crostata small copyEvery new year evening I prepare a “crostata” with our jam.

And every year I decorate the top with the dough, creating the number for the new year. So I thought I did this year. But when I was getting the cake ready to be served, my son noticed that I had written 2005 instead of 2015… Ten years less, thanks to a zero replacing the righteous one…
In a rush I lifted the zero, I cut it in order to create a one and put it back on the cake. Nobody noticed and the cake had the usual success, despite the numerical error.
Was it a lapsus? My subconscious was trying to tell me something?
If I think about it, 2005 was the year in which we began our adventure in Umbria. There was not Holiday Farm at that time, but in ten years Il Cucciolo was born, it started to walk, it knew many people, it collected experiences and memories and it helped us grow. Today we are introducing a new web site which we hope will be more in tune with our times and the experience accumulated in our first ten years.
With the new site, we are starting a blog which we would like to nurture in order to share our experience. The best way to start seems to be the beginning, remembering that first night of ten years ago…
Thinking back, that date was a kind of ritualistic transition. It was the moment in which me, Breon and our two children (Lucia one year old and Simone four) were committing to living in Umbria. It was a big jump, considering that we had lived in Manhattan up until few months before. From New York we landed on an umbrian hill, 5 km away from the first smallest town of Petrelle, part of the Città di Castello area. We had only few suitcases with the essential for a vacation in the cold, but they were more than enough for the first few months of adjustment to the new life. (to be continued…)