quaint, actually

in the park, laughing at David Sedaris stories.

Right now I should be lining up summer work and sorting things out for the next school year. With weather like this, though, it’s hard to think beyond the next gelato. It’s a trap of this properly seasonal climate: all winter you sit smoking and thinking, coiled tight around your ambitious schemes with nothing to distract you. Then just as the time comes to put all your plans into action, the sun comes out and the most complex thought you are capable of is gaaaaaah, daisies. My idea of forward planning is ordering limes and mint from my local greengrocer (no shops sell them, he says he'll hook me up next time he's at the wholesale market) so I can make mojitos at home.

Sarah’s in the Aeolian islands now, having volcanic mud baths. Last week we spent a day in Florence. I was late to meet her (noooo, Katrina, you don’t say?) and so she waited at Ponte Vecchio and eavesdropped. A bulldog-faced Texan woman pointed her camera at the Arno and said with pugnacious satisfaction, ‘Ah, now, this is quaint. This is actually quaint.’ Which will of course be our secret password from this day forward.

She’s met a lot of my students since she’s been here, actually—she caught the end-of-second-term restaurant season. It’s distressing how many of my students insist on ordering ‘a large cock’ whenever we practice our restaurant language. I should point out, however, that the way most foreigners pronounce penne means that they are basically ordering a plate of penis. I like the symmetry of that. If you want to avoid the mistake, by the way, be sure to pronounce the double-n with emphasis. If, however, your waiter is cute and you’re up for a little misunderstanding, ‘penay’ away.

hermits, hot springs

This entry will be a list because, overwhelmed by the volume of doing-stuff that has uncharacteristically characterised my recent existence, I can't get an anecdote together.

Recent visitors with highlight moments:

Lily: Climbing the tower at Siena to see the cypress-stitched fields below and the big bell above, mad nightrider dos resulting from long-uncut hair and high-altitude bluster. Drinks on a balcony bench seat overlooking the main piazza. More drinks, this time in Venice, being glasses of wine drunk while sitting cross-legged on a jetty by the Rialto at night, watching the young couples in matching parkas go by in their outboard dingies.

Lily, queen of the world

Dorsoduro

The boat market

Nik: I'm sure we went places but I don't remember where; we just talked ourselves inside out. All to the good. You can see from the photo that we got as far as the park at the top of the hill.

Jenny and Paul (Reggio) and Sarah S (Australia): Camaldoli monastery and hermitage, sooooo pretty, which made me want to be a hermit. A latin-reading, pottery-making lady hermit. And the procession of the dead Jesus at Terra Nuova. Explanation to follow, probably. Think of it as a mobile passion play.

Lovely Camaldoli

Montepulciano

Don't freak out, it's just tomato sauce.

Sarah S and Fausto, an Aretine friend: Bagno Vignoni, a medieval hotspring resort that used to be such a den of iniquity (men and women bathing naked with nothing but strung-up sheets separating them, gasp) that St Catherine's parents brought her there to tempt her out of her saintly ways. It didn't work. You're not allowed to swim in the main pool anymore, but down the road a bit you can bathe your feet in the gutter that carries the run-off to the river below. Hot waterfall footspa, rock.

Sair the cutey