I've been meaning to write this for months, but of course, haven't. A friend asked me to write a note to her mother to get her to go, and I ended up with something that could also be used as a blog entry. Also, since I just mailed off my check to go again at the end of October (YAY!), it seemed like I should get this off my to-do list as soon as possible.
Last year when I went, I was completely stressed out from work and had reached the point of burnout. Both my brain and my body felt completely bruised when I got on the plane to Italy, less than 12 hours after getting back from a work trip to DC.
Because I traveled by myself and booked a single, my expectations were fairly low. A lot of times, places will put the single travelers off into a cramped corner. At Torre del Tartufo (and I suspect also at Casa Ombuto), this wasn’t the case. There were 7 of us in my class – a single woman from Ireland, a single woman from NYC, and two couples who’d been friends since college celebrating a 60th birthday for one of the wives. I think the temptation at most places would be to cram the single girls into one suite of rooms to save on the cleaning, but Sarah, Heather, and I each got an entire apartment to ourselves. If you go to the website, you can see pictures of the room I stayed in (Origano). The couples were up in the Tower, where the views are breathtaking (that’s where they’re putting me when I go back this fall).
Every detail is thought of – it’s not luxurious like the Ritz Carlton, but it’s pretty and cozy and spotless and amazingly comfortable. When you come in, there’s a little welcome gift waiting for you. There are no phones or televisions or clocks in any of the rooms because they want you to relax. (The school manager told me there’s only one alarm clock, so if multiple people need to get up early, the person who gets up earliest gets it first, then resets the clock and tiptoes into the next person’s room, and so on. Awesome.) This place has only two goals: for you to feel at home and for you never to feel hungry (that’s my take on it anyway). And halfway up a big hill in Tuscany on a truffle farm, so it’s really quiet. The first night, I woke up in the middle of the night and honestly though I’d gone deaf for a few seconds before I shook off enough of my disorientation to clap my hands (yes, I know how ridiculous that is -- I was jet lagged and disoriented! It was the middle of the night!!). It’s THAT quiet.
There’s only one computer, and it only has dial-up access, which the school manager asks that you not use for too long, as the school only has the one phone line. I was able to get BlackBerry coverage, but only down by the pool, and who wants to use their BlackBerry at the pool on vacation??? I did check my BlackBerry but mostly just to post on Facebook what a good time I was having. :)
Sarah, Heather, Diane, Helen, and I took the cooking class, while Ira and Marty (the husbands) smoked cigars, drank wine, and sat in the pool. We had four days of cooking class, all in English (apparently, they're always in English), and we cooked a LOT. When I first saw the itinerary for the week, I thought four cooking classes was too few, but by the fourth one, I was exhausted! We made our own lunches, afternoon snacks, dinners for every day that were there. Almost all of the herbs we used came from the spectacular gardens. I even had to snip bay leaves from an actual tree!! (The chef had to show me which one it was.)
On the field trip day, we ate lunch made by an Italian grandmother at a little farmhouse where they make cheese, and then we had dinner at one of the best seafood restaurants in Tuscany. In addition to the cheese farm, we also visited an ancient, walled city and a ceramics factory, where I picked up a couple of lovely items for the dinner parties I have not yet thrown.
There’s also a day that’s completely free – no cooking classes and no planned activities. Franco, the chef, purposefully has us make too much food on the other days so that there are leftovers to eat on the free day if you decide not to go sightseeing. There’s also a fully stocked refrigerator if you’d prefer to make something else. I decided not to go sightseeing, even though I had options. The couples invited me to go to Florence with them, and Sarah invited me to go to Cortona (where they filmed “Under the Tuscan Sun”) with her and Heather, but I was enjoying the solitude, and I had 6 books to read (all of which I finished). Also, I got to pretend that I owned the place by being there by myself. It was heavenly.
We asked Barbara, the manager, whether it was common that everyone got along as great as we all did, and she said yes. She also said, “Why wouldn’t you get along? You all already had two things in common when you got here: you chose Italy, and you chose cooking.” You’ll meet people from all over the world. We happened to have people mostly from the US, but Barbara said that they get people from as far away as Australia and easily from all over Europe.
It’s really the best vacation I’ve ever been on, even better than taking the Queen Mary 2 across the Atlantic. If you love Italy and cooking, you HAVE TO GO. If you need some solitude and silence to work through the tangle of partially formed thoughts in your head, and you have a stack of books you want to get through, it's perfect. (Diane and Helen coaxed me away from my books and into a conversation, but Marty and Ira told me not to feel pressured to join them – they totally understood my desire to rest my brain and just read.)
I can't wait to go back. There are enough changes happening at the company that I suspect that I will REALLY need this vacation when it finally happens. I'm excited to see Tuscany in the fall!
And it's time to open that Rosetta Stone box that contains my Italian lessons!
