Village happenings Archives

Village happenings Archives - Itch.world

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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.

picture of boy holding an umbrella watching the Scampanata in Anghiari Italy

May 1, 2020 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Intrigue, humiliation, and cake batter

I am feeling wistful that today would have started the month of the Scampanata, which happens every five years, and only in Anghiari. It is one of my favorite things about our village. In 1621 it was described as an ancient village tradition and was only postponed during two World Wars. And now.

Please do me the honor of reading the description below and watching the video and let us all pause for a moment and appreciate the things that make us human and connect us and that we do for the sheer joy of it. The things that we will need to rebuild and reinvent. The things I miss the most. (Article below originally posted in 2019).

*************

I want to jump through the screen, grab you, and say “You will watch this. Now.” Then direct you by holding your shoulder, with no refusals allowed, to the best screen in your environment, and I’d click here. Cause this story and video are my favorites yet.

But I am sitting on a Tuscan terrace overlooking a valley filled with rolled hay and sunflowers eating cacio and pepe made by actual Romans so I can’t. Instead I will use my words, as I always used to tell the kids.

I am going to tell you about this event that embodies what I love about Italy—it’s highly-local, quirky, and resonate with deep human fears and joys. Every five years, in the village of Anghiari, an ancient rite unfolds, but with up-to-the-minute alliances, tricks, and grudges. It’s the Scampanta. The centuries-old society that ensures that the Anghiarese do not oversleep. (The verb scampare means to be a near thing, a close call.)

The rules are simple. You volunteer to join the Society of the Scampanata and show up in the piazza three times a week, in the month of May, by the time the bells strike 6 in the morning. And you sign in. That’s it. Sounds so simple. And harmless. The complication is that if you oversleep a fate worse than what you can imagine awaits—and we’ve all had pretty horrible dreams about the repercussions of sleeping through the alarm.

Trouble is, it may not just be up to you and your alarm. In a small community tiny slights can build momentum and every five years is about the right pressure-release timer to get back at that person who always parks in your spot, or hasn’t mowed the meadow as promised. And as you need to be born in Anghiari, or a resident for at least ten years, to participate the social connections are deep and complex.

If you are late to check in you turn yourself over to the Society for your fate. If you live out of town there are people who will drive to your house to fetch you—sometimes with a police escort. Some days during the month everybody is there on time and you can feel the sense of disappointment in the assembled crowd.

You really need to see the video to see what fate awaits those who oversleep or are somehow prevented from arriving in time. Some unfortunates have woken up to find their front door bricked shut during the night. Others have had their cars lifted onto blocks in the wee hours and all four tires removed. Still others have been convinced by friends to go with them to play a trick on someone far from town and had the tables turned—finding themselves fooled into getting out of the car and then stranded in the woods.

It must have been really hard to make sure you woke up on time in the days before alarm clocks. There’s a history of Anghiari that was written in 1621 that refers to the Scampanata as an ancient event at the time. Not hard to imagine that its roots run deep into Spring rituals around the need to plant and till the land.

And it is unique. No other place on Earth has the Scampanata.

Next time you want to hit the snooze button just remember the lyrics of the Scampanata song:

“Scampanata, scampanata
in Spring you return to our halls
to visit the lazy who stay in bed
to break their sleep and their balls”

September 29, 2019 In Best Of, Live By Nancy

Dinner theater and the Genoa disaster

Few Italians will forget where they were the moment they heard about the collapse of the Ponte Morandi bridge in Genoa, which killed 43 and left over 600 people homeless. It hit a nerve beyond the sheer horror of the disaster. Italians are master engineers and pride (I’d venture to say even define) themselves on the beauty and engineering elegance of their creations, especially in the heyday of the Italian economic boom of the 1950s and 60s. This 1963 bridge, designed by Riccardo Morandi, was internationally famous for its beauty, but also for its bold use of structural concrete, and the collapse was a blow to national dignity.

(image from the Financial Times)

But beyond that the collapse speaks to the Italian belief that corruption is endemic and that the common people pay the price. The bridge was maintained by the Autostrade per l’Italia company (largely owned by Benetton) which is a hugely-profitable monopoly running the network of expensive to use, but fast, roads in Italy. Turns out the inspection company has ties to, and shares offices with, the company they are chartered to inspect and regulate.

Which brings us to Anghiari’s annual play, the Tovaglia a Quadri, dinner theater created, produced, and performed by a small team over a course of ten nights in August. Tovaglia a Quadri is written weeks before the performances so the topics are fresh, and it serves as an annual hard look in the mirror about the issues challenging Italy and village life. (Here’s Itch on last year’s play about how Amazon is changing local life.)

(all photos from Tovaglia a Quadri, including at top, courtesy of Giovanni Santi.)

This year, with the Genoa disaster looming in the background, they wrote about our local brush with dangerous bridges. The E45, which is the longest north-south freeway in Europe (starting in Alta, Norway and ending 5,190 kilometers away in Gela, Sicily) runs right through our valley. The section that goes to the Adriatic coast passes over some really high, long viaducts. Soon after the Genoa disaster a truffle hunter in a forest under one of these massive bridges happened to look up and notice the horrible condition of the bottom of the roadway and took some pictures. The result was this major artery of Europe being completely closed for months while the situation was assessed. (It’s now been “solved” by opening only one lane, slowing the speed limit to a crawl, and limiting heavy trucks. Every time I have to drive it I hold my breath.)

The irony for the writing team of Andrea Merendelli and Paolo Pennacchini is that where the truffle hunter took the photos was on a 2,000 year old Etruscan road, still viable, and used even today for the migration of animals from the mountains near us to Maremma on the Tuscan coast, called the transumanza. The bridge that is failing was built only 25 years ago. And there’s the added dimension that our valley shut a flow of traffic, goods, and ideas from across Europe. (Politics, anyone?) The title of this year’s play is ViaDotta, which is translated as viaduct, but also via, or way, of dotta, which is between wisdom and knowledge.

The plot follows from there, including a scheme from a local entrepreneur to showcase the transumanza to local tourists, against the will of the locals who love their pets but are not in favor of other domesticated animals being in such close proximity. In a very funny scene the entrepreneur insists that the shepherd he hires change from his usual attire of a t-shirt and sweats into one that the tourists would associate with the calling—scratchy white wool.

I was particularly interested in sharing this with you when I saw that a New York Times article about this year’s topic—the transumanza—was on the most popular articles list last week. I also saw a video about it at a London Tube station this week.

Just for the record, Anghiari got there first. I knew I’d be on the cutting edge when I moved to a tiny Tuscan village.