san martino spino and vicenza

Outside there are three goats making goat sounds. Eric just pointed out how the chicken, even when it's trying cannot be quiet. A tractor drives by, the house is cold, old, boxy and miles away from any town. Yet there is internet. Usually, finding internet over here is like finding a contact lens on the bottom of Crater Lake. It just doesn't happen. But this is Samuele's house outside Ferrara and the dude's got all sorts of stuff you wouldn't expect to see in a rural farmhouse.
We've been all over the place in the last few days, from the bucolic reaches of North-Central Italy to the bulbous foothills near the Northwest. I'll admit I'm quite partial to the rural areas. It's not so far off from my family's homestead back in the Sacramento valley. Depressive grey skies, vivid green fields and idiot drivers. We played at our friend Tiziano's small, small....small house in San Martino Spino; a sleepy outpost for who knows what else but espresso and old people? Tizio (his nickname) grew up in this town and it's clear as day he finds it home. Peculiar though, considering he's a worldly troubadour who spends half his year traversing Europe and pretty much anywhere that will have him play. An eccentric in every positive sense of the word living in an itty-bitty conservative Italo-Mayberry. He's friends with the craziest of bands, big and small, and shows a hospitality to his guests unfamiliar to many our age from stateside. Lessons are being learned in regards to hospitality.
We set up and kicked out our set in a space no larger than Kanye's sock drawer, really pushing the limits of my snare drum. Before the show we all sat down to pasta and red wine. Mom, you would have been into it. We had three ten liter boxes of "red wine"; that's pretty much all you really need to know.
On the subject of red wines: there seems to be an affinity for a local wine here called Lambrusco. I'm not saying I don't like Lambrusco, that would be pointless. That's like saying I don't like Handi-snacks or French Fries; which I do. But it's not going to win any medal's of honor from the fellas at Dom Perignon. It's a frizzy, semi-sweet, semi-dry, off rose colored intoxicant. It works, that is true.
Eric told me one time that for a period in his life he considered himself a "bum wine connoisseur". He was talking about Thunderbird, Night Train, all those malt wines that rot your gut. I'll leave the handle of Carlo Rossi out of this one for Mom too. Carlo kinda sits on his own throne, he's the bourgeois version of bum wine. Well, to finish the thread I think Tizio would fill the shoes as Lambrusco connoisseur. Maybe that's harsh, as there is a resilience in pride for even the most "off" libations here in Italia.
So then we left Tizio's place, bodies and minds surprisingly intact and spry enough to hang in through the two hour AutoStrada (rat-race track) up the North and into Vicenza. Somewhere en route I got a kind of car sickness, mixed with one of those feelings that screams on the inside "what am I doing with my f***ing life" and I almost lost it. It was hard to figure out, and frustrating like a sore muscle or a runny nose during a make out session. We played and I channeled that energy well enough, in fact maybe turning out my best performance yet on the drums; but when the show ended it came like a riptide and I was sucked up to my bed on the second floor above the venue to relent the strange feelings. The band packed everything up for me and I slept well, rose early this morning again to the mute sky, like looking inside out of a soiled cotton swab.
But you think, don't let this weather wear you out. And then I'm back in the saddle, onward south to Bologna for our biggest show of the tour. Opening for Art-Punk inventor/innovator/pretty much rock legend Mike Watt. A suprising and exciting possibility. We hang out now at Samuele's farmhouse, waiting for Tizio to come and drive us an hour south to the venue. The trip is tightening and tomorrow we play in the city that was once the earth's navel, Roma. How amazing? Life IS good. Many missed folks back at home, but shitchyeah, you know, shitchyeah....