life in an italian village Archives - Page 9 of 11

life in an italian village Archives - Page 9 of 11 - Itch.world

A three-minute escape to Italy.

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December 8, 2018 In Lingua, Live By Gianna Delle Valle

How are you?

“How are you?”

Such a routine question. “Come stai?” But try asking a distant acquaintance (or any random stranger) on an Italian beach in summer and brace yourself for the hour-long conversation that will follow.

Answers will detail how many hours slept and the quality of sleep, the state of bowels and urination, if the appetite is normal, how the stomach feels, if there are any sore muscles, how healthy teeth and gums are, and if there is any hint of a headache.

If any blood tests have been done recently the conversation will cover key results, and how to improve any findings that are off, such as cholesterol. Descriptions will follow of diets tried, the miracle of kiwis, herbal remedies, new pills on the horizon, special yoghurts, or anything that will fix whatever item needs improvement.

If you are at the centre of the universe then every day you need to have an awareness of the most important thing in the world—you.

By going abroad I was surprised that internal systems seem to work without monitoring. Bowel movements, sleep patterns—these things work without constant checking!

And equally surprised that the last thing we monitor is our true selves, our souls. As if we expect it all to work. As if it does not matter.

November 30, 2018 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Let’s talk about money

Death, sex, money, obscenities—the rules are hard enough to determine in your native culture and language. I find discovering how another culture handles them a constant fascination. The Tuscans are in-your-face frank about so many things that I would have expected that money would be near the top of the list, but there seems to be this slight reluctance to demand payment mixed with honesty, the assumption of honesty on the part of customers, and a lack of urgency about getting paid that I don’t yet fully understand.

So many examples… Lola, our dog, was very sick this summer, which required once or twice daily visits to the vet for a month, complete with blood tests, IVs, and ultrasounds. She was finally declared cured so I asked to pay. The vets said they were busy with other things and to worry about it later. I followed up a series of calls and texts to get the bill, and a month or so later they finally totaled it up, texted me the total, and I was able to pay them.

In this area of Italy, when you eat at some restaurants you don’t get a bill. You go to the register and recite what you had and they tell you how much. Simple when it’s a couple of people, but groups of kids commonly go to these places —like 15-20 people—for birthday parties and other celebrations, and then go up, one at a time, and pay for exactly what they had. And it all seems to work.

At first, I thought these types of experiences were simply a function of being in a small town, but then John went to a medium-sized city about 45-minutes away to rent a rototiller for a few days. They load this three thousand euro piece of equipment in the back of the car and jot down his first name and phone number on a piece of scrap paper and he drives away. No deposit. No credit card taken. No ID. And no surprise when he returned it two days later.

One year we found a Christmas tree (late) tall enough for our living room even further away from the house. The guy cuts down a 15-foot tree to size, carefully loads it on the car, we choose a second smaller tree, and then realize he doesn’t accept credit cards. His solution is to give us his bank account number so that we can transfer money to him later rather than having to worry about finding cash that evening. “Con calma!” “No hurry!” he yells after us as we drive away with the trees.

One day the car needed gas so I stopped at a local station. It was cold and I didn’t want to pump it myself so I pulled into full serve. The older guy who owns the station came out, waving me to back up and move the car over to the self-serve pump. I assumed that it was because the other pump was broken, but no, he says “That one’s too expensive!” and proceeds to fill the tank himself.

My daughter, Donella, and I returned to this station about a month later badly needing windshield washing fluid. We had just filled the car up at another station where they were out of the fluid we needed, so we stopped here. I went in to buy a bottle and the same man comes out, insists on filling up the fluid reservoir, and washing all the windows for us, then charges us one euro for the solution. We pulled out, a little stunned, and Donella’s reaction was “How can this world even exist?”

I have no idea how much we owe our dentist at the moment, post braces, wisdom teeth surgery, and multiple cleanings, but we will get it all sorted out, at some point. And the price is always more than fair.

The Tuscans often pride themselves on being furbo (crafty, fox-like), and thrifty, so I find it hard to reconcile these traits with this seeming lack of urgency about getting paid, and an assumption that people will pay. Homogeneous culture? (But we are clearly outsiders, albeit with the “right” kind of passport.) Or perhaps a desire not to contaminate daily life with too much fixation on finances? I haven’t got an answer for you now, but will write more as I learn.

November 23, 2018 In Live By Nancy

An Italian Thanksgiving takes a village

November, 2012. It’s our first Thanksgiving in the village. Six weeks earlier we’d moved into our rented home for the year. The entire place consisted of four nuns cells, and the wide corridor connecting them, in a convent from the 1600s in the “new” part of town. We decided to celebrate, and boldly invited over 20 new friends, some of whom had never celebrated Thanksgiving before.

We had a lot of logistics to solve. Where was everybody going to sit? How do you get a whole turkey in Italy? Was it even possible to cook this much food in our tiny kitchen, which took up half of one of the 12′ by 12′ nuns cells, the small dining table claiming the other half of the space?

Then it all started coming together, as friends started to pitch in to help. There’s this wonderful organization in Italian villages, the pro loco, whose only charter is to plan and run village parties. This organization is well-staffed and equipped. One friend explained our lack of tables and chairs for a big party to the pro loco, and they lept into action, delivering five banquet tables and two dozen chairs to our door. This sounds much easier than it was, as our door was on the third floor of this ancient convent, reached through a massive front door from the street, down a long, dark, wide entry corridor that led into the open cloister, across the cloister, up three flights of twisting stairs, then down another corridor. Finally our door. Miraculously, two days before the event we found furniture from the village stash leaning against the walls.

Now for the turkeys. The butcher in the square said he’d never sold a whole turkey, but he’d call a farmer and make the arrangements. When we went to pick them up he disappeared into the walk-in cold storage and then two large turkeys were pulled to the front of the shop, hanging upside down on hooks mounted on the overhead track that runs the length of the store. These were not your average Butterball, all neatly trussed and demure. Nope, these guys had reached rigor mortis totally spread eagled, wings and legs splayed. He stuck each one into its own large plastic bag, but neither bag was large enough to contain the whole bird without various limbs poking out.

Our friends own a linen company, Busatti, and offered to bring the linens they used for parties. Another friend had a small apartment, with an oven, down the hall, so we were able to spread cooking between two apartments. An earlier visitor from California had brought cranberries in her suitcase. A few pumpkins are grown in the Valley and could be turned into pies. All the tables fit, end to end, in our long corridor.

It always feels slightly odd to be away from the U.S. for Thanksgiving because life in the rest of the world carries on, oblivious to the holiday in the U.S. It’s hard sometimes to make it feel special. But this Thanksgiving I will always smile about. I am still thankful for these people, and this place—but that first year was a revelation, realizing that somehow we’d landed on our feet in our new life in Italy.

November 15, 2018 In Chow, Live By Nancy

Bringoli: in praise of fat spaghetti

In Italy, it seems as if nearly anything is a possible subject for a celebration—I think it’s part of what makes the culture so joyful. One of the key celebrations around these parts is to honor a really fat spaghetti, called bringoli. And because I am dedicated to deepening your knowledge of pasta, you get to celebrate bringoli too.

I wouldn’t have guessed that fat spaghetti would be highly seasonal, but apparently it is, and late autumn is its moment. November 11, specifically, La Festa di San Martino. Apparently Martin, a Roman soldier, was standing guard one bitterly-cold night in 335 CE, and gave half his cloak to a very underdressed merchant. He spent the rest of the night freezing and hallucinating. In the morning, he promptly converted to Christianity.

I think he’s one of the better saints because there are great feasts in his honor all over Italy, celebrating the new wine, various local cookies, meatballs, and even one for radicchio, up near Venice. But here in the Valtiberina (Valley of the Little Tiber—the headwaters of the famous river), La Festa di San Martino means it’s the time for bringoli.

It’s an unassuming little festival, with several volunteers in one tent cooking bringoli with either a meat or a mushroom sauce, served up in a little plastic bowl. The actual cooking happens behind a kind of screen, which is mysterious. Perhaps it is to protect proprietary village secrets. The volunteers served our two portions with ragu, and were running behind on making the mushroom sauce for our third serving. By the time the mushroom bringoli was ready they decided to replace our original two with hot ones, as pasta is not something you eat cold.

This being Tuscany, there are plenty of open fires—when they grill something, the Tuscans do it over a fire that they’ve burnt down to embers, rather than using charcoal briquettes, and there are elaborate grilling carts to make it possible to keep a fire producing usable coals all evening. Over the flames volunteers roast sausages and toast bread that is rubbed in garlic and drenched in olive oil. (If you take hard, white Tuscan bread and toast it until it gets a little charred over coals, the bread not only gets slightly infused with smoke, but gets a texture not unlike sandpaper, which lets you grate down a half a clove of raw garlic when you rub it into the bread.) Other fire tenders roast chestnuts.

As you sit outside in the cold, huddled over your fat noodles and drinking Vino Novello (Italy’s answer to Beaujolais Nouveau) in an arcade under glowing, buzzing fluorescent lights, Italian village magic happens. Everybody is out and socializing, from a couple of four-year old girls twirling in the middle of the street, who clearly believe they are in charge of the whole event, to the packs of teens aware of every micro-movement of their peers, through to the old men and women, laughing with people they’ve known since childhood.

It’s my daughter’s favorite festival of the year, topping even the polenta and fried bread ones. Her friend, who is now studying in Venice (a good four-hour train ride away), came down for the weekend just for it. “He gets it,” she said. It is a unique time when everyone who appreciates anything good in life gathers together to enjoy local food at its simplest and best. It is also a celebration of community and the heart of our town. It’s rare to see anyone from outside town, but you’re almost guaranteed to see everyone from within.

To make your own, feel free to substitute pici, although they are in no way similar, the locals tell me. Top with a lovely ragu or a porcini mushroom sauce.

November 2, 2018 In Live By Nancy

The many time zones of one village

Time moves differently in Italy, I’ve heard people say. A friend from London says that the moment she knows she has arrived in Italy is when she withdraws money from the cash machine in the square, which seems to take about 30 seconds between each step of the process, it feels like geologic time if you’re not used to it.

We used to live in an apartment in old town over a little store. I’d go down each morning to get fresh bread for the kids’ breakfasts before taking them to school. The opening time on the store’s door is definitive: 7:30. One morning, I was still standing by the locked door at 7:45, when the owner finally showed up. I was getting nervous about getting the kids to school on time, so I said, trying to hide my annoyance, “I thought you opened at 7:30.” The very sweet woman who owns the shop replied, totally at ease, “7:30…7:45—uguale.” “Uguale” meaning “equal, no difference.”

The most obvious way that this, more elastic, sense of time plays out is when the bells of the village ring to announce the current time. From various places we’ve lived we’ve heard the bells from several towers tolling the time, twice an hour (depending on which bells are working). You’d think this would be a very predictable thing, and a cacophony every thirty minutes, but it’s not. Each bell takes its time, ringing in seven o’clock, for example, at 7:00, 7:07, 7:10 and up to about 7:12, then taking its turn again in 30 minutes. The half-past bells add an additional beat, with a different tone, before or after the count to signify the half hour. Except for the one that doesn’t, and just rings the hour bell again.

The bells get a bit more aligned after the twice annual shifts for daylight savings time, and then they drift further apart. Time, in a village, is all relative.

I’d like to get deeper into this story and report back. Does one person change the time on the bells or is it done by by different bell keepers? How do they decide which bell is the one that is most accurate, or does it matter?

But for now I want to leave you with a question. The next time you look at your phone or Apple watch to find out the time (when I often get a little thrill knowing I actually know what the exact time is), does it matter if time is relative or absolute, and is it true (and perhaps better) that 7:30 and 7:45 may, in fact, be uguale?

November 2, 2018 In Chow, Live By Nancy

Raining olives

We just pressed the olive oil from our trees. The days of picking are all-consuming: spreading nets under the trees, raking the olives off the branches by hand with small plastic rakes, pouring the olives caught by the nets into plastic crates, and moving the crates to safe storage until the olive oil can be pressed, which should happen no longer than 48 hours from picking. Thankfully, this year we had help, two Americans, a friend and her 19-year old son, coming to Italy for the first time.

The culmination of all of this work is going to the olive oil press, or “frantoio”.

The crates of olives are unloaded and weighed with great import, carefully watched by the others in line for the press. It’s a competitive “I have more olives than you” moment. We do respectably well, olives weighing in at over 500 kilos (over half a ton), in 25 crates. But soon we are put in our place by three very scruffy 40-something guys who came in after us, unloading about 75 crates. “Smug devils,” I think to myself. We eye them. They eye us. No smiles.

We settle in for a long wait. Turns out everybody showed up with twice the amount of olives they’d predicted, slowing down the process from an hour or so to about five. No English is spoken here, so my friends amuse themselves by watching the scene and playing with the various dogs on hand for the press. The guy who runs the press runs around in his black tracksuit, overseeing all.

He decides that our friends’ lack of Italian, and John and my limited understanding, does not hinder communication in the slightest when it comes to the important topics of life. He pulls us over to look at the olives unloaded by the three guys. “Idiota!,” he tells them, encouraging John and our 19-year old visitor to chime in with their opinion of the three. Turns out they had used mechanized rakes, getting a great yield, but bruising the olives in the process, and mixing in a lot more twigs and leaves than is desired. The guys didn’t blink, complimenting our smaller yield on the lack of leaves, twigs, and bruises. All are laughing and chatting away now. These guys remind me that Tuscan men seem to have a lot more fun than men in other countries.

The woman of the mill shows up with plates of freshly baked cookies, crackers, and bread, drizzled with just-pressed oil and salt, which she enthusiastically passes. Mr. Mill decides it’s time to get out the wine just as we are starting to pour our boxes of olives into the press, which is the last chance to pick out sticks, leaves, and any olives that don’t look worthy. We are all trying to do final quality control, leaning over the large open funnel leading to the grinder, while balancing our never-empty plastic cups of wine and a constantly replenished supply of bread with olive oil, crackers, and cookies that the owners watch carefully that we finish.

Our new press buddies in the background.

Finally the oil comes streaming out. It is a record harvest for us—more than 100 liters when we are finished with all the trees. Dark green and very peppery.

And to celebrate the owners decide that it is time to bring out the special grappa.

October 27, 2018 In Live By Nancy

Feeling cozy in an Italian cemetery

This story started out to be about the cemetery, in honor of Halloween. As my Itch stories often do, it ended up being about something different. It is about death, but also about love and community. After all there are two holidays that follow All Hallow’s Eve: All Saints Day, and All Souls Day—days for remembering and affirming family and friendship.

One dark, rainy, winter night I decided to walk home, alone, from a nearby pizza restaurant so I could get more steps on my fitness tracker. I took the route that goes by the cemetery, and instead of walking by it, I decided to go in.

We live near this cemetery. I drive by it multiple times a day, see a steady stream of people walking by our front gate going on their daily visits, and witness funeral processions coming from the church at the top of the hill down our narrow lane to the cemetery. The hearse drives by, followed by a priest chanting on his loudspeaker, and a stream of mourners on foot. Despite this proximity, I hadn’t yet ventured inside the cemetery gates.

Italian cemeteries are special places, obviously well-visited and loved. The density of tombs is impressive, stacked five high in a sort of high-rise condo complex of mortality. It feels somehow warm, crowded, and social. I think it is due to the quirky humanity of the decorations that crowd the shelf-edge of nearly every nook. Battery-operated candles are the only lights in the graveyard at night (and there are so many that it is well lit), and one or two plastic floral arrangements in ceramic vases are crowded on every shelf, next to multiple figurines. Photos abound, which give a glimpse of the personality and passions they had in life. The gates are not locked at night, although the cemetery is officially closed, and none of the floral arrangements or figures of small angels are fixed in place.

That night I was stunned by how cozy the whole place was. At one point I realized how foreign my life here really is, that a woman alone could spend 45 minutes in a graveyard at 11:00 at night feeling cozy? Not wary and on-guard about personal safety. Not thinking of old zombie movies and ghost stories. Not even particularly melancholy about my own mortality. Somehow this kind of cemetery puts mortality in perspective and makes death seem somehow more tolerable.

In Italy, death is not hidden and sanitized. A Canadian friend of ours, who lives in the village, lost his life partner a few years ago. He found that things progress quickly here, as burial usually happens in 48-hours (bodies are not usually embalmed.) The expectation is to keep the body at home until burial, and to always keep the body company. For our friend, a steady stream of friends and neighbors came by with encouragement, food, and to help keep vigil or “veglia”.

I asked him how he thought the experience would have been different for him emotionally had his partner’s death happened in Canada, or America, where the body is immediately removed. He said although he was at first surprised, the whole experience “was like a big hug”.

He walked behind the hearse to the cemetery, accompanied by a crowd both young and old. Friends took his arm for much of the way.

He visits his partner’s grave every day to say hello, think, and remember, and also to socialize with everyone else who is visiting the cemetery. When he is away his neighbors help to tend his partner’s grave. He describes his trips to the cemetery as being like a family visit.

Italians are also pragmatic. It’s good not to become too attached to one’s nook. The place is only leased for a set number of years. After that, if the family doesn’t want to renew the lease, the bones are removed to the “ossario,” a large underground room for bones that every cemetery has, and the site in the wall reused.

October 26, 2018 In Chow, Live By Nancy

A one-table restaurant, Tuscan style

There’s a farm stand I love. It’s a big shed and they sell things from their land, including eggs from the chickens who are underfoot. I asked if they had any broccoli rabe and they sent their son into the field to cut some. He returned with an armful, stems dripping.

They have created a fabulous font.

John and I happened to be there around lunch time and I noticed two construction workers sitting at the one tiny table in the place. Minutes later I saw two bowls of spaghetti aglio e olio go by, one of my favorite things to eat. I asked a crazy question—”do you serve lunch here?” The answer was yes, cooked in their kitchen next door. The workers finished eating, explaining that they come here nearly every day, and left the table so that we could sit down, taking their coffee elsewhere.

And we had this wickedly good lunch—grilled vegetables from the garden followed by pasta, and wine. Served with such pride and pleasure. All for €9 each.

My 15-minute errand turned into a 90-minute lunch, making me late for everything else that day, but sometimes when Tuscany grabs you by the collar you can’t say no.

October 20, 2018 In Live By Nancy

Are roosters born evil or do they learn?

I never knew that roosters had to learn how to crow. Or that adolescent ones crow an octave higher than the more seasoned members of the flock. Or that they have to learn how to enunciate the whole of cockaa-doodle-doo. These things take practice. Loads and loads of practice as we have learned waking up every morning for the last month.

So it seemed a rooster recording update was needed. Here’s the latest of what we wake up to, as recorded by me, this morning, stomping through our wild boar-ravaged lower pasture, to get to the neighbor’s chicken coop. Couldn’t get close enough because of the wild blackberries to get a decent photo, but will work on it.

October 20, 2018 In Chow, Live By Nancy

Finding chestnuts. Bravery. And humanity.

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

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

Chestnut Grove from Itch.world on Vimeo.

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

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

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

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