Live Archives - Page 12 of 13

Live Archives - Page 12 of 13 - 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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October 20, 2018 In Chow, Live By Nancy

Finding chestnuts. Bravery. And humanity.

I had this article about chestnuts completely written. Some very nice discoveries that I thought you would find interesting. Then I decided on Friday that I needed to double check a couple of things, and to get some video of the almost-worthy-of-an-amusement park four-wheel drive up a stream bed to get to my friend’s grove of chestnuts in the middle of the forest. I asked him if I could tag along the next time he gathered chestnuts, he agreed, then mentioned that it was his birthday and that a few other friends were coming to have a lunch in the woods.

Simple, right? These things sound so much easier in retrospect, and in print, then they are for me to do. I’m shy, I hate to impose, and am very sensitive that I can’t communicate in Italian with any measure of fluidity or nuance. My Italian is very much in the sledge hammer stage, and I knew I’d be in for an all-day Italian-speaking extravaganza. My heart was pounding with anxiety when I joined friends in the piazza to drive up the hill.

Chestnut Grove from Itch.world on Vimeo.

I also know that this is why I am doing Itch. Every week I am pushed to do more than I am comfortable with, more than I actually want to do, both in my Italian community, and in my creative life. I am creative, every day, for clients, but this is different. This is for me—I’ve never written, at all, before now. But have wanted to, my whole life. Every week is a new frontier, rough edges all around.

And my relationships in the village had reached a comfortable point. I now know hundreds of people, engage in short conversations, goodwill flowing in both directions, but it’s difficult for me to get deeper, for all the reasons above. Itch is a wonderful forcing mechanism.

So I found myself in the middle of the woods, at a long table surrounded by stumps, eating roasted pig parts rejected by the rest of the world but revered by the “real” Tuscans, debating whether truffles found locally actually count as authentic Tuscan food, and singing, yes, singing, helping friends learn the English words to “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” while a guitar was played. And with these sweet, kind, generous, secure, happy people it didn’t matter a bit if my conditional tenses are garbage, or that business development is taking longer than I would like, or that I didn’t know these people profoundly. I was at peace—accepted, included, encouraged, supported. At that moment on a Friday afternoon it was hard to imagine a similar scene unfolding anywhere else but this Tuscan woods. And I knew that this was the point of this post.

Here’s the original article about chestnuts, for your edification.

October 13, 2018 In Live By Gianna Delle Valle

La Bella Figura

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.

“Far bella figura,” or “make a beautiful figure,” is an Italian state of mind—and a national obsession. “Make a good impression” does not even come close to describing the rich combination of looks, gait, elegance, and manners included in the concept of the “bella figura.”

It means to dress elegantly and appropriately.

It means to have an elegant posture and gait.

It means to smash the objective you’ve set, whatever that is.

It means to stand out with your thinking.

It means making sure the light shines on you, no matter what.

It means taking centre stage and being the main character of the occasion.

It means to be the best at what you do.

It means people look at you and think “wow.”

It means to walk with your head tall.

It means to stand in tunica bianca (in a white tunic) despite adverse situations.

It means losing with class and without losing dignity.

It’s the full package, not divided into chunks with post-industrial taste: philosophy, fashion, interesting lives in social media, right ambition at work.

It’s the “sum being bigger than the parts,” a definition of “homo” with Renaissance smack.

It means to be able to navigate different circles successfully, of being able to be relevant amongst bakers and fishermen as well as millionaires and princes.

After something happens, parents question their children, bosses their employees, friends question friends: “hai fatto bella figura?” “Did you make a bella figura?”

One often hears disheartened accounts of having made a “figura di merda” or “shit impression” with all the details of what went wrong, like a post football match replay after a loss. I remember in high school we even had a nasty jingle to highlight “figura di merda,” clearly a social deterrent for not having prepared well enough.

So dear fellows, companions on this journey on earth, and kind readers: stand tall, head high, put on your best face, and coolest trainers. Today make a wonderful, magnificent, victorious “bella figura.”

October 7, 2018 In Lingua, Live By Nancy

Con Calma

One of my favorite Italian expressions is “con calma,” or “calmly.” I hear it used several times every day.

The phrase is very different from “calm down” in English, which, to me, has this slightly judgmental, and even a bit condescending quality, that hints that you are overreacting. The effect is to make me feel less calm. By a lot.

A perfect example of “con calma” was a morning when I was at a cafe near the beach on a small island. There was a big crowd of hungry people waiting for their morning coffee and pastries, and only one woman working—her two co-workers hadn’t come into work that day. The waiting crowd kept telling her “con calma.” With calm. Meaning we get it, you are doing the best you can, it will all work out, breathe.

There’s a local restaurant that we love that serves squares of pizza from big sheets and little else. There’s the wife who serves and works the register, and the husband who cooks in the back. The two could win the Olympic gold in pairs for “con calma.” It’s always a comforting and calm experience eating there, even on Wednesday lunch during the school year.

Wednesday is the long day at the town’s public schools, so the kids don’t get out in time to go home for lunch. The elementary school has a hot lunch provided, complete with three courses, china plates, and actual flatware. Served by volunteer grandparents at long tables. But there’s no school lunch available for the middle school students, and people seem to fear that they might go hungry, or have to eat something cold, in which case the world might end. So parents have organized this thing where a couple of them go to this restaurant with all the kids’ requests for pizza—all custom made and assembled into labeled bags—which the volunteer parents then deliver back to the school a couple of hundred yards away.

The restaurant comes to a standstill for other patrons, who all stand around waiting for about 45 minutes while the staff of two completely focus on each order for the kids. “Paolo gets one slice of salami pizza and one hot dog pizza, a bag of chips, and a Fanta.” Times about 30. It’s town “con calma” in action for all concerned—the relaxed and understanding patrons, the husband and wife team, and the parents who make it all possible. No one is flustered or annoyed. After all, in Italy, everything stops to make sure that kids eat well.

I can’t think of an equivalent phrase in the U.S.—maybe because being calm, an acceptance that others are human, that situations come up, and, as a result, things might not move as quickly as we’d like—aren’t things we particularly value or want to accept.

As I go through my day and am stressed about little things I frequently tell myself “con calma” and it reminds me to save the stress for things that really deserve it.

September 27, 2018 In Live By Gianna Delle Valle

Living like an Italian lion—in London

Itch is delighted to feature the second installment 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.

I read that lions, most of the time, take it very easy. These prolonged periods of laziness are the foundation for big bursts of energy spent hunting prey (or mating)—in short getting in the swing of things only when it really matters. The rest of the time they enjoy the moment in the slow lane.

Italians aspire to live in the slow lane, punctuated by bursts of intense activity only when required, or when emotions demand.

Despite more than 20 years abroad, I am no exception. I like to start my day in London as I would in Italy. The other commuters rush to the fast train to get to work as quickly as possible. Not me. I figure I will be hunting all day in my office. Now it’s time to enjoy.

So I choose a nice path to walk to the station and catch a very slow and uncrowded train. Sometimes I stop at the local station cafe for a coffee. Other times I meet my grown-up daughter at the main station at the nicest breakfast place. We sit there and pretend to be in Sardinia at Capo d’Orso, having breakfast while listening to the sound of a harp on a terrace overlooking the Mediterranean under olive trees. We ponder the finer point of life while we sip our organic smoothies or eat our avocado on toast. We talk, we laugh, we people watch. We are the lions on the savanna. Gazelles run all the time: they have to. Lions, however, lounge majestically.

And then the clock reminds us that it is time to go to the office to hunt. I have never figured out, though, if in my office-savanna I am a lion or a gazelle. Most likely a gazelle, aspiring to be a lion.

September 25, 2018 In Chow, Live By Nancy

My pasta aisle is bigger than yours

Dear readers, I have decided that you do not, yet, know enough about pasta. I have started to accept as normal that there’s a pasta aisle bigger than Texas in every Italian grocery store.

On a recent trip back to California we were stunned to rediscover that the pasta section in Safeway was a mere 17 feet. Felt like trying to find provisions for a fine meal in a 7-eleven.

So I will begin to educate you. You need to be able to tell your frogs’ mouths pasta from your radiators and volcanoes. You need to know that al dente is far more crunchy than what you probably think. What sauces go with what shapes. That the cooking water needs to be salted far more than you probably do now.

And you need to know that you never have to do anything as uncontrolled as throwing pasta against a wall to test if your spaghetti is done. Italian cooking is far more scientific and precise than that. The know-all cooking times on the packaging need to be taken very seriously.

This spaghetti, for instance, is perfectly cooked at 11 1/4 minutes.

(Unless you finish cooking it in the pan, like spaghetti aglio e olio, when the spaghetti is removed two minutes early to finish in the pan with the garlic and oil, and a couple ladles of the pasta cooking water.)

Full disclosure—I don’t yet know everything about pasta. This is an excellent excuse for me to up my pasta game, and keep you informed of the discoveries.

September 22, 2018 In Chow, Live, Recipes By Nancy

Making gnocchi, and a film, in Italy

John and I have this idea to start filming local grandmothers cooking. A possible way to enter more deeply into Italian life, capture some of the spirit of Tuscan woman, and learn more about food.

We gather some savvy, younger locals and start brainstorming about people we can shoot. The grandmother who hunts? Possible. The grandmother who makes feather whips for the lingerie store? Very possible. For our first shoot we settle on two of our collaborators’ grandmother in a house in the countryside outside of town, complete with a huge watermelon patch.

The morning of the shoot comes. We are prepared to act with military precision, which is the norm for any shoot. The “call time” comes to meet our collaborators and head to the country. The meeting location changes. The start is delayed because breakfast isn’t finished. Their grandmother actually lives in the ancient center of town, not near the watermelon patch at all. We start to get nervous.

We arrive at their house on a tiny street from the 1100s and the grandfather, Franco, jumps into cooking action. Maybe the premise of the video, cooking grandmothers, needs to be reassessed?

Then it all starts to unfold. The constant lesson of Italy. You can predict nothing, control nothing, but just step back and enjoy the gifts of grace, ease, and warmth that the Italians offer. Which more often than not is so much more than you could have possibly imagined or engineered.

Anna, the grandmother, is everywhere in the kitchen at once. This gnocchi pas de deux has clearly happened hundreds of times in their kitchen. Both of them are cooking with a rare ease, barely even looking at the food as they cook.

While Franco forms the dough for the gnocchi, and then shapes and cuts it, he tells us stories about what is was like for families growing up as tenant-farmers in the years before the “economic miracle” of the 1960s (thanks Marshall Plan), with 30 people in a house, hunger, limited mobility, and the Padrone with total power.

The conversation ranges across centuries and topics, and the enormous mound of gnocchi dough melts away. Anna is taking away the cut gnocchi, boiling it, and then rolling it in oil to separate and cool, directly on the marble table.

Soon after we sit down with the extended family to eat. As it has been said before, “And it was good.”

This is, in some ways, one of the most unfiltered films we’ve ever done. It’s as close as we can get you to sitting down in a Tuscan kitchen for a visit. Please let us know what you think of this rawer kind of glimpse. And we hope you learn a lot about gnocchi along the way.

September 12, 2018 In Live By Nancy

Small world

A couple of my friends have asked me what daily life is like in a small village. It’s a little like this:

I enter the butcher shop. It’s market day, so it’s very crowded. There are two butchers, brothers. The taller one is holding court on the raised platform behind the glass shrine of meat. They are both in their 50s and always seem to be in a great mood … always. Friends of mine who visited were amazed to see one brother telling jokes over his shoulder while whacking a huge hunk of beef down to size with a foot-long cleaver.

This tendency might explain the missing part of one finger.

Today, he pauses between customers to cut a sample of porchetta (a delicious Tuscan thing—a roasted whole pig stuffed with herbs) and has the crowd pass it to a specific customer, a woman in her 50s who is with her daughter and is seated near the door. The daughter says loudly enough for everyone to hear: “He spoils you.” The butcher says: “I was in love with her when we were in preschool.”

At this point, another patron, a grandmother who is just tall enough to see over the meat part of the shrine but not over the top of the glass, adds: “No you weren’t. You were in love with Clementina.”

September 6, 2018 In Lingua, Live By Nancy

Furbo: clever like a fox. And my son.

Italians have this great word, “furbo.” It means sly, clever, fox-like, and is one of Tuscany’s most prized character attributes. A guy who is furbo won’t be able to get a permit for a pool but will join the community fire watch and offer to put in a reservoir in case a fire breaks out. And then build it in the shape of a swimming pool. That happens to be in his yard. (And we’ve met him. And he’s told us, in detail.)

I wasn’t expecting to use this vocabulary word when I was doing one of my most dreaded tasks as an Italian mother—parent-teacher conferences. There’s no schedule, just a block of time when all the teachers sit at desks in the classrooms and the parents stand in line in the hall and wait their turn.

If a waiting parent is particularly organized they will post a list so other parents can note the order in which they arrived. But mostly, you run from one classroom to another trying to hold your place in multiple lines while attempting to chat in Italian. (Another great word is “chiacchierare,” for chatting or gossip.)

And then you have to go in and talk to the teachers. One by one. And no one speaks English—not even the English teacher.

My sessions never take long. The average parent’s turn with a teacher is about 15 minutes. For me, it’s one. Every parent wants to be next in line after me.

When I went to Sebastian’s first conference at his new school, the basics were conveyed quickly, and were consistent with what previous year’s teachers have told me. “He’s smart. Doesn’t work had enough. Too much energy. But lovely.” This last round, however, he got two “furbo” ratings and one “Furbissimo.” (Italian adds this useful suffix “-issimo” to mean an extreme level of something.)

I was crushed. My little boy furbissimo? On the way home I called John, in shock, to share the upsetting news. He couldn’t have been more delighted. Our son was really becoming Italian.

September 1, 2018 In Live By Nancy

Spectacular spettacolo

Every August, in the Tuscan village of Anghiari, magic happens. For 10 nights in a row, a local square becomes the stage for a freshly-written play, part of a 23-year-old series called Tovaglia a Quadri. I love it because it is a highly improbable thing—that a village takes the time every year to create a fearless, sharp, witty, and poignant reflection of what it means to be a member of a small Italian village, in today’s world. Written by, acted in, and attended by locals.

Each year, the new production is a full-length musical, staged in a tiny square in town. The buildings around the square are used as sets, with actors popping in and out of windows and doors. In the middle of the square are long tables, covered with checkered tablecloths, where the nightly audience is served a three-course dinner. A new play is written every year—often mere weeks before—ensuring that the topics are current. The name Tovaglia a Quadri means tablecloth (tovaglia), with squares (quadri), but the word quadri also refers to a stage.

This year’s play was Ci Amazzon, which is a play on words of “ci amazzono”—”they are killing us”. It takes place a hundred years in the future after Amazon has won the latest world war, leaving a dystopian landscape of a village in which even the grandmothers are happy to have all their needs met online so that they don’t have to leave the house and talk with each other. It explores the tension of getting exactly what you want versus having fewer choices but a more engaged community.

Prior topics have included Anghiarixit—a referendum to gain independence from Tuscany —because, after all, what has Florence really ever done for Anghiari since 1441, when the Florentines bested the Milanese in The Battle of Anghiari, a crucial battle of the Renaissance? Another year the play provided a scathing and hilarious look at immigration with the villagers all eager to emigrate to Australia to start new lives and businesses, while being terrified of a black teenager who was found on the banks of the Tiber river. The villagers thought he was an African immigrant who fell off a boat in the Mediterranean and washed hundreds of miles upstream in the river. He turned out to be from the next village and had fallen into the river after a night of partying with friends. Another was about a World War II concentration camp located nearby.

The play has been happening every year for 23 years, and is the creation of co-authors Paolo Pennacchini and Andrea Merendelli. Andrea directs. The first few years were experimental, trying things like improvisational comedy. They wrote their first real plot in 1997, and the play featured a character talking about his memories. Paolo told me that in 2010 they decided to shift from looking at the past to try “to explain the things happening around us.” And the current hard-hitting format was born.

The town wildly embraces this annual tradition. There are 130 seats for each of the 10 shows and tickets sell out almost immediately. I went to buy mine the morning the tickets were available, arrived 15 minutes after the office opened, and found myself 66th in line. The entire process took hours!

I’ve noticed that many of the local businesses now sport “Ci Amazzon” stickers in their windows, taking the idea of the latest play into a lasting, physical reminder.

I can’t wait to see what they conjure up next year.

August 31, 2018 In Lingua, Live By Nancy

The art of obscenity

Last winter, my Facebook feed was overwhelmed by contagion. Scanning the posts, it was clear that an alarming percentage of my American, English, and Italian friends were sick with the flu. And while I felt for them, the thing I really noticed was how differently friends from each country talked about their illness. Americans were sure to share details, for instance, “I’m dying. Never been this sick. The stuff I’m coughing up is GREEN.” The Brits were, well, British. “Been in hospital for 10 days. A bit under the weather.”

But the Italians… They were all about the balls. (And not the balls one uses to play sports.) Balls are a vital part of talking about a wide range of subjects, but they turn out to have a special place in capturing the suffering that comes with the flu. A female friend posted: “Ho due palle gonfie di ste teste di cazzo … Va a finire male me lo sento.” It means: “I have two swollen balls thanks to heads of dicks. This will not end well, I can feel it.” Italians love to swear, and Tuscans are known to be particularly bold and colorful. I’ve found grandmothers to be particularly impressive.

This phrase has uses beyond illness, and it also is frequently used to express “I am annoyed by these stupid people.” I highly recommend using it under your breath during the next meeting you are in when someone is annoying you. You have equal rights to the phrase whether you’re a man or a woman. I’ve recorded my son Sebastian saying each of these so that you can get it right.

Interested in dabbling in Italian testicle-based phrases, but need something a little lighter? You could try “che palle” meaning “what balls” or “how annoying.” (It’s also the name of a chain of arancini (fried rice balls) shops in Sicily.

Other phrases you might want to know:

“Mi hai rotto le palle.” meaning “you have broken my balls.” This is used in response to a distinct action that has happened.

If what is bothering you is more ongoing feel free to use “Mi fai girare i coglioni,” “You have twisted my balls.”

And the ever useful “Tu sei un coglione.” “You are a ball.” (Yes, it’s singular.) A bit softer as it is commonly used, more like “You are an idiot.”

Ready to expand your ball-adjacent Italian vocabulary? Try “a cazzo di cane,” which means “like a dog’s dick.” It’s used frequently to describe a job done badly.

More on the Italian obsession with balls at a later date. Just a friendly reminder. These are not my words. I am a mere reporter, aiming to be as scientific as possible, in linguistic matters.