Nancy, Author at Itch.world - Page 11 of 19
A three-minute escape to Italy.
Tuscany, travel, medieval village, Italy, festivals, celebrations, customs, cooking, recipes, living in Italy, moving to Italy, visiting, visit, restaurants, language
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August 3, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Is skateboarding a crime?

One morning the bell on the front gate rings and one of neighbors, a policewoman, is standing there in full uniform. She hands me this piece of paper and tells me that I must call to speak with the police in the next village over about Sebastian and skateboarding.

Sebastian has been really into skateboarding this summer and spending hours every day at a local skatepark with friends. What could possibly go wrong?

I couldn’t make the call until the afternoon as I wanted all of us to do it together, having no idea what we were in for. It seemed to be a good idea to have Donella for her Italian, John for father-figure moral support, and Sebastian, so he could atone for his clearly numerous, although not yet disclosed, sins. I had a significant knot in my stomach all morning.

The moment to make the call comes and we all stand around the kitchen table with the phone on speaker. You can feel the tension. We make the call and it rings. This perfectly nice woman answers and says she’s so glad we called. That she’s a mom and a friend of our neighbor and just wanted to say that our son and his friends have been seen a couple of times skating outside the park—on roads and the main corso, or pedestrian street of the medieval town—which is dangerous and not allowed. She also thought that one of the group was a bit too old to be hanging out with them and just wanted me to know all of this. As one mom to another. Then she wished us a great day.

 

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July 21, 2019 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

Pinocchio at the Relais & Châteaux resort

Several years ago I guessed that Il Borro, the restored hamlet owned by the Ferragamo family and part of the Relais & Chateaux group of luxury hotels, might be a really nice place during my then 93-year old mother’s heart valve replacement. I returned to California for her procedure and in the preliminary meeting, when the team of surgeons and cardiologists learned that I lived in Tuscany, everything stopped while they told me in great detail about their various family vacations in this far-away paradise called Il Borro. Excuse me, but don’t you have work to do, like on my mother?

Now that I live about 45-minutes away I’ve visited a couple of times to eat and wander around but somehow had missed the whole point of the place. It’s not the ancient hamlet, perched on a rock outcropping, which has been restored to within an inch of its life, or the infinity pool, or the spa treatments, or winery, or olive groves, but the most interesting thing is a tucked-away collection of animatronic Pinocchios created by the parish priest who lived there years before it was purchased by the Ferragamos. Father Pasquale Mencattini first built a mechanized nativity scene in the 1950s, followed by small tableaus of traditional Tuscany—this one is in a tavern.

But I think his masterpieces are the Pinocchio scenes.

Built within TV sets they are stashed in a small cellar. The general public can see them, you just have to ask reception.

While writing this I also discovered that The Adventures of Pinocchio, written by the Italian Carlo Collodi, was first published as a serialized story in a newspaper of children’s stories in 1881 and became instantly popular. The collected stories were put into book form in 1883 and it’s reputed to be the most translated book in the world, after the Bible, and is one of the best-selling books of all time.

But back to Il Borro. Would I suggest staying there? I am a complete sucker for any Relais & Chateaux experience, but I’d have to say no. Not if you want to actually visit Italy. The resort is all about the curated and imagined Italian experience as opposed to the real one—the hamlet even comes complete with a collection of artisans at work—but give me a coffee at a not-too-clean bar filled with cinghiale hunters any day.

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July 21, 2019 In Roam By Nancy

Mona Lisa’s bridge

I sometimes drive over the Buriano Bridge, just outside of Arezzo. It’s a seven-arched, one-lane wonder built in 1277 spanning the Arno. If that isn’t cool enough, the bridge is the one off the Mona Lisa’s shoulder, at least according to Carlo Starnazzi, a University of Florence paleontologist, who published a paper with his research in 1995.

The landscape was widely thought to be Leonardo da Vinci’s fictional creation, but Starnazzi argues that Leonardo had mapped this area extensively when he hired by Cesare Borgia to study how the river might be diverted by water works to starve nearby cities during a siege. On the map he created he’d drawn the Buriano bridge. (A little side note, Borgia was the inspiration for Machiavelli’s The Prince. If the assignment paid well, and used his engineering skills, da Vinci was up for the job, no matter how nasty the employer …)

Starnazzi even found a vantage point—a now abandoned castle—which in Leonardo’s time would have aligned with the geographical features exactly the way they appear in the painting. And Leonardo was a native of Tuscany and knew the area well.

There’s a bit of competition for claiming bits of Italian geography as the inspiration for what’s behind the Mona Lisa. Several other theories place the background in the Italian Alps, in Bobbio, located south of Piacenza, and in Montefeltro in the Marche.

But I am going to believe it it the Buriano Bridge as I pass over it not infrequently and the “evidence” seems pretty good to me. There’s also a sign making the bridge put up by the village … so it must be true. (The bridge is very near Il Borro resort, home of the Pinocchio collection.)

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July 14, 2019 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

Three years after the earthquakes

I was in need of a little exploration so I decided to head out to see Norcia and Castelluccio, two villages high on Mouni Sibillini hit hard by the Italian earthquakes of August (6.2 magnitude) and October (6.5), 2016.

Norcia is still charming, although the signs of devastation are everywhere. It was part of the Papal States and after a large earthquake in 1859 the church imposed a strict building code that limited housing structures to under three stories, and thanks to that most of the houses survived. The larger buildings, like the 13th-century basilica of St. Benedict, were completely destroyed. The facade is the only thing left standing. The basilica is on top of an earlier structure, and is believed to be where St. Benedict and his twin sister were born in 480. The basilica is in the process of restoration, although when I was there I only saw two men working and a crane lifting a wheelbarrow over the rubble that was the inside of the church.

The same side of the church, before the quakes:

Norcia is also the homeland of the norcini, or traveling butchers, who were in charge of the family spezzatura (cutting up of the pig) that John and I were lucky enough to go to. The area is renowned for its salumi, prosciutto, and other various prepared pig parts.The town still has its share of stores selling norcineria, although many are outside the town gate and in temporary structures.

Hanging around town are signs protesting the slowness of aid from the earthquake. This one, in the main square with the ruined church behind, says “Three governments and three commissions, only promises.”

After a coffee in Norcia I drove deeper into the mountains to the tiny village of Castelluccio, home to “nearly” 150 people. Sixty percent of it was leveled in the earthquake, the town was evacuated, and all road access closed off for over a year. The road is open again, as is the village, with a few shops and restaurants largely operating from temporary buildings. Not all villages have recovered as well—on the way I spotted this road leading to other small villages, still closed. The words “infinite shame” are written on the do not enter sign.

The valley that Castelluccio is in is one of the most beautiful, and unusual, places I’ve ever seen. It’s an immense valley, located high in the mountains, with a very flat and wide bottom. There’s only one road running through. If you zoom into the main image above you can see Castelluccio on a small hill to the left of the valley—a glorious site for a town. It’s famous in the spring for flowers blooming on the plain, which I’d just missed, but the hay had just been rolled into bales and the valley was stunning. It is also where some of the most famous lentils in the world come from—as loved by foodies as their more famous cousins the de Puy lentils from France. I hope you can see how beautiful this place is, especially with the hay bales. If you are viewing on a phone. Perhaps zoom in?

My restaurant radar was thrown off by all the identical temporary buildings, but I followed my nose all the way up the hill to the last restaurant, where all the workmen were headed, always my best clue to local food. I had the best handmade pasta with cinghiale sauce that I’ve had yet in Italy, where sauces with wild boar are common. (You can see some of the destruction to the left of the temporary building.)

But the best part was that I was seated at a table next to two brown robe-clad monks. The last thing I was expecting was for them to turn out to be American. One is the Prior of the Benedictine Monastery in Norcia. I started a fascinating conversation with them—about why most of the monks in this community are American, what it is like to build a new monastery with such a weight of history to live up to, the earthquake and its aftermath, making beer, and creating the #1 hit album on Billboard’s classical chart. All ahead in the next Itch.

And if you find yourself in Castelluccio, I’d highly recommend the Agriturismo Monte Veletta for lunch.

 

 

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July 14, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Why I like going to the dentist

One of the scary things about moving to a new country, culture, and language is doing things like finding a new dentist. There’s such a comfort level built up with trusted doctors and dentists and it’s unsettling to walk into the unknown when your body is involved. I was hoping to find competence, but was surprised to find incredible skill married to something else—that ability to relate on a human level in professional settings that it something I treasure about the Italians.

Our journey started when we had a dental “emergency”. One Saturday morning, the day of a big high school dance, Donella’s front tooth chipped. We got a referral and phoned the dentist, Marco, who we’d never met. Donella explained the situation, and although we were not his patients, he was sick with the flu and had a fever, and the office was closed, he immediately agreed to meet her and fix it before the dance, never for a moment questioning that this was a big deal.

So the whole family started going for the whole range of normal dental stuff. John and I had some quite elaborate crown-like work done with great success. Marco is a film and music buff and has an amazing collection of DVDs. He is equal parts artist and dentist so when you get work done it takes as long as it takes to make it perfect, which gets even longer when he stops for minutes at a time to analyze a scene from a movie that we are watching, or to search for an obscure piece of music that he is reminded of by the piece that’s playing.

But then we needed to have Donella’s wisdom teeth taken out. My American worldview is that there’s a line you cross with things like wisdom teeth and root canals where you need a specialist oral surgeon, so I was surprised when our dentist said he could do it. With great trepidation, but a foundation of trust we built about his skill, I agreed.

The Italian style of removing wisdom teeth is that you take one or two out in a session. We insisted that all four be removed the same day, which he was very reluctant to do, but said he’d try. We show up for the procedure and I ask about what beyond normal numbing is given for pain—I certainly needed every bit of the “twilight zone” I was in when I had mine removed. Donella is a bit odd about teeth—loved when she had loose teeth and she could wiggle them out. She was the go-to kid in elementary school for all the other kids with loose teeth cause she was so good (and fearless) about pulling them out. But that’s really different from having wisdom teeth pulled.

He said he nothing beyond numbing. I insisted that we at least had some Valium on hand in case she needed it during the procedure and he agreed and wrote a prescription. I went off to the nearby pharmacy to fill it, especially after seeing the array of tools on hand.

I return to the office just in time to hear Donella scream. I instantly morph into super-Mom calculating how far to the nearest airport, how quickly we can get her to a surgeon in the States, etc. etc. I go to the door, peek in, in my best confident voice assure Donella that I am back, standing by if she needs anything, and silently willing her to walk out if needed. Turns out that the shot for numbing was a bit more intense than she’d expected.

In the waiting room I am shaking and feeling a bit sick with nerves, really regretting this level of going local. About twenty minutes pass and then I hear laughing, cheering, and chatter. The dentist comes into the waiting room holding a tool with one tooth aloft. I go into the room to discover that he’d let Donella remove her own tooth, and she is saying this is the most fun she has ever had.

Hmmm. This was turning out a bit differently that I was thinking. The scene repeats itself three more times—she ends up removing two of the four herself. After all four are out the mood in the room is completely triumphant.

The dentist later admitted to Donella that he was so stressed about removing all four that immediately after the only thing he could do was drive to the sold-out Umbria Jazz festival, where he met a guy outside selling an extra ticket for a front-row seat. He stood there for hours, soaking in the music, and celebrating an excellent day in the office.

 

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July 13, 2019 In Live By Nancy

Changing the air

It’s been hot this summer—not like it was in France—but still hot. In case you are curious about how Italians manage the heat, considering that there is almost no air conditioning, here’s how it’s done. Most buildings are made of stone with thick walls that serve as insulation. You air the house out in the early morning when it’s cool and then shut all the windows, keeping the cooler air inside. (The Italians call it changing the air.) Shutters are very handy because if you close them on the sides that get direct sun they provide a second layer of insulation.

This morning this is what greeted me in our bathroom during the morning airing, and I thought it was pretty.

 

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June 29, 2019 In Best Of, Recipes By Nancy

Apricot Cherry Galette

Our young cherry tree just finished it’s work (above) so we had to make one of our favorite summer recipes—an apricot and cherry galette. The rough, non-fussy shape of the dough is somehow perfect. We’ve tried a lot of recipes, but our favorite is from Bon Appetit. The original recipe is in the link, but John made some changes in the instructions below that he found helpful to get the dough right.

This pretty tart is great with vanilla ice cream.

CRUST
1 cup all purpose flour
1/8 teaspoon sugar
Pinch of salt
6 tablespoons (3/4 stick, 85g) chilled unsalted butter, cut into pieces
2 1/2 tablespoons (about) ice water
FILLING
2 tablespoons all purpose flour
2 teaspoons plus 4 1/2 tablespoons sugar
8 large apricots, halved, pitted
1 cup pitted cherries (about 6 ounces) or frozen, thawed
2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) unsalted butter, melted, cooled
Vanilla ice cream or frozen yogurt

FOR CRUST: Stir flour, 1/8 teaspoon sugar and salt in bowl to blend. Add butter; cut the butter up with a pastry cutter/blender tool (or with a couple of knives) until coarse meal forms. Mix in enough water by tablespoons, while stirring until a few loose clumps form. At this point it’s just flour and loose clumps of butter and water. It looks like it would never form into dough. Ignore that. Gather into ball with your hands; flatten into 3/4-1” thick disk. That simple pressing together transforms it into a pie or tart dough—and, as a disk, it’s actually partially rolled out. Wrap in plastic; chill at least 1 hour and up to 2 days.
Preheat oven to 400°F. Line baking sheet with parchment. Roll out dough on floured surface to a rough 11-inch round. Transfer to prepared baking sheet.

FOR FILLING: Mix flour and 2 teaspoons sugar in bowl. Sprinkle over crust, leaving 1 1/2-inch border. Place apricots cut side down on crust, placing close together and leaving 1-1/2 inch border at outer edge. Scatter cherries over apricots. Top with 4 tablespoons sugar. Fold pastry edges up around apricots, pressing against apricots to form scalloped border. Brush crust with butter; sprinkle with 1/2 tablespoon sugar.
Bake until crust is golden and fruit is tender (some juices from fruit will leak onto parchment), about 1 hour. Remove from oven. Using pastry brush, brush tart with juices on parchment. Gently slide parchment with tart onto rack. Carefully run long knife under tart to loosen (crust is fragile). Cool on parchment until lukewarm. Slide 9-inch-diameter tart pan bottom under tart, then place tart on platter. A pizza peel (very large spatula) is also a handy way to move the tart to a serving platter. Serve slightly warm or room temperature with ice cream.

Serves 6.

Bon Appétit
June 1995

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June 29, 2019 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

Six boys disappear into a cave…

In 1979 six Italian boys who had formed a speleology group were out practicing their rappelling skills on a rock face on the steep side of the village of Narni. The oldest, Roberto Nini, mistakenly crashes into a cabbage patch on a terrace below. At first the farmer,Ernani Proietti, is angry, but Roberto tells the old farmer about the group’s passion for finding and mapping caves and other underground chambers.

Ernani shows them a hole into the cliff face in the back of the stable where he kept his livestock and tells them to see what was there. Just like the moment in the wardrobe in C.S. Lewis’s fictional Narnia (inspired by Narni) in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe that moment forever changed the lives of the boys and the town.

Above the farmer’s plot was the abandoned San Dominico monastic complex dating from 1303 (which was built on top of a 6th-century Paleochristian church.)  The monks left in 1860, the monastery was falling to ruin, and then it was bombed in WWII. In 1979 the rubble from the bombing still cascaded down the cliff and formed the back of Ernani’s garden and shed. What Ernani didn’t know, and the boys discovered, was that the bombing had uncovered access to several underground chambers which had been walled up several centuries before. And Roberto Nini was to spend the next 40 years of his life investigating the mysteries inside.

The boys enter the pitch black cavern. The first thing that their light illuminates is a pair of eyes looking back at them. They belonged to a fresco of an angel in what had been a church from the 1300s. On all the walls are beautiful frescoes.

The church had been badly damaged by water. The boys started working to clear it out and started a volunteer group that has restored it and gives tours, called Narni Underground, or Narni Sotterranea. Some of the tours are led by Roberto Nini himself. Over time the boys kept discovering more chambers, including an intact Roman cistern next door to the church.

The third and fourth chambers held the most startling thing they discovered—an interrogation chamber from one of the main courts of the Papal Inquisition of the 16th and 17th centuries, and a prisoner’s cell. Centuries before the church had walled the rooms off and denied that there had ever been an active seat of the inquisition in Narni, but Roberto went to work.

He discovered that the Church had ordered most documents about the inquisition to be destroyed in 1809. While in storage in a warehouse waiting for the paper mill one box was stolen and ended up in a monastery in Dublin. When Roberto found out about this he went to Dublin and found the papers that referenced the trials in Narni. This led him to be admitted to the Vatican Library where he found additional documentation. One record told the story of a Giuseppe Andrea Lombardini who was put on trial in 1759. When the prisoner cell was discovered they found on the wall a large inscription “IO GIUSEPPE ANTREA LOBARTINI CAPORALE – FUI CARGERATO”, meaning, “I Giuseppe Andrea Lombardini was incarcerated”. The entire cell is richly decorated with masonic symbols and markers of time spent in the cell.

The visit was great, but what I loved most was the story of the people behind the site. The volunteer giving the tour was exceptionally engaged, enthusiastic, and passionate—it was like the first time she’d shared the stories. It is amazing to me that somehow these boys had managed to rally the community, form a volunteer organization, find funds and talent for restoration, and do the level of research that they had, all over the course of decades. Interesting to see how saying “yes” to going into an unexplored cave changed so many people’s lives.

(Thanks to Underground Narni for the beautiful photos.)

 

 

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June 19, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

A line of Indians

(Part of a series on driving in Italy.)

When you are with a group of Italians who suggest all following one another to a restaurant, at a location about an hour away, in seven separate cars, and they aren’t sure exactly the name or location of the destination so can’t provide it for your GPS, but aren’t worried as you will all follow each other in a fila Indiana, just say no. Make up any excuse. Trust me.

This just happened to Donella and I leaving a horse show about two hours south of us. A big celebratory dinner was in order for the group, and we were off. Donella informed all of them that she’d just gotten her license and that she didn’t want to go too fast, and all agreed.

Here’s what happened. They were all perfectly well-intentioned to be easy to follow and not to lose the rest of us in line. (Of particular importance to me, as the last car.) But then then divided freeway opened up in front of the first car after the small rural roads. And the lead car saw the second car following him closely and did what any Italian’s instinct is to do. Speed up. This whole thing magnified kilometer after kilometer for our 70-kilometer jaunt. Although this was not a particularly great road—certainly no autostrada—we were all following each other at speeds up to 160 kilometers per hour (99 miles per hour) on a road where the maximum speed is 110. I was white knuckling the whole thing as our little train of cars passes car after car. We even passed an Audi. (If you remember from a previous post Audis are usually always the rude car behind you trying desperately to pass.)

Donella was in front of me, driving our old car which starts shaking madly at more than 130. (The other cars in our group included a Porsche and a Mercedes.) I didn’t want to call her to tell her to forget the whole thing because I didn’t want to take my attention off the road for a second, nor hers. I’m terrified, angry, and amused, and don’t have the language or cultural chops to take this on. I wonder what a real parent (not someone who merely pretends to be one) would do in this odd situation. The obvious thought to overtake her and then slow down—a lot—did not occur to me. I reflected that I probably wouldn’t be having this problem with a group of Americans taking a bunch of kids to dinner after an athletic event.

We reached a section of road work where we all merged into one slow lane and after that things got better. Turns out Donella had called the lead car when we were all going slowly and told them off.

When we arrived at the restaurant Donella and I were shaking. I sat next to the lead car driver, who I don’t know well, and felt struck dumb to address what I was feeling. When I calmed down a bit I asked him what happened, and he said that he saw the second car following him closely and thought that they wanted him to go faster, which he did. I guess there was some part of the concept that the car was supposed to be following that was momentarily lost. For 70 kilometers.

So, just say no.

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