September at La Romita 

The Rome airport is officially called the Fiumicino Airport, now.  I feel its  former name, Leonardo Da Vinci, was far more emblematic of my two week painting holiday in Italy in September 2003.  I am the veteran of many art history courses, and the Italian renaissance and the artists thereof has always been one of my favorite historical periods. I was so excited to be in Italy at last, I even found the Italian road signs saying  Roma, Firenze, or  Napoli thrilling as we left the airport.

                That trip  was a 40^th birthday gift from my mother, and the trip of a lifetime to Italy, one of the consistent top three places in the world I had always wanted to go. I vowed I'd 'never forget' it, but alas, as I began to read over my trip diary, I realized many details were already hazy.  It was an incredible two weeks for many reasons, but what made it so successful  for me was that all the things that can make travel stressful, such as ‘where will we spend tonight, how do we get there, and where/what will we eat? were all taken care of for us each day. Our base was the school where we ate most of our meals.  The day trips, all fascinating, were planned out each day.  It didn’t matter if we were headed to Assisi, Carsulae or Orvieto--every excursion was wonderful.  All we had to do was be ready  by eight a.m. after breakfast when the bus came. We came, we saw, we painted. Oh yes, and we ate.

            Enza Quargnali, the present owner of La Romita was born into a prosperous Roman family in the first half of the twentieth century, and her grandfather had bought the former 16^th century Capuchin Monastery property from the Bishop of Spoleto circa 1870.   Her extended family spent their summers and all of World War II at La Romita. The art school began as a study abroad facility for American art students in college in  1962. Now, the art school is run in five two week sessions for adult art students between April and October each year.

“I always felt sorry for our mule,” Enza said at dinner one night while telling us about her childhood summers at La Romita.  “My aunt always drove the wagon when we fetched our groceries down in Terni, because she was the only one who could make him keep moving  back up the hill to La Romita.”

I could see the mule’s point; even in the bus, it was a respectable climb. Terni, an industrial city, is rather like the Pittsburg of Italy, but once up at La Romita, the beauty and the peace, punctuated with an occasional sheep bleat or rooster crow, were profound. It had an authentic, mostly wonderful funkiness to it.  The place had personality in a way that no hotel can.  The first afternoon there after the long, uncomfortable flight to Rome, I lay down on the narrow single bed in my room for a much needed siesta. Clunk. As a sleeping surface, my bed resembled cotton padded paving stones.  I defy anyone to sleep in that bed and not channel the spirit of bygone penitential Capuchins. The small bedside lamp had  a forty watt bulb which made reading in bed a challenge, but fortunately, by the time I went to bed at night, I was usually tired enough to sleep and sleep hard.  Simply being there was a privilege, so I hardly cared when I had to dump my newly hand washed clothes in the fortunately  clean and empty bidet and rinse them out in small batches in the bathroom sink.  Who cared about that, when we hung them out to dry in the little olive grove behind the dining room? Garments dried on that clothes line smelled of country air, of spruce and olive trees and faintly of smoke rather than boring American clothes dryer.  

It was a strenuous holiday, but we’d been warned about that.  Each morning we were up at seven for breakfast and to prepare for the day’s excursion.  Our meals were eaten family style at the three long scarred wooden tables. We sat in a mismatched series of wooden chairs that were all uncomfortable in their various ways. Each morning we’d have a brief blackout with our breakfast, usually when someone would make themselves some toast without remembering to unplug the coffee maker, first.

              Edmund, the resident manager who saw to all our needs, would go restore the lights.  “We have to be a bit careful with the electricity up here,” he'd remind us when he came back.  “The wiring was installed by Leonardo da Vinci.”

Our art studio was the old monastery chapel, but most of the painting we did was en plein air on our daily excursions. Our group was fourteen women most of whom were from the Washington D.C., Northern Virginia area and students of Margaret Huddy, our La Romita session teacher. On the first evening when we gathered to introduce ourselves, when  I confessed I had signed up for La Romita on the basis of an ad in a watercolor painting magazine, knowing nothing about Margaret as a teacher, all the others thought I’d made a great leap of  faith.  Not all art teachers were created equal; while Margaret believed in getting out and seeing the Italian countryside in order to paint it, veteran La Romitans had not always been so lucky. An infamous former teacher during a previous session attended by another member of our group, had grudgingly authorized "sketching trips" around and about, but most artwork on that trip had been done in the chapel turned studio.

            “Don’t drink too much coffee,” Margaret warned us at breakfast every morning.  “Nothing worse than having to interrupt your  painting to have to go find a bathroom in a small town.”  Small wonder that ‘dové il bagno?’ (where is the bathroom?) was the first Italian phrase most of  us learned and remembered because we had to use it daily. 

            After breakfast, we’d be off for our daily dose of painting and sightseeing. The half day trips were usually devoted to painting in small towns near Terni, while the excursions to Assisi, Perugia, Villa Lante and Orvieto were all day affairs, during which we were responsible for our own meals.

Margaret would often do a painting demonstration for us first thing off the bus at our location of the day, then shoo us off to scout out painting sites like a reverse shepherd.  “Do not aspire to masterpieces” was the last piece of advice she gave us before warning us to meet up at noon to catch the bus. Sure enough, the smaller   paintings that I did on that trip were all far more successful than my ambitious attempts at full page paintings. But no matter what the success of my paintings on any given day at La Romita, at some point I had this amazing realization; ‘I’m really here, painting in Italy! This is so incredibly cool!’

My  most successful painting of the trip

After the morning’s painting, depending on when we finished, we’d return to the ubiquitous Piazza Communale to purchase a cappuccino from the ubiquitous coffee bar, thus beginning my love affair with cappuccinos that endured long after that trip. My love of Gelato dates from the same time, and we all put away a lot of it in those two weeks. On the first day at San Gemini, while we waited for the bus, we watched the conclusion of a wedding as the bride and bridegroom emerged from the old stone church across the piazza and were driven off in a cream Rolls-Royce, the ubiquitous Italian 'wedding car', to the cheers and good wishes of their fellow townspeople.   

Margaret, who had done her days' painting in the Piazza Communale, reported how  everyone had been on hand an hour earlier to see the bride arrive at the church, and then had dispersed as soon as she'd gone in.

   "Everyone must know exactly how long their priest takes with the weddings in this town," she told us.  "They all started coming back for the send off about ten minutes ago."    

            When we came back to La Romita for lunch hungry after our morning in the open air, we’d all fall on the food as if it were our first meal in a month. It was the most wonderful Italian home cooking; never elegant, but always abundant and delicious with a different form of homemade pasta every day. We chased our food down with quantities of  red or white vino di tavola poured from beautiful ceramic pitchers from Deruta. (I loved those pitchers so much, I purchased one of my own; it made my suitcase very heavy.) Our group was the most  enthusiastic that year  in our consumption of wine at each meal and we would purchase bottles on our  daily expeditions to be stored in the studio refrigerator. Edmund also told us we were one of the jolliest, most mellow groups of 2003.

         After lunch, we were free to write postcards, do laundry, take a siesta or a shower (with 4 showers and 16 people, rotating showers  was a necessity), or continue working in the studio to put finishing touches on the morning’s  painting, or scout out painting spots around La Romita itself, of which there were plenty. Around sunset each evening, we’d gather in the courtyard and pour ourselves a mug of wine from our personal stashes in the studio refrigerator then sit and socialize while we waited for the dinner bell.  Then we’d go in and consume our dinners with ravenous eagerness all over  again. 

         Spoleto was a little baroque gem of a city except for their gothic Duomo (cathedral), and the bits of Roman antiquity showing in the amphitheater.  I bought a little green glass pen in Spoleto that was so beautiful, I simply had to have it, although I haven’t yet mastered the technique of writing with it easily. I loved Assisi also, despite its abundance of tacky little tourist shops. The town, full of lovely gothic stonework including the  Basilica of Saint Francis, is built of rosy-pink Monte Subiaso stone, with some white and grayish lavender accents. Many houses had little periwinkle blue shutters, and almost every house and building had it’s red clay tile roof. The colors of Assisi were so beautiful and subtle, it hardly mattered that we were there on an overcast day.       

 Drinks in the Back Garden before Dinner

        The interior of the Basilica of Saint Francis is beautiful but not subtle: the bright Giotto and Cimabue frescoes depicting the life of Saint Francis cover the walls from floor to ceiling, and it’s hard to know where to look first. You cannot exclaim over them, though; real live Franciscan monks in actual monastic  habits circulate  through the church muttering  “fate silenzio!” at unwary tourists who  speak too loudly on holy ground. The ceiling directly above the altar area still shows signs of the damage caused by the earthquake of 1995:  these days, Italy is intensely protective of its cathedrals, and the historic significance of Saint Francis’ Basilica is such that only period art materials that match the original medieval fresco colors may be used, some of which are no longer available. The Chapel of Santa Chiara (Clara), a disciple of Saint Francis’ did not fare so well; originally, it had frescoes to rival that of Saint Francis, until some absolute military idiot scraped them all off the walls in the 16^th century.  The frescoes at Saint Francis’ Basilica which were damaged by the earthquake are being pieced back together in Rome; a task on the order of putting Humpty-Dumpty back together a thousand fold.               

Etruscan Gate, Perugia

   Except for our day at Villa Lante, our full day excursions were more for sight seeing than  painting.  A pity, especially on the day we spent in Perugia.  We went to a museum in the morning of our visit to Perugia,  most of the paintings in which appeared dedicated to the Crucifixions.  I still think of it as “The Crucifixion Museum” although they did have some Nativity scenes and Madonna entrono col Bambinos for a little variety. As another member of our group remarked it really covered the highs and lows in the life of  Christ,   especially   the medieval paintings which left very little to the imagination.  In retrospect, I would far rather have spent my morning painting the old Etruscan Gate of Perugia, but I used up the last of my film on a photo of it.  Orvieto has a wonderful gothic cathedral, although the Western portico was covered with scaffolding. Italians are very strict about no photography inside their cathedrals, or I would have photographed the Orvieto Duomo extensively.  The light inside is this warm, golden color as the window panes are thin slabs of alabaster.  

            Only the die-hards went out on our last day’s painting excursion to Stroncone; I was painting the church tower, where I was joined by several townswomen all smoking like factories, but very friendly, as I had found most Italians on that trip.

            “Ah, bella, bella,” they murmured, seeing my nearly finished painting. “Va a lavoro.”

            I spent my last day in Italy in Rome, having a few hours to kill before my evening flight. I can attest that the view from the top of the Spanish Steps is spectacular, as I not only saw them but climbed them. After climbing down, I chanced on a lovely, shady little piazza off the larger Piazza di Spagna and sat on a bench there, massively grateful for my refuge and the chance to sit still in the shade without having to converse. A large dog lay on the cobblestones near his mistresses' bench a few feet away, looking as exhausted as I felt right then.  I both was and was not ready to go home, as the cumulative exhaustion of the trip hit me.  But my Roman wanderings had taken me from the Piazza Navona past the Pantheon and the Trevi Fountain. If coins tossed into that fountain still mean anything, I’ll go back to Italy. After all, there's still so much of it left to see.