Roam Archives - Page 5 of 6

Roam Archives - Page 5 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

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June 8, 2019 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

Empire in a hamlet: Brunello Cucinelli

I keep hearing interesting things about the cashmere designer and “humanistic capitalist” Brunello Cucinelli, most recently that he hosted Jeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, and other, as the Italian press headlined, “Big della Silicon Valley” in the hamlet which is the headquarters of his 500 million euro brand. The subject was “…our respect, safeguard and promotion of what has always been seen as the deepest treasure of people, the highest evidence of the original nobility of man, the utmost expression of freedom and moral supremacy: the soul.” Equally curious and skeptical (whenever billionaires start making plans for the human soul), I wanted to learn more.

The Cucinelli lore is that Brunello grew up deep in the Umbrian countryside, near Perugia, in a house without electricity or running water. After the family moved to the urban north of Italy so that his father could work in a cement factory the family happiness plummeted, and Brunello saw his father return from work often humiliated and morally defeated. After dropping out of engineering school to study philosophy on his own he pledged to create work for people that provided moral and economic dignity. “I have listened to the wise and moving words of Saint Francis, Saint Benedict, Kant, Marcus Aurelius, Socrates, Seneca, and I have realised that economic value is nothing without the human component and that the former cannot survive without the latter.” In 1978 he started out with a $500 loan and dyed some cashmere sweaters a range of bright colors (previously cashmere was available mostly in neutrals). They were a huge success.

The company grew from there and in 1982 he married his highschool sweetheart, Federica, and they moved to the hamlet where she grew up, Solomeo. In 1985 they made the town the headquarters of the growing business and purchased the ruins of a 14th-century castle to refurbish. As the company continued to grow they invested more and more into the community and the workers, paying 20% more than the average wage, ending the work day at 5:30 and discouraging working online after that time, and closing everything for a 90 minute, highly-subsidized lunch. Pretty interesting considering fashion is one of the most competitive and “always-on” industries around. “People need their rest,” Cucinelli says. “If I make you overwork, I have stolen your soul.”

Cucinelli has restored the hamlet, including the church and the theater, and founded the Solomeo School of Arts and Crafts (inspired by William Morris and John Ruskin) to teach and celebrate fine craftsmanship. Recently they cleared away some ugly industrial buildings at the foot of the hill and built a light-filled new factory, youth center, sports grounds, and parks. It’s a great model that he can do good and it only adds more value to his brand.

photo from brunellocucinelli.com

I heard that at one point he wanted to increase the size of his business substantially and looked at what it would take to expand while controlling quality of product (and life)—how to resource more cashmere, where to get it dyed, how to find enough craftsmen to hire and train to make the garments, where to build more factories—and decided that instead of scaling volume he would raise prices significantly, which has been successful because of the huge popularity of the brand.

I went to Solomeo for the morning and my feelings were mixed. I was so excited to see how he’d restored the village, but I found the restoration to be a bit cold and not preserving the organic serendipity that makes old buildings so human and interesting. I showed Donella and John some photos over lunch and Donella said “It looks like it’s a new ‘Tuscan village’ gated community in China.” Hmmm. It’s fair enough that the company dominates the hamlet—it does employ 1,600 locals—but I wasn’t expecting it to feel quite so antiseptic. However it is wonderful to save a tiny hamlet that would probably otherwise be largely in ruin.

photo from brunellocucinelli.com

On the other hand the clothes are incredible. I loved everything in the store but find it hard to imagine paying $3,000 for a simple cashmere sweater, over $8,000 for a coat, or $9,000 shearling jacket, even if I could.

I want to love everything he is doing—I’ve often wondered how to help foster thriving businesses without wrecking everything good about Italy—but there is something holding me back from being 100% a fan girl. Maybe it’s that what I love most about Italy is the inherent messiness, directness, lack of branding and facade. Along with the sad realization that those traits don’t usually drive success and growth. Wondering if there are ways for villages to prosper, kids to have career options, family businesses to thrive while not killing what makes people happier, more present, and more “real” than I’ve seen anywhere else. It was fascinating to see one model for a solution.

(top image from corcianonline.it)

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 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 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.

March 31, 2019 In Roam By Nancy

My new favorite thing in Rome: Ostia Antica

Every so often Italy offers up something that takes my breath away. Ostia Antica is near the top of that list. This archeological site near Rome is huge, almost empty of tourists, gorgeous, and compellingly, unnervingly revealing of little human details of the 100,000 people who lived there in its prime, in the 2nd and 3rd centuries A.D.

Things like this bar, at the intersection of two major streets, with a mosaic floor angled towards the front door that roughly translates “Fortunatus’s Place. You know you’re thirsty — come on in and drink.”

The streets still bear the marks of the carts which passed over 2,000 years ago.

Ostia Antica was founded sometime between 700 to 400 B.C. as Rome’s port at the mouth of the Tiber. It thrived for several hundred years and then fell into ruin at the end of the Empire. The city was silted over after that, preserving it. It’s over 80 acres and only about 2/3 is excavated. I walked for hours, passing only a handful of people.

I found it humbling. It’s beautiful and sophisticated with everything a city needed: forum, baths, temples, theaters, fire and police departments with barracks, markets, guildhalls, factories, warehouses, shops with living quarters over them, and homes, both grand and modest. The city was originally five stories and there are still staircases that ascend into nothingness. The balance and harmony of the public spaces and private buildings certainly beat what I see being created today.

Little details reveal themselves everywhere. The mosaics are diverse and abundant. (I found a good collection of photos of mosaics here.) There are still remnants of decorative frescoes in some of the homes.

The site is not too hard to get to from central Rome—you can even get there on the Metro because Mussolini believed that the Romans all needed easy access to the sea, so the line was extended to the coast. It is also just a few kilometers from Rome’s main airport, Fiumicino. In case you’d like more information I found an article in the New York Times about Ostia Antica that was interesting.

Trust me, go. And for more ideas about things to do in Rome after you’ve visited the main sites, here’s an article with other places I love.

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 17, 2019 In Chow, Roam By Nancy

Il Bindi: one table, many courses

In one of my favorite villages in Tuscany, Monte San Savino, a friend spotted a place to eat with just one large table, Il Bindi. I’ve tried to get in several times over the past year, but it’s always booked. I finally managed to reserve on a Wednesday night in February and it was worth the perseverance.

Il Bindi was started in 2006 by Paolo Bindi and is now run by his daughter, Cristina, and her husband. She cooks, with one assistant, and he takes care of the guests. They serve one set menu only and it changes every day. The table seats 20 and the night we went it was all Italians, except for us and three Brits. Because it was mostly Italians any sense of reserve between the different parties around the table quickly melted. The family to my left, who was celebrating the father’s birthday, had a thirteen-year old daughter who had brought along two friends. They were very shy about the fact they hadn’t taken English seriously enough in school and kept asking me to tell them how to say things in English. The lack of pretense, humor, and curiosity of the group was so distinctly Italian that it almost didn’t matter what the food was like.

But it was impressive. They served about twenty different courses, completely made by hand, and all more refined and creative than we’ve found almost anywhere else in Tuscany.

Monte San Savino is worth a trip in itself. Halfway between Siena and Arezzo it has the qualities I treasure in certain villages—it’s a gorgeous, perched hill town from around 1100, but it feels like it has an authentic life apart from tourism.

When we went to pay the bill the total was €60, including a bottle of wine. We will be back, if we can get in.

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.

February 9, 2019 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

The lost Leonardo: The Battle of Anghiari

One of the great mysteries of the art world involves one of the most important commissions of Leonardo da Vinci’s career: painting one-third of a 174-foot wall of one of most the massive and politically prestigious rooms in Europe, the Council Hall in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Oh, and to make life interesting and present a bit of a challenge, Michelangelo was commissioned to paint the opposite wall. Michelangelo had just finished the David. Leonardo The Last Supper. They were both hired by a man who understood just a little about competition and manipulation, Machiavelli. It was the only time they would work together on the same project.

Leonardo was 51 and Michelangelo was the hot, up-and-coming young artist at 28. The two men couldn’t have been more different. Leonardo was known for his grace, elegance, sparkling conversation, and mentoring a circle of younger artists. Michelangelo was disheveled, brooding, short-tempered, solitary, often filthy, and the last thing he wanted was any mentoring from Leonardo. Michelangelo was openly disdainful of Leonardo when they encountered each other in public. Both men were gay, but Leonardo seemed to have been more public and comfortable with it. Michelangelo was more tortured about his sexuality and is reported to have decided to be celibate.

The Council Hall was the center of power in Florence when Florence was at its apex. It had just become a republic after the long dominance of the Medici and there was a period of peace. They expanded the hall to seat 500 representatives (it’s now called the Salone dei Cinquecento) and the subjects of the paintings were chosen to convey Florence’s military might and power. Leonardo chose a battle that had happened on June 29, 1440 along the Tiber river in the valley outside the small, fortified hill town of Anghiari (which happens to be our stomping ground.) The battle, which pitted Milan against Florence—one of Florence’s few military victories—involved forty squadrons of mounted soldiers and 2,000 on foot. The battle was a turning point for Florence because Milan gave up trying to conquer the rival city. However, Machiavelli was disdainful of the battle as only one soldier died, and that was from falling off a horse.

Leonardo decided to make the central scene a small group of soldiers vying for a standard flag rather than to portray the large scale of the battle. He was as fascinated by showing the struggle to the death of the horses as much as the men, and did dissections and studies of the similarity of expression and facial muscles of each species. Leonardo wanted a softer and more luminous look than traditional fresco techniques could give, so he decided to use oil paints. There are many entries in his notebooks about how to convey the reality of battle—how much dust is kicked up and how high in the sky it hangs, how bodies are dragged through bloody mud, the noise—and he felt that this newer technique would let him marry the nuance of oil painting with the grandeur of frescoes.

He completed the cartoons for the painting, mounted them with a flour-based paste, designed an innovative scissor-type moveable scaffolding, and went to work. In addition to experimenting with paint he also experimented with a base layer that was thought to be a mix of resin and wax. In his prototypes it dried well, but on the wall it remained wet, despite the fires he lit in the hall to promote drying. Not only did the preliminary work not dry, it started to melt.

Leonardo attempted to continue work, but was well-known for procrastination and not finishing projects. The City of Florence renegotiated his contract so that he would have to repay all his fees and forfeit his work if it wasn’t completed by 1505. His deadline came and went, and the painting wasn’t finished. Then a huge storm hit. The cartoon was thrown to the floor and deluged by water from the rain and a large overturned bucket. The project was all but dead.

Meanwhile, on the other wall, Michelangelo was not doing a lot better. He started the project and then got called away to do the Pope’s tomb and Sistine Chapel in Rome.

So the two unfinished paintings sat, facing off, adorning one of the most important rooms in Italy. People came from all over to see Leonardo’s unfinished work, which contemporaries described as some of his best, even in its unfinished state.

In 1565, Vasari, who is the first art historian and adored both Leonardo and Michelangelo, was hired to oversee the redecoration of the Palace and creating finished paintings in the Salone dei Cinquecento. So he painted over the work of Michelangelo and Leonardo in his own paint by the acre style, which remain in the room today.

What we know of the painting (the images above) were actually done by Rubens a century later from contemporary studies of The Battle of Anghiari.

But the story may not end there. An air gap was discovered behind the Vasari, and a team led by Mauricio Seracini from University of San Diego, who is one of the leading diagnosticians of Italian art, got permission to drill through previously restored sections of the Vasari to see what might be behind. They found traces of pigment that matches what Leonardo was experimenting with at the time, and many historians doubt that Vasari would have painted directly on top of two of his most revered masters. (There is also a mysterious phrase on one of the flags in Vasari’s work, located where no one who was not on scaffolding could read, that ways “Cerca Trova,” “He who looks will find.”)

So you’ve got some compelling leads that one of the greatest paintings of all time might be behind this wall, but you are in Italy, so what happens? The project to uncover what might be there is shut down by a group of art historians who question whether this experiment, which is harming already damaged sections of the Vasari, goes against the Italian constitution, and call the police saying it might be illegal. Oh, and they hated Renzi, who was Florence’s Mayor at the time and was in favor of the exploration.

And there the story remains since 2012. If the painting is ever uncovered it require massive meddling with the Vasari (like pouring glue all over it, putting another substrate over the front, peeling the painting off, and putting it on another base. What could go wrong?)

And the Leonardo might just be a smudge of running pigment. But, how amazing that this possibility even exists.

If you want to know more about Leonardo I’ve enjoyed Walter Isaacson’s 2017 book, Leonardo Da Vinci.