Photojournalism: Tuscany

We never made it to the yarn shop. A hotel in San Gimignano had room to take us so the four of us ate our chicken noodle soup and piled into the car. One last look at the Bavarian landscape and it was go time!

Boooo!

Tuscany in Spring!! Now this is more like it!

San Gimignano piano man

Courtyard with old frescoes in San Gimignano

Warm and sunny plazas in San Gimignano

We stocked up on Chianti from this lovely Tuscan farm

Sienna sidewalk cafes

Tuscan Coastline

San Gimignano at night with the full moon

Hotel Leon Bianco where we stayed

Italy took great care of us and I can see why so many people are drawn to it. It was my first trip to one of the countries of my ancestry and there was something about it that seemed familiar, even though I had never been there before. My sister pointed out to me a plant that was growing wild all over the hillsides, an oxalis, that from my great grandmother on down to our generation our family has grown in pots in our houses. I'm not sure where she got that first one, in Italy or from someone in the States, but this was the first time I had seen this plant anywhere else outside our family. It is clear to me that I don't belong to Italy; I am American through and through. Nevertheless, my curiosity and some sense of this place as a distant home prevent me from feeling completely foreign.

I wonder, as I often do since I have been here, what made one person stay and another leave here for America? What would life be like for me and what would I be like if it would still be possible for me to exist but my family had never left Europe? Is there some fundamental difference between a nation of people who "left" and the nations of people who "stayed"?

Posted from Munich