At last! The falling stars of San Lorenzo honoured properly in our household!

Everything I know about the meaning of San Lorenzo:

Lawrence of Rome (c. 225 – 258) was one of the seven deacons of ancient Rome who were martyred during the persecution of Valerian. Lawrence is said to have been martyred on a grill. During his torture, Lawrence cried out "This side’s done, turn me over and have a bite." - Wikipedia.

There is a famous poem about the martyred San Lorenzo by Giovanni Pascoli that everyone quotes:

	San Lorenzo, io lo so perché tanto di stelle per l'aria tranquilla arde e cade, perché si gran pianto nel concavo cielo sfavilla...

my translation:

Saint Lawrence, I know why so many
stars burn and fall through the tranquil air:
it is because your tears
are sparkling in the concave sky...

How many years have we been in Italy on August 10, the day of San Lorenzo, known for its association with falling stars? Hundreds? Well, at least 10. As usual, the nights of August the 10th and 11th were overcast. Never yet caught the effect of the falling tears.

Meanwhile, astronomically speaking, the annual passage of the earth through the "Perseid meteor shower" continues, although the actual peak night is now really August the 12th. Thank goodness someone gave me a heads-up to check the sky again last night.

The night was so clear, I wished I had a star map to learn some additional constellations. Luckily I can recognize Cassiopeia, and the darkest part of our balcony faces it, because I looked it up this morning and I now know that the Perseids fall from Perseus, which is right below Cassiopeia and beside Andromeda, so we were looking at exactly the right band of the sky, without even knowing it. I had a sensation of a flash/fade from the corner of my eye. Once. Hmm - am I imagining it? Twice? By the sixth time, I realized this was it! (Here is the perfect place to check it out: http://stardate.org/nightsky/meteors/)

It was like magic. And as always, it is the pile-up that makes the feeling so intense:

• thinking of the meteorites as astronomical objects and the shower as a purely astronomical event. How cool is the universe?
• thinking of the story of Perseus and Andromeda and Cassiopeia, and how wonderful it is that they are linked in the constellations (see below).
• thinking of San Lorenzo and his martyrdom.
• thinking of the poem and its metaphorical linkage of the meteor showers with the martyr's tears.

By the way, Andromeda was the daughter of the beautiful queen Cassiopeia, who, in punishment for her mother's bragging, was chained to a rock to be sacrificed to a sea monster. She was rescued by Perseus as part of his adventure. Further connections: He also killed the Medusa and here in the museum in Pesaro is an enormous ceramic Medusa by a local ceramicist, (copied from Caravaggio's self-portrait as the Medusa) which killed the artist by falling on him, a continuation of the Medusa's malevolent spirit...

The marigold is wondering rather nervously:
If you could know everything, would it ALL connect?

Can't get to Italy - still pursuing reading for France

Despite some amount of preparation and drafting of a book list for a trip to Italy, I am not yet finished with France.

Here was a comment left for the posting re: Joan of Arc books:

poetbdk said...

Mark Twain's biography is probably the best one on the list you have but I can not say for sure as I have only read about half of them. The complete Twain book is available online at:
http://www.maidofheaven.com/joanofarc_mark_twain.asp

August 9, 2009 5:27 PM

As far as I can understand, his suggested link take one to the essay, which was appended to the book, as part of a link to a current book, but
this link:

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/conte-joanofarc.html

takes you to the full-text on-line version of the book.

I'm there!

Summering in Italy IS worthwhile!

Well, I have been waiting to write something interesting about our time here in Italy. Every day, all there has been to say is that we woke up late, ate lunch after doing some dishes and laundry. Then we went to the beach, then we went for dinner, a bike ride and then bed. Delightful, but not exactly “woo-hoo!”

However, finally we have had an unforgettable sequence of activities that make us feel that our choice to spend summer here has been worthwhile.

Here’s how it started: Pesaro has begun an initiative to keep the stores open after dinner, combined with little public entertainments like craft markets or street performers or concerts. We turned a corner one night early in our vacation, following the sound of music, and found a choir singing.

The smallness of the town came into play as one of the sopranos turned out to be a baby-sitter we shared a summer with a number of years ago. We have run into her here and there over the years, but this was special. Her choir specializes in ancient English music (of all things). They have a full program over the summer, and she particularly recommended one of their upcoming performances. It was an adaptation of Purcell’s mezz-opera The Fairy Queen, which is taken from Shakespeare’s A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream. By coincidence, our younger child performed the play this year to close Grade One, so even the kids knew the story quite well. It wasn’t too long or too late or too expensive. It all added up to be worth considering.

After the usual afternoon at the beach, that particular evening came. I had the wrong town in mind, but we figured out our mistake before we headed out. We drove off with the right town in mind, but in the wrong direction. We corrected that mistake, too, feeling more and more like we were dragging the kids, late, to some obscure and difficult grown-up entertainment.

Instead, it was true dream on a mid-summer night. We arrived in time. The performance was in an outdoor amphitheatre, part of a beautifully restored villa complex in a village in the hills above Pesaro. The moon was shining, the crickets were chirping in the pines, the moths were fluttering and a fountain was flowing. The music was old and exquisite. (I know Purcell’s Dido and Aeneus to be pretty, but still, you never know.) The instruments were so old that at every pause, they were re-tuned. In addition to the choir, there was a soprano with a slightly odd, but compelling, voice and a “sopranista”: a male soprano, singing in same register, but with a completely different tone. That’s something that sounds old-fashioned, I can tell you. There were beautiful Italian ballet dancers, with their long hair and summer tans, dancing as all the fairies in the story. It was an enchanted hour. We all loved it. Just to give it a perfect local feeling, at the table offering local wine and snacks after the show, we ran into a couple we have known (slightly) at the beach for several years.

The next night , after our afternoon at the beach, we went straight to eat at our favorite beach-side restaurant, and then we all biked down to go roller-skating at the beach-side, outdoor roller rink. The kids tried it last year, but it was my first time on old-fashioned roller-skates. Super-fun. The other end of local culture.

Oh. I also should mention that the Aperol Spritz aperitivo habit is still going strong. This year, we have discovered that the bar at the beach stand next to ours makes them, so we can enjoy them under our umbrellas, in our bathing suits, with whichever friends are still around, just before heading home from the beach in the evening.

If you ask me, vacations don't get much better than this.

Not finished on Paris yet...

Of course, I forgot to mention the Madeline books, by Ludwig Bemelmans, which would be essential for kids visiting Paris, and I came across Little Bo in Paris by Julie Andrews Edwards in my own kid's bookshelf, which I do not think any of us have read, but which I would definitely pull out if I was heading there with mine.

There are also many books and series about artists, with their stories and their art, particularly the French impressionists, any or all of which would also let a kid feel like they knew something about Paris and art before they even got there:
A lovely book, more or less about the Musée d'Orsay, is Laurent de Brunhoff's Babar's Museum of Art. Laurence Anholt and Richard Muhlberger have both written several books in this category, any of which would be worth looking at with kids.

Further Suggestions for Paris Reading

People I know are fascinated by the idea of finding something perfect to read on a trip to Paris, and the suggestions keep coming. Luckily the people I know are really interested in books, so the suggestions are great. Here they are, in no particular order:

Vita Sackville-West wrote a biography called Saint Joan of Arc, which a friend told me of, but had not read. I loved her book about her garden Sissinghurst, and the memoir of life with his parents written by her son Nigel Nicholson, so this sounds promising.

Two friends (a married couple, of all things) both said they LOVED Geaorge Bernard Shaw's Joan of Arc book, Saint Joan. Must read?

A good friend recommended The Piano Shop on the Left Bank by Thad Carhart - a book about music: it sounds like heaven.

Essays by French philosophers, such as Pascal and Montaigne. (Not to make it sound like philosophy is my life, but I have read a few of each, and they are surprisingly entertaining, and I would gladly accept a gift of such a book to take on a trip to Paris). There is also Sartre. In what city beside Paris would you really conclude that "Hell is other people?" Hmmm?

George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London came highly recommended.

I was told I should have thought of and also mentioned Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

And Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, which I LOVED, but thought of as provincial, rather than Parisian. Its literary value over-rides that consideration. I was wrong not to mention it.

I thought of Auguste Dupin - Edgar Allan Poe's french detective, admired by Arthur Conan Doyle, and the progenitor of all detectives, a character created before the word even existed. The most famous story is Murder in the Rue Morgue, but there is also The Purloined Letter and The Mystery of Marie Rogêt. Must dig out my copy of his complete works. Yes.

Something worthwhile for kids would be the Disney movie The Hunchback of Notre Dame. They would be discovering something familiar once on a trip to Paris, which is, I think, more the point than the value of the movie per se.

The Marigold asks nervously: Is there still more? Of course there is. Is it worth mentioning? Probably. Do I have time? Ack!