Sickness and Travel Planning

I have an unpleasant cold, which means as the birds sing in the 60-degree sunshine in the courtyard, I'm sitting with the space heater cranked up in the office, one blanket on my lap and the other around my shoulders.  One of the downsides to living communally is that when you're sick and would rather not see anyone, ever, you still run the risk of meeting people if you actually want to leave your bedroom for the office, the kitchen, or the bar (where Gabry has, unsuccessfully this time, been petitioning me to try his "grappa cure").  Luckily IDAF and will walk around ensconced in my blanket like a human burrito.  I have not, however, yet reached the stage of being willing to exit the bedroom in my too-large lilac chenille bathrobe, which I think initially belonged to Jen but which I swapped for a kimono-style robe my mom had given me.  That bathrobe is the color of my childhood bedroom but it's warm as hell.

However I have used this time to plan out some of our final major travels!  The first is at the end of March, when I will head to Boston for RSA and Sean heads to Nantes for a conference of his own; I'd known about RSA for a long time (and in fact the second half of my shoptalk was basically that paper) but Sean just found out about the Nantes thing and so had to withdraw from the Sicily AAR trip.  We kind of resigned ourselves to not going to Sicily, especially because of the expense and difficulty of getting an automatic rental there.  We changed our minds, though, particularly after our friends Heather and Larry came to Rome from Siracusa, where they're living this semester.  Now we're going to go down and spend three nights in Siracusa in April--no rental car, no grand scheme to "do" Sicily, just three days to chill out and explore one part of the island with people who know it well.  There are plenty of ruins and an archaeological museum, which Woody and Leslie recently saw and raved about.

The trip I just booked is for May: we're going first to Budapest, where we can stay with Danny and Kim for a few nights, and then we'll take the train/bus a couple of hours to Vienna, spend three nights there (including our seventh wedding anniversary!) then fly back to Rome.  There are lots of Titians and other relevant artists in those museums, so I'm very excited.

Apart from that, the other travel we're hoping to do is within Italy itself.  Carla and a friend went up to Turin, rented a car, and drove through the Barolo and Barbaresco vine territories, which looked incredibly beautiful; she brought back lots of bottles, several of which I've been lucky enough to sample.  We'd like to do that, maybe in June with friends from the Academy.  We've also got to go back to Naples, and at some point try to go see some of the places where Sean's family came from (though as he recently discovered, his paternal grandmother's family, the Brignoli, were from Piedmonte and not Campania like he'd thought).  In other words, to edit what I said in my last post, by the time I leave here I'll have been in every region of Italy except Valle d'Aosta, Liguria, and Calabria (forgot that one!)