Sunday, April 19, 2009

The best part about living in Italy

First, check out pictures from our trip to the US on my Picassa Web Albums. The link is to the right of this page. Second, don't forget to leave comments or send me your stories. It's hard to keep writing these with out any feedback!

Living in Italy has it's good points and it's bad ones. My least favorite is that practically everything is closed on Sundays and Mondays. It's getting a little better with grocery stores and some stores in Genola (Cuneo's version of Rockville Pike) being on Sunday and at least a few pizzerias being open on Mondays. But my favorite is on a beautiful day you don't have to go far to sight see and wander around beautiful medieval streets. Last Wednesday Fabri and I spent the afternoon exploring three small towns around Saluzzo.

Our first stop was Revello. We walked around the historic center and checked out a couple churches there. Then we set our TomTom to Barge, and passed through Envie along the way. We stopped in Envie when we saw a castle that interested us. Unforunately it looked as though it's a private residence and therefore unvisitable. I really have to go to the Cuneo Office of Tourism and get the Open Castles listing for 2009. That is a tourist pamphlet with information on all of the visitable castles in the area. Then we continued on to Barge. All of these cities are at the foot of the alps like Saluzzo. Envie was interesting because the whole city was terraced. The hilly portion of Saluzzo is not. Barge is the largest of the cities we visited. The Barge church featured in the slide show below was covered with square holes and every single one was fenced over to prevent pigeons from nesting there. The most spectaicular site was by far in Barge where 3 rivers come together. That's what I'm posing in front of in the last photos.



Also, we've had our first harvest from the balcony garden: baby greens! We had them with store bought lettuce for a delicious lunch out on the balcony the other day. We're really going to enjoy having this extra room.
From Blogger Pictures

3 comments:

Carolyn said...

So glad to hear that they even have Rockville Pike in Italy! You're not so far from home! If only we had open castles in proximity to our Pike. I'd even be happy just with closed castles to look at from afar! And how 'bout those home grown baby greens on the balcony? Freakin' bucolic!

doshtate said...

The Greens look tasty! What else did you plant? That's probably in another blog...will go back and look :)

Love the pictures!

Jess said...

Planted now is flowers, herbs (rosemary, basil, oregano, thyme) and jalapeno peppers. I plan on planting (probably this weekend) cilantro, tomatoes, marigolds and maybe an eggplant and/or a cucumber. I also have a couple more pots for flowers. Yay balcony gardens!