We played this one last October.  Big club - a great venue with great audiences.  It was a lot of fun to be back here.  Once again, we stayed outside the city (enjoying our un-jetlag day) at a quiet hotel in Castel Gandolfo.

View from the hotel.  In Italy, everywhere you look is history coming alive.  We're told that the lake was a volcano at one time.  Popes have been going to that castle on top of the hill for hundreds of years for a summer hang.  It's about 30 miles outside of Rome - barely an hour by car for us but in the old days that qualified as a journey.

But who cares about a bunch of dead Roman guys anyway?  Much more important, the hotel had a good wireless internet connection in the lobby. Here Tony and Larry ignore history and the breath-taking view for more important things;  Website updates!

This one will go down as one of the toughest gigs on the tour, but with the best view - no contest on that one.  On the fabled Island of Elba, Sugar Reef is a smallish music club sitting high on a cliff.  Just take a look!  The club was way too small for us.  With a logical capacity of maybe 75, they jammed in 300 or so revelers.  We did two shows starting at 12:30am and didn't get back to our hotel until 5am.  We'll know to avoid that scenario again!  But man, what a view!

Not sure what inspired it since the club owner has plenty of hair, but this sign was over the door to the liquor storage room.  A definite photo op for Tony and I.  On the down side, the tiny 5x10 room under the sign was our 'green' room.  With the shelves and refrigerators there was barely space for 4 people standing close together and in a line - and no place to sit down.

Club owner/host Pierro introduces the band.  Come to think of it, he is a little thin on top.  He kept handing me shots of rum during the show.  After a while I ran out of excuses to not drink them, and suddenly the room wasn't so small.  It was a nice rum.  I think.

A full auditorium concert performance ... a radical change from the much smaller club stages of the last few days.  We're told that the paintings on the walls date back to the 14th century, and the restored building to considerably before that.  Unfortunately the light was low during this show so I had trouble getting usable photos.  Got a couple of good ones though.

I reconnected with a friend from The States, guitarist Caris Arkin, who's been living in nearby Assisi for 14 years.  That's Caris in the center, with his daughter Emma and Ricardo, a musician from Assisi.

Sometimes a disco, sometimes a performance venue - whether the name is a tongue-in-cheek thing or one of those questionable translations, Noise turned out to be a terrific venue and a good show for us.  Coming off an 8-hour drive, we really needed that!  The club was packed - and definitely one of the best audiences we've had.  They were very responsive - rockin' with us but totally quiet and attentive during the ballads.  That's turning out to be an ongoing issue for our shows.  Our set covers a very wide dynamic content range, and people tend to drift when we do something quiet.  Not a problem this time.