Chump Lady Returns from Italy

Chump Lady ends her blog hiatus and returns from Italy with tales to tell.

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Leave it to me to take a vacation during a record heat wave in Europe. I promise to return to the regular infidelity programming tomorrow after my brain catches up to my inbox, but today I’m just going to natter on about where I’ve been.

If you’re one of those people who hates hearing about other people’s holidays, perhaps triggered by midcentury slideshows from your youth, captive on some boor’s sofa in those pre-internet days, as Uncle Myron droned on about the battle of Gettysburg — skip today. I’ll get back to heartbreak and reinvention soon. Today I’m taking hostages on my blog sofa.

I was in Italy.

On a painting workshop with my art teachers, Victor and Natasha of Winter Palace Studio in Washington, D.C. This has been on my bucket list for years. They used to go to St. Petersburg (they’re both Russian immigrants who studied at the Imperial Academy) and do tours of the Hermitage, but the war put an end to that. So for the last three years they’ve gone to an villa to paint in the village of Seiano, Italy (on the coast between Naples and Sorrento).

I turn 60 at the end of September. And I was determined to take this trip as my Great Indulgence into decrepitude. Unfortunately, Mr. CL couldn’t go as he just started a new job and has no leave, so he valiantly held down the fort. Which is the kind of sacrificial thing a FW would never do. And I came home to a clean house and a stocked fridge.

I also came home sunburned, dehydrated, and covered in bug bites.

Because I chose to travel during a record heatwave and the group stayed in a villa that had no air conditioning. We slept with the windows open, which meant sleeping under a mosquito net. (The Italian mosquitos found my pink, tasty flesh anyway.)

We shared a kitchen, the plumbing was iffy and perhaps dated to Roman times. (Flushing a toilet caused the tub to gurgle.) But this was the small price of admission for scenic grandeur. And also, if you’re traveling with people who grew up in the former Soviet Union, there is no complaining. (Between 10 of us, 5 were Russian.) These people eat hardship for breakfast and march up hills in 90+ degree heat and scoff at taxis.

I mention marching up hills, because the villa was perched on a cliff on the top of a mountain, looking across the Bay of Naples to Mount Vesuvius. The only way to get to it is to hike up a goat path (that I’m sure really does date to Roman times). So to get groceries? Down the goat path and back up the goat path. Train station? Bottom of the mountain. Beach? Very bottom of the mountain. And if you are so weak as to hire a taxi (I broke down a couple times for the sweet, sweet sensation of air conditioning), it only takes you midway up that mountain.

I’ve never sweat so much in my life.

I sweated my entire body weight. There wasn’t enough hydration to counteract that much sweat. I got sunburned the first day while slathered in 70 sunblock. (I probably sweated it off.) It was blazingly hot and humid every single day. Look, I’m a pasty person. I did one of those DNA tests once and discovered that my mitochondrial gunk was from Scandinavia. (Which would explain my love of smoked fish and cold water.) So, I’m literally not made for southern Italy. And I’m kvetching because I want to temper how insufferable the rest of this post is going to be.

THE TRIP WAS AMAZING!!!

And very physically uncomfortable.

BUT AMAZING! EPIC! Journey of a lifetime!

I got to paint! Eat eggplant every day! See art! Make art! And travel with my favorite teachers, who are wonderful people as well as exceptional artists.

Each morning we would paint from 10 a.m to 1 p.m. and then spend the rest of the day sightseeing. We did Naples, Pompeii, Herculaneum, Sorrento, Positano, Capri and Vico Equense. Mostly by train (which is hugely unreliable in a way that made me think of traveling on Zambian Airways circa 1989 — known then as “Air Perhaps” to the locals). This was Train Perhaps. But it was cheap, so we attempted a lot of Italian commuter train travel. (Friends got stuck in a tunnel. I missed that adventure.)

Strap in to my captive sofa for some photos.

Me trying to paint the view.

Me painting without a fundamental understanding of perspective. Natasha: “This looks like a child painted it.”

In fairness, this was my first attempt at plein air painting (I prefer portraits). Here’s Victor correcting my work.

These were just three-hour color sketches and I’ll finish a final painting this month. But the education wasn’t the painting, it was the culture. It was the opportunity to spend two weeks marinating in classical art. The churches! The scenery! The museums! The history!

I now have a thing for angels.

Apparently nothing in Italy can’t be improved without the addition of more gilded cherubs and angels. The angels have angels. The Baroque more-is-more aesthetic works here. Italians make Roman Catholicism fun. We arrived for Saint Antonio day (June 13) with fireworks and loud parties. I’m not exactly sure what it was all about, but they sail a statue of him around the bay and back. There’s a procession, a feast. Then when we left, there was another procession of the Madonna, who gets dressed, with more processing and fireworks… Church bells ringing…

I also discovered the art of presepe (the nativity).

It’s this wonderfully weird Neapolitan art form of the nativity from the 1700s, only baby Jesus comes to your town. So, it’s wise men, the shepherds, Mary, Joseph — and angels, so many angels — and also the butcher, washer woman, cheesemaker, local grandees, dogs, chickens and cabbages. I saw presepes in Naples and the church in our village of Seiano had one! All the figures are carved from wood and cork and dressed in silk.

Here’s baby Jesus on the beach at Seiano!

HOW COOL IS THIS?

And Naples had a precept museum and a street devoted to selling presepe figures.

From the museum Certosa San Martino:

But once your appetite for superfluous angels and nativity figures has been whetted, you need more. Will I walk uphill in 96 degree heat to look at churches in Naples? Yes I will.

Caravaggio!

You can walk into a church and see a CARAVAGGIO!!!!!!

It’s going to take some time to recover from all this culture and beauty(and heat stroke). I’ll kick my brain back in gear tomorrow.

Until then I leave you with this image of me diving from a boat, butt midair. Is this butt approaching 60? Yes. Is this the most flattering picture of me ever taken? Absolutely not. Is this butt having an adventure? Yes.

I wish all your butts happy adventures.