On the 23rd, we went to Castelfranco. About 40 minutes' drive from Treviso. We arrived armed with stale bread for ducks: Castelfranco on a Monday morning needs ducks to spice it up. Initially the ones we found were disappointingly replete and spurned our offerings, but eventually we found four that were satisfyingly hungry. Lara named them 'Near He and Near She, and Far He and Far She' as there were two pairs, duck and drake each, one swimming closer to the bank than the other pair. She found the names incredibly amusing and yelled them out each time whichever one of them it was got a bit of bread. Ah, the joys of being six. Well actually it was quite amusing to see even if you were forty.
Here's Lara being unavailable behind the Whale and in front of the walls,
and here's the lion on the clock tower. I hope you appreciate this one as I nearly got run over in the process of taking it. OK that's an exaggeration. I was a tad ... incautious.
Ah, now the geese were quite a different matter. Highly voluble and more eager than was strictly healthy for my fingers, as usual. If there's a bird around, you can trust me to end up with fingers in its beak. Lara was much more sensible in feeding them.
We tried to have a look at the cathedral but, just like the last time we came, it was shut. After lunch we wandered back, and hey presto it was open - at an hour it shouldn't have been, too. Upon moseying in with considerable eagerness, we found it was open in preparation for a funeral - with the result that we couldn't see the famous painting by Giorgone in there, but still, we saw the church, which is also nice. That's not the main thing, though. On the way out, we saw the notice for the person whose funeral it was. Some magnificently sprightly lady of 103!!! There was a picture of her and she looked great. ONE HUNDRED AND THREE, as my knees are nobbly. Then just yesterday there was a snippet on the news that (something like) 170,000 Italians are centogenarians. I tell you what, that Mediterranean diet must work wonders. What's even better, is that they don't stint on their wine rations, either. Full steam ahead for me, I'd say.
Then there was LUNCH. Noontime, in a quiet medieval city, and one simply gets the urge to dine on tripe in broth. I didn't resist it. Reckoned it would be a jolly long time before I got the chance to try tripe in broth, so carpe diem - or carpe tripe. For those that are curious, it was much less of an extreme flavour than you might expect. Rather highly seasoned, simply in salt and pepper, and the tripe itself had the consistency of croutons that haven't melted in the soup yet - and somehow don't quite disintegrate. Fairly mild, relatively interesting.
However, the LITTLES had a pork chop. A pork chop about as big as her head. It came a little later than mine or the Whale's items, and the waitress put it down in front of her with a 'buon apetito' and left with a supressed giggle at the expression of shock on Lara's face at the scale of the task ahead. By the time she cleared the plate away, the shock was on the face of the waitress and Lara was barely moving from pork-induced coma. See this here? Honest, we didn't give her any wine. Just pork.She even managed to have a canolo afterwards.. or at least part of one.
In the car on the way home. Playing with sharks, of course.
Later that day, we went to pay a visit to Iole and Aurora at their place. Kids played, we chatted.
... Chatted, and played with cats. They have two cats and one dog. Heaven.
Still later, the Marchesin family came over for an hour, and kids played, we chatted. On this occasion, Filippo and Lara just disappeared off into our bedroom and we saw no heard hide nor hair of them. Filippo speaks English so communication wasn't an issue, it seems. Here's a photo that I took, but perhaps the self-timer ones we found later on Lara's camera tell us more about what they were actually up to.
Self-timer specials....
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