Author: Linda

For Whom the Bell Tolls ~ September 10, 2015

  • Thursday, September 10
  • Day 3
  • Rome

The Casa di Santa Brigida Convent bells toll inviting people to mass. Amusingly the striking of the bell is preceded by what sounds like the hee-haw of a donkey.   Just as amusingly my 3rd floor room is located beneath the bell tower.

  • Bell tower taken from Abby’s roof top garden
  • Bell tower above Abby’s chapel
  • Abby on Pizza Farnese with imposing recycled Roman bathtub fountain


Someone’s Home ~ August 22, 2015

  • August 22, 2015
  • 17 Days Before Departure
  • Blue Ridge Parkway, Virginia
  • 10 miles, total assent 2,118 feet

Preparing for the St. Francis of Assisi pilgrimage.  When the parks were formed in the 1930’s, not all the displaced families disappeared from the mountains. They left their dead. 

  1. Cemetary
  2. Gravestone
  3. Chimney

In the 1930s, Shenandoah National Park was pieced together from over 3,000 individual tracts of land, purchased or condemned by the Commonwealth of Virginia and presented to the Federal Government. In the process, at least 500 families -described as “almost completely cut off from the current of American life” were displaced in what was considered by some to be an humanitarian act. To restore, or rather create, a ‘natural’ landscape out of the patchwork of recently abandoned settlements, Civilian Conservation Corps volunteers dismantled buildings and obscured the detritus of human habitation with the purity of imported vegetation.


Posey Snail ~ August 20, 2015

  • August 20, 2015
  • 19 Days Before Departure 
  • Monticello, Charlottesville
  • 12 miles, total assent 1,492 feet

Preparing for the St. Francis of Assisi pilgrimage.  Posey posing as a snail.  “The most beautiful bean in the world is the Caracalla Bean,” wrote Thomas Jefferson. The flower is snail-like and the pods pea-like and editable.