On our way next day to the swimming pool higher up the mountain where the wedding and reception were to take place, we walked a distance of a kilometer along a service road skirting a forest said to be inhabited by wolves and wild boar. We swam and read there before returning for a barbecue in the evening, at which Audrey, the only child present among the 50 guests, won many hearts by picking daisies to present to several. On Wedding Day, dressed as a flower girl, she was reluctant to repeat the gesture, but the wedding was none the worse for the omission. It was a traditional Prayer Book service in the shadow of Mount Subiaco, rising in front of us to a height of four thousand feet, the hotel being at an elevation of some 2500 feet. I read from the New Testament of Jesus’ first miracle at the wedding feast at Cana, a Romanian relative of the bride’s read a personal selection of her own, the priest gave a friendly and comforting short sermon, and the threat of rain posed by a distant thunderclap receded, blessings were distributed, and the reception began in the formal dining room adjoining the pool nearby. The food was good; Audrey loved the risotto; speeches and dancing followed, and as Audrey’s family had to leave early the next morning for home, they said good night and farewell. We listened to music from a very capable band playing popular songs and even some Romanian folk music, spoke to the bride’s Romanian parents and her grandmother, spry and vigorous at 80 years of age, and it was soon time for the two of us to head bedwards.
After breakfast the next day we too left, happy to have reserved accommodation in advance in Orvieto on the way to Rome. The drive to Orvieto, another Umbrian hill-town, was entrancing: we followed the autostrada south from Perugia, following the course of the young Rio Tevere, the famous River Tiber, southwest almost to Orvieto itself before it continues south to join the Rio Aniene near Rome, flows through the city and empties itself at its delta near Ostia into the Tyrrhenian Sea, a distance of some 400 miles from source to outlet, through Tuscany, Umbria and Lazio. We left the autostrada for a twisting, climbing mountain road at some point before Todi, and followed this route past Lake Corbara beneath us, through tunnels cut into the rock, to arrive at noon, much earlier than anticipated, at Villa Acquafredda, ( ‘Coldwater’), a superior bed and breakfast establishment on the outskirts of ‘Orvieto Scalo,’ (lower Orvieto), below and outside the high cliffs of tufo or volcanic rock surmounted by man-made walls that surround the older city above. Later that day we were to look down from the heights to see the Villa clearly below.
