Requiem per un Saturno - Dec 5, 2013

If you have been following my posts of our year in Italy, at some point you probably realized that on many of the adventures Angie and I have shared we were accompanied by a partner; a third party, an enabler who faithfully played a thankless role in helping provide us the most amazing year imaginable:

Today we a said goodbye to the Saturn.  An Italian salvage yard seems hardly a suitable ending for so faithful a companion, but the harsh realities of Italian bureaucracy made it virtually impossible to give the car away.  And in the end, it was done in by defective windshield wipers.  The activation switch inside the steering column had broken, preventing the wipers from turning on.  Getting parts special ordered from the U.S. would have been very expensive; finding an Italian mechanic willing to try to fix it, impossible. 

It had never been our intention to ship back to the States a 15 year old vehicle with 146,000 miles on it, but we had hoped that we might find some church or someone who needed a car we could donate it to.  It didn’t work out that way.  It cannot be overstated the role the Saturn played in the life Angie and I made here in Italy.  It took us everywhere.  It took our family and friends who came to visit us from the U.S., everywhere.  It took new friends we made here in Italy, everywhere.  We crisscrossed all over Tuscany and northern Italy, including Venice, Lake Como, Cortina and the Cinque Terre.  We drove across Switzerland, into France, up the Alsace Wine Route, and we crossed the Italian Alps six times.  And in 14,000 miles of driving in Europe the Saturn always started right up, and it always safely brought us home. 

As I closed the driver’s door for the last time, I was acutely aware I was closing the door on a life others can only imagine; indeed, a life only those with imagination can imagine.  
I will not miss the Saturn; I will not miss the way it rattled and clattered, nor the way the radio screeched, nor its harsh ride on rough Italian roads, nor the fact that only one window worked. 
I will miss everything the Saturn represented.

An Italian Thanksgiving

Sorry for the late posting on this, but Angie and I have been busy packing up for our long journey home to the States on Saturday. 

As you can well imagine Italy does not celebrate Thanksgiving, but those of us who are U.S. ex-Pats still do.  When we cannot be home for the holidays we try to reach out to other ex-Pats to share our holidays with.  

Angie and I are very privileged to have made wonderful friends during our time here, and Angie set about organizing a fabulous Thanksgiving dinner for those who could come.  

We wound up with a pretty big group in our apartment, 11 of us in all.  Among our number we counted one Britt (Pat) and two Italians (Donatella and Andrea).  

Despite the difficulty in finding some of the regular Thanksgiving staples in Italy, we had everything; turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, roasted carrots, mash potatoes and gravy.  We also had non-traditional dishes including melanzane parmigiana (eggplant parmesan) and kale salad. 

Primi Piatti (first courses) was crostini con funghi e formaggio (sautéed mushrooms with melted cheese on small toasted breads) and traditional crostini and schiacciata.  To maintain the authentic flavor of the breads, I toasted them over an open wood fire in Andrea’s giant BBQ grill.  All the breads were served with copious amounts of olio d’oliva – the fresh, one day old, “first press” olive oil from Andrea and Donatella’s olive orchard that we had harvested that week.  Once everyone got a taste of that oil, the Primi Piatti just disappeared…. 

Somewhere along the way our guests were able to find a superb pecan pie and pumpkin pie.

As the sun set through the open kitchen window it illuminated the olive trees with a silvery glow, once again reminding me of all that Angie and I have had to be thankful for.

A special thanks to our good friend Joss who joined us for Thanksgiving 

and who took at least half of the pictures featured here.