Roam Archives - Page 4 of 6

Roam Archives - Page 4 of 6 - 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-roam,category-38,paged-4,category-paged-4,wp-theme-stockholm,ajax_fade,page_not_loaded,,select-theme-ver-4.4.1,paspartu_enabled,wpb-js-composer js-comp-ver-7.9,vc_responsive

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.

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, 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 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.

July 21, 2019 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

Pinocchio at the Relais & Châteaux resort

Several years ago I guessed that Il Borro, the restored hamlet owned by the Ferragamo family and part of the Relais & Chateaux group of luxury hotels, might be a really nice place during my then 93-year old mother’s heart valve replacement. I returned to California for her procedure and in the preliminary meeting, when the team of surgeons and cardiologists learned that I lived in Tuscany, everything stopped while they told me in great detail about their various family vacations in this far-away paradise called Il Borro. Excuse me, but don’t you have work to do, like on my mother?

Now that I live about 45-minutes away I’ve visited a couple of times to eat and wander around but somehow had missed the whole point of the place. It’s not the ancient hamlet, perched on a rock outcropping, which has been restored to within an inch of its life, or the infinity pool, or the spa treatments, or winery, or olive groves, but the most interesting thing is a tucked-away collection of animatronic Pinocchios created by the parish priest who lived there years before it was purchased by the Ferragamos. Father Pasquale Mencattini first built a mechanized nativity scene in the 1950s, followed by small tableaus of traditional Tuscany—this one is in a tavern.

But I think his masterpieces are the Pinocchio scenes.

Built within TV sets they are stashed in a small cellar. The general public can see them, you just have to ask reception.

While writing this I also discovered that The Adventures of Pinocchio, written by the Italian Carlo Collodi, was first published as a serialized story in a newspaper of children’s stories in 1881 and became instantly popular. The collected stories were put into book form in 1883 and it’s reputed to be the most translated book in the world, after the Bible, and is one of the best-selling books of all time.

But back to Il Borro. Would I suggest staying there? I am a complete sucker for any Relais & Chateaux experience, but I’d have to say no. Not if you want to actually visit Italy. The resort is all about the curated and imagined Italian experience as opposed to the real one—the hamlet even comes complete with a collection of artisans at work—but give me a coffee at a not-too-clean bar filled with cinghiale hunters any day.

July 21, 2019 In Roam By Nancy

Mona Lisa’s bridge

I sometimes drive over the Buriano Bridge, just outside of Arezzo. It’s a seven-arched, one-lane wonder built in 1277 spanning the Arno. If that isn’t cool enough, the bridge is the one off the Mona Lisa’s shoulder, at least according to Carlo Starnazzi, a University of Florence paleontologist, who published a paper with his research in 1995.

The landscape was widely thought to be Leonardo da Vinci’s fictional creation, but Starnazzi argues that Leonardo had mapped this area extensively when he hired by Cesare Borgia to study how the river might be diverted by water works to starve nearby cities during a siege. On the map he created he’d drawn the Buriano bridge. (A little side note, Borgia was the inspiration for Machiavelli’s The Prince. If the assignment paid well, and used his engineering skills, da Vinci was up for the job, no matter how nasty the employer …)

Starnazzi even found a vantage point—a now abandoned castle—which in Leonardo’s time would have aligned with the geographical features exactly the way they appear in the painting. And Leonardo was a native of Tuscany and knew the area well.

There’s a bit of competition for claiming bits of Italian geography as the inspiration for what’s behind the Mona Lisa. Several other theories place the background in the Italian Alps, in Bobbio, located south of Piacenza, and in Montefeltro in the Marche.

But I am going to believe it it the Buriano Bridge as I pass over it not infrequently and the “evidence” seems pretty good to me. There’s also a sign making the bridge put up by the village … so it must be true. (The bridge is very near Il Borro resort, home of the Pinocchio collection.)

July 14, 2019 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

Three years after the earthquakes

I was in need of a little exploration so I decided to head out to see Norcia and Castelluccio, two villages high on Mouni Sibillini hit hard by the Italian earthquakes of August (6.2 magnitude) and October (6.5), 2016.

Norcia is still charming, although the signs of devastation are everywhere. It was part of the Papal States and after a large earthquake in 1859 the church imposed a strict building code that limited housing structures to under three stories, and thanks to that most of the houses survived. The larger buildings, like the 13th-century basilica of St. Benedict, were completely destroyed. The facade is the only thing left standing. The basilica is on top of an earlier structure, and is believed to be where St. Benedict and his twin sister were born in 480. The basilica is in the process of restoration, although when I was there I only saw two men working and a crane lifting a wheelbarrow over the rubble that was the inside of the church.

The same side of the church, before the quakes:

Norcia is also the homeland of the norcini, or traveling butchers, who were in charge of the family spezzatura (cutting up of the pig) that John and I were lucky enough to go to. The area is renowned for its salumi, prosciutto, and other various prepared pig parts.The town still has its share of stores selling norcineria, although many are outside the town gate and in temporary structures.

Hanging around town are signs protesting the slowness of aid from the earthquake. This one, in the main square with the ruined church behind, says “Three governments and three commissions, only promises.”

After a coffee in Norcia I drove deeper into the mountains to the tiny village of Castelluccio, home to “nearly” 150 people. Sixty percent of it was leveled in the earthquake, the town was evacuated, and all road access closed off for over a year. The road is open again, as is the village, with a few shops and restaurants largely operating from temporary buildings. Not all villages have recovered as well—on the way I spotted this road leading to other small villages, still closed. The words “infinite shame” are written on the do not enter sign.

The valley that Castelluccio is in is one of the most beautiful, and unusual, places I’ve ever seen. It’s an immense valley, located high in the mountains, with a very flat and wide bottom. There’s only one road running through. If you zoom into the main image above you can see Castelluccio on a small hill to the left of the valley—a glorious site for a town. It’s famous in the spring for flowers blooming on the plain, which I’d just missed, but the hay had just been rolled into bales and the valley was stunning. It is also where some of the most famous lentils in the world come from—as loved by foodies as their more famous cousins the de Puy lentils from France. I hope you can see how beautiful this place is, especially with the hay bales. If you are viewing on a phone. Perhaps zoom in?

My restaurant radar was thrown off by all the identical temporary buildings, but I followed my nose all the way up the hill to the last restaurant, where all the workmen were headed, always my best clue to local food. I had the best handmade pasta with cinghiale sauce that I’ve had yet in Italy, where sauces with wild boar are common. (You can see some of the destruction to the left of the temporary building.)

But the best part was that I was seated at a table next to two brown robe-clad monks. The last thing I was expecting was for them to turn out to be American. One is the Prior of the Benedictine Monastery in Norcia. I started a fascinating conversation with them—about why most of the monks in this community are American, what it is like to build a new monastery with such a weight of history to live up to, the earthquake and its aftermath, making beer, and creating the #1 hit album on Billboard’s classical chart. All ahead in the next Itch.

And if you find yourself in Castelluccio, I’d highly recommend the Agriturismo Monte Veletta for lunch.

June 29, 2019 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

Six boys disappear into a cave…

In 1979 six Italian boys who had formed a speleology group were out practicing their rappelling skills on a rock face on the steep side of the village of Narni. The oldest, Roberto Nini, mistakenly crashes into a cabbage patch on a terrace below. At first the farmer,Ernani Proietti, is angry, but Roberto tells the old farmer about the group’s passion for finding and mapping caves and other underground chambers.

Ernani shows them a hole into the cliff face in the back of the stable where he kept his livestock and tells them to see what was there. Just like the moment in the wardrobe in C.S. Lewis’s fictional Narnia (inspired by Narni) in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe that moment forever changed the lives of the boys and the town.

Above the farmer’s plot was the abandoned San Dominico monastic complex dating from 1303 (which was built on top of a 6th-century Paleochristian church.) The monks left in 1860, the monastery was falling to ruin, and then it was bombed in WWII. In 1979 the rubble from the bombing still cascaded down the cliff and formed the back of Ernani’s garden and shed. What Ernani didn’t know, and the boys discovered, was that the bombing had uncovered access to several underground chambers which had been walled up several centuries before. And Roberto Nini was to spend the next 40 years of his life investigating the mysteries inside.

The boys enter the pitch black cavern. The first thing that their light illuminates is a pair of eyes looking back at them. They belonged to a fresco of an angel in what had been a church from the 1300s. On all the walls are beautiful frescoes.

The church had been badly damaged by water. The boys started working to clear it out and started a volunteer group that has restored it and gives tours, called Narni Underground, or Narni Sotterranea. Some of the tours are led by Roberto Nini himself. Over time the boys kept discovering more chambers, including an intact Roman cistern next door to the church.

The third and fourth chambers held the most startling thing they discovered—an interrogation chamber from one of the main courts of the Papal Inquisition of the 16th and 17th centuries, and a prisoner’s cell. Centuries before the church had walled the rooms off and denied that there had ever been an active seat of the inquisition in Narni, but Roberto went to work.

He discovered that the Church had ordered most documents about the inquisition to be destroyed in 1809. While in storage in a warehouse waiting for the paper mill one box was stolen and ended up in a monastery in Dublin. When Roberto found out about this he went to Dublin and found the papers that referenced the trials in Narni. This led him to be admitted to the Vatican Library where he found additional documentation. One record told the story of a Giuseppe Andrea Lombardini who was put on trial in 1759. When the prisoner cell was discovered they found on the wall a large inscription “IO GIUSEPPE ANTREA LOBARTINI CAPORALE – FUI CARGERATO”, meaning, “I Giuseppe Andrea Lombardini was incarcerated”. The entire cell is richly decorated with masonic symbols and markers of time spent in the cell.

The visit was great, but what I loved most was the story of the people behind the site. The volunteer giving the tour was exceptionally engaged, enthusiastic, and passionate—it was like the first time she’d shared the stories. It is amazing to me that somehow these boys had managed to rally the community, form a volunteer organization, find funds and talent for restoration, and do the level of research that they had, all over the course of decades. Interesting to see how saying “yes” to going into an unexplored cave changed so many people’s lives.

(Thanks to Underground Narni for the beautiful photos.)

June 19, 2019 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

I just got back from Narnia

With time to kill at a horseshow in Umbria I decided to explore the nearby hilltown of Narni, which the Romans called Narnia.

First of all, let’s address the name thing. Yes, it is the inspiration for C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, although it is unlikely he ever visited the Italian town. According to Lewis’s biographer and former personal secretary, Walter Hooper, Lewis read about Narnia in Roman history where it is mentioned by Tacitus, Livy, and Pliny the Elder. He had a Latin atlas in which he’d underlined the name “Narnia”. Lewis told Hooper that the name in the atlas had indeed inspired his fictional Narnia. This atlas was later given to the town.

To make things even more interesting, one of Narni’s local saints was named Lucy Brocadelli (1476-1544), who had religious visions starting at the age of five. She wanted to join the Dominicans but was married off as a young teen to a Count from Milan. She convinced her husband to let her live in celibacy. They lived together quite happily despite her propensity for giving away their belongs to the poor and wearing a hair shirt. The husband’s limits were reached, however, after she stayed out all night and came back the next morning with two men—who she claimed were John the Baptist and Saint Dominic. Her husband locked her up for Lent and when she went to church on Easter she ran away and joined the Dominicans. The Count was so angry he burned down a nearby Dominican property. She became a prioress, and received the stigmata (one of the few women to do so). Her benefactor, the Duke of Ferrara, started a new religious community for her but the Duke had the unfortunate habit of bringing his dinner guests by the convent after the meal and asking Lucy to make the stigmata bleed and go into ecstasy. After he died the others in the convent didn’t take well to this attention and locked her in a cell for forty years. After she died her body was discovered several years later to be “uncorrupted” and she was beatified in 1710. Her body is now in the cathedral of Narni. I cannot report on how corrupted, or not, it now is. She is thought to be the inspiration for Lewis’s character, Lucy Pevensie. (I swear on St. Lucy that this is actually the abbreviated version of the story. Please forgive my long digression—I’m still not sure it’s right to take you through this whole Lucy story, but I couldn’t resist.)

But there’s more Narnia in Narni—there’s an ancient, pre-Roman stone table that is outside of town. Local historians believe it was used for animal, and perhaps even human, sacrifice, which is not a surprise given the climatic scene in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.

Amazingly, there is hardly any reference to C.S. Lewis’s creations in Narni. (Unlike Dubrovnik and its dozen or more stores selling Game of Thrones junk.) It’s an enchanting little hilltop town perched between two valleys—a more gentle slope to the front of the town and a dramatic drop-off to the back. It has been inhabited since Paleolithic and Neolithic times and first named by the Osco-Umbrians as Nequinum in 600 BC.

It is my favorite kind of Italian town. Not too big and not too small. Gorgeous, almost unknown, very, very few tourists, friendly, enough of a critical mass of locals that it feels like it has a vital life of its own apart from visitors. You can visit a church from almost any century you choose, starting around the year 1000, all within the tiny center.

Here are a few of the different ones.

S. Maria Impensole from the 1200s.

S. Francesco from the 1200s with amazingly frescoed pillars.

For visual punctuation you’ve got the basic hulking fortress towering over the town and an abandoned Benedictine monastery perched on the backside of the town on a mid-ground range of hills.

I found out that it is close to the geographic center of Italy. I was almost fooled by the sign in the piazza in town, in several languages, saying that it marked the center of Italy, but dug a little deeper and realized that the actual point was a 10-minute drive up a dirt road to a parking lot and then a 30-minute hike through an enchanting woods, which would have done old C.S. proud. Didn’t see another person. Paralleling the hike there are openings into an underground channel, which turned out to be part of a Roman aqueduct system and still completely intact.

So here’s the for real geographical center of Italy.

Nearby happens to be a bridge from the 1st century, Ponte Cardona.

There was so much to do in tiny Narni that I returned for a second day to visit the underground Byzantine church, Roman cistern, and a Tribunal of the Inquisition, with adjacent prisoner cell, all discovered by chance in 1979. That’s for next week’s Itch.

Oh, I also went apartment hunting for you. Here you go.