Live Archives - Page 9 of 13

Live Archives - Page 9 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

archive,paged,category,category-live,category-39,paged-9,category-paged-9,ajax_fade,page_not_loaded,,select-theme-ver-4.4.1,paspartu_enabled,wpb-js-composer js-comp-ver-7.9,vc_responsive

March 31, 2019 In Best Of, Live, Roam By Nancy

Satan in a box: the autovelox

Continuing the series on what you need to know about driving in Italy…

You are driving along on a freeway. All the cars around you are comfortably ignoring the speed limit, treating it as a mere suggestion, then suddenly all the cars break dramatically to slow to exactly the speed limit for about 500 meters, then continue along their merry way. Why? Most likely you are in the presence of the dread autovelox. These camera boxes along the side of the road capture your speed and if you are going too fast a speeding ticket appears in the mail about a month later. The ticket gets more expensive the more you exceed the limit, but they’ll get you for even small transgressions. We recently got one for going only 4 k.p.h. faster than the limit.

The tricky part is that not all of them are operational, which is why it’s important to pay attention to how seriously the other drivers around you are taking the speed limit. In the province of Arezzo many of of the boxes do not function and I love the reason why. Arezzo was a very wealthy and powerful Italian city with several politicians who were some of the most connected and influential in government. It’s not an accident that the autostrada and the main train line between Florence and Rome take quite a detour to stop at Arezzo.

According to local lore one of the mega powerful and connected politicians was caught speeding by an autovelox and received a speeding ticket. He was furious. So furious that he mysteriously was able to get the vast majority of the boxes in the province turned off.

The good news for drivers is that there is always a sign warning you of an autovelox ahead of the actual box, but reading it assumes that you are actually paying attention to the constant chatter of signs that are a part of any road journey in Italy. To avoid a surprise ticket always assume they are active, especially outside the province of Arezzo.

March 23, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Finding inner peace at the ATM

My Apple watch frequently reminds me to take a minute and breathe, as did my Calm app on my phone, until it caused me too much stress and I had to delete it.

My recent trip to the Bay Area, complete with super-efficient ATMs, put my usual experience of getting cash in the village square in a new perspective. Just trying to get euros in Italy is a big, brash reminder that there is nothing to do in life but slow down, breathe, and look at the view. A friend once told me that when she gets cash from this ATM she knows she has actually arrived in Italy. And if you don’t get the message at the ATM you certainly will in line at the butcher, getting a coffee, or a ordering slice of pizza. Con calma above all. In these places we are among friends and equals and wouldn’t want them to rush or stress over the size of the line. Anything else would be rude and foolish at once.

I thought you might want to see the slowest ATM in the world in action.

March 23, 2019 In Live By Nancy

The darker view of Italian life

OK, it’s not perfect. Living in Italy has its dark sides and challenges, as does any other place on earth. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently as we have some life decisions to make around education.

We live in a village, which offers so many good things that speak to us every day—people are warm, relaxed, funny, and coming from their hearts rather than striving to prove their worth with every encounter. I am sure we are seeing a very special slice of Italy, partly because it is rural. Living in an urban center, like Milan, is probably far closer to what it is like in New York, London, or San Francisco. What we lack in innovation, drive, and ideas doesn’t bother me as these other human elements more than overcome, and I get exposure to the “real world” pretty frequently through work, friends, and travel.

But now Sebastian is in his second year of high school. A school he adores and bounds out of bed every morning at 6:30 to attend. A school where the teachers don’t posture in any way to impose control or superiority. When John or I walk in the halls we are struck by the atmosphere, which is so different from the schools we attended, where the teachers and administrators always seemed frightened that their cloak of control would slip. Here the relationship between students and teachers seems to be almost one of peers. This even extended to a teacher discussing, with the whole class, their extramarital affair as a way of warning the class to be careful about whom they fall in love with. Students are taught to speak their minds and question authority, and they have no problem getting angry with a teacher face to face if there is a perceived injustice. John likes to say that the true accomplishment of the middle and high schools are that they taught our kids to be Italian.

The Italian system forces students to choose a high school with a certain focus—these range from the Liceo choices, which are academic (classics, math and science, linguistics, art) to trade schools for subjects like forestry and hospitality. Sebastian and Donella both chose Liceo Artistico, which we affectionately refer to as Slacker High, so our experience doesn’t speak to the more aggressively academic choices like Classico. But even the most academic of the high schools seem to rely a great deal on memorization and rote learning. The local schools work well for most of the families around here because the kids love the valley and want to stay, and there are few jobs which require university degrees. The trade off of leaving isn’t worth the possibility of greater career possibilities.

In this paradise of Liceo Artistico both hit a wall about two years in. Doing well without ever having to study outside of class and lacking peers who had any interest in going on to university lost its charm. For Donella, the answer was going to a boarding school in England and doing the IB degree, then on to university at UCL. The answer may be the same for Sebastian, but it really bothers me for our family, and for the millions of students in Italy, that this choice needs to be made at all, as well as the disparity issue that we are lucky enough financially, linguistically, and to have this path as a possibility.

I was mulling all this over one day when I went out for lunch by myself to a restaurant run by sisters from Rome, Una Terrazza in Toscana. Cinzia and Daniele (photo above) had only one other customer that day and when he left they joined me for lunch at the table they’d moved to the middle of the front entrance so that it would be best positioned for the sun and we talked for about an hour. They were asking me about what we do for a living, what the kids are doing for school, and whether we think the kids will remain in Italy. And they told me of their great sadness for Italy. That it had felt for while in the 1980s that anything was possible, but now it feels like a country for old people.

It was a theme that was beautifully conveyed in an insightful, poignant, and beautiful documentary, Spettacolo, about a tiny village in Tuscany where most of the population writes and acts in an original play every summer. The documentary followed the development of that year’s play about waiting for the end of the world, which I think a lot of Italians feel. (The concept of locally-written and produced plays, Tovaglia a Quadri, also happens in the village of Anghiari.)

I guess with any of these big, overwhelming subjects the only way to think about it is personally. And for me, the constant challenge is how I can blend the thirst for learning, challenge, and growth while not falling into the traps of competition, insecurity, and anxiety. How to blend the American and the Italian bits of myself. And I still have great hopes for Italy because I believe in the Italians.

March 17, 2019 In Best Of, Live, Roam By Nancy

The visual delight of Italian road signs

(Part I of a series on Driving in Italy.)

The architecture, the design, the paintings, the love of pageant and opera—few other cultures are as visually-obsessed as the Italians. This visual exuberance even extends to Italian road signs. There are literally hundreds of different types of signs that warn, chide, and advise about almost any situation you could imagine yourself encountering on the road when driving in Italy.

Italian road signs almost always come in groups and tell little short stories about a section of road through their hieroglyphic language. Sometimes it feels like there’s an Italian grandmother sitting in the passenger seat, delivering a monologue while I am driving. “Watch out, sometimes there are deer and boar on this road. Why Giuseppe hit a deer 15 years ago! And even though it is July, it can freeze and be slippery around this curve in the winter! And your tires could pick up gravel and possibly hit someone walking by the road. SLOW DOWN big curve coming! Did I mention that when it rains a lot it can flood here? WATCH OUT—soft shoulder!” And all this can be delivered in about 20 feet of road signs. With more around the next bend.

When we took the very hard test to get our Italian driver licenses, and had to memorize the meanings of hundreds of signs, I was particularly amused by this sign of a car falling off a dock into the water and could hardly imagine a context when it might be necessary to use it. Then I went for the weekend to the tiny Isola del Giglio in the Tuscan archipelago and discovered why it exists in the road sign oeuvre.

More about the Italian visual nature in one of my favorite books about Italy, Tobias Jones’s The Dark Heart of Italy. There’s a fascinating chapter about the British preference for the written word and the Italian preference for visual communication, and how it plays out in the culture.

March 9, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Carnevale, village style

Maybe other celebrations of carnevale are more famous—Venice, New Orleans, London, Rio—but I’d argue all night that none of them have the pure joy, community, and heart that carnevale has in a small Italian village.

Carnevale is a tradition that started in Venice a thousand years ago. It’s the last great hurrah before the beginning of Lent, with its tradition of penitence. Carnevale evolved from ancient pagan Spring traditions of fertility and rebirth that were repurposed into the Christian calendar by the ever-pragmatic Catholic church.

In the village of Anghiari carnevale is one of the biggest events of the year. Tractors, which pull the floats, are washed and polished. Traffic is diverted from the main street. Containers of silly string and bags of confetti are everywhere. Nearly the whole village turns out, most everyone in costume, especially the kids. A lawn mower-sized tractor pulls a train of carts around the piazza for the smallest children. Floats often make political and social statements and can be surprisingly elaborate, but my favorite is often from the hamlet of Motina, which has about 100 inhabitants. One year the whole hamlet dressed up as the 101 Dalmatians.

But what gets me is the sweetness, spirit, and warmth of the thing. I can’t watch this parade, which circles the town multiple times, without getting tears in my eyes. It’s the way people honor and care for each other. It’s the old guy who wanders around the village every day, seemingly lost, always dressed by his family in a vest of safety orange, who was asked to lead the parade. The two buff 20-something male heartthrobs who never miss this opportunity to cross-dress, much to the delight of the crowd. The band, which is never quite in tune, but always enthusiastic. The Italian love of spectacle and show, manifested by the littlest kids dancing completely to their own rhythm on stage, cheered by the crowd. It’s that there are ways for everyone, from the youngest to the oldest, to be celebrated, to be seen, to have fun.

More scenes from carnevale, in case you haven’t seen this video before.

March 3, 2019 In Best Of, Lingua By Nancy

Word of the week: motozappa

Motozappa. It makes your mouth zing to say it. Its more Germanic sounding English translation, rototiller, is left stuck in the mud on a rutted dirt road by comparison. Just say the two together and you will see what I mean. Having words like motozappa is of the many reasons it’s great to live in Italy. (In addition to being considered tall—at 5’4”—and having what I am often told is an exotic name, Nancy.)

The next time you happen to be in the yard just think of how much more you could do if you got your hands on a motozappa. The zappa part comes from the verb zappare: to turn over, dig over, dig out (soil, ground).

February 23, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Nonna net

Soon after we arrived in our village we got a lesson about the effectiveness of the nonna network in Italy.

During our first year in Tuscany what helped the most to get our non-Italian speaking kids thriving in the all-Italian local schools was a couple of sent-from-the-Gods tutors who helped with the transition. They’d pick the kids up at school, check in with the teachers and find out what was coming up the next day, but what became the most important in many ways, take them to the family lunch before starting in on homework. One of Sebastian’s tutor’s grandmothers often cooked for the extended family, plus Sebastian, and got to know him very well.

One day John and Sebastian were walking across the piazza and the grandmother came rushing towards Sebastian, obviously upset and concerned. She started talking to Sebastian in very loud, rapid-fire Italian, her five-foot tall frame towering over his eight-year old height. At the end of what seemed to be an epic scolding she gave him a huge hug and walked away.

John asked, “What was that all about?” “Nothing,” said Sebastian.

So we called the granddaughter, who spoke some English, and got the story. Living in a small village our kids ran free a lot. Apparently earlier in the day Sebastian had been taking a walk with a very attractive local mom and her young son on the path that runs next to the top of the ancient walls of our hill town. This defensive wall is at least 50′ high and the top of it has a flat surface about two feet wide. It drops from the lower part of our village to the valley and helped protect the town from invaders. Sebastian decided to show off, so he jumped up onto the top of the wall to walk for a bit.

But his brief high-wire act had been spotted by a grandmother, who none of us knew, as she was looking out her window. She immediately called her friend, Sebastian’s adopted grandmother, and explained that she saw him break a big village rule: no walking on the wall. She thought her friend would want to let her young American friend know how dangerous this was.

And we learned our first of many lessons that prove that Italian grandmothers rule. They take responsibility for enforcing village mores, and such a transgression would warrant an instant phone call to a friend to rectify—the nonna net in action.

February 23, 2019 In Lingua By Nancy

Word of the week: magari

This a word that I hear all the time and that can be used to mean a lot of different things. The dictionary translates it simply as “maybe” or “if only” but that just scratches the surface of how useful this word is.

You can use it to express “Of course! I’d love to!” as in an ironic a response to whether you’d like to go to Paris for the weekend (implying “Of course! If only”).

It often has a strong wistful sense, a kind of “if only” from deep in the soul. “How I wish it was true.” The kind of word you’d pull out to express the regret of a relationship that should have ended differently: “Magari it could have gone differently.” It can also has a meaning of “God willing,” as in things like passing one’s exams, or finding great fortune. This meaning can be accompanied by a bit of a shrug and wave of both hands.

The last set of meanings are “maybe, and what if” “Magari we should open a bottle of wine,” “What if magari we get to the restaurant and they don’t have room?,” or “Magari he would notice she dyed her hair red” are all situations in which magari would be perfectly at home. For starter usage, though, you can’t beat the wistful look into the distance and slight shrug of its “what if” meaning.

Magari you can now speak Italian.

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

Three ways Italy is different from California

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

Dogs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lunch

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

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

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

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

Coffee

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

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

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

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

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

Spezzatura di maiale: nose to tail in action

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

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

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

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

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

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