Week Two

Buongiorno Ragazzi!

Hope everyone is well. For those of you that have been with me since the beginning, thanks for sticking with it. I hope you've been able to live vicariously.

The past few days have been a blur of more coachings, lessons, rehearsals, concerts, etc. On Monday we had a concert in nearby Cortona, a beautiful 45 minute drive away. The drive there took us through some beautiful mountainside towns, past villas and castles, farms and fields, olive trees and vineyards. The sun was beating down over the entire sight, forcing humans and animals alike into shady recesses, but inside the air conditioned bus we could be distanced observers to the beautiful scene. The concert space was a villa down the valley from Cortona, which is higher up the mountain. The villa housed many Europeans who were on their holiday, so the concert was a little less formal than previous concerts for real live Italians. I ended up not singing as well as I would have liked, but seeing the beautiful sunset (reminder: this is the Tuscan sun we're talking about) over the mountains coupled with a fantastic (free) dinner on the house with boar, pasta, among other tasty things, io sono contento in generale.

I'm now going to go back in time to describe Sunday merely because it was awesome. Sunday was our first completely free day since coming to Arezzo, so what did my roommates and I do? Get up early and enjoy the free day is not the right answer, unfortunately. (Syntax is fun!) We slept in and didn't start moving until around 11:30. However, I don't really feel too bad because when we did start moving, we didn't stop for another seven hours.

We had been in Arezzo for about two weeks and had never really even explored it. (For the purposes of this story, we = Jonathan Gmeinder, James Maverick, and I [pretty much the best roommates ever].) We packed a backpack with the remainder of our fruit from the week, as the grocery store is only open on the weekdays, and we set off to explore. Our first stop was the Duomo at the top of the hill. We had walked by this beautiful church several times and were well acquainted with its bell-tolling schedule (8am seems earlier and earlier every day...) but had never actually gone in. I think one could make a fantastic Italian vacation out of solely visiting churches. The actual church was beautiful--it's unbelievable to think about the amount of energy and money spent by not only one generation of Italians, but by many generations. In our society, nothing really takes much longer to build than a couple of years [insert societal critique about the impatient American culture], but this took a total of four centuries from first groundbreaking to its completed form now.

After visiting the church, we went outside into the 95ºF heat and threw the frisbee around a little bit in the park at the top of the hill. The good news was that we purchased some sunscreen at a local pharmacy; the bad news was that it costed almost 15 euro. Oops. The Italians seemed amused by our lowly form of entertaining ourselves, but it felt good to run around and feel the breeze. 

After about forty-five minutes of playing in the blistering (dry) heat, we continued on to check out the Medici fortress at the top of the city. Unfortunately, it didn't seem like we could go in, so we just admired the structure from the outside. It was quite formidable and would have (presumably did) withstood any foreign army's attempt to conquer. The fortress had been built in the 13th century and was a summer home for the Florentine Medici (as a family, they did pretty well). In our quest to find a way into the fortress, we stumbled upon a gigantic cemetery.

I think the accompanying pictures tell the story much better than I could, but if I were to pick several adjectives, they would be the following: expansive, beautiful, reflective, full-of-dead-Italians.

We continued on a treacherous road that was barely designed for the likes of two fiats to pass each other. Hence, our passage around the blind curves was taken at a respectable trot. The road passed under an old aqueduct and forked off up a small foothill. After buying water bottles in the vending machine of a nearby gas station, we commenced our climb up the mountain. We passed by beautiful villas, deserted churches, vineyards, and rows and rows of olive trees. These houses were unbelievably beautiful, complete with pools, corrals (the non-singing horsy kind), and many expensive cars. As we climbed higher into the foothill, the density of houses became thinner (mind you, this was quite a far stretch from the American phenomenon of suburbia).

When we reached what we thought was the peak of our foothill, we were probably several hundred meters above Arezzo, so we could look down on the backside of the city and view its expanse. The city itself is in the middle of a large valley that stretched on as far as we could see. Had we climbed the actual mountain, we may have been able to see Florence, but the view was still pretty unbelievable. There wasn't a cloud in the sky (that seems to be a general theme here). We snapped a few selfies on our cameras (after failing to find a place where we could set a timer, I swear!) and began the long trek down. Once back to the aqueduct road, we continued around the city, stopped at the nearest gelateria, and headed back. In total, we were out in the sun for about 6 or 7 hours. The sunscreen was worth it. I think that for as long as I live I will never forget that experience--the breathtaking scenery, the beautiful day, and the great company.

The rest of the week passed as normal. We musicked, we eat, we slept. On Thursday, I had a concert in Florence with the Concert Group. This was an entirely new set of music from the previous one, so it was at times a little shaky, but the audience was mostly tourists, so they didn't really care (the Italians would have, definitely). Also, for those of you fledgling audience members out there, please don't give a standing ovation in a foreign country. They don't do that. You look like a fool.

This past weekend deserves its own post, so I will get to that hopefully tonight. Be excited. It was unbelievable. 

Hope everyone is doing well on the home front. 

More later.