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A three-minute escape to Italy.

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August 30, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Seven ways to beach like an Italian

After taking a brief break from Itch to spend time doing August-y things with visiting family and friends — which I decided is truly Italian — it’s time to get back to writing. While doing vacation activities, like hanging at the beach on Elba Island and our neighborhood pool, I’ve noticed a few ways in which Italians relax differently.

1. The more crowded the better. Why would it be any fun to go to the beach or pool when it is not packed? The reason to be there is to see and be seen, hear the latest gossip (le chiacchiera), and know you are in the right place because everyone else is too. Any civilized beach will offer chairs and umbrellas to rent in rows as closely packed together as possible — beach to beach these range widely in price and luxury level. Having a chair is really important as it provides a base of operations and a place where you can leave your things when you go to a long lunch.

As I’ve already told you in my Venice post, when we first moved to Italy and were living in Venice for six weeks we went to the Lido to go to the beach late one afternoon. After picking our way through a field of bodies to get to the water we went out swimming, facing the horizon. After less than an hour we turned back to shore very surprised to discover the beach was totally empty. It was, after all, time to leave and get ready for dinner. That was one of our first hints that Italians love to travel in packs.

A friend just told me that there is no exact translation for “privacy” in Italian because it is considered a sad, lonely, irrelevant, and undesirable thing.

2. Don’t forget lunch. We are not talking about a sandwich and soda. The Italian love of lunch — in smaller towns everything still shuts down between 1 and 3:30 — extends to the beach. Make sure to reserve first thing in the morning in one of the many seaside restaurants and plan to take at least an hour and a half. You will want to make sure to have several courses, a bottle or so of wine, dessert, and coffee afterwards. The star ingredients will be all sorts of fresh seafood, especially shellfish. My mouth is watering right now thinking about the black squid ink risotto with mussels I got a bite of. And don’t forget that you will also be having a large and leisurely dinner. (This may have something to do with #6.)

3. The flock migrates. Every year Italians often have their summer vacation with the same friends and family at the same beach, staying in the same hotel or house, and even renting the same cabana or beach chairs. On the Lido there’s a long waiting list for these little huts and chairs as they are rented year after year by the same family, and they are expensive, several thousand euros for a season. One family will rent and then split the cost between numerous relatives and friends who come to share their small plot of beach.

4. Bring toys. It’s vital to have the two paddles and ball that are batted back and forth in the small open territory between the chairs and the water’s edge making walking along the shore impossible. Rafts and floaties are also important. Unicorn rafts seemed to be especially popular this year.

5. A tan proves you were on vacation. Apparently the darker the better is still the thing.

6. Strut in a tiny bikini (no matter your body type or sex.) I love this part so much. I’ve been swimming at the local pool this summer and consistently notice that all shapes and sizes of bodies are showing it off with equal confidence and enthusiasm, often in suits that are so tiny that they are virtually naked. I’ve been so used to the vibe in the States where those who have great bodies strut, and those of us who don’t wish for an invisibility shield, but settle by trying to shrink into the background in swimsuits that cover as much as possible. This equal-opportunity freedom to strut totally changes my relationship to the pool and beach.

7. Do not confuse swimming with exercise. I am always the only person doing laps at the pool and am looked at with concern and alarm as if an intervention might be needed. This was equally true in the sea in Elba. It all came to a head that time I decided that I had to get some exercise at the local pool only to discover that it was Pool Toy Day. I am still American enough that I did my laps anyway. And counted laps on an Apple watch. Oh well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

February 3, 2019 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

Adventures in high fashion: Sugar

Where I live I’m surrounded by three-wheeled Ape trucks, nonne in housecoats, and farmers in “onesie” jumpsuits on tractors. The last thing I expected to find is that I am near one of the fashion meccas of the world: Beppe Angiolini’s remarkable store, Sugar, in Arezzo. Another surprise is that an expat friend I’ve made in the village is also an ex-fashionista with serious cred in the fashion world and has become my guide and interpreter of this foreign universe. Or at least foreign to me, who has always been slightly terrified of high fashion.

This savvy woman used to be one of the key executives at Neiman-Marcus where she helped discover brands, including bringing Prada into the limelight. Then she moved to Italy to turn Gucci around with Tom Ford. So when she raves about Beppe and his store, and why it is important, I listen.

Luxury brands control every aspect of how their collections are displayed and sold. They go to market through their own stores or through branded sections of stores that carry many different lines. There is no mingling between Chloe and Alexander Wang in the racks at Barneys. If a store buys a collection, they buy the whole thing. Apparently there’s only one guy with enough clout to pick individual items from collections and art direct his own mix, and that’s Beppe, who opened Sugar in the 1980s.

Beppe Angiolini from TheSartorialist.com

He recently restored the ancient Palazzo Lambardi in Arezzo and relocated his store from across the street. The mix of lighting, mirrors, video, and modern furniture with the ancient frescoed walls makes one of the most fascinating architectural spaces I’ve seen. During restoration they discovered several rooms with Roman mosaic floors which they have skillfully incorporated with raised glass floors. In this stark space is a startling juxtaposition with a cluster of mannequins sporting the latest look.

Particularly after the demise of the store Colette in Paris, Sugar is now even more of an international destination. They will be opening rooms to stay in on the top floor, and have a small caffe with seriously good coffee.

And no, I am no more fashionable than before. But at least I know where I can work on it. And if you are so inclined, they have a serious online store at Sugar.it.

January 18, 2019 In Roam By Nancy

Me and the monks—silence and soap

In the last week or so I’ve felt a strange desire to spend the night in a monastery. Could be that I just had a birthday, or the need to reflect at the beginning of a new year, or just the desire for a real adventure, but I keep thinking about how much I want to go away to one of the many monasteries around here for a one night retreat. Solitude, silence, reflection, ancient buildings and art. The only problem seems to be that they are closed to overnight guests for the winter. So yesterday I did the next best thing—drove up to the Eremo and Monastero di Camaldoli. My reasons were twofold: the search for solitude, and good lotions and potions.

The monks around here are famous for making soaps, liquors, and cosmetics. The giant in the marketplace is the Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

Part museum, part store, all gorgeous. It has been in the same building since the monks of Santa Maria Novella started selling their wares to the public in 1612. It’s an interesting place to visit in Florence, although the crowds of tourists and price lists in dozens of languages take away from the charm. As does the fact that they now have hundreds of stores worldwide.

I was after something less-known so I found myself driving for over an hour on a tiny road through a national forest in the dense fog until I finally reached the summit of a mountain and the Eremo di Camaldoli. This hermitage was founded in 1012 by the Benedictine San Romualdo and is currently the home to nine monks who live in seclusion in separate cottages on the other side of a large gate.

I badly wanted to spot a hermit but didn’t see another living soul through the fog, except for the woman in the shop. I did spot a non-living human, though. It was completely otherworldly and the austerity, foreignness, and loneliness of it was haunting. And the church was beautiful.

Several kilometers down the hill a monastery, and a hospital, were added to an earlier religious site from 995. Here pilgrims were treated and a laboratory produced medicines. The monks who live there, now around 90 in number, have been producing various medicines and potions ever since. They started a store in 1450. The store is still functioning and includes their books about medicine.

Although largely silent and in retreat from the world, they have an online store if you want to order your own, or you can follow them on their several social media sites. Why not turn to monks for anti-wrinkle cream and foot balm? I tried both and I really liked them, and their shampoo, body wash, candles…

But here’s where the story gets weird, and passes my editorial threshold for Itch. In doing further research I uncovered that there’s a branch of this monastery in Big Sur. (You have to admire their branding in snagging the URL “contemplation.com.”) I wrote to them and they said they are indeed linked, and that the head honcho from Italy comes over every five years or so to make sure everything is in order (“tutto apposto.”) It sounds like an amazing stay, although it books up about a year in advance.

But here the plot thickens. There is also an affiliated branch in Berkeley, the all-too familiar town we left behind. In a house on a road I used to travel several times a week.

From the top of a mountaintop far in rural Tuscany to a suburban house in Berkeley. And it is all linked. To quote Buckaroo Bonzai, “Wherever you go, there you are.”