Italia Blog Dump: Pitigliano

Written on June 17 tuesday

It’s actually 2am June 18 wednesday but whatever. So today was Pitigliano day, my research day. The previous night, Azmina, Derek Yoshi and I spent the evening planning for the trip today and translating questions etc. It was mostly Azmina doing all the work so thanks Azmina! I was pretty useless but I’ll put in my hours when presentation comes along.

So we started the early early 7am roll call in the 2 cars on our way to Tarquinia, an old Etruscan tomb site where you can go down steps and see what these tombs are like. They mostly look like little carved out rooms with faded paintings on the wall. One of them had group sex with a guy with a whip, woman bending over in front of him and sucking on the guy in front of her. Oh those kinky etruscans. The views all around are amazing and I’m still not sick of looking over the hilltop into the next town yonder.

Our next stop was the Saturnia hot spring thermal baths. I did not want to expose my leper-like sunburn to the world which I deeply regretted. It looked like so much fun and there are so many other fat, old and wrinkly people out there. Derek, Yoshi and April didn’t go in to for different reasons. I spent my nice sit down eating sandwiches talking about how bad/hot people look with Derek and taking super duper zoomed in shots of hairy, fat people in Karen’s camera. Her boobs are huge and I also took a nice macro shot of them.

Our last stop was Pitigliano. I was pretty beat when we got there, falling asleep in the car (contract!). We walked up a bit on the Vie Cave, a series of carved out pathways starting from the top of the hilltown to the bottom. After that, my team gathered the troops and distributed the work to everyone. Pitigliano was really fun and exciting, a real hilltown totally not catered to tourists (although after interviewing a few people, tourism seems to be the biggest earner of the town). The streets were narrow and winding, going up and down stairs getting to places. People were really friendly and me, Azmina and Brad even got to enter an old man’s vacation house and drink free aranciata! Score! How exciting. Derek and Yoshi managed to find a bunch of young artists to talk installation art with and ask about the rest of the town. Old people everywhere.

We had dinner in a fancy restaurant with really amazing food. Rus ordered antipasto for everyone which totally ruled. Pitigliano Bianco is really good and I had a few glasses of that to go with my super awesome Stinco di Maiale (leg of pork). So good. I can’t explain how succulent that dead animal part was. Murray had wild boar pasta and we split. I was pretty tipsy and really fucking full after all that food and wine but I just couldn’t resist some tiramisu. Heaven.

October 22nd, 2008

Entry Filed under: Italia