It’s not every day that you walk by François Mitterand on the road to Paciano. Unless, of course, your friend, the Bossy Blonde, has decided that the flattened frog on your morning walk should have a name and that it should be of a dead French man, and that she only knows of one. I am totally in favor of this. I am decidedly all for the anthropomorphizing of any and everything (I have named all of the cars I’ve ever owned, obnoxiously enough) and why not memorialize the man whose last meal was a tribute to the particularly cruel, yet delicious, cuisine of his homeland (the outlawed eating of ortolan, anyone) by naming roadkill after him? 

Anyway, after two full weeks of the daily sighting of Monsieur Mitterand in all his squashed glory, he was absent today, no longer a mile marker for my morning routine, having most likely been washed away in the torrential, unseasonable downpour we had in Umbria on Saturday. A storm that started just as our poor, mistreated and overworked Fiat gasped back into town after a ridiculous “little drive” that should have taken 45 minutes. 

We had set out to go to a cheese factory outside of Todi with the idea to then carry on to Orvieto for some lunch and bubbles, but it quickly devolved from a great plan into a two and a half hour carnival ride on roads that Bossy later described as like “driving on radiatore, radiator shaped pasta” through the insane mountainous landscape. It was BRUTAL, and only salvageable as a day because there was CHEESE (my favorite being the black truffle pecorino) at the finish line at Caseificio Montecristo.