It is really a dream of an apartment, the kind that makes it easy to imagine living a beautiful life surrounded by sun-soaked potted flowers and succulents, drinking wine with friends on the terrace, retreating under an outdoor roof should a shower interrupt your dinner.
Never mind that I can’t keep a single houseplant alive in my real life. Look, a potting bench with a sink, or maybe it is a wet bar. Either, neither, both, it doesn’t matter. It’s a fantasy, remember?
I took a mirror selfie on my way out the exterior door. It was a little chilly so I wore leggings and flats and a fleece and a scarf over my little knit black dress.
d buy better coffee in town if necessary.
I left the 3yo with the 17yo and went up to investigate myself, promising to buy him something.
I ordered two panini with ham, cheese, lettuce, and tomato—one for me and one for the 17yo—and got tomato-flavored potato chips for the 3yo and also a Coke for the 17yo as a treat for having watched the little guy so attentively. And we got more french fries, and a glass of wine for me.
When the man behind the counter brought our french fries, he had a big bottle of ketchup. “You need?” he asked, gesturing.
“Yes, yes!” said the seven-year-old, pointing, and I said: Siamo americani. È…. necesario? and then thought, wait, was that a Spanish word?
He laughed, squirting ketchup into the french fry basket, “È indispensabile!”
My panino was good, hot and crisp with cool lettuce and tomato, and my wine was tart and slightly frizzante. One thing I have noticed about wine here is that if you ask for a glass, or a carafe, of wine, they only want to know: Rosso o bianco? And after you tell them, they might ask if frizzante is okay, as if they’ve been burned by tourists who weren’t expecting their not-champagne, not-prosecco wine to have little bubbles in it. A lot of it is frizzante, and some of the reds are pale and pinkish, almost rosé.
But nobody yet in Italy has shown me a wine list. Maybe if I ordered a bottle? So far it has all been glasses and carafes. They always bring me wine, red or white according to my request, and il vino frizzante mi piace, so I guess I don’t need to know what I am drinking exactly.
Around here all the wine, it seems, even the red, is chilled, not cold but cool, and also it all has a vinegary nose: like sniffing red wine vinegar, or sour ale. It tastes surprisingly tart, most of what I have had. But it goes down very easily, refreshing before the food arrives; and when the food arrives, it folds itself smoothly into the dish and seems softer, warmer, luscious, part of the meal.
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We went back to the beach and spent another hour or so. I was enjoying just lounging around in the sun, which is a recent development; I have been training for it. Honestly, it is hard for me just to sit and be, a lot of the time; there is always something at home I ought to be doing, and sitting in the sun reading a book or just thinking is hard for me to do. The last couple of summers at home, I made a real effort to go outside for fifteen minutes at lunchtime, every nice day; put my feet up, read a book, feel the sun on my bare feet and arms.
I put that practice to use.
While I was there on the chair, wrapping up and unwrapping as the sun dove b
ehind clouds or came out to warm me again, I got a lot of pictures of the family. This is one of my favorites.
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After showering and resting, we decided to go to Mass on Saturday evening and then have dinner in town.
Church was at six p.m. We got there on the dot and were astonished to discover that it was utterly packed. We had to stand off to the side, in an alcove where the baptismal font was. The 17yo was carrying the 3yo in the carrier on his back; the 3yo fell asleep, so there wasn’t much for the 17yo to do other than to keep wearing him for the whole mass. He stood, leaned on the font, leaned on the windowsill, made do.
The 7- and 11-yo had their Magnifikids. They sat on the floor, backs to the wall, which I think was okay because we really were out of the way in the baptismal alcove. Most of the standing people were by the front door (“the back of the church”) where they had a better view. There were also benches along the side walls.
In case you are wondering why nobody offered our young and tired family a seat: Nearly everyone near us was elderly. There were a few families here and there; this town is not at all devoid of children, not the way Rome was. But there really was nobody around who ought to have offered us a seat! It was fine to stand.
I would have liked a song book, though.
When the Gloria started, my daughter perked up, because it was exactly the melody for the same Latin Gloria that she chants in the youth choir in our home parish. “Gloria in excelsis Deo,” sang the cantor, and my daughter jumped up and loudly started in on “Et in terra pax hominibus—” and then shrank back in embarrassment because nobody else was singing, after the cantor started they had all just started reciting the rest of the Gloria. In Italian.
Oh well, she survived.
It really is nice that the Mass ordinary is the same everywhere. Except for the homily itself, you know exactly what sort of thing is being said. The language may be different, but you know what is going on. If you want you can keep up, saying your own parts in your own language, or you can listen intently and find out how they do it here: Signore, pietà.
I concentrated as hard as I could on the homily, and I gathered that today there was some couple in the parish who was celebrating a notable wedding anniversary, perhaps a fiftieth; and the pastor started out his homily talking about marriage and its gifts, especially the gift of forgiving each other many times, and then segued into a discourse on forgiving “seventy times seven” (I am good at catching numbers as they fly by). I hadn’t checked what the gospel was, but just now I am looking at iBreviary and I see that I was correct, that the “how often must I forgive?” story was the gospel for the day. So I caught that. Also that he finished by talking about marriage again.
Most of it goes right by, but I catch phrases that come whiffing past my ears: “live in Christ and die with Christ,” “the gift of his whole self,” “a large sum of money,” and pretty much all the numbers. Also the priest made a joke when somebody’s cell phone went off for the third time, which made people laugh in the way they laugh to humor Father when he makes a joke from the pulpit; and I am not sure, but I think the joke was along the lines of whether the phone would ring seventy times seven times. Anyway, no more phone ringing after that.
I coached the kids to go slowly and see what the other people do when they go up for Communion. In both Italy and France, the people have gone up more or less in rows, but oddly enough they go from back to front: the standing people and the baby-rockers in the back come down the aisle first, and then the back rows file up past all the kneeling people, down the center aisle and then after receiving split out to the side aisles and walk back. The front row goes last, and the last row goes first.
Mark told me later that our mopheaded 7yo, who had his hands folded and was concentrating hard on not messing up or stepping on his sister’s heels as he came down the aisle for communion and therefore looked more angelic than usual, drew all manner of Italian-grandmotherly attention. I didn’t notice, but I don’t doubt it.
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Afterward we let the kids play on the playground next to the church.
It was a nicely appointed playground, with big wide terraced steps for parents to sit, and a long rampy thing down which one child rode seated on a skateboard, over and over and over. It was lovely to sit and feel the cool evening and let them play.
Mark ran home to get our 7yo a Benadryl. Something about the salt water had made him very itchy.
Pro tip: Always travel with children’s Benadryl.
Then we headed off to find a restaurant.
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It was about eight o’clock on a Friday night, and many places looked quite empty, so we were a little confused when we kept getting turned away and being told that without a prenotazione we couldn’t be seated. Finally we figured out that it was only eight o’clock, and so of course nobody was in the restaurant yet, because who would be eating dinner that early in Italy?
But they’d reserved their tables! And when they showed up at eight-thirty or eight-forty-five, they were not going to want to see us in any of them.
Finally, just when I started to despair (and when the 3yo was starting to tell me, “But they had chairs in that restaurant! They were not full!”) we found the Bottega di Cibo. And they had a table on the patio, under cover and sheltered from the wind, which they were glad to give us.
With breadsticks right away for the 3yo.
we could share in the family and so that the most small one would not get any more less happy, and that was all fine, and then we started listing pastas, and the waiter interrupted us to explain—Mark figured this out before I did—we can’t order everything to come all at the same time and have pasta for everyone. We would have to order some things that were not pasta.
Afterward (oh my gosh, it takes forever to get the waiters’ attention for anything, I wanted a second glass of wine and I never had a chance to ask for it, and we should have asked for the check right away, I know there are downsides to a tipping economy but Americans reap the rewards in excellent attentive service) we decided not to order dessert.
We went for gelato instead. And since the first three gelato shops were closed we were quite happy to find one open. Mark and I were too full, but all the kids got some. The best flavor was our 11yo’s sorbetto, pineapple with pineapple pieces.
At the end of that day I had no trouble sleeping, let me tell you. We opened the windows and listened to the motorcycles, and fell right to sleep.
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