Letter from Italy

Our old wooden mailbox

I seem to notice more each year how much more ritualized and regularized life is here. I think our stays here, usually two months or so, are just the right length to give us a unique perspective that is neither local nor tourist. We must join in daily life, but we never do so without noticing how it is.

For example, I can NEVER get used to having to remember to get milk and bread between 8:30 am and 1:00 pm, or 5:30 pm and 8:00 pm, and not on Sunday afternoon or Monday morning.  I go to make lunch when we’re hungry, say at 2:00 pm and uh-oh! No bread. Or oops, I didn’t realize the milk was nearly finished at breakfast. The stores are only two steps away, but they are closed. And, if I forget breakfast milk on the way home from the beach at 7:30 pm, that’s it. I can’t pop out for some after dinner. I have to run out in the morning, BEFORE I HAVE HAD MY COFFEE, to get some milk to make coffee with.

All this to say: if this knowledge is ingrained from childhood, you manage your life accordingly. It never surprises our neighbours to realize that on Monday morning there is no milk to be had in our neighbourhood. And for them the shopping for bits and pieces all the time is ritualized and regularized. I am always buying as much milk and bread and fruit and cold cuts as I can carry on my bike, to minimize the number of trips. None-the-less, they are very small shopping trips compared to what I would usually do at a grocery store with my car. Meanwhile, everyone else in the store is buying one etto (ie a 10^th of a kilo or 100 grams: in English it would be useful to have a “hectogram”, wouldn’t it?) of prosciutto and 2 buns and 3 peaches. And, they’ll come back later for a piece of veal and some spinach for dinner.

I feel and observe the same rituals around going to the beach, setting up at the beach, going home from the beach and cleaning up for dinner out. We are so used to our regular rushed pace, and so committed to maximizing our relaxation time, that it takes conscious effort to slow down and be thorough, and some of it we can’t always manage.

We do now try to think over the list for the beach bags, despite having a cabina (a rented cabin) where we store beach toys, towels, spare books and bathing suits. Does everyone have a couple of suits? Does everyone have a current book? Hmmm. Are there enough towels down there? Do we have some spending money for the bar? What about something to put on to walk home in?

 

Our space at the beach

 Then, arrival at the beach. Get the key and open the cabina. Carry down the towels and the suntan lotions. Pull out the lettini (Italian beach loungers – unrivaled for comfort and practicality, and practically unavailable in North America). Lay out the towels. Take off clothes and drape them over the spokes of the umbrella, all this while staying politely within the space to which your rented beach umbrella entitles you. Then, if you have children, there follows half-an-hour of putting on their sun protection creams, including arguing time, and resulting in sandy, lotion-y hands that require a wash. Then, and only then, can you spend another 10 minutes putting on your own, and arranging yourself at the correct angle to the position of the sun, with a smooth towel underneath you, and your book in your hand. Ah, bliss!

Now, going home from the beach is quite long too. First, beach toys need to be de-sanded as much as possible and taken up to the cabina. Just as the kids are old enough to do it for themselves, they basically lose interest in toys, so that is a total loss. Towels need to be shaken out and assessed for re-use potential. Mostly they are good for a couple of days, but when it’s really hot, and there are a lot of bagni (swims), it might only be one day. In any case, all the towels need to be either folded VERY neatly (this is what I observe ALL Italians doing, especially when taking them home at night) or hanging them on pegs in the cabina to dry out. Then, we all  get dressed, throw out our garbage and pack up our bags. Then, we go give our feet and flip-flops a good rinse at the fontanella (actually a little tap provided for cleaning your feet, but also good for cleaning your hands, your buckets and  your screaming toddlers). Then we leave.

Evening at the beach, just before toy-clean-up time

To this point, we have more or less conscientiously adopted the local customs. We allow half an hour prep time for leaving the house, and arriving at the beach. We allow ourselves 15 or 20 minutes for leaving the beach. Pretty good, considering. At this point however, we often diversify from the locals, scandalously! Instead of going home and cleaning up and dressing up, we go straight to dinner, from the beach, as is! Shocker! We regularly eat (by this I mean 2 or 3 times a week at each) at two or three of the best restaurants in town, which happen to be near the beach, and even near our section of the beach. Thus, we feel it our right, as regular clients, to show up as we wish. The proprietors are kind enough, and sensible enough, to accommodate us, no doubt putting our strange eccentricity down to our foreign-ness. 

I have also come to realize that this same ritualization is a diet secret of the Italian, although it is perhaps lost to the younger generation. For about a dozen years now, we have seen the same people at the beach. Many of us have watched each others’ kids grow up from baby-hood, as we have visibly entered our middle age. However, many of the people around us, from middle age and beyond already those dozen years ago, still look exactly the same, and here is why. Not only do they meticulously clean and fold away their beach towels and beach bags and bathing suits at the end of each day, they also do so at the end of each season, and they can pull them out again in perfect shape year after year. (Side note: from personal experience I know ladies who have pulled out bibs their children used 40 years ago, clean, pressed and ready to be re-used by their grandchildren. Bibs. Pressed.) What does this have to do with diet secrets? Their eating habits are every bit as ritualized.

Completely different flavours: anise, sour cherry, mint....

They consume the same modest amounts at the same time of day as they always did: one espresso and 2 cookies for breakfast 1 peach at 1:30 pm, 1 cigarette at 3 pm, one blue popsicle at 5 pm, 1 glass of wine at 8pm, perhaps with a second cigarette. They do not share the greedy self-indulgence of finding oneself in this world of deliciousness, nor our habituation to abundance. We love everything that is offered – not only pastries, nutella (don’t get me started on nutella), pizzas, gelato, pasta, and so on, but the milk! the yogurt! the eggs! the butter! the figs! There is nothing we CAN resist, and we are not able to consume with modesty.

This is one of our favourite breakfasts

The Marigold wonders nervously: Could we actually lose weight eating cookies for breakfast? Is it worth trying? Should I write a book?

A Canadian in Italy

People who know me know I prefer not to read the newspaper. The biggest events in current history I get from the unavoidable chitchat that surrounds us. Everything else I find to be noise, and unpleasant noise at that: crimes, transgressions and the inevitable idiotic bureaucratic bumbling at all levels of government, reported from every corner of the earth. I even say that the more I hear of the news, the more I long to read Jane Austen. (Substitute any other author from the past according to your own taste.)

However, this policy does not hold while I am here in Italy on vacation. Part of the reason for my change in policy is that here I have reading time to spare (see my prior post). In my normal life I save all my reading time for books, not newspapers, not even book reviews, and I watch virtually no TV to boot (although I would if I had more time for it). But even more, the variation in my habits is due to the charm and interest of the papers I can get here.

The local paper,  called Il Resto del Carlino, (adorably meaning it costs only the change from an old coin: the Carlino) covers the world, of course, but it also has about 4 or 5 pages covering Pesaro, plus 1 or 2 covering each of the smaller nearby towns we also know well, like Fano and Urbino. The stories are of genuine local interest: lost cats, dogs improperly brought to the beach, numbers of people admitted to the local hospital during a heat emergency, events in the piazza, a daily feature on “the cute girl under the next umbrella”. I always look for people I know, or know of, and I often find someone. 

I also love, but LOVE to read the weekend edition of the International Herald Tribune. The news of the world is presented thoughtfully and yet the paper is kept short not by shortening the articles or making them graphic (in fact, the exact opposite of USA Today, which I enjoy reading when I am in the US for those differentiating reasons), but by lengthening the analysis on only the most important stories. Plus, I love the arts coverage, which always makes me long to catch the current big show in Bruges, or Tokyo. And, best of all, it carries the Sunday New York Times Crossword puzzle, to my mind the only crossword puzzle worth doing. None of this is stale-dated, so if it takes me until Wednesday to get to it, all 20 or so pages are still of deep interest.

Can you tell I am writing this on Saturday morning, just waiting to pick it up and start reading it? I am just finishing an article from last week about the divide between opera and musicals and attempts made to bridge the gap. Isn’t that something I could easily think about and write up myself? Ahhh! Vacation bliss.

Thanks for the idea, Rob!

Notes from Italy - Good and Bad - 2011

 Good - Food, of course! Burro di Bufala (butter made from buffalo milk [as in the mozzarella]) is awfully good. I think it might be a new product even here, as I have never noticed it in the stores here before. I had read about it in a magazine not long ago, and possibly it is available all over the world by now. It takes a lot to get me to pass up my beloved Burro Sorresino, which comes in an adorable old-fashioned yellow tin, but I had to try it, and it was worth it. Even the butter, on toast, has that slightly “farm-y” taste that I love in mozzarella di bufala. I am keen to try making a spaghetti alla carbonara with it. I love butter with the eggs and bacon of carbonara, even if olive oil might be more authentic.

I am always impressed with the care given to every part of food here. I live in a more northerly climate, in the middle of a big industrial city. Everything is grown elsewhere and shipped in, except for a very few precious items, which can be found in a very few precious restaurants. Food pleasure is available, and must be taken where you find it, but fresh and local, it mostly ain’t.  On the other hand, here everything is fresh and local, and that actually can be so extreme as to limit the menu. It makes me laugh (on the inside) when people are asked to describe what is served at a new restaurant in the area, because the local menu is already set. 

BUT, when you shop at your  little local grocery, the farmer picked the figs (ficchi bianchi - white figs in this case) this morning, and brought them in to his friend at the store (in a kind of gray market transaction). The shopkeeper asks if you are eating the melon right now, because she wants to sell you one that is PERFECTLY ripe right now. The different plums have different seasons a few weeks long and different names, and the nearby town of origin is indicated (or the province of Italy, if they happen to come from that far away – which is still only something like identifying peaches from Niagara in Toronto). The bread has to be eaten today, and all milk is only sold by the litre, and lasts only 3 or 4 days. That’s pretty fresh, and unpreserved.

Bad - Internet access. Will the torture never end???? Somehow trying to arrange for internet access showcases the worst of Italian organization. So much potential, so much openness to new technologies, so much bureaucratic bungling and delay. The past couple of years I have really been excited by the prospect of mobile internet access, and I even bought a device that not only receives a mobile internet signal, but broadcasts to its own little wireless network. Isn’t that awesome for a family of tech users – one little mobile key, powering the internet on a number of devices, and portable to boot? Last year we arrived in mid-July. By the time I purchased the device and tried my best to set it up, fruitlessly, it was already August, the Italian vacation period (yes – all of August) and no qualified help was available. I limped along, at least, with one wireless connection to my device. OK. This year we arrived good and early. I went in good and early to get help setting up the network. No problem. Bought a new sim card, loaded in unlimited data for 30 days. 36 beautiful hours of a mobile wireless network. Then…it died. And the bill had gone home to Canada, and there is no recourse. Now I am in the midst of trying transfer of the sim to my iPhone, in order to take advantage of the access I have paid for, but it does not seem to like it. Of course - the is phone locked! Should I try putting the sim in my old phone, in case unlocking an iPhone buggers it up for use when I return to Canada? Another visit to the stupid store, to figure it out; I almost can’t face it. Many of our favourite bars offer free wi-fi, but…access is complicated and many of the baristas don’t know how to sign you in, and…there are unexplainable periodic interruptions in service, and…we don’t usually go around with computers, for writing, but rather iPhones for jotting. However…

Good – Opportunity to read! I don’t know if it is the heat, or the freedom from the school schedule or the small town pace we are forced to adopt, or our lack of access to TV during all this spare time, but I feel such a sleepy torpor here (is that redundant?) that I spend a lot more time reading than I usually can. I find I am totally able to read whatever I want, no matter how challenging, or silly for that matter. Shout out to Gil here: I finally understand how to enjoy reading an e-book.

If you read an e-book in bed, when you are tired, and you stop touching the screen to turn pages because you are falling asleep, the BOOK SHUTS ITSELF AND TURNS OFF THE LIGHT, so you don’t have to! Oh yes! I had a some books that I was waiting to get at: a couple of LibraryThing early review titles, and I had bought an indie book from Amazon, on principle, from a girl who wanted to share her writing at the price of a tune on iTunes. You go girl! (This is a screen shot of Amanda Hocking's book on my phone.) And then the book turned out to be fun enough for summer reading, when I got around to reading it last week, that I went ahead and bought the 2^nd book of the trilogy. Then I uploaded a couple of sample books from my desktop into iTunes to sync over, and I plan to grab a couple of public domain classics if I can. Now all of you nay-sayers that say “Oh, it’s too small” and “I could never get used to it”: nonsense. Self-shutting-off-reading-light-and-book in one? Doesn’t get better than that at 2:00 a.m. (Said by a person who has always envied insomniacs their extra reading time.)

Bad – No bird watchers among our acquaintances. I think that Pesaro might be quite a diverse mini-eco-system? bio-zone? –sea and shore and rivers and hills, with quite a large nature park nearby. I feel that the birds have multiplied in number and kind over the years I have been coming, probably due to deliberate action to preserve the biosphere, and possibly by the dwindling of the fashion for hunting and eating them. I have a guidebook, but I find I like to look at a few guides to compare for identification purposes, and I can hear lots of birds that I can’t identify through a book. I need a knowledgeable person to tell me which bird makes that trill I am hearing and what bird makes that croak, and whether those large black-winged gulls that I see, which seem to really be northern birds, do in fact range down here now. On fish and shells, a lot of people are pretty good. Birds – still looking for someone.
(PS This is a Blue Tit, the local chickadee, and I have actually seen and identified one this summer, as I usually do. It is just that my list here is so short, darn it!)

Good – The local art shows look promising this year. I plan to attend an opening at the civic museum on Friday, and I have an acquaintance who told me about a small kind of private museum of works restored on behalf of the city by a local business association, and the "new art" museum in town, Centro Arti Visive Pescheria, which is the old (ancient) fish-market is closing a show of documentary photos (yawn) and opening something to do with Rossini that looks fun (yay!)

Bad – None of the music on offer looks like it will offer the thrill of the new that we have enjoyed other years. The Rossini Opera Festival seems to be scaling back (I imagine it’s all about the money). The ancient music series that we have loved in other years is all out of town, so less amenable to impulse. I might try to catch a performance of Rossini’s Petite Messe Solonelle, which is beautiful, and is usually offered several times by several different performance bodies. I've already missed one, but we’ll see,

Days you can only have in a small Italian town

photo by souci photo

Well, we have had another of them:

One day we went to look at a local archeological site, Colombarone, unusual even anywhere in Italy. It is history in layers, starting with a Roman villa of the 4th century, which lasted until the 6th century, then was squatted in as a ruin for a while. Then in about the 7th century, the foundations and building materials were re-used for a basilica, which fell into disuse about the 11th century, but were re-used again for a parish church in the 12th century, which also gradually fell into ruin, leaving behind what became a chiesola or little church, which led to the discovery and partial excavation of the site in the 18th century. Over the last 25 years the site has been excavated and researched extensively, and put on display under a canopy. We spent about an hour there, had a personal tour guide, and bought the kids' and the adults' books about the site. It can give you shivers, this stuff.

Then we had to rush to an appointment with a young local ceramicist, Annalisa Speziali, who wanted to teach the kids about ceramics by letting them glaze prepared bodies. Ceramics is one of the historical arts of this region, and as a way of life and art it is dying. They all enjoyed it so much, that she subsequently had them in to her shop to form a body each, which are now drying out, and which she will let them glaze, and then fire in her kiln. Before we leave, we plan to go see her laboratorio with its kiln, out in the country. I guess we will be packing a handful of ceramic pieces in our luggage to bring back. (Check out her props under Art Links, to the right)

THEN we had to rush to meet family friends, a star of the Rossini Opera Festival and his wife and daughter, who happen to be from Rochester. We became friends with them a couple of years ago when we overheard them speaking and recognized their American accents from our part of the world. We had aperitivi with them (Aperol spritzes, natch) at one of our mutual favourite local bars, the bar El Cid. The kids like it because they can bike around in the park, instead of sitting at a table. Sadly, it was not karaoke night, as we had all hoped to enjoy a bit of over-kill together. As it was, musically speaking, we had to content ourselves with the tenor's Bel Canto Concerto a few days later, about which more another day. Suffice it to say it was not a hardship. (See the link to tenor Gregory Kunde's home page under music links, to the right. Greg and his wife Linda are also active in music in Rochester. I have given the link to their chorale as well. We plan to make the trip to see them sing close to home, too. I guess we are joining the legion of fans who follow Greg around the world.)

Side note here: A couple of years ago, we met some family friends from home for a day in Florence (instead of meeting them at the park with our Starbucks coffee, as usual). Just before splitting up to go our separate ways, we decided to buy the kids t-shirts on the ponte vecchio. We chose a booth and stopped at it and started shopping. The guy in the booth recognized the Pesaro accents and asked. Why yes! We had come from Pesaro. He used to work there. Really? Where? At a bar near the Palla di Pomodoro (a really fabulous public sculpture in the park near the sea). Really? We hang around that area. Which one? The Bar El Cid! Well, we'll say hi to Ivan for you. Now that's a small town and a small world.

How places in the world offer such a smorgasbord of cultural options, so casually, so easily, so delightfully? The mix seems impossible for one life to encompass, let alone one day.

The marigold wonders nervously:
This is as valid as summer camp, right?

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?

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.