get the hell outta town

Sarah returned from her Grand Tour of the south, of which the best story was when her Pompei tour guide got into a vaffanculo screaming match with another tour guide, and the next day, according to her hostel-mate who went down there, crossed paths with the same guy again and ended up knocked out cold and bleeding. Anyway, flouncing around Amalfi is all very well but in the end she acknowledged her true place in life: in my kitchen, hand-rolling ricotta gnocchi for me when I’m working late. She's left for Rome again now, and she claims she's off to Tokyo next and then back to Australia, but she'll be back. She won't be able to make it without me. Oh yeah, she'll be back any minute.

The weekend before last we went to Pisa on a rainy night and found the pizza to be very good and the tower to be leanier than our wildest dreams. On Sunday we went for an outing with Alexandra (the replacement replacement replacement teacher, who is Virginian and funny and smart). We tried for a thermal spring but missed the bus and ended up randomly in Orvieto. It’s your basic Umbrian hilltop town comprising a gorgeous cathedral and one long street of wine shops and delis. Or so it seemed to us. There may have been other things to see but we were happy barrelling from one free wine tasting to another. Alexandra is something of a wine buff, and knew what questions to ask about soil composition and grape varieties to convince the shopkeepers to fetch out the nicer wines from their hiding spots in the back of the fridge. And there were fruit-infused honeys to sample out of pump-top jars, and plates and plates of lemon-cornflake-currant cookies. We sampled the hell out of that town. I think we’d drunk a good half bottle each and had a coating of sugar around our mouths by the time we went to a bar and actually bought something. Orvieto. Remember the name. It’s the anti-Terontola.

Last weekend we made it to the thermal spring after all, Querciolaia at Rapolano, and alternated swimming in the hot pools with lying in the hot sun. I think there may have been wine involved too, but it’s a little sketchy. We read magazines and rolled cigarettes and frightened the Italians with our mozzarella skin tones. We swam around in the opaque calciferous water and avoided the intertwined couples near the edges: I didn’t fancy an immaculate hot springs conception. We also went to Bologna, ostensibly for a concert, but since we got the date wrong we simply had more time for shopping and eating.

Now Sarah’s gorn. I am sad. There are some photos, however. Want to see them? And do you want to know what Arezzo looks like?