"I spent the summer in northern Italy, staying with a family of distant relatives in the town of Belluno, which is in the eastern Dolomite range, part of the Italian Alps. My host was a third or fourth cousin twice removed, and was much more Austrian than Italian - from what I could gather members of his family had fled Austria for Italy after the fall of Mussolini, hoping to make their way through Italy to Switzerland, but had found Belluno a fairly safe and pleasant place to be, so they decided to just remain there after the war had come to an end."
He shuffled his flatware around his plate to suit his left handedness, took a bite of the broccoli, and continued.
"Savio, that's my cousin, was unemployed the entire time I was there - he pretty much took care of his three kids while his wife worked, unless he wanted to take me on a hike or drive to some important or noteworthy place nearby, in which case he would drop the kids off with one of his sisters, whichever one wasn't currently mad at him, and then we'd spend the day playing tourist and tour guide - and Savio was a great tour guide, knew where a ton of obscure or rarely visited stuff was, and knew a lot of people. I don't think we went anywhere that he didn't know at least two or three people who were happy to see him, graciously providing us with at least a filling snack and even occasionally joined us if we were going on a hike, like the day we went to Saint Christiana to mingle with the rich and famous, or when we went to Venice so I could ride in a real Gondola."
After wolfing down another few pieces of broccoli and taking a long sip off his pint, he picked up right where he left off.
"Yeah, you wouldn't believe all the people I met in the little towns and villages that he'd take me to that had never left the area they were born and raised in to go visit fantastic places that were only an hour or two away. Hell, Rome was only about as far away as we are from Durango, and Savio had never been to Rome until I talked him into driving down for a weekend. Can you believe that? One of the world's capital's in his own backyard and he'd never been there. We had a pretty good time there, too, but after we got back all he could say was that it was okay. Man, that beats all, eh?'
He dug into the last of the broccoli and started on the loaded baked potato, but didn't let that slow down his recounting of his fun-filled summer.
"We even drove to a small town in Slovenia - Bovie or Bovic, something like that, which was a beautiful drive, just really amazing scenery. It's a small, touristy place surrounded by incredible mountains and a lot of war memorials from both world wars. A really beautiful place but it rained the entire time we were there."
Pausing to take a couple more swigs of beer, he then turned to me and asked, "So, what did you do this summer"
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