Friends in Foreign Places

One of the things that please me the most about these travels of ours is that we know people in France and Italy and England with whom we can visit. We have friends. It makes a significant difference to me that we are not exclusively tourists visiting cultural sites and restaurants, but that we can spend time--a minority of our time, surely, but still some of our time--with locals, talking about their lives and ours, and keeping up relationships over sometimes quite long periods of time. (Language study also differentiates us from many tourists.)

Thus in Florence we spent one evening with Vicky, Jeff and little Celeste, and had a lunch with Aldo; I had an afternoon coffee with Niccolò, who was my teacher at la Scuola Leonardo three years ago. These little visits give us such pleasure. At la Scuola Leonardo, as I've mentioned, we were greeted enthusiastically by two members of the staff. (I also inquired about a teacher I spent many weeks with in two or three past years, but he has retired following an injury, otherwise he would most likely have kept on teaching forever.) I didn't manage, or remember in time, to get pictures taken of any of these encounters.

When we transferred yesterday to Siena, we had the opportunity to cross paths with Alessandro, a relative by marriage. He is from Milan but lives in America, and he and his wife (my stepsister) have been visiting relatives in Italy; she's now in England working on a book. He was in transit from one place to another and it worked out fortuitously that he could detour to visit us in Siena, and that we have a spare bedroom he could stay in. We had a really nice visit for almost 24 hours, and I did manage to take a picture this time.

Then today we had a little visit with our friends Tim and Karen, whose daughter is studying in Siena this semester, and this week their itinerary and ours happened to coincide. They have rented a lovely apartment with a roof terrace overlooking the city in all directions. And again we got a picture!