Lorenzo had offered for us to stay at the castle again, and since we hadn't even been there for 24 hours the previous time, we had to say yes! After walking around and viewing the sights of Parma, a very beautiful city (we went into the benedictine monastery and I said 'ciao' to the monk- on second thought, 'bon giorno, padre' probably would have been better..), we hopped on the train to Fornovo where Lorenzo met us. We picked up some groceries and headed for the mountains. After Lorenzo left, by this point it was dinner time, so we cooked some great homemade pasta with local parmesan and sat in the cool attic, reading and enjoying a bottle of wine. I had been carrying around a giant 1,000 page novel, book ten of Steven Erikson's Malazan Tales of the Fallen. I started reading the series four years ago, and had saved the last 100 pages of the novel for the epic setting of Castel Corniglio. Steve's imagination continues to amaze me, and I feel pretty lucky to be able to co-write songs with such a good author and lyricist. He sent me all the poems from the last book six months before it was published, and I had written about six songs using these poems, which are part of our setlist during the tour. So it was a very intriguing journey of discovery to see how these poems, with which I already had a very personal relationship, fit into the novel's storyline. By the time I finished the novel, Aliza had fallen asleep, curled up in a ball on the couch, while I sat and worked on new songs and restructured some older ones, and also started work on a solo violin piece (inspired by a character, Fiddler, from the novel). Coffee and cake for breakfast, we packed our day packs, my guitar strung over my shoulder, and went off in search of a waterfall that Lorenzo had told us about. We knew that it was 45 minutes up the river, and there was a trail he had told us about, but we hadn't finished getting directions from him.. We decided to make it an adventure and try to find the trail ourselves. We walked through the rolling fields and pastures of the estate, past old houses that were servants quarters in the 15^th century (half of them now partially in ruins, echos of the lives once lived there). We eventually found a trail, which turned into the trail, past the old pond and crumbling stone boathouse, and we felt as though we were in some surrealist movie.. The trail went deeper into the valley, which quickly became a canyon, as we passed over moraines of shattered marble and limestone. I saw a big black snake slither away (but didn't tell Aliza until later). The trails seemed to merge into other trails, and all we knew was that 20 something minutes after the pond there would be a small trail leading down to the river. Luckily we found it before disappearing into the Appenine back-country.. It was a bit steep and sketchy, but the rocks weren't too loose and we managed, the humidity driving us to the waterfall. We could hear the rushing water now that we had descended into the canyon. Soon we saw the beautiful turquoise water, flowing down the tiers and shelves of the mountainside. It was more beautiful than we could have expected. We found twin waterfalls pouring into deep pools, plenty of water for swimming. Yay!! Its was our first real swim of the season, since Vermont swimming a month ago was more like a dash and dunk in the snowmelt.. We had a nice picnic of prosciutto, soft chesse, and Italian bread, and decided to walk back along the river. The wide riverbed was full of dry, perfectly shaped stones, like the ones used to build Castel Corniglio, with the small river meandering through these stones, often changing its course. I sang as we walked, working on new songs, Aliza helping me with lyrics, as we balanced on the loose stones and hopped across the riverbanks. We were ready for another swim by the time we got back! As we got to the bridge, Lorenzo was crossing in his old blue '74 Toyota jeep/pick-up/cool car thing. He was on his way home, planning to return later to film us performing within the walls of the castle. After a steep and hot climb back up the hillside to the house, we had a nice siesta. After some nice wake-up tea, we went out and filmed about six songs in different spots around the castle (we will post the videos on youtube when we have a strong enough internet connection). At first, we closed the castle door so that the dog, Badoo, couldn't get in, but then he started howling a little bit too off-pitch, so we just let him back in- you might see a random little dog tail a few times in the videos.. We felt pretty lucky to be recording next to this beautiful old castle. We went over to Lorenzo's and Maria cooked us another amazing meal. We had to decide which route to take to get to Belgium the next day- we had lots of options, choosing between going through the alps and down the Rhine river or going further west up the Rhone valley or making a detour and going out to the west coast of France (life is rough, eh?). They lent us the car to get back to the castle, but when we got there we realized we didn't have the key, and the house was locked- we thought we would have to drive back a half hour and wake up Maria and Lorenzo in the middle of the night! But then I realized we had left the kitchen window open, and we managed to climb in. And so ended this chapter of our adventures at Castel Corniglio..