Sundays in Umbria

Sundays in Umbria. We’ve spent dozens of them at the villa and it’s safe to say that Sunday is our favorite day of the week. Lazy days. Family days. The day of rest. There is something special about a Sunday in Umbria.

This Sunday we skipped our usual routine of lunch in Bevagna at Simone’s restaurant. After all, we dined there the night before, on the last day of Bevagna’s Mercato del Gaite festival. The excess of wine the previous evening and the fatigue of travel had drained us and called for something a little less energetic and closer to home.

So we lazed around the house, first outside in some shade by the pool and then inside stretched out on one of the couches. Then outside again where the cool breeze took the edge off the bright sun. How could we keep up such a frenetic pace?

The hour for lunch came and nearly went before our group – Suzy and me, Wendy, Homer and his new bride Jocelyn – finally gave up on the idea of picking some vegetables and salads from the garden and decided instead to wander into Cannara for a light lunch at Carlo Magno. When we arrived it was nearly three o’clock, an hour when most restaurants would be turning away customer and preparing for dinner or a siesta. But Danilo, the genial proprietor and Carlo Magno’s chief pizzaiolo, just gave a shrug and told us to make ourselves comfortable. We did so at one of Carlo Magno’s outdoor tables, modernish metal tables under a giant umbrella, with a view toward Cannara’s center. For the next three hours we made ourselves very comfortable, downing a couple of excellent antipasti (tuna carpaccio, a caprese salad and a summertime favorite, panzanella) as well as some excellent pastas. As a rule we have kept mostly to Carlo Magno’s pizzas, which are the best in town, but as is often the case in Italy the pizza oven was not fired up at lunch and so we turned to pastas and secondi for our meal. We were glad we did, particularly Wendy who ordered a new summer offering, a cocoa infused ravioli stuffed with a mixture of ricotta and grapefruit and topped with a citrus cream sauce. It is a dish tailor made for a hot summer afternoon.

It wasn’t until nearly six o’clock when we finally made our way back to the villa. But before leaving Carlo Magno the bells of one of Cannara’s half a dozen or so churches began a slow peal. Hearing church bells in our little village, particularly on a Sunday is not unusual. The slow pace of the ringing, though, had a certain sadness to it and signaled a funeral in town, or at least a memorial service. Shortly after the bells began their slow ringing the townspeople, individually and in small groups began a slow, deliberate walk past the restaurant toward the church that was the source of this beacon. The procession of friends and neighbors continued for nearly a half an hour when the ringing ceased and presumably, the townsfolk said their goodbyes to one of their own.

We returned to the villa and continued the day’s activity of inactivity. And as the sun began to sink toward the hills to our west, bathing distant Perugia in a reddish glow we began bathing our throats with reddish wine, a rich, velvety Montefalco rosso that was the ideal slow wine for this slow, lazy, slightly melancholy day. Later after darkness shrouded our quiet valley we broke out the outdoor movie screen and projector and watched a few episodes of a mind numbing but extremely entertaining American comedy series under the clear skies and bright stars that so inspired St. Francis some eight hundred years ago. Homer and Jocelyn returned from their visit to nearby Spello bearing pizzas from Carlo Magno, which had fired up its pizza oven for the dinner hour and we enjoyed the entertainment, the pizzas and wine and the fresh night air under the stars.