Journeys - The Albergo Diffuso Puts Rooms All Over Town - NYTimes.com

Journeys - The Albergo Diffuso Puts Rooms All Over Town - NYTimes.com

What the hell is this?

What the hell is this? I can hear you saying. A plastic cup of weeds and some red thing that looks like a cooked red pepper? You would be only partially right! This is not just a bad picture of some weedy flowers, no this is the aftermath of a typical Italian meal! Notice the almost empty wine and water bottles, the stained table cloth? Yes, table cloth even though it is out doors, Italians love to eat in style as it were. The silverware, dishes and of course the white table cloth. Fine dining in the great outdoors, it civilizes the meal! and as we all know, the Italians have been the great civilizers after all! Think Rome! Running water! Toilets! And I am sure back then they had the ever present white table cloth! What else were they to wipe their hands and mouths on?
I recall going to the beach with my in-laws for a weekend. At the time they had reserved a spot in this campground for the summer. They would go every weekend, my mother in-law would go to the beach and my father in-law would ride his bicycle all over kingdom come. They went prepared, with a table and chairs, electric stove, silverware, china, essentially the entire kitchen including fridge and yes the ever present never forgotten, table cloth. Funny, my mother in-law had two on this table, a flowered vinyl table cloth which stayed on the table at all times, and the white cotton cloth which only appeared magically at meal times. I don’t know if she had the self cleaning type or a stash of clean ones but every time she pulled it out it gleamed bright cleanliness in the sun. Who would have thought camping could be so civilized?
Of course in Italy, camping is quite the different experience. Within the grounds there is a restaurant, a bar, a place for music and gathering and huge bathrooms with immaculate white tiled walls and floors that are lovingly cleansed daily, twice even! Often there is a gelateria as well. The Italians aren’t much for roughing it, as I said Rome and civilized and all that. But sleeping in a tent is pretty rough, especially when your air mattress deflates and you don’t have a way to patch the hole because it is eleven o’clock at night and the little store that carries everything just closed! Damn! Just grab a couple table cloths and make a bed, you’ll sleep fine!

A timeless beauty

Amazing to think that I actually left this place all those years ago. I needed a job and I knew I could generate money in the States, when all my contacts in Florence had generated nothing in a year. It does seem silly to have left the beauty and tranquility behind, but I had a beautiful girlfriend and I had to support her. Money does that. I wonder now what would life be like if I had stayed and struggled to make it work over there. I just felt it was the right thing to do at the time and I feel that if we had not made the choices we did, we wouldn’t be where we are and have the family we do.
When I was in Florence, I did an amazing amount of writing. Of course I had lots of time, we rehearsed maybe three times a week and gigged once every two or so, so I wasn’t busy. I used to write on command, poems, songs and short stories. I have a stack of that stuff. Then it was like waking up, here in America, ok time to go to work now, dream is over! Hup! Hup! Put that silly stuff aside and get your lazy ass moving! And guess what? I did. For fifteen years I haven’t written a lick, other than the usual letter or proposal, contract and now email. Writing takes time and needs a quiet place of inspiration, of which Florence is very much. Every time I think that maybe I can sit down for a couple of weeks and hammer out some things, life gets in the way, things like the electric bill, cable and phone, and oh! Oh! Can’t forget taxes!
The funny thing about life in Tuscany is that there seems to be more time. The days seem longer, with the minutes stretching before snapping to the next. Maybe it’s a space time contortion thingy, you know, the fact that they are six hours ahead of us gives them more flexibility, rubberizes there minutes and stretches their hours! Or maybe some things are just not that important that they can’t wait until tomorrow and hey there’s Fede and Vitoria let’s sit and have a coffee! Time seems to be found almost as easily as turning over that next rock and finding a worm! You know those roll over minute commercials for cell phones, the ones where you can reuse unspent minutes? I think maybe that is what the Italians have mastered. They have figured out how to roll up all those unused minutes at the end of the day and reuse them the next! Fantastic! If only they could market that…………………….