Easter weekend

Maundy Thursday 28.3

Rose has today and tomorrow and Monday and Tuesday off for Easter. When I asked about the days off back in the fall, I was told school was off Friday through the following week. So I decided to be gone all next week. Turns out, Rosie will now miss three days of school. However, I talked to her teachers about it and they purely did not care. She’s going to be fine in math and mediocre in Italian no matter what, so the teachers were really more interested in what we were going to do than in what she was going to miss.

I had thought about leaving tomorrow and going for the whole ten days, but then I realized everything is shut over Easter weekend. And being Italy, nothing is open on Monday anyway. So we’ll go on Monday and just be gone for the actual weekdays.

It is gloomy and depressing out, raining and cold. The house is freezing because I hate running the electric heat – Michele Facchini told me it’s probably more than 10E a day to run – but the fireplace and stufa just don’t keep the upstairs warm. I built up the fire so when Rose’s friend Sofi came over it would be warm enough to play, but they don’t seem to have noticed one way or the other. They had a great time, and Laura is coming over tomorrow, and possibly Denise Saturday. So a very social weekend for Miss Rose.

Good Friday

Laura’s mom, Sonia, called early to say that Laura couldn’t come – she was sick and the last thing we need about to leave for a week is to get sick. Sonia said Laura was disappointed and insisting on a playdate next week, when of course we’ll be gone, but we’ll figure something out for after we get back. Rose was very disappointed too, of course, as was I – I was hoping Sonia would have coffee and hang out for a bit. I need to call Ida (her sister) and just invite her out for coffee – I really like her, but without kids as a touchpoint I don’t have an excuse to run into her. 90% of life is just showing up – or in this case, making phone calls.

Went over and visited Ornella for a little bit. I told her last week that I am making Easter dinner for the five of us – lamb roast, polenta, grilled zucchini and chocolate bunny cake. She seems a little stronger, but she is still on the sofa bed in their living room – still can’t make it up the stairs. Meanwhile, I felt a terrible cold coming on and so went to bed for most of the afternoon.

The weather continues gray and rainy, but the snow is all gone -- it's been about 45F every day, but the gloom and the wet make it seem colder. And it's not much warmer down south, worse luck. At least it's supposed to be sunny all week. Our hotels in both Salerno and Orvieto are smack in the middle of the historic district, so we won't have far to go to get to everything we want to see.

The church bells went crazy at 3 pm today. I couldn't figure out what on earth until I remembered that at the 9th hour he cried out with a loud voice etc. No one seems to have done anything particular for Holy Week - I asked Eleanora about it and she just said that everyone in the place goes to Mass on Sunday, but there's next to no one at the other services.

Saturday

Tried to call Denise’s mom (also Sonia; this town does not go for much in the way of original names) but got no answer. We never confirmed a time so I guess they just made other plans.

Went and picked up the lamb roast this morning at the Pellegrino butcher. They must butcher their lambs a LOT younger than I’m used to in America, or have significantly smaller sheep than in New Zealand – two lamb legs (and REALLY legs, thigh bone and hip joint and all) came to a total of 1.7kg. I’m used to a single leg of lamb, boned and rolled, being close to 2.5kg. When I asked the butcher to bone and roll them he looked at me like I was crazy. Then he charged me 35E for the privilege. Yikes. On the plus side, they’ll cook in no time!

Baked a chocolate bunny cake for dessert. Yes, the foodies among my friends will call me a heretic, but I can’t wait to get home to Betty Crocker mixes. I just have never found a cake recipe that’s as easy or consistent as Betty’s. And NONE of them taste right. David’s blondies are magnificent and cannot be duplicated by mere cake mix. But for chocolate cake, I just want Betty back. However, a springform pan lined with carta forno is not to be dissed. We all use paper cupcake cups and never think twice about it. Time to start using BIG cake cups!

Aurora was very sad that she wasn’t getting to spend Daddy’s birthday with him, so we skyped with Matthew this evening. He had gone to the tax preparer and found out that we are NOT married for 2012, so I get to file as head of household. Yay me. We’ll be splitting the girls for tax purposes this year – since he has the condo having more deductions adds up faster for him than for me. Next year my tax situation should be interesting since I’ll only have 4 months of income. But since I didn’t find all this out till today and there’s no way I’m going to get it all done tonight, it means I won’t file till after we get back, bleh. Oh well, looks like I’m only getting about $600 back anyway, so it’s not like I could have had gobs of extra money by filing earlier.

Easter Sunday

Italian time change coincided with Easter this year. Which means that I overslept and missed mass in Pellegrino. It’s not so much that I wanted to go, but everyone in the village will be there. It’s A Thing You Do. Oh well. Got up and cooked the lamb, grilled the veggies, fixed the polenta and made a lovely gastrique out of my last 2 T of blackberry jam and the tail end of the bottle of balsamic vinegar. At one o’clock Claudio appeared and helped me carry it all over to their house.

We sat down and I started to get stuff out, but Ornella said wait, we have salume and pickles first. Well, ok. So we had salume and pickles. Then she got out a lasagna. And we all ate some lasagna. And she and Claudio and Ricardo ate a LOT of lasagna. So when I got all the stuff I had made out and started serving it, they weren’t really hungry anymore. They each had a bit of the lamb, but it turns out none of them really like it, nor yet polenta, nor yet grilled zucchini. And I think I was justifiably pissed. I mean, I told her a week ago what I was planning to do. She could have at least said, golly, we don’t really like any of that stuff, so don’t spend 50E on making us a nice lunch. The whole point was to spare her having to cook when she’s so ill. And so she just cooked anyway.

I went home to frost and bring back the bunny cake, but I didn’t cream the butter well enough and it was all lumpy. Tasted ok, if you don’t mind little spurts of butter in your frosting. As I was taking it over, I encountered Francesco’s brother Alberto going into the Besozzola church (into which I had not yet been). Seems there was to be a mass at 3:30, just ten minutes away! So I took the cake over and kinda unceremoniously dumped it at their house – Ornella had also made tiramisu, so I just didn’t care anymore whether they ate it or not. I went and got a shawl and a veil and went to church.

It was relatively warm out – finally got a little sunshine! – but inside the church was FREEZING. Since it’s not used at all in the wintertime there’s no heat. Pretty place, but I’ve become such an antiquities snob – a lovely little 19^th C church doesn’t really hit my radar. There were 20 of us there, median age about 70, at a guess. Alberto’s in his late 20s, me, and then everyone else. Clearly the diocese doesn’t expect any kids or strangers to come to mass here ever – there are no prayer books and all the attendees rattled off all the responses by heart. Alberto was playing the organ for some of the chants, but it was never entirely clear what the tunes were.

The priest struck me as the sort of priest that a tiny parish like this would have had in the Middle Ages . He was ancient, unable to sit up all the way straight. He mumbled through the mass with the lectionary open, but routinely either got the words wrong or pronounced them in dialetto. He got the Pope’s name wrong. (Admittedly, Francesco is of new vintage, but still.) And of course, coming as I do from a very conservative Anglican tradition, I was a little startled that he had a regular suit on under the chasuble, instead of a cassock. (He hiked the thing all the way up at one point to get a tissue out of his pocket. It seemed oddly shocking – I mean, he showed us his SUIT PANTS! I know, I sound like an idiot.) I’m not sure if I just didn’t understand any of it or if the sermon was in dialetto, but I couldn’t follow a word. I would have been fine with the service if I’d had a prayer book, since I could tell that the prayers were all the exact same as the Anglican missal, but I only know the words fast enough to understand and recognize them, not to come up with them on my own. Then after he said, “Messa finita”, he started to talk again – apparently we got a second sermon. People kept starting to leave and he kept talking. All terribly awkward. But eventually we all escaped to the sunshine.

Spent the rest of the afternoon and evening getting ready to go south. We’ll start in Salerno, a town I have wanted to see since I wrote a paper on the 13^th c medical school there, and then go to Paestum for the day one day. I’ve never felt the pull of Greece that so many do. Italy has everything I’ve ever wanted: Etruscan, Roman, medieval, Renaissance history and art all crammed into one tiny peninsula. But most of southern Italy was heavy colonized by the Greeks from 800-200 BCE. Thus, much of what people are so crazy about in Greece is actually here! And Paestum has some beautiful things. So we’ll do one day of “Greece”. Then up to look at one last group of Etruscans in Orvieto. If I can find them for not HORRIBLY much money, I’m thinking about getting some new dishes in Orvieto. I love my little green and white majolica ware cream pitcher, and I would love to get actual dishes to match it. However, I’ve seen the pattern for sale on line and they’re 168E per 4-piece place setting. Uh, no. I’ll manage just fine without at that price. But if I could find FOUR 4-piece place settings for that, the temptation might be too great. We’ll see. Many Orvieto ceramics have a chicken in the middle of the decoration. Majolica chickens leave me cold.