When we were kids Giovanni spent his summers at this end of the street and I lived in the castle at the other end, which I photographed by day:
The weather was actually crap, rainy and gray and about 50 degrees (10C) after the sun went down. Walking the village by night this June reminded me of many long lonely winters I spent in the unheated house:
The family mansion has been empty since I left and it was sold to some businessmen who had grand ideas for the grand structure that they have managed to do absolutely nothing with. There it sits dominating the village and deteriorating as only grand old homes know how. It looks like someone is in the downstairs study, but its just a street light reflected in the glass.
That picture evoked for me the endless winter nights sitting by the fire reading and waiting for the short cold days to pass. It was not a happy time for me. Not many people live in the village, even fewer than when I lived there and nowadays most of them are temporary, the equivalent of snowbirds in Florida. The empty square damp with June's extravagant rainfall I found had all sorts of angles for the camera:
I thought this shot of the village church had something of the Hollywood Mexican about it. Once a year on the feast of St John the Baptist I climbed the tower and helped ring the chime on the big bell:
The village was dedicated to the proposition that grain harvested had to be stored so they built large stone warehouses to pile the stuff into. Just because the buildings had a purpose didn't mean they couldn't be stylish:
And off the main piazza there's a road leading down to the back of the village where a few more hardy souls live, year round.
And of course there is a little shrine in the wall, the sort of shrine one sees anywhere in the world, even Key West. I photographed a similar display one night on Flagler Avenue and published the picture in this blog. Here's the shrine in the wall in Morruzze, taken with a flash:
And speaking of shrines this isn't the only one. The bigger of the shrines is at the entrance to the village, a chapel sized building surrounded by boxwood hedges and live oak trees:
The altar cloth was providing a snug residence for a couple of locals seeking shelter from the unseasonable rains:
My front door looks out on the main piazza and it was for many years my garage door as my first Vespa lived inside the door in a vestibule under the stairs as did all my early mopeds and motorcycles when they were small enough to fit:
Later I took to parking them in the main courtyard under the house, an area I stuck my camera in and fired off a flash. The "new" owners don't seemed to have developed a grasp of what to do with the space. I had the same problem:
Just looking at the pictures makes me miss my snug little 800 square foot berth on a canal in the Lower keys. Less is best, it turns out.
Both my sisters continue to live in large converted farm houses and both of them complain they are too big and cumbersome. Elizabeth lives in the house in the middle distance:
Her twin Patricia lives in this house that she is planning on renting in the future:
And from here the view across the Tiber valley to Todi, a medieval hill town in the best Italian tradition, full of romance and movie theaters and market days for the desperate peasants stuck in the surrounding countryside. This view was the back drop to my youth:
Architecture, History and Art, and I turned my back on it all. There's a proverb that comes to my mind when people ask, breathlessly why I left. "Those with teeth don't have bread while the people with bread don't have teeth." The bread for my teeth lies in the islands off the tip of Florida, not in the mountains of Umbria. Weird but true.
