Caffè with Lucia

This morning while we were watching the Yale MOOC on Roman architecture in preparation for a day trip to Ostia Antica the phone rang and it was Lucia, Alina's mother and the matriarch of the family, calling to invite us to join her for a coffee.  Boy, did our Italian get a good workout.  She is delightful and talks a mile a minute.  We learned that when she became engaged to her late husband that he gave her a ring and she gave him 100 olive trees.  Eventually they turned their olive farming hobby into a fattoria (an estate) which produces one of the top rated olive oils in Italy and operates as an Agriturismo called Il Fontanaro.  Both she and Alina commute back and forth between Rome and the fattoria which is located an hour and a half away in Umbria near the village of Paciano.  Paciano is practically next door to Panicale where we rented a house during two trips to Italy and were visited there by the Belangers, Elliotts,  and McConnells

After the coffee she took us on a tour of our local area and where across the railway tracks it is all agricultural land and a beautiful place for a walk.  There is an estate there called Castelucia which includes a villa which has been converted to an inn and restaurant with stables and a driving range on the property.  As it was too late to go to Ostia Antica after our morning with Lucia so we headed downtown to the Trastevere district of Rome for lunch, a visit to Santa Maria in Trastevere (see photo below) and walk through the area and it's botanical garden.  At lunch we struck up a conversation with a woman who is a director of a hotel in St. Moritz.  Our initial encounter with the Swiss lady at an outdoor table was off to a bad start when she lit a cigarette sending Lynne scurrying inside only to change her mind again and Insist that we would have to eat outside regardless.