27.10 David LeMoine is my hero. He bought our train tickets for us since my card doesn’t work at Trenitalia any more (I tried about once an hour for nearly 15 hours straight). The price had gone up a bit from when I was looking before, but not horribly. The thing I keep running up against: I’ve spent most of my life travelling alone. Small increases in fare that wouldn’t have bothered me alone are more painful when there are three of you!

We loafed most of the day, but around 1pm Ornella came by and said that she and Iole were doing torta fritta for dinner, we should come. When I opined that I really wanted to learn to make them, she said that while she had a top secret recipe, since I was going back to America eventually she would teach it to me. So I got to help her make the pastry for the torta and Rose got to come see their new puppies (so adorable, 3 days old, Rose thinks we can take one and keep it this year and then somehow get it home. Uh, no).

The party over at Iole and Gianni’s was lovely. The girls decided they didn’t want to sit through another evening of everyone speaking Italian so they stayed home. Iole has what I am determined to call a summer triclinium in her back yard. Just a big room with a huge table, small stove, stereo, and huge windows looking into her grape arbor and vegetable garden. Really lovely. Ornella made the torta in the electric skillet outside (definitely have to get a pasta machine now, since you have to roll the pastry out to cook it and the machine is just better at it than I am!) and the rest of us laid the table and burned our fingers on hot torta. There was prosciutto and mortadella and culaccia (yum culaccia, my new favorite cold cut) and a thing whose Italian name I forget but which was basically scrapple cut superduper thin. There were Italian cheeses whose names I don’t know, and gorgonzola and parmesan. And there was leftover pastry at the end, so Ornella made… NUTELLA FRITTA! Ravioli with nutella filling. What a happy food this is. I had made them with wonton wrappers before, and this wasn’t that different, but yeah, I liked the torta fritta version better J

I met Carla, Katie (who’s Italian. Try pronouncing Katie with an Italian accent) and Paolo, who have houses in the ghost town at the top of the mountain. I suppose since they live there part-time (they also have apts in Salso) it’s not exactly a ghost town anymore, but it was an 18^th century village that was abandoned and they’ve restored their houses up there. Carla wanted to get something from the house before the nutella torta were served, and invited me to come see it. Her house is just 2 biggish rooms on top of one another, with two more similar rooms still to be restored. She said she ended up knocking a lot of the original house down and then rebuilding it with the same stones on a similar plan, but the insides were so terrible that there just was no fixing them. It’s basically just a big kitchen with a bedroom and bath on top.

Next time the weather is nice (it rained non-stop today except for one 15 minute period where the clouds broke and the full moon was visible. By the time I got inside to tell the girls to come see how beautiful and they came out, the fog had come up again and the drizzle had started) I propose to walk up there. Carla says it’s about a 20 minute walk, and definitely boots required – a long stretch of the “road” is unmetalled dirt track. She cut her headlights at one point as we were going up – even in the overcast dark I could see that the view was impressive.

Everyone is so nice to me here. “Don’t go back to America! Get a job and stay with us!” Like it’s that simple for a teacher with no European credentials and a custody agreement, alas. But it’s a happy place to be.