Italy 2014 Day 04 – Thursday 23 October

I Pellegrini 
(Photo provided by Rick Johnson, taken by Alexis Darbonne)
(Larger at bottom with key)

[Well, from the lateness of this post you can see that my ambition of “live-blogging” this trip with daily updates ended up being a bust.  As I’ve mentioned already, one of the trade-offs of being part of a packaged trip like this and thus not having to worry about arrangements and so forth, just be where they said when they said – and this trip went off virtually flawlessly in that respect – is being on someone else’s schedule, and they drove us pretty hard.  It had to be that way, I understand, to get in all the things we wanted to do.  But by the end of each day mental as well as bodily weariness made it virtually impossible to think coherent thoughts much less compose an extended narrative.  A substantial three-course dinner, with wine, did not help the cause of blogging.  I did good to get notes jotted down in my pocket journal.  So I’m actually “back-writing” this – on the plane, just out of Rome, on the morning of Wednesday 29 October, just out of Italian air-space over the south of France!  Nevertheless, I’m going to write each day’s entry as if I were more timely … as I wanted to be!]