“I think it is a magic place”

While selecting photos for our new website (nearly ready to launch !) I came across this essay by Isabel, then aged nearly seven, dictated with the intent to begin her regular blogging column. Eight years have passed, but better late than never.

This records our visit in July 2010 to visit the Festa della Fioritura at Pian Grande in Umbria, to enjoy an extraordinary abundance of wild flowers that bloom around Castelluccio at that time of year. Year after year we have included the same event in our clients’ travels. Castelluccio was devastated by an October 2016 earthquake and is yet to be rebuilt in any substantive manner. The flower show however goes on.

“Castellucio is a town in Italy’s Umbria.  Up on the peak of the hill there is the ancient town and down in the valley there are fields filled with poppies, flowering lentils, and wild flowers that make you want to dance in them. It is absolutely a magnificent place.  If you have danced in the flowering lentils and want to go up into town, you follow a thin path of sparkly pebbles. It is a hard walk, but very nice once you get there.  

If you look very carefully you may be able to see a few bears at sunset.  

The most beautiful sunset I saw there was like an egg falling through the sky and cracking at the very peak of the mountain before disappearing behind the horizon. Green clouds were around it.  

There are lots of haystacks here and there. 

I think that is a magic place.  

Animals are everywhere here around Castelluccio. An owl landed on the tree as the night closed in.  Next morning I went for a walk and found myself in a place I had never been before.  There were apple trees all around me.  There was a mole under one of the apple trees, a sleeping owl in the old oak little holes with bunny rabbits peeping out.  A fawn with its mother cantering towards the wood. Sparrows on the grass.  And that was when I thought I saw a fairy, flying in the wind. 

As I was about to leave the last thing I saw were wild geese flying through the sky.  And then I left.”