A long summer.

Hi everyone!
The summer 's been long and a hard pleasure with the boys at home for 3 months and a half, but I'm back.
I'm here and happy to be back to my normal life.
I want to give you a possibly short update about my vacations.

In July, I went/come to USA and it was a fantastic time.
I can't describe every single thing I've been amazed from but I'll tell you about some things I've found quite strange or different from here.

At first I want to tell you Americans that you're lucky to be artist in this land, because it's a wonderful inspiring place and because you as artists have a lot of opportunity that here in Italy we don't have. I've seen so many open shows in many towns that here we don't have and neither it's allowed to use open spaces to go and market your art.

You're lucky as artists to have so many and big art-suppliers shops. I only bought a thing in USA and it was a big Tom Lynch plastic squared palette (the only space remained in the cases was an external pocket)

It was easy to drive in the roads with our satellite GPS but mostly I loved the way you sign the next exits in the highway and the "toll-free" too as we were 4 in the car! (we don't have this here)

I loved the 24/24 open markets and I loved to have a policeman inside it I felt really sure going to buy late in the night.

I wondered for about 20 days where you Americans go to buy the fresh food, than in Dan Diego I met a nice Italian lady "Hi Daniela" who lives there with her family since 8 years (not to say how little is the world but she is from my same town) and she told me that in USA you have the "Deli" shops...
I stood stunned because I thought that a Deli was an Indian Restaurant.

I found strange that in San Francisco the same breakfast at Starbucks costs 10$ less than in San Diego, same brand and same breakfast. I must admit that I miss a lot Starbucks, I think we have only one or two just in Milano and Roma.

The biggest surprise for me was Los Angeles, I liked it a lot, maybe because I thought it was an horrible town or maybe because we had our hotel near Beverly and Hollywood.
The place that disappointed me more was Malibù, I surely prefer Santa Barbara.


Just a note about the fact that I had to visit every Entertainment Park on the Road, I could visit only the San Francisco Moma and I didn't liked it much (well the architecture is fantastic), but this is because I don't appreciate a lot the Modern Art in its inner specific definition. Abstract is not in my mood.

An other note: I've never seen as many tramps as in San Fran, it hurt my heart.

I took about 1200, pics mostly are not related to the landscape or portrait of the family, but mostly are reference for my artworks (i.e. photos of each salt&pepper of each restaurant I visited, people sleeping everywhere, Fed Ex trucks allover, trash baskets, people walking with coffe cups in the streets etc...)

We have mostly ate in steak-house and Italian restaurants, this is because we just had problems like this, I can't imagine if we had to eat elsewhere. I'd like to point a thing about Italian restaurant in general, those that have an Italian owner had a much similar taste in their dishes to those whe have here, and the owner mostly told us that they had to modify the recipes to be much USA tasty. Those who had a non Italian owner or cooker were absolutely... awful! And I tried to explain that in Italy we don't use garlic at all in our food (in one restaurant we couldn't find any course without garlic if not the dessert).

We still laugh a lot when we think at the faces of our waiters when we ordered our meals we usually go with an appetizer, than a first course with pasta and a second one with meat or fish and veggie, it seems that you don't eat so much, and I discovered why. I've seen people eating ad drinking beer at any time of the day, we don't do that we eat 3 times a day but a full complete meal, for breakfast a tea or cappuccino with tosted bread (no butter) and jam. But you should have to see the reastaurant's bills :D

When I left USA I was very happy to have visited California, but I thought I'd never wanted to live there (not for a real reason), now that I'm back since a while I start thinking that maybe it could be a nice idea to move there, but you know that Italians are people that love to stay sit in their land and I'm not ready (yet) to leave this loved but hated country!