Blogs from Basilicata, Italy, Europe - page 3

My thoughts have been swimming towards the past lately...i've been hovering in warm memories of home in Connecticut, not even of Florence. And because of the holidays coming up, being a new town, new apartment, new life in many ways, I've taken solace in the feelings of comfort and magic that I felt in CT during my childhood/adolescent years. I've also realized that making a home or nest is not as easy as all that poetic rhetoric describes- an honorable challenge. It's not attached to place, as most say, and yet it's the qualities of that physical place that provide the skeleton upon which we add, build, transform our needs and desires into what we can physically and mentally call "home". I'm not there now, not yet. We'd built a small nest of sort in Florence. ... read more

in this agricultural region of Italy harvesting or "la raccolta", whether for the current season's mushrooms, chestnuts, olives, mandarin and clementines or cabbage...it's all in the family, not just the local farmers who are out there hard at work...the work of the farmer or "contadino" is the homefront... On a crisp and sunny Sunday morning my husband and I joined my sister-in-law's husbands family (3 brothers and 2 sisters plus a dozen children) in northwestern Basilicata, near Castelsaraceno, for a day of gathering chestnuts or "castagne". Our drive from Bernalda (8 cars worth of family) was about 70 minutes winding roads through the low rolling hills, past roughly plowed terrain, fields rich with local autumn vegetables as well as abandoned stone farmsteads and bridges. Once we reached the forrest protected by the region of Basilicata, ... read more

Waking up early seemed like a reoccurring theme during our journey through Italy - today was no exception - we were up early and packed heading to the Naples train station. Even though it was the early morning, the humidity was probably 100%, but Grace and I have adjusted to (read learned to deal with) the weather in the South. We were headed further south: catching a five hour-long train to Bari and a transfer to a local train to get to Matera, another 2 hours. If you've never heard of Matera, it is probably because the town is small and not easily accessible. Grace and I could have chosen an even smaller town or the large touristy city of Palermo in Sicily, but we opted for Matera. The country of Italy is shaped like a ... read more

Friday 5th September Nova Siri…….Castro Bolito Today was a lazy day!! I love those days!! We had some food stuff that we wanted to use up, so before heading off to the beach we cooked some sauce for lunch and a casserole for dinner. As part of the price for the accommodation, we were given a lounge chair, a beach chair and umbrella. The kids went canoeing, first with us and then on their own. Since they had their own lifejackets I wasn’t overly concerned. Actually Kurt was supervising them from a distance of 20 metres in his own canoe. I don’t know how that was supposed to work! When I tried to help the kids move away from the shore with their canoes, I often fell on the rocks because the tide was so ... read more