Castelvecchio Subequo

My Garden
We planted Million Bells, basil and rosemary. The soil is as hard as rock, but by slowly adding water I was able to turn it back to dirt.

Yummy!



And now we are here and I am pretty sure we never left, the winter, the ups and downs the worries seem far away. Coming back to a place one has to wonder if it will live up to memory. It felt like coming home. With coming home there are the joys of home ownership. If our neighbors had not taken care of things, we might have come home to a foot of water from the upstairs neighbor’s pipes breaking. Enrica and Salvatore moped up the water. Now I see how frescos are ruined. The water brought out the salt in the plaster and white clouds had “bloomed on the wall”. The mediocre paint job I had done was washed away. Luckily it was not a Micodeangelo or a Di Vinci, but the effect was the same. If I hadn’t been reading about frescos the white clouds apparently growing out of the wall would have been quite alarming.

                                                                              The Market

 Our water pipes are broken in the bathroom and the resourceful, Paulo is coming to do a small fix and then a proper job on Monday. We can not get the gas in our stove to work, but we were able to use the grill to heat up pizza. The gelato was excellent, the caffe divine. We have seen many of the people that we knew last summer and my Italian is a little better this year. I can’t say much more, but I can understand more. Things are perfect, as Mica and Barry left them, but I do wish we had asked them to drain the pipes. It is good that this is a stone house or it probably would have fallen down with all the water coming in from the ceiling. Beyond that true calamity, the trash system has changed and the Commune and the internet place were both closed. But. Tomorrow is market day! We slept very well last night, we ate well today, people seemed happy to see us, and we are in Italy.