San Martino D' Agri

O.K... Several people have mentioned to me that the title of my last post was spelled wrong. I had Carmelina spell out Mangia to me and yet I still spelled it wrong (Manjia). I think all of the Mangia Mangia Mangia clouded my brain.

Carm and I left last Wednesday morning. We left 7 AM to be exact. 1 cab, 1 minibus, 1 car, and several rest stops later we ended up in San Martino D' Agri at around 6:45 PM. All we wanted to do was put our bags down and eat some delicious food that was waiting for us. We didn't get to eat until around 8:30 PM.

The thing about San Martino is that it is a small town that sits atop a mountain. While hypothetically you could walk across most of the town in a few short minutes, realistically that's probably not going to happen... To highlight this point I will walk you through step by step of my first few hours in the town. One of Carmelina's Zia's (aunt) picked us up from the place the bus dropped us off (it was literally just the parking lot of a small restaurant in the closest town). About 20 minutes later we are at her daughter's house in town. After some chit chat (luckily in English, as they once lived in Bellmore) we make a whole one house over to have a quick chat with the neighbours (Italian). Then we make it yet one more house over and say hello to Carmelina's grandpa (Italian). After spending some time there we manage to get down the street to the only bar/cafe/convenience store/ card room in town. This happened to be run by her Zia's son. We stopped in to chat and say hello to him (English, also from Bellmore). We would have dinner with his family the following night. Then we made it a few houses down to a relative of Carmelina's where we stopped to say hello and get the key to her house (Italian). Finally we headed towards her house. But wait, we had to stop and say hello to another Zia of hers. This is where we would be eating dinner... but we could not pass without stopping in to say hello (Italian). Then we actually finally took the walk to her house. We had the neighbours help us set up a few things and get a fire going to warm the house up (Italian).

We ate dinner at her Zia's house that night, and there is where I truly learned the meaning of Mangia Mangia Mangia. Here is a note to anyone who may travel to a small town in Italy. 2 bowls of pasta and some bread are just an appetizer for the main course. Actually I'm not quite sure what the main course was because different types of meats and other foods just kept coming and coming. I pride myself on being able to always finish the food on my plate and not to be outdone by anyone else at the table. I met my match. Her Zia can out eat me any day anytime.

So here I am desperately trying to keep up with the onslaught of food. At this point I am praying that it will stop. It is so delicious that I can't say no. Yet it is never ending. Like the old saying goes though... be careful what you wish for..... the phone rings, the food is stopped.

A pipe burst in the house. Water is apparently leaking through the floors. We rush back to the house where her neighbours have already begun fixing the problem. We have to put the fire out, meaning no heat, and we have no running water. That night we slept under about 8 blankets each and a couple of electric heaters. We had to flush the toilets with buckets of water, but I was happy to get a short reprieve from Mangia Mangia Mangia.

I won't bore you with more details of the next day, but I will say that the dinner I had was nothing compared to the amount of food I would consume over the following day. We had the freshest food; everything was homemade, from the pasta to the wine. Some was caught in the woods, from the meat to the chestnuts. Literally from when I woke up to when I went to sleep I was in a constant state of eating. The only time I would get a reprieve was when we would walk somewhere else to go eat more.

For any of you with a facebook account, I have posted all of my pictures from the trip so far on there. If you look below each picture you will usually see a short description of the picture. There are currently two photo albums of pictures on there. For everyone else I will try to find a good site to put my pictures up on in the next day or two.

I will try to post a blog about the rest of my trip tonight or tomorrow. On friday morning I leave Florence :-( but I am going up to Geneva, Switzerland :-). I hope all is well back wherever you are!! Thank you for all of the comments and all of the emails that I have been receiving! I always love hearing from everyone and it keeps me motivated to keep this blog up to date.