Piano shopping!

Today the program directors and I went piano shopping! After our Italian class, we drove to Arezzo (the drive was quite bumpy, especially in a stick shift) and went to Vieri Niccolini's Strumenti Musicali. They had a lot of brands that I had never heard of before (as well as Yamaha and Kawai), and the one I eventually picked out was a little Petrof upright. He has a nice touch, decent regulation, unfortunately no sostenuto pedal, and a versatile tone that seems to sound good with every style of music. He needs a first name (I like Petrof for the last) and I am taking suggestions. I might name him after someone in the Alberti family, unless someone else has a good idea. He's coming on Thursday, and I'll be drumming on tabletops until then if we can't get something else worked out. Our wonderful cook has offered to let me play at her house, but I don't think that will happen until next week.
I love how the community is so close knit here...I've recognized our architect and our program director around Sansepolcro, and everyone seems to know someone, and if you know someone who knows someone, then you know both someones.
We were discussing people's surprisingly fierce allegiance to their home (for example, no one from North Carolinian likes being taken for a South Carolinian, and no one from Toscana wants to be thought to be from Umbria). I like the way our Italian director expressed it; she said "I think even if I really like another country...I am still so much my country. It's-a something inside of me, my identity."