I bought some traditional local specialties: cookies called ricciarelli and a slice of a ficchi e noce cake.

The cake is a type of panforte described as fruit cake but it’s much denser and chewier than any fruit cake I’ve had. I don’t like fruit cake but this was not too bad. The name means figs and hazelnuts. It was not too sweet and the texture made me think of Eat More candy bars.

The ricciarelli are like macaroons. Crispy exterior but airy sweet interior without a lot of flavour. They are made with egg whites, nuts, and honey as a base. There seem to be two types. The lighter coloured ones have ground almonds and darker ones have chocolate or cocoa as well as ground nuts.

They are traditional Christmas sweets and supposedly have a history going back to 14th century Siena. The powdered sugar on the ricciarelli make them a messy thing to eat. I didn’t know when I would have them, certainly not while walking around. I had some of them for breakfast. The sugar should keep me going for the morning.

At school we were working on the imperfetto past tense. It’s mainly used for descriptions of past things, places, times, states of being. To practice, we each had to talk about our elementary school experiences. As the others went to school in Singapore, Germany, Switzerland, Brazil, Puerto Rico and New York state, and the instructor in Italy, it was pretty interesting. The Brazilian was in a grade one class of 50 kids! Italian schools make you do oral exams. Kids in Switzerland do short language immersion stints where they live with a teacher for a short period in order to work on one of the other official languages of Switzerland. Everyone who went to Catholic school hated the teachers who were mean nuns who hit them. The woman from Singapore had a classmate who failed seven times but had to stay at school until he was promoted. (She said he became a musician. Sounds like he may have had a reading disability.) In German, the top grade is 1 and the worst is 6. In Switzerland, the top grade is 6 and the worst is 1.

In the early afternoon, after starting a load of laundry:

I went to the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena. It focuses on Sienese artists, which means mostly medieval. There are some pretty good medieval Sienese artists like Duccio but their best works aren’t in the Pinacoteca.

The best Sienese Renaissance artist is Pinturicchio, another whose best Renaissance works I have seen in Rome. This one has a lot of medieval elements like the gold and general icon-like composition. There isn’t much information accompanying the works. Some pieces have more explanation but this one doesn’t even have a date for the work.

There was an entire room of Caravaggesque paintings. In some instances the artist was unknown.

The optional afternoon activity was a lecture about Caravaggio. There are no Caravaggio’s in Siena. The instructor, Giulia, who lead the Duomo tour the day before, was very interactive. Interesting for me to learn some art related Italian terms.

My other activity was cooking. We made a crostini with sausage and stracchino, a fresh cheese we saw a lot last year in Bologna. This was followed by ravioli filled with ricotta and pecorino with a simple tomato sauce, then veal and ceci, chickpeas, with rosemary and il dolce was an apple cake.

I only took one photo.

Including eating, this took 4 1/2 hours. Towards the end of the evening almost everyone lapsed into either English or German. A little wine and a lot of food and the effort of speaking Italian got to be too much.