Nancy, Author at Itch.world

Nancy, Author at Itch.world - Page 15 of 20

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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February 17, 2019 In Best Of, Chow, Live By Nancy

Three ways Italy is different from California

During a frenzied week back in California, where I lived for most of my life, I was stuck by hundreds of differences between the Bay Area and my adopted home in Tuscany. Here are three of the stranger things I’ve noticed this week.

Dogs

Lola in a restaurant in a high chair. The owner insisted in bringing it out for her so that she wouldn’t have to be alone on the floor.

Right after we first moved to Tuscany our friends’ dogs had puppies, and we got our Lola. Having a dog has been a great window into some of the differences between Italy and the States.

Most Italians love dogs and they are welcome everywhere. Lola comes with us into restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, banks, post offices, trains… She frequently gets served a bowl of water in a restaurant before we even order. Once she and I went into a caffè and she happened to see one of her favorite dog friends. The woman who works behind the bar encouraged us to take the dogs off their leashes so that they could play. Lola and her boyfriend started romping in the caffè, bumping up against people and racing across the floor underfoot. At one point her dog friend got a little over excited and lifted his leg to pee against the bar. His owner and I froze, horrified. The other bar patrons and the owner burst out laughing and she shooed us away as we attempted to clean up the mess and insisted on doing it herself.

A couple years ago I had a minor medical procedure. When I was in the recovery room coming out from anesthesia John mentioned that Lola was tied outside the hospital. The nurse suggested that we bring her into the recovery room so that she could snuggle in bed with me and escape the heat outside. So Lola joined me in bed in the hospital room.

The kids, Lola, and I were enroute back from a long day in Florence and stopped for hamburgers. I had forgotten to bring food for Lola so she hadn’t eaten all day. Donella mentioned this to our waiter, and he and the kitchen staff went into high gear, immediately cooking a burger for Lola and bringing it out on a plate.

I can’t even imagine a parallel to any of these experiences (and there are many more) in California. The additional range of places Italian dogs go, and the experiences they have, seem to make them a bit smarter in the ways of the world, a bit more “emotionally intelligent,” than their stateside counterparts. Probably helps that most Italian dogs I see aren’t purebreds and are bred much more for personality than looks.

Of course not all dogs in Italy are pets. In our rural area I’d guess about twenty five percent of the dogs I see are working dogs—hunting dogs for wild boar and truffles, dogs that protect sheep from wolves. These dogs are not at all coddled and often live outside full time.

Lunch

In Italy lunch is probably the single most important event of the day. The world stops for a couple of hours. Stores and offices close. School ends at 1:30 so that kids can join their families. Streets empty and the pace of life changes. Because everything shuts down it means there’s no social demarcation between people who have time for lunch and those who work through. We frequent restaurants populated by workmen, delivery truck drivers, and laborers, as well as those filled with businessmen and ladies who lunch, all lingering over a meal that lasts over an hour.

The meal is usually two to three courses—pasta, main, and dessert—accompanied by wine and coffee. People linger, talk, laugh, relax. The work day ends at 7 or 8 in the evening, but they have had this total break in the middle.

On one of my first trips back to California after we moved I raced across town to get to Target before 1:30 so that I could get what I needed before they closed for lunch. About ten minutes into my drive I realized I probably wouldn’t have that problem in Emeryville.

In the Bay Area it often feels like lunch is something to be accomplished as efficiently as possible—ideally the optimal mix of organic protein, carbs, and fat, at the right price point, consumed as efficiently as possible—so that you can get back to the “real” business of living, the important stuff that defines us. What if it turns out in the game of life that the really important thing was the lunch with friends?

Coffee

This week I’ve had time to kill between meetings so I’ve been hanging out in various coffee places, chains and independents, and noticing the differences between what it means to get coffee in Italy and in California. There are lots of obvious ones—in Italy you stand at the bar for your shot of espresso. People don’t get coffee to go. Coffee is never served in paper cups. There are no huge cups filled with 1,000 calorie mocha pumpkin unicorn frappuccinos. Cappuccinos are only had in the morning—in the litany of Italian health rules it’s believed that dairy is bad for the digestion after about noon. In California, nobody ordered a caffè corretto (literally a corrected coffee), an espresso with a healthy shot of grappa, sambuca, or some other liquor, often served late morning (or pre-dawn if you are going out with friends and loaded guns to hunt.)

But the biggest thing I’ve noticed is that having a coffee in Italy is a social act. Everyone is talking at once and standing in a group at the bar drinking shots of espresso. A visit to the caffè happens first thing in the morning, mid-morning, and mid-afternoon and waves of people congregate at these times, eager to see what is new with everyone else since when they last saw them a few hours before.

An espresso is 1€, and a cappuccino 1.20€, so people often pay for one another’s coffees. I’ve had mine picked up a lot, often by someone I haven’t even talked to that day. When you go to pay you discover it’s already been covered. There’s no weirdness in this, like there can be if someone buys your drink in a bar, and absolutely no expectation of anything in return. It’s a small flirt that puts a spring into both people’s steps, and all at for 1€. I can’t think of a comparable act in the U.S.

In contrast, I couldn’t help but notice how non-social the act of getting coffee is in California. There are a few people chatting in line, and a tiny minority of tables with people actually talking to each other, but the vast majority of people seem to be alone, focused on their computers or phones, mostly with headsets on, and completely removed from the environment and people around them. The difference is jarring—the only common factor between having coffee in the two worlds is caffeine.

February 9, 2019 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

The lost Leonardo: The Battle of Anghiari

One of the great mysteries of the art world involves one of the most important commissions of Leonardo da Vinci’s career: painting one-third of a 174-foot wall of one of most the massive and politically prestigious rooms in Europe, the Council Hall in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Oh, and to make life interesting and present a bit of a challenge, Michelangelo was commissioned to paint the opposite wall. Michelangelo had just finished the David. Leonardo The Last Supper. They were both hired by a man who understood just a little about competition and manipulation, Machiavelli. It was the only time they would work together on the same project.

Leonardo was 51 and Michelangelo was the hot, up-and-coming young artist at 28. The two men couldn’t have been more different. Leonardo was known for his grace, elegance, sparkling conversation, and mentoring a circle of younger artists. Michelangelo was disheveled, brooding, short-tempered, solitary, often filthy, and the last thing he wanted was any mentoring from Leonardo. Michelangelo was openly disdainful of Leonardo when they encountered each other in public. Both men were gay, but Leonardo seemed to have been more public and comfortable with it. Michelangelo was more tortured about his sexuality and is reported to have decided to be celibate.

The Council Hall was the center of power in Florence when Florence was at its apex. It had just become a republic after the long dominance of the Medici and there was a period of peace. They expanded the hall to seat 500 representatives (it’s now called the Salone dei Cinquecento) and the subjects of the paintings were chosen to convey Florence’s military might and power. Leonardo chose a battle that had happened on June 29, 1440 along the Tiber river in the valley outside the small, fortified hill town of Anghiari (which happens to be our stomping ground.) The battle, which pitted Milan against Florence—one of Florence’s few military victories—involved forty squadrons of mounted soldiers and 2,000 on foot. The battle was a turning point for Florence because Milan gave up trying to conquer the rival city. However, Machiavelli was disdainful of the battle as only one soldier died, and that was from falling off a horse.

Leonardo decided to make the central scene a small group of soldiers vying for a standard flag rather than to portray the large scale of the battle. He was as fascinated by showing the struggle to the death of the horses as much as the men, and did dissections and studies of the similarity of expression and facial muscles of each species. Leonardo wanted a softer and more luminous look than traditional fresco techniques could give, so he decided to use oil paints. There are many entries in his notebooks about how to convey the reality of battle—how much dust is kicked up and how high in the sky it hangs, how bodies are dragged through bloody mud, the noise—and he felt that this newer technique would let him marry the nuance of oil painting with the grandeur of frescoes.

He completed the cartoons for the painting, mounted them with a flour-based paste, designed an innovative scissor-type moveable scaffolding, and went to work. In addition to experimenting with paint he also experimented with a base layer that was thought to be a mix of resin and wax. In his prototypes it dried well, but on the wall it remained wet, despite the fires he lit in the hall to promote drying. Not only did the preliminary work not dry, it started to melt.

Leonardo attempted to continue work, but was well-known for procrastination and not finishing projects. The City of Florence renegotiated his contract so that he would have to repay all his fees and forfeit his work if it wasn’t completed by 1505. His deadline came and went, and the painting wasn’t finished. Then a huge storm hit. The cartoon was thrown to the floor and deluged by water from the rain and a large overturned bucket. The project was all but dead.

Meanwhile, on the other wall, Michelangelo was not doing a lot better. He started the project and then got called away to do the Pope’s tomb and Sistine Chapel in Rome.

So the two unfinished paintings sat, facing off, adorning one of the most important rooms in Italy. People came from all over to see Leonardo’s unfinished work, which contemporaries described as some of his best, even in its unfinished state.

In 1565, Vasari, who is the first art historian and adored both Leonardo and Michelangelo, was hired to oversee the redecoration of the Palace and creating finished paintings in the Salone dei Cinquecento. So he painted over the work of Michelangelo and Leonardo in his own paint by the acre style, which remain in the room today.

What we know of the painting (the images above) were actually done by Rubens a century later from contemporary studies of The Battle of Anghiari.

But the story may not end there. An air gap was discovered behind the Vasari, and a team led by Mauricio Seracini from University of San Diego, who is one of the leading diagnosticians of Italian art, got permission to drill through previously restored sections of the Vasari to see what might be behind. They found traces of pigment that matches what Leonardo was experimenting with at the time, and many historians doubt that Vasari would have painted directly on top of two of his most revered masters. (There is also a mysterious phrase on one of the flags in Vasari’s work, located where no one who was not on scaffolding could read, that ways “Cerca Trova,” “He who looks will find.”)

So you’ve got some compelling leads that one of the greatest paintings of all time might be behind this wall, but you are in Italy, so what happens? The project to uncover what might be there is shut down by a group of art historians who question whether this experiment, which is harming already damaged sections of the Vasari, goes against the Italian constitution, and call the police saying it might be illegal. Oh, and they hated Renzi, who was Florence’s Mayor at the time and was in favor of the exploration.

And there the story remains since 2012. If the painting is ever uncovered it require massive meddling with the Vasari (like pouring glue all over it, putting another substrate over the front, peeling the painting off, and putting it on another base. What could go wrong?)

And the Leonardo might just be a smudge of running pigment. But, how amazing that this possibility even exists.

If you want to know more about Leonardo I’ve enjoyed Walter Isaacson’s 2017 book, Leonardo Da Vinci.

February 3, 2019 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

Adventures in high fashion: Sugar

Where I live I’m surrounded by three-wheeled Ape trucks, nonne in housecoats, and farmers in “onesie” jumpsuits on tractors. The last thing I expected to find is that I am near one of the fashion meccas of the world: Beppe Angiolini’s remarkable store, Sugar, in Arezzo. Another surprise is that an expat friend I’ve made in the village is also an ex-fashionista with serious cred in the fashion world and has become my guide and interpreter of this foreign universe. Or at least foreign to me, who has always been slightly terrified of high fashion.

This savvy woman used to be one of the key executives at Neiman-Marcus where she helped discover brands, including bringing Prada into the limelight. Then she moved to Italy to turn Gucci around with Tom Ford. So when she raves about Beppe and his store, and why it is important, I listen.

Luxury brands control every aspect of how their collections are displayed and sold. They go to market through their own stores or through branded sections of stores that carry many different lines. There is no mingling between Chloe and Alexander Wang in the racks at Barneys. If a store buys a collection, they buy the whole thing. Apparently there’s only one guy with enough clout to pick individual items from collections and art direct his own mix, and that’s Beppe, who opened Sugar in the 1980s.

Beppe Angiolini from TheSartorialist.com

He recently restored the ancient Palazzo Lambardi in Arezzo and relocated his store from across the street. The mix of lighting, mirrors, video, and modern furniture with the ancient frescoed walls makes one of the most fascinating architectural spaces I’ve seen. During restoration they discovered several rooms with Roman mosaic floors which they have skillfully incorporated with raised glass floors. In this stark space is a startling juxtaposition with a cluster of mannequins sporting the latest look.

Particularly after the demise of the store Colette in Paris, Sugar is now even more of an international destination. They will be opening rooms to stay in on the top floor, and have a small caffe with seriously good coffee.

And no, I am no more fashionable than before. But at least I know where I can work on it. And if you are so inclined, they have a serious online store at Sugar.it.

February 2, 2019 In Chow, Recipes By Nancy

Dangerous dinners: Vesuvio pasta

One of my favorite discoveries in the grocery store was Vesuvio pasta. It comes from the South of Italy and has loads of nooks and crannies for a good chunky sauce. It’s a fairly modern pasta made in an area that has been famous for making pasta since the 11th century, Gragnano in Campania. Apparently there is something special about the combination of the durum wheat from the area combined with the water that flows down from Monti Lattari. The shape is made by forcing the dough through rough bronze dies and letting it air dry.

This region is close to Naples, and thus Mt. Vesuvius, which dominates the area. I will never forget walking down a deserted street in Pompeii which perfectly framed the view of the summit of Vesuvius towering over it. I was imagining AD 79, but also realizing that this monster could go again, at any moment. Mt. Vesuvius is one of the most dangerous volcanoes in the world as over three million people live in its shadow. Vesuvius has erupted many times in ancient history, with a massive explosion in 1800 BC that buried some Bronze Age settlements. Since AD 79 there have been many times it has blown: 172, 203, 222, 303, 379, 472, 512, 536, 685, 787, 860, 900, 968, 991, 999, 1006, 1037, 1049, 1073, 1139, 1150, 1270, 1347, and 1500, 1631, six times in the 18th century, eight times in the 19th century, and in 1906, 1929 and 1944. It hasn’t gone since 1944, but it’s not a leap of faith to assume that it might erupt again.

We know a bit about the eruption in AD 79 because of the writings of Pliny the Younger. At the time the Romans were not sure Vesuvius was volcanic as it hadn’t erupted for nearly 30o years and the rich soil of its slopes was densely planted with vineyards and gardens. The volcano erupted for two days. After the first explosion Pliny the Younger writes that his uncle, Pliny the Elder, went by sea towards the explosion to rescue a friend and observe the phenomena first hand. He never returned and died on a beach when the winds changed and they couldn’t leave by boat. The others with him survived, so it is assumed that he might have had a heart attack or stroke. Pliny the Younger’s careful descriptions have earned the respect of volcano experts, who named this explosive type of eruption after him, Plinian. We have a fondness for Pliny the Younger because he had a villa somewhere near our home and wrote about our valley.

If you want to add a little danger to your dinner you can order your own Vesuvio pasta through Eataly. It’s great with any recipe that calls for a pasta like a fuselli. Eataly suggests a simple ragu with sausage.

January 27, 2019 In Best Of, Chow, Live By Nancy

Spezzatura di maiale: nose to tail in action

After living in Tuscany for six years we were lucky enough to be invited to one of the most storied family events in Italy—the spezzatura di maiale—or the dividing of the pig. This tradition of using all parts of the pig has inspired chefs from Fergus Henderson of St. John in London—whose restaurants and cookbooks have popularized the idea of “nose to tail”—to Samin Nosrat, who filmed a pig being butchered in Italy for her cooking series “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat.” An invitation to spezzatura di maiale offered the chance to go deeper than the popular coverage to see what this tradition is like in a family setting, as it has been done for generations.

For the majority of people in Italy, for hundreds of years, raising a pig was everything. I’ve learned that the ideas we have about the bounty of the Italian countryside are largely a modern construct. For most of history everyone but the aristocracy was barely getting by. Many of the oldest generation still living were raised in conditions of near-starvation because of Mussolini’s agricultural policies—for many years in the 1900s even plain pasta was a luxury. It was difficult to raise a pig to maturity because it required enough excess food to feed it. If at all possible, people raised two, one for their own use and one for the doctor. A kind of early medical insurance.

The pig is slaughtered in the winter because it is colder—the whole world becomes a refrigerator. A day or so after the pig is killed the spezzatura happens, which is a full day of work for four men (this seems to be an almost exclusively male task). Since the middle ages there have been butchers, called norcini, who traveled from town to town during the winter to do the spezzatura. Their skill with knives also made them the default surgeons and dentists.

After the intricate and precise work of cutting up the pig and making sausage, pancetta, salumi, prosciutto, and other things pork, there is a feast shared with friends and neighbors. When other families kill their pig it is their turn to host the festa. According to the family we joined this tradition has been largely unchanged during their lives, and it provides an opportunity to have some favorite foods, which are only available on this day.

We had no idea what to expect, and being a morally conflicted meat eater, I braced myself to be unnerved. But there was something about the atmosphere—the complete focus and attention of the men, the immaculate room, and the use of nearly every last part of the pig—that left me with feeling more of deep respect for the animal than anything else. This is an event that is not taken lightly. Very little of the meat is consumed fresh. The majority is preserved for use throughout the coming year. At the end of the day there were a couple of bones left, and that was it. Organs, skin, fat, cartilage … everything else was carefully used.

A bonus is that a breed of pig that was endangered, the Tuscan cinta senese, is now safely off the endangered list and thriving, because so many small farms, including this family, are raising them.

January 27, 2019 In Live By Nancy

You will die

When I first moved to Italy I was amazed by all the things I did on a regular basis that I was warned were actually dangerous. Going outside with wet hair, even if it was mid-summer. Not wearing a scarf to protect my delicate neck from any wind. Drinking coffee that was too hot. Drinking water that was too cold. Not bundling up while, or after, exercising. Eating overcooked pasta that is not properly al dente. Sweating. Sleeping with the window open when there is a breeze. Getting a chill of any kind. Walking around barefoot in the house when it’s cold. Swimming any sooner than three hours after eating. My daughter, Donella, would occasionally arrive at school with wet hair. The teachers would send her to the bathroom to blow it dry under the hand dryers so that she wouldn’t be in danger.

At the time, being a smug Californian, I knew that I had science on my side. These outdated ideas of wellness were amusing, but not anything to pay attention to. Then an expat friend from Brooklyn who was married to an Italian and had a young son and I started to notice a lot of odd coincidences. She was stacking wood one winter day in her cellar that opens out on a small street in our village. She was working hard, the sun was out, and she took off her outer jacket once she got warm, still wearing a heavy sweater and hat. A parade of grandmothers came by on their way to the market, and each warned her that if she didn’t put her jacket on she’d be sick the next day. The following morning she woke up with a bad cold.

Donella was outside one very cold and snowy winter day for hours without a scarf, then went out that night with her head uncovered. The next day, she fell feverishly sick and had to stay in bed.

I read an article that researchers have discovered that al dente pasta is easier to digest, and doesn’t release as much of a flood of sugar to the system as it does when softer. (Most Italians I know will not eat any pasta outside of Italy because it is always dangerously overcooked.) Other research reveals that your immune system is less able to protect you, and you are more likely to catch a virus, if you are cold.

What if the grandmothers are right? Stay safe out there.

January 18, 2019 In Roam By Nancy

Me and the monks—silence and soap

In the last week or so I’ve felt a strange desire to spend the night in a monastery. Could be that I just had a birthday, or the need to reflect at the beginning of a new year, or just the desire for a real adventure, but I keep thinking about how much I want to go away to one of the many monasteries around here for a one night retreat. Solitude, silence, reflection, ancient buildings and art. The only problem seems to be that they are closed to overnight guests for the winter. So yesterday I did the next best thing—drove up to the Eremo and Monastero di Camaldoli. My reasons were twofold: the search for solitude, and good lotions and potions.

The monks around here are famous for making soaps, liquors, and cosmetics. The giant in the marketplace is the Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

Part museum, part store, all gorgeous. It has been in the same building since the monks of Santa Maria Novella started selling their wares to the public in 1612. It’s an interesting place to visit in Florence, although the crowds of tourists and price lists in dozens of languages take away from the charm. As does the fact that they now have hundreds of stores worldwide.

I was after something less-known so I found myself driving for over an hour on a tiny road through a national forest in the dense fog until I finally reached the summit of a mountain and the Eremo di Camaldoli. This hermitage was founded in 1012 by the Benedictine San Romualdo and is currently the home to nine monks who live in seclusion in separate cottages on the other side of a large gate.

I badly wanted to spot a hermit but didn’t see another living soul through the fog, except for the woman in the shop. I did spot a non-living human, though. It was completely otherworldly and the austerity, foreignness, and loneliness of it was haunting. And the church was beautiful.

Several kilometers down the hill a monastery, and a hospital, were added to an earlier religious site from 995. Here pilgrims were treated and a laboratory produced medicines. The monks who live there, now around 90 in number, have been producing various medicines and potions ever since. They started a store in 1450. The store is still functioning and includes their books about medicine.

Although largely silent and in retreat from the world, they have an online store if you want to order your own, or you can follow them on their several social media sites. Why not turn to monks for anti-wrinkle cream and foot balm? I tried both and I really liked them, and their shampoo, body wash, candles…

But here’s where the story gets weird, and passes my editorial threshold for Itch. In doing further research I uncovered that there’s a branch of this monastery in Big Sur. (You have to admire their branding in snagging the URL “contemplation.com.”) I wrote to them and they said they are indeed linked, and that the head honcho from Italy comes over every five years or so to make sure everything is in order (“tutto apposto.”) It sounds like an amazing stay, although it books up about a year in advance.

But here the plot thickens. There is also an affiliated branch in Berkeley, the all-too familiar town we left behind. In a house on a road I used to travel several times a week.

From the top of a mountaintop far in rural Tuscany to a suburban house in Berkeley. And it is all linked. To quote Buckaroo Bonzai, “Wherever you go, there you are.”

January 11, 2019 In Chow By Nancy

A very fine vintage

In the nearby farm stand where they grow organic vegetables in fields outside the door, and will harvest to your request, they also serve lunch. (The subject of another edition of Itch.) John and I had lunch there several days ago with friends and talked to the owner about the red wine he was serving, made from grapes he had grown and harvested. Our friend wanted to know what type of grapes were in it—pretty much the first question for any wine-maker. The owner responded that he had no idea. They were grapes that were growing on his property. And that he had added some white grapes into it as well.

January 11, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

A wrinkle in time

Some mornings when I wake up I look at the painted walls in our bedroom and think about time. When we started working on the house the walls in the bedroom were a uniform yellow. One day when we were chipping away at something on the wall some paint fell off and we discovered that underneath the yellow the walls had been frescoed with an art deco pattern in blue, grey, green, and purple. John and I spent most of our free time for the following few months on ladders using baking spatulas to chip away at the yellow to uncover what was below.

In one small section, a chunk of wall fell away and revealed yet another pattern below the one we were working on, this one with cobalt blue. We think we’ve pieced together that the earlier decoration was probably done in the 1700s, and the art deco one in the 1800s. They were painted because what is now our bedroom, which is on the second floor, would have probably been the living room at the time, as you would never receive guests on the ground floor.

But what interests me most is to imagine the thoughts and conversations of the people who stood right where I am now laying, probably having animated discussions about which pattern to choose, which colors, which painter. The same conversations, concerns, and inspirations of light and proportion of the room that John and I have had, but separated by four centuries. Sometimes I feel like there is a thin gauze separating us, and if I strain hard enough I can see through it to the other side, to those other people and times. And I am reminded all the time that we are very temporary caretakers of this little patch of earth.

There are a couple of spots of even older paint that we stumbled across. When we bought the house everyone believed it was from the 1700s, but when we started restoration it became clear that the core was much older. Our house is a big box, taller than it is wide. The core of it was apparently a three-story defensive tower/home, which underwent a major remodel in the 1700s to add another third to the side and back. (The picture at the top shows how many times windows changed positions on the front of the tower over the years.) As a historian once told me, if you lived outside a walled village you either lived with multiple families in a hovel, or a defensive tower. This older paint dates from when our bathroom wall was part of a tower. And you can go back and back. A very nice farmhouse that is near us down the hill was once a Roman villa. The tiny lane in front of our house was originally an Etruscan road. And that’s just what we vaguely know about.

A lovely friend mailed me a book called Here. In it, the illustrator Richard McGuire has imagined the snatches of life that have occurred in the place that is now a nondescript room, spanning hundreds of thousands of years. It reminds me to occasionally take a deep breath, no matter where I am and how modern it seems, to appreciate what a small speck we really are in a very long chain of events that have happened, and will happen.

January 2, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Lepers, donkeys, and baby Jesus

Around Christmas every year a surprising transformation takes place in the small hamlet of Le Ville. A cluster of nondescript, fairly modern houses, and the adjacent garden plots and fields, turn into ancient Jerusalem.

Our local Jerusalem is inhabited by Romans, slaves, shepherds, spice grinders, metal workers, basket makers, rug merchants, a colony of lepers, and more, along with cattle, goats, sheep, and donkeys. At the center is always a couple, accompanied by a newborn, a bull, a donkey and a couple of angels. It is the living nativity of Le Ville, or “presepe vivente.”

I grew up in a culture where Christmas is all about the tree. In Italy, the most important symbol is the nativity scene. They are more common than Christmas trees—there’s one in every church, most homes, and some businesses. I even spotted one in the deli case of the cafe at the train station.

A few towns have decided to take it further and create living nativities. In 2005, some people from the hamlet of Le Ville went to a living nativity over the border in Umbria and decided that they would create their own. They started work in July of that year, and according to the organizers, “worked incessantly, every afternoon, late into the night” to make the Christmas deadline. It was small but a success and has grown every year. This year around 10,000 people will come.

It’s the thing I look forward to the most over the holidays. There are over 200 volunteer participants in 50 scenes, lit by over 1,500 candles and numerous open fires, with music from Ben Hur playing over speakers. The path through it is a kilometer long. There’s a cantina halfway through serving olive-oil soaked bread toasted over an open fire, and pottery mugs of hot spiced wine. The sheer pageant of it sweeps me along—Italians have a special gift for spectacle—it is not surprise that opera was created here.

It also has a nice Tuscan practicality. It happens for five nights between December 26th and January 6th—it can’t start earlier because there wouldn’t be a baby Jesus. The three wise men don’t show up until the last event, on Epiphany or Twelfth Night (when they originally appeared). They enter with great fanfare and head to the manger.

The competition to be the sacred family is carefully managed by the organizers so as to not hurt any feelings. Couples who have recently given birth take turns, and Le Ville leads the way in gender equality with three of the five babies this year being girls. Also, parents are parents—you don’t need to be married to be Mary and Joseph.