We have finally gotten to summer after a long, cool, wet spring. Events are planned in the Piazza. The old men play briscola all afternoon at the tables at Bar Mary. Evenings lately are boistrous affairs with the European Soccer championship going on. Lots of cheering from the Piazza as people crowd around the TV provided by Mary and Irene.

We have recently said goodbye to Luther’s brother Jeff and family who were visiting Italy for the first time and managed to find a few days to visit us here. It was nice to catch up and get to know his children Aaron and Allie. We visited Perugia, had a great dinner in Montone and they all took a cooking class at Agriturismo Calagrana. It was pouring rain that day!

We made a trip to Gubbio where a talented artisan makes beautiful reproductions of Byzantine and Roman friezes etc. I had wanted to buy one for a long time. Here is the one I chose.

As for bureaucratic things, we applied WAY back in January to renew our Permessi to stay and we finally got our appointment to pick them up in JULY! Of course our old Permessi expired in June making a gap. We visited the Large Lady who handles the health insurance with our receipts and the phone text with the appointment time. She was appalled at how long it had taken. She still couldn’t give us our new cards to last until the end of the year. So she just gave us until July 30. I was concerned that we have it in force for our upcoming trip to Poland.

I have not reported on our efforts to get our Italian driving licenses. Since we have valid German ones we tried to have them transferred to Italian. Anything to avoid having to go to driving school and take the test in Italian! We have not been successful, alas. We were making good progress until the woman noticed that on the German license it gives our place of birth as our STATE and on our Italian documents our CITY where we were born was listed. Oh NO! So we brought our passports and our birth certificates to them which show BOTH city and state of our birth. They refused us. We will have to formulate a Plan B I guess. It is always something.

So in just over a week we are off our our road trip to Poland, making stops in Slovenia, Slovakia, and Austria along the way. I hope it’s not too hot! We have found some Americans who wanted to come to Italy and offered to house/cat sit while we are gone. That is a nice thing for both them, us and the boyz.