Another full day. We need a vacation!

We start our day after a quick breakfast with a journey from Perugia to Todi, one of the countless beautiful ancient hilltop towns that dot the Umbrian countryside, in order to meet Andrew and Kimberly Sikora, a couple of Americans who have emigrated to Italy to follow a number of passions and dreams. Our objective is to get to know them and learn about their businesses, which include upscale villa rentals in Umbria and a host of services and support for villa vacationers, as well as organizing cooking classes with celebrity chefs such as Patrizia Chen and placing candidates in cooking, wine tasting and oil tasting courses at the local Academia del Gusto. It promises to be an interesting meeting and we hope to come out of it with resources to offer our customers.

We meet Andrew and Kimberly across from the Bramante church of Santa Maria delle Consolazione, an impressive structure just outside the city walls, and they cannot be more fascinating, friendly or engaging. We discuss their portfolio of upscale villas located throughout Umbria and, shortly, Tuscany and other regions. Their goal is to offer not only great rental properties, but a range of appealing activities and support services to ensure their customers have a truly unique and memorable Italian vacation. We leave with a host if ideas about how we can work together.

We also leave with their recommendation for a place to have lunch. We follow them to a municipal parking lot below the city walls that is reached by a contraption that is half elevator, half funiculare; basically an elevator that goes up a hill, rather than up a shaft. Upon entering the lot a machine dispenses a green plastic chip, a little larger than a bottle cap. This is turned into the cashier (Cassa) upon your departure, whereupon the cashier reads data stored in a microchip inside the chip indicating the time you entered the lot. He charges you for the elapsed time and gives you back the chip, which you insert in the slot at the exit gate. These Italians think of everything!

We spend not nearly enough time wandering to the center of this very accessible town, reaching the central square for some photos. Along the way, we stop at a pasticceria for an assortment of outstanding cookies and treats, including one that is cup-shaped, made from a soft almond brittle, filled with caramel and chocolate covered coffee beans. (Bar Pasticceria Ciucci, via Mazzini 20).

We are the only lunch patrons at Pane e Vino (Via Augusto Ciuffelli, 33, tel. 075-8945448; closed Wednesday), located just inside the city walls from our parking lot (and the funiculare). The menu features traditional Umbrian fare and we decide to try the menu degustazione, the fixed price tasting menu, which features a choice of 6 appetizers, 2 pastas, 2 entrees and 3 desserts. After informing the waiter of our selection we begin to select which of the appetizers, pastas and entrees we want. We are told no choice is neccessary. The menu degustazione comes with all choices.

Several hours later we emerge from Pane e Vino, sated, sleepy and swollen. We head back toward Deruta to transact some last minute business, stopping along the way to check out a few cashmere outlets that this region is famous for. Of note are Maria di Ripabianca in the town of Ripabianca, between Todi and Deruta, IMA in Torgiano (there are a number of other terrific sites in Torgiano, the seat of the Lungarotti wine family’s farflung operations) and Pashmere in Ponte San Giovanni. These outlets feature terrific quality products, with an acceptable range of styles and sizes. You may not always find what you are looking for (and even heavily discounted items, e.g., 50% off, can still be quite expensive), but it is definitely worth a try.

We make a brief stop in Ponte San Giovanni to check out Javier’s new patterns and to add a few additional items to our order, which is being shipped to Bethesda tomorrow. He continues to impress us with the quality of his work and the beauty of his portfolio of designs.

After catching up on paperwork at the hotel, Javier and Marina meet us at the Sangallo Palace Hotel for a last night dinner. Rather than walk to the historic center, Javier is convinced we can find parking (you should note that the center is off limits to automobile traffic certain times of the day, including after 2am; while many Italians scoff at these restrictions cameras will photograph your license plates and a ticket will be sent to your rental car company, which will charge your credit card for any fines you receive). What ensues is a 15 minute drive up, down and around the narrowest, windiest and, given the cold weather which has resulted in a mixture of rain, sleet and snow for the past several days, slickest roads in the western hemisphere. It is like a ride at Disney World, except you really can die! It is great fun and, literally, to die for.

We finally find a parking space in a municipal lot hundreds of feet below the Corso Vannucci. We take an elevator to terra firma literally a five minute walk from where we began. We are only a few minutes from our destination, the Ristorante Victoria.

Being responsible parents of 4, Javier and Marina rarely dine in Perugia these days, after both having been to university here. The Victoria is a recommendation from a friend and the food couldn’t be better. Strangely, however, the lone waiter is totally uninterested in providing us basic service, such as water, food or the bill, perhaps because the four of us speak English the entire evening. Nonetheless, it is a perfect finale to a perfect Umbrian visit. All that remains is to pack up tomorrow morning and, if we are lucky, get a brief walking tour of Perugia before heading back to Rome’s Fiumicino airport and our flight to Palermo, Sicily.

For local Umbrian wines by the bottle, check out the Enoteca Provinciale di Perugia (via Ulisse Rocchi n. 18, tel: 075-5724824). They have a huge selection of wines from Montefalco, Torgiano, Assisi and throughout the region and they appreciate Americans who are interested in their goods.]

Day 3 starts a little later than usual, as we adjust to the new time zone. After making a few morning telephone calls we take a brief stroll down Perugia’s Corso Vanucci, the main street in the historic center. We really love Perugia. It’s one of our favorite places in Italy, but despite its accessibility and all it has to offer, it is often overlooked by American tourists. We are really excited when our friend and supplier Javier Casuso (D’Arna Ceramics) arranges for an English speaking friend to take us on a walking tour of the historic center on Wednesday. Check back for more details.

After noon we pick up Javier at his studio in Ponte San Giovanni, a small town about 10 miles outside of Perugia, to have lunch together at the Deco Hotel. We have gotten to be good friends with Javier and his wife Marina over the years, and we often have lunch or dinner with them at the Deco Hotel. This place is off the beaten tourist path, serving meals mostly to local businessmen. With Javier’s entree, we are always welcomed warmly and have never had a bad meal. They feature an excellent selection of seafood, which may seem odd for an Umbrian restuarant. Nonetheless, the quality is outstanding.

Lunch is a largely social affair and we are fortunate to have Marina drop in on us at the end of the meal. We enjoy their company immensely, as Javier is a Spaniard who emigrated to Perugia and can speak eloquently about his art as well as about Italian life from an outsider’s perspective. On the other hand, Marina’s roots in Perugia are deep. We enjoy learning about Italy and their corner of it, and spend countless hours comparing stories about raising four children in Washington and Perugia.

We part after lunch with a promise to drop by the studio to see several new ceramic patterns Javier has been working on. We hope to add some of these to our product line.

Then it is off to Ficola, one of the largest ceramics establishments in Deruta. We spend quite a bit of time there selecting new product for the store, including a number of outdoor ceramic tables and outdoor handpainted garden urns for the spring. While we can special order these items, they can take several months to be manufactured and delivered, so if you are interested in one, stop by the store to see what we have in inventory.

Next, it’s on to Geribi, one of our favorite suppliers in Deruta. Although we have an appointment with Josephine Durkin, Geribi’s Kiwi business manager, we are fortunate to see Gerardo. He is an immensely talented man whose designs, which are modern interpretations of classic patterns, have brought new life to Deruta ceramics and who is a respected and oft-imitated leader in this artistic community. Gerardo is finalizing some new designs to be publicly displayed at a major gift expo in New York and he and Josephine give us an advance look at some of those designs. If you miss the New York expo, be sure to check Bella Italia this spring for their new line!

Although Josephine is busy preparing to leave for the show, she takes us to meet the proprietors of le Case Coloniche, a beautiful agroturismo bed and breakfast inn in the countryside just outside of Deruta. We spend an hour with Francesco and Andrea, the proprietors, getting a tour of the facilities and speaking to them about activities available to their guests, including horseback riding, tours of Perugia, Assisi and other sites, visits to the Perugina chocolate factory and, of course, ceramics shopping in Deruta as well as cashmere outlet shopping in nearby towns. The Case Coloniche is a terrific choice between a hotel and a rental villa, offering many of the amenities of the former with the rustic charm of the latter. They also offer much greater flexibility than most villa rentals, which normally require a weeklong booking and accommodate larger groups only. Rooms at the Case Coloniche (which include simple bedrooms as well as multi-bedroom apartments with kitchen) can be booked by the day for a single traveller, but can also accommodate larger groups as well. Please feel free to contact us if you are interested in further information.

We end our evening at dinner at Il Rustichello, a charming Umbrian restaurant adjoining Le Case Coloniche. Josephine knows the proprietors well and we are treated traditional Umbrian fare, including a lot of truffles, served by the mother, father, son and daughter who run the Rustichello (Uscita Deruta Nord, tel 075-972020; closed Tuesdays). Guests at Le Case Coloniche can dine here both well and affordably and stumble home for a good night sleep.

Speaking of which, it is nearly 2:30 in the morning in Italy and we have an 11am appointment with some very interesting people in Todi tomorrow morning, so you will have to check in tomorrow for additional news.

Ciao a presto!
Suzy and Bill

We depart National Airport for Philadelphia where we board a nonstop US Air flight to Rome. We arrive early Sunday morning in Rome after a surprisingly good night sleep, having recently adopted a transatlantic strategy of trying to drop off to sleep as soon as possible. This seems to buy us about 4 or 5 hours of activity upon arrival until the drowsiness begins to set in.

We pick up our rental car from Avis (booked through Autoeurope, which seems to have consistently better rates than what the majors themselves offer, although that price advantage has seemed to diminish over the past several years) and head toward our evening’s destination – Perugia, the capital of Umbria, situated about two hours north of Rome, off the A1 autostrada. We decide to head to Orvieto, a beautiful hill town about an hour and a quarter north of Rome, for some sightseeing and lunch. This part of Italy is much less crowded with tourists at this time year, but perhaps that is for a reason – it is cold, gray and snowing and our warmest clothes were packed securely in the bottoms of our suitcases.

Strangely, we are not the only distinguished American visitors in Orvieto today – when we arrive at the main piazza we find it teaming with Italian police and a host of American Secret Service agents, who are arranging for a visit by Vice President Cheney. We wait in the snow for nearly two hours to get some video of him arriving, stills of which we are posting on the website. We’re not sure whether to attribute the DC license plates on the motorcade vehicles to jetlag or déjà vu, but we can confidently say we have never seen DC plates in Italy before, and probably won’t ever again.

Unfortunately for the Italian press contingent, who have been ordered to stand behind barriers for two hours and who have been subjected to at least two searches (one from a very unfriendly looking german shepard) they get nowhere near the Veep. Perhaps we can interest Corriere della Sera or La Repubblica in some of our photos!

Cheney’s first stop is at an impressive ceramics store that honestly is remiscent of Bella Italia (regardless of your political views, you must admit Cheney knows a good thing when he sees it). Upon leaving the store we immediately go in to see what he liked and whether he bought anything. The owner, still beaming from 43.5’s visit replies “si” (“yes”), but when pressed admits that while Cheney liked everything, he needed to check out the goods in a couple of other stores before deciding what to buy. Feeling a certain bond with our Italian peers we decide that when both the Vice President and we return home to DC, we’ll invite him to Bella Italia to close the deal!

We thaw out over lunch at a simple, yet heated establishment called La Buca di Bacco (Corso Cavour, 299/301, Orvieto, tel: 0763-344792, closed Tuesday), enjoying an appetizer of assorted Umbrian hams and sausages, followed by an Argentinian Angus steak covered with a mushroom truffle sauce and arucola and a wild boar stew with polenta. Comfort food that warms the heart, as well as frozen toes and fingers.

Then onward to Perugia, one of our favorite towns. We arrive at the Hotel Sangallo, a modern-ish hotel in a favored position just below the main historic square of Perugia. The square is accessed by a series of escalators running through a network of ancient tunnels that run through the town. You exit the escalator in the basement of an ancient palace and work your way through a maze of catacombs until you emerge on Corso Vanucci. We hope to take a walking tour of the center of Perugia on Wednesday to learn more about its history and architecture.

That’s all for now. We’re off for a quick bite to eat and then to bed. Tomorrow we see our good friend Javier Casuso (proprietor of D’Arna Ceramics) and Josephine Durkin, business manager at Geribi Ceramics who is also introducing us to some cousins of the Lungarotti wine family, who run a beautiful bed and breakfast as well as a number of specialty tours of Umbria.

Ciao a presto!
Suzy and Bill