Family Visit

... or how to spend a weekend with close cousins, good food discovering other faces of central Italy.

Every time we come to Italy we like to spend a weekend at my hubby's side of the family, in a town called Campobasso. This place is also my mom's birth place, of all towns in Italy: it is definitely more than a coincidence that I married in Canada a person whose parents are from my mom's side.

Oratino

Here live a great number of first cousins on Nick's side, in lovely villas that one could not build nor afford in Rome. It is like combining the life of a little town with a farm life style which is truly a blessing any way you look at it.  Naming all cousins here would be too long, but I did try to add all the best pics of family that will make our family in Edmonton happy. They will know who everyone is and how good they all look over the years.

We are being treated like royalty, which is always the case when we come visit. This is a familiar trait in the Palladino family, it runs in their blood. I let you imagine the way we end up spending our time together: the tables are always filled with good food (mostly home grown), good wine (to keep the spirits happy) and good company. As we come back every two years, this is the time of checking on everyone's health, life, school and overall ensuring we are all good. I take millions of pictures as usual, by now everyone knows I do. These become little treasures that remind us all of the time spent together and the stories we end up sharing and retelling each other, over and over. Like all families do... or at least all families who are as close as ours.

Cripta in Trivento

I also add the usual visits to the small towns around this region, Molise, where every year we discover a new small village, a cathedral with a nice cripta, corners of a small town up a hill (they are all up hill, by the way!), or an old Roman excavation site! It is amazing how a little region like Molise can hold so much history and beauty, and yet much of it remains unknown and undiscovered. If one had the time and a bit of money there could be much to invest in here, in terms of touristic attractions. And many would definitely enjoy the delight of discovering corners of Italy that hold so much history and have so many stories to tell.

We visited just a couple of these in the last two days: Oratino, a medieval town well kept and whose streets are filled with flowers and attractive corners. We ate at a restaurant that was made inside an old olive-making factory.  I should also add that it rained a bit during the first two days, which is a refreshing state of weather after the hot days we have experienced to date.Then we visited Madonna del Canneto, a sanctuary at the border of three regions, and then discovered the beauty of a little archbishop town called Trivento, where a cathedral is built on the ruins of an old pagan temple that goes back to the 4th century. As we entered the church we discovered nothing really unique about the place, but an older fellow at the sanctuary had tipped us about the underground tunnels of the place, which we encountered almost by mistake. NOt even a sign was there to advise us of the beauty of the rooms under the ground. And we entered without even checking on the fact that the door to the cripta had an outside lock with the key in the lock - anyone could have locked us in as we were there. At lunch time in a small town in Italy that is a possibility, where we could have been left stuck inside with no way of escaping!

Of course it did not happen, and we made it back to the main street, safe and sound, as I took more pictures around the town, that you will notice from the ones I added to the slide show, it almost look like a ghost town. Again, lunch time during summer days in Italy is a time when everyone is home enjoying a lovely home cooked meal and gets ready for a nap... The world can wait up for the afternoon portion of the day.