First day with the parents and Ryan - Villa Sceriman

Ok, so first of all I want to let everyone know that we’re all safe and sound, the earthquake that hit yesterday was about 60 miles northeast of Rome, which is pretty far south of us still. We were actually out at an amusement park called Gardaland (similar to Great America/Disneyworld) and I got a call from my dad on top of this floating space thingy. He’s all panicked but I assured him we were nowhere near the earthquake. It is horrible from what I can tell, and L’Aquila is torn apart. Sarah said earthquakes are pretty common in Italy, just not ones that are that big.

And onto my next addendum, I’m going to try and catch up on this thing, b/c what I’m about to write happened about two weeks ago. So I really am going to try and keep this more up to date so I can remember more of the details. Here we go:

Last I left off my parents had just arrived. Carl picked them up from the airport and drove them back to the house. They had been traveling for about 20 hours and were exhausted. KP (my 13 yr old neice) and I took mom to the panificio around the corner to get some fresh bread for dinner, but I’m still not sure if she remembers it at this point.

Oh, by the way, this reminds me…there’s a church about two blocks from us, and I swear the bells in the tower celebrate the passing of every 15 minutes by ringing…for 15 minutes. So as we were walking to get the bread the bells rang. The entire time. And this was quite a walk. So trust that I will never, ever need to wonder when it is 11:15, 11:30, or 11:45. And don’t even get me started about dead noon.

Anyway, the parents take a nap and then we drag them out of bed and to a vineyard called Villa Sceriman. I had never been to this place before, as Sarah discovered it about a week after I left last fall. It’s absolutely gorgeous. Picture what you would think an ancient Italian mansion would look like, with vineyards in the back, and that’s where we were.


The first historical record of Villa Sceriman dates all the way back to 1447. In 1740 it was bought by the Sceriman family, rich ship-owners from Armenia, who divided it between several tenants and left a considerable amount of land dedicated to the vineyards. Now it’s a major exporter of wine all over the world.

We had a lot of this wine. This is a picture of us at the beginning of the evening:

With the wine came a lot of prosciutto and a lot of cheese. Here’s the woman cutting the cheese (tee hee):

And here’s the lovely man who gave us samples of all of their wine:

Do you see the Italian customers? Italians love to drape their sweaters over their shoulders and around their waists.

Here are my parents closer to the end of the evening, three sheets to the wind (jk mom!):

Although it was a bit chilly, it was still a beautiful evening. My parents and Ryan were excited to finally be in Italy, and we were excited to see them, so we all decided to celebrate! Here’s a picture of Ryan and I with some of the background of the place:

And to end this whole night, I’ll give you an idea of what the wine in Italy costs:

And this was expensive wine! There are vineyards we go to weekly that will give you a jug of wine for about 1,20 euro. I’ll explain that later, as well as show you why it’s so cheap. We are absolutely surrounded by vineyards.

First night in Italy for the parents and Ryan = success!!