Foxox tumbls stuff

We went to Marostica and Bassano del Grappa today:

I attached a couple of photos. The first shows the walled city of Marostica from the ruins of the fortress on the adjacent hill. Marostica has a massive human-scale chess board paved into its central square and every few years, a sort of reenactment of a historic political chess game is played out with people and horses as the chess pieces. The second shows the bridge into Bassano del Grappa, a town known for its bridge and for being a center of grappa (thus “del Grappa”) production (liquor from the leftover pieces of the grape plant after wine production). The Poli grappa brand is about a hundred years old so it doesn’t have the history of other distilleries, but they sell well (we can probably even get it in the States). Poli has a museum in Bassano, but the distillery building itself is actually closer to Vicenza (we passed it on the drive back). Marostica, the first town, is known for its chess board and for being a walled city, but also for its cherries and cherry grappa.

We went to an Italian grocery store for ingredients for dinner. It costs 1euro to take a shopping cart, but you get it back when you return the cart, and the carts lock together. The rear wheels on the carts here spin on casters like the front wheels, so it’s easier to maneuver them inside the store. Aisles are smaller, so I guess that’s why! They don’t automatically bag your groceries; it seems to be customary to bring your own bags or just have everything loose in the car. We prepared salads and zucchini, and got fried calamari as the main dish from a seafood place nearby. I got some kinds of beer here which I never see in the US. I had a Gösser (Austrian) radler… 60% lemonade, 40% beer. Marcus says it’s popular in Germany/Austria during the summer time, and not at all seen as a “girly drink” like it might be in the US. It tasted a lot like Mike’s Hard Lemonade

Tomorrow we will go to a villa near Vicenza and then go into Vicenza during the day when shops are open. On Sunday we are going into Venice; we have tickets to some museums already reserved, and then we’ll figure out what to do from there. We go to Rome on the 17th, if I remember correctly. A friend from Penn is in Rome at the time, so we may get to meet up there. We’ll stay there for 3 or four days, then in Florence for a couple of days. I think we are going to drive up to Innsbruck, Austria too, at some point. The city where the Pope Benedict’s family lived (and where he was taken as a POW) during WWII isn’t too much farther up into Germany, so me may go there to see that too!