Oh the weather outside is frightful…
Currently the temperature is 19 F today's high. Today's low was 11, better than when we arrived, when we longed for 10.
In Bellagio, the weather almost every day was very foggy and rainy, with some days the wind blowing so hard we lost our internet connections and hats. The local olive harvest was delayed due to the wet weather. 
When it was sunny, it was so gorgeous it was breathtaking. The snow pack on the mountains around us grew bigger every day, inching down the sides of the mountains, and the temperatures on the lake very quickly became quite cold. On one of our last days there, we went across the lake to try to walk--as much as we could--to San Martino, a gorgeously-situated old church perched on a mountainside. The way is a pilgrimage of sorts. However, it was rainy and cold, and the little stones that form the path are EXTREMELY slippery when wet, so it was exhausting. We gave up and ended in an local bar for lunch!
Once in the beautiful walled small city of Lucca, about 2-3 hours south of Bellagio, we encountered the same cold, wet, rainy weather, with snow pack on the local mountains! Lucca was just dressing up for Christmas, and the Christmas lights got turned on during our second evening. Local people were out in a shopping frenzy; one would never guess that Italy is experiencing a severe economic crisis. The narrow medieval streets were crowded with people, though perhaps most of them were doing what we were doing: window shopping. The restaurants were mostly empty, although they were serving terrific Tuscan peasant dishes and local red wines. Our bed and breakfast was in a 13th century merchant’s tower-home, a type of Tuscan housing that was surprisingly common in that period: a bottom floor that was a shop, a floor above to house the work-shop, another one above that to provide general living space for the family, with the upper floors for sleeping chambers, and wooden stairways or ladders on the outside in order to reach them all. The roofs held gardens for the family, including vegetables and small fruit trees! And when the merchants (including whoever owned “ours”) got more prosperous, they built villas onto the towers. Some of these towers still rise above the other buildings. Ours no longer was visible from the outside as a tower, but had long ago blended into the main room of the villa (part of the B&B) and other buildings around it. 
We went to Florence on the train, from Lucca, one day, in order to see a wonderful art exhibit (Bronzino), and thank heavens it was terrific, because it poured so hard that we could not see anything else of Florence due to our umbrellas in front of our faces. It is good we had seen Florence before. We discovered the holes in our shoes that day.
And then we took to train north again to Milan and a bus, in the cold rain, out to the airport. By the time we got there, it was snowing, and we realized that Europe as a whole had turned into a frigid, snowy land where few planes or trains were moving. Our plane got off the next morning, despite the local snow and the dire predictions of the desk clerk. We arrived at Munich Airport, to a snowstorm that was paralyzing much of Germany. After an hour’s delay in boarding, we sat on the runway for 3 hours (they fed and “watered” us a number of times), while one runway after another closed, we got de-iced 3 times, and our pilot kept telling us that we were “first in line’ on one or the other runway when it reopened (we went to the head of the line quickly as many other flights were simply canceled). He also informed us that he had to rev the engines before flight to get the ice out of them. I kept wondering if there was something crazy about taking off in that kind of weather (by the way, the UK and the rest of Northern Europe have also had remarkable amounts of snow recently).
We arrived in a Sweden that is experiencing the coldest October, November, and early December months in 100 years. It was below 0 F the night we arrived, and had to catch a 2-hour train to Orebro (where the conference I am attending is being held). We kept being warned that the trains might be delayed as the switches kept freezing and entire lines kept having to be shut down. We made it and found Orebro, a lovely university town in central Sweden, to be covered in snow and ice, with more falling. Snow has not stopped falling since we arrived two nights ago. Don says that maybe there is some sort of re-circulation system, like a fountain, where the snow hits the ground, evaporates in the extreme dryness, and goes back up in the sky, from where it is recycled as snow again. Amazingly, Swedes of all ages continue to bicycle in this weather and, of course, many are walking.
We have also learned what the winter darkness means. Only in the far north does the sun not rise at all in winter; here in the first week of December it begins to grow light at about 7:30 am, but the sun does not actually rise above the horizon until about 10:00 or 10:30 am. It then does not make it above a two-story building, on the horizon, until it sets again, fully, by 3:30 (but of course dusk is earlier). Don has not seen the sun since we got here, as he is in the downtown, and the low buildings block the horizon. I have glimpsed it from the café in the campus center, at about noon, as it is dark when I go to and from the campus.
The day after tomorrow, we go to Dublin on our way home, just for one day. After a month of mostly wet, cold weather, I have chosen my warmest sweater, socks, and pants to wear there, as it is undoubtedly cold and wet there, but hopefully not as cold as here. As one walks along the street here, it is easy to imagine that one’s cheeks are cracking with the cold. And yet, the candle-culture we had loved so much in October is still in full swing, the Yule decorations are everywhere, our B&B served us hot glog tonight, and the town has set up, outside the big church at the top of the town square, an outdoor stage for the Yule concert and sing-along that will take place Sunday night (after we have left).
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