Blind Date

Ciana-Carlo, the owner of the local market wanted to play matchmaker with me so this morning at the very early hour of 7:30 (I only ever awoke this early for high school, crew practice, and training rides), he drove me to a small town nearby to meet a 40-ish guy who owned a market there. We had coffee together, four of us, and then CC left me in the market for a few minutes to chat with this local fellow. In ten minutes, I learned that he was born in Città della Pieve, had lived in Torino, and had just opened his market a month ago. He just moved two months ago to a tiny village where there are only ten houses, twenty denizens, and one tower, in which there lived an Australian, American, and German (I think). The American once worked for Coca Cola, his father recently passed away and left him with a lot of real estate in Manhattan, and he was renting a car for a year to travel throughout Italy. After all this, I figured out that heck, I really do understand Italian. Before we left, CC made plans for a bunch of us to go out and have pizza together. A second group date?

After picking up his daily purchases, CC and I stopped in the back kitchen of the bakery in town where an adorable older Italian named Lello makes all the bread we eat. Cool to see.

Since I was up early and the weather stopped being disgusting (schifosi), I actually watched the sun cross the plain from my back terrace. It was so clear out – after ten days of rain – that not only could I see my mountains again, I could even see the snow on top. After an hour of caramelizing onions for my French onion soup, I spent as much of the afternoon as possible out on the terrace, a relief from the indoors.