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.

Ermione at the Rossini Opera Festival

What a thrill!

At first, the look of this year’s production of Ermione at the Rossini Opera Festival reminded me of a couture fashion show – distressed white set, stark black, red or white costumes, in the form of uniforms with boots and evening gowns. Not, however, the usual fascist reworking, but abstracted and symbolic. As I thought about it, it came to me that this story is a tiny sliver of Greek myth, which, if not completely unknown in our time, is just about.* In a way, an attempt to show the story as history would be unnecessarily confusing. It reminded me of looking at history paintings: sure we can identify that there are people with well-known names in life-like settings, but we have no context, and we can attach no meaning. In fact, the natural language of our time is comic-book-style abstraction. We can make sense of black, red and white used to indicate good versus evil, rage versus control, confusion versus order, and most importantly in this case, manipulators versus manipulated.

This opera was not performed for 150 years because it was considered too dark! Maybe so, until now, but darkness is the natural tenor of our times. Ermione, especially treated in this way, is contextualized perfectly within the world of Sin City, 300 and Batman, not to mention real-life terrorism, torture and ethnic cleansing.

Then, there was the music and the singing. As with Il Turco in Italia that I saw at last year’s Rossini Opera Festival, the music was delicious: spellbinding for hours. I think my favourite moment was the end of the first act with everyone on stage, screaming their power and rage and disappointment and fear, beautifully, at full volume. I felt my hair blowing back with the sheer power of it, like in the old Maxell ad.

To be complete I have to say that the performances were awesome, and the audience went wild several times. For me it was especially exciting as I have come to know one of the performers a little, and to see his everyday gestures forming part of his characterization was a kind of like having an extra-sensory experience.

At the end, I am left asking why these operas are so obscure, so far from the standard repertoire? Step aside La Bohéme; step aside Madama Butterfly; you old-fashioned weaklings. Ermione – time for you to step up to the plate! You can bring the 21st century crowd to the opera!

*Funnily enough, this sliver of the story is linked to that of Idomeneo which I saw performed by the Opera Atelier earlier this year. Each features a Greek returning with a slave from the Trojan war, plus Idomeneo has Elettra (Electra) while Ermione (Hermione) involves her brother, Oreste (Orestes). Love those Greek myths. I like to say that I would rather be offended than bored, and this material never fails to qualify.