Best Of Archives - Page 12 of 15

Best Of Archives - Page 12 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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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 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.

April 27, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

“Endgame” in a small Italian town

Warning: some spoilers

Avengers fever has hit our valley. Sebastian went with friends to see Avengers: Endgame in Italian on opening night in a packed theater in a small Italian town. (Not the theater you are picturing—it’s a theater from 1836, highly decorated, ringed by four floors of tiny boxes with three or four seats each.) He was so excited that we insisted we go to the English-version screening the following evening at the multiplex in the larger town of Arezzo.

As this was one of the few showings in English our theater was packed with Americans. It was fun to compare the experience of seeing the film with an American audience with how Sebastian described the all-Italian audience in the smaller town. Our American crowd, largely consisting groups of teen boys, was pretty darn quiet and reserved. It didn’t feel like there was a shared sense of catharsis and that we were all kinda there on our own seeing the film, although we were in a group.

Not how Sebastian and his friends experienced the movie. First of all, there was a large age range of attendees. He said that groups of middle-aged friends (sans kids) were as common as groups of teens, and many families with small kids. He came out of the movie buzzing, and it said it was largely because of how the whole theater of 400 was responding to the film throughout. It went from a shared gasp of feeling and shock when Hawkeye’s daughter disappears in the opening scene, to laughing shouted comments on the heavy-handed Audi product placement, to absolute, stunned silence when the dead superheros return in yellow orbs with Dr. Strange. (Sebastian said he, and the person next to him, and it felt like the whole audience, was trembling. And this is from a 15-year old.) Many people cried, and there were cheers throughout.

I wish I had of seen that version, but again, I’m one of those people who think it is the most delightful thing in the world when airplanes full of Italians applaud and cheer upon landing—much to the disdain of the often British minority of passengers. There’s something about this accessibility and ease about emotions that I just can’t get enough of.

April 27, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

The world of Italian brotherhoods

The Misericordia procession on the night of Good Friday is mysterious and evocative, and to an American sensibility, alarming. A procession of hooded and robed figures carrying crosses and a symbolic coffin, lit by torchlight, followed by hundreds of villagers is a glimpse into another world. It is one of those moments when I need to put my cultural instincts on hold to understand what is really going on in my little corner of Italy. I was watching the procession when one of the figures, unrecognizable in his hood, paused to say hello and I recognized the voice of a friend. I called him later to invite him to meet for coffee so that I could learn more.

The robed members of the procession were members of the Misericordia, an ancient cofraternity, or brotherhood, present in nearly every town in Italy. Today, the Misericordia provides ambulances and emergency staff, volunteers to drive the elderly to doctors appointments and physical therapy, and during Donella’s year in middle school it was the Misericordia who drove a fellow student, who was quadriplegic, to and from school every day in a special van. But I was unclear on how this civic function related to the procession.

The idea of laymen banding together in such brotherhoods is a very ancient tradition, first happening in Constantinople and Alexandria. The first one in Europe popped up in Paris in 1208. Cofraternities arose during the middle ages when these groups of “brother citizens” filled gaps that existed because there was no functioning government, only a feudal system caught between the power of rich landlords and the church. Somehow people needed to get buried, especially during times of plague, the sick needed to be tended, orphans and illegitimate children needed care (and dowries!), and prisoners needed a companion to take them to execution. Another friend (who is not a member) mentioned that these brotherhoods often aided members in deeper business and social ties with bits of friendly information and advantages, in addition to fulfilling one’s duties as a “good Christian”.

Although there were a range of these organizations, the main one that exists in modern times is the Misericordia. Our village organization dates from 1348, the year the plague hit. (Once was not enough in 25 years as the plague also returned in 1363 and 1374.) The group had a few struggles in the 1700s when the Grand Duke Leopold thought these brotherhoods had too much power and disbanded them, but they returned as nothing nearly as effective replaced them.

My friend from the procession, who is a member, said that he is the third generation of his family to belong and that supporting the group is an important tradition, especially as membership has declined by about 50% over the last forty or so years. The Misericordia is deeply rooted in the Church, but not run by the Church, and it was impossible for my friend to weigh whether belonging had a more religious or secular/service meaning. “As with much in Italy, it is largely the same.” People in the village are expected to support the group by contributing what they can in time, money, or both. Some of the staff is highly trained and receive salaries to work full-time as EMTs, but there are many ways to be involved, such as volunteering to drive those who can’t to appointments.

I was describing the difference between calling “911” in America, where an ambulance appears that you will have to pay for, staffed by people you’ve never met, with our experience once in calling “118” here where five paramedics appeared with an ambulance which took us to the hospital, all free of charge, and my friend was surprised. I said that we have no equivalent (or tradition) of the Misericordia because we don’t have the same sense that seems to pervade the Italian village that we all need to take care of each other. He looked puzzled as he tried to imagine this lack of ties to the people who live around you.

April 13, 2019 In Best Of, Chow, Live, Recipes By Nancy

How I know it’s spring in Tuscany

One of the things I love most about creating Itch is that I’m constantly reminded to keep attentive to what unfolds around me every day. I had so much fun thinking about spring for this post, and the little things that make me know that it has arrived.

1. Fava Beans

In the spring fava beans are suddenly everywhere, but show up in two completely different ways. First there are the fave that you eat. Italians often serve them in a very different way than I’d had in America. I was used to the beans being shelled, the small inner beans removed, and then blanched to make it easier to remove the skin around the inner, bright green bean, which was the only part served. (One memorable exception to this was many years ago in San Francisco’s Mission District at Delfina when they served fried baby fava beans which were eaten whole, outer pod and all. They were delicious.)

Here, even at very nice restaurants, when you order fave you often get a plate of raw, whole beans, along with some thin slices of pecorino cheese, salt, and some olive oil. You then remove the inner pods yourself and eat them raw, along with the skin coating them, accompanied by some oil and cheese. We still aren’t totally convinced that this is as good as just the innermost pod cooked in some delicious way, but this kind of dish makes everything dependent on the essentials: the fave must be very, very fresh and the quality of the oil and cheese is critical.

My sister turned me on to a recipe that involves throwing whole, really fresh fava beans in a plastic bag along with some olive oil, sea salt, red pepper, and garlic, tossing together to coat, and then roasting the beans over a fire until cooked and tender and a bit charred in places. You can eat these whole and we have served them several times as an aperitivo, along with a prosecco.

But fave in markets and restaurants aren’t that unusual in many places around the world. The second way fave are a harbinger of spring is that they are used as a cover crop to restore nitrogen to the fields where tobacco was planted late last summer. All those glorious little beans are plowed under just when they get really promising, unharvested.

2. The Lamborghini come out

If we were to do an MRI of our brain activity with the verbal prompt “Lamborghini” I think our brains would light up in very different ways. The image I conjure up is one of a tractor. After WWII Ferruccio Lamborghini started a company to make tractors out of reconfigured military equipment. He also made heating and cooling equipment and between his businesses became wildly successful. So successful that he started to collect luxury cars, including a Ferrari, which was a constant nightmare to maintain. He decided to start his own car brand in 1963.

Today, in the valley, having a Lamborghini tractor is definitely the cool kid choice and at this time of year the tractors, Lamborghini or otherwise, hit the fields and make them incredibly well-groomed. Soil is also prepped in long, rectangular patches for personal vegetable gardens, called orto, often in the front yard of a house.

3. The dandelions face their natural predator, the horse

We cheated and put a horse cookie in the middle of the dandelions to make sure that Salome would cooperate for the shot, but she ended up ignoring the cookie to concentrate on her favorite thing, fresh dandelion greens.

4. The world turns blue and green

5. Poppies

6. One of my favorite restaurants opens again after a long winter.

Laura and Marco open Il Travato in Monterchi sometime around Easter. I just saw Laura near the piazza and she said that Pasquetta is THE DAY! (Pasquetta is literally “Little Easter”—the relaxed family day after Easter usually marked by a picnic.)

Laura taught us how to make her best-in-Tuscany spaghetti aglio olio e peperoncino, which we often make at home.

7. Bees

April 6, 2019 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

La Verna: my night with the monks

After years of curiosity I finally got the courage to book a room at the monastery at La Verna. I’ve written about this strange desire to retreat for a night to a monastery. The urge increases when we have terrible weather—it seems to take the fun away if it’s not adequately dark and brooding. We had a wave of stormy weather with intense clouds, and they had a room available, so this was my moment.

I’ve visited La Verna many times for day trips and find the landscape mysterious and otherworldly. The sanctuary is located near the summit of Mount Penna, known for huge exposed rock plinths and sheer cliffs that look as if the gods were playing with blocks. (The mountain takes its name from the pagan god of the mountain, Pen.)

La Verna is famous because of St. Francis, who was given the mountain in 1213 as a retreat. He was meditating away up there one day in 1224—September 14th, to be precise—when he received the stigmata. He carried around these bloody wounds for the final two years of his life until he died in 1226 in Assisi. In case you have any doubts about the stigmata thing they have his blood-stained robes on display.

Turns out it wasn’t just St. Francis who found the La Verna landscape charged. Long before he arrived the mountain was the site of a pagan shrine to Laverna, who was the goddess of thieves. Apparently the abundance of caves and the thick forests were perfect for those so inclined to thievery, although who they would have found to rob on this deserted summit is a bit hard to imagine.

I arrived up there, checked into a spartan but comfortable room with a single bed, and followed my instinct to hike up to the summit. I followed a stunning trail through an ancient woods of beech and spruce, kept undisturbed by the monks since 1213, that twists around to reveal sheer rock faces and huge rock plinths. For the next four hours I saw no one.

When I came back down the mountain I visited my favorite spot in the monastery, which is the bed of St. Francis. Apparently he often meditated here, in a sort of cave, formed by perilously piled fallen rocks. I sat in the spot where he slept (now protected by a metal grate as people were chipping away at it) for a good 20 minutes, listening to the rain, undisturbed by other visitors, and I must admit, did have a moment of profound peace. One of the first in my nascent practice to think less and be more.

My sense of peace even lasted during a meal with three strangers, all traveling on their own, speaking only Italian.

And the silence of the night was perfect.

I think I found what I was looking for, and now appreciate this special place on a different level, which is handy since I can see the distinctive shape of Mt. Penna from our house and often need that prompt for a bit of a reset.

Oh, and for those of you who enjoy art, they have several amazing Della Robbia ceramic alters and decorations.