Day #72 in Orvieto

May 5, 2013 – Friday

The halfway mark of two months in Orvieto seemed to be close to the end and there was a feeling of panic as if we would soon return home. But at the same time… there were still two months left. And even at the “one and a half month” mark on this Sunday, it still feels like a long time between now and when I return home. After a long morning of running, grocery shopping, making lunch, and reading Purgatorio, Becky and I were hanging out in our room, talking about how weird it was to be freaking out at the two month mark and now it’s two weeks later. And a month and a half seems like forever right now. With the last travel weekend approaching and we’re preparing for final exams for our third class, the definition of time has been warped and we’re consumed with thoughts of what we might regret once we’re home. Should we spend money to travel on the weekends? Should we stay in Orvieto because it’s already so beautiful and there’s still so much we haven’t done here in town? Travel weekends also include the strange tension between including everyone in the group and being exclusive to keep the travel group small/manageable. Anyways, everyone has been talking a lot about plans for the next few weekends, but soon we’ll be into June!

About what happened for the rest of the day… Jenna, Laura, and I went to the gelato festival for one last hurrah and to use up our final tickets. We came back to the monastery an hour early for dinner to help finish making the pasta with the help of Hannah. The homemade pasta was SO GOOD! Hannah taught us how to made this tomato/basil/lemon sauce and it was one of the best dinners we’ve had at the monastery. And it was also the best because it was fun to make.

Rainy run through Orvieto this morning

When Becky and I were talking today, we were reminded of an excerpt from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (this was a book that we read for our first class, Disegno):

Marco Polo explained that what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past, it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each now city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer posses lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.

Marco enters a city: he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man’s place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had some to be in the place of that man in the square By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded, he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else’s present.