and stately procession through time. It is one of the things that we treasure most about Italian culture. It is one of the reasons that we are moving there.

That is all to say that we have not yet managed to rent the rustic farmhouse with trusted gardener. We have merely begun the conversation. There will be many days (or even weeks) during which we will continue to discuss. These will be pleasant conversations, but they will not be speedy conversations. Thus was the Renaissance made. One must respect the Renaissance and settle in for the long haul. Pull up a comfy chair.

In the meantime, I continue to pack boxes of books and cart them in loads to the storage unit. There is nothing that encourages minimalism like physically lifting up into the air every single object that you own. As this process moves forward, as I tote more heavy boxes around, I somehow find that fewer and fewer of my books are actually all that necessary to my future life. It is a hard discipline, but salutary.

The electrician was here yesterday. He was a lovely person, which is good because we will be seeing more of him in the coming days.

We had a to-do list and a sense of dread. It was a long list and a well-justified sense of dread, given the state of things. We have relied on duct tape and prayer for many years now. But it wasn't as bad as we feared. At least we do not need to have the entire house re-wired, which was my big -- and completely reasonable -- anxiety. But it was a long list and he will be back next week to do more of it.

In the meantime, I moved the first load of books into our new storage unit today. They are very heavy and turned our Subaru Impreza into a low-rider. The important thing to remember about your car's suspension is that it likes to be tested, to be challenged, pushed to see how far it can go. Otherwise, it becomes restless and irritable. Also, after a decade of Jonathan's driving, we are selling the car for parts in May anyway.

And we sent an email to the rental agent about the rustic farmhouse and got back a very favorable reply. The rent is more than we intended to spend, but we couldn't help ourselves -- we were swept away by beauty. It's the old story. We are talking to the agent tomorrow on the phone to settle everything.

This is a video of us making the decision:

The plumber was here for five hours today. During that time, darkness fell and the snow began to fall. I contemplated the nature of time and the universe and also did our taxes.

But all of our plumbing is now like plumbing that normal people have.

We were going to have a lovely chicken and lentil curry for our dinner, but that has not happened because of no running water for five hours. We are getting a pizza instead.

Looking at my old journals from when I lived in Italy 40 years ago, I found these soup labels. You might not have thought that Campbell's Soup would have been widely available in Italy in 1983, but apparently it was. I would not have thought I would have eaten it, but apparently I did.

 I dropped out of college after my sophomore year. Long story.

Then through a series of accidents (including a broken leg, a broken heart, and -- no lie -- meeting two strangers on a train) I emerged on a late summer afternoon from the train station in a little town in Italy that I'd never heard of before and had never intended to go to: Pietrasanta.

The town walls dated back centuries and built into them, just next to the arched gateway opening into the main piazza was Bar Igea. (You can just see it's awning in the drawing below.)

It was tiny inside and the tables out front were in the shade of the ancient trees. I tacked a notice up by the bar saying -- in English, because my Italian then was minimal and mostly incorrect -- that I was looking for a place to live.

In this half-assed way, the next day I rented -- for the equivalent of $35/month -- a two-story, five-room house in the hills above the town. There was no heat except a fireplace, but there was a fig tree growing right by the front door and a view of the sea from the tiny balcony. At night, I could hear the surf from my bed. On clear days, I could sometimes see the coastline of France.

The marble mountains come up very abruptly from the narrow ocean plain and the climb up to my house was steep. There was a bus that zigzagged up the switchbacks from town and I rode it when I was going up. But when I was going down, I walked on the footpath through the olive groves that covered the mountainside. Sometimes I met a herd of goats along the way. People who have ever had much to do with goats know that this is not necessarily as charming as it sounds.

The olive groves are terraced by low stone walls, centuries old. This is a goat-free picture I took one day on the path.

At harvest time, the olive growers hang gossamer white nets under the trees to catch the falling olives before they hit the ground. The olive harvest lasted for weeks and, during it, the mountainside seemed misty all the time, like clouds had taken up permanent residence there among the trees.

You can't eat an olive straight off the trees. Before they are cured, they taste like wood and have the same consistency. I found that out the hard way.