Sunday, our group’s first full day in Umbria, lived up to its being a Sunday. For Sunday’s are a special day in Umbria as they are throughout Italy.

What’s so special about Sundays? Or at least what was so special about our Sunday?

It wasn’t simply the visit to the Luchetti family farm, a place of peace and serenity where nature takes center stage. Where chianina cows are raised and cinta Sienese pigs are fattened. A place where a 25 year old toils with the patience of a senior twice his age, cleaning and salting fat legs of pigs for their yearlong journey of becoming prosciutto.

It wasn’t simply the opportunity to share the day with another food and wine tour group from the other Washington (this one Bellingham), with our friend Jennifer McIlvaine acting as the glue that connected our group and hers. Although it was special to watch our guests bond immediately with their counterparts. Food and Italy have have a way of forging those bonds.

It wasn’t simply the blue skies and unusually hot “fall” weather.

It wasn’t simply the visit to Alma and Dino’s tidy farm, just around the corner from our farmhouse, just another patch of farmland that makes up a single quilt square on the countryside that is one enormous quilt of farms. But what a patch the calloused couple has created. Fields of lettuces, fennel, asparagus, broccoli, cauliflower laid out in neat, tidy, fertile, bountiful rows, each one bursting with life. Truly bursting with life. Here you feel that farming is not so much work as it is a gift. To be the keeper, the custodian of these fields is hard work, no doubt, but in the joyous faces of Alma and Dino you can read that it a labor of love and contentment.

It wasn’t simply the meal, an hours long Sunday kind of leisurely feast set around a table twenty feet long and shaded with the retractable umbrella built into the couple’s mobile farmstand truck. A feast prepared by Jennifer and her former boss and everyone’s friend Salvatore Denaro. Salvatore, the notorious, noteworthy, noted chef, gardener, media personality. Salvatore, an imp and an impresario. Each dish passed around with a smile and a twinkle, each glass filled with a rousing chorus of “Vino, Vino, Vino.” Each occupant at the table feeling as though he or she was the special guest of honor.

It wasn’t simply having Jennifer and her husband Federico and their two adorable children steal the show and our hearts. Federico coaxing the infant Gabrielle to ham it up with the three liter wine bottle from Federico’s winery while his protective sister Olivia watched over the scene to keep him from any harm or too much embarrassment.

It wasn’t anything in particular that made this or any Sunday in Umbria special. It was all of it. For on Sundays in Italy it is not just family and friends that take center stage. It is life and love that is invited in, not just for a quick visit, but for a long, lingering sojourn.

I fear that by inviting ourselves into their world we may some day change and diminish – tarnish – that which is truly special in Umbria. Things like Sundays. My hope is that Umbria changes us first. Let’s hope that sometime in the near future, back in Washington, DC or Bellingham, Washington on a Sunday afternoon, while enjoying lunch al fresco with your family you, too, may hear drifting on the winds the refrain “Vino, Vino, Vino.”

Ci vediamo!
Bill and Suzy