We’ve just arrived home from two weeks in Italy, a beautiful country full of wonderful people, delicious food and breathtaking landscapes. It was also a country where none of us spoke the language, and where we faced constant puzzles just to open a doorknob, flush a toilet or turn on the hot water.

I recently read a book about learning foreign languages. The author said, “If the only thing you know is how to ask where the train station is, then you should ask everyone you meet, whether you want to go there or not.”

On this trip I tried to be fearless about speaking Italian. Simple conversations turned out to be no problem. People seemed to appreciate the effort and often responded with broken English, so we would end up speaking a sort of half-and-half language with a lot of hand gestures and would understand each other perfectly.

One night I refused a dish of spaghetti fifteen minutes before having to sing, saying, “No, grazie, I’ve got to cantare.”

The waiter smiled, said, “Okay,” and walked away.

I turned to Luca, our Italian booking agent and road manager, and said, “He understood me.”

“Of course,” Luca said. “‘I’ve got to cantare’ is perfectly fine.”

Another time we were asked, “Would you like mice in your salad?”

After a pause Marlon ventured, “Maybe just a couple small ones.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Mice?”

“Um, yes, is a yellow vegetable.”

Mais.

Well, si, we all wanted corn in our salads.

One way to get a sense of what that ancient Roman emperor meant is through music. Music makes us one — at least the humans. Another way is through food. Viewing the world as Marcus Aurelius did, you realize that you are what you eat, even before you eat it.

Here in Italy we are enjoying some of the best food in the world. Luca, our Italian booking agent who has been traveling with us, explains it this way: “It is in the ground. You travel fifty kilometers and the food is different, because the earth is different.” The ham and cheese around Parma, for instance, are different from any other ham and cheese in the world.

When I think of the giant agribusiness farms of today, the poisons and chemicals and genetic mutations and dead zones in our oceans, I have to wonder what kind of living organism we are turning ourselves into.

Well, I don’t mean to get too preachy. Life is sweet. We should all do what we can to make it sweeter.

Three shows down in Italy, they’ve all gone well. Pictured above is an after-hours jam at La Dispensa in Mirto, Sicily. We arrived in Mirto in the dark, so we had no idea where we were, except that we had been climbing winding mountain roads in the rain. In the morning we awoke to this view:

My black cowboy shirt is getting a little pungent. We flew south from Milan with only one carry-on bag each, so I could bring just one stage outfit with changes of underwear. I must not have offended anyone last night, because after the show there was plenty of air-kissing and drink buying (mostly grappa and a little Irish whiskey). Anyway, it was good to have a day off in Palermo. I washed my socks in a hotel sink and hung them on the balcony railing to dry. Everybody’s in good spirits. Tomorrow we fly north and rejoin our luggage.