On Sunday we visited the ruins of a first-century Roman amphitheatre in Gubbio; as young L. studied Roman history in school this fall, the visit was a teachable moment, as well as being fascinating in its own right.

While we pretty much had the site to ourselves, midway through an Italian couple joined us. Which is how I found myself being asked to “scream”: they were up at the top of the theatre, while I was on stage, and they wanted to hear the acoustics (we later learned that she works in a speaker factory).

Lisa had a chat with them, and ended up giving them one of our This Box is for Good boxes. She also extracted from them a recommendation to visit Portonovo if we were thinking of visiting the Adriatic coast.

As it happened, we did decide to visit the Adriatic coast, renting a house 50 m from the sea for two nights here in Numata. And tonight we had supper in Portonovo, at a restaurant called Emilia.

Our restaurant opened its doors back in 1929 with our grandmother: Emilia. Emilia would come down from Poggio to the sea to organize lunches and refreshments for the first tourists in the area, locals from Poggio, Camerano, and Ancona, who loved spending time at the beach. That’s how it all started.

Today the restaurant is managed by Emilia’s granddaughter Federica, and it was Federica who enthusiastically welcomed us to return for a table when we showed up before their 7:30 opening time.

The restaurant is right on the water, and we had a lovely meal of seafood—I had spaghetti with mussels to start, followed by mixed grilled fish; both were excellent.

For dessert I had “pannacotta with dried fig salami,” which knocked my socks off it was so good. I will remember it for a long time.

As we were finishing up, Lisa had the idea that we should leave a This Box is for Good box behind, and while we debated simply leaving it on the table, we decided instead to present it to Federica on the way out.

It was clear that the gesture touched her, and so it touched us. It was also clear that she understood the “refill and pass along” conceit immediately.

A story that started with one box, ended with another.

This box really is for good.

We’re posted up 50 m from the Adriatic, in Numana.

About 280 km across the water in Croatia is where my grandfather was born.

It is warm and, at least today, gloriously sunny.

Since she came out three years ago today, Olivia’s declared May 7th her second birthday. I’m not there to celebrate it with her this year, though she has plenty of people who love her who are there. From afar, I remain enormously proud of her. I love you, Olivia.

Winnie Lim quotes Salman Rushdie, from The Ground Beneath Her Feet:

Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself. Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be. Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter’s tools. Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end.

Reading this, I realize that I’ve spent the four years since my father and Catherine died in succession missing this point: no matter the nature of our relationships, they formed part of my definition of myself, through their own construction of who and how I was.

When they disappeared, I lost that buttress.

It’s both freeing and destabilizing.

While walking through the village of Spello, we just now witnessed a most archetypal Italian scene: a well-dressed man driving an antique Fiat 500 pulled up in front of a perfume store we were standing in front of, rolled down his passenger side window, and shouted to the proprietor; when she came out, he handed her a box of flower petals, and then drove off.

Two nights in a row Lisa and I have been able to steal away for a drink before supper. Last night it was to Bar Jolly here in Gubbio. I took the opportunity to sketch the disused Post-Telegrafi office across the street.

Over on our This Box is for Good website we’ve published a detailed play by play of our experience printing our April box, using Lego, at Grafisch Atelier Hilversum in the Netherlands. 

While the La Festa dei Ceri on May 15 has a well-documented program, figuring out the timing and route of today’s first-Sunday-in-May repositioning event was more challenging, and involved piecing together bits of information from the web and Google Translated conversations.

As it happens, we need not have worried, as it all played out on our doorstep on the Via dei Consoli.

Anything we might have imagined this might have been was an underestimate by a factor of ten: hundreds and hundreds of people jamming the streets, a drum corps, a brass band, singing, and small children riding the ceri bareback up steep cobblestones streets.

We jammed ourselves right into the middle of it, joining the claustrophobic procession up the street to the Piazza Grande where everything culminated in a cacophony, with the ceri being raced around in circles by their bearers and then up the stairs of the Palazzo dei Consoli where they will spend the ten days leading up to the 15th.

It was all, to say the least, an experience.

Watch this video about our Dutch facilitator, teacher, and collaborator Roy Scholten to learn more about his 50 Vogels project. 

We have, by happenstance, ended up in the town of Gubbio the weekend before La Festa dei Ceri, a pageant, held yearly, since the 12th century, on May 15.

The mechanics are difficult to do justice to: there are three large “candles,” which are not candles at all, but rather 300 kg wooden pillars. Atop each gets mounted a figure of one of three saints—St. Ubaldo, St. Anthony, and St. George.

Tomorrow morning, in a sort of festival pre-show, the candles are brought down the mountain from the Basilica, where they spend the off-season.

On the 15th, the scene is described like this on the sign we encountered today:

The culminating part of the festival is reached in the late afternoon, when begins a frantic rush that runs through the city and then goes up to the slopes of Mount Ingino bringing back the Ceri in the Basilica, where they will remain until the first Sunday of May of the next year.

The town is currently being festooned with banners; they hang from almost every window.
There are three different banners, one for each of the three saints: red and yellow for St. Ubaldo; red and azure for St. George; red and black for St. Anthony.

We took a “birdcage”—a precarious-seeming standing chairlift—up Mount Ingino this afternoon to visit the candles ourselves. Tomorrow, for, what, the 800-and-somethingth time, they’ll be the centre of everything; today, they were just sitting alone by themselves in a corner of the Basilica.

It’s all rather weird and wonderful to be amidst.