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Picture yourself sitting in your kitchen about to have dinner. Maybe you’ve cooked up some lovely fish item. It’s the end of the day (and you’re in Italy), so you’re relaxed, things are going well. Maybe you’ve even had a glass of wine or two… what the hell, it’s $3 a liter. Then, picture yourself, poised to take a bite, looking up and seeing this:

Egad! This is what happens when you live in a city where the humidity is almost always %98, except for when it’s raining, and its name in Italian is extra-fearsome-sounding - muffa (pronounced moo-fa). For full disclosure here, I want you to know that I’m basically writing this whole article simply as an excuse to say that word a few times. In any case, after about ten minutes of broken Italian at the hardware store, we discovered that we had a muffa problem and were provided with a product having a seemingly inconceivable name. I bring you the Smuffer!

The Smuffer is basically just bleach in a spray bottle (spruzzatore, also funny), but it leaves the muffa begging for mercy, and now that our whole house has been properly smuffatized and we’ve learned some muffa-prevention tips, we’re hopeful that the situation is under wraps. Four muffas in that last sentence alone… I’m good.

This past weekend Hannah and I took a trip to Trieste. We thought it was about time to take another weekend trip, and after looking through our Italy guidebook for a while we decided on Trieste for a few reasons:

• First off, it’s in the Friuli Giulia region of Italy, and that’s really, really fun to say. Clearly they at least have a sense of humor there.
• Second, our guidebook (Lonely Planet) listed the food as one of the major attractions, focusing on their abundance of meat products and beer, and made several mentions of the local specialty, boiled bacon. Now I know they have a sense of humor. Boiled bacon, seriously?
• They call these restaurants buffets. You mean it’s all you can eat boiled bacon? Let’s get on the next train.

Predictably, our first stop was one of these restaurants. At first we (well, really just me) were disappointed because there was no buffet as we think of it, just a regular restaurant. My stomach was bitterly disappointed until I looked at the table next to us and noticed that the man sitting there was eating something that strongly resembled an entire pig. My happiness increased when I opened the menu and found that pretty much all they had was sausage. We had a great time, drank a few good beers, and I ate so much that I felt disgustingly full until Monday.

It turns out that they have things in Trieste that aren’t food, and it’s really a beautiful place. It’s up in the far eastern corner of Italy, and it’s on the Adriatic and surrounded by mountains/hills, which made for some fantastic views. At the top of the hill that’s closest to the center of town there’s a castle and an amazing church that has some seriously beautiful Byzantine mosaics.

And, yes, of course they had something creepy as well.

In the middle of town they have an old Roman amphitheater. It’s totally dumbfounding to me how old these things are. When you’re standing there in front of a thing trying to count on your fingers how many centuries old it is and you run out of fingers it means it’s really, really old. Here’s a picture of the amphitheater and a few others from our walk around town.

On Sunday we also took a trip to the Risiera di San Sabba, an old rice husking plant that was converted into an extermination camp by the Nazis in 1944. Today there are the well-preserved remains of the place along with a small museum, and it takes no time whatsoever to be confronted with the significance of the place and how absolutely horrifying it must have been. The museum had a good deal of information about the spread of fascism in general and had copies of some of the memos documenting the formation of the camp, most of which were highly disturbing. My overall impression was of how trapped everyone must have felt, not able to leave the country and knowing that they could be picked up at any time and taken to a place like this. You want to believe that it couldn’t happen today except that of course it actually is happening right now in places like Darfur and Iraq.

Ok, it was time for something more lighthearted, and Trieste had just the thing… a castle!!! Castles make everybody happy, right? In 1855, Archduke Maximilian of Austria built a castle in Miramare a few miles (they call ‘em kilometers here) north of Trieste that overlooks the Adriatic, and it’s really something. The castle itself is quite beautiful, and it’s surrounded by a large park with some fantastic gardens. Here are some pictures of the castle and surroundings.

And one last picture… here’s the “what not to do” sign from the park surrounding the castle. Hannah astutely observed that it’s a little strange to forbid people from washing their hands with squirrels, but I guess they wanted to have all of their bases covered.

Burano is another of the well-known islands here in the Venetian lagoon, and Hannah and I took a trip out there this past Sunday. Though the island is well known for the lace that has traditionally been made there, we just went because it sounded like a really cool place. And is it ever. While things here in Venice are generally very old, very ornate, and very grey, Burano decided instead to go with very quaint and very colorful. I think this was a good decision for them, and it makes for a truly beautiful place just a thirty minute boat ride from Venice.

Burano has got to be the most photogenic place I’ve ever seen, and if I had any idea whatsoever how to take a good picture, I’m sure you would be so convinced. As it is, I’ve just got some decent, humble pictures here to share. Here are some of the general colorfulness…

You may notice from a few of these pictures that Burano also seems to be the laundry capital of the world. I’ve never seen so much laundry in my life, or such a uniform display of it at nearly every single house. But I’m digressing. Oh, and they also have tons of cats.

And to wrap this up, here are a picture of my beautiful wife and of Venice in the distance seen from Burano.

By the way, I know that colorfulness isn’t really a word. Promise. I do proofread these things, you know.

Just as I began to get over our experience with the creepy shriveled hand relic thing a few weeks ago, Hannah and I took a seemingly innocent stroll over to the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. I might have suspected that we’d see something creepy, since we were in the same neighborhood as the hand - and because we nearly always do - but I remained unprepared for what we found there. First, though, the building itself is absolutely spectacular. Tintoretto apparently spent about 28 years making paintings for the place, which is a really long time even on the metric system. In any case, while everybody else was focusing on the amazing ceiling, I was on the hunt for creepiness, and boy did I score. In a little room off to the side, in the middle of a table was THIS.

Now, what that is is something that looks very much like a human head in a fancy case. I’m tempted to believe that it’s a fake head except that it looked so darn real, and the fact that it seemed just imperfect enough really convinced me. The strange thing about this one was that it came out of nowhere. No warning (lawsuit in the U.S.), no information (typical in Italy), no nothing. Even the internet has proven no use in this case. It’s not clear what will be required to top this one, but I feel confident that a) it exists, b) it’s here, and c) we’ll find it.

Last week was Carnevale here in Venice. Carnevale is a lot like Mardi Gras in the U.S. except that instead of people throwing beads and women exposing themselves they have people dressing up in crazy outfits and lots and lots of fully clothed tourists. Someone told me that during the week of Carnevale the number of people in the city literally TRIPLES from 60,000 to 180,000 (interesting article here). This has the effect of changing the streets from looking something like this…

To something like this…

All right, both of those were taken during Carnevale, and the second one is a Hare Krishna parade that we got stuck in, but you get the point. If I can’t exaggerate, what do I really have left. In any case, we had a great time during the whole thing, and here are a handful of pictures we took. I wanted to get more pictures of people in the whole Carnevale get-up, but since you mostly see them at night, we didn’t manage to get very many good pictures. Here is a link to a picture, so you get the idea.