Alex's Video B'Day Card from Norcia, Italy

We're in Norcia...a small Umbrian hill town known for it's wild boar, truffles and pork products. Michael helped us record this video birthday card for Alex...we really miss you and wish you could be with us here.

Marian's Christmas Roses

Each Christmas season, everyone at our house looks forward to these Christmas Pastries. My mother-in-law called them "roses". They are a variation on the traditional Neapolitan Christmas treat called Struffoli. It's the same ingredients but the technique for shaping them into flower shapes was handed down from Bill's mom

BUON NATALE ~~~~MERRY CHRISTMAS

I've never really been a fan of those Christmas letters that we all stuff into our Christmas cards.....an attempt to condense a year's worth of family activities to update friends and acquaintances. We know a family of five that distills their annual accomplishments into 5 haiku poems .....a technique I've admired and attempted to copy on occasion

2010 is not a haiku year. Exactly the opposite. We had so much to share that we blogged about it, chronicling the wonder and awe(and craziness) of living in Italy. What a year it has been. Many of you followed our adventures here and we've really enjoyed this way of staying in touch with old friends and making new ones.

We've been home for almost 7 weeks now and are learning to live with the schizophrenia of splitting our year between Florida and Italy. We'll be returning to Soriano in April to work with Culture Discovery Vacations. We've blogged about this amazingly serendipitious development that connected us with Michael and Paola and gave us the opportunity to realize our dream of living part-time in Italy. They even added us to their website www.culturediscovery.com ....how cool is that?

It's Christmas time and Alex is coming home and we will have an old-fashioned 3 generation Italian-American Christmas with grandparents and aunts and uncles. In time for our celebration, Bill has completed the design and construction of his first Neapolitan Presepio ......hopefully the first of many. (pictured above)

We want to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and all the blessings of the season ...... and we hope that, in the new year, all your dreams come true too.

KNOCKERS

We started taking pictures of door knockers almost from the moment we arrived in Italy last March. Everywhere we went, we'd see a new design that we hadn't seen before, as well as lots of repeats.....particularly Egyptian women and lions.

But that hand hanging on the door was really creepy and we became obsessed with finding new and unique specimens in our travels.


Some were so old and rusted and barely hanging there at all. Others were so elegant and shiny, with beautifully carved doors behind them.








I think, originally, Bill was going to write a pun-laden post, comparing knockers to....well, you know, but thankfully he got distracted and so now I'm having a nostalgic moment and thought it was a good opportunity to post lots of pictures at one time......now that I have fast internet again, I'll have to figure out how to format these posts better.



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Oh Hiatus

Florida weather is lovely......and that's about all I can say about our re-entry at this point. Once we find our equilibrium, I want to continue writing about Italy...

Please check back after the Holidays. We miss Italy....and the delightful exchanges on this blog.

a presto~

PINK-lets

Where-oh- where have these little pink piglets gone? That's a rhetorical question, guys, so please don't feel compelled to answer. Sadly, I know where they've gone. After all, I live in a part of Italy that is all about PORK!!

Nevertheless, these darling little piglets showed up in a pen in the front yard of a nearby house recently, and for days and days and days, they made me smile. I grew up in Suburbia, USA, so piglets in the front yard are a novel sight for me. Each time we drove by, I'd insist that Bill stop the car so I could get a really good look at the little oinkers. If they were not in the yard, we'd just call and they would come waddling out of their pen, oinking and squealing, expecting to be fed. We had a few scares, when we called and they didn't come out......but then the next day, they'd be there again, climbing all over each other to get to the food trough. But last week.......there were a bunch of turkey chick-lets in the piglets' pen.

Now even a suburban kid knows that piglets are WAY cuter than turkey chicks.......and I am very sad that the piglets have gone missing. They were just so pink!!!

C'ERA UNA VOLTA - UNA FAVOLA (Once upon a time- a Fairy Tale)

Once upon a time there was a Nobile Family that lived in a castle high atop a shining medieval hill town in Alto Lazio. For many years this family ruled all the territory within sight of the castle's watchtower. Then wars and politics changed the social structure and Italy became a united country, and there was no longer an official nobile class.

Many years passed in this shining medieval hilltown and the decendants of the nobile family continued to live in their castle home. But as with many of the old nobility, in order to keep their homes, they welcome guests who were interested in learning what life was like"once upon a time".

Recently, Prince Riccardo graciously hosted us in the home of his ancestors, where we learned about his family's dramatic history that includes Vatican intrigue as well as a magnificent library which archives the family's activities dating back to 1068.......(to be continued)