Our Italian Holiday - Pt. 1, Roma

 

“To travel is to live.” – Hans Christian Andersen

 

We just got back from 15 days in Italy and it was marvelous. The trip was a serendipitous treat won in a benefit auction, enjoyed by Mr. Clark and I, our grown kids and their spouses. Mr. Clark’s frequent flier miles covered the airfare, so all we had to pay for was food, drink and the sights we saw. And, yes! We saw some wonderful sights! Every day was jam-packed with an adventure or two, as well as so much history and ancient beauty that at times it felt like we really had died and gone to heaven. 

 

We started with a few days in Rome, then spent a week in a small villa in Umbria (just south of that famous Tuscan sun)…After that came a few days in Cinque Terre (a series of five small ancient villages connected by hiking trails, trains and boats – no roads), then two final days in Florence. It was a whirlwind feast of new sights, sounds, smells, tastes and treats. Our family has always enjoyed traveling, but this was, indeed, the trip of a lifetime.

 

Rome (or Roma in Italian) is busy, loud and frantic – racing scooters, like swarms of angry wasps, don’t have to obey traffic laws and aggressive drivers in tiny cars are allowed to stop, turn, honk and swerve at their own discretion. In the summer, Rome is hot and the narrow cobblestone streets are full of tourists. All of this is punctuated by amazing food, delicious wine, gelato on every corner, and more huge, ancient, spectacular sights than can be imagined…I mean literally, than can be imagined.

 

The thing that struck me most about Rome is how very long it’s been there. Roma (the first small settlement) came to be in 750 B.C. The city (and the Empire) reached its’ zenith in about 120 A.D. and then took another 300 years to fall. During that time, people walked many of the same streets and saw many of the same sights we did…It’s unfathomable, even as you gaze at it all and pinch yourself to be sure you’re really there…If you want to get in touch with just how fleeting life is and how insignificant one life can be, stand on the top steps of the Colosseum or look out on the city from a point high in the Forum…And then, reconnect with the meaning of just one life, by standing in the middle of the Pantheon , a place of worship since 25 B.C., and feel your soul awaken again…

 

We stayed in a small apartment within walking distance of everything. It was listed through Air B&B and the Trip Advisor ratings were good. (Trip Advisor is THE source for what one needs/wants in Italy…The vendors themselves swear by it.) The night we arrived, we opened the wood shutters covering our large windows to hear a man singing opera at the top of his lungs, filling our shabby courtyard with what felt like (especially at the end of a nine hour flight) the essence of Roma.  

 

After eating and drinking and hiking our way through Rome, seeing every sight in our travel books and sampling every delight anyone we know had recommended, we entrusted our lives to “the old gods and the new,” rented a van and navigated our way out of the city and into the Italian countryside.

 

Umbria is a land of hills, long devoted to agriculture and by long, I mean centuries and centuries of farmers farming the same piece of land. Because of marauders from all directions, the towns are located in walled cities - ancient, beautiful walled cities - each guarded over by a castle. The entire region looks like a postcard – rolling hills, verdant vineyards, well-tended fields, lush productive gardens, quaint villages and castles, everywhere.

 

The people in Umbria speak little or no English, but are very warm, accommodating and friendly. The food is delicious, all freshly prepared with local ingredients, and the wine is to die for. It’s made from theSangrantino grape which only grows in Umbria – brought from Turkey centuries ago by immigrants. To top this heavenly scenario off, one experiences everything one has read about in Tuscany (Umbria’s wealthy, more well-known sister) for a fraction of the price.  

 

Our villa, Fondo Le Teglie, is a recently remodeled version of a 400-year-old farm house. It’s one of the Il Gusto del Paese properties owned by a woman from Georgia who relocated and started living her Italian dream some years ago. Thankfully this woman is a friend of BB Webb who owns The Carl House and since both are animal lovers, BB convinced our host to donate a week at her villa to Barrow’s own Pup & Cat Co., which is how la famiglia Clark landed there. This place, as well as all of Umbria, is as quiet and idyllic as Rome is loud and busy.

 

The Italians have an expression for what we did at the villa - il dolce far niente, the sweetness of doing nothing – and I can assure you, nothing is sweeter…Next week, more about our Umbrian adventures and the rest of the trip.

 

(I am slightly embarrassed to share this, but friends and family back home seemed to genuinely enjoy vicariously experiencing the joys of Italia through our posts and pictures. Hence, these next few travel oriented columns…Enjoy!)     

 

learning to ride the rain...

"Worry is a misuse of imagination." - Dan Zadra

Gaining wisdom from a mosquito on a rainy day? That sounds like a stretch, yet it happened to me. I like listening to NPR and on a recent rainy morning I heard a piece about how mosquitoes deal with raindrops, which to them are like three ton comets pummeling them from the sky. Needless to say, there's no mosquito umbrella big enough or strong enough to protect them from that, so how do they survive a storm?  

Well, according to a team of mechanical engineers at Georgia Tech, mosquitoes don't dodge raindrops, they ride them. The researchers found this out by firing jets of water at mosquitoes while filming them with super-high-speed video cameras. What happens is the mosquito rides the raindrop until the wind catches its wings, which act like tiny kites and pull the mosquito off the raindrop and back into the wind; then away he or she flies. Apparently, they do this over and over again until the storm ends, with each raindrop ride lasting about 1,000th of a second.

One of the researchers, a man named David Hu, described it as "rather than resisting the raindrop, they basically join together." How Zen is that, especially for a mosquito? I don't know that much about being Zen, but I do know resistance is never part of it. 

This riding the rain business is not without risk, however. If the raindrop is close to the ground when the mosquito hops on and the wind doesn't catch its wings before the raindrop hits the ground, kersplat! Dead mosquito. Of course, the mosquito doesn't know about this risk, so rainstorms must present a series of thrilling rides for those nasty little pests. After all, unlike people, bugs don't worry, right?

This notion of riding the rain rather than resisting it appeals to me and got me thinking about my approach to life's rainstorms, both literal and figurative. I am a worrier whose glass is always half empty. If I were a mosquito, I'd be the only one buzzing loudly and frantically about how the sky is falling and we're all going to end up smashed on the ground. And, in the process, I'd miss out on all of that lovely rain riding...not much of a life approach for a mosquito or a person, really.   

Since I've always lived life on the gloomy side, I tend not to think much about changing my approach. I admire happy-go-lucky types and people who dance in the rain, but I can't imagine being one. Not until recently, when I started thinking it may be time to change my view.

Maybe it's age - it takes a lot of energy to worry all the time - or maybe it's the beginning of wisdom (another symptom of age.)  Anyway, lately I've grown tired of always looking on the dark side and have been consciously trying to focus, instead, on the light. It turns out, this is easier to do than I imagined it would be.

This notion of positive focus is not new. From Phillipians 4:8 ("Whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely or of good report; if there be any virtue, any praise, think on these things") to Oprah and Dr. Phil, the power of positive thinking is a known phenomenon. For some reason, it's just taken me my whole life to try it.

I find that if I empty my mind of the chatter and brain brick-a-brack, breathe, focus, listen and feel, the good stuff just starts flooding in. And, I experience things I never thought I'd spend much time feeling, like calm, contentment, peace, happiness and optimism. (Doing something mindless and repetitive like weeding, vacuuming, jogging or mowing helps, as it seems to keep my brain from going back to tensed-up mode...) This all is a welcome change and so far, I'm impressed with my progress.

Like all changes, this positive attitude thing involves one or two steps forward, then a step or two back, but in general, it's getting easier to focus on the bright side and worry less; and, it turns out, I don't miss worrying at all.

The Story People are some of my favorite philosophers and their take on this is, "I once had a garden filled with flowers that grew only on dark thoughts but they need constant attention & one day I decided I had better things to do." Like those mosquitoes, I may learn to ride raindrops and/or dance in rain yet...