h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Ah, you silly Americans! You actually expected tomatoes and spinach to be canned?

Italy has great vegetables, and they are much cheaper than vegetables in the US are. When I stayed in Firenze for my Italian course I would often buy ingredients and cook my own food.

Actually, thinking about it, I have no idea _why_ vegetables are so expensive in the US. I mean, the country is big enough and has a varied enough climate to grow pretty much anything, it's not like they have to import it from far away.

And yet, a lot of stuff *is* imported, even if you live in California's Central Valley, which is supposed to be a darn fertile place

Here's the next instalment in my critique of the tour:

I had a few hours to kill before our evening concert, so I asked the concierge if the hotel had a laundry. The answer was no, but he helpfully told of a Laundromat not far away, across from a Farmacia. Naturally, it would have to be at the bottom of the hill. So, I walked down the hill (again) with a bundle of laundry, spent 8 Euros getting it washed, and walked back up the hill to hang it up in my room. Happily, by now the tour organizers had rounded up a shuttle bus to take us down the hill, and thence to the Chiesa Valdese di Roma (Valdesian Church of Rome) for the first concert of our tour.

We rehearsed in the church. Things went well. We walked a block or two to a restaurant for our supper. Service was leisurely, meaning a lengthy wait for the salad course, and another lengthy wait for the pasta course, which turned out to be lasagna.

Our schedule was tight, and we had to leave before the tiramisu arrived. Then, back to the church, where we changed into our concert attire (black tuxedo pants, white shirts, black ties, and cummerbunds for the men, black skirts and white blouses for the women). Our audience was not large, but our 9 nonsinging members helped to make it seem larger. There were also a couple dozen people who were waiting for a bus in front of the church. They listened at the back of the church for quite a while, until their bus arrived.

The Valdesian is one of the few Protestant churches in Rome. It has stained glass windows arranged in three levels along the side walls of the sanctuary. The ceiling overhead is flat, not vaulted, giving the interior a boxy shape, not unlike Boston's Symphony Hall.

Sunday, July 8, 2007

For some of us, singing for a Catholic Mass at Saint Peter's Basilica was the most anticipated part of the tour. We were scheduled for a 12:15 p.m. Mass today, which meant being on the bus by 9:15 a.m., so we could drive to the Vatican parking garage and stand in the hot sun until being admitted at 10:30. The line we were in was long and slow-moving. We had been told that Vatican security was extremely strict. Bring nothing but your music, we were told. Not even money. Not even our hotel room keys.

The immensity of Saint Peter's does not dawn on you at first. Being intensely focused on the performance we were about to give, we didn't realize that five other Masses would be going on in other parts of the basilica simultaneously. During the Mass (which was conducted in Italian), I didn't understand more than 5% of what the priest was saying. A Vatican organist gave our conductor the cues to stand up and sing. We sang two American traditional hymns ("Amazing Grace" and "Wondrous Love"), Mozart's "Ave Verum," and Vianna's "Exultate Justi"). The Mass ended at 1:05. We filed out, past alcoves and recesses where other services were going on.

Back to the hotel we went to change for the afternoon's excursion to the Borghese Museum. Now that we had shuttle buses to negotiate the hill for us, the hotel didn't seem like such a bad deal. However, the shuttle bus could only carry half of us, so this meant two trips. Our reservation at the Borghese was for 3:00, which meant being back at the bottom of the hill at 2:00. What we gained by the convenience of the shuttle bus, we lost by not having time for lunch.

The Borghese Museum is thought by many to be among the most beautiful museums in the world. It has many paintings depicting the Madonna and Child, a
fitting theme for a group that had sung at Saint Peter's just a few hours earlier.

Unfortunately, art (even great art) does not fill your belly. It took several trips up and down the stairs to find the museum's café. When I did find it, my search was rewarded with a plate of tomato slices and a large mound of mozzarelola cheese, and a few pie-like tarts.

Monday, July 9, 2007

We had been pressed for time at every point of our tour so far, but today seemed the worst ever, as we needed to check out of our hotel, pick up box breakfasts (but no coffee!!) by 6:30 a.m., and be on the bus by 7:00. Then we were off to the Vatican Museums for the morning. Other people were lined up at the front door when we got there. The line seemed to run on for miles. Our reservation was for 8:00 a.m ., and we barely made it.

I was lucky enough to be in Paolo's group again when we began our tour. We were given headphone sets, though mine only worked intermittently.Various rooms held ancient Greek and Roman statues. Further on, we were led through a hallway lined with huge tapestries, and then a room full of period maps. Finally, we arrived in the Sistine Chapel, where we were allowed 30 to spend minutes. Silence was required in the Chapel, but large numbers of people were there, and every so often a rrecorded voice would demand silence in six or seven different languages. The ceiling and walls of the Sistine Chapel are sublime in their depiction of pink and golden flesh against a sky-blue background.

I hated to leave after the 30 minutes were up, but Paolo was required to give us a more in-depth tour of Saint Peter's than we had had the day before. We learned that Saint Peter's is the largest church in Christendom, and that it houses the bodies of earlier popes, plus religious relics, and that it sits atop an earlier church that was built on the spot where Saint Peter was crucified by the Romans.

We said goodbye to Paolo and emerged from Saint Peters. Across the street from the Vatican entrance is the former residence of Pope Paul VI, which has been converted to a gift shop. Around the corner is a self-service restaurant with acceptable coffee and enough food to keep us going until lunch.

We met at the obelisk in Saint Peter's Square, and were led to our bus for the trip to Perugia. We stopped for lunch at a self-service restaurant that straddled the highway.
Our hotel in Perugia is designed with a jazz motif. The lowest level, which houses most of the dining areas, has laid out the design of an enormous piano keyboard on the floor in the Internet room. There are musical notes on the room keys as well as the walls in the guest rooms.

After checking into our hotel, we rode to the center of perugia and had a tour of the square, after which we were turned loose for supper. At the top of the hill in the main square, you can see the mountains in the distance, and several other hill towns a few miles away. Perugia has depended on a wall for most of its history, as have the other towns we saw. The nearest of them had a substantial wall, which the tour guide informed us was the "new wall," built in the 13th century. The "old wall" was put up in the 3 rd century.

The tour guide told us to try some of the local perugian food at restaurants on the Via Rocchi, a narrow, steep road surrounded by stone buildings that had probably been there for centuries, if not millennia. I sat at an outdoor table for bean-and-barley soup and a simple sandwich. (Later, another tour member told me I had chosen a place famous for its food and jazz performances. Who knew?)

Being a hill town, Perugia is laid out on many levels. To facilitate getting around, a series of escalators leads upwards from the bus station. The bus was to pick us up at the station at 9:00 p.m. While we waited, we listened to a free jazz concert at the back of the parking lot.