Best Of Archives - Page 10 of 15

Best Of Archives - Page 10 of 15 - Itch.world

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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November 3, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Halloween in Italy

My Halloween week started with a really disturbing dream involving the reappearance of my Mom who passed away three years ago. I don’t want to go into any details but in my dream she was decidedly, very certainly, unmistakably dead. And I was not pleased to have her visiting me in that state.

I was telling a friend about the dream who it turns out believes that this time of year, exactly around Halloween, is when the veil between the living and the dead is the thinnest, and that this has been known and celebrated around the world since pagan times. The Celtic Druids marked the midway point between the Fall Equinox and the Winter Solstice with their celebration, Samhain, that is an early forebear of Halloween. It coincided (at that time in history) with the Pleiades star cluster culminating at midnight, which is somehow very relevant. The spirits of the dead were thought to be the most restless and present to the living world on this special night and needed to be shepherded back to the land of rest.

This rumbling in my subconscious caused me to look at Halloween in a different light. I’ve always heard about Day of the Dead celebrations but before moving to Italy had never lived in a culture where this aspect accompanies, and overshadows, Halloween. When we first arrived seven years ago Halloween was barely a blip on the local scene. I was really worried that Sebastian would nix our move as this was the first holiday he’d celebrate in Italy, so his then eight-year old self and I dressed up in some pieced-together costumes, me carrying an arsenal of nerf-guns and armed with a supply of American Halloween candy, and set out in the mist to the deserted square to trick or treat. We were told to stick to the stores. Most shopkeepers were mystified about what we were up to but glad to receive a dolcetto Americano, an exotic treat called a miniature Snickers bar, in a kind of reverse exchange. All good-naturedly contributed something. Our favorite “treat” was a sausage from the butcher. I will never forget Sebastian’s face when the butcher handed it to him over the counter.

Much has changed in seven years. Now you commonly see carved pumpkins, there are a few activities for kids, and there’s a general festive atmosphere in towns and villages. The next major town has a Halloween disco. The grocery store features a small selection of kids’ costumes. But it’s not the big event.

The main focus is November 1st, All Saints Day, and November 2nd, the more inclusive All Souls Day, both of which are full-on holidays with most businesses closed. All the action happens at the cemeteries. Right before the holidays cars are double parked around every local cemetery (even the smallest hamlet has one) so that families can come and decorate the graves with new fake flowers, battery-operated candles, photos, and small ceramic figurines of angels and the like. (Many graves touchingly come in pairs of husbands and wives.) The supermarket display of plastic and fresh flowers dwarfs the section of costumes, and tents selling flowers are set up around the cemeteries. Traffic around our nearby cemetery is routed in a one-way direction to prevent collisions. Inside the walls of the cemetery it is a cheery, convivial scene with crowds of people of all ages talking and laughing and tending the graves. I wrote about the Italian approach to death, cemeteries, and recycling graves in last year’s Itch.

The very spiffy graves after much work by the families.

It’s a revelation for me to see the trivialized American Halloween tradition reunited with its more ancient and profound roots about death and those who have passed beyond our worlds.

It has even started to make me question my plan for eventual cremation and wondering if it wouldn’t be nice to have a little niche, right beside John, with a photo and plastic flowers and perhaps a clay figurine of Lola. That way if I do wander into the butcher, in a less than fleshy form, demanding a sausage on the night of October 31st, I will know my way back home on November 1st.

November 3, 2019 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

Terme di Saturnia

It seems that at least once a week on social media I am seeing a photo of the rather otherworldly Terme di Saturnia. I wanted to see what it was really like and went during the fantastic Itch getaway to Sorano.

Just to get this out of the way, it is truly beautiful. This cascade, the Cascate del Mulino, is part of a large complex of hot springs. Hot, sulphurous water (99.5 degrees) is warmed by the volcano underneath and gushes from the earth at 800 liters per second, coursing down the hill into these perfect little pools. It’s free, unfenced, and always accessible.

The downside is that you do have to come prepared. There’s nowhere to change but in your car, the pools and parking can get really crowded, water shoes are a good idea as the rocks get very slippery, and there are minimal food and facilities available, so it’s all very do it yourself.

We were wimps and came and explored around the pools and then headed further towards the source to the Spa and Golf Resort Terme di Saturnia to “take the waters.” I find the thermal spa culture in Italy fascinating and was eager to compare this to my prior experience at the Terme San Giovanni, among others. People of all ages and body shapes come, very intently going back and forth between linked swimming pools of different temperatures and scooping of handfuls of white sulphur and other minerals from the bottom of the pools to slather all over their bodies. Robes and slippers around the pools are a must. The Terme di Saturnia has just moved to a “Wellness Wears White” slogan (yeah, I know) and new policy dictating that all robes and towels have to be white (which they provide for an extra fee if you don’t bring your own). It’s a very, very Italian crowd and was a fantastic afternoon.

November 3, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Postcard: Making the McDonalds

In a swirl of pre-production chaos dinner looms and I go down to the nearest butcher shop knowing I can get everything I need to make hamburgers. There are about six people in line in front of me and while I wait I grab the only package of hamburger buns on the shelf. After about five minutes it is my turn. The woman behind the counter carefully cuts off pieces of beef, from cows raised nearby, to get the right mix of lean and fat, seasons it all, puts it through the grinder, then shapes and presses patties, carefully separated by paper and wrapped. While this is happening a line of about six people grows behind me. I ask for some cheese from the big block and she asks how thinly I want it sliced. I point to the burger patties and buns and she says with a big smile “Fai il McDonalds questa sera?” (Are you making the McDonalds tonight)? I laugh back and answer “si”.

The six people in line behind me can’t contain themselves and all jump in with a rush of opinions about McDonalds. The man behind me says that McDonalds would never have beef of this quality, and that you can’t even compare the two. The woman next to him says that she has heard that the buns McDonalds uses are often several years old. (I do not point out to her that the ones I just got off the shelf had probably been there since World War II.) Someone else volunteers that they have never been. I calmly assure everyone that even though I am American I am not a fan of the chain and much prefer to make my own McDonalds at home.

There is a palpable release of tension at my admission and with a cheery round of “ciao” and “buona serata” I am on my way into the dark night.

October 27, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Gianna Delle Valle

An Italian’s DNA surprise

Itch is delighted to feature more from our Italian abroad, Gianna della Valle, with ideas about how to live more like an Italian no matter where you are. She has made a study of how to bring elements of the Italian way of life into her adopted, more frenetic homeland.

As an Italian living in London people ask “Where are you from?”

Easy for me to answer as my family, for many generations, came from the same hamlet in northern Italy. My father and my mother were neighbours and my grandparents and their grandparents and their grandparents knew each other for as far back as anyone could remember. That’s Italy for you. We have roots. Family trees. It means families are like trees, solidly rooted in places. People and generations may be the leaves and branches but the family is the tree. A tree stubbornly planted in front of that hill. Nothing to do with aristocracy or anything fancy. Simply, we are from there. And in the house we can find things left by a great grandparent (or a great great great) that have survived layers of renovations and are a reminder that we always leave something behind. Better it be useful.

Then I came along and at some point in my twenties decided to pack and followed the North Star, which after some years in Germany led me to London. I still feel the guilt. And after decades I am still given “the traitor treatment” when I go back. “Italy is so perfect and beautiful,” the logic goes, “why did you leave? There were no wars or major disasters. There was absolutely no reason. Why?” I must say, in my defence, I did ask my grandfather for his blessing before starting this adventure, as I always sought his wisdom. And his simple question was “What is it that you like so much over there?” I thought for a few seconds and my answer was “because I look at the sky and the clouds are always running.” “Well then, go.” And that was that. The clouds are always running in England – unlike the Italian sky where not much moves in days. And the constant breeze, the smell of water and wet grass. From the first time I was in London it felt like home. And so it has felt ever since.

A couple of years ago I was having drinks with some colleagues and the topic was DNA testing. A few of them had tried it and it unlocked new learnings. I laughed. I certainly would not need the results to tell me where I was from! I definitively knew! Anyhow, there is nothing like a pub challenge, and there I was with my saliva in a tube, sending it somewhere unknown.

I was due for a shock when the results came back. There was not a drop of Southern European blood in my body. I was from the North, up to 30,000 years ago my ancestors were from somewhere North – between Denmark and England. I thought this must have been a mistake. So I sent a sample from my mother in a way that would not in anyway highlight we were related. And my father. No, niet, nada. Not a single whiff of truly Italian stock in our tree that seemed so stubbornly planted in front of that hill! But I was truly the daughter of my mother and my father (so no surprises there, in case you wondered). I reach out desperately to other people with more obviously diverse backgrounds – and yes, their results were correct. So it was true. I was ultimately from a place where the clouds are running.

What about my parents? What did they think about it? Nothing really — it’s easier to believe what we could see and touch about our ancestors’ belongings, sprinkled around our house like fairy dust, than something so far away and questionable like a saliva swap sent to a faraway lab in Canada.

When we look with a horizon of 30,000 years the history of humanity is one of change and movement and that’s the fascination of DNA tests. There is so much tension today about where we are from. Shouldn’t we all just look up at the clouds in the sky?

October 27, 2019 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

Why Sorano is one of my favorite places

I’m always on a quest to find amazing corners of Italy that aren’t widely known. Back when I was starting Itch I asked an Italian friend, one of the most curious and smart-about-Italy people I know, what were some places I had to go. He replied instantly. Pitigliano. So I went and fell in love, especially with the village of Sorano. I have mixed feelings about writing about this area of southern Tuscany, right between Orvieto and the Maremma coast, because it is so wonderful and undiscovered. But it is also too good for friends not to know about. Promise not to share.

I’ve now been twice in two months, which is a first for me. In addition to a cluster of lovely villages this area has one of the most evocative hot springs or terme in Italy, the Terme di Saturnia. It was also a major Etruscan stomping ground and has some mysterious and haunting traces of these lost people. The Etruscans lived in central Italy prior to the Romans in the 10th – 9th centuries BCE (and gave their name to Tuscany). Not much is known about them because they left only a few examples of a complex written language that has only partially been translated.

One thing they did leave behind are a set of roads in this area carved deep into the soft volcanic rock, or tufa. These underground roads have walls that tower up to 20 meters in places, and you can still see a few ancient chisel marks. There are miles of these trails which connect Pitigliano to Sorano and Sovana. Along the way they also lead to ancient necropolises. No one knows why they were built but hiking along them is memorable, especially as they two times I’ve done it I’ve only passed a couple of other people.

Because the area has such soft rock there are caves everywhere. Just outside of Sorano is Vitozza, a lost city that was inhabited from the 1200s to the 1800s. The from parking to the archeological site is along a path beside a river where you pass cave after cave, all fronted by brightly covered doors, a couple with “for sale” signs. These give way to the more ancient settlement with its ruins of two castles and a church, and over 200 caves which were used as both houses and stables for animals. You can still see niches and supports for beds carved into the walls.

Another Etruscan archeological site of the Citta’ Del Tufo complex is just outside of the one-street village of Sovana and has a cluster of large tombs with some very cool statues.

But for me one of the best things is the village of Sorano, which I much preferred to the slightly more known Pitigliano. And we found a fantastic place to stay, the Hotel Della Fortezza, in the Orsini family castle from 1200.

John and I just stayed in the tower. Yep, we had the whole tower over the drawbridge. It’s a bit rough around the edges but the cost was around 120€, including breakfast.

Both times I visited I only spent a night and felt rushed to try to see all the interesting things to do in the area. I’d suggest taking a few days. After all the hiking a visit to the famed Terme di Saturnia was needed — details next week.

October 19, 2019 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

Leonardo the Loser

When I was settling my ragazzi in their various schools in England I had a chance to visit Buckingham Palace to see the Queen’s collection of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings. Two hundred of them. They are usually kept out of site in drawers and shown to a few favored visitors, like when the Pope drops by.

I feel a bit intimate with (and possessive of) Leonardo because of the local relationship we have with him — a feeling I never thought I’d have about one of the greatest minds and artists of all time. One of the things I enjoyed the most were the maps, many of which showed details the Arno river near us, and towns I frequent, like Arezzo. In an earlier Itch I wrote about why many think that the bridge over the shoulder of the Mona Lisa is outside of Arezzo, an area he knew well.

And then there’s the Battle of Anghiari which was never finished and painted over, and is shrouded by mystery and theories. One wall of the exhibition is devoted to many studies for his most ambitious painting. (More from Itch on this.)

But what amazed me was the sheer scale of personal failure that was contained in those hundreds of drawings. He clearly had wanted to make an epic bronze equestrian statue, and he had three different commissions to do so, but none were finished. The most developed, the Sforza monument, got as far as a full scale clay model which was later destroyed when it was used for target practice by the invading French troops. The 75 tons of bronze that had been gathered was melted to make canons.

He’s famous for the failure of technique — all the experiments in materials which resulted in so many paintings literally dripping off the wall (the reason that the Battle of Anghiari was painted over.)

He got further than anyone before on understanding anatomy but never completed his treatise as his involvement in dissections was “denounced before the Pope and likewise at the hospital”. His research was finally published around 1900. One of the greatest scientists of all time had no impact on the discipline of anatomy.

The Last Supper has a door cut into it.

Designs for fantastical war machines, water clocks, and canals altering entire valleys never got beyond sketches.

A substantial part of the time he spent in the employ of the powerful seems to have been spent planning entertainment events, like masked balls, down to the costumes.

If this had of been my biography I think I might have been just a little tempted to conclude, at the end of my life, that I had largely failed. We don’t know how Leonardo thought of his career, but it is so clear looking at these drawings the sheer scale of ideas, curiosity, tenacity to understand, and genius. He experimented more, and thought bigger, than perhaps anyone else. That’s a kind of failure that should encourage us all.

October 19, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

The Artist Formerly Known as Mommy

(or “And Then There Were None”)

I am ripe for a personal rebranding. This summer before both kids left for school in London I told the family to prepare to get to know someone new — The Artist Formerly Known as Mommy. The kids looked at me with a mix of annoyance, fear, fascination, and pity. “You know, like Prince,” I added. “After he became a glyph.”

I remember the moment when my current identity started. When “Nancy” became “Mommy.” I was pregnant with Donella and John and I were taking a vacation in Italy. We were eating at a very nice restaurant when I started to cry. For a moment I wasn’t at all clear why tears were running down my face as I was thrilled to be having a baby. Then I got it and managed to sputter out to John that I was sad to be saying goodbye to Nancy while I morphed into Mommy.

Now the moment has come to change course again. It’s intimidating. Such a wide open plain of possibility. Going back to the old Nancy doesn’t seem quite right, nor does remaining Mommy. Hence TAFKAM.

Then I get a series of texts from Sebastian needing IKEA-level blow-by-blow instructions about how to log onto Vueling, check in, and get his boarding pass for his flight back to Italy. And a call from Donella with the latest ups and downs of dorm life.

A friend recently told me it’s not about the “or” it’s all about the “and.” (Ironic advice as I remember all the work with did with Carly Fiorina at HP when the and/or thing was a mantra that she’d frequently center speeches around. I scoffed loudly but it is kinda true.)

So the true art for TAFKAM will be how to blend the two prior manifestations into the future in the right mix. Shedding some things while growing others. And so much around getting to the next level of Italianness.

A friend was recently reading Norah Ephron’s I Feel Bad About My Neck and shared this quote.

“The day finally comes. Your child goes off to college. You wait for the melancholy. But before it strikes—before it even has time to strike—a shocking thing happens: Your child comes right back. The academic year in American colleges seems to consist of a series of short episodes of classroom attendance interrupted by long vacations. These vacations aren’t called “vacations,” they’re called “breaks” and “reading periods.” There are colleges that even have October breaks. Who ever heard of an October break?”

Gotta go to pick up Sebastian at the airport. He starts his TWO-WEEK October break today…

October 19, 2019 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

Brexit at a London grocery store

My return to Italy is postponed by a few days so I find myself in the dairy section of the Waitrose in Crouch End, London. I am not at peace with the world, to put it mildly. I’ve had a traumatic day, am feeling very shaky after having an allergic reaction to something I ate the day before, and I have exactly 16 minutes to shop for dinner before I need to be on a conference call with clients.

I am bending over looking on the bottom shelf to find lactose-free cheese, feeling dizzy, when a tiny, elderly woman, very elegantly dressed and with perfect makeup, approaches me and asks if I know the difference between evaporated and condensed milk. I tell her that I really don’t but would guess that condensed has more sugar.

She goes on to say that her only living family member is her son who now lives in Singapore and that he has been calling her almost every day demanding that she stocks up on supplies for Brexit. She says that during the war she remembers her mother hoarding condensed or evaporated milk, but she can’t remember which.

There is nothing else in her small basket. She’s looks blankly around at the packed shelves, clearly overwhelmed. Then she asks me if she needs to be this worried. I stammer that it probably doesn’t hurt because things are so unpredictable.

Then I tell her I have to go and turn to the register with a huge lump in my throat cursing myself for not being up to the challenge, untimely conference calls, and Brexit.

September 29, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Dinner theater and the Genoa disaster

Few Italians will forget where they were the moment they heard about the collapse of the Ponte Morandi bridge in Genoa, which killed 43 and left over 600 people homeless. It hit a nerve beyond the sheer horror of the disaster. Italians are master engineers and pride (I’d venture to say even define) themselves on the beauty and engineering elegance of their creations, especially in the heyday of the Italian economic boom of the 1950s and 60s. This 1963 bridge, designed by Riccardo Morandi, was internationally famous for its beauty, but also for its bold use of structural concrete, and the collapse was a blow to national dignity.

(image from the Financial Times)

But beyond that the collapse speaks to the Italian belief that corruption is endemic and that the common people pay the price. The bridge was maintained by the Autostrade per l’Italia company (largely owned by Benetton) which is a hugely-profitable monopoly running the network of expensive to use, but fast, roads in Italy. Turns out the inspection company has ties to, and shares offices with, the company they are chartered to inspect and regulate.

Which brings us to Anghiari’s annual play, the Tovaglia a Quadri, dinner theater created, produced, and performed by a small team over a course of ten nights in August. Tovaglia a Quadri is written weeks before the performances so the topics are fresh, and it serves as an annual hard look in the mirror about the issues challenging Italy and village life. (Here’s Itch on last year’s play about how Amazon is changing local life.)

(all photos from Tovaglia a Quadri, including at top, courtesy of Giovanni Santi.)

This year, with the Genoa disaster looming in the background, they wrote about our local brush with dangerous bridges. The E45, which is the longest north-south freeway in Europe (starting in Alta, Norway and ending 5,190 kilometers away in Gela, Sicily) runs right through our valley. The section that goes to the Adriatic coast passes over some really high, long viaducts. Soon after the Genoa disaster a truffle hunter in a forest under one of these massive bridges happened to look up and notice the horrible condition of the bottom of the roadway and took some pictures. The result was this major artery of Europe being completely closed for months while the situation was assessed. (It’s now been “solved” by opening only one lane, slowing the speed limit to a crawl, and limiting heavy trucks. Every time I have to drive it I hold my breath.)

The irony for the writing team of Andrea Merendelli and Paolo Pennacchini is that where the truffle hunter took the photos was on a 2,000 year old Etruscan road, still viable, and used even today for the migration of animals from the mountains near us to Maremma on the Tuscan coast, called the transumanza. The bridge that is failing was built only 25 years ago. And there’s the added dimension that our valley shut a flow of traffic, goods, and ideas from across Europe. (Politics, anyone?) The title of this year’s play is ViaDotta, which is translated as viaduct, but also via, or way, of dotta, which is between wisdom and knowledge.

The plot follows from there, including a scheme from a local entrepreneur to showcase the transumanza to local tourists, against the will of the locals who love their pets but are not in favor of other domesticated animals being in such close proximity. In a very funny scene the entrepreneur insists that the shepherd he hires change from his usual attire of a t-shirt and sweats into one that the tourists would associate with the calling—scratchy white wool.

I was particularly interested in sharing this with you when I saw that a New York Times article about this year’s topic—the transumanza—was on the most popular articles list last week. I also saw a video about it at a London Tube station this week.

Just for the record, Anghiari got there first. I knew I’d be on the cutting edge when I moved to a tiny Tuscan village.

September 13, 2019 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

The new man in my life

He may be a bit old for me, but everyone says he has the perfect body. He’s the mysterious, quiet type and never leaves my side. John doesn’t wholeheartedly embrace this new relationship but tries to understand my passion. My new love’s name is Apollo and he comes from around 90 BC.

I’ve been on an eight-year quest to find the perfect ring made with an antique coin. Nearly every window of any jeweler I’ve passed by for years has been scanned for “my ring” and always come up short. This quest hasn’t stopped with me—friends and family have also been on the lookout and will occasionally send a text photo asking “Could this be it?”

John, meanwhile, has been all sang froid and thought he had the perfect hand to play. We live on nine acres of land that is listed as archaeologically significant for possible Etruscan and Roman artifacts. Whenever I whined about wanting this kind of ring he’d tell me to go out in the yard and find the coin myself. Unfortunately all of our restoration, trenching for putting power lines underground, and gardening has turned up nothing more significant than broken bits of recent crockery.

So I meet my lovely niece, Christine Sarkis, in Rome as she started her Italian vacation. She’s a travel editor and had recently done a story about unusual stores in Rome, including a small store noted for its jewelry created from coins, called Serra. Mysteriously we found time in our crowded morning to go to the shop. And I met Apollo.

Alessandro Serra, the third-generation of the family to have the shop, became fascinated by Roman history, and through it, by coins, which helped to make the abstract tangible. The coins find their way into our modern world mainly as a result of having been buried for safety, particularly at the fall of the Roman Empire. When troves of a few hundred coins are found they find their way to experts who verify them, and then sell at auction (with the guarantee of taking them back if found to be inauthentic.) Alessandro started buying at auction and assembled an interesting collection from which he makes jewelry. Part of the reason that Roman coins are relatively plentiful is that the empire was so widespread, and controlled by soldiers, all of whom needed to be paid every month. Silver coinage was a way to do that and made its way to all corners of Europe.

In addition to being built Apollo is also the god of sun, light, music, truth, healing, knowledge, and the arts, all things I like. And archery, which I don’t know much about but am open to. On the back of the coin is Minerva in her chariot pulled by four horses. In Rome she was best known for arts, trade, and strategy.

I find meaning wearing something that was created by another human so long ago. That was carried around in so many pockets and traded for countless glasses of wine, meals, horses, bread, and God knows what else by people who were so different, yet exactly the same, as me. I was hiking recently on an Etruscan trail (next week’s Itch) that was stunning. I realized that it was more beautiful to me because the natural beauty had been shaped by humans living thousands of years ago. (Somehow more compelling than our more recent interventions. I wonder if a Target parking lot will every give a future generation a rush.)

My coin was widely used in 90BC and was similar to a nickle today. It’s called a denarius, from which many of the current words for money, like dinero, comes. It was the backbone of Roman coinage throughout the empire from about 200 BC to the middle of the 3rd century AD.