Meet the Cast

Meet the Cast:

This week I am including three entries in addition to this one, each of which gives a taste of my life in Italy and introduces you to the incredible characters I’m meeting here: Benedicte (and the adventure of the missing cookies), the owner (and the current residents of) Piazza San Francesco #4 , and Laura and Marina.  As I introduce each person or group, I am including country of origin.  For a professor of cross-cultural education, this is heaven! 

By the way, I don’t use the term incredible lightly:  I chose to come here for the year because I truly believe there are places in the world with a special ability to draw together important energies for healing, whatever form those energies might take.  Siena is one of those places.  I’ve never been anywhere so likely to inspire me to pray, to nourish myself with books and poetry, to move me to tears with its beauty, to shake me into laughter with its absurdities.  People who “get” Siena stop in their tracks to stare at the shade of the light reflecting on the brick or fall silent staring at the night’s first stars.  The other day on my evening walk I looked over the city wall and there was this silver glow in the olive trees backed by a rosy pink sky.  It’s no coincidence that going to Tuscany to heal has almost become a cliché; it’s not that the place is perfect – there are many, many problems here, like any place where people work and spend their lives – but there is also power to heal.  As I wrote one of the entries, I was sitting in the Piazza del Duomo on a marble bench pockmarked by hundreds of years of rain.  Maybe this photo can show you what I mean by magic – and this is WITHOUT the sun shining on the façade.