I came to Montefiascone in the summer of 2005; I was really needing a change of pace in life, so I enrolled in two week-long summer courses offered there at the School of Conservation and Preservation. At that time, I was still interested in going into book conservation, so I thought this would be a good opportunity for me. The first course was in medieval manuscript pigments (we ground up a lot of our own pigments using raw materials and even made some lakes), and the second was in medieval album bindings.
Since that experience, I've decided I prefer the field of archives to that of preservation, but my time in Montefiascone was still a good experience. The town is beautiful and sits atop a hill overlooking the Lago Bolsena. Since classes were only in the mornings, I often took the bus down to the crystal-clear lake and lounged around in the afternoons. During one of the weeks, Montefiascone was holding its yearly wine festival EST! EST! ESTE! (obviously I partook in the festival offerings), and I also spent a lot of evenings at the various restaurants enjoying the local cuisine with the rest of the my classmates (a very international group). All in all, it was a relaxing time and a much needed escape from everyday life.
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