Italy: Sunny and Hot

Hello from sunny Italy. Land of olive trees, great art, and of course fabulous wine, great clothes, gelato, and much more.

My traveling companion, Susie, on Monday is going to start working in the oldest pottery in Italy, over 500 years in business, Ubaldo Grazia Maioliche. This is her fifth time coming to work at this pottery over the past year. She is designing a line of pottery that is for sale in Coumbus, OH at Caterina's, in the German Village.

Katherine, the owner of Caterina's, is the wife of X-Mayor Greg Lushutka (not sure of that spelling), and has been in business for about 5 years. She sells marvelous luxuries from France and Italy. At her suggestion, she and Susie came to Italy last year, and Susie spent 6 weeks learning from the experts the process of making, transferring and painting her designs, in this historic pottery.

We stopped at the 'fabrica' today to see if Ubaldo was there. But he was away. It is still the vacation time for the locals, and Susie expects that he is on vacation. Both of them will be back at work on Monday.

Susie has learned how hard it is to control the ratio of pigment to water that will giver her the finsihed look that she wants. It was fun to see her pieces all lined up on one of the work tables, waiting for her.

I have taken many photos since our arrival at 10am yesterday, but I am not sure if I can download the photos directly from my camera into this blog. If not, I may have to go to Plan B. And since this afternoon, my blog wouldn't let me get into it to start with, I am not willing to try at this moment.

After all, I have been drinking several glass of Soave wine. I saw it on the shelft in the grocery this afternoon, and took it as a sign, as today is my dear departed Father's birthday, and this wine was one he learned to love on my parents trip to Italy in 1973!

Until then, I will say that we painted one painting yesterday, in the private garden of the man that was running the beautiful hotel that we staying in in Todi, south of here.

Caio!