Dusk @ St. Peter's on a Sunday in November

Some images from a dusk trek to the Vatican with visiting French cousins...

Tuscia Chestnut Festival

Autumn in the northern Lazio countryside is dream-season for back road-trips...so last Sunday we took a drive that evoked childhood memories of family drives in rural northern California. Our destination: the town of Tuscia, which was holding its annual Chestnut Festival. (The area produces more than 5% of the world's chestnuts).
We arrived mid-day and were baffled to find the town eerily quiet, save for a few vendors selling chestnut cookies, chestnut spread, and home made jams...so we wandering the Medieval core of Tuscia in search of the festivities. Instead, we found some architecture that could have inspired opera sets.


And a bit of evidence of local efforts to tidy things up for the festival...
Finally, we found the chestnut action: indoors in several restaurant "caves" where residents and visitors were partaking in a great feast featuring chestnuts! Moral: For Italian food festivals, it pays to arrive early (or make advance reservations). We had to satisfy ourselves with a jar of chestnut spread and some chocolate hazelnut cookies purchased at one of the half dozen stands erected for the event.
Our images of purchasing freshly roasted chestnuts at various outdoor stands were off target: there were plenty of raw chestnuts for sale, and even a few groups of burly men roasting wonderfully aromatic chestnuts, but these were all destined for the indoor feasters...and not for sale to aimlessly wandering visitors. Even without tasting the roasted chestnuts or partaking in the chestnut feast, Tuscia was impressive.

Barack Mania in Italy

La Repubblica, one of the main Italian newspapers devoted its first 11 pages exclusively to Obama today and another half dozen pages deeper in the paper. The front page and some of the other pages are below. The large headline reads “The World Has Changed.” And the article in the bottom right corner bears the headline "The End of Autism” (only in Italy would one see such a headline!) and opens with “Barack Obama is the president of the world. Not in the pessimist and impossible sense of emperor of us all, but in a realistic and positive sense, as the man that the majority of humanity wanted as the leader of the most important country in the world.” The article goes on to report on a virtual planetary election held on the internet in which Obama won 94.5% of the French vote, 88% of the Chinese vote, 92.5% of the German vote and 92% of the Italian vote.

Pages 2-3: (click on photo to enlarge)

Pages 4-5:

Pages 6-7:

The Latest Italian Romance: Gondoliers for Obama