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Mellow sunshine made the trees dressed in fall finery glow in the warmth of the day. We were off on a day trip from Milan through rolling forested hills to Orta San Giulio. The small town rests on the shore of Lago di Orta, one of the smallest of the lakes that decorate the northern part of Italy between the plain of the Po River and the Alps. This area has long been our romantic destination, both in actuality and in my mind.
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We were getting annoyed by the young couple who were clinging to us like overcooked noodles. But they kept on with the questions and the importuning: “Please follow us.”
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“Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar” rang out over the city, echoed by calls from other mosques. The sound, the essence of the Middle East, was our wakeup call in golden-hued Amman, and it accompanied us on our week-long tour of Jordan
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We stopped for an early lunch in Jixian, a scruffy city and a marked contrast to glitzy Shanghai. Piles of rubble were everywhere, as if the city had been bombed.
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The kid was twanging what looked like a three-stringed banjo covered with snake skin. Behind him the windows of the music store were filled with taiko drums of various sizes. Definitely not Bluegrass Country or Bourbon Street even though the music had some similar sounds. Instead, it was Kokusai-dori on a Sunday afternoon in Naha, Okinawa, capital of the southernmost of Japan’s prefectures, the Ryukyu archipelago. The “banjo” is actually a sanshin and the music is called shima uta, an Okinawan roots-style now popular throughout Asia and on Youtube.
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The Madonna delBagno is a small church nestled inconspicuously near the main road to Deruta. It is famous for painted ceramic tiles affixed to the walls by worshippers in thanks to the Virgin for rescue from near death.
In the 17thcentury, an itinerant merchant, one Cristoforo Merciaro, or Christopher the Peddler, found a ceramic fragment on the ground. Fourteen years earlier, a Franciscan monk had placed the little piece, painted with a primitive image of the Madonna and Child, in an oak tree for safekeeping.
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