daVinci, daSchminci

8 June 2005
This place, the home for years of Brad and Estel Willits who have graciously offered it to us, is wonderful. It’s huge, it has electricity and water, and (here comes the good part) it’s completely deserted and away from everything. I wish we could stay here at least another month. Our week and a half total Italy time will pass before we can blink, especially when you figure in our “side trips” to Milan, Venice, Florence, and Rome. The most surprising geographical feature is that there are hundreds of rice fields around here, something I haven’t seen in abundance since I lived in the Philippines. We’re in the North (we went through the Alps to get here), around an hour from Milano, and obviously there must be a great deal of rain, although we haven’t experienced any yet. We took a quick trip to Milan to see da Vinci’s Last Supper, but there was a—get this—two week wait to get in, so we left, saying in our best Sour Grapes way that “it’s been falling apart since right after he painted it, and all the restorations have taken their toll, anyway.” So naturally, we drowned our sorrows in food: first, really spectacular gelato on a street where we could window-shop the Milan fashion scene; and second, four delicious pizzas at a cool, way-out-in-the-woods bistro. Two other highlights were a really bad bottle of wine and the girls’ first look at a prostitute, who strutted around in a skirt so short in the back that one could see that, poor thing, she must have been too poor to buy underwear. We left both behind us and came home to the abbey, where we feel home. Breme=good; Milan=bust.