Italian Christmas

So that was fun, exhausting, aaaaaand exactly nothing like Christmas, really.  Despite the lights in the streets, the tree in the Salone, and Sean's month-long warbling of Christmas carols, it has never felt less like the holiday to me.  Then again, I've never spent Christmas outside the States before.

We celebrated the (rather warm) day here with a massive potluck, the belated centerpiece of which was Ji Hye's fried chicken.  Sean made a huge pot of pasta fagioli, so at least there was something traditional going on, haha.  After the food, there was bocce and soccer in the backyard, Sean winning a few games of the former; later that night there was pool, with Sean "Sleeper Cell" Gleason losing a few games. I even played with Rick against Helena and Steven, two of the kitchen interns, and managed to do pretty well, even if we lost in the end.  I went to bed before the Christmas sing-along started around midnight, but sitting in bed chatting with Lakshmi I could hear the rousing strains of "Dominic the Donkey" and other classics being belted out by a mildly intoxicated crowd on the floor below.

Although there were no wrapped presents this year, we still got each other gifts!  Mine was writing to the restaurant in Belluno where we had dinner in August to see if I could order a bottle of their specially-made amaro that Sean had been so fond of.  They never replied, but I found the pharmacist who makes it for them, who was not only willing to send two bottles COD to Rome, but threw in all sorts of cosmetic samples with it!  Sean, for his part, visited the antique booths in Piazza Borghese and found a matted print of an engraving after Titian (of a painting I'd never seen before, which is in the Louvre).  This was dismembered from a 19th-century book, and when I looked up the identifying marks of the engraver the first result was a matching leaf in the British Museum, which is cool!  He also bought me a bottle of Refosco, which we shared last night around the pool table.  I still dream of the Sancin Refosco on the menu at il Refolo in Venice, but that doesn't seem to be available anywhere south.

Our Christmas Eve was awesome too, I should say; after the Academy lunch a big group of us went to see Star Wars (in my and Sean's case, for the second time!),  got extraordinarily overpriced drinks at the bar on top of Hotel Bernini and wandered around before settling in for dinner and very serious Star Wars discussion at Insalata Ricca.  Some folks stayed downtown to go to midnight Mass, but Mass in the Pantheon was cancelled, strangely enough, with almost no warning and no explanation.  It was a full moon and a beautiful night, made slightly less so when walking over the Tiber--the smell of starling guano is seriously gross!!