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That wasn’t so boring (part 1) – San Miniato al Monte

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“Let’s go to a museum or something today!” I say to my kids one Sunday morning. With trepidation.

We might live in Florence but that doesn’t mean we spend a lot of time visiting its cultural treasures. Our weekends are about birthday parties, supermarkets, bike rides, piano lessons, playdates, lego sessions and homework – and yet my two girls (aged 10 and 8) complain that they get dragged around the sites much more than their (Italian) classmates do.

“But … but … we don’t want to … It’s boring … It’s hot today … I have homework … We’ve seen everything already!”

I’m quite good at keeping our family cultural visits short and interesting. I’m qualified to do so: I have a degree in art history and I studied here for a bit, I have an eye for symbols and details that can keep them interested, and I can almost decipher the often-poor-quality labels and guides on the wall. In fact our doses of culture are so short that we haven’t even visited some of the main sites, almost 2 years in. But whether you’re visiting an historic place for 2 day or 2 years, it can take energy to make it worthwhile for your kids.

Today however, my older daughter is inspired. “Let’s go to San Miniato al Monte”, she says. “I was just there with my class.”

Aha, a new secret weapon – she can share the school tour with us!

Instax photo by daughter

San Miniato al Monte is one of the oldest, and most atmospheric and amazing, churches in Florence. Actually it’s a basilica and still-working abbey, with an interesting cemetery. As my daughter is studying the Romans and lots of geometry in 5th grade right now – it made sense to visit: Miniato (the saint) was a victim of the Romans in Florence and apparently studying the patterned facade is a good geometry exercise. Sounds way better than my own memories of school trips to cold Dublin parks.

You can read the full history of San Miniato yourself in any guidebook or online (and there is also a town west of Florence with the same name). The building was begun in the early 11th century. But here I’ve set out some basic tips on how you can visit it (or any site) with kids: small doses, rest and quirky details.

Tip 1. Take your time

After walking all the way up from the river (see note on practicalities below) why shouldn’t you sit and read some more of your Topolino (Mickey Mouse) comic book while your older sister talks about the history? Of Romanesque architecture, the saint (Miniato) whose head was chopped off and who then walked up the hill, carrying his head, and why someone decided to build a church here.

Tip 2. Spot the saints

If you’re going to learn anything about medieval and Renaissance art while in Italy, it’s good to start early with your saint-spotting so you can learn something from the thousands of frescoes you’ll find. Here’ s a handy list you can study up before you make a visit. And read up on frescoes too.

“Look at the huge size of this saint – Christopher maybe? Know his story?” This giant is not someone I would have noticed 20 years ago but definitely a detail we saw today.

Random little creatures and details in a huge basilica.

Tip 3. Symbols and details

San Miniato – as my daughter tells me – is full of images of an eagle, often standing on some cloth. This was the symbol of the local association (the Florentine cloth merchant’s guild) that doled out the money for the monks to build the church: so the deal was – we’ll give you the money and means to build your church up there, help you drag the marble you need from Carrara and you just need to be sure and show off how generous we are, stick an eagle all over the place. “Well isn’t that how advertising works nowadays”, I ask her. She looks askance.

And sure enough there are eagles all over, even on the top of the front. This one was in front of the altar.

“Feels like Indiana Jones in here!”  “Who’s that?”

The stone floors of San Miniato are amazing but none of our photos came out. But if they had brought a sketchbook they could have worked with lots of patterns, shapes, creatures. Like in this bizarre carving near the altar.

Tip 4. Find the messages

While Italian kids don’t learn Latin until middle school, they do start learning some useful snippets, like reading Roman numerals. When we came across this beautiful phrase chiselled into the stone along the righthand side, my daughter amazed me by mostly remembering how the teacher translated it:

Stando davanti a Dio non state con il cuore vagante perchè se il cuore non prega in vano la lingua lavora 

(more or less: Do not stand before God with a wandering heart because if the heart doesn’t pray, the tongue labours in vain)

Remember kids, they had no printers back then.

Tip 5. Bring your own camera
…and let them find their own interesting scenes. My daughter just started using an Instax camera, a modern version of the instant-print Polaroid. Here she is lining up a shot.

When she borrowed my own camera she found all sorts of odd things.

Back door to the garden
Portrait of the mother/dragger-arounder

Tip 6. Rest and necessities

We brought water but could probably have found a water fountain in the park around the church if we needed to. I had run out of coins but the nice young student minding the bathroom kindly let the two kids run in for free (be warned, they won’t all do that!).

Like many monasteries in Italy, the (Olivetan) monks at San Miniato make and sell their own cool stuff at the pharmacy shop. And they have ice-cream!

It could also be an amazing (or boring) experience to hear the church in its full use during a Gregorian chant service. Why not try it?

Monks’ Cloister. Instagram @whereintheworldisdannie

Tip 7. Pause and reflect

We always stop to light a candle in a church, the girls enjoy knowing that we’ll take a minute  and  think about other people we love who aren’t with us.

Stop in the moment and feel how your eyes and senses take a few minutes to adjust to the darkness and history inside this place.

This really is one of the most beautiful spots in Florence, we didn’t see it all, didn’t learn all of its history and stories and after less than an hour they really needed to move on – especially the younger one who had long finished her comic . But I think that the impression these snippets can make is enough to teach them something of the heritage we’re so privileged to live within and continue forward.

Getting to San Miniato al Monte

As well as being a big old dusty church the biggest drawback to San Miniato  is that it’s way up on top of that hill on the south side of Florence. But it’s just up a little from Piazzale Michelangelo which is a must-see stop for every visitor to Florence.

Solution 1: drive all the way up or take a bus (12 or 13 from the train station) to Piazzale Michelangelo.

Solution 2: It’s really best if you walk all the way up from the river – it is steep but it’s actually not that far and relatively car-free for little feet. Not so easy for strollers though.

I persuaded my two girls to walk all the way up from the river. We bought some sandwiches and cold drinks at a hole-in-the-wall panini shop squeezed in among all the restaurants on via San Niccolò, and sat and ate them on the steps of the church opposite.

The San Niccolò area is very cool, with lots of nice places to eat, shops and interesting street art on the walls – read more on how kids can enjoy the vibrant street art of Florence.

Head through the enormous old city gate, the Porta San Miniato and keep going up and you’ll come to steps – via del Monte alle Croci – and you’ll get to Piazzale Michelangelo at the top. (On another day take the walk along the wall to the right, up to Forte Belevedere and explore that area.)

The walk up to Piazzale Michelangelo is not actually far but it is quite steep. Once at the top you can see San Miniato and the steps up to that.

Some cool kid-friendly spots along the way up:

Along the walk you can still see the remains of the old Via Crucis (stations of the cross). And behind the fence on the right is an official city cat colony – you can see the cute cat houses marked with the red iris leaf of the Florence city council.

The Rose Garden is a lovely spot – views, wacky Belgian sculptures, grass to picnic on, flowers.

Piazzale Michelangelo is usually full of visitors and you’ll soon see why – the views over the whole city are superb. Underneath it you’ll find the cleanest public toilet in Florence, run by a grumpy man and his dog who listen to a classical music station.

On the other side of Piazzale Michelangelo is the Iris garden and you can walk down that way to another city gate, Porta San Niccolò.

Secret route up the hill: after the Fuori Porta restaurant, at the little watercolour shop, turn right and then before the restaurant Beppa Floraia (a favourite with locals) follow the path on the left that’s grassed over. Keep walking up and this turns into a real (hidden) road, Via dell’Erta Cantina. It’s like a little hidden village with its own great views and fun for kids. It’ll also take you up towards San Miniato.

Bribes for tired kids:

  • souvenir sticker or poster from street artist/traffic sign hacker Clet‘s workshop on via San Niccolò.
  • a good ice-cream back down at the bottom of the hill. Read my blog post to learn about ordering ice-cream.
  • a souvenir from Piazzale Michelangelo.

Comments? Let me know if there are other spots in Florence you’d like to hear about visiting with kids. I can’t guarantee they’ll come with me but we’ll give it a go!

Wisteria Hysteria

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Purple against green in the Tuscan countryside. I wasn’t prepared for this! I am in no way a flower or garden person, and unlikely to ever become one. But living in this paradise I’ve been constantly amazed.

Since Christmas we’ve been surprised by roses, nameless white flowers, daffodils. And of course an amazing spectrum of fruit blossoms – cherry, pear, apple, and (who knew) walnut, almond and others we still haven’t figured out. Then at the end of last week, right on the 1st of April, my visiting mother-in-law and I noticed this purple everywhere. Ah, Wisteria, she sighed.

It’s draped most beautifully over ancient high stone walls, along the sides of car repair shops or over the shaded areas of a supermarket car park. I’ve taken a few photos, but none can get close to conveying its gorgeousness. Wisteria is now my new favourite thing.

As I’ve grown older, spring has taken on a significant role every year – I notice it more every year and how it differs in each place I have lived. Growing up in suburban Dublin I vaguely noticed daffodils and crocuses, which always seemed to “come very early this year”. Moving to New York I thought I knew all about cherry blossoms, based on the 10 or so along my parents’ road. But then I discovered the pleasures of a real cherry blossom festival at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, which happened to be around the corner from our rent-controlled apartment and where we spent many Saturday mornings (free admission and a safe courting spot for the many young Orthodox Jewish couples). I also discovered the glories of the magnolia tree in that lovely space. Living through my one spring in Vancouver was a fuller experience, I marked the smell of lushness everywhere, as nature wanted to reclaim this modern built-up space. And then I lived almost 15 years in cold cities – Toronto, eastern Canada and Oslo – where spring still takes on immense meaning, echoed the last few years through desperate images posted on social media by friends in these places.

Blossoms in springtime – so vivid, so energising, and so short-lived. I was curious to learn so much and I’ve learned that Wisteria – actually a 19th century import to Europe from China and Japan – blooms spectacularly only for a few days but it can really take over, strangle other plants, and it’s poisonous all year round! Something to pay attention to in this country where things can appear lovely on the outside but may need further attention on the inside.

I’ve  learned that it’s called Glicine in Italian – pronounced in Tuscany with a lovely soft middle “c” like a “shhh”. A smooth, comforting word which actually belies the complexity of this plant. We recently took a trip away and stayed in a tiny movie-set of a town deep in the Maremma in southern Tuscany. We had to meet someone to give us the key to our Airbnb apartment-in-a-castle and she gave us directions to park by the bar and walk up. Which bar? I asked. Why, there’s only one bar! Bar il Glicine. We found it, one of those non-pretty, functional, very local, useful and friendly spots you want to find in an Italian town. Other spots in the town feebly indicated their status as a bar, but apparently this one won out – like its namesake it has the strongest hold on the locals’ imagination and isn’t going away.

How lucky I am to now be experiencing the refresh of nature in an old and stunning small town outside Florence. Living here 20 years ago as a student, it seems (upon recollection) that I paid attention to very little beyond museums and bars and the limited number of streets I reached on my old black 3-speed bicycle. I definitely did not notice the arrival of spring. This year we are living with a garden for the first time ever, a particularly lovely one which we have already harvested for its olives and where we can finally plant some seeds with the kids. So I guess I’m making up for it now.

(Originally posted April 2016)

 

These Crazy Celts!

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I’m Irish, which means I’m a Celt. I’m strong and bold and proud of… all the things we’re supposed to be proud of. I don’t have red hair and only drink moderately but I love the music and art and language of my homeland, all of which are widely considered to be “Celtic”. And I am charged with carrying forward all this legacy, this Celtic-ness, to my own two daughters, to teach them to stand up proud and be counted as Celtic women!

But it looks like they have their own ideas as to what that word might mean. And I might need to revise some of my own thinking – as I found out last weekend.

Celts in Italy?

We took a few days off to go skiing a few hours northwest of Florence, in the Apennine mountains along the border of Tuscany and Emilia Romagna. We discovered that the cheap self-catering place we had booked online was not only remote and hard to find but was actually a intact, restored “celtic” medieval mini-village (called a borgo in Italy) at the otherwise-uninhabited base of Monte Cimone.

Near to our lodgings there were various Celtic remains, which included a stone and thatch hut that was rebuilt to show the typical home of the assorted Celtic tribes that were living (well actually hiding) in the area around the 4th century. They were being slowly driven north by those determined Romans – who eventually succeeded in their task, pushing whatever was left of the Celts to cling on at the edges of Europe (my own homeland included). There were Celtic tribes were all over Europe and you can find traces of them in most central European countries and where the Romans didn’t push them out, they were eventually converted to Christianity and mostly disappeared.

“You know, the Celts weren’t as organised as the Romans” says our 10 year old as we climb along the interpretative path to reach the hut. “They were a bit all over the place, quite violent. And they had a thing about heads”.  She’s been studying this at school – the Celts get about 4 pages in her history book, unlike the 50 pages of Roman history she’ll be slogging through for the rest of the term.

The steps along the hut’s side were for yearly maintenance of the thatch, a tradition still going in Ireland, where similar huts were found.

Celts, Kelts or Chelts?

The hut was called a Capanna Celtica – if you pronounce Celtica the Italian way it’s with a Ch. The 8 year old in the back seat tries out the pronunciation – Cheltica – and it sounds strange to my ears. “How do you say it in English?”, she asks. My hard-wired Irish-educated reaction is to firmly tell the kids in the that in this family we use the hard C like a K, “Celtic”. Unless it’s for a football club in Glasgow. “Or the Boston Celtics”, chips in their dad.

But if you dig around a bit, on the internet no less, you quickly discover that this is a complicated issue.

The pronunciation of the word is a modern invention. Julius Caesar would have pronounced it Keltic (apparently) but in Britian it was taken up with an S back in the middle ages. The romantic Celtic revivalist movement of the 19th century, in Ireland and Britain, brought the hard C back into fashion and it has stuck.

Here’s a fantastic, and deliciously mean, quote from a piece published during the 1850s by the Celtic Union in Ireland.

“Of all the nations that have hitherto lived on the face of the earth, the English have the worst mode of pronouncing learned languages. This is admitted by the whole human race […] This poor meagre sordid language resembles nothing so much as the hissing of serpents or geese. […] If we follow the unwritten law of the English we shall pronounce (Celt) Selt but Cæsar would pronounce it, Kaylt. Thus the reader may take which pronunciation he pleases. He may follow the rule of the Latin or the rule of the English language, and in either case be right…”

A Celtic Chip

I think my sense of being Celtic was drummed into me over many years and I carried it around like a chip on my shoulder. At school we learned that the Celtic artwork of Ireland was the highest point of our artistic heritage, revered around the world. Last summer I dragged the family around the “Treasures” room of the National Museum in Dublin, to be awed by the Tara Brooch and Cross of Cong. To my eye they’re still astonishing, to theirs a little less so – as attested by my not being able to take a photo of them standing still in front of one of these receptacles of national pride.

Gobsmacked husband

I studied the History of Art at college and during a year of study in Florence in the 1990s there was a huge blockbuster exhibition on about the Celts, one of the first big comprehensive exhibitions about them. I never got to see it but I got my hands on the enormous catalogue and was horrified – on behalf of my entire nation – to see how little Irish art had been included. How could they? What wonders they were missing out on! The exhibition, I realise now, was focused on the earlier origins of these peoples – the likes of those building huts with thatched roofs to be discovered years later by tourists stopping by on their way to the ski slopes.

The golden age of “Celtic art” on show at the Dublin museum (between the 600s and 800s) really uses the term as a romantic name for a style, to call it something in contrast to the artistic void that was the dark ages in the rest of Europe. Those soft-accented, bald-headed monks who laboured for years over illuminated manuscripts and the artisans who pressed precious stones into mitres left amazing prizes behind them before the Vikings arrived and started messed things up.

Cartoon Celts

What the kids know about the Celts is a bit broader and more up to date. Apart from those history classes, this Horrible Histories book is one of a series which recently appeared in the house. It includes plenty of discussion about what they did with heads, sanitary customs and other yucky details.

Asterix books are also popular in the house, and with Italians. These long-loved stories of the plucky little Gauls (what the Romans called Celts) up in their corner of Brittany with their secret strength potion, and appetite for dancing and wild boar, were constantly beating up the Romans.

Indeed Obelix’s famous catchphrase – These Romans are Crazy! – works beautifully in Italian.

“Sono Pazzi Questi Romani”

– which nicely echoes the SPQR, the official title of Rome (Senātus Populusque Rōmānus: The Roman Senate and People). They were crazy alright, but in the world of Asterix they never quite got the better of them.

So here we are, a family of Celts in Tuscany, battling against the stereotypes and trying to make sense of it all. At this stage of my life, having lived in several places, I can claim many other identities that just the ancient Celtic – Canadian, New Yorker, Londoner, Norwegian, even a little Tuscan. And my kids even more so, with their feet in several homelands.

Maybe I shouldn’t mention to them the fact that being a Dubliner by birth I’m probably more Viking than anything else.

Carnival in Fiesole

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The carnival season in Italy is a big deal. It takes up several weeks before the beginning of Lent (starting on Ash Wednesday) and involves parties, food, dressing up – it keeps going!

Growing up in Ireland, we didn’t celebrate carnival. I’ve never really understood why it isn’t celebrated there, it being such a traditionally Catholic country. The biggest deal was to celebrate Pancake Tuesday – it seemed a huge treat to have my mum serve up crepes after school with (at the time) amazing lemon and sugar. Even in Norway, carnival is celebrated by children with special foods, parties and dressing the kids up in old Halloween costumes, if you could get away with it.

But here in Tuscany every pastry shop (pasticceria), bakery and supermarket produces the traditional dolci di carnevale – the sweet stuff you only eat at this time of year: in fact you can eat it for weeks before Lent and, strangely, the weeks after too. Lent, Easter, it’s all a bit of a blur here.

Fritelle are like doughnut balls (like the beignet of New Orleans) filled with rice, raisins, cream or fruit. Cenci are biscuity pastries laden with icing sugar and up in the right of the photo is Schiacciata Fiorentina – a plain cake snowed under by icing sugar, usually with a non-iced gap for the Florentine lily in the middle.

In Ireland we certainly had no parties and dressing up and fun before the season of Lenten hardship began. Though St Patrick’s Day was usually in the middle and that was a one-day-free ticket for fun.

The big Italian public celebrations in Venice and Viareggio are well known, but most towns have their own local events. We live in Fiesole, a small town in the hills above Florence, and it’s usually celebrated in the modern way: pile all the kids into a room in their varied costumes (some shop-bought but many homemade, even ours!), feed them up with lots of sweets and give them tons of confetti and cans of silly string and let them wreak havoc for an hour or two.

This year some enterprising parents and local associations organised a more traditional celebration for Fiesole. Our kids got involved and spent a few Saturday mornings working on crafts, masks and games for the big party which happened in the town last Saturday.

Here are some photos from the day – a procession with handmade masks and costumes, led by the town band and down to the central piazza where there were games and general mingling.

Even the regular staff at the bar/cafe at the Casa del Popolo joined in: the community space from where the parade started.

One of the organisers was a master puppeteer (and school dad), Nicola who previously worked on the carnival in Arezzo. He made the princess that led the parade and got the kids doing old-fashioned carnival features like making papier-mache-filled eggs and a giant wooden catapult.

It was cold and windy.

Some of the 50 or so migrants who are housed in the town got involved, in an effort to get to know the local community better. Mostly young African men, they came with their own handmade masks, carried the main princess and created a drumming circle which added some energy to the piazza.

Another group, from the local after-school programme (the wonderful La Barchetta) created colourful bird banners with strips of cloth fluttering in the wind. At the end of the party these banners were burnt in a ceremonial fire (by which time we had long gone home with tired kids).

Our local pasticceria Alcedo, is considered one of the best in Tuscany.

The local band were terrific.

 

Empty egg shells filled with confetti were part of the games – they still hurt when they land on your head.

The band played on.

 

Streets and piazzas all over Italy will be full with this paper stuff thrown around by the kids, over several weekends. It’s called coriandoli (though we call it confetti, which rightly confuses our Italian friends).

On the way home we met a goat coming towards us. We don’t usually see farm animals around here and thought for a second this was a strange, vaguely supernatural carnival moment. But she probably just snuck out of the farm down the road at Maiano, which is a few fields/gardens/high walls away. She seemed quite freaked out, and apparently ended up in the piazza, butting her head against the pasticceria window when she saw her own reflection and then disappeared down the steep steps by the library.

The zebra and the musketeer head home, spreading more coriandoli as they pass.

 

 

 

Street art of Florence

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It might seem strange that in this city of Renaissance art you can become an addicted consumer of street art, but that’s what has happened to me. The streets of Florence are filled with an amazing variety of images – from mysterious tiny symbols to brash murals. I’ve been keeping track of some of the artists with my phone camera and share some of the main artists below.

Having a visual bent and training I love keeping an eye out for familiar artists on a random wall or street sign – but I also love passing on the fun of it to my children and the visitors we get to show around Florence. In fact the kids are more likely to point out some Clet-adjusted traffic signs to a confused visitor from abroad than know the name of the 17th-century church we’ve just passed. For anyone visiting this uber-centre of culture, most of it of a visual nature, street art is now an accepted part of the scene and I believe it’s great visual training for eyes that are still learning concepts of style, composition, colour and communication.

Zed1, Florence (photo from italymagazine.com)

You could atcually say there has been a Renaissance of street art in Italy and many of these Florence-based artists are making their mark internationally and being recognised in more serious form at home like at the recent exhibition showcasing 18 local street artists at the (brand-new) gallery Street Levels Gallery on Via Palazzuolo.

Is street art not just graffiti? There are several big differences between the two, you can read in more detail here. Graffiti is of course an Italian word, used for centuries to describe an image scratched onto a hard surface, like a wall (Graffiare means to scratch). In modern times it’s a form of marking or statement usually on public property.

As for street art – speaking broadly you can say that it is more public than graffiti, and it’s more about images and less about (indecipherable) text and territory-marking, it’s more tolerated and usually more public though it can be just as sharp and political. Let’s say it’s easier on the eye and (frankly) more artistic.

Unknown, Florence

Street art is often associated with the huge murals present in many European cities (we used to enjoy the extraordinary ones in Oslo) though some cause more controversy than others, like the gory but artistic images that have very recently appeared in Brussels.

In Florence the streets are narrow and the history is heavy so the local artists have found interesting ways to blend their images in – on gas cover panels, wine holes (read more about them in my other blog post), underground passages or road signs.

Street art is not to everyone’s taste and because it’s on the street it gets dirty, destroyed or removed. But these artists are working in a temporary, non-secure context. Consider how much nerve it must take to pop a drawing on the wall of this Renaissance city (even if it is already dirty). The city has not always, or ever, been pristine, no doubt there’s been graffiti on these buildings for hundreds of years – indeed some think Michelangelo left some scrawls behind on the Palazzo Vecchio, read more here.

Unknown, le Cure

I’m fascinated by the originality and sheer daring of the placement and content of the street art here. And it’s quite an experience to encounter it in the streets of Florence where the artist often plays around or challenges the hyper-famous images contained/constrained inside the museums and souvenir shops. After admiring the amazing 600 year old frescoes in the city churches, (as well as the mind-boggling restoration techniques so well now explained and displayed), enjoy this modern fresco form as you wander the streets.

So if you’re planning a trip to Florence and want to explore its vibrant street life or you’re coming with kids then here’s a quick guide to some of the top street artists. You’ll find their work all over the centre of town and under Instagram hashtags like #streetartflorence, #murifiorentini and #firenzestreetart.

*  * * * *

L’arte sa nuotare / Blub

The artist Blub runs a series around town called L’arte sa nuotare (Art knows how to swim) and his is one of the more popular styles in Florence with visitors. Usually starting from a famous image from art history, ideally one from a museum around the corner, he places them into an underwater environment – to refresh them, make them speak to us in a new and less jaded way.

His facebook page

Blub, L’arte sa nuotare, Florence
Blub, L’arte sa nuotare, Florence
Blub, L’arte sa nuotare, Via Romana
Blub, L’Arte sa Nuotare, Florence

 

Exit/Enter

My personal favourite, Exit/Enter creates beguiling and intriguing and very simple line-drawn images with a splash of colour that make you stop in your tracks. Apparently he was frustrated by the lack of gallery opportunities for a young artist so took to a public space instead. Fully integrated into the street in which they appear, his pieces often give a sense of movement and flow to your walk through the city. Florentine disegno in modern form?

Exit/Enter Facebook page

Exit/Enter, Via Palazzuolo
Exit/Enter, Florence
Exit/Enter, Florence

 

Exit/Enter, Santo Spirito

Clet

Like many artists drawn over the years to Florence, Clet is not a local but he’s now an internationally-known name. Originally from Brittany he has been based here for many years and at his workshop in San Niccolò you can pop in to say hi and buy a few souvenir stickers of his iconic images. His roadsign interventions are a deliberate public statement about the limits of civil society, without altering the original signage and its communicative design (well maybe sometimes I get distracted when driving). The vinyl stickers he designs and sneaks onto city signs are often quickly removed but just as easily placed on again. They’re also a huge hit with visiting and resident children!

Have a look at this Guardian slideshow to see him in action.

Clet on Facebook.

Clet, Piazza d’Azeglio
Clet, Piazza dei Ciompi
Clet, Piazza Ghibellina
Clet, Florence
Clet, Lungarno Vespucci

And a few extras that have caught my eye but I know little about

Mehstre, Via Verdi

 

Unknown, Via Romana

 

Unknown – Borgo Pinti

The Le Cure passageway

A well-known dedicated space for grafitti and street artists is the underground passageway at Piazza Le Cure that crosses several junctions and the train track. Grab a gelato at Cavini on the corner and wander down into this intriguing underworld gallery, you might even hear the organ- and radio-playing local resident.

The meaning of snow

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It’s been snowing for a few days up here in the hills above Florence – delicately, sometimes with fat flakes that you can catch in your mouth. There’s not enough to stick to the ground and local life is only slightly disrupted, some people who live further out in the countryside are actually snowed in and can’t get to school. But there isn’t much panic, just patient tolerance as it surely won’t last. As veterans of hard winters we are charmed and I have to stop myself from stopping the car to take another photo of an olive tree blanketed in white. I learn the term “bufera di neve” which sounds soft and gentle but which I’m surprised to learn means blizzard. Tuscan-style.

Our 7-year-old attends a Montessori school in the woods and on Monday we meet the other kids at the start of the day, it’s slowly becoming whiter around us. One of the dads brings up that old chestnut, about how Eskimos have 40 different words for snow. “Which makes sense”, he says, “think of all the different types of snow there are”. And we do think about it: the stuff that falls out of the sky, sometimes fat, sometimes fast. The hard-packed stuff and the stuff that’s almost too fluffy to hold onto, the stuff for moving through and the stuff that has to be dug out of your way to get anywhere, the blowy blustery stuff and the snow you can use to build something, sled or ski through.

My daughter is indeed a child of snow. During the hours before she was born, to ease the labour pains I walked and walked, (yes I was tough) through the historic cemetery close to our Oslo home. It was snowing hard, the air was dampened and our (good) boots stomped tracks through the soft powder, past the graves of Munch and Ibsen and the WWII resistance fighters, feeling strangely comforted to walk among these old souls. Within a few hours we got to meet our own little Norwegian.

A few years later we walked through the same graveyard every day to her nature kindergarten, which brought the children into the woods outside the city 3 days a week. Over her 2 years with that group, this tough girl clocked up many hours of trekking through snow, sledding down hills, chopping wood, building shelters, a latrine and obstacle courses in the trees. In all weathers. She knows more about snow than I ever will.

I didn’t grow up with snow in Dublin and have only as an adult come to know and respect it. By marrying a Canadian I made a serious lifestyle choice which was further compounded by living for several years in eastern Canada and then, when we started raising our kids in Norway. But there we took it on as a part of life which affected almost every aspect of daily life 4-6 months of the year.

And here we are now in the woods outside Florence, looking at this almost foreign-looking snow falling through the tall Roman pines, we almost crave it as it’s been so long since we’ve seen it. The kids open their mouths and catch the fat flakes when they see them, they’re transported with delight. A week before it snowed near us, my daughter’s friend who lives deep in the country arrived at school one morning with a cloth bag around her neck. She produced from the bag, very carefully, a glass jar. Opening it up she proudly showed us a mushy mess and declared “Snow from my garden!”

Now I watch my daughter listening intently to the young Italian dad discussing the eskimos and I realise I’m disappointed to think that her deep, deep connection to this cold white stuff in its many forms and shapes and surroundings and uses and receptacles of emotion is limited to just one word. In English we just call it snow, and in Oslo, we used the very Norwegian-sounding word snø though if you dig deeper there other words available.

And what about this whole 40 Eskimo words thing? It’s an idea that has stuck with people but it’s basically not true, a linguistic misconception and a more complex issue which I can only suggest you read up on it. Similar ideas that circulate include there being numerous Irish words for rain. In fact I just read last week in the local paper – and this was of great interest to the dad – about the dozens of  phrases for “it’s bloody cold” in Tuscan towns and villages.

I watch my girl stick out her tongue to catch another flake and run off down the road towards the school with her classmates and teachers. And I know that she and I know that words don’t really matter so much. It’s the feelings and the memories that stick.

Finding Hitchcock

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The time has come for us to start weaning our children off the films that only they want to watch. In the age of Netflix it’s so easy to leave them to their  own devices, literally, and we have to make an effort to sit together and watch a film as a family: their dad and I are reliving our own glowing memories from childhood of enjoying films as a family together on the couch (including hiding behind it as Indy battles with the snakes).

So to start our plan to watch more interesting films, together, we started with Star Wars (it took a couple of goes but then they really took to the fantastical element of it and have now seen every film), Singin in the Rain (who doesn’t love Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds?) and then Back to the Future (lots of swearing and we had to explain what a Walkman is).

But we needed a good adventure film, with spies and suspense and action. My own favourite is North by Northwest – so we thought we’d start with that. We’re unapologetically old-school and we like watching a physical movie on the TV screen, so before going jumping onto Amazon to buy a copy I thought I’d try the library. Yes, very old-school.

Over our years of living in foreign countries, we’ve become experts on making the most of the library system wherever we are, especially for browsing films. This goes back to our time in New York (around 1999-2002) when we lived close to the fabulous Brooklyn Public Library. We would indulge in raiding their film catalogue, scanning each shelf at a time and carting home our tote bag laden down with a few brick-like VHS tapes, many of which then refused to work that Saturday night. But we enjoyed catching up on some random choices like Powell & Pressburger and Kurosawa, and watching anything with music by Michel Legrand or hair by Veronica Lake. We were also lucky during our 7 years in Oslo to live close to the central library there (the grandly named Deichmanske Bibliotek) and had lots of cinema to choose from, though the foreign-language films often had no English subtitles so we no doubt missed out on a few years’s worth of Brazilian and Hong Kong blockbusters.

So here I am now looking for the 1959 Hitchcock classic to watch with our kids and I head to our local library in Fiesole – it’s a small town and we’re lucky to have a library. It actually has a decent selection of classic and modern films on DVD, and still some VHS. Because there are surely some Tuscan households that still use one.

I start to browse through the DVDs for North by Northwest. I look for the letter N in the titles. No joy, the titles are all a bit jumbled and not shelved according to any alphabet I know. I look to see if they might be organised by genre, or then by country – Italian vs non-Italian. Still no luck.

I interrupt the librarian at her desk, she looks up and smiles (as they do the world over). “How are your DVDs organised?” And she answers, “Oh they’re shelved according to director”.

Of course they are. This is after all the nation of cinema lovers: Italians take their cinema extremely seriously and worship their filmmakers as much as their Renaissance artists. Who wouldn’t know their Pasolini from their Fellini, or even their Spielberg from their Scorsese? Fair enough, I’ve actually studied some of this stuff myself and I can find them on these shelves.

But when it comes to more popular movies, what do you do? What about all those mindless action movies, sequels, random 1970s family movies? Could you name the director of any Bond movie or the auteur behind Frozen?

Still, I have an easy one and I find the Hitchcock selection.  Here’s a nice range of his titles, but they’ve changed all the names! (I’m sure they didn’t do that in Norway.) But these do sound quite nice in Italian: “I 39 Scalini” (The 39 Steps) and “Rebecca, La Prima Moglie” (the first wife). But no sign of Cary Grant in his immaculate suit. I do take home the Man who Knew Too Much (which proved to be a bit spookier than I’d remembered, Hitch uses lack of music to great effect).

With no luck at this library I check the central library in Florence next time I’m in the centre of town. It’s a relatively-recent library, in a lovely renovated old convent. But the contents are a different story. Their cinema section proves to be less organised than our own up here and it’s clear they get a lot more customers, or at least ones who have DVD-players equipped with steel teeth. The films are here organised differently: by title. Heimat sits between Harold & Maude and Heat. Who makes these decisions? Who knows?

The DVDs are shoved downwards into pull-out shelves and you have to make an effort to look through them. Still, I stumble on some fun titles I wouldn’t otherwise see, like this collection of four Jacques Tati films (which has about half the contents intact):

But still no North by Northwest and then I realise – of course they’ve changed the name of that one too! Taking out my phone I cobble onto the sickly Wi-Fi offered by the library and discover online that I should actually be looking for “Intrigo Internazionale” – International Intrigue. (Which is odd, as the film doesn’t go much further than South Dakota.) They don’t have it, but at least now I’m armed with more information.

In the end I find the movie in the Feltrinelli bookshop near the Duomo – they have a cheap DVD section upstairs. For 8 euros we can keep it all to ourselves and build up our own little library at home. And sort them however we like.

P.S. The kids really enjoyed it and had loads of questions about it afterwards, mostly about guns and kisses.

P.P.S Here’s a list of all the Hitchcock titles in Italian if you’re interested.

Women of Christmas

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Christmas has some pretty larger than life figures – Santa Claus/St Nicholas, the baby Jesus, the three Kings, and the shepherds and angels, all of whom were undoubtedly all male. But apart from the central – and rather busy – figure of Mary, we don’t associate many women with the Christmas season. When I stop to think about it though, I can say that my own little family of four has adopted a few as we have been absorbing traditions from the countries we’ve been living in over the last decade.

Living for seven years in Oslo our girls basically grew up as Norwegians. From December 1st they would open presents every day  on our homemade advent calendar, listen to Norwegian songs (some okay, some bad), bake all the right things. And every year they somehow managed to ignore the fact that all their school friends expected Santa to arrive at their door on Christmas Eve while our version of Santa showed up later that night, popping down the chimney into our chimney-less third-floor apartment to drop off his gifts. But of all the Norwegian traditions, we loved most celebrating Santa Lucia on December 13th.

Dear old Saint Lucy is, coincidentally for us, an Italian saint but arguably just as popular in Scandinavia than in the parts of Italy that still commemorate her today. In Norway every year, kindergarten children take part in a procession at daybreak (not really so early, about 8:45 am), each child is dressed in a white dress tied up with silver tinsel, and one lucky girl is chosen to wear the crown of candles (usually battery-operated though we did know of one hair-fire). The children walk around, singing the lovely Santa Lucia song and maybe afterwards eat some of the special Lucia biscuits a generous mum might have baked.

It’s a beautiful ritual of light in the midst of darkness and our two daughters just loved it. After moving to Italy I thought it would be nice to keep up the tradition. Which is how this photo came to come about.

This is me and my two Irish-Canadian daughters dressed for a Santa Lucia procession at the local Ikea store outside Florence. This is organised every year by the group of local Swedish mums who on the day, roped me in to also wearing a white dress, placing me at the front of the procession which paraded its way through the store, against the usual shopping flow and shunting the goggle-eyed Italian shoppers (and their camera-phones) into the sides as we passed. It was not an experience I would have pictured 20 years ago, nor do I plan to repeat it. But our girls had a blast and felt themselves back in Norway again, even if this was a Swedish affair – that’s close enough!

Also while living in Norway, I was fortunate to fall in with the Oslo Irish women’s association, a wonderful group of kind souls, some of whom moved to be with their Norwegian sweethearts before I was even born, and others more recent economic migrants like ourselves, all of them with much great advice on surviving in Norway. This group decided to bring back to life – in Oslo – the old Irish tradition of getting the women and other domestics out of the house after the feasts of the season. Known as Little Women’s Christmas, or Nollaig na mBan, it used to be popular in certain parts of Ireland and has been going through a revival recently. It’s a lovely tradition and we did not hesitate to feast it and raise a toast to ourselves every January 6th in the main Irish pub of Oslo. Even at those prices.

Since the summer of 2015, our home is in Italy and just before Christmas, as I was packing all our bags for our trip back home to Dublin I realised I had to organise our brand new, “other” Christmas before we left. Never mind the stocking waiting to be hung up and filled by Santa in Dublin, I also needed to fill another stocking full of sweets and goodies for our girls for the morning of January 6th. We’ll be back in Italy by then (in fact they pleaded that we would be) as that is the feast day of the Befana, the Italian witch who traditionally does the present-giving in many parts of the country.

The Befana is actually a most Italian kind of story – she is a (generally nice) witch or old woman who met the three kings following the star to Bethlehem. As one version of the story goes, when she got word of the big news, she went off to organise a present for the baby Jesus but the kings weren’t going to hang around and they took off. To make up for being left out of the most famous Christmas gift-giving ever, she has been giving presents ever since to children every Epiphany – children living in Italy. Unlike Santa, she expects a glass of wine when she lands on the roof and she might still give a piece of coal to anyone naughty. (After quickly consulting with local friends on how to manage this, I’ve learned that you can buy a plastic piece of coal in the shops for the stocking).

Funnily enough our daughters didn’t mention last Christmas that they planned to celebrate Befana – probably because we had not been here so long and their Italian wasn’t yet good enough to pick up on the comments about it from their friends at school.

This year they seem to have it sussed it out, realising that we are now technically in her catchment area.

As long as Ryanair/Aer Lingus gets us back there in time!

This story was published in the Irish Times in January 2017.

Olive Harvest

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An unexpected, and amazing, part of our experience of our time in Italy has been to live among the olive trees of Tuscany. You see them everywhere. Wise, solid and often ancient they stand firm through all weathers. They are the real natives of this gorgeous place.

The olive tree is treated with amazing respect by the people around us: for centuries they used their skin, juice, leaves, branches, bark and roots. Nowadays the main product is the oil, which is still the fuel of Tuscan life – the basis of daily cuisine and tourism, and an aid for ailments.

At school, a birthday is marked not by cake but by pane e olio (bread and oil) shared with the whole class: something my two kids are slowly adjusting to.

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The freshly-pressed oil of harvest time (October-November) is the most precious of all, ideally from your own garden. People prefer to make their own oil, enough to last the whole year, and most families have land with trees planted somewhere in the area, or they source it from a family member or friend/colleague. It’s a let-down to buy your good oil from the frantoio or market, or at worst the supermarket. Always in the background is the fear of pests or memories of the catastrophic winter of 1985 when most of the trees in Tuscany were destroyed during a deep freeze.

We have olive trees in our (rented) garden and though there was no harvest this year due to an infestation we were really fortunate to join in last year’s communal work to pick the olives. This was an amazing chance for our kids to see the whole process and be a part of this incredibly strong tradition and lifestyle.

Over the course of two weekends we got together with the neighbours we somehow rarely see and with great cheer we laboured to pick the olives by hand. (Some big farms use machines to pick them but by hand is still considered the best way).

With five other families we worked to prune the trees, pick the olives, sort them and them haul them off to the local oil press where they were quickly turned into oil to be consumed right away. The pressing part was not romantic, it’s all done by machinery now but going there with your olives and coming home with your own, tasty oil is the best part of the experience.

Olive trees and boxes
Our front garden – we filled up about 40 of these boxes

During the painstaking picking process we chatted with our neighbours, got to know each other better, picked up some useful swear terms and on the last day had a potluck lunch in the garden with plenty of wine, cake and some dancing. It was not unlike a Norwegian dugnad – that twice-annual get-together with the neighbours you steadfastly ignore to clean the street or paint the walls and drink beer.

From the 40 trees in our common garden each family came away with about 8 litres of delicious cloudy, tangy oil – which we could happily certify as being organic and fair trade. Each tree yields about a litre of oil. Our trees were only planted 30 or 40 years ago but already they show some of the amazing character of those ancient trees: they’re starting to split off into two parts, merging into the general landscape of the garden. Promising to live longer than any of us.

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I took these photos during last year’s communal harvest in our garden.

Olives
Olives are ready to pick when they’re green and purple/black – they are horribly bitter if you taste them directly off the tree. They need to be either pressed for oil or cured in salt water for 6 months.
Ladder
One by one the trees are pruned and the branches fall on the ground for the kids to pick
Picking by hand
The olives are best picked by hand – sometimes including child labour.
Nets under trees
Special nets are laid out in a circle around each tree, making sure to catch every single olive that is knocked off or picked.
Raking
Using a plastic rake to pull the olives off.
Cutting the branches
Climbing up to cut the branches. This seems to be the most-coveted job and we know of an 85-year-old-man who still does it.
Olives
We gathered about 20 boxes, loaded them into 2 cars and set off to the frantoio (oil press) 10 minutes away
Nets
Setting out the nets under the trees
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Waiting for our turn at the press, it was a busy day
Press
No quaint methods here, all noisy machinery
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Our younger daughter had a day of picking olives with the whole of first grade. Great material for a project and she definitely understood the process better than I did.
Final oil
The fresh oil is sent home in large plastic containers. We found some large metal containers in our garage, probably last used by our landlady several years ago. The neighbours instructed us to wash them out with water and a little soap, nothing else.

 

And how did it taste? Buonissimo!

Windows of Wine

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Some people say that of all Italian cities, Florence is the least interesting from the outside. That all its treasures and intrigue are to be found inside – in the churches, museums, libraries and palazzi. Walking around the historic centre it does indeed seem quite grey on the outside, its narrow streets go on for blocks as they wind around walled-in palazzi, villas and convents, offering few of the smaller squares and parks you’d find in Rome. These monumental buildings and walls are broken up by immense gates and forbidding doorways.

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Look a little closer at the elements breaking up the wall space and you will start to see – as I did only this year – a little hole next to some of the doors. It might have a pointed arch, and it might be blocked up or have a little wooden door. It’s a small window, just large enough for someone to pass a bottle of wine through it. Which is actually what these windows were built to do.

Built into the wall to allow the purchase of a glass or bottle of wine, these windows date back to the time of the grand Duchy during the 1500s and were in use mostly until the 1800s. Enterprising Florentine families who had a vineyard in the country and plenty of chianti or vernaccia to spare, would sell it directly from their home to thirsty city-dwellers. There are about 150 of these wine windows around Florence and about 30 more in a few other towns and cities nearby. But otherwise they are not found anywhere else in Italy.

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Customers would bring their empty bottle (often a traditional fiasco), hand over the money and receive a full bottle of quality wine. The wine window would be located close to the cantina (wine cellar) and so the servants could conduct the transaction easily without needing to let anyone into the fortress-home. A document from 1591 lists the price of a full bottle*: 1 lira, 6 denari and 8 soldi (the old Italian shillings and pence system).

Even though some of them are still used today – to hold a plate of doorbells or sometimes still as a window – many locals don’t even know their history. An association to study and try to preserve them, Buchette del Vino, was set up only last year and they are busy working to find and preserve them all. Just before writing this, I found one of the Fiesole ones right at the bottom of our road, having passed it hundreds of times!

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They are usually called buchette del vino – a buca or buco means a hole, and buchetta is a little hole. But this being a city of poets they have some other great names, indicating a very local history: finestrini (little windows), nicchie (niches), porticielli (little gates), tabernacoli (tabernacles) and best of all porte del paradiso (gates of paradise).

One wine window is in the wall of famous gelateria Vivoli, near Santa Croce and it was only discovered after the Florence flood of 1966 when some of the wall stucco was washed away. More on that in this article in the Florentine. And a local secret agent during the War, Rodolfo Siviero – sometimes called the James Bond of the art world – made full use of the partially-hidden wine hole in his river-front home to help save numerous, presumably smaller, works of art. The windows have been rarely depicted in images, but this 1920s painting by Florentine artist Ortone Rosai includes one.

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Ortone Rosai, Giocatori di Topa (1928)

Some windows still have their “original” wooden door or knocker, many are filled in and some are used to nice effect by the ever-enterprising local street artists of Florence. At least I think so:

SeahorseDoor

 

The association has a map marking all the wine windows of Florence and area and also some interesting documents, like an amazing photo of a delivery of wine bottles or the 1772 decree by the Grand Duchy to allow the sale of wine in all locations in the city. They can also organise guided tours, something new for your next trip to Florence?

These windows could surely tell a few stories and, more poignantly, they call to mind the setup these days in Naples where doors have holes cut into them to allow for easier exchange of drugs. The same concept: an anonymous, zero-miles transaction, skipping the middle man.

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* Note: Much of the info is taken from the Buchette del Vino website and an article in La Repubblica on 26 November 2016.

50 years after the Flood

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This weekend sees a huge anniversary in Florence. 50 years ago on 4th November 1966 the Arno river burst its banks and flooded the city – with huge consequences. More than a hundred people died and thousands of businesses were ruined and families made homeless. Even more of a milestone was the destruction and damage done to historic buildings where tens of thousands of artworks and books were damaged or destroyed by the water or the over 600,000 tons of mud, sewage and rubble. The National Library, which sits right on the riverbank, lost millions of books. Around the corner, the church of Santa Croce saw unbelievable damage.

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Foto David Lees

Immediately, thousands of volunteers started coming into the city, from the area, from the rest of Italy and from abroad. They became known as the Mud Angels, gli Angeli del Fango, forming themselves into a civic army that tackled the cleanup of the dirty, despoiled city. Experts in conservation and restoration flocked in to help and many new techniques were invented as a result – it is in fact a milestone in art restoration. A group of women artists around the world, the Flood Ladies, donated art to fill the empty spaces and their efforts were well-noted this week as well. More on that on this local blog.

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Italfotogieffe/Banca dati Archivio Foto Locchi

Next time you visit Florence keep an eye out for the markers discreetly placed in walls and arches in different parts of the city. They mark the (amazingly high) level of the river after the flood.

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When you look at these amazing photos today you can see why it was such a disaster for the city. On the radio this week I heard a local mud angel – a scout troup leader from Scandicci – describe how on this occasion the famously reserved Florentines found a way to come together as a community and save their city. Even more than today, 50 years ago Florence was a city of shopkeepers, tradesmen, teachers and civil servants as well as the home to amazing treasures that it has kept safe since the Renaissance. It is these treasures that have, over centuries, brought strangers here, often resulting in a clash of opposites. Today it feels overwhelmed by tourists – apparently 9 million visit every year – but they are mostly confined to a small part of the city centre, which these days we only rarely visit.

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Santa Croce, Foto David Lees

And I was pulled to come here too, over 20 years ago. When I was finishing secondary school and planning what to study next I set my heart on learning to be a conservator. I have no idea where the impulse came from, I had loved art at school but was a terrible artist, preferring the history of art instead. I decided to study Italian and Art History at UCD and during my degree spent a year in Florence. I knew little then or indeed until this year about the flood and the effects it had on the world of restoration – a world I soon found was not for me, all chemistry and mathematics and not so much creativity. But reading today’s Irish Times I discover that a kind woman at the National Gallery in Dublin who once let me poke around in her workshop all those years ago, Maighread McParland, was in Florence 50 years to help with the efforts.

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The city has organised an amazing number of events, exhibitions, lectures. All the Mud Angels they could find were brought back and honoured. On Instagram you’ll find hundreds of visual reflections about the river and the local English-language magazine, The Florentine, has lots of good stories. And here’s a great video of images – set to the song about the flood by local troubador Riccardo Marasco.

A nice touch of was the reopening yesterday of the piece of road along the river – the Lungarano Torrigiani – that collapsed to great media attention during the spring. (A bit of road that doesn’t really affect more than those of us who need some more parking options closer to the centre of town.)

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Photo David Lees

Last night there was a no-doubt very beautiful candlelit procession from San Miniato al Monte, that gorgeous church up the hill from Piazzale Michelangelo, all the way down to the river and across to Santa Croce, the spiritual heart of the city. We didn’t make it, due to a wisdom tooth issue and Friday night crankiness, but maybe I felt it might have been too emotional to handle.

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Wikiart

The symbol of the flood, and all that it meant for Florence and those who love it, is Cimabue’s crucifix which is now up again in the sacristy of Santa Croce. Created in around 1265 – long before the Botticellis and Michelangelos that adorn the knockoff posters and aprons in the local tourist shops – it is the symbol of the whole story, its stunningly-beautiful face of Jesus and clearly damaged state encapsulating the sometimes-overwhelming heritage of this city.

 

All photos are from 1966 and have been borrowed from the internet or the book Gli Angeli del Fango (Giunti 2006)

Sweet Halloween

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My kids are going out tonight for Halloween in our little Tuscan town. They’re joining some friends from school – and their slightly bewildered Italian parents – for dolcetto o scherzetto. Literally: little treat or little trick. It’s still a novelty in Italy, only coming into practice over the last ten years, and people feel a bit pressured into doing what they consider to be an American celebration that’s oddly similar to Carnevale but really quite foreign.

At this time of year I insist on enlightening those around me, in whatever country we’re living in, that Halloween is really an Irish festival, and a big one at that. Like so many other things, the Americans made it their own and then exported it back to us.

At a basic level I would tell you that in Ireland we (in our romantic childhood memories) would eat special food, play games, dress up and have bonfires. But my memories of it are larger than just what we did and more about how it felt, and that’s what I try to pass on to my own kids.

Trick or treat – it’s an American term, so I always tried to avoid it but it’s catchy and useful for successfully translating into other languages. As kids we would say we were “going around the houses”.

dogI like the idea of my kids declaring “dolcetto or scherzetto” at the neighbours tonight and it conjures images of charming little ghoulies jumping around with their goodie bags and spiky sticks. The houses and shops of Italian towns are noticeably empty of flashing pumpkins and witch window stickers so it is just a fun, relaxed event for kids. In Norway it is also still an imported novelty, and quite low-key, but Norwegian kids are mad keen on sweets/candy so it’s very popular. There the kids say “Knask eller Knep” (munchies or trick) – a slightly harsher and, I think, more scary-sounding phrase.

This is our second Halloween here in Italy and we’ve helped our kids enjoy it by working together on their own costumes and finding other local kids going out in a group to knock on doors for an hour or two, coming home with weekends worth of sweets. Parents have been asked to alert the neighbours in advance, to ensure no doors are slammed in faces – or, magari, that some kids might actually do a trick on them. norskWe were lucky while living in Oslo that a wonderful group of Irish mammies organised an Irish-style Halloween party every year, which gave the local half-Irish kids some frame of reference for an ancient part of our heritage.

It was a big deal that in Ireland we had Halloween and in Britain they didn’t. They had a weird (and spookily anti-Catholic) celebration of Guy Fawkes night, a week later. On our island, the kids would spend weeks setting up bonfires in each area, and people would sneak fireworks over the border from Northern Ireland (which had its own share of bonfires back then) – they were illegal in the Republic, rightly so as the hospital emergency rooms ended up busy anyway.

Halloween for me was the feeling of something being in the air, spooky and magical. My mum would prepare a special dinner including colcannon (buttery mashed potato and kale) and for dessert there’d be barmbrack, a fruit cake only eaten at Halloween and hidden inside would be a ring – won annually by my sister. Other things might be hidden inside, though not quite to the level of Mrs Doyle’s baked-in-sweater in that Father Ted episode.

The friends would come over, mixed ages and siblings all together, and we’d dress up – the girls inevtiably making more of an effort than the boys, who would have have picked up a mask down at the corner shop. One year I felt it sufficient to just pile 7 different hats on my head, just to give my mum a break from putting a costume together.

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Leaving the warm house you’d head out together into the dark streets, a sense of being together in a group, all of us dressed up strangely to scare away any spirits that are out and about. I took it seriously, perhaps because I was usually the youngest. It was always dark, often cold and you would see candles (no sign of any pumpkins back then) in some windows and know that the bigger kids were setting up a bonfire down the road, which you may or may not be allowed to go watch this year. Knocking on doors, we’d yell “d’ye have anything for the Halloween party?” and each of us would have to explain your costume – who you were meant to be, or how you made it. Some of the older residents would actually bother to ask you to sing or recite your party piece. If they approved, they’d pop a handful of monkey nuts or hazelnuts, apples, some coins and maybe some sweets into your bag. There would be tricks played on mean neighbours, eggs or worse through the letterbox and a lot of disappearing bell-ringing.

sweets

After you had gone around enough houses and avoided the competing groups on the streets, you’d come back to the appointed house and have “the party”. You emptied out the bags of goodies and fight over sharing the sweets and getting rid of the nuts – usually to a patient parent. The apples and coins would be tossed into a bucket of water for a game of grabbing them with your teeth and almost drowning. There might be a donkey to pin, apples on a string or other once-a-year games. Many homes would hear stories told – of the devil, the púca or the banshee – but fortunately for me (always terrified of ghost stories) this did not go on in our house.

The darkness outside seemed to grow longer, the inside of the house glowing with sweet treats and fun. And security. You were home now, the door was closed to the rest of the night and to the spirits to do whatever they had to do – next day you could wake up and know that it was all done with for this year, the strange carnival happening while you were asleep, safe in your bed.  The next morning would invariably be bright and crispy. The saints were now in charge.

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Doggy bag? Sì, grazie!

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We live in Florence and so we’ve had visitors come to stay. As you’d expect we usually take them out to eat and sometimes – after a serious 3 or 4-course affair – someone might declare they’re full and suggest they bring home the leftovers. “How do I ask for a doggy bag?” “Umm… well”, I reply. “It’s not really what you, um, do here”. So they order some more wine and keep picking at their steak and grilled fennel. Which I assure them wouldn’t taste the same tomorrow anyway.

In Italy you eat what is on your plate. There is an unspoken understanding between the chef and you: that she/he knows how much you should eat of a certain dish to satisfy your taste and that you should know yourself how much you can handle today. There is still a strong current of resusing unused food in traditional recipes – like in Tuscany where old bread is used for the next day’s Ribollita soup (my preferred comfort food) or Panzanella, bread salad.

Lunch at the Mercato Centrale, Florence
Lunch at the Mercato Centrale, Florence

But recently Italians have started to admit they can’t always finish up their meals and are trying – with the help of the government – to embrace a new concept. The doggy bag.

The name – doggy bag – is thought to originate in wartime America where responsible citizens were encouraged to feed their pets only with table scraps, taking them home in wrapped up wax paper bags marked with “Bones for Bowser”. Diners soon starting asking for it for themselves and the concept stuck. This is from an interesting Smithsonian article I found.

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Courtesy of Tuscantraveler.com

While it’s easy to ask for a doggy bag in an American or Canadian restaurant it’s just not common in many parts of “Europe”. Taking care of your leftovers is popular with thrifty and conscientious hipsters as well as graphic designers, and big-shot English chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall leads a campaign called Too Good to Waste, an effort to persuade nicer British establishments to offer doggy boxes. They have a cute slogan: Be a lover, not a leaver.

But the issue goes well beyond individual diners and into the much wider global issues of food and waste management. The FAO has estimated that 40% – that’s 40% – of food produced in Europe goes to waste. France passed some fairly tough laws last year which punish producers who do not deal with the issue. The Italians decided instead to take the kinder track, to instead provide incentives and improve ease of use. Perhaps they were encouraged by the interest taken in the issue by Francesco, everyone’s favourite pope.

In August this year the Italian senate unanimously passed into law a bunch of measures to start dealing with food waste. Aiming to reduce the estimated 5 million tons of food thrown away every year, the measures include ways for companies and farmers to more easily donate unused food to charity by setting realistic rules about sell-by dates and food safety and liability issues.

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A typical sagra table

But of most interest was the inclusion of an initiative to encourage ordinary Italians to break the habit and consider it normal to take their unfinished food home rather than let it go to waste. A budget of one million euros was set aside for a government initiative to persuade people to start using doggy bags – so far it’s hard to see exactly what has been done but it sounds good.

The under-secretary responsible, Barbara Degani, declared “the family bag is a semantic upgrade of the famous doggy bag, allowing us to take the concept out of the ghetto of our imaginary modesty and ask for one at the end of a good meal. The choice to not waste must be the new way of life. So asking for a FB (family bag) is a marker of virtuous behaviour.”

The idea of the family bag is going to take some time to trickle down and will need a push to get people used to the idea. It is a big change. This week there was a news story, for World Food Day, about a  “nudging” experiment carried out in a Milanese restaurant. The diners were each left a two-coloured token on their place setting when the meal started. The token was meant to be a neutral way of indicating their interest in taking home what they could not eat. It was left on the table with the green side up, indicating the diner would be happy to have a doggy bag. They had to make a conscious change to red to decline the service. Apparently they were successfully nudged into taking the food home.

We are used to taking extra food home, especially with kids, but we haven’t done it much here apart from the occasional pizza. On a recent IKEA trip, we discovered in their restaurant they have a stack of flatpack doggy boxes. Like any other product it needed assembling and was a bit smaller than expected. I still find it odd to see Italians lunching on meatballs and daim cake (even if the restaurant does sell wine by the glass) but this might give them some ideas in the food recycling department.

Troppo buono per essere spreccato, the boxes declare – too good to chuck away. Trust the Scandinavians to start getting the message across.

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More Ikea assembly

 

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Other posts you might be interested in:

The Food is Beautiful

More about real dogs in The Life Domestic

In the Swing of Things

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My seven year old is sitting in the dentist’s chair. As dentists go, he’s young and charming, and he has nice ankles – he wears runners with no socks. We communicate in Italian about the child and her teeth. I understand most of what he says, but in a situation like this I find there will be a word or terms that I don’t know. I realize that, once again, I had forgotten to spend 5 minutes before leaving the house to check the dictionary for some other words that might come up, maybe molar or orthodontic surgery.

Living daily life in another language means you’re confronted all the time with new situations, new unknowns. Whether it’s going to a judo class or the climbing park, the pharmacy or the post office, there will be a word or a term that will throw you and you’ll be asking: “I need to get the what before tomorrow?” Or “there’s something wrong with the what in my engine?” (This does of course also happen to Italians especially where paperwork is involved: they don’t necessarily find it any easier to get simple tasks completed).

So when I can I try to prepare by checking some words, anticipating difficult discussions.  It took me a few confused yoga lessons before I remembered to look up the Italian words for hips, shoulder blades and twist gently but our teacher’s soothing voice made any position sound great – just try saying la posizione della montagna and you’ll feel yourself calming down.

Before arriving at the dentist my daughter and I talked about what we needed to show him. He was to check all her teeth, one loose tooth and another loose tooth that’s not supposed to be loose. I’m prepared with a few key words: denti da latte (milk teeth) and the evocative denti del giudizio (wisdom teeth). But “loose tooth” – maybe I should have checked that in the dictionary.

tooth
This is from our amazing Quebec-made visual dictionary 

So there she is in the chair and I tell the dentist – she has a tooth that is …. aah … moving. “Ah”, he says, “it’s still growing?” “No, no, it’s moving … like this.” And the impatient child pipes up from the chair – sta dondolando! It’s swinging, or in this case, it’s wobbling! Wow, there she goes. My daughter has started translating for me. Of course she would know how to say it, it was probably one of the first things she’d hear from fellow 6-year-olds in the school yard. It’s a bit strange I haven’t heard it before, but I’m probably multi-tasking more on a daily basis. There’s my excuse.

Living daily life in Italian means you get to use fantastic words and expressions every day. The rolling r’s and the double zz’s, it actually feels good to speak it and being here as an older adult I appreciate it even more.

Un dente dondolando – a swinging tooth. Isn’t that wonderful? The word for me conjures a picture of a swaying ski lift hoisting fur-booted skiers up into the Dolomites. Or a cute toddler asked to be pushed on the swing – la dondola. A quick Google search manages to bring up the image of Michael Jackson dangling his child over the balcony (if you remember back that far).

heidi
From the book we’re reading at bedtime – Heidi Heckelbeck Is Ready to Dance!

Dondolando – Swinging, swaying, dangling, wobbling, rocking, balancing. That’s indeed what we’ve been doing on a daily basis here, making it up as we go along, all of us balancing between friends and family and familiarities in our homes, old and new.

But now, a year in – and with routines in places, circles of friends and acquaintances set up, local knowledge and our own spaces carved out in this place inhabited by many others over many centuries – we’re mostly gotten into the swing of it ourselves.

Of mice and murder

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The mice of Fiesole have a plan.

MONDAY

I’ve been waiting three days for the local hardware shop to open. Three days since we came home from holiday and discovered our house had been done over by a gang of mice (definitely a gang). So as the bell tower in the piazza rings out four times, I’m here waiting with one other customer for the door to open. I want to buy mousetraps*.

Along comes the owner – I don’t know her name yet but she’s the young, busy, bustling, bespectacled type that makes you feel at ease and she has a Florentine accent you could spread butter with. We bustle in after in.

I love this shop, in fact I love all Italian hardware shops. It’s covered from floor to ceiling with stuff, and all of it is useful. There are wonderful things in plain sight which you didn’t know you needed, and others you desperately need and only she can find for you (and at a good price). In fact the shop is called a Utilità (meaning Usefulness, well in this case just Utility) which is one of the several cool names for a hardware shop, another being the even more lovely word, Mesticheria.

baobab

In this, or any, Italian hardware shop, you can step in and embrace the visual jumble, browse the mugs and tablecloths, mango slicers and egg timers, Beatles mugs and non-stick pans, fresh-cut keys and shoe polish. Or you can just enjoy asking for something specific and watching the owner – who grew up in this family business – disappear into the back, under the counter, or up a ladder to where you thought only the wicker baskets were hanging.

As it turns out, many people come in just for a chat, it being right on the main street – the narrow part where the German camper vans have to squeeze through with confusion.

“Oh, that’s a real stink of someone’s bad cooking oil!” she says as she gets herself behind the counter. “Is it from the Indian restaurant across the road?” I ask. “Oh no, they use the right oils, there are always lovely smells coming out of there.”

Foolishly, I let the other waiting woman go first, she is of course a local and I become frustrated when I can’t completely follow the train of their conversation. My Italian isn’t always so awake after lunch. She passes over some cash and it disappears into an envelope, something is scribbled on a piece of paper: it must be to do with the town dinner in the piazza on Friday night.

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Not quite the Fiesole shop, but they all look like this

The shop door has been left open to let in air (and pungent oil smells). In the doorway a man has partly lodged himself, craning backwards to talk to someone further down the street or, judging by the volume, across the road. Maybe even the Indian restaurant owner. Living here in this country of talkers, I try my best to start up similar types of chats with the shopkeepers I meet everyday – about the earthquake all the way down there in southern Tuscany, the school schedule, their elderly father, or mine. The doorway man disappears after a few minutes without having come in for his full chat or his packet of nails.

I can tell right away I’m not the first person to come in looking for help with mice murder. The hardware lady’s tired expression gives her the appearance of a local miracle-worker – why do they all think I can sort out their household problems for them, why can’t they just get their houses in order? – and sure enough she tells me she’s all out of traps, the old-fashioned kind, the gluey ones and the little tent ones. In fact, she tells me – “Fiesole is full of mice”.

But she won’t have any more traps in till the end of next week. “Oh Dio!” I say, and mention that I’ll be in Florence tomorrow and may have to take my custom there; she surely understands the urgency. She digs around and shows me all she has left – a packet of terrifying poison tablets – but she isn’t really suggesting I buy them. “It’s much better you buy a trap that ensures you can see the dead mouse, not just guess that it went off and died its (horrible) death somewhere else.” I nod my head. Certo.

She keeps talking before I have the chance to tell her that we have, sort of, a cat on the case. We have in fact started brazenly inviting the neighbour’s cat in for a few ganders around the house and it’s becoming quite fond of one particular floormat and some of the Lego. But she’s already noting in her order book which traps she needs to get in and she tells me I should really get the tented one – “put them in this location at this time of day, make sure you touch them with gloves or your smell will put them off.“ Will the mice guess from my smell that I’m not Italian? I wonder to myself.

“Why do you think there are so many mice around these days?” I ask her. “It’s not really turning cold yet.”

“I don’t really know”, she answers. Then she fixes her eyes on me and states, “Si stanno organizzando”. I take this to mean they’re getting themselves organized, plotting something. She says this with seriousness. And of course she must be right.

As I run back to the car empty-handed, I look around me, imagining the mice mini-gangs of Fiesole and its neighbouring hamlets who are busy setting up a network underneath these streets, the ancient groves and crumbling walls, and the decaying old basements and ill-fitted kitchens, plotting a way to finally take over the three hills of Fiesole.

They’re organizing!

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Wood vs Metal

WEDNESDAY

I go to another hardware shop down at the bottom of the hill, in the Cure area of Florence. It’s a bigger shop and there are several people milling around the counter but I’m beckoned forward, the husband of the couple will help me. I tell him I need some mouse traps.

“Fine. Do you want them alive or dead?”

“Um, dead.” (Should I want them alive?)

“And are they small or big? Small like this?” – his hands relatively close together. “Or big, like this? Like a cat?” Oh no, I react, they’re not quite so big. “Right, those are the mice you get from the river.” I assure him we live right at the top of the hill, relieved that we decided against living down here.

He disappears into the back of the back, even though the front of the shop looks like it would have everything. He comes back a minute later with some fancy-looking metal traps, with little teeth on the edges. They’re made in Germany. Of course they are. He tells me the wooden ones are no good. I know that already.

As he rings them up,  the customer beside me who’s buying serious lengths of waterproof fabric takes notice. “How much are those?” she asks. “1 euro 80 each.” “Fine, I’ll take a couple of those too then, thanks.”

FRIDAY

So far I’ve caught one little mouse and I’m learning that different cheeses make no difference, nor does chocolate or honey as recommended by some. It must be all about the placement.

Now I’m off to Florence to the really serious hardware shop down near the market.

And a weekend of murder.

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*Note to readers: I offer no apology for my topocide. Having learned in several previous cities that I cannot live with a mouse in the house, I have found it best to do them off the quickest and surest way there is.

 

 

 

The Real Scoop on Gelato

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A Japanese friend who has lived in Italy for about 15 years remembers the oddest thing she noticed when she first moved here – a man walking down the street eating an ice cream.

When you live here for a while, you develop a different relationship with gelato from that of your tourist days. As a visitor to Italy gelato is a treat to be savoured – only here can you eat the genuine article, like an original cappuccino. But over the long-term eating gelato – especially during the hot months – becomes part of your routine, indeed your daily nourishment. I could almost use the word “diet” as our own family doctor recently “recommended it” my younger daughter’s sore tummy.

Cup

We have a favourite gelateria in Florence, Badiani. We discovered it by chance on our very first August night in the city, staying at a cheap Airbnb flat a few blocks from the stadium. We arrived into this oven on the night of a Fiorentina/AC Milan match and the kids were as perplexed by the noise of helicopters and bright lights as we were by the civilised purple-clad fans chatting and relaxing outside the local wine bars. Good old Google maps pointed us to a gelateria at the other corner of our block and it turned out to be not only our favourite place since then but one of the best, and least- touristy, in the city.

I am not really a big ice-cream person, perhaps due to eating too much of it during the (J1) summer I spent serving ice-cream in Boston, at the well-known local spot Emack and Bolio’s: my one claim to fame was that I served Mark Wahlberg (then known as Marky Mark).

But living here now, especially with children, I enjoy the taste and flavours of gelato in a way I never did before, with so much more satisfaction. Living here as a (clueless) student I went to the same few places over and over and had no sense of good taste – though to be fair, one of them was Vivoli, still wowing customers today. But I think the scene has improved hugely during those 20 years and gelato eaters have become more demanding.

When you get to a point in the day where you’re hot or tired or in need of a pick-me-up, the smallest sized cone will be enough to completely refresh you, as well as your palate. Eating more than 3 scoops on a large cone – that’s starting to overdo it a bit. And not what the locals would always do.

So here are some tips from me on how to eat gelato like a local.

Gelato versus Ice cream
The main difference is that American-style ice cream uses more eggs and cream and is heavier. Italian gelato – which means frozen, so it can actually refer to all types of sweet cold stuff – uses more milk than cream, contains fewer preservatives (if any) so it was probably made very recently, might have a lighter colour and it has fewer and fresher ingredients. It could still have a lot of sugar, depending on the place, but as long as you know … that’s up to you.

You’ll notice the gelato is not always scooped up into a ball and it’s not hard and icy but soft and nearly melted. The best servers will churn it gently with an oblong metal spoon before being gently piling it into your cup or cone.

Scoop

Choose your gelateria
A shop devoted to selling gelato is called a gelateria (plural = gelaterie) but a cafe or bar might advertise themselves as such too, and they may serve high-quality gelato.

Look for a sign declaring Produzione Propria – which basically means “we make it ourselves”. (In some cases that might mean they made it from a packet, but you’ll learn to spot the difference.)

Avoid the gelaterie that displays their gelato piled up really high, and with bright colours – especially noticeable for pistachio and banana. If it’s from a pre-made gelato mix you might see a little sign displaying the logo of the dairy company alongside the flavours. But some days you’re desperate and you can’t really go too far wrong!

The best gelaterie keep their gelato in steel containers, even sometimes hidden away so you have to choose from the list of flavours on the board and you can always ask to taste them. Quantity of flavours is not always a marker of quality – some of the best and most local places offer just a few flavours. And that usually suits the local clientele just fine.

Medici

Choose your price and pay
First choose what size and price you want, pay for it at the cash desk and take the receipt (lo scontrino) to the counter and start choosing from the wonderful array. So if you want a €2 cone or cup you would ask for un cono/una coppetta da due euro.

In some places it’s okay to choose your gelato first and pay after, but this system is helpful as you don’t have to worry about paying extra to sit down, if there are seats, and you don’t have to dig around for change while holding a melting ice-cream.

Cup (una coppetta) or Cone (un cono)?
Eating from a cone is a more sensory experience and can make it last longer. Good, say, if you’re really hungry or driving a car! As for a cup, you could quibble about the wastefulness of the plastic spoon and paper cup, with no obvious method of recycling nearby. But Italians seem to go for either, depending on their mood.

The smallest size (about €2 or less) will usually be enough for you and in most gelaterie you can fit two flavours (gusti) for that. You tend to order by size and then work out with the server how many flavours you want. It’s not so much about the scoops and size, it’s actually more about the marrying of the right flavours.

If they haven’t given you a little spoon (un cucchiaino) it’s polite to ask for one unless you (or your child) can easily access the dispenser.

Taste it first
It’s fine to ask for a taste while you decide, though asking for 4 or 5 might be pushing it. You can say posso assaggiare? (can I try?) or posso gustare? (can I taste?). 

Choose your flavours carefully
Flavours that go well together are usually grouped together, in Italian they’d say they marry well (questi gusti si sposono bene).

So for example you shouldn’t really mix cream-based and fruit-based. Why? Because the textures are different; the flavours might clash; one of them is more melted than the other; or just because the server says you shouldn’t really have the mango and coffee together. Indeed I was once refused my chosen combination at our favourite place – I had to bow to their sense of propriety, though they could have been a little less stern about it!

Rome

KEY FLAVOURS
Remember, try to combine flavours that sit close together in the cabinet.

The Chocolates
It can be very dark (fondente) or more milky (cioccolato al latte or just cioccolato) or you might find it mixed with orange (arancia) or something spicy (messicano, con chilli etc).

Vanilla
I grew up with vanilla being the standard neutral ice cream you get (if you haven’t really deserved something fancier after that day’s dinner) but in Italy it’s not always on the menu. When you do find it – it’s called vaniglia – in a good gelateria, it will really taste of vanilla.

The Creams
These are the plainer, more neutral flavours, to complement a stronger chocolate or nut. But they can be magnificent in their simplicity. You have crema (often like a bakery cream), panna (more like whipping cream) and the simple Fior di latte (milk). This last is worth ordering just to be able to enunciate such a beautiful name.

A Florentine speciality is Buontalenti, named after the local lad (well, actually an architect to Grand Duke Cosimo) who, many claim, brought gelato into the modern world around 1600. It’s a lovely creamy, milky flavour and a delicious secondary choice.

Straciatella
A simple choice, this is a creamy gelato with chocolate chips. Almost as refreshing as my own favourite, menta (mint usually with chocolate chips).

Pistacchio
Be prepared for a new taste sensation. Pistacchio nuts are the pride of Sicily and they make wonderfully smooth gelato with varying degrees of nuttiness. A good gelateria will offer several styles of pistacchio and my favourite is (of course) Pistacchio da Bronte – named after the small Sicilian town, which eventually became a variant, through the father of those Yorkshire writers, of my own surname, Prunty.

Note that in Italy it’s pronounced the other way, with a hard “c” – Pistakkio.

Other Nuts
I’m not a nut person but my kids assure me you can’t go too wrong with nutty flavours as a primary or counterpoint to chocolate. Hazelnut (nocciola) is common though as it’s an expensive ingredient it’s worth looking for a good-quality and pure version. For a more chocolate-based flavour you’ll find nutella is a common ingredient, as well as Bacio – from the (acquired) taste of the Italian chocolate brand.

Flavours

The Fruits
A good gelateria follows seasonal pattern of fruits. Some wonderful words to learn here: fragola (strawberry), melone (melon), lampone (raspberry), frutti di bosco (mixed berries), anguria or cocomero (watermelon), arancia (orange), pesca (peach), ciliegia (cherry), fico (fig).

Limone (lemon) is usually year-round and almost a category on its own, with an amazing ability to bring down your temperature and a good measure of the quality of the gelateria.

Semi-freddo and others
This is your section with flavours like Tiramisu or Zuppa Inglese (trifle) which are more like semi-frozen puddingy desserts, not quite ice-cream. Nice if you’re hungry as well as hot.

Some interesting colours are produced from sesame (sesame side gelato, which is gray/purple and considered healthy), liquirizia (licorice, green/brown, let me know if you try it), and a friend swears he once had tabacco (tobacco).

You can also find flavours like riso (rice) and cheese-flavoured gelato like mascarpone, or my current favourite which is ricotta e fichi (ricotta and fig).

Gluten

Gluten-free and Vegan
Many fruit flavours actually have dairy in them (you can tell by how much the colours of each fruit seem more fruity or more creamy). But more and more gelaterie offer gluten-free or vegan flavours and will usually advertise them. Or you can just ask.

And the best gelato in Florence?
Gelato is good all over Italy though Florence (luckily for us) is considered one of the top spots.

This wasn’t meant to be a guide, but how can I not make a few suggestions?

Downtown the perennial favourites which you’ll find in many guides are Vivoli, Carabè, Perche Nò and La Carraia. I quite like the big multinationals Grom and Venchi, though I prefer the former as they’re all about freshness and have a great location beside the Duomo. Near San Marco there’s the nice Sicilian place Arà è Sicilia that does amazing granitas and on the other side of town at the bottom gate of the Boboli Gardens, at Porta Romana, there’s the friendly and health-conscious Gelateria Yoguteria Porta Romana. But in our house, the favourite by far, even if I find them a little snooty, is Badiani – close to the football stadium and well-off the tourist track but buzzing with well-heeled locals and flat-footed football fans long into the evening. My preferred option for friendliness is further back along the road to the centre, Cavini’s – cheap and fresh and friendly. (In Fiesole I previously recommended Ferro Battuto but as of June 2017 it has not reopened. Best to stick with Le Cure for a gelato nearby.)

Vivoli

How to order like a local
Similar to the art of ordering at a busy cafe, it’s an education to observe how the regulars procure their scoop of the day. Here’s how:

After greeting a few people in the door you drop your coins of exact change in the cashier’s bowl and wander over to the display. You probably already want the same thing you’ve had the last couple of weeks – and many people go for just one flavour in their cup – but maybe you go for something new. You catch the eye of the next server who scoops up your choice in 10 seconds, you’re out the door, hovering to eat it while you chat to another regular. And you’re gone, back to work or your shopping errands or your car, in less than 4 minutes. Or if this is evening-passeggiata time you might linger to chat for another hour. Just play it by ear.

Some other links:

More on gelato in Florence from Emiko Davies
A little history
More on flavours

Happy scooping!

Wash your Language is a blog about real life and language, by an Irish-Canadian exploring the change in pace in Italy after years in Norway. I offer web copyediting and proofreading as well as translation from Norwegian to English and Italian to English. Read more.

The Midsummer Saint

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Saint John the Baptist – what a great saint he was! Source of wonderful stories of strength and piety, meeting a dramatic ending that has fuelled many gory images and theatrical overkill for years. His feast day is June 24, tonight is the Eve and an excuse for celebrations in many countries over many centuries. It’s handy that his feast day also happens to be midsummer – the middle of the year and a marking point for many. I think of it as a magical time.

SalomeCar
Caravaggio – Salome with the Head of John the Baptist, NGL (Web Gallery of Art/Wikipedia)

St John – Saint Jean Baptiste – Sant Hans – San Giovanni.

These are the names that have marked each midsummer through my life, and from the earliest years they have made me feel more and more at a remove from the place I still often call home – Dublin.

Our family holidays were spent in Connemara, in the deep west of Ireland, at the unoccupied house of my aunt and uncle – a bungalow perched on a small empty lake with shelves of books, card games to play, four bedrooms to be fought over, turf for the fire (yes, in summer) and no access to drinking water anywhere west of Salthill on the edge of Galway city. As the (clueless) youngest I found myself tagging along with whatever was happening and I have memories, foggy but still there, of being at the house for at least one “St John’s” and joining the local teenagers who were going strangely crazy around a messy bonfire. They were kind to let us Dublin intruders (jackeens) enjoy the moment with them, well they seemed to through their chatting to each other in an Irish I never learned to understand. They had clearly been building up the bonfire for days in a patch well-hidden away from the road, one field through the maze of stone-walled partitioned fields we spent hours navigating in the least rainy of daytimes. Those were my first moments of seeing a parallel life to my own, a glimpse into what it could be like to grow up, to live somewhere other than my world in suburban Dublin.

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My husband is from the western folds of Canada but he’s always been a Francophone and held a candle for the romance held for Jean Baptiste in France and Quebec. Always the political type, he travelled with college friends to Quebec in 1995 to persuade the locals to vote “Non!” in the referendum about leaving Canada – over 20 years before today’s vote today in the UK. The result was very tight, and the union held. (There continues to be a sense of two solitudes in Canada, though our man Trudeau junior is doing his darndest.) The main Quebec holiday is actually on June 24 – La Fête de la Saint-Jean-Baptiste, or just La Saint-Jean. This always seemed a much more festive day in Canada, those French Canadians knowing much better how to have fun than the rest of the country on the other official holiday of July 1st – Canada Day. Indeed many Quebecois would choose that day to make their annual move from one rental apartment to another – sorry, we’re busy. During our time living together in Canada we lived in several diverse places, but never managed to set up home in Quebec (or have to deal with its separate immigration process) – so for us it keeps its mystique. Another “other” place.

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Living in Norway for seven years, we were bitten by the bug of the Scandinavian Midsummer. In different parts of the country Norwegians have their own traditions but when celebrating in Oslo we were often reminded that “it’s really a Swedish holiday” – that’s where you really want to go for the hard-core celebrations, dancing around poles, fancy costumes and all. In either country it is of course a fantastic opportunity to celebrate – the longest days of the year, a reason to stay up late, be outside, breathe the air and celebrate life. When the kids were very small, we joined a Swedish-style celebration at Oslo’s outdoor folk museum and I was amazed to find myself letting them splash around in a pond with other kids well past 11pm – this was some serious hair-letting-down going on around us. Bonfires were to be found, parties were held late into the night and there was always a sense of holiday about it. Midsummer has such a resonance there, it’s in people’s blood. But it wasn’t in mine and it felt like someone else’s celebration. It wasn’t part of my upbringing, except for those hazy memories of the stone fields in the dark.

Nikolai Astrup - Midsummer Eve Bonfire (Bergen Art Museum)
Nikolai Astrup – Midsummer Eve Bonfire (Bergen Art Museum)

So here we are in Florence – where the patron saint is none other than St John. San Giovanni. And they’ve been celebrating him since medieval times, none better to do so. In Roman times, Florence’s patron was the god Mars and early Christians figured that St John was a good enough match for him, so he became the patron saint. The wonderful Baptistry in front of the Duomo is of course named for him. But what does it means for us newcomers – we have a public holiday tomorrow, we can watch a costumed parade with church celebration which includes the showing of whatever relics Florence got of St John himself, enjoy tomorrow night’s big fireworks show and – if we had the stomach for it –  watch some of the calcio storico match/fight going on outside Santa Croce. This is Florence’s less savoury equivalent to the genteel palios of Siena and other cities, a rough, no-holds-barred form of combat where four teams representing the quarters of the city fight over a ball. Maybe we can watch some online afterwards (after enjoying further reruns of the amazing goal from last night’s Ireland-Italy victory!)

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Photo from VisitFlorence.com

June 24, our first midsummer in this place, still at a remove from all the places we have lived and loved, but full of opportunity to learn more, see and taste more.

Wash your Language is a blog about real life and language, by an Irish-Canadian exploring the change in pace in Italy after years in Norway. I offer web copyediting and proofreading as well as translation from Norwegian to English and Italian to English. Read more.

The Life Domestic

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There’s a sign tacked on the wall outside our local pizzeria.

“Found. Gray (domestic) rabbit. Call this number”

IMG_6095And added underneath by someone: Already eaten!

Here in Tuscany rabbits are indeed a regular, and tasty, part of the menu. But the writer of this notice knows that a pet is a pet – hence the care given to mention that the bunny hopping around his house is “domestic”.

In Italian the word for “pet” is “un animale domestico” (a domestic animal) or “un animale di compagnia” (companion animal), this latter sounding only slightly less technical, giving some indication of the emotional value and importance of this human-animal bond.

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Italy is a very public society and as no pet is a better companion than a dog, you see dogs everywhere here. They accompany their owners into shops, cafes, church services, on the bus and in the laps of car drivers.

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These dogs were left to wait outside the famous butcher’s Falorni in Greve in Chianti – maybe their cones were a foil against the amazing smells during the 15 minutes their (German) owners were inside.

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Eating out for lunch or dinner there’s often a dog – of any size – under a table or yapping close by.

And one local gelateria even offers ice cream for dogs.

Ice cream? I'd love some too!
“Ice cream? I’d love some too!”

I was at a children’s sports competition recently and along with half the parents of Florence I was crammed into the stands, indeed sitting on the concrete steps of what was probably the emergency exit. One woman left just after her daughter’s performance – she inched along the row, mobile in one manicured hand, the other holding the leash of her dog, the little yapper left to navigate his own way through the pedicured feet around him.

I can’t say much about the place of cats (or rabbits) in the family home, having come across few. A notable exception was seeing one in the supermarket once, a big furry gray thing ensconsed in the arms of its owner as he moved along the aisles.

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Beware of the cat (a sign on our road)

Dogs are treated much the way children are – you don’t see them cuddled and spoiled all the time, they’re just along for the ride, even if that includes having their photo taken against the Ponte Vecchio. I haven’t done a spot check of how many Italian dogs have social media accounts (see #puppiesofinstagram) but I suspect overall it would be odder here than in other countries – many of these animals are still more for domestic purpose than simply objects of affection.

There are lots of ideas out there about how different languages interpret the bark of a dog. Scientists believe dogs can understand each other but people have different ways of hearing their bark: but what they seem to have in common is that they speak twice – such as “hav-hav” (Hebrew) or “wan-wan” (Japanese).

My husband and I have been living too peripatetic a life over the last 20 years to justify having a pet of any kind (apparently), but my 10-year-old and I are shameless dog people and share the habit of commenting on every dog we see on the street (or restaurant), especially older dogs who we’d love to adopt. At a recent lunch with friends in the country, my ears perked up when their neighbour mentioned her dog had just had 15 pups. Marking my interest she tried to convince me it would be a good idea to take one home – “well yes”, I told her, “I do have the time to walk it every day, yes we have a garden, yes half the family would love one, but it’s a really nice rented apartment… we couldn’t possibly”. “Oh! but it’s a dog”, she cried. “This is Italy, dogs stay outside!”

And indeed they usually do, at least in the countryside. Over the last couple of decades dogs have started to live more indoors, especially as city apartment-dwellers increasingly like to keep lap dogs like pugs and poodles. But many dogs around our small Tuscan town, are clearly less considered as pets than for traditional jobs like guarding, or weekend-hunting. And they stay outdoors – making sure they let us know they’re there, with a good old barking fit at 4am or 4pm. The ever spot-on Italy observer Tim Parks thinks this Italian need to keep the dog outside might be a hangover from people’s lingering collective memories of living under the same roof as cows and chickens.

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The word “domestic” comes from the Latin word “domus” which means house, specifically the house of an upper-class Roman. It entered English as “dome”, or stately building. To me it feels like a formal word, indeed often with negative connotations. It can be associated with the mundane (domestic affairs), with servitude (domestics) and even with aggression and violence (domestic violence or abuse). This last is in fact an ongoing issue in Italy where societal norms deal badly with issues of partner violence, underreporting of abuse is low, and after some horrific high profile murders the media is currently talking of a nationwide emergency of “femicide”.

Un animale domestico – that’s how you say it in many languages. In English the term domestic animal is seen as a more technical term, referring to an animal that is not wild, but serves people and is dependant upon them. It’s even a legal term, have a look at this legal case I found about whether a camel should be considered wild or domestic.

But domestic animal just doesn’t sound as cosy as what we say in English – pet. What a lovely word that is! Just saying it makes you think of an animal that is not only domesticated but truly an emotional companion, for walks in the rain, sitting in the windowsill (tugging at the lace curtain), or just for being there to stroke/pet while you sit together (and watch the cricket on the telly).

The word pet actually came from the Scots Gaelic peata, tame animal, and its softness lends it associations of affection and caring. In Ireland, where it also came straight from the Gaelic, it’s used everyday as a charming appellation for children and friends (“ah sure listen pet, she was just chancing her arm”).

Down the road from our house is a farmhouse down off the road. We can look down over the high garden wall and say an encouraging hello to the unfortunate mutt that lives there. He’s left to himself all day long with a small scrap of garden between the wall and his owner’s house, his dirty mess left all over the ground and with little company. He can’t stop his tail from wagging sadly even as he keeps up the pretence of barking ferociously at you. A weary, empty bark.

In December we visited the cathedral of Lucca and I was taken by how many people were drawn to, (and drawing), this sculpture – the very beautiful funerary monument to the young Ilaria Caretto, carved by Jacopo della Quercia in the stunningly early date of 1406. At her feet sits a dog, not unlike a pug you’d find today in a flat in Kensington or Madrid. It may or may not be her dog, but it’s certainly intended by the artist to represent fidelity and undying love.

What more could you ask for in a pet?

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The Food is Beautiful

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You’re moving to Italy, they cried. Think of all the wonderful food you’ll eat every day! Your kids will learn to eat well, you can shop for fresh, amazing, natural and colourful food at the market everyday and absorb ancient secret recipes for the healthiest food on the planet! Washed down by good wine which will be cheaper than water!

It sounds good doesn’t it?

And yes, the whole food side of things is wonderful now we live in Italy and it’s fascinating to observe how it is completely integrated into daily life. In fact, I’m holding myself back from gushing too much – my Norwegian readers will understand just how amazing it is after years in the barren aisles of Rema, Coop and Kiwi, forced to buy overpriced, low-choice foodstuffs. Eating out with our kids in Oslo was something we could rarely afford to do and we often travelled home from a trip abroad with a bag full of  basic groceries (cheese, ham, even soap) that was cheaper abroad; even from Denmark or Germany.

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I was never ready for this food at the Norwegian supermarket.

But like any element of life in a new country, you begin to see more complexity. This is also true when you start eating like a local.

When we first arrived, we behaved like tourists (well, Norwegian tourists) who relish the thought of living amidst all this good stuff.

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Produce at Esselunga

Here we were in Tuscany at the end of summer and markets and restaurants overflowing with tomatoes, aubergines, greens, beans, watermelon, and oranges. Into autumn we got to taste the fresh red wine (vino novo), the type that’s not even corked and goes fizz in your mouth. We ate well and started to explore the local flavours, encouraging our kids to try new foods. On their first day of pre-school camp they had clearly clued into the behaviour of their new peers. What did they give you for lunch, we asked them. Oh just rabbit lasagne.

We soon realized how food is part of the conversation. Every conversation, in fact. In other places the default topic is the weather or real estate. In Italy it’s food, among strangers, friends and especially family. It makes sense, there’s so much to say, so you can see how it’s treated with great respect and interest.

A Scottish friend who’s lived here many years told me how she first found it so dull, all this chat at the office lunch table about olive varieties or fillings for tortellini or the new pizzeria up the road, but after a while she got into it and finds many reasons to talk about it. And we’re heading that way too.

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Italians love to talk and that’s what cellphones were designed for. (Smart phones are still mostly used as conversational devices here, often shoved up the side of your moped helmet just before you put it on and buzz off down the road). On the bus, walking down the street, if you tune in to someone talking on their phone, you’ll almost certainly hear it’s about food: “can you pick up some of that and we’ll serve it with the rice, enough for 8” or “how did you make that filling, it was delicious” or just “where did you book for lunch on Sunday?”

Any visitor to Italy has enjoyed the typical three-course meal imbibed over a lazy hour or two, often with friends: pasta or rice followed by fish or meat and dessert and coffee, with wine and water. It’s a wonderful way to eat when you’re on holiday, if you’re keen to try lots of new flavours in a new region. You can find strongly-held traditions when it comes to what should be eaten when, with what sauce, and in what season. When you’re living and cooking here, you find your own way to cook up all those ingredients from the market, start working through the shelves of pasta: spaghetti number 3, spaghetti number 1 or fresh pici (my new favourite). And I even tried out making pasta – so far just once.

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My ravioli

So we kept eating, but then I was posting fewer posts online of amazing pasta dishes, gelato or just the simple lunches I rustled up at home. We do sometimes make the trip to shop at the market – always an enjoyable experience – but it’s easier to get to a supermarket every day. Just as millions of Italians do. And d’you know what? Not every Italian is an expert cook – cooking classes are popular everywhere and people do buy frozen pizza!

Then after a while, you realise you’re not crazy about the unsalted butter or unsalted bread and you start to crave some hearty Norwegian wholegrain spelt. Or, much as you appreciate the fantastic artichokes appearing week after week, you never really master a way to cook them. You don’t really fancy eating tripe for lunch, famous as it is meant to be.

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And then you finally admit to yourself, that really you wouldn’t mind a curry. If you manage to find the ingredients at the supermarket, keeping your head down while you browse the corner section with international foods. Or how about some rhubarb! I can’t find that in Tuscany.

At home with the kids I often cook a normal (i.e. Irish/Norwegian) dinner of meat and two veg and recently it was a bizarre treat to cook up an old-fashioned macaroni and cheese for the kids – I barely remembered how to do it and to me the taste was an instant return to New York, and a little place off Union Square that served up single tureens of steaming, cheesy mac & cheese.

Another issue is food quality and knowing what you’re buying. Even where we live, out towards the countryside, it’s not easy to find organic meat or the best quality eggs. I’ve only begun to read about Italy’s huge industrial food industries and realise the farmers markets we have found really need more customers, like for this delicious local red wine. The woman who produced it had to remind us to pour out the top oil coating before drinking the wine. Olive oil, the original wine preservative.

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I’m still excited by most of my shopping experiences – like this handy box of basil I found in the frozen section. And I’m still trying to figure out the best ways to use an ingredients like fabulous sage (salvia) which grows profusely in our garden and yet the Coop sells a tiny packet in plastic for €1.26. I know, I should be ashamed of myself! At least I’m getting to learn more how to cook through meeting great people.

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The kids – are they learning to eat well? It’s hard to tell. They have developed a new relationship to food through eating new things and being served three-course hot lunches at school. But they’re also young and – here’s a revelation – Italian kids are picky too, and they don’t always get the best choices in food. Yes, even in Italy! More on that in another blog post.

Eating here is a wonderful experience, and all that you could imagine. It’s hard to admit it’s not perfect, many friends (and not just serious foodies) would give their eye teeth to live where we do. Believe me, we are grateful for it and the opportunity to learn how it can be such an integral part of the culture we’re living in – a bigger part than it has been for me before.

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Seatbelts optional

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It’s school pickup time and I offer a lift home to my friend and her two kids. Like us, they are a non-Italian family. We realise that giving them a lift would mean fitting six people into the five spaces of our car. We discuss putting one child on a mum’s lap with a seat belt around both. We know we could manage, it’s just a two minute drive to their house. But she wants to play it safe and decides to walk home with one of the kids instead. Four in the car, all belted up. That’s fine.

Up in this Tuscan hilltown we call home, the roads are mostly narrow and twisty and you soon learn how to park in awkward spaces. Reaching my friend’s place, I carefully edge the car backwards alongside the railing outside the building. The trick is to squeeze it in just enough to feel you’ve made an effort to allow the neighbours space to pass, but not so tight that a child can’t open the door to squeeze out. All the same, I pull in the driver-side mirror. To be on the safe side.

As I’m reversing/squeezing, I see coming up behind me a white Smart car – one of those “urban”, very small cars that older Italians love and still manage to drive fast. The car really is tiny and the driver takes up most of it. Or… what’s that? … do I see two drivers? There is one large man, but he seems to have the face of a six-year-old. In fact that is a six-year-old, a boy, whose hands are also on the steering wheel. He’s sitting on the driver’s lap.

As the B side of my brain keeps moving my own car, the A side is asking a few things. Is that six-year-old driving that car? Is it so small that there’s no seat for him? Is it physically possible to even get a seat belt around him if he’s on someone’s lap? Do a car like that even have seat belts?

Of course it must. It’s a smart car.

At this stage, having spent seven months driving here everyday I’ve become used to seeing the optional use of seat belts. After years of living in Norway and Canada, where it’s unthinkable to even have the wrong sized booster seat for your child, this has been an eye-opener. It shouldn’t be. I suspect in most parts of the world, seatbelts are optional or ignored, and I’ve – shock, horror – even seen kids go belt-free in Ireland.

It’s fun, but really quite pointless, to reminicise about my childhood car memories – as the youngest of four siblings and many cousins, I was often the one perching uncomfortably in the middle bit of the back seat, inching towards the front-seat adult conversation, or simply just placed on the floor. Seat belts weren’t much of an option, they came in only in, um, 1992. Ah sure, there was less traffic, it wasn’t so dangerous back then. We like to think.

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But my heart is in my mouth now when I think of my own kids being driven around in hazardous circumstances. My nine-year-old was driven to and from a party here one evening and was more excited to tell us afterwards about the seating arrangements in the car: coming home there were eight people in the car, who sat on laps or in the boot/trunk, or if they were in a seat with a seat belt, there was no real need to belt up.

Several Italian friends have been shocked by my birthday party story. According to my sources, seat belts laws are definitely enforced here and indeed you often see the other extreme of safety- the highest-end car seats in place for every child well into teenage years.

But every day you can see all variety of seatbelt neglect. Some of the variations I have seen with my own eyes, especially along the school run:

  • Child moving around in back seat or front passenger seat, presumably not belted in.
  • Multiple children moving around, ditto.
  • Child sitting on driver’s lap, possibly belted? Probably not.
  • Child sitting in the boot/trunk or perched up in the back window.
  • Infant held onto the mother’s lap in the back seat, both of them sitting perpendicularly with back to the window (still trying to figure that one out)

As for mopeds, they almost seem safer as I see the child and adult always wearing a helmet and moving at a reasonable speed.

And of course the school bus jaunts off on trips with no seat belts in place (still no doubt a common scenario in many countries) and my kids seem to enjoy the bumping around involved in it – they choose carefully who they get to sit across from. Indeed my younger first became aware of the seatbelt-optional rule on a quick trip to Rome three years ago when we asked her in the taxi: why won’t you put your seatbelt on? Her answer: well the driver’s sure not using one so why should I?

Note to readers: Driving in Italy is offering me more than one blog post, to mention at the very least the near-constant use of cellphones. More to follow…

Back at my friend’s house, I watch the Smart car pull up to the building opposite and the child jumps out to press a button. The Italian-style protect-all-my-property-gate opens slowly and the boy stands to the side while his grandfather (or father?) hooshes the car up the little driveway. Reappearing with a little scooter, he sets the boy up to scoot around on the road before they head into the house. The older man sees my car, still carefully reeling into position, and his arm immediately goes out to protect the boy, to wave him away from my car. There’s little danger of that, I have my eyes glued to him, whizzing around happily on his scooter.

Or maybe his grandfather knows that the kid can drive better than he scoots.

 

Wash your Language is a blog about real life and language, by an Irish-Canadian exploring the change in pace in Italy after years in Norway. I offer web copyediting and proofreading as well as translation from Norwegian to English and Italian to English. Read more.

The Need to Greet

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Every country has its own culture of social politeness, often a complex system that goes beyond acknowledging another person’s presence to placing people according to their allotment on the social scale – an older teacher, a priest, the white-haired guy who gives out the parking tickets in your small Tuscan town. I’ve been very struck in Italy by how important greetings are, especially seen through the eyes of my children.

We moved here 8 months ago with our Norwegian-reared children. In Norway, one doesn’t always greet  an acquaintance when walking past and saying hello and goodbye can be brief exchanges anyway: you can get away with saying hei for either one. Or with just a nod of the head, smiling not essential. (There are also “good morning”s etc and I associate the lovely God Dag (Good day) only with our dear English friend David who, as an actor, could get away with such an extravagant term.)

In Italy, we have found ourselves at the other end of the politeness spectrum. As parents we’ve had to revert to our longer-held education in acknowledgment and greeting. And to try and gently, but firmly, encourage our children to go a bit crazier in the hellos and goodbyes department.

So here’s a little primer on Italy.

Everyone knows Ciao. It’s one word that can mean both hello and goodbye. Very handy, and cute.

However … you won’t get far by saying only that when you greet people, especially if you plan to spend more than a few days in an Italian environement. Ciao is considered casual and it’s generally fine for children to use when addressing the butcher or that white-haired parking guy. But it’s not really appropriate for many daily salutations – and this is a country that takes salutation very seriously.

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Photo taken at the Stibbert Museum. That’s quite the expectant look.

Salutare of course means “to greet”, both arriving and leaving. Echoing the Salute that Italians say when they give a toast, it nicely encapsulates a sense of health and of respecting the other person.

There are many ways to say hello and goodbye, most of them with the pleasurable sensation of a well-enunciated Italian word. You should try them all out, ideally after you’ve quickly ascertained what your relationship might be to the person: buongiorno (formal, universal) and its variations buonasera, buona mattina, buondì. Salve is a useful in-between for addressing the neighbour-you-haven’t-quite-met. Then there are the goodbyes (which can be long) – arriverderci, arriverderla – and the promises to see each other other again –  ci vediamo, a dopo, saluti.

To acknowledge someone’s presence and, conversely, to announce your arrival is very important here. This is a place where human contact is part of everything, and most everything is public.

This need to be acknowledged and always say hello is something I’m still getting used to. In the changing room at the doctor’s office or even the swimming pool, each person entering says Buongiorno, and Arrivederci when leaving. They’re saying it to the room in general, even if it’s full of half-naked strangers who answer dutifully back to the air. (One reason I’m slow to pick up on this habit, apart from the obvious, is that my Italian Rs are still a bit rusty to make my Buongiorno sound properly Italian).

It is impolite to not return someone’s “Buongiorno” or “Arrivederci”, especially for a child. This has been a challenge for our (as previously mentioned) Norwegian children. An entire group of people in the room might stand by the front door, expecting the appropriate response from an adult. Indeed it’s as if everyone is taking on the common cause of guiding this child on the right path to full politeness. Eyes will roll and voices might be raised – “get over there and give that strange man with the bag of sweets a hug (un abbraccio) now!“

Italian culture is renowned for its many subtle complexities of placing people on relevant levels of authority, according to profession, gender, even attitude. In his book, The Italians, John Hooper memorably describes the local barman sizing him up each day depending on his dress and demeanour, addressing him variously as dottore, professore and even capitano. And there is ongoing debate about a woman’s choice to be called a professore and not professoressa, or an avocatessa (lawyer) and not an avvocato.

The two versions of “you” are still very much in use, unlike in English where it went more democratic many years ago. One uses a different form of “you” depending on how well you know the person – lei (formal) and tu (casual) – and people will ask you ci diamo del tu? which means, “are we familiar enough at this stage to stop saying Lei?” Another potential headache, but with a smile we non-native speakers can usually get away with any mistakes.

With such an open culture of greeting amongst strangers, a greeting can quickly turn into a conversation  – to me a similar rhythm to the Irish style of chat, but with a more positive and lively feel to it. I regularly find myself in random conversations, nodding enthusiastically to the details of my locker-mate’s tango class or the fellow shopper in the pharmacy, even if I don’t really know what they’re talking about.

And it doesn’t always matter, we’re engaged in human interaction, talking about the joys of life – and in a very simple way, making each other feel more like liked, just through that moment of contact.

 

Irish – where it all began

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I’ve lived more of my life away from Ireland than in it, but of course I always think of it as home and part of my children’s identity too. Language is key to that. At school I learned Irish for many year starting at the age of 4, and it’s not an easy language to learn. But I really believe that early start got me to where I am today.

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I was lucky to go to a primary school that had a positive attitude to the language, and in later years I was one of those kids who didn’t really mind wading through the 18th century epic poems, mad grammar and spelling, and the much-maligned kitchen sink drama of Dingle housewife Peig (a book known to be ritually destroyed after completing the exam). What made it tough for people was that it was mandatory: you had to pass it to enter university and get a civil service job. But it’s a wonderful language to hear and speak and has a deep, rich heritage, very close to the traditional music that I play and love.

My parents weren’t able to help much with my Irish homework – it was not taught well in the 1940s. But my siblings and I benefitted from the first great strides made during the 1970s to standardise the teaching of the language. An early advantage I discovered when moving away from home was how useful a secret language it could be — though you might get in trouble commenting about others on the London tube.

Irish – also called Gaelic, but that’s more for foreigners – is actually the official language so the country is technically bilingual. This means that street signs and paperwork are in two languages and as an EU minority language, taxpayers’ money pays for interpreters sitting in the European Parliament. Many people still think of it as a dying language, that too much is invested in it. A begrudger might indeed think I’ve lived away for too long and am too romantic about it. In reality only about 80,000 people speak Irish  on a daily basis although this number has been growing and the many second-generation Polish and Nigerian children often famously learn it better than their peers.

Moving away from Dublin in 1995 I could not have imagined the blossoming of the language seen in the last 10 years, becoming cool enough that you’ll hear teenagers speaking it on the bus in Dublin (well, certain parts of the city). The Irish language TV station TG4 is an innovative broadcaster, full of lovely young faces, and if we were living in Ireland we might well have our children at the local gaelscoil (Irish school) to ensure they’re learning better than I ever did. You can actually study the language in most countries in the world.

I’m a strong believer that the learning of Irish from an early age – a language so structurally different to English – leads to a population naturally able to take on more languages (and indeed carry a tune). Many a smart politician during the Celtic Tiger was delighted to welcome the Dells, Googles and Facebooks who wanted to build their European headquarters in Ireland, encouraging them to take advantage of one of Europe’s most multi-lingual (and youngest) countries. And they’re still there, though the graduates have been leaving in droves since the recession – a story for another day.

After learning Irish from the age of 4, I started on school French at 10, then German for a few years and by the time I got to university (having survived all those exams about the modh coinniollach) I was all set to take on Italian or Russian. Italian won out and here I am, many years later, working on i pronomi possessivi with my 6 year old who can roll her Rs much better than I ever will.

Screen Shot 2016-03-17 at 15.46.38
gaeltee.com

When my daughters were small, I would use some Irish phrases in everyday chat – Tabhair dom do lámh (give me your hand), Oíche mhaith (good night) or Tóg go bog é (calm down). I would have used more except we were living in Norway and needed to focus on getting used to Norwegian or just practising English.  So for 7 years we mixed it up a bit.

Now, in Italy, we’re living through a third language and I’m figuring out how to do the trilingual thing with them – learning Italian, speaking English everyday but also remembering their Norwegian. (We only speak English at home).

But some of those old phrases are hard-wired – they’ll respond when I say them – and this morning the older one assured me she could say a few Irish words to her classmates if they were curious: Dia Dhuit (“Hello”, or literally “God be with you”) and Dia ‘s Muire Dhuit (“I’m grand thanks”, or literally – and I kid you not – “God and Mary be with you”.)

Conas tá tú – she waved at me as I walked away.

Tá mé go hiontach – I’m grand thanks!

Watch up Trump, here is coming il Presidente!

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This story hasn’t really hit the news and I can’t think why. An Italian has been pretending to run as a presidential candidate in the US and thousands have fallen for the joke.

You couldn’t make it up. The BBC revealed last week that an Italian marketing professional Alessandro Nardone transformed himself 8 months ago into “California congressman” Alex Anderson who was running as a candidate* for the US presidency. This was for a gag, to promote a novel Nardone had written about this character, Anderson. As part of the stunt he launched a pretty comprehensive online campaign with the benign tagline of #americaisnow, and to his surprise it actually took off and after a while he was getting media requests to join campaign debates. He never even left his small town in northern Italy and friends helped him record a campaign video at the local bar: in the video he whizzes along on his moped waving an American flag to loud guitar music, up to a group of “supporters”, stopping short of kissing one man on the cheek.  He has over 20,000 twitter followers and attracted more each time he slagged off Hilary Clinton.

Fair play to him – he’s a smart guy who pulled off a crazy idea, he clearly understands social media, and indeed probably knows more about the US than many of its actual voters. He even thinks Edward Snowden should be president (or did he mean to say running mate?).

Now as a language nerd (and this is a language blog) I wonder – how could he have come this far? Reading through his website and twitter account, you should be able to see something is not quite right, but no-one realised anything was up.

Screen Shot 2016-03-07 at 23.27.20

We’re talking, of course, about bad English. That’s not to say that native-speaking politicians, or their interns, displays full mastery of the language. Anderson/Nardone seems to walk the thin line – he has enough confidence to get his meaning across, it’s just all a bit wobbly in the delivery.

How did people go with his opinions – or even understand what he was talking about? Here’s his bio which reads smoothly enough, if a little odd (and hilariously fake):

Alex was born thirty-nine years ago in the heart of Los Angeles, and grew up in San Pedro with his mother Ann, his father Ron and his inseparable friends seagulls, which he used to watch at the harbor, every day at sunset. After graduating from Yale, Alex got a PhD in International law and economics and, after only a few months, passed the exam becoming the youngest District Attorney of whole California.

Then it gets stranger and harder to read:

…in this case, the young Anderson seems to have what it takes. What do I mean? Wanting to be vague we could talk about simple cursus but as the Huffington Post here love to be precise, we say Skull andBones. It tells you nothing? But of course yes, who does not know the secret society the most famous and influentialof the Globe? Okay. So happens that both Bush senior as Bush son they so proudly part, just like Anderson, starting from his grandfather, to get to the “small” Alex. Strange life, right?

Were those people who followed him actually paying attention beyond the headlines on the website?  Wonderful headlines like this one:
Screen Shot 2016-03-07 at 23.27.31

Someone clearly did some decent proofreading along the way (you can still get one of these for just $6!):

Screen Shot 2016-03-07 at 23.23.03

And then, as usual, it’s the status updates written on the fly that really show that something is (linguistically) very wrong.

Didn’t anyone notice the Italian accent shining through here?

Screen Shot 2016-03-07 at 15.03.23

Or mixed-up possessive pronouns?

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But this guy claims to have been retweeted more than Jeb Bush and has more twitter followers than many other candidates*. Which makes us wonder how important Twitter really is at this level of “politics”. That’s something to look at in another post.

I could also look more at the general quality of English from someone like Trump or, indeed the Italian prime minister and some people even get picky about what Obama might have said wrong.

But hey, we do live in a democracy. Even – apparently – one that can cross oceans.

———

*The complete list of declared candidates for the 2016 US election comes to 1,591. It includes characters like “Riff Raff”, “Luther T. The Merciless Lieutenant Ridiculous Warlord Stock”, “The Muslim Dictator Trump”, “Vladimir Putin” and the out-and-out “Antichrist”. But obviously you don’t have to be registered, or indeed real, to throw up on an online campaign.

————–

About Wash your Language

I’d love to help you polish your English! I offer web copywriting and editing as well as translation from Norwegian to English and Italian to English. Read more.

That’s Amore, amore

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Valentine’s Day is behind us, for this year. But in Italy words of love are everywhere, every day and in every situation. It’s there in the plaintive teenage graffiti, the songs on the radio, the kisses on the street and, I’ve really noticed, in the way people address each other. “Amore! Come va?”

And why shouldn’t everyone be addressed as “love”, especially when life is beautiful in such a beautiful place? A parent to a child, a friend to another, a shop assistant to the customer – everyone can be called “amore”.

In Norway you’ll commonly hear the lovely phrase skatten min – my treasure (or more precisely, for these days, “my taxes”.) But it’s not really relevant to strangers. Where is the love that’s so strong and all-enveloping it’s used all the time?

And I mean, all the time:

“Ah my love, this cash register is closed”

“Oh my love did you not do your homework?”

“Sorry love, did I bump your car?”

Amore
Florentines love their graffiti

An old Yorkshire greengrocer might ask “what’ll you have luv?” It’s affectionate and charming. But that’s not really love, it even needs to be spelled differently to be sure there’s no awkward reminder of the big word itself. This is no grand passion he’s echoing.

English has many words of affectionate greeting (any of which could be used to translate Amore) – darling, sweetheart, dear, baby – but they’re taking us far from the original sentiment.

In Ireland what do we say? Pet or dote. They’re both affectionate and, characteristically, a bit different (with the emphasis on the soft Irish t). But like so many expressions in that wet-and-windy/changeable country, they’re at one remove from straightforward language and simple expression of affection.

In Canada I hear “bud” used a lot (especially to kids dressed in any kind of sporting attire). I’ll admit it’s not my favourite word but it is clearly affectionate and certainly bandied about enough to cover the recipient with a sense of commonly-understood affection and kindness, with a certain jostling parental remove.

Here in Italy, as well as Amore, people might be called caro/cara, or Tesoro, something my kids get called by strangers and now (why not?) by me.

But I’m going with Amore. Simple, ancient, melodious, universal. It’s what it’s all about.

Read more about the street art of Florence in my 2017 blog post

From Norway to Italy

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In the summer of 2015 I moved with the family and all our worldly goods from Oslo to Italy, and what a change it has been! So many aspects of daily life are different, and it has been fascinating to settle into a normal life in a beautiful place. I’ll be sharing some of my observations about how people communicate in different ways, some of the interesting expressions particular to a place and the little things that can sparkle a day.

I have a degree in Italian language and literature (from many years ago) and it’s a real pleasure to be able to speak it on a daily basis – even when facing civil servants, teachers or doctors. It is also helping my kids manage the change, having a mum who can understand their homework and translate to their friends.

Firenze Boat

The initial switch from Norwegian to Italian was tricky – and still is when we have Norwegian visitors – especially when managing some of the smaller words we use everyday.

O – in Italian “o” means “or”: pizza o pasta? But in Norwegian “o” is how Oslonians pronounce “og” which means “and”. So we’d find ourselves ordering too much food at a restaurant.

(Ah, food… now there’s a subject I could devote a whole blog to, how the issue of food rocks your life when you move from Norway to Italy)

Vi – in Italian “vi” means “you, plural”: vi abbiamo visto sulla spiaggia (we saw you on the beach). This was confusing as in Norwegian it refers to “us”: vi har sett dere pa fjellet (we saw you on the mountain). Hence much confusion as to who was doing what.

Switching from “ja” to “si” took a bit of work to change as have the Scandinavian habits of head-nodding,  “umm ummming” and taking in a loud breath instead of using words – all very un-Latin.

Pulling out your hands and using them to help communicate, that’s taken some getting used to. And it goes without saying that people talk more here… much much more.

But in general I find Italian much more approachable, and don’t feel so self-conscious about trying out something and making mistakes. There are so many filler words and expressions you can use (bahs, mas and ehs) that communicating is more flowing and more visual. And just a few more smiles to help things along. You can also shout more (and be shouted at) but hey, I’ve lived in New York and can handle that fine.

Stay tuned for more stories of cultural shift.

About Wash your Language

I’d love to help you polish your English! I offer web copywriting and editing as well as translation from Norwegian to English and Italian to English. Read more.

The songs on the bus go round and round

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Warning: this blog post contains an ear worm.    

It’s a mid-winter Wednesday afternoon and we sit on the top deck of the 46a bus in Dublin, the bus route of my teenage years. I’m here with my two girls on one of our regular visits back to family.

The bus is quiet so my six year old decides to sing – what else but the theme song from Frozen. (You’ve heard it before.) She sings it once through. And then she sings it again, in Norwegian – a version the good people of Dun Laoghaire are strangely surprised to hear, and to be honest, not so excited about. Much as the song is hated by parents and bus-riders the world over, you have to admire the under-7 urge to belt it out in any language:

La den gå
La den gå
Perfekt er fortid så
Jeg er klar
Og jeg smiler bredt
La det storme her
Litt frost gjør meg ingenting uansett*

I was quite surprised when she came home from kindergarten last Autumn with this version in her repertoire. And then I was even more amazed to discover it was localized to 41 languages – the song (and film) is the most widely-translated yet by Disney who took pride in the mammoth task of finding local singers to tackle the wide vocal range of the original song, correct lipsynching, and transcreating the song’s admittedly rather complex lyrics to local meaning. The variations in titles alone hint at some serious cultural variations, from ”I Will Rise at Dawn” to ”I Have this Power” to ”It has Happened”.  The multi-language ”behind the scenes” version on YouTube is inspiring millions of multi-lingual divas.

MultiLingual

There has been some debate about the choice of languages – European languages being more in evidence than African or Indian. It is worth considering if 5 ”versions” for Scandinavia does balance against hundreds of sub-Saharan languages which would reach many many more viewers.

An interesting take by an Arabic scholar bemoans the strange backwards step taken by Disney in choosing Modern Standard Arabic rather than contemporary or Egyptian Arabic as used in other films. This version is actually closer to Classical Arabic and the results sound like – “I dread not all that shall be said! Discharge the storm clouds! The snow instigateth not lugubriosity within me…” 

Growing up in Norway my kids have so far learned English songs and Norwegian songs, and they don’t often overlap – some notable exceptions being Old McDonald or Fader Jakob/Freres Jacques (which for some reason we confusingly sing in French unless you grow up in North America). And here was a full-on local version of this oversung song which many children might think was the version. All over the world.

When I first moved to Norway I heard kids on the bus (not many, they tend to keep pretty quiet here) singing their own approximated versions of the song of the day, Mamma Mia – indeed that was a ”Swedish” song I learnt when I was little. And sure, I’m all for hearing good Norwegian pop songs being sung or even hits Kardemomme By.

The prevalence of English songs in other countries is a big issue, I’ll save that for another day. But for now let’s just enjoy anyone who wants to sing and sing and sing.

*I don’t pass judgement here on the Norwegian translation of the lyrics but I do detect a little smirk in the Norwegian version of ”the snow never bothered me anyway”

** 2019 update: a reader of the blog has informed me that her father was actually the Norwegian lyricist!

About Wash your Language

I’d love to help you polish your English! I offer web copywriting and editing as well as translation from Norwegian to English and Italian to English. Read more.

Norwenglish 3 – A Word of Welcome

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You drive your gorgeous rental Tesla out along the exit from Gardermoen airport, clear signs directing you towards Oslo or other exciting points in the Østfold. A sign looms up* with a friendly message in English:

Goodbye and Welcome Back!

You do a double-take – have you found yourself on a road heading back into the airport? How did they know you’d get lost so quickly? And are they always this friendly?

Closer inspection of the Norwegian sign above it reveals:

Ha en Fin Dag. Velkommen tilbake!

Directly translated – Have a good day and welcome back.

Velkommen tilbake: this is a charming expression – a wish that after a wonderful experience here you will choose to come back sometime, and that when you do come back you will receive a warm welcome. From whoever put up that sign.

But, my Norwegian readers, in this situation it does not translate as Welcome Back. That’s what you say when you actually arrive again, not when you’re leaving!

I’ll suggest some alternatives for this kind of scenario (leaving a place, finishing a website transaction, saying goodnight to the very last customer in the bar):

Come back soon! Come again!

Have a good trip!

Hope to see you again!

Thanks for coming/shopping/just being here! 

Or just the Goodbye is enough on its own

And here is a more correct use, where you will indeed be welcomed back in the spring to this tower on the Oslo waterfront for an amazing view.

Tjuvholmen Tower(Actually, it would sound better as “See you in the Spring”. Springtime sounds a bit Cole Porter-ish.)

To recap:

Velkommen = Welcome (that’s fine and dandy, it’s said when someone arrives)

Velkommen tilbake = See you again sometime, we really did enjoy having you even if we didn’t communicate it so well at the time.

* Disclaimer – it’s been a while since I’ve driven from the airport, and wouldn’t usually stop to photograph signs, so this particular sign might not be there, or worded differently. It’s an illustration of a scenario. And come to think of it, can you actually rent a Tesla?

About Wash your Language

I’d love to help you polish your English! I offer web copywriting and editing as well as translation from Norwegian to English and from Italian to English. Read more.

Norwenglish 2 – Leave it as you found it

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It’s always fun to find ways to find equivalent words for some Norwegian terms. In our house we leave many words as they are, to keep things easy – barnehage, skattekort, trikk, matpakke, brødskiver and other terms that relate to the mechanics of Scandinavian daily life revolving around work and children.

In the blog post linked to below, the author has done a great job tackling 10 Norwegian terms. (Yes there are way more comments than content but it’s worth a read!)

My 2 kroner:

Kose – as verb, adverb, adjective – is a wonderful term and best kept in the original. It conveys so much of Norwegian warmth and good intent.

Takk for sist is also one of my favourites, once I figured it out. That was about the same time as Takk for meg/Takk for nå/Takk for idag/Takk for oss.

Døgn. How clever to have a word that means 24 hours, but you don’t have to say 24 hours!

Dugnad – I’ll come back to that one. The easiest thing is to just live here for a while and experience it for yourself.

Språkvask – the inspiration for this site! A lovely way to describe the cleaning or nitpicking of some text, to make communication clearer.

10 Untranslatable Norwegian Terms (Matadornetwork.com)

Matador

 

About Wash your Language

I’d love to help you polish your English! I offer web copywriting and editing as well as translation from Norwegian to English and from Italian to English. Read more.

The New Yorker and Me

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I was fortunate to live in New York city (Brooklyn, to be precise) from 1998 to 2002 and it took me only about 6 months to feel I had become a New Yorker. It was a wonderful time, so full of opportunity, experiences, people from everywhere, food from everywhere else, and I learnt so much of my career there. First producing all sorts of projects at a lively web design agency, often bumping into Tim Robbins and Julia Roberts who had an office upstairs – and then working freelance for a huge local union, many of whose members were immigrant workers, some of whom were killed on 9/11 while working as janitors and window cleaners at the World Trade Centre.

A big part of my being a New Yorker was reading the New Yorker every week. I knew the magazine from before – my aunt in Dublin would buy the odd copy – but owning my own subscription was a very concrete and grown-up achievement. I was being steeped in the grand tradition of James Thurber, Lillian Ross and our own Maeve Brennan to Philip Gourevitch, Adam Gopnik and Malcolm Gladwell. Toting my slim copy through different commutes I absorbed so much about good writing, and how to describe the world. I could read every single cinema listing as a substitute for seeing all those movies, or imagine I was up to speed on the political scene. We would all compare notes with each other on the pattern in which you read it – for me it was movie reviews, talk of the town, listings, books and then everything else. Friends of ours, a couple, had two separate subscriptions, each landing into their mailbox at the same time each week: they even had their own way of filing away the archive copies. I still have my 9/11 black cover edition.

Whenever I need a dose of excellent writing now, I’ll pick it up and read something – on iPad or from the podcast, whenever I can. (Because it’s a digital relationship, I’m always weeks behind – I’d surely be up to speed if I were to splash out on the paper edition.)

And just like listening to a good radio station, you’ll always find something to read and learn something you didn’t know when you got up that morning.

So here’s a new classic piece for your delectation. It just shows you that English is not always so easy for English speakers to write.

One word of advice, don’t read it in public…

“Sentences have been around since the dawn of paragraphs, and indeed since before that, for sentences are essentially the building blobs of a paragraph.”

How to Write a Sentence, by James Thomas (October 24, 2014)

NewYorker

About Wash your Language

I’d love to help you polish your English! I offer web copywriting and editing as well as translation from Norwegian to English and from Italian to English. Read more.

..Work in Progress..

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To write well you have to read a lot. I’m working on posts about some interesting articles I’ve been reading about language, writing, translation and more. And I’m going to help with ongoing tips on improving your written English.

The map of languages

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I love this hand-drawn map of Indo-European languages. Created by the Finnish-Swedish designer and author behind the web-comic StandStillStaySilent, this is a beautiful visualisation of how the languages relate to each other.

I like how the Celtic branch hangs, slightly randomly, below Albanian, but it’s a little strange that Gaelic is listed as one language, no differentiation between Scots-Gaelic and Irish (the other Scots is included close to English, being a variation of it).

Also very interesting to consider that Arabic and Hebrew, and variations thereof, are not part of this family tree but comprise their own.

Enjoy as you will! Map of Indo-European Languages

 

 

About Wash your Language

I’d love to help you polish your English! I offer web copywriting and editing as well as translation from Norwegian to English. Read more.

Norwenglish 1 – Numbers

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Nummer
Photo by Theo Simons, Flickr

Ever think you might be writing in “Norwenglish” and not plain English? Not sure about those little in-between words, how numbers should be written, where to put a hyphen or a dot?

One little Norwenglish blip can trigger a reaction in the reader, and possibly lessen their confidence in what you’re trying to say.

This series includes some reminders and tips to help you along.

NUMBERS

One small difference in how a number is written can be confusing to those outside Norway. For example:

Company X has 3600 employees in more than 20 countries.

3600 should read 3,600.

Here’s a quick guide to how to write numbers correctly in English. For the most part, English uses a comma where Norwegian uses a space or point.

Norwegian English
100 100
1 000 eller 1000 1,000
10 000 10,000
1 000 000 1,000,000 or 1 million
1,5 km 1.5 km
38,5% 38.5%

 

About Wash your Language

I’d love to help you polish your English! I offer web copywriting and editing as well as translation from Norwegian to English. Read more.