November 1st is All Saints Day and the residents of Italy celebrate by making a pilgrimage to their local cemetery to decorate the graves of their loved ones. The graves are then illuminated with artificial candles after dark. Cortona’s only cemetery is perched dramatically on the edge of the hillside – it’s spectacular! Larry spent some time in the cemetery with the tripod after we got back from the antiques market in Arezzo, with some beautiful results.
Larry and I had read that the largest antiques market in Tuscany takes place in nearby Arezzo on the first weekend of each month – of course we had to be there to experience for ourselves. We set out one afternoon for the 45 minute drive north to check it out, and then spent at least another 45 minutes looking for a parking place. The antiques market attracts over 500 vendors and over 20,000 visitors so you can understand the challenge. Arezzo is a beautiful town, with one particularly stunning main piazza. We had a great time walking down the streets and through the stalls – they had everything from jewelry to china to silver to furniture to maps to cashmere sweaters.
Halloween is an American holiday, for the most part. You do see small slivers and hints of it here and there in Europe – a few costumes or spooky trinkets trying to inch their way into the stores. It’s trying but it hasn’t quite caught on yet. We were planning on being a good example of the Halloween spirit in Cortona via our own little jack o’lantern display. The daughter of our landlady, Lucia, surprised us with a jack o’lantern on our porch when we came home on Friday night. She had taken some pumpkins from their garden and carved 3: 2 for their porch and 1 for us. We were touched by her attempt to make us feel at home and celebrate our American holiday with us.
Saturday morning we awoke early to go to the weekly town market – filled with everything from a mini drug store to shoes to vegetables to purses. I love the European tradition of the weekly market and it’s one of the things I wish I could export to the US. We had a great time shopping, eating, and observing the town come out to catch up on daily gossip. We managed to find one expensive pumpkin at a produce vendor in town and hauled our future jack o’lantern back up the hill to home, stopping to enjoy the view and visit with some friendly neighborhood animals along our way.
We spent the afternoon carving a two-sided jack o’lantern – Larry did an homage to ‘The Scream’ by Edvard Munch and I did a vampire (based on a drawing Larry did – I never progressed beyond the stick figure stage and can’t draw to save my life). One of our neighbors drove by shaking his finger at us as we put them out front and lit them – mumbling something about Lucia – apparently he doesn’t appreciate the encroachment of American holidays on his town. Larry said, “I kicked his tire and told him that Little Italy has been reduced to one block in New York City.” Lucia was so impressed with the vampire carving that she took pictures of it and vowed to try to replicate it next year.
Pics are small in the gallery below, but click on any picture to make it larger.
Florence is only about an hour away from Cortona, so on a recent sunny day we decided to take a road trip. Tony came with us too, so we could release him back into the wild. He was looking a little worse for the wear on the ride and I was worried about him, but as soon as we found a good spot and Larry dumped him from the jar he scrambled under a rock. Arrivederci Tony!
It was a beautiful afternoon. We spent some time strolling along the Arno, had lunch at the piazza in front of the Palazzo Vecchio being watched over by David (or, a replica of him anyway), and then spent the afternoon among the Renaissance masters at the Uffizi: Botticelli, Michelangelo, DaVinci, Raphael and Caravaggio, among others. It’s a small museum but dense and requires several hours of one’s time to cover it properly. The building itself deserves careful attention. Once housing the offices for the ruling Medici family, its hallways and galleries are intricate and beautiful.
It was unfortunately already dark when we departed the Uffizi (these shorter days are really putting a crimp in our sightseeing!), but we visited Piazza Santa Croce for an outside look at the beautiful church which is the resting place of Michelangelo, Galileo, Rossini, and others, and then took a trip to the nearby Vivoli, site of the famous Italian gelato. I ordered a rice (sort of like rice pudding in ice cream form) and chocolate gelatos; Larry had chocolate mousse and coconut. We both had our first introduction to Italian gelato at Vivoli when we visited Florence right after high school. We discovered a whole new level of ice cream on that trip. Goodbye Baskin Robbins, I’ve found a new friend! But honestly as much as we fondly remember it, we’ve had so many amazing gelatos in recent years (New York has some amazing gelato shops) that it wasn’t quite as good as we remembered. Still, fun to be back in a place that held so many nostalgic memories for us.
One recent weekend Larry and I went on a drive and ended up at a little antiques market in the neighboring town of Castiglion Fiorentino. What a great spot for people watching, on top of interesting antiques (and junk).
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