SO much happened, and we have about 200 pictures, but I’ll condense my 8 pages of written notes (since there was no internet, I wanted to remember everything). We drove down to Alvito yesterday to visit the birthplace of Derek’s grandparents. It is a Beautiful town on a mountain. I hope some of the pictures do it justice. No one spoke English, so I had to resort to my rusty French to communicate with the proprietress of the hotel. See, I should have brushed up on my French instead of trying to learn Italian! Too bad I don’t know how to say “cemetery” in French…we didn’t find it until the second day.
So we couldn’t actually DO much, but we walked all over the village, checked out the castle at the top of the mountain, ate at the cafe, where the waitress got really frustrated when I asked for tè con leche, mixing up two romance languages I don’t know. She kept asking, lattè? And I kept saying, No! I don’t want a lattè! I want tea with milk! When she finally figured out I wanted milk, I said oui. She must have thought I was a freak, speaking THREE languages I didn’t know. Sigh.
Yesterday was Republic day, so everything in Alvito was closed. We had to drive to the nearest town, Sora, which seemed about 100,000 or so (compared to a couple hundred) in the pouring rain, but we had an amazing dinner with homemade pasta (Derek had fettucini, I had gnocchi) and delicious secondi (he had chicken, I had a buffalo milk caprese salad).
The hotel was AMAZING–dated, but 20 foot ceilings, clearly a former chateau or villa or something–must do more research on that. We had a huge suite of 3 rooms, and we awoke at 5:45 to birds singing on the mountain.
Still no English speakers in the morning (though plenty of gawkers), but we spend an hour or so exploring the cemetery to find that all of Derek’s family tree names are common (especially Angelo Tata), but apparently everyone who died before 1920 is buried somewhere else. Sadly, no one could tell us where. We probably found about 100 second cousins of Grandpa and Grandma, though… Maybe if we had the right words in any European language, we could have found out more. We stumbled onto the grounds of the local school, where a concerned mom got the teacher, who offered us a tour of the school after hearing that the Derek’s Nona was born in Alvito, but we had to decline.
Sadly, we had to get the car back by noon, but I think our 20 hours there were worth it. I took a ton of video, pictures of almost everything (seriously spooking the natives), and hopefully Derek’s Fam will be able to feel that they were there, too! I think we got the REAL Italian countryside experience, with air-dried towels, black (and I mean black) coffee, no English, and no other touristas.
A contrast to the rest of the day…