Arrival

Buon Giorno! We arrived safely this afternoon, after a full day reaching Florence, a night at the Hotel Paris, a good breakfast in the hotel's 500 year old frescoed-ceiling breakfast room, and a three hour train ride. We were met at the Santa Maria degli Angeli train station by our landlady, Laura, and her children Giorgio and Emma. Laura's a runner. Va bene. We rode a couple of miles up Mount Subasio to Assisi. Above is the view from our apartment door. Our place is, I think, about 800 years old. Stone walls, stone and beam ceilings, quite beautiful. Wine and cheese awaited us. Thinking about tearing up the return tickets. A bit of history: Santa Maria degli Angeli is where Saint Francis lived by a tiny church called the Porziuncola ("small portion"). In the 1700's a Franciscan missionary in California came across a river and named it after this Italian place, and a town grew up there that was aptly (if not concisely) called El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora La Reina de Los Angeles de Porziuncola (the town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels of the Porziuncola). As time went by, people started shortening the name of their town, until it finally got honed down to... "Los Angeles." A couple of other California cities were named after people who grew up within a few hundred yards of our apartment, Santa Clara (Saint Clare) and, of course, San Francisco. Ciao.