Pattona: chestnut flour and water baked under hot coals in a testi.

Now we're getting down to the wire, which means trying to eat as many home-cooked meals as we can before we go home to NYC and take-out Chinese and Tortilla Fresca. Santina, my son's godmother and the oft referred-to baby in the Tonelli family portrait has made my husband's favorite food item, pattona, and she wants us to come have it for lunch.

Pattona is a sweet, gummy cake made from chestnut flour and water. The family members who are old enough to have lived through WWII won't eat it because back then that was all there was to eat. I'm not crazy about it, but I can eat a piece or two, especially when it's accompanied by a piece of delicious sage pork sausage, which it was today.

Santina has just returned from a special trip: a pilgrimage to Lourdes, where she bathed in the miracle waters. Santina is the consummate pilgrim -- she's been to Lourdes and to that place in the former Yugoslavia and she goes pretty regularly to visit the relic of Succisa's patron saint, Santa Zita, which lies in the Duomo in Lucca. (More on Zita later in this postcard.)

While she was away, Santina asked her daugher, Giovanna, to come stay at her house and tend to her garden and animals. In addition to her pets (one cat and one dog), Santina keeps several chickens and rabbits.

Apparently Giovanna had a tough time of it. On Tuesday morning she woke up and found the cat dead on the side of the road. Then on Thursday the male rabbit was discovered cold and stiff in its hutch. Giovanna came up to Case Rotelli that night and told us that Santina had called from somewhere on the road and asked if everything was all right. She didn't want to ruin her trip, so she said yes, everything was fine.

Anyway, today after lunch Santina's son Massimo stopped by with his children. Massimo is great fun. He joked that if his sister had stayed any longer the dog and chickens would be dead too.

(You only keep one male rabbit as a breeder. More than one and they fight.)

Massimo was there at his mom's request. She had brought us all souvenirs from Lourdes. She also presented Renato Sr. with a brochure she picked up that she thought was in English, but turned out to be German. So she gave him an Italian one instead.

We looked over the brochures, marvelling at how much Lourdes looks like Disneyworld. The heathens among us (that would be me) joked that they could process more pilgrims by installing a handicapped-accessible flume ride alongside the grotto. Too bad Massimo doesn't understand English. I think he was the only one there that could appreciate the joke -- if only he knew what a flume ride is.

Santina gave her two grandchildren and our two children little gold bracelets. Then she broke out the holy water. She purchased several souvenir jugs and poured us each a shot. We all made the sign of the cross and gulped it down. I prayed for it to make my acne go away. Massimo said that he would need a lot more water to wash away all the blasphemies he had uttered that week. Santina ignored him the way my mother ignores me when I'm being impertinent.

She also gave us these souvenir bottles of water to take home with us.

We packed them up, along with a flask of blueberry grappa she made. (An equivalent amount of grappa gives you a much better buzz.) My father-in-law, Marco, is returning home with us tomorrow, and, like us, he has some things he needs to attend to before leaving. It seems he needs us to drive him to the Succisa cemetery, so he can say goodbye to his parents and those siblings who have passed on. Then he wants to stop at the church to make an offering.

Here he is (at right) donning one of his many baseball caps. Besides the Yankees, I've seen him with Oakland A's and Boston Red Sox caps. Ask him if he's an American League fan and he'll give you a blank stare.

I think he's embarassed because he hasn't been to mass all summer. He doesn't go on Sunday morning because it's too crowded, he says. He can't go on Saturday night because it interferes with his dinner schedule, which he maintains rigorously.

We get to the church and he asks me to help him figure out how to light a candle. They've got little electric toggle switches and he keeps trying to press them rather than flip them up. I show him how it works and watch as he stuffs 5,000 lire in the slot. I told him that for 5,000 he's entitled to light at least 5 candles, but he tells me one is enough.

At left is a picture of the fresco on the ceiling of the Succisa church. It depicts Zita, who was a house servant, giving away her employers' food to the poor.

Marco wants to find the priest so he can give him his offering. We go next door to the rectory and a sloppy, half-dressed, man comes to the door with dirty pants and a painter's cap. I'm thinking this can't be the priest, but I'm wrong -- it is. He's delighted to meet the "American" Tonelli and even more delighted to take his cash. I would have been disturbed by this except that it made my father-in-law so happy to be recognized. Thirty-three years ago he left this village to live in the U.S., where he never really made it big.  Now he returns to Succisa as a summer celebrity.