Most Italians have never heard of San Martino Spino, let alone know where it is. But this tiny town is the home of the wonderful and talented Tizio, aka Bob Corn. This kind and generous man helped us book some of our Italian shows and invited us to play the the festival he organizes, Musica Nelle Valli. He also opened his home us.. and the other 35 bands... whom we awkwardly 'bunked' with, 6-12 to a room, for the weekend. Luckily, all these musicians were also really, really nice people :) We spent a lot of our time with Mesta from Serbia, PowerDove (Annie and Curtis- America via UK), and the punk-jazz group from Portugal, with the longest band name ever (bascially it's a description of a symbol, the previous band 'name,' which is two eighth notes reversed/backwards..). The festival was three days long, friday to sunday. We were scheduled to play Saturday night but we arrived early to stake out a bed. After going for food and cappucinos at the local bar, we made our way to the festival grounds, a half hour walk outside of town, through lush green fields, lots of dust, irrigation canals, a sky saturated with clouds, but with the sun poking through. Five of us walked over, and piled into a festival staff member's car for the last five minutes to get out of the heat. Tizio, and his label FoolTribe, had rented out this venue lost in the countryside. We're still not sure what the building was used for, but now it's used for concerts and art displays. The structure itself is a beautiful space, a circular hut shape, with brick/ceramic paving stones as a floor, stucco walls, and exposed giant wooden beams. The concerts were set up on either side of the circle so that each band could prepare while the other played. There was a great diversity of music over the weekend, mostly a rotation between hard rock/metal/punk circus bands, and acoustic and electronic. The shows started late on Friday, so we passed the time outside in the beer/food/wine tent, drinking amazingly refreshing on-tap, cool, sparkling, local Lambrusco red wine, and getting to know the other musicians. And we shamefully admit that we did play a good round of iPhone scrabble, six of us versus the computer. We won. After seeing most of the bands that night, we decided to head back to Tizio's not too late. Luckily, he lent us some community bikes which we used for the weekend. However, we happened to leave during a giant wind and lightening storm, with only tiny speckles of rain, as few as the stars poking through the clouds. It was an epic bike ride home, with no bike lights, no moon light, along the dirt, pot-holed road, with the strong wind blowing and gusting horizontally across the Italian fields. At one point the wind was so strong, we had stopped, and Aliza couldn't get back on her bike! Needless to say, we did make it back safely, but full of adrenaline. We were sleeping soundly until the other bands came home. After the dust and noise had settled, were we awoken by a chorus of snoring.. luckily we were tired enough to block it out. It is a little awkward to wake up with almost two dozen tired and hung-over bands, but as we said, everyone was super nice, and once the coffee set in, everyone was pretty happy. We got all our show gear ready, and biked like pack-mules to the venue, this time in the nice, warm, pleasant breeze. It definitely was not too early to enjoy some sparkling wine as we listened to the first of the 16 bands scheduled for Saturday. Tizio had graciously given us a great time slot, late enough that a lot of people were there, but early enough that we had time to enjoy ourselves after the show (more wine). Mesta played a great early evening set, a welcome calm after a loud afternoon of amplified music. The band before us was a crazy hard-rock circus band, which we wished we could have enjoyed fully, but we had to set up. The sound man was very helpful- even though neither of us could speak each others' language, sign language worked. All the seats filled up for the show, and we had some very good moments during our set. It was at the same time serene and surreal to be playing at such a beautiful venue. It was slightly brisk outside, providing a nice cool down from the hot venue, with all the stones and ceramic absorbing the heat of the crowd. We later found some seats in the front row to watch PowerDove, Annie singing with her dreamy voice and picking soft tones on her guitar, while Curtiss added ambient sounds, tones and noises with a high-tech miniature midi controller attached to his Mac (he's now doing his PhD in electronic composition, we had fun shop-talking about avant garde electronics). That evening we rotated between the beer tent and the venue, listening to all the great groups Tizio had found. We biked home again, this time with lights! Day 3 of the festival was mixed with a sense of exhaustion and happiness, and a bit of sadness after having to say goodbye to new friends. We only stayed for half of the day's entertainment since we needed to catch a train, but we made sure to catch the great acoustic picking style of Gypsy Rufina and the eighth note Portugal band. We must agree with Tizio when he said that this band put on an incredible show (in the words of Tizio, 'what a f***ing concert, man!!). It was a truly adventurous instrumental, punk jazz, rock n' roll.. It was hard to say goodbye to Tizio, who had been working hard the weekend, hardly sleeping, and even working the bar Sunday afternoon when the volunteers were still sleeping! We gave him our heartfelt thanks and left for the train with Tizio's friend and Mesta. We had three days off before having to be in Belgium. One day was needed for traveling, and the other two we decided to spend at Castel Corniglio. After waiting for the train in Mirandola (there is no train to San Martino Spino), we found ourselves once again in Bologna Centrale, had another bad sandwich near the internet cafe (all the other food we had in bologna was good!), and found a neat hotel in Parma. We didn't realize the hotel was on the outskirts, but it was worth it to have a clean, inexpensive, air conditioned room for one night. It felt great to shower off all the dirt and sweat from the the festival weekend..