I want you to experience the Umbria I have come to know and love in over forty years here on the land, just outside Assisi. Live Umbria, “Italy’s green heart,” from the inside. Live our splendid early May medieval festival, Calendimaggio with me, with “the locals.” Enjoy the photos of our May 2016 “Inside Umbria”…
Even though I’ve been speaking Italian for more than half my life, words still flee me; at times, I feel that my perception of the exact translation of a word is imprecise. I read with pride the late May Abruzzo newspaper article on my husband Pino’s sponsorship of a second theatrical piece in L’Aquila, the…
Pino has to head to Valtopina often these days as his team is doing earthquake restoration work on the nearby tiny hamlet, Giove. There’s only one restaurant right in Valtopina’s centro – Ristorante La Gabella – and it makes every Valtopina jaunt an experience, a culinary one. “La gabella” was a 16th – 17th c.…
Just 30 km east of Perugia, skirt the mountain village, Valtopina (population, about 1400). Take the curvy road winding around hillsides of olive groves, to the tiny hamlet Giove perched on the wooded slopes of Monte Faeto where cranes stretch out over the village. Heavily damaged in the earthquake of 1997, a 2011 court suit…
Every year for Corpus Domini (60 days after Easter), over seventy stunning floral tapestries carpet piazza and winding alleyways of medieval hilltown gem, Spello, fruit of months of flower-gathering and then all-night work to create the flower masterpieces, le Infiorate. On the morning of Corpus Domini, as as the spellani floral groups are anxiously adding…
I was about twelve years old when our family made a trip to the late 18th-c Spanish Franciscan mission church San Juan Capistrano in California. On a recent Abruzzo jaunt, Pino and I linked up with the Mission’s origins, exploring the Franciscan monastery just outside L’Aquila, San Giuliano, where San Giovanni from Capestrano (a tiny…
I remember the year that a tour guest summed up our walk through Spello on Corpus Cristi (60 days after Easter) this way: “Seeing the Infiorate should be on the cover of the book, A Thousand Things to Do Before You Die”. I second that thought each year when starting out early with my tour…
I’ve been told by more than one that you can’t truly feel the passione for the Ceri unless you join in carrying one of the three mammoth pyramidical structures, called “candlesticks.” Said to represent those candles carried solemnly in Gubbio patron saint Bishop Ubaldo’s funeral procession mid – 12th c, the wooden Ceri – phallic…
As you walk through Assisi’s main square these days, you’ll hear metal clanging as workers set up the grandstands. Posters of medieval personages adorn Assisi notice boards. Blue and red flags flutter in the breeze over Assisi’s meandering medieval alleyways. In the stone-vaulted medieval taverne of Assisi’s two rival factions, la Parte de Sopra (“Upper…
La Festa della Vernaccia is celebrated in the tiny walled Umbrian town of Cannara just after Easter for this treasured dessert wine is intertwined with Easter in local tradition. The cannaresi traditionally inaugurated their wine of the vernaccia grapes on Easter Sunday morning accompanied by the traditional Umbrian cheese bread and the new salami. Many…