Cooking School Castro Dei Volsci June 1-June 4

                                                          June 1-4                                           Trip to Date

Miles Walked                                          15.6                                                    290.1

Feet Climbed                                         1850                                                  33,610

Song of the Day:  Night Parade by Robbie Robertson

Oh we'll be marching, oh oh in the night parade

Oh Lord, we'll be marching, marching out in the night parade

In the night parade

Walking the night beat the rhythm of the street

Moving to the heartbeat of the city, the city

Sorry for the delay in posting the past few days.  This damn cooking school is exhausting.  We go from 8 am to 11 pm everyday, with virtually no down time in between.  It's not easy cooking, eating, and drinking all day long!  Linda and I are both looking forward to getting back to the lazy life of walking 20 miles a day.  We will be at the cooking school until Sunday morning, when we will take a train to Naples (a 4 hour trip), then a ferry to Capri.  So, this is an update on the first 4 days of the cooking school.

On Monday, we took a 3 1/2 train trip from Foligno to our cooking school.  Other than a 3 year old throwing a temper tantrum for an hour, it was a very pleasant trip.  We have always found train trips in Italy to be a great way to see the country.

The cooking school is located in the mountain top village of Castro Dei Volsci, about 50 miles south of Rome.  The surrounding countryside here is surprisingly populated, with villages spread every 4 or 5 miles apart.  Here is a photo from one of the villages.  You can see some of the villages spread around the valley:

The week seems to be organized around three daily activities:

1.  Cooking/lunch:  everyday starting around 10:00 or 10:30, we have a 3 hour cooking class where we prepare our lunch for the day.  There are 10 people in our cooking class (all Americans).  This part has been a lot of fun and we have enjoyed the excellent Italian cooking instructors.

2.  Outings- everyday, we have at least one outing.  These outings have included visits to an olive oil factory, a proscuitto (Italian ham) factory, a couple of cheese factories, a lemoncello (an Italian liqueur) factory, A sausage factory,  to a seaside town, the weekly town market, etc.  By the way, I use the word "factory" loosely, as these tend to be very small, mom and pop type of places.  For the most part, these outings have been interesting and informative.  The school has a couple of vans they they use to transport us around.

3.  Dinner- every night, we go out some place for dinner.  Often times, these are long drives.  The most interesting of the dinners was a visit to the home of an Italian woman, who is the Mom of Vincezo, the olive oil guy.  More about him later.  While the food has been better than most of what we experienced during our hike, little of it has been outstanding. The one big exception was the visit to the home of Vincezo's Mom.

The hotel is a small boutique type of hotel, located in several old (400-500 years old) buildings in the village, and is owned by an Italian American from Miami named Gregory.   Most of the rooms have been modernized and are quite nice.  There are a couple of fairly sizeable kitchens where the cooking classes are held each day.

In addition to the normal activities, this week has been special for a couple of other reasons.  Tuesday (June 2) is Republic Day,  sort of the July 4th of Italy, celebrating the birth of modern Italy in 1946.  It is a National Holiday.  As it was on Tuesday this year, many people took Monday off to have 4 day weekend.  Additionally, We'd, June 3, is Saint Oliva day here in this village.  Saint Oliva is the patron saint of the town, and there is a huge celebration starting the night before.  There were fireworks, religious ceremonies, a carnival, a procession, etc throughout the day.  Here are several photos from the day.  

Picture of Saint Oliva over most of the doorways in the village:

Procession through the village, carrying the statue of St Oliva.  Notice the Priests leading the Procession:

Soldiers in the Procession:

Close up of the people carrying the statue.  We were told that this thing weighs about 500 pounds.  The village is very steep and it was a warm day, so this is not easy work.

Here are some photos from our outings.  The first is of Vincezo, the olive oil and wine maker.  The ladies lovingly referred to Vincenzo as "Jesus."   As you see from this photo, Linda couldn't bear to look at Vincenzo (Vincenzo is the Itslian guy with the Oregon t-shirt):

Dinner at the home of Vincezo's Mom:

We also visited a cheese factory.  You may not know that bufala mozzarella is made from the milk of water buffaloes, which were originally brought to Italy as work animals.  Here are some water buffaloes. I really wanted to use bob marley's Buffalo soldier" as song of the day, because it is one of the 

All time great songs, but not appropriate for this setting.

We also visited a proscuitto factory:

And a local farmers market:

One day, we visited  a seaside town and had a nice seafood dinner:

And we also visited another hilltop village for dinner one evening:

And another ancient village. Here is a wall and archway that is supposedly 3000 years old:

Here are some shots from the cooking class.  As you can see, cooking class includes drinking wine....

Making gnocchi dough.  We have spent a fair amount of time kneading dough this week. I'm concidered Springsteen's "the rising" for the song of the day, consider the time we have spent trying to get that damn dough just right.

Having a lunch we had  prepared in one of the dinning rooms.  This one is in the basement, and was an olive mill from the 1500's:

Cooking panacetta as base for a sauce:

All in all, it's been an interesting week.  As you can see from the miles walked, not a lot of hiking this week, although we are on our feet all day long.