sounds of Italy Archives

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A three-minute escape to Italy.

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February 6, 2021 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Would you just look at that

Almost ten years ago, when we moved here, I wondered if my sense of being gobsmacked by beauty several times a day would last or if I would just grow used to it. If anything, it has grown stronger.

I’ve been surprised that our appreciation is matched or even bested by the Italians bred, born, and raised surrounded by such beauty. I’m in a couple members-only Facebook groups for the village where the main topic of conversation is how beautiful it all is, accompanied by lovingly taken photos. These will be followed by a few dozen comments laden with beating heart gifs and responses like “Spettacolo!”. The mayor often chimes in. (The community gets most of its news from the mayor’s personal Facebook posts — you have to be friends — usually leading with a Covid update for the town, and followed by cheery reports about a new sidewalk going in or improvements to the basketball court. He’s the first non-Communist mayor since The War so he has a lot of suspicion to overcome.)

This love of place all came to an exciting head over the last few weeks when the village found itself in a social media competition for the Most Beautiful Village in Tuscany. We are far off the tourist map, unlike places like Cortona, Montepulciano, or San Gimignano which, in the humble opinion of the village, have ceased to exist in any meaningful way except as tourist destinations. Despite our lack of fame we somehow ended up in the semi-finals against Volterra, a shocking turn of events. All stops were pulled out as pleas went out to everyone in the village to flood the competition with their favorite village photos. We won that round and were in the final competition against Massa Marittima. They have just a few things to their advantage — a cathedral, prehistoric artifacts, a castle from the 9th century, a church founded by St. Francis himself, and a vantage point on the Mediterranean, but the villagers fought a strong social media war of images and vote coercion of friends and family and WE WON!! It even made the national papers. Now we can get back to the real work at hand deciding with the mayor how high the basketball hoop should be on the newly repaved courts.

Not that there aren’t the fair share of box stores and car lots around here, but it matters that we live in the shadow of a thousand-year-old village in a beautiful valley. Untouched nature is breathtaking but there’s something about the long interplay between people and the land that floats my soul. That the village is constructed of stones that were sitting right here so that the color is perfectly matched to the surroundings. The tiny cobblestone streets worn down in the middle by centuries of foot traffic. The patterns that the plows make in the rolling fields. This all matters deeply to me.

There’s also beauty in sound. I love falling asleep to the noises of owls, foxes, deer, and wolves, and waking up to the sound of roosters and church bells. I know many would fight me on the last two but I am adamant that roosters and church bells are lovely sounds at just the right distance — so they don’t wake you up but you can appreciate them when you are awake.

It’s not just me. John, of course being the epically visual guy he is, is constantly touched. But it does surprise me a little that the kids notice and comment so frequently. Those moments when we’d be driving an angsty teen to high school and they’d point out the window and say “would you just look at that.” I was driving Sebastian to the airport to return to school in the UK last September and I stopped the car so that an old man could cross the street, pushing his bicycle. After he crossed in front of the car he stood in front of an old stone building in his oversized puffer jacket, gave us a huge smile and a wave, and then pushed off on his ancient, bright pink bicycle. Sebastian’s comment, “That was beautiful.”

In this odd moment we find ourselves in let’s never forget how important it is to appreciate the beauty around us, be it the steam from a cup of coffee, fog over a valley, or a smile from a stranger on a bicycle.

October 1, 2020 In Best Of, Roam By Nancy

Cheese made in heaven

Since I had such a memorable adventure on the Chamonix side of Mont Blanc I felt it was only fair to give the Italian side a chance so on the return trip to Italy we stopped in Courmayeur for the night. We had work to do. Largely involving cheese.

Before this trip I’d asked Edward Behr for advice about food in the Val D’Aosta. (Edward edits and publishes The Art of Eating, which is one of my favorite publications on food and wine.) One of his recommendations was that we track down a Fontina maker in the mountains. Challenge accepted.

To do so we needed to add on an additional night in Courmayeur — not a hardship as we’d landed in a nurturing, cozy, and rustic place, Maison la Saxe. The six-bedroom inn was in a rustic farmhouse from the 1700s, one of many houses in a tightly packed cluster literally in the shadow of Mont Blanc. When I say tightly packed I mean the tiny lanes between the houses are about an arm’s width across. I asked the owner, Raphael, a guy in this thirties who was born in Courmayeur, had lived all over the world, and then returned to the village to restore and run the inn, and he said they were built tightly together not for defense but warmth. It’s the kind of place where my stone shower had a window thoughtfully installed with a view of Mont Blanc.

Maison de Saxe Courmayeur

I enlisted the aid of Raphael for our Fontina search. He called a Fontina maker who invited us up the following morning. Up is a description I chose carefully. It took us 40 minutes to go just a couple of kilometers above the town of Aosta on one of the curviest roads I have ever driven. Pretty soon we were at eye level with the highest peaks and surrounded by green meadows. It was the closest to heaven I will probably every get.

Raphael had given us coordinates of where to park which was an unmarked grassy area at the top of the road. We then had to actually find the cows and cheese-makers. We asked at a tiny restaurant and were pointed to a hiking trail leading ten minutes straight up through the pastures to a small barn, the summer home of Azienda Agricola Quendoz.

The cheese maker took us into a small room with a huge copper cauldron to show us how it’s done. The cheese maker was originally from Morocco and had come to this spot, fallen in love with it, and moved here to take care of the cows and make cheese, more than a decade before. I can see the appeal of this life.

Fontina cheese copper cauldron

True Fontina comes only from here. To be recognized as “Fontina” (which has DOP — protected designation of origin — status from the EU) the milk has to come from red-pied Valdostana cows who graze only on these mountain grasses. They are milked twice a day and the cheese is made twice a day as each batch has to be from a single milking. The milk is heated in large copper cauldrons, enzymes and rennet are added to produce curds, the cheese is separated and drained, and pressed into a wheel-shaped molds. It’s brined in salt for two months and then set aside to age for three more months, frequently turned and salted. We tried the just ready Fontina along with a much more aged version and they were complex and interesting, not at all like the boring cheeses marketed as Fontina from other countries. This was nutty and buttery and wonderful.

Then on the way back down we got to meet some of the girls.

I wanted to write this article this not because I thought you needed to become Fontina aware, but more because I wanted to share this place of beauty and peace and a glimpse into a different way of life.

Trip notes:

If you are ever in Aosta but don’t have time to make it up the hill Raphael also pointed us to a small cheese shop downtown with a surprisingly large selection and a big cheese cellar in their basement (photo below) called Erbavoglio Antica Latteria. They put together a delicious tasting for us and looks like I can also order from them. I see more Fontina in my future.

Ed Behr also recommended Salumeria Bertolin in Arnad, just as you enter Valle d’Aosta. I stopped on my way to France and loved it. A wide variety of mountain salumi and delicious tasting board. I was fascinated by one that looked like a salumi but was made from beets. When life gives you beets…

May 31, 2020 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Joy in five unexpected places

Trying to find some joy during quarantine has been hard for me. I’m finding it helpful to turn my attention to things that make my heart happy when I feel overwhelmed by world events, which my obsession and worry will not change at all. Here are five random things that made me happy from the last day or so.

Color

I find that several times a day I am just staring at certain color combinations and drinking them in. It feels like they are changing my body chemistry in some good way.

Chickens

I’ve been getting eggs from the farm stand, along with gorgeous produce. Since they come wrapped in newspaper we keep them in a white ceramic bowl in the fridge and it makes me happy every time I open the fridge door.

A gang of the neighbor’s chickens have started hanging out in Lower Field and gather to watch John work and to wait for him to leave so they can swoop in to look for bugs and seeds. Lola has three chicken kills notched into her collar from far in her past so we are hoping that the field is a bit too far for her to wander to on her own. (If you look closely below you will see the gang.)

In addition to visiting they start crowing at around 3am these days but as just the right distance away to be somehow amusing if I happen to be awake but never wake me. Here’s the recording of a couple of them I did about a year ago when I was fascinated that adolescent roosters had a higher pitcher crow.

And of course there’s nothing wrong with a nice roasted chicken.

Poppies and wheat.

And just wheat.

All from the daily walks that keep me sane.

Getting back to essentials

It hasn’t prompted a full-on Kondo but since lockdown began I seem to get a deep sense of satisfaction slowly going through things and throwing out what I don’t need or want. Oddly enough this has also touched my online life where I’ve been getting rid of loads of unneeded apps and gone deep into cleaning up bookkeeping. It feels good and like one part of life I can control.

February 23, 2019 In Lingua By Nancy

Word of the week: magari

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

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

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

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

Magari you can now speak Italian.

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?

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.

August 31, 2018 In Lingua, Live By Nancy

The art of obscenity

Last winter, my Facebook feed was overwhelmed by contagion. Scanning the posts, it was clear that an alarming percentage of my American, English, and Italian friends were sick with the flu. And while I felt for them, the thing I really noticed was how differently friends from each country talked about their illness. Americans were sure to share details, for instance, “I’m dying. Never been this sick. The stuff I’m coughing up is GREEN.” The Brits were, well, British. “Been in hospital for 10 days. A bit under the weather.”

But the Italians… They were all about the balls. (And not the balls one uses to play sports.) Balls are a vital part of talking about a wide range of subjects, but they turn out to have a special place in capturing the suffering that comes with the flu. A female friend posted: “Ho due palle gonfie di ste teste di cazzo … Va a finire male me lo sento.” It means: “I have two swollen balls thanks to heads of dicks. This will not end well, I can feel it.” Italians love to swear, and Tuscans are known to be particularly bold and colorful. I’ve found grandmothers to be particularly impressive.

This phrase has uses beyond illness, and it also is frequently used to express “I am annoyed by these stupid people.” I highly recommend using it under your breath during the next meeting you are in when someone is annoying you. You have equal rights to the phrase whether you’re a man or a woman. I’ve recorded my son Sebastian saying each of these so that you can get it right.

Interested in dabbling in Italian testicle-based phrases, but need something a little lighter? You could try “che palle” meaning “what balls” or “how annoying.” (It’s also the name of a chain of arancini (fried rice balls) shops in Sicily.

Other phrases you might want to know:

“Mi hai rotto le palle.” meaning “you have broken my balls.” This is used in response to a distinct action that has happened.

If what is bothering you is more ongoing feel free to use “Mi fai girare i coglioni,” “You have twisted my balls.”

And the ever useful “Tu sei un coglione.” “You are a ball.” (Yes, it’s singular.) A bit softer as it is commonly used, more like “You are an idiot.”

Ready to expand your ball-adjacent Italian vocabulary? Try “a cazzo di cane,” which means “like a dog’s dick.” It’s used frequently to describe a job done badly.

More on the Italian obsession with balls at a later date. Just a friendly reminder. These are not my words. I am a mere reporter, aiming to be as scientific as possible, in linguistic matters.

August 4, 2018 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Rooster ring tone

There’s the most fantastic rooster who wakes me up every morning. So ready for the stew pot, partial cock-of-alzheimer’s, partial been-out-too-late drinking. Indescribable call. So I decided not to try, but to go one better.

One Sunday morning around 5am I decided to track him down. Armed with a mic and recorder I drove down to two different chicken coops in nearby fields and stealthy, like the fog, sneaked around until I heard my mystery rooster.

He is now properly recorded, and turned into a ring tone because I wanted it, which means that at least one of you probably does too. And no roosters were harmed in the making of this post.