Nancy, Author at Itch.world

Nancy, Author at Itch.world - Page 12 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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June 19, 2019 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

I just got back from Narnia

With time to kill at a horseshow in Umbria I decided to explore the nearby hilltown of Narni, which the Romans called Narnia.

First of all, let’s address the name thing. Yes, it is the inspiration for C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, although it is unlikely he ever visited the Italian town. According to Lewis’s biographer and former personal secretary, Walter Hooper, Lewis read about Narnia in Roman history where it is mentioned by Tacitus, Livy, and Pliny the Elder. He had a Latin atlas in which he’d underlined the name “Narnia”. Lewis told Hooper that the name in the atlas had indeed inspired his fictional Narnia. This atlas was later given to the town.

To make things even more interesting, one of Narni’s local saints was named Lucy Brocadelli (1476-1544), who had religious visions starting at the age of five. She wanted to join the Dominicans but was married off as a young teen to a Count from Milan. She convinced her husband to let her live in celibacy. They lived together quite happily despite her propensity for giving away their belongs to the poor and wearing a hair shirt. The husband’s limits were reached, however, after she stayed out all night and came back the next morning with two men—who she claimed were John the Baptist and Saint Dominic. Her husband locked her up for Lent and when she went to church on Easter she ran away and joined the Dominicans. The Count was so angry he burned down a nearby Dominican property. She became a prioress, and received the stigmata (one of the few women to do so). Her benefactor, the Duke of Ferrara, started a new religious community for her but the Duke had the unfortunate habit of bringing his dinner guests by the convent after the meal and asking Lucy to make the stigmata bleed and go into ecstasy. After he died the others in the convent didn’t take well to this attention and locked her in a cell for forty years. After she died her body was discovered several years later to be “uncorrupted” and she was beatified in 1710. Her body is now in the cathedral of Narni. I cannot report on how corrupted, or not, it now is. She is thought to be the inspiration for Lewis’s character, Lucy Pevensie. (I swear on St. Lucy that this is actually the abbreviated version of the story. Please forgive my long digression—I’m still not sure it’s right to take you through this whole Lucy story, but I couldn’t resist.)

But there’s more Narnia in Narni—there’s an ancient, pre-Roman stone table that is outside of town. Local historians believe it was used for animal, and perhaps even human, sacrifice, which is not a surprise given the climatic scene in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Amazingly, there is hardly any reference to C.S. Lewis’s creations in Narni. (Unlike Dubrovnik and its dozen or more stores selling Game of Thrones junk.) It’s an enchanting little hilltop town perched between two valleys—a more gentle slope to the front of the town and a dramatic drop-off to the back. It has been inhabited since Paleolithic and Neolithic times and first named by the Osco-Umbrians as Nequinum in 600 BC.

It is my favorite kind of Italian town. Not too big and not too small. Gorgeous, almost unknown, very, very few tourists, friendly, enough of a critical mass of locals that it feels like it has a vital life of its own apart from visitors. You can visit a church from almost any century you choose, starting around the year 1000, all within the tiny center.

Here are a few of the different ones.

S. Maria Impensole from the 1200s.

S. Francesco from the 1200s with amazingly frescoed pillars.

For visual punctuation you’ve got the basic hulking fortress towering over the town and an abandoned Benedictine monastery perched on the backside of the town on a mid-ground range of hills.

I found out that it is close to the geographic center of Italy. I was almost fooled by the sign in the piazza in town, in several languages, saying that it marked the center of Italy, but dug a little deeper and realized that the actual point was a 10-minute drive up a dirt road to a parking lot and then a 30-minute hike through an enchanting woods, which would have done old C.S. proud. Didn’t see another person. Paralleling the hike there are openings into an underground channel, which turned out to be part of a Roman aqueduct system and still completely intact.

So here’s the for real geographical center of Italy.

Nearby happens to be a bridge from the 1st century, Ponte Cardona.

There was so much to do in tiny Narni that I returned for a second day to visit the underground Byzantine church, Roman cistern, and a Tribunal of the Inquisition, with adjacent prisoner cell, all discovered by chance in 1979. That’s for next week’s Itch.

Oh, I also went apartment hunting for you. Here you go.

June 8, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

More cheese rolling

I was driving some friends home the other Sunday after a hike when we were stopped by the road being taken over by a cheese rolling competition—it appeared to be at least the regionals by the size of the crowd and number of teams and participants. I captured thirteen seconds of a very solid throw for you:

It was such an important competition that they even had the, if you will allow me, big cheese category, the Parmigiano. Which weighs around 55 pounds and requires a back brace. Unfortunately that event happened earlier in the day.

Cheese rolling is dear to my heart as it was an early subject of an Itch column, so you can click through to read all about the history and rules of this fine sport.

I loved that, for some reason, the all-Italian speaking team from Arezzo decided to name themselves in English.

June 8, 2019 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

Empire in a hamlet: Brunello Cucinelli

I keep hearing interesting things about the cashmere designer and “humanistic capitalist” Brunello Cucinelli, most recently that he hosted Jeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, and other, as the Italian press headlined, “Big della Silicon Valley” in the hamlet which is the headquarters of his 500 million euro brand. The subject was “…our respect, safeguard and promotion of what has always been seen as the deepest treasure of people, the highest evidence of the original nobility of man, the utmost expression of freedom and moral supremacy: the soul.” Equally curious and skeptical (whenever billionaires start making plans for the human soul), I wanted to learn more.

The Cucinelli lore is that Brunello grew up deep in the Umbrian countryside, near Perugia, in a house without electricity or running water. After the family moved to the urban north of Italy so that his father could work in a cement factory the family happiness plummeted, and Brunello saw his father return from work often humiliated and morally defeated. After dropping out of engineering school to study philosophy on his own he pledged to create work for people that provided moral and economic dignity. “I have listened to the wise and moving words of Saint Francis, Saint Benedict, Kant, Marcus Aurelius, Socrates, Seneca, and I have realised that economic value is nothing without the human component and that the former cannot survive without the latter.” In 1978 he started out with a $500 loan and dyed some cashmere sweaters a range of bright colors (previously cashmere was available mostly in neutrals). They were a huge success.

The company grew from there and in 1982 he married his highschool sweetheart, Federica, and they moved to the hamlet where she grew up, Solomeo. In 1985 they made the town the headquarters of the growing business and purchased the ruins of a 14th-century castle to refurbish. As the company continued to grow they invested more and more into the community and the workers, paying 20% more than the average wage, ending the work day at 5:30 and discouraging working online after that time, and closing everything for a 90 minute, highly-subsidized lunch. Pretty interesting considering fashion is one of the most competitive and “always-on” industries around. “People need their rest,” Cucinelli says. “If I make you overwork, I have stolen your soul.”

Cucinelli has restored the hamlet, including the church and the theater, and founded the Solomeo School of Arts and Crafts (inspired by William Morris and John Ruskin) to teach and celebrate fine craftsmanship. Recently they cleared away some ugly industrial buildings at the foot of the hill and built a light-filled new factory, youth center, sports grounds, and parks. It’s a great model that he can do good and it only adds more value to his brand.

photo from brunellocucinelli.com

I heard that at one point he wanted to increase the size of his business substantially and looked at what it would take to expand while controlling quality of product (and life)—how to resource more cashmere, where to get it dyed, how to find enough craftsmen to hire and train to make the garments, where to build more factories—and decided that instead of scaling volume he would raise prices significantly, which has been successful because of the huge popularity of the brand.

I went to Solomeo for the morning and my feelings were mixed. I was so excited to see how he’d restored the village, but I found the restoration to be a bit cold and not preserving the organic serendipity that makes old buildings so human and interesting. I showed Donella and John some photos over lunch and Donella said “It looks like it’s a new ‘Tuscan village’ gated community in China.” Hmmm. It’s fair enough that the company dominates the hamlet—it does employ 1,600 locals—but I wasn’t expecting it to feel quite so antiseptic. However it is wonderful to save a tiny hamlet that would probably otherwise be largely in ruin.

photo from brunellocucinelli.com

On the other hand the clothes are incredible. I loved everything in the store but find it hard to imagine paying $3,000 for a simple cashmere sweater, over $8,000 for a coat, or $9,000 shearling jacket, even if I could.

I want to love everything he is doing—I’ve often wondered how to help foster thriving businesses without wrecking everything good about Italy—but there is something holding me back from being 100% a fan girl. Maybe it’s that what I love most about Italy is the inherent messiness, directness, lack of branding and facade. Along with the sad realization that those traits don’t usually drive success and growth. Wondering if there are ways for villages to prosper, kids to have career options, family businesses to thrive while not killing what makes people happier, more present, and more “real” than I’ve seen anywhere else. It was fascinating to see one model for a solution.

(top image from corcianonline.it)

June 1, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

The world of Italian women shepherds

I am lucky enough to have been forwarded a link to an Italian documentary, In Questo Mondo (In This World), about women shepherds. I was transfixed for an hour and a half—caught up in the lives of these women, ranging in age from 20 to 102. Living in the most primitive of conditions, doing physically grueling labor, walking miles per day with the flocks in all types of weather, spending their time almost exclusively in the company of animals, and always being on the very edge of financial viability, these women told similar stories of rebellion, following their hearts, and finding contentment.

(photo copyright of Anna Kauber and used with permission)

The film is gorgeous, leisurely, and immersive. Watching it I felt as if I was transported as an invisible observer into these women’s worlds. I was curious about the film so I tracked down the director, Anna Kauber. She was a delight to talk to—smart, articulate, curious, sophisticated, and funny. She is an agricultural scholar, fascinated by Italy’s agrarian past and present. She came across the subject of women shepherds and began, as she calls it, a pilgrimage to meet and understand them. Her desire to learn and know rather than ask a few questions and leave is why the film has such an immersive and quiet feel, and why it moved me so much. Anna would spend a minimum of three days with each woman, living with her day and night, and film nonstop, never asking questions or doing a formal interview. As the women became more comfortable they would begin to open up and tell her about their lives and feelings in the most natural and intimate way possible.

Anna ended up spending over two years filming, living out of her small yellow Fiat, covering 17,000 kilometers in every part of Italy. She spent time with over 100 shepherds, with 22 ultimately ending up in the film.

Rosina Paoli thinks that the prevalence of depression comes from being so removed from nature. “I don’t know what ‘depressed’ means. Just come up here and hoe! That’ll cure your depression!” (photo copyright of Anna Kauber and used with permission)

As different as these women are from one another in age, location, and education, a few themes crossed almost all stories. These women say their relationship to animals is different than male shepherds. They name individuals in the flock (and many will come when called by name), know all their personalities, and are deeply kind. Anna told me that male shepherds joke that if a lamb is born with a problem they will work hard for a couple hours to try to save it, but that a woman shepherd will do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, to save the lamb. Several of the women spoke of the more distant and transactional (even occasionally cruel) relationship that male shepherds have with the animals, where they feel much more maternal.

(photo copyright of Anna Kauber and used with permission)

Most of the women had needed to fight to become shepherds. Traditionally it is not a role that women are seen as capable of doing and many had to rebel against family, society, friends, and male shepherds. But it is a life they find freeing and rewarding. As Caterina de Boni Fiabane says, “I fell in love with the phenomenon of seasonal migration, of not always staying in the same spot, having your home be more than just a small town. My home goes from here to Friuli. It’s a big home. I move, starting from here. Everywhere I go I know people. I feel at home, it’s wonderful.”

(photo copyright of Anna Kauber and used with permission)

Anna felt that the time she spent with these women changed her. She said that she was impressed by how much the women were content and lived in the present moment. Whether it was pouring rain or glorious, whatever misfortune or wonderful event happened, they faced it head on.

The film is a labor of love by Anna, with some additional crowd-sourced funding. It has been doing well on the Italian film festival circuit, winning Best Italian Documentary at the Torino festival, Best Documentary of the Year at MAXXI Roma, as well as awards in the Brescia and Trento festivals.

Unfortunately due to some funding restrictions I can’t share the link to the film widely, but let me know if you are interested in seeing it, or have an inspiration to organize a screening in the U.S. or London, and I can provide a link. (It is subtitled in English.) Anna (and I!) would love to get it out into the world.

May 30, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Postcard from the farm stand

It continues to be rainy and cold. I need to get out of the house so I suggest lunch at the farm stand. John and Donella don’t want to come, so I go alone. Inside there are three tables. Two are filled with workers who I often see eating there and they all say hello. A small plastic table with folding chairs is still sitting empty, pushed into the corner next to the wall. It’s warm inside, the Giro d’Italia is on the TV, and everyone is watching.

The menu changes every day and today’s choice is pasta with barely cooked fresh cherry tomatoes and basil, followed by a steak. The pasta is perfect—a local type of onion making it sweet along with the punch of the tomatoes. I call John and tell him he must come and I save half my pasta for him. The owner takes it away to keep it warm. Donella decides to join us after errands and we add her to the corner of the folding table.

The owner and workers share theories and predictions about the Giro and try to explain race strategies to us. The workers leave and the couple that run the farm stand sit down for lunch at the next table. They jokingly want to know if we want another lunch prepared for Sebastian at yet another time. Our pasta, steaks, grilled vegetables, wine, strudel, and coffee come to 20 euros.

There’s a new kitten, only a month old and really too young to be away from its mother. Donella holds the kitten and I get Lola, who is a true kitten whisperer, out of the car. We let them run around together and the kitten is in equal parts courageous and frightened, not sure if Lola is mother or dragon. Lola lays on the ground, off her leash, and looks away when the kitten approaches to make it more at ease. Soon the hen and her two baby chicks join the mix.

As I leave the sun comes out over the valley. My heart is full.

May 26, 2019 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

Three intriguing things about Lebanon

Part two about our quick trip to Lebanon. The lure was to see a post-war, thriving country in the middle east with fabulous food and welcoming, cosmopolitan people. We found all of that, but I’m still thinking about some of the more nuanced and interesting things that surfaced. Next week, Itch returns to Italian subjects.

Arab or not?

After a civil war as divisive and destructive as Lebanon’s one expects to see the scars, which are inescapable, with many buildings still in ruins or riddled with pockmarks from gunfire. I wasn’t expecting to encounter, in an equally pervasive form, some of the beliefs about being Lebanese that fed the conflict.

Several of the Lebanese we ran into as tourists (our sampling was Christian) self-identified as Phoenicians, the Mediterranean civilization of maritime traders that flourished from 1500 BC to 300 BC. I got the first hint that there was a powerful, self-defining narrative from the advertising that ran on the Lebanese airline, Middle Eastern Airlines, while we flew to Beirut. Many of the ads were for banks, and all had a similar flavor: “You are a mover and shaker out in the world building businesses, trade, and making things happen. You need a bank to keep up with you no matter what port you are in or how much you are making.” Our tour guide at Byblos, one of the oldest continually inhabited places on earth and a thriving Phoenician port town, made the point, more than once, that the Lebanese are not Arabs, but Phoenicians, which explained their distinct look and more secular worldview. Which was NOT ARAB. This was an opinion echoed by several people we encountered during our short stay.

The Phoenician self-identification was used all through the 20th century as a shorthand for Lebanese nationalism, started by the Maronite Christians in the 1920s to differentiate themselves from the Arabs. I can see why it is attractive to be descended from the Phoenicians, creators of the alphabet, the zero in math, open-sea navigation, the color purple, and global trade, but I wondered if it was true.

The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in England published research in 2017 showing that the modern Lebanese actually have inherited 93% of their genes from the Canaanites, who evolved into the Phoenicians, and lived in today’s Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel. The irony is that these genes appear equally among Lebanon’s population (as well as beyond the borders) crossing today’s religious, political, and cultural differences.

As Claude Doumet-Serhal, director of the archeological excavation which found the Canaanite remains from which the DNA study was based said, “When Lebanon started in 1929 the Christians said, ‘We are Phoenician.’ The Muslims didn’t accept that and they said, ‘No, we are Arab.'” But what was uncovered is that “We all belong to the same people,” she said. “We have always had a difficult past … but we have a shared heritage we have to preserve.”

Al Falamanki

I went to a monologue by Spalding Gray in which he talked about finding those “perfect moments” in life, which can never be planned or anticipated. The last night we were in Beirut we came across this restaurant, Al Falamanki which gave me my perfect moment for the trip.

Opened in the 1960s the restaurant is open 24 hours a day and features live music, backgammon boards, and at least one hookah per person. There’s a large open courtyard at the center of it all and when we were there it was bustling and we were the only tourists. The guys from the photo at the top played a long game of backgammon, each with a hookah at hand, at the table behind us. Next to them were two couples on dates, and next to them a table of single women out for a night on the town.

We tried hard to find places to catch a glimpse of what modern Beirut is like, but this place did it for me. I’ve rarely seen such an at-ease and relaxed group of people having fun, and suddenly I understood what people love about Beirut.

Baalbek

In the infamous Bekaa Valley near the Syrian border lies Baalbek. I’ve seen a lot of Roman ruins around the Mediterranean and in France and England, but this site is extraordinary in scale and condition. It has been continually occupied for 8-9,000 years and has traces of buildings by the Phoenicians, Egyptians, Assyrians, and Greeks before the Romans built what is largely visible today. The temples often flowed from one god to another as the civilizations changed, often with the same focus. The temple to Jupiter is thought to be built on the earlier Greek temple to the sun god Helios. The other huge temple in the complex is dedicated to Bacchus.

If you ever have the chance, go.

May 21, 2019 In Best Of, Chow, Recipes, Roam By Nancy

Suddenly a kitchen in Beirut felt a lot like Italy

To add another layer of adventure to our trip to Beirut we cooked with a family in their home, found through a service called Traveling Spoon. It turned out to be one of the best things we did on the trip.

In the outskirts of Beirut we arrived at an unassuming apartment building. Tania, our hostess, welcomed us and showed us into the living room where we met her mom, Joelle, and her brother. We all chatted for about an hour—I was starting to wonder whether I had forgotten to check the “cooking class” box on the form—when Tania asked us what we wanted to make and presented us with an array of choices. We decided on a range of things and then set to work in the small kitchen.

Learning to make a bunch of Lebanese classics was a blast, but what really make the evening for us was the warmth and wit of the family, with Tania and her mom ruthlessly teasing each other, her father, Boutros, arriving from working in his very large garden further outside of town and pouring rounds of homemade arak (an anise-based liquor), and various family members and friends coming and going.

In the middle of cooking the phone rings and Tania’s two-year-old niece had managed to video call her grandmother without her family’s knowledge. All cooking stopped while everyone chatted with the two year old. When Tania’s brother realized what had happened and came on the screen, looking slightly disheveled, Tania tells him he looks like a terrorist. At this point Sebastian delivers his highest compliment—that the whole thing—the frenzied, attentive cooking, the warm and funny family, even the apartment and kitchen, are exactly like what he loves about Italy.

We learned to make the Lebanese salads tabbouleh and fattoush, stuffed grape leaves (warak enab), hummus, baba ganoush, stuffed zucchini, and two potato dishes, among other things, but my favorite was chicken served over rice. It was different than anything else I’ve had and incorporated some new-to-me ways of using spices and techniques, all very easy. We made it last night, with Tania’s help answering last minute questions over WhatsApp while on the exercise bike at the gym, and I think I have the recipe nailed.

Tania’s Lebanese Chicken—Rez 3a djej—and the “3” is not a typo:

In a large pan heat some olive oil and saute an onion, three cloves of chopped garlic, a large bay leaf, two cinnamon sticks, and about 5 each of whole peppercorns, allspice pods, and cardamom seeds. Brown slowly, until the onions are really soft. Put in a whole cut up chicken and brown well. Add water until the chicken is just covered, put a lid on the pot, and cook over low heat until the chicken is completely done. (Tania used a pressure cooker to speed this up.) We had largely dark meat and this took about 30-45 minutes on the stove. Remove the chicken to cool and retain the liquid the chicken was cooked in.

For the rice saute a mix of nuts (we used cashews, peeled almonds, and pistachios) with a good amount of oil and butter. After the nuts are toasted drain them in a sieve and retain the cooking oil and butter in a large saucepan. Use the nut infused oil as the base to brown two onions, and ground beef (about 1/2 pound). Measure the amount of long-grained rice you want to use—you will later add twice the amount of liquid—and rinse the rice well to get it to absorb some water. Add the uncooked rice to the mixture which is browning along with salt and ground pepper to toast the rice slightly. Add cooking liquid from the chicken twice the quantity of uncooked rice, cover and cook on low heat until rice is soft.

Remove the chicken from the bones and shred.

To serve place the rice in a large bowl and layer over the chicken pieces. Add the nuts on top to garnish.

Other Lebanese cooking hints from our evening:

— Tania’s mom makes a pepper spice mix that is used frequently. It’s a ratio of 2:1 allspice pods to peppercorns, plus a cinnamon stick, ground fine in a spice grinder.

— The secret to making great tabbouleh is getting the size of all the vegetables (parsley, onion, tomato, mint) very, very small. It’s particularly hard with the parsley, so Tania rolled it into very tight bunches and julienned with a knife into the thinnest possible strips. Don’t cut the parsley more than once as you don’t want to mush it. When everything is cut add a good splash of lemon juice, olive oil, the pepper mix, and salt. (Watching I was amazed at how generous the amounts were of these last three things.) Add some uncooked bulgur wheat for texture.

— Fattoush includes cucumber, lettuce, tomato, onion, green pepper, and radish, and is dressed with sumac, pomegranate molasses, mint, salt, and pepper. Make sure that all the vegetables are cut distinctively larger than for tabbouleh so that there is a real differentiation. Add bitesize torn pieces of thin toasted pita at the end to blend with everything else and soak up the juices.

— Hummus is simple. Soak the chickpeas overnight, then boil them until soft. Leave in a little cooking liquid when they are pureed in a food processor. Add tahini, a big splash of lemon juice, and salt. To serve place in a shallow bowl and make a channel to pour over olive oil. For a nice decoration take a fork and dip into powdered hot pepper to leave an imprint on the edges.

— The trick for baba ganoush is in how the eggplants are cooked. Tania’s family roasts them directly over the gas flame on the stovetop, turning frequently, until charred on the outside and totally soft inside. It takes about 15 minutes, and they pierce the skin of the eggplant in several places before cooking so that it doesn’t explode. When mushy let cool, then peel under cold water. Puree the insides with tahini, lemon juice, and salt. This method of cooking the eggplants gives the whole dish a really nice smoky flavor.

— The Lebanese use sugar water frequently, particularly poured over desserts. Tania makes her own with 2:1 ratio of sugar to water heated to melt the sugar, then adding a good splash of lemon juice, orange blossom water, and some rose water.

May 12, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Passing as Italian

(Part 3 of a series on driving in Italy. Photo is out our back window one day when we found ourselves in the middle of the famed Miglia Mille rally on our way to lunch. Full disclosure, both cars did pass us.)

One of the most important things to master to drive well in Italy is the art of passing. The first thing to know is that Italians drive when they drive. There is no drifting along in your lane, thinking of what really should have been said in that meeting, or what to make for dinner. (This generality does not apply if the driver is in an older white or green Fiat Panda. That self-identified group has their own distinct norms and behaviors—the subject of a future Itch.)

The norms of passing are most evident on the autostrada. Rule number one is that you never drive drifting along in the left lane—which is used only for passing. You wait your turn in the right lane behind the car or truck you want to pass, looking in your side mirror while cars blast past, then pull out, pass, and quickly reenter the right lane before another car comes up on your rear madly flashing its lights for you to get out of the way. And know that if you are not regularly being trailed by an irate driver in an Audi flashing lights then you are going far too fast.

Passing on local roads is not an occasional thing but something you do constantly, which I guess has to do with the wider variety of vehicles on the road than what I was used to in America. We contend with the full range of under-powered scooters, three-wheeled vehicles called apes (pronounced “au pey” which in Italian means “bee” — not to be confused with the Vespa, or “wasp”). Then there are the tractors, trucks, and previously mentioned white or green Fiat Pandas. All require passing.

The rules for passing are well-documented and necessary to master in driving school, but nearly nonexistent in practice. It’s up to everyone’s definition of common sense—like parking. Friends who were staying with us were marveling at having been passed on a striped-off section of road leading up to a tunnel. I knew exactly where they meant, having become Italian-enough by now to pretty frequently use this particular patch of road—just wide and long enough—to pass somebody before reaching the tunnel.

In general all of this passing works out well, with a great deal of common sense and politeness, as least in our area of Italy. But one time I was passed I got so angry that I actually followed the offending van to have a word with the driver. I had been waiting in the left turn lane at a light, the light changed and I started to move forward, when suddenly this white van behind me pulls out into the oncoming lane, passing me to the left of my left turn lane, to make the same left turn. This could have resulted in a head-on collision with oncoming traffic. I followed the van to the local hospital where he stopped and much to my delight there were two policemen in the parking lot. With Donella’s help, and full of fury and indignation, I spewed my tale of catching this rogue in an act of very, very unsafe driving and demanded that they ticket him, or at least yell loudly. The police officer glances up the hill to where the white van is now parked near a small door going into the hospital and says that he understands my frustration but isn’t going to speak with the driver. “He’s picking up a body at the morgue. A difficult job. Sometimes things in life that are hard make you drive badly.” I kinda got his point.

A small detail from driving school rules I found interesting. The person being passed is equally responsible for the safety of the event as the person doing the passing. I don’t remember a similar law in America. It seems a bit unjust, but also oddly mature and pragmatic. An odd reminder that I have more responsibility for the events in life than is sometimes fair or comfortable. But true nevertheless.

May 12, 2019 In Lingua, Live By Nancy

Brava!

I think I’m addicted. I find myself going out of my way to do certain things that might provoke a hearty Brava!, usually accompanied by a beaming smile. Once you are used to people saying brava to you daily there is no going back. (Of course brava has its gender and singular/plural equivalents: bravo, brave, and bravi.)

For me the easiest way to earn a brava is to provide correct change, or pay 2.16€ instead of just 2.00€ so that a 1.66€ purchase is easier to make change for. When I travel to the U.S. or Britain I find myself plunking down ridiculous configurations of bills and change for a coffee, trying to make the job of the cashier nice and tidy, all with the secret intent of earning a brava. The clerk usually looks at me like an idiot and wonders why on earth I’d be giving them 2.16 in cash instead of making life easier by paying with Apple Pay or a contactless credit card. And then I know that I am not in Italy anymore.

Another way to earn a brava is to express an opinion that is slightly beyond brutally obvious, or might echo a matter of taste that the other person in the conversation shares. “I think that shutter would look better painted in gray” might very well elicit a “brava, brava, brava!”

I never wanted to know the true degree of awesomeness really being expressed, preferring to compare myself to an opera diva or a world-class ballerina when I make correct change, but John made me ask. So I talked to my hairdresser about it, asking him to rate brava on a scale from OK to Fabulous. Turns out it’s about a quarter of the way up the scale from OK. Another quarter up the scale is bravissima. I will still happily take any brava I can get. Try it, you may see what I mean. Next time you execute a great parallel parking maneuver, or think of the perfect response in a conversation, give yourself a hearty bravo and see how it feels.

May 5, 2019 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

Cunning, danger, and beauty: La Foce

Every once in awhile there’s a person, place, point in history, or an aesthetic creation that stops you in your tracks. Something that causes you to think “Could I have ever done that?” And even more rarely, “Could I have ever been that brave?” La Foce, and Iris Origo, provide that spark for me.

The first layer of the experience is the garden, one of the most magnificent in Italy. The Val d’Orcia, south of Siena, and more specifically Pienza and Montepulciano, is one of the most arid and rugged parts of Italy, described by Iris as “bare and colourless as elephants’ backs, as treeless as mountains of the moon. A lunar landscape pale and inhuman… a land without mercy and without shade.”

Iris and Antonio Origo purchased an old, crumbling villa with no running water or electricity, surrounded by this barren land, and over fifty years, starting in 1924, created one of the most iconic gardens in Italy. This curved road, flanked by cypresses, is often on the cover of guide books and was created by them from the barren land.

Iris was half American and half British and very wealthy. Her father died of tuberculosis when she was young. Her father’s family had never accepted his marriage to an Englishwoman and his dying wishes were that she grow up “free from all this national feeling which makes people so unhappy.” He suggested Italy, where she could become “cosmopolitan, deep down” and “free to love and marry anyone she likes, of any country, without its being difficult.” Her mother raised her in Florence, in the Villa Medici in the hills outside the city, where frequent guests included Bernard Berenson (her mom used to play a “guess what painting that detail is from” with him), and Edith Wharton. There she met and married Antonio Origo, the illegitimate son of an Italian aristocrat.

The couple decided to experiment with the latest in agricultural and social ideas with their new property, La Foce, restoring the main buildings, and the tenant farmers’ quarters, creating schools and healthcare facilities, a social club for workers, and undertaking massive work restoring the land to arability. Iris took the lead on the workers and families, who when they bought La Foce, lived in dismal tenant-farmer conditions and were 90% illiterate. Antonio focused on making the farm productive. The land had been deforested by the Etruscans, who had cut down all trees and overgrazed the grasses resulting in the loss of almost all the topsoil. For the next 2,000 years the land remained barren, making the planting of crops, and even the movement of people on foot between nearby villages impossible due to the heavy, wet clay.

(photo thanks to La Foce)

The before and after is clear in the landscape below—previous to their work most land in the Val d’Orcia looked like the lunar landscape to the right in the photo. The rolling green hills, curved road, and rows of trees were all created by them.

They brought in the British landscape designer, Cecil Pinsent, to work with them on creating the formal gardens. He worked on La Foce on and off for the next 30 years. It is said that the garden gets progressively more subtle and sophisticated as his Italian, and hence the ability to communicate with his worked, improved.

All this is fairly interesting to me, and lovely to visit, but the part that captures my imagination lies with World War II and the fact that Iris was a genius at observation, a very talented writer, and a bold and brave woman caught between her adopted Italian homeland and her British and American roots.

Before the war, and during it, she kept diaries which she kept hidden in different places on the property. If the diaries had been discovered by the Germans during the war it would have meant certain death for her, and possibly for her family. She was very well-connected in Italy, England, and America (her godfather, William Phillips, was the American Ambassador to Italy) so her comments are often deeply behind the scenes but she’s equally adept at capturing what a range of Italians from illiterate workers to the middle-class in Florence to the aristocracy were thinking and feeling during this period.

The Nazis decided to house American and English POWs at La Foce and Iris had to walk a careful line as she needed to appear to side with the Germans or their ability to help hundreds of people behind the scenes, and their work on La Foce, would be lost. At night she was taking food and information to the partisans who were camped in the woods around the house, and to the POWs whom she could not interact with during the day. They were housing orphans and evacuees from the bombings in Turin when the Germans seized La Foce in 1944. The Origos led 60 people to safety (among them many children and babies) by walking to Montepulciano, including through mined fields.

And at night she wrote. Crisp and vivid of detail, while also capturing the big picture of the war, it is almost impossible to believe that she could create such a body of work under such conditions. Her most famous work is War in the Val d’Orcia: An Italian War Diary 1943-44. Very recently published is an earlier diary, A Chill in the Air: An Italian War Diary 1939-1940 which seems, unfortunately, to be relevant today. Iris writes in April 1939, “It is now clear what form propaganda, in case of war, will take. The whole problem will be presented as an economic one. The ‘democratic’ countries, i.e. the ‘haves’, will be presented as permanently blocking the way of the ‘have-nots’ to economic expansion… Fascists are thus enabled to see the impending war as a struggle between the poor man and the rich—a genuine revolutionary movement.”

To immerse yourself in all-things-Iris, it is possible to visit the garden on a guided tour several afternoons a week. The Origo’s daughters, Benedetta and Donata, now have the property and have converted some of the outbuildings into places to stay. The social club they built for the workers, called the Dopolavoro (literally “after work”) is now a restaurant that serves simple but lovely food and wine with a nice outside area to eat on hot days. My hint would be to do the last tour in the early evening, followed by dinner. Pinsent designed the gardens so that the shadows would move like dancers.