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Posted: August 18
Rome in August is quiet, beautifully so, and this year the heat has been very bearable. I even felt a bit of a chill early Sunday morning when I set out for a bicycle ride. August means very little traffic, but the key thing is that the city empties out and the workmen go away with their families, so there is no banging and hammering from the incessant repair work on our building. Most of the employees here at the Jesuit Curia are also on vacation so I have been able to dig into some projects that take more concentration than I can muster when we are going full steam. On the other hand, not much is happening, so writing a blog slows down a lot. Best of all, though, is that I have more chance to paint. The two paintings on the Jesuit Voices home page were just recently finished. I want to tell the back story of the one with the sea of red poppies.
My sister Rosemary and her family came to visit in June, and we spent a few days in Tuscany in an apartment on an “agriturismo” farm that was grows wheat and grapes and also cares for guests. Tuscany is as spectacular as people say, a bit more lush, a lot softer than the rough mountains near Rome. It is a warm and welcoming area, and we felt very much at home. We rented a car and drove north from Rome. I kept stopping to look for fields of poppies that come wild to Italy in the late spring. I saw a whole field a few years ago when I was out on a bicycle ride and have wanted to paint them ever since, but they come when the want to and so far I have never been at the right time and place even to get a photograph like the image in my memory.
We stopped once near Montepulciano, but the field was not all that full of the bright red blooms and there was no interesting background. Every once in awhile I saw something intriguing in the distance, but nothing close by. We got to the farm and settled in, then my brother-in-law (another Tom) and I set out to find food to cook for the evening meal. The nearest village was only a few kilometers away so we drove over and quickly went through its whole two-block length without seeing anything that looked like a food store. I asked someone where the food store was and they graciously explained it was just back around the corner. We turned around and repeated the trip and quickly ended up on the other end of town without seeing any store. I pulled into a side street to talk to some men relaxing in the shade of a tree.
”Where is the food store,” I asked in reasonable Italian.
“You just drove by it twice,” came the reply. The helpful man pointed out a store that we had indeed driven by, but it was closed.
I protested that fact, but he just shrugged and explained that today was Wednesday and all the food stores in Tuscany were closed on Wednesday afternoon. It was the custom. And in fact, I had not asked where I could find a store that was open.
“What about food for tonight?” I asked in desperation.
“Umbria, go to Umbria; their stores close on Thursday.”
He pointed that the nearest town in Umbria was only five kilometers away, so Tom and I set out determined to be successful hunter-gatherers. We went through the town and dropped down a long sloping descent and turned the corner to find the treasure trove of all fields of poppies: an uncultivated field absolutely filled with the red flowers, so much so that they flowed together into a carpet in the distance. It was exactly what I wanted and better than I hoped for. We pulled over and both took out cameras. (Hint: if you are a maniac photographer, always go hunter-gathering with another photographer who doesn’t mind tromping all over a field getting every angle and absorbing the scene deeply into memory.)
And that’s how I got the source material for the poppy painting.
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