Back home in Celano again. The mountain air is clearer now and the views are beautiful. The heat wave of the last few weeks has dissipated and the temperatures are 10 degrees less than before. Up here in the mountains it is a really lovely temperature, maybe even requiring a light jumper late at night. The children have arranged to go on a passeggiata with Enricá's grandchildren or Oscar's children - Anastasia and Eliana. This really means that the kids are all going to roam the streets together for the afternoon but there is a sort of cultural tie to it. It is what you do after lunch, have a wander of the streets, meet up with people and chat - a passeggiata. People dress up for it too. So Morgan, Kailin and Genevieve set off on their passeggiata armed with some money to buy themselves yet another gelato and to meet Anastasia's and Eliana's friends!
While the kids were roaming the streets of Celano, Adri and I took Zia Loreta to the cemetery or as the Italians call it, Campo Santo (sacred field). In Italy people are not really buried under the ground, but actually housed together in a quiet region. The Houses of the Dead in Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings' comes to mind when you walk the quiet paths between the housed tombs of the residents of Celano. Loreta goes every Saturday to visit the resting place of her husband Filippo and her beloved daughter Graziella who passed away recently. We went in the afternoon and it was cool and not crowded. Positioned perfectly on the slopes of a hill you could look straight at the castle and across the fields of lake Fucino. The Mountain looked over us comfortingly. Standing there, I couldn't imagine a more perfect place to have a cemetery, looking over the country that you had lived life in. It really was a sacred field.
Fred
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