Settling In to Spello

DAY 1

Delivered by the various planes, trains and automobiles to our long-anticipated apartment in Italy’s Spello, Umbria we shook off the residue of the time difference and the labors of travel and walked around. Spello is a hill town in the green heart of Italy — Roman, with later medieval accretions. There are more modern overlays, but those are less apparent; receding behind the more ancient cobblestones, walls and narrow passages. More crowded than we had anticipated — it was, after all, Saturday in the closing weeks of tourist season — we relaxed at our sidewalk table and over a simple lunch let the reality of our surroundings settle in.

We began planning this trip over a year ago — longer than that if you include my near-constant supplications over the past decade to Lori and the gods not to let me die before returning to Italy. We arranged for an apartment over the internet, eventually purchased our flights, and began to dreamily anticipate. Italy has had its problems over the course of its history, but there are good vibes here — a magic that I’m sure exists elsewhere, though perhaps nowhere quite like here. There is a depth, a grounding, a sweeping authenticity that is at once settling and centering, but also stirring and inspiring. There is an affectionate appreciation for the individual — the village flirt, the neighborhood artist, the aspiring poet with a constantly rotating collection of hats — subsumed beneath a more profound reverence for the community ethos within which those individuals, colorful and quiet alike, find place. Symbolically appropriate, then, that on our first full day in Spello we participated in the dedication festivities of a new outdoor public art installation evoked by that very theme: the many and diverse, within the larger and overarching community, as conceived and executed by an American artist who lives with her Italian husband part-time in Spello.

Whatever else we saw in these welcoming first hours and days in Spello — whatever else we ate and touched and dodged and felt — what we heard as the constant soundtrack on the streets and in the piazzas, punctuated by joyful exclamations and cheek kisses, were well-wishes. “Good morning.” “Good breakfast.” “Good Sunday.” “Good afternoon.”

“People here just want to wish you a good everything,” our friends and guides for the day explained.

And somehow we were included in the greetings and the smiles and benedictions. It’s a nice and welcomed contrast to the hyper-competitive, elbow-to-the-front-of-the-line, trash-tweeting, self-interested jostling that has made our home culture such a full-body contact sport. My soul is breathing again. Deeply.

Buon giorno, then. Have a wonderful day