1.9 WAY too long between posts! I’m so behind.

Saturday I took Mamma down to Salsomaggiore for the first time. We went over to one of the bancomats to get cash, but when we asked it for 250E it said “contact your bank.” What? So annoying. Turns out her bank is convinced that if you need money and are abroad all at the same time you must be running some sort of scam, so they won’t let her take more than 200E ($250) a day. I like my bank better – they let me take up to $2000 a day (which is the only way I managed to pay for my car!). We walked through the main part of town through the public park and up to “I Marziani” (The Martians!) to see about getting another grounded computer adapter. Success! The lady at the cash register asked if Mamma were my grandmother (erk) and I thought she asked is she THE grandmother, which of course she is, so I said yes (another erk, oh well). However, the lady then proceeded to tell me, “You must hope that you are as beautiful as your grandmother when you are so old.” I wanted to get a cast iron skillet too, but they only had fancy French ones for $75. I will continue the hunt.

We went to the grocery store and got lovely steaks for dinner (I NEVER spend this for steaks at home, but $12/lb is the minimum they cost here, ack) and Mamma wanted to get wine. I don’t drink it. I don’t appreciate it, and I don’t care for the ones that pair better with food. Give me a sparkly moscato and really, I’m happy. But she wanted something I would drink. There was a white wine right in front of me that was secco. Meh. But next to it was the same brand, another white, on this this one was “amabile.” Amiable. Ok, I’m in – I want to know what “amiable” wine is like! (I have no idea what the cut was of the steaks, but they were AMAZING. Still haven’t cracked the amiable wine.)

A note on food generally: The Italians eat much less junk than we do, mostly because there’s not that much junk in the store to get. At home they say “stay to the outside of the store” because the prepared stuff is all in the aisles. There’s about one full aisle of prepared stuff in any of the grocery stores we go to. Now, admittedly, the grocery stores here are significantly smaller than at home. “Supermarket” is any market having a square footage between 2000 and 25000 sq ft. That’s a lot of leeway for what constitutes a SUPER market. The IperCoop (HyperCoop), or anything calling itself a “hypermarket” has to be more than 250000 sf. They have more junk. But turns out, not a ton more. The Italians just don’t do prepared food. Frozen premade pizza dough? Absolutely. Frozen premade pizzas? Yeah, but literally like 3 brands with 2 kinds apiece. Dried pasta? Barilla is after all locally made, so yes, tons. Premade pasta dishes (chef boyardee type stuff): haven’t seen any yet. Closest I’ve found is a can of couscous and tuna salad. The Italians eat a lot of tuna, so premade tuna salads turn up. But seriously, that’s about it. Premade spaghetti sauce comes in pomodoro (plain tomato), basilico, and bolognese (with ground beef already in it). Put your own damn mushrooms in it! It means a lot more cooking, but we’re also eating MUCH better food. And once a week I go to the panificio and get fresh bread, focaccia, pasta and gnocchi. Fresh stuff is better than packaged crap. Who knew.

When we got home that afternoon it was time to get ready for the wedding. Federica Berzieri, daughter of the local landowner (apparently nearly everything I can see from my patio belongs to his family) was getting married, and because Besozzola’s church is still a church – Berzieri’s is short and squat and has been converted to a little town office building (yes, their town is in fact their town J ) – they were having it here. I had to move my car so they could use my space (I park next to the church) to set up the reception tent. I helped set up the tent for a bit (turns out I have experience putting up PVC pipe pavilions J ) and chatted with the various cousins who were doing the work. I asked one of them, “Would it be ok if we came and watched the wedding?”

He gave me a somewhat blank look. “A wedding is a village festival. You live in the village.” Another cousin came to the rescue. “She is American, she does not know. Of course we wish you to come, and to the reception too.”

So we got kinda dressed up (it was pouring rain at 4:30, though it was down to misty by 4:50, and opinions were divided on how much to dress – the actual wedding guests ranged from cocktail dresses and tuxes down to jeans and sweaters) and went over to wait for the bride and groom to arrive. A few minutes before 5 a very fancy car pulled up, bringing what I can only describe as An Event swathed in vast amounts of while muslin and tulle, with her face completely covered with an enormous tulle veil. When she got out of the car it immediately became obvious that this was a joke – one of the groom’s friends “elegantly” dressed – as the crowd started chanting “Kiss her! Kiss her!” The fancy car drove away and returned about 15 minutes later with the real bride, interestingly, NOT wearing white, but a deep rose ballgown with silk flowers all over it, and no veil at all.

The church is tiny and was packed to the rafters with family and people who actually knew them, so we didn’t go to the mass, but hung out with the rest of the hangers-on outside, drinking prosecco and eating parmesan. We Americans don’t really think of just hacking hunks of parmesan to eat off a great huge wheel of the stuff. But when you’ve got amazing locally-made parmesan (the caseificio, cheese factory, this wheel came from is visible across the valley), it’s definitely time to indulge.

Once everyone came out, I found the father of the bride and introduced myself, and said as best I could, congratulations, she is lovely, thank you for letting us come. He enjoined me to eat more cheese and drink more prosecco. And as he is the local “principe” I figured that was pretty much an order, so far be it from ME….

31.8 Day of the Dead, sorta. But not depressing :)

Today I took Mamma down to register with the vigili. If you’re going to be in one place here for more than 8 days you have to tell the cops. The vigili weren’t home by the time we got there so we left a message and walked around Pellegrino looking at stuff and seeing if we could find some more American plug to Italian outlet adapters. (Pay attention: this becomes important soon.) We got a couple ungrounded ones, but no one had a grounded one for the computers (we got one in Naples when we had only one computer, but now that the boxes have arrived we need two).

 Upon our return and after lunch Rose, Mamma and I decided to go for a walk. Ro came with us, and we walked up the hill on a road we hadn’t investigated before. Mamma and Ro got tired and went back down the hill after a bit, but I carried on up the hill until I got to an enormous house with a swimming pool, seemingly just a few hundred meters from another village. I decided to walk up to said village. It wasn’t. It was the farm compound, I’m guessing, of the huge house. The road petered out there, but another branch went up behind the house. Another adventure for the next time I go walking.

On the way home as I came down the hill towards Besozzola I saw Mamma and Rose on the other side of a depression in the hillside, about 150m away from where I was. I stopped to wave and heard Rose say, perfectly clearly, “Mamma’s over there.” She wasn’t shouting. She was just telling my mother in a perfectly normal conversational tone of voice. I said, equally conversationally, “Rosie, look up.” She did.

A natural whispering gallery. We chatted across it for a few minutes just because we could, though at first Rose was completely confused because she couldn’t figure out how I had gotten from one side to the other so fast – otherwise how would she be able to hear me? Then I came down and around to see what Mamma was looking at. She was next to the engineer’s house. He had painted a bunch of engineering tools and formulas on the side of his house. She said, “Harris would have loved this.” Yesterday was the one year anniversary, you see. I added, “And the whispering gallery too.” So we stood there in the sunshine for a little while and remembered. It was nice.

It seemed only appropriate at that point to go down the hill into the big field towards the village cemetery. It’s little, and not terribly old, as European cemeteries go – earliest grave is 1890. But it’s really interesting to note the local burial customs. Every grave from about 1925 on has a silver-mounted cameo photograph of the deceased, all terribly stern and taking it very seriously. A few babies; a few young men dead in WWI or WWII; but mostly citizens of advanced age staring out at you and making you VERY aware of slouching and not having brushed your teeth adequately. There were a couple very elderly women who died in the late 1980s who looked like they were from the 1780s, in their long heavy black dresses and enormous headscarves. Only the very most recent pictures were in color (one from February of this year); all the others were black and white. The tombs in the ground were almost all big headstones with slabs over the actual casket, and most of them had an electric light in the shape of a wall sconce or a torch burning below the names. I suppose you endow the tomb or something to pay the light bill. “I tuoi cari” – your loved ones – appears on most stones; not unlike the Romans’ tombstones, it assumes you can manage to add “miss you” or “remember you” or similar sentiments on your own. All the most recent burials were in a mausoleum wall, but clearly inhumations, not cremations – the niches in the wall were clearly wide and deep enough for caskets. They'll have to expand before too long, though -- only about 35 niches left!

4.9 Time for an update. On Monday I managed to arrange to pick up my beautiful new car, well, beautiful used car. New to ME. A 2005 Opel Meriva (pronounced MerEEva in real life, but MERiva in our house because we love “Brave”) diesel 5 speed. Not my dream car. Only gets about 22 mpg out on these mountain roads. Oh well, it’s only for 10 more months. It’s easy enough for Mamma to get in and out, it’s big enough for carpool, and it’s easy to drive. I’m over it.

But naturally this being Italy nothing is easy. I had to go to Pellegrino first, and made the mistake of asking Anna the GPS Girl how to get to Parma from there. Anna believes solely in shortest distance to travel. She sent me over the scariest road I have yet encountered. There were places where I couldn’t look at the road more than 10 feet in front of me for fear I’d get vertiginous and drive over the sheer drop on either side. I’m sure the views were spectacular. I most sincerely did not want to know. But sure enough, though I cursed Anna with hitherto-unthought-of curses, we presently emerged at the entrance to the freeway into Parma. You don’t realize how much you love going 70 mph on a straight open four-lane-each-way road until you’ve gone 12 mph on Death By Sheer Drop Roads for 45 minutes.

I dropped off the rental and they informed me that because I was late I had to pay an extra 235E. I opined that I had already paid 80E through the broker who got me the car in the first place. They opined that they didn’t know anything about that and didn’t care. Paid the 230E. (Happily, a relatively nasty email to the broker got me about 210E back. Not worth fighting further.) Then I got to the car dealership, and realized I had left all the insurance paperwork at home. Fortunately that, at least, was in my email, so they let me check email and print it out. Huzzah! A car! (Only relatively simple thing I’ve done all month!)

Monday evening the vigilio (local policeman) came by to check and make sure that all three of us really did live in the house, that we were only three, that everything I’ve been weeping about in bureacratic offices all over the province of Parma was actually true. He’s very sweet, really, sort of a junior Santa-type, fat and cheerful and with a short brown beard. He showed me the paper on his clipboard that now had a check mark, a signature and a date next to my address. The Comune, at least, has been relatively easy to get along with.

Tuesday the cleaning lady came. She worked for 5 hours and I must say I could only tell that the beds had been changed and the stairs swept, but whatever. She also gave me an hour massage, so I guess at the end of it I didn’t care as much about the cleaning ☺ and of course, since the house was now at least theoretically spotless and neat, what has to happen? The boxes finally arrive, of course! Barely 2.5 weeks late, so really, where’s the issue. We got 4 of the 11 unpacked that night, but of course the house was awash in stuff when my very neat-conscious, put-everything-away-NOW mother arrived.

So I’m doing all this in anticipation of the advent of my mother for 2 months. Well, that and panicking about the arrival of my friend Margaret, whose husband was coming to Lyons for a conference and they decided they’d see a little of northern Italy while they were at it. I got the dates confused: I thought Mamma was coming in on Tuesday and Margaret on Wednesday. But Mamma was coming in on Wednesday. Turned out that that would be better anyway – they’d just flip 2 of their other plans and stay with me here Tuesday night before Mamma even got here, and no one would thus overlap.

Except.

Why is there always “except.” ?

 Margaret’s plane left Dulles something like 40 hours late. So they weren’t getting to Besozzola until like midnight Wednesday night. Which is gross for someone who has actually experienced the thousand-foot drops on either side of the mountain roads in daylight. I suggested perhaps not. But they did end up getting to Salso.

Meanwhile Mamma was have adventures in flying of her own, as her flight from Asheville to Atlanta was CANCELLED IN JULY and no one ever bothered to tell us about it. I thought that was pretty groovy on Delta’s part. (I learned all this later.) So she was having to have all her flights rearranged so she would still get into Milan when I was expecting to have to go pick her up. She arrived, exhausted, weepy, with an Italian woman named Simone carrying her things. Seems Simone had totally adopted her during the Paris-Milan leg and had made herself responsible for delivering elderly American lady safe to her daughter. Praise the Lord – poor Mamma was so disoriented from the various schedule changes and the absence of sleep that she had totally panicked when she realized I couldn’t come in to baggage claim to get her. (*I* hadn’t, just because Linate is a tiny airport and the only way to leave baggage claim is through the one door where I was standing, so she couldn’t go anywhere without my seeing her, but she was too tired to process this.)

The drive to Linate was easy – must remember to tell people coming to visit, come in through Linate not Malpensa, which is another hour north of Milan. On the way there, I passed the Castell’Arquato, which was very cool looking and about which more presently. I got a little turned around on the way home, but Anna as usual gave me a serviceable, if less than direct, route home. We stopped at the panificio and got focaccia and gnocchi; I remain hopeful that Mamma will one day learn to pronounce them. The man dishing them up said “Quattro porzioni, si?” Yes, I said, and watched amused (and Mamma, horrified) as he scooped up enough for four portions if that is all you are getting to eat today and possibly tomorrow. The girls, it turns out, are unregenerate heathens and won’t eat the fluffy clouds of spinachy-potatoey delight, so Mamma and I get them all. (It took 5 days for us to eat all of them. Mamma does not believe in the size of pasta plates that Italians do.)

Thursday Mamma slept most of the day, and I took off down to Salso to see Margaret, David and Daniel, who is my godson and on whom I have not laid eyes since he was 4. We had a lovely walk around the baths and the park in the middle of town, found Margaret some Parma Violets perfume that she wanted (it’s apparently a very old perfume recipe, early 19th c., none of this “Goop By JLo” type crap), got nice lunch (and subjected Daniel to actual Italian pizza, to which he eventually objected because it had all the “wrong” cheese on it!) and sent them on their way to Venice. Not as long a visit as we had planned, thanks United, but at least I got to see them.

Weekend update coming soon.