we apologize to our gentle readers

Forgive us for being off line for a week. Not to make excuses, but the school work has been nearly killing us!

Faithful readers will recall that, in addition to having to study the intricacies of Italian grammar, with its prepositions, pronouns, verbs, SEVEN versions of the definite article (all of which just mean “the”, after all) and a vocabulary filled with “false friends” which do not mean what they should (it would be a lot easier if you could just look at “parenti” and figure it meant “parents”, but, no such luck), not only do we have to do ALL THAT, we have to study Italian culture after class!

Normally, this means one Tuesday visit to Bar Manganelli on the Piazza del Campo where we study aperitivo and apericena. We worked hard at this last week, even doing some extra credit work on Wednesday. Either the school didn’t think we had worked hard enough, or maybe they thought we showed a lot of promise, but, anyway, this week they sent us to Bar Manganelli on both Monday AND Tuesday for further studies!

We felt we had mastered Prosecco Manganelli last week (and the weather has cooled off) so we moved on to more advanced study of Tuscan reds. Since we had planned a visit to Montalcino on the weekend, we studied Bar Manganelli’s curriculum on the most famous wine of that region, Brunello di Montalcino. It was hard work, but after the two evenings of diligent study, we felt we had mastered the fundamentals. It is a great wine; we looked forward to further study!

But then, they announced that the Wednesday field trip would include a visit to a Tuscan Vineyard! To study ANOTHER Tuscan wine, Chianti! Tired as we were, we gamely marched on and studied how the wines were madeand the wines themselves. Fortunately, they only made us study five wines, and, with our earlier diligent study, we felt we did well!

But, they weren’t finished with us! On Friday, instead of the usual luncheon at the school, they marched us down the hillto a restaurant outside the walls of Siena, where we studied Italian cuisine as well as Italian wine. The lesson was capped by an excellent violin performance by a young lady with considerable promise.

It was been a tough week, but we worked very hard and felt we were ready for the extracurricular studies of Brunello di Montalcino we had planned for the weekend.