My Journey to Italia

Welcome Dinner and Montepulciano

September 17, 2006
A lot has been going on recently! Since Wednesday night I’ve been on the go quite a bit!

Wednesday was our welcome dinner at a local restaurant. It was fun, the food was good (not as good as my host mom’s) and it was nice to get to know some more people in the program. I’m finding lots of new friends now, people I actually want to hang out with that seem really cool! I also drank some of the wine provided and it was very good. Not really strong so it was nice.

Thursday was the first excursion for Group B. (Since there are so many people in the program we are divided into two different large groups for culture class and excursions, those groups are then divided into three even smaller groups for smaller excursions and Italian studies classes.) After language class we all loaded into a big bus and headed for Montepulciano, a small medieval town in the Tuscan countryside. The bus ride was a bit long, an hour and a half, but Tuscany looked beautiful, even though it was raining the entire trip! It would have been nice to have been able to see everything with the sun shinning but I love the rain (since it barely rains in Lancaster) so I didn’t mind much.

When we got of the bus we were greeted by a large church overlooking most of Tuscany. A few minutes later our Italian tour guide showed up and we shuffled into the church. Apparently, the church is centered around this really old fresco of the Virgin Mary and Jesus. The Catholic Church has declared the fresco the sight of a miracle. As the story goes, two girls saw the painting blink at them multiple times, and later that day while an old farmer was leading his oxen back from the field they stopped and knelt to the image. The church was built around the fresco and became a blessed site of worship. I also learned that anytime a gold crown is painted on or physically stuck onto a painting it means it was the site of a miracle. It was kind of a strange tour because we didn’t get to look at the church before we were back on the bus heading up towards the main town.

There we were quickly ushered through a winery, then another church (it also was built around a fresco that was declared a site of a miracle: One day there were some young boys playing a ball game near the wall with the fresco painted on it. One of the boys who lost the game was so angry that he took a hammer and struck the picture of the Virgin. Instead of cracking the wall, the image became bruised and the boy became paralyzed until the time of his repentance. The fresco still has the image of the bruise on its head, which is now garnished in a bright golden crown. We also learned another story about a nearby church with another miraculous fresca. One night a young man was playing cards and gambled away all his money. In anger he struck the image of the Virgin Mary, blaming her for his lost. Blood splurted out of the image at him and he died on the spot!) and then down the long and curvy streets of the city. In Siena they have the Palio, the horse race between the contradas, every summer. In Montepulciano they have a contest between their eight or so neighborhoods, which consists of two men pushing a large barrel of wine up and down the streets from one end of town to the next! The very end of the tour consisted of viewing a palace were a Pope once lived.

After the hour-long tour, which I’m not really sure what I was supposed to get out of it, we had an hour to ourselves. The town was very beautiful, very small and cute, but it was really hard to look around in the rain so we didn’t see much. I wish I could go back when it’s clear out. Me, Jessica and Sara ended up going into a café and having some dessert and my first café latte! It was surprisingly good. Then it was back to Siena. We were only there for two hours so it was kind of an odd trip but still very beautiful.

posted by Madeline Faye @ 4:28 PM