Pbenjay's Blog

Time waits for no one and as my time with Joel and in Guardia winds down,

The Days Are Flying By!

Sunday morning I have my own Guardia  ritual which is what most of the town does;  I get up, get dressed, grab my shopping bag and go to the open air farmer’s market.  I love it! This week I didn’t buy much because we are leaving.  I bought some oranges, bananas, tomatoes and olives.  I still had not used the fava beans  or fennel I bought last week.  Tonight for sure it would be orrichiette with fava beans and onions;  You cannot imagine how good that tastes and you will never find it in an Italian restaurant  in the USA.

Joel took me out driving so I could get over my fear of driving this Fiat 500L in Italy.  He is seriously and sincerely concerned about me driving from Campania to Abruzzo by myself. He’s concerned! I’m a wreck.  We try for a destination where I will follow the GPS. Sounds like a plan.  I was doing fine until I didn’t see the red light in Telese because the rear mirror in the Fiat blocked my view and the lights were on a pole that was about 6 ‘ tall on the side of the road.

Once I was out of town things went much smoother until she ( the gps) said to turn right after 300 meters. First of all if she is going to speak English, then why is does she speak in meters, I don’t know how far 300 meters is so I passed the turn.  So I turned around and made the turn. BAD MOVE! Within 50 yards I had a white gate with a flashing red light in front of me. Is it possible there is train here?  Two seconds later, the arm goes up and over the rise, two cars come barreling down straight at us.  “Move to the right” , Joel yells. I do and go up,over the small rise and immediately I came nose to nose with another car. I jerked the car off the road a bit, stopped, put it in neutral, and said I’m done.

You can guess where this is going…. we ended up on a road ( more like a path) wide enough only for one car literally. A car came at us, the woman pulled her car into a side shallow ditch, I kid you not, we drove on.  Joel was furiouL,s with the GPS and launched into a litany of how he would be a nervous wreck thinking about me while I was driving across Italy to Abruzzo with the GPS.  The next car that came toward us forced us up the side of the road.  That did it. Joel was really yelling about the insanity of following directions from this maniacal mechanical voice!  I just prayed we could go ahead, no more cars would come by and surely this road would end in some area of civilization ( since those cars had to come from somewhere). Yes it did….

Now that we were actually out of the woods I re-programmed the GPS (again) for our destination of Saint Agata Di Goti. For some reason we’re still 4 kilometers away.  Once we got into the really beautiful old village and parked the car, we were struck by its cleanliness, quaintness and charm.  People young and old were riding bicycles, eating gelato, sitting and talking.

The following photos are just a few of my impressions of Saint Agata di Goti.

I loved the character etched into this man’s face and posture

You can always find a few women sitting and talking in every village

A long view of the steeple

It’s pronounced
Cheen in ma! right Joel?

Wherever you look the streets are paved with these stones and yet another church.

Oh look our mayor is campaigning in Italy! Hey Bill there are no electoral votes there.

By the time we walked around it was getting dark and Joel had spotted a restaurant that looked inviting so we decided to eat in this charming village.  He ordered a pizza Bolognese thinking it would have some red sauce on it – thinking was the key word here because nowhere in the description was the word pommodori.  It was a pizza with slices of mortadella on it and dabs of pistachio purée.  Live and learn or at least ask mom to translate for you!

To be continued…