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Courgetti

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I laughed when I noticed the name on this packet I had picked up in Tesco. The spirally courgettes (ridiculously cut up and ready for me to cook, when I could of course have done it myself, but they were on the cheapo shelf) had already gone into that evening’s stir-fry.

Who’s ever heard of Courgetti? I chuckled to my family. They must have made that up. Mixing up their courgettes and their zucchini. Or, actually they mixed up courgettes and spaghetti – and that is a thing now. Tesco did not mess up, or invent the name. Courgetti – courgettes cut up into spirals – have become a standard alternative for many to wheat-based noodles.

Best of all, in the US – where they eat zucchini, not courgettes – they’re called Zoodles!

I buy courgettes in the supermarket here in Ireland, though in Tuscany I would have asked for zucchine and in Canada they’re zucchini. Why the difference?

This thin-skinned summer squash, a younger version of a marrow, the courgette actually originated in the Americas – along with the other members of the Squash family (known as cucurbits) which includes melon, pumpkins and cucumbers. These were all a staple in central and south American for centuries and started making their way to European kitchens from the 16th century on.

The Italian name – Zucchini – is the diminutive form of Zucca (the name for squash or pumpkin). In many parts of Italy a single one is called a zucchina (plural zucchine) and in others (Tuscany, Piedmont and Sardinia), it’s more typically masculine, zucchino (plural zucchini). It became a popular vegetable to cultivate in northern Italy in the 19th century, coinciding with the immigration of many Italians to the US and so the name stuck there. A lovely example of culinary re-introduction. (Note that zucchini is always plural in English, you don’t say I’ll cut up a zucchino. But then, we don’t throw a single spaghetto onto the wall to see if it will stick. Not something you’d see in an Italian kitchen.)

The French word – Courgette – is standard in other English-speaking countries: the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Malaysia and South Africa. (Australians stuck with zucchini for some reason). Obviously it’s a key ingredient in many French dishes, but it’s actually quite a recent entry into the language, only first appearing in the OED in 1931.

Squash is also used in some countries, that’s what we would be buying in a Norwegian supermarket for example.

The marrow is a trope of English gardening, with weird competitions of marrow-growing featuring heavily in my memories of 1970s sitcoms. I like to think Roald Dahl had fun with this, when his BFG eats his disgusting snozzcumbers (cucumbers being a cousin of squash).

Living for many years with a Canadian the two of us still switch back and forth between the two main names for this bitter but buoyant vegetable, confusing our kids (who don’t even like it). I like to use both names: I’ll fry up thick diagonal slices of courgette (a la Toscana) for my pizza, but one of my favourite things to bake is Chocolate Zucchini Loaf. I could never bring myself to call it Chocolate Courgette Loaf. Yuk!

Tune in another time and we’ll have a look at eggplants… I mean, aubergines… or melanzani.

The Italian Chippers of Ireland

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Today, May 22, is national Fish and Chips Day in Ireland, when you can get a takeaway meal at your local chipper for half price. But… it only applies to the Italian chippers, as these are the original chippers. They might display a sticker like this in the window to show they’re part of the crowd.

Names you see around the country, like Borza, Libero, Aprile, Macari or Romayo are a marker that you’ll get a decent meal – if you’re into huge portions of fried food, as many Irish people never seem to tire of.

The first chipper in Ireland was started by Giuseppe Cervi who – sometime in the 1880s – mistakenly got off the America-headed boat at Queenstown (Cobh) in Cork and walked all the way to Dublin where he eventually started up a fish n chip shop . He might have picked up the idea of fried fish from England, where it had been popular since the 1860s with greater availability of fresh fish inland. One story says that Cervi started frying up potatoes by accident, thinking he was frying chestnuts. His chipper in what is now Pearse Street was a big success, and his wife Palma was known for starting the phrase “one and one”, still used for ordering in Dublin today as she would point at the menu and ask a customer what they wanted – “uno di questo, uno di quello?”

The majority of Irish chippers we know today were founded by families who arrived in the 1950s – amazingly – from around the village of Val di Comino, in south of Rome. The ties have remained in place and if you travel around that area now you might find Irish-registered cars and some auld fellas playing bowls in the piazza speaking with a broad Dublin accent.

Whether Irish chippers serve up better food than British chippies is a debate for another day. But today, help yourself to a half-price fry-up if you pick the right place. Don’t even think of heading to the famous Burdock’s down by Christchurch, Dublin’s oldest-surviving chipper (1913). It might be world-famous… but it’s not Italian.

Here’s the full list of chippers taking part.

There’s also a full-length documentary on Italian chippers by Nino Tropiano, I haven’t watched it yet.

Ancient Palermo

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I spotted a few of these trilingual signs last week when we were in Palermo. Written in Italian, Hebrew and Arabic you can find them on some of the streets in the old Jewish area of this fascinating city.

In April 2017 the signs were defaced by vandals who blacked out the non-Italian names. It didn’t take long for some civic groups – and the mayor himself – to get involved in cleaning them up and ensure this bit of local heritage was not muddied. Apparently the Hebrew isn’t even really correct, just a quick transliteration of the Italian name. An indication that the signs (and the idea behind them) are a modern, and public, labelling of the area’s heritage.

Palermo is really ancient, founded by Phoenicians – that is, the guys who came before the Greeks. Jews were part of the huge mix of people and they lived just fine under the various rulers of Sicily, like the Normans and the Arabs. At one point Palermo had 300 mosques. But it all changed in 1492 when the Jews of Sicily were forced (by the new Spanish rulers) to go into exile or convert to Catholicism. The population never really recovered.

Here’s a link to an Italian story about the signs if you’re interested.

And a link to an interesting NYTimes story.

Besotted by Bassets

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It’s becoming a saga – this business of our family not yet having a dog. My elder daughter and I spend a lot of time discussing breeds and looking at other people’s dogs. Like this little fella we saw last week in Sicily while out for a passeggiata with friends in Catania.

I would call this dog Dachshund, or a sausage dog. Dachshund meaning Badger Dog in German. I guess there’s a reason for that.

“Che bel Bassotto” my friend called him.

“A Bassotto?” I asked. “Then what do you call a Basset Hound?” He didn’t know but I went home and looked it up. In Italian, Bassets are also called Bassotto or just “Basset Hound”.

Bassotto comes from the French “bas”, meaning low. And Basset Hound comes from the same kind of root – Basset meaning “quite low”.

But these two breeds are not really related to each other (according to another quick Google search); the droopy eared one is English and the cute sausagey one is German.

And – for the record – neither of them is related to a Beagle. Which in Italian is called “un Beagle”.

To confuse me even more, my younger daughter points me to her Italian Donald Duck comic book (which she still reads weekly) and points out the gang of bumbling bad guys – in Italian they’re called La Banda Bassotti. Meaning, the Dachshund gang.

“Ah those guys”, says my husband, “when I was a kid and read those comics they were called the Beagle Boys“.

And sure enough, these guys have a pet/guard dog called “Ottoperotto”. Who is a Dachshund.

Never mind all these cute beagles, bassets and sausage dogs. We might just make do with something simpler, like a labrador.

(You can check out an earlier post I wrote about how Italians love their dogs, whatever the breed)

(Oh, and the word besotted? That’s not connected. It comes from to become a sot (a fool, or drunkard).

A Neighbour’s Kiss

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We’ve been to lucky to set up our new home just outside Florence, a rental apartment carved out of a beautiful old villa. It’s 15th or 16th century, says our next-door-neighbour who introduced himself on our first day. Cinque o seicento. I’m not sure which. Luciano is in his mid seventies, more of a grumpy charmer than a flirt, good humoured and, soon, ridiculously complimentary of our children who can be a little noisy, even by Italian standards. Think, Walter Matthau with a twinkle in his eye and that’s Luciano.

Our gardens run alongside each other, but his is much neater and with a much-better view of the Duomo, down below us in Florence. We often hear him in his garden, pottering, talking loudly to his wife in a way you soon learn is normal for Italians.

I know that he’s the one responsible for leaving a plastic bag for my daughters on our hallway door. This bag contains some of the little plastic figures that are part of a tokens campaign at the big Florence supermarket. These figures are hot currency at school and our neighbour seems to realise how valuable they might be to an 8 year old.

It’s not surprising he keeps his gesture anonymous — the first time he knocked and delivered his offering in person he was mobbed. It was one of those rare moments when my children were actually shocked with gratitude. They even gave him a hug, un abbraccio, something they wouldn’t normally do— he is an old man, who often smells of too much lunchtime wine.

It’s been a couple of weeks since his last door-handle dropoff, so I suggest to my girls that they bring something over to him as a present. Not necessarily to remind him to clear out his grocery bags; more to thank him for his kindness.

In a rare rush of baking last night (this is Italy, who bakes?), I made a cheesecake. I suggest they give some of it to Luciano. Oh they’re all over this idea and have to be persuaded to give him only a third, not half the cake. They want to go to his apartment together and give it to him, my husband and I are not to come with them. This is their thing.

They also decide to make something for him. They attack some sheets of coloured paper and produce a little origami box and a paper swan. As we write out a card none of us can remember the name of Luciano’s wife. We don’t see so much of her, not as much as we hear over the hedge.

With cake and presents in hand, our daughters head out the door, across the cool terracotta floor, to the older couple’s apartment across the hallway. We stay near our door to listen in as best we can.

The wife — with ultra-red hair and dark mascara, also in her mid-70s, childless — hears the bell and her voice echoes from inside their pristine home. A home which has never — and never will — host a grandchild. Chi è? she asks sharply, who’s there? Siamo noi, the girls voices tumble together, it’s just us. She pauses, then realising they’re genuine, she opens the door. Her voice softens. Buonasera. Then another pause while she goes back inside to get Luciano, who is surely the main recipient of what they hold in their hands. After a few seconds, his deep bass voice joins hers and my girls are swept inside with obvious whirls of hugs and exclamations — che carino! ma che bello! siete cosi gentili!. “You’re so good!”

We can only picture the scene from our side of the hall, our hearts pounding to listen in to this moment of independence.

Just a few minutes later we hear the other door close, and they come back in to us.

Their faces are glowing. Alive from realising how one kind thought and a bit of creativity can spark absolute joy in a surprised, older receiver.

Did you remember to tell him to put the cake in his fridge? No, they smile.

I kiss my younger girl’s head and I can smell the perfume of the older woman. I kiss it again and the smell is gone.

The Truth about the British Isles

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It’s a bit of sport for Irish people to watch how a successful Irish person – like Saoirse Ronan – is called British by the media. Over the years I’ve had to explain many times (even to English people), that we are not British, or part of Britain, or the UK. But we are in the British Isles, though not the British Islands. More complicated is Northern Ireland which is part of the UK, but not part of Britain. But it’s also in Ireland but it also depends on your point of view…

This week, the best female chef in the world award went to Clare Smyth. Born in N.Ireland she lives in London, where she got the job to cater the royal wedding (their royals, not ours, though I am also technically Canadian so they are mine too…)

The Guardian, 20 June 2018

In most papers (Irish Times, the Telegraph, Northern papers) she’s “Northern Irish”.
In the Irish Independent she “Irish”.
In the Guardian she’s “a Briton”.
And in other local papers she’s just “Antrim-born”.

(Quick tip – you’ll only offend Irish people if you get things mixed up. Though the Scots might not like it, or the Welsh, or some Manx, or whatever people from Guernsey are called…)

If you’re still confused, here’s a nifty diagram I think is excellent.

And you can read a really detailed explanation on the British Isles in Wikipedia.

Winter in Venice

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It’s so obvious that it didn’t even occur to me. Venice is a city for walkers. Visiting it for a few days last December with our two kids, we discovered this was a huge plus: no cars or buses – or even scooters – meant that we could all walk down streets and alleyways together, letting them run ahead, watching out for canals to trip into, though many are walled off.

Visiting in winter it is a little less busy and it really is cold, but Venice sure looks gorgeous and like our experience of Florence in winter, it is definitely more of a local town.

The streets and alleys and bridges are narrow and especially in busy areas you find yourself moving along with the flow of foot traffic. It’s a clichè of Venice but so true: it’s easy to get lost. On my last visit, during Carnival 20 years ago, my friend and I really did get caught up in the side-alley slinking and disappearing of characters dressed in cloaks.

Being a city of walkers means you have to do everything on foot and this influences the fabric of the local society and relationships between people. For one thing, you have to know where you’re going – addresses apparently mean little in Venice, and Google maps has had little success mapping actual street addresses. If you go to someone’s house they often need to come out and meet you at a meeting point. Another point, and this is noted by the writer Donna Leon (in her detective novels and her lovely book of essays on “her” Venice) is that people can shield their identity, and their homes, from acquaintances as they only ever meet in half-way public spaces.

I was fascinated to watch the locals move through this flow of people, you could tell them from their elegant but sensible clothes, fur hats and beautiful gloved hands, and from their more deft, quicker movements (and sighs of impatience). Many pulled along a wheelie bag – for groceries – or had a little rucksack on their back. Supermarkets were small and pokey. People have to shop every day because everything you buy has to then be carried home. If you want a larger item – a washing machine or your christmas tree removed – you have to hire help or get a boat to bring it as close to your house as possible and then of course up all those flights of stairs.

All around this watery city you see delivery men pushing an empty wheely cart one way, or in the other direction full of milk cartons, newly-fixed espresso machines, boxes of fish from the market. Postmen push wheely trollies, the fire brigade whizzes around on the water, there are no bicycles or scooters and even few baby strollers. Where is everyone? Are they all withering old ladies stranded at the top of a palazzo, remembering the golden age?

It reminded me of my four years living in New York, another very public place – whether walking or on the bus or subway you are face to face with your fellow residents and in New York you really do look at each other.

If you don’t feel like walking (or if your fingers freeze off) you can take the bus – it’s a boat of course and it’s not cheap but it definitely gets you around the city, letting you see it from the waterfront views, especially along the Grand Canal. These were the public – i.e. grander – original entrances to the Renaissance palazzi, and worth contrasting to the quieter, more secretive entrances and alleyways you find when exploring on foot.

This is a city with about 50,000 residents – and it’s decreasing every year. More and more locals are priced out by non-locals buying up property in the historic core, much of it as investment or at most temporary acommodation.

In Venice one of the many problems created by the infamous cruise ships is that the visitors don’t spend their money on land-based food and lodgings. Only 20% of these visitors actually get off the ship, the rest presumably enjoying videoing the view of San Marco from the water. Another problem is the increased number of homes owned by non-Venetians, sending prices up to cut out the locals.

Walking through the city you can sense the discarded everything that lies below – beneath the streets, in the water. Most cities do sit on top of their waste (ask any archaeologist) and here you do start to feel it everywhere; crumbling masonry, stained stone and wood, closed-up shopfronts, signs marking high-water or acqua alta – periods when certain areas might be flooded by local floods. But then there’s a surprise bit of art on the street or a glimmer of light through a craftshop window through the fog.

And the magic is there. We got a sense of a different twist of it on a blustery afternoon at the beach, the Lido. A strange choice, but when you’re a kid, a beach is a beach. Wandering through the closed-up beach huts of the Hotel des Bains we found our way to the entrance of this iconic old spot. The hotel is now closed up and according to the guardedly-chatty Polish security guard, the new owners don’t know when it will be cleaned up and reopened.

The Hotel des Bains was the inspiration, and setting, for Thomas Mann’s 1912 novella Death in Venice. When I was about 19 I sat in an arty cinema in Paris and had my first “big film moment” when I was captivated by the lavish Visconti 1971 film of the book: lapping waves, obsessions, melting makeup and bar-perfect Mahler. After our trip here I finally read the book and Mann’s prose captures the sickness of the whole city, even, you might say, of civilization.

“Such was Venice, the wheedling, shady beauty, a city half fairy tale, half tourist trap, in whose foul air the arts had once flourished luxuriantly and which had inspired musicians with undulating, lullingly licentious harmonies. The adventurer felt his eyes drinking in its voluptuousness, his ears being wooed by its melodies; he recalled, too, that the city was diseased and as concealing it out of cupidity, and the look with which he peered out after the gondola floating ahead of him grew more wanton.” (Thomas Mann, Death in Venice)

I ask our 10 year old her how she enjoyed our weekend in Venice. “I really liked it… but I don’t want to go back”. Why not? “Because it’s sinking and I don’t want to make it any worse”.

I tried to reassure her that we did our bit, trying to live as locals: shopping for groceries at supermarket and markets, sampling smaller pastry cafes, restaurants, buying warm hats and gloves from an Italian (chain) store when heading to the Lido, even renting ice skates from the man running the charming temporary ice-rink at Campo San Polo.

La Serenissima – she’s still there, just getting a little older.

Italy in Winter: Syracuse

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Winter is an amazing time to visit Italy, especially to the places that are lower down the tourist must-see list. Here is the first in my series of photo posts from winter trips we’ve done in Italy, when everything can feel more local, more authentic, more glowing and even sometimes more freezing than you might expect.

This week I was working on a translation a website for a hotel in Sicily (“a magical place where you can dive deep into a world of myth” etc etc). One section of text was about Syracuse and I remembered the golden afternoon we spent in that beautiful city a few years ago. It was October which is, fair enough, not quite winter but the sun had that autumnal, almost-winter luminescence. I dug out the photos from our trip and here they are.

Syracuse – or Siracusa. Yes there is a city of the same name in New York state but this one in Sicily is that bit grander. It was founded by the Greeks on the east coast of Sicily and it was actually the capital of Italian Greece (Magna Grecia) for quite a while and at one point was the same size as Athens! A few notable people were born there, like Archimedes (yes, that one) and Santa Lucia/St Lucy who died here around 300 AD in a horrible way: suffice to say she’s the patron saint of eyesight. In fact December 13th, Lucia’s feast day, is celebrated in Syracuse in great style and indeed in many parts of northern Europe too – not least Norway and Sweden. I once found myself celebrating the day while processing with a bunch of Swedish women and girls in white robes in the Florence branch of Ikea, one of the stranger experiences of my life.

I have to admit I didn’t know much of all this history when we visited, I was just absorbing the atmosphere and keeping small people from having tantrums. And now, after living for two years in Tuscany, I’d happily go back and appreciate it better, compare it to the other places I’ve come to know; like many other Italian city centres it’s a UNESCO world heritage site. And I would taste the flavours of the food more carefully (almonds, pistachio, citrus, seafood) and pay closer attention to the dialect.

The historic core is on an island called Ortigia and the centrepiece is the fabulous Duomo (cathedral) and its surrounding area.

The beautiful cathedral is most interesting in its details

And for its history. It was built on a Roman temple to Minerva, acted as a mosque for 200 years – during the fascinating Arab period in Sicilian history – and the Baroque form you see it in today is due to its being rebuilt during the early 18th century after yet another earthquake.

The piazza really is at the heart of Syracuse.

 

This fountain of Diana is worth a visit, it’s early 20th century and nicely modern.

Not unlike Venice, this intriguing city is full of alleyways, strange facades, curious faces.

Golden streets, tobacco shops, lotto-playing dogs? Yes, this could be anywhere in Italy.


We found this amazing sunken garden off the beaten track, on the mainland before you reach the main historic core of Ortigia. Part of the huge archaeological park that’s centred around the 5th century BC Greek theatre, this bit is off to the back and casually called the Latomia del Paradiso, or Quarry of Paradise. This is where the stone to build the city came from and other, later purposes for such a unique space included gladiator bouts, horse races, ox sacrifices and in 413 BC (yes, BC) it housed the 7,000 prisoners of war from the Syracuse-Athens war.   

Like many other experiences in Italy, magical moments are made when you find yourself wandering around a vast, incredibly ancient, barely-signposted or even safety-controlled space. The sharp-eyed man at the ticket office was chatty, warning the girls to put on some mosquito repellent, as if we were heading down, down into a Roald Dahl story.

Some old helmets were conveniently left lying around the stage – last used, who knows when? No-one else was around so we got to try them out, as well as the fabulous acoustics from this modern stage.

In terms of family memories from our day in Syracuse – highlights were the three separate trips to the souvenir shop to replace the snow globe that kept falling on the ground, discovering octopus in the risotto, more gelato, and popping into a pharmacy to get antihistamine for insect bites.

But that’s the great thing about taking lots of photos – you can always conjure up the ideal family day out in hindsight.

Rollerblading in Florence

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I’ve been writing a monthly column about family life in Florence with tips on making the most of the whole city, not just the obvious attractions.

For the September edition of The Florentine I tried to capture the haven we have found in the Cascine park, rollerblading along the (mostly) smooth paths under the wonderful shady trees.

As September afternoons begin to cool down and the evenings shorten, my daughter and I often feel the need to get outside after school. Living up the hill in Fiesole, it’s not easy to go for a quick bike ride here. What we crave is flatness and the only place in Florence to really get that is the Cascine park.

We are drawn to this park all year round to wheel along the straight, smooth paths, enjoying the greenery, the space and the people. From rollerblading men in Lycra to five-year-olds with crooked bike helmets, if a Florentine has wheels to spin this is where they come.

Here is the full story in the Florentine magazine, September edition.

 

 

That wasn’t so boring (part 3) – Ytalia sculpture show at Forte Belvedere

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Reflecting balls… smelly sculptures… discussion on life and death… views over Florence… one gigantic skeleton.

This is what you’ll get on a visit with your kids to Ytalia, the contemporary sculpture show at Florence’s Forte Belvedere. It’s only on for until October 1st but now is the perfect time to visit, in this cooler weather and before school gets busy. There’s even a temporary bus service running to it from outside the Pitti Palace.

I was flipping through my photos from our visit there in June and I remembered how much fun we had, all of us! I’ll share below some images and reflections on what the kids enjoyed most about the art.

This is the 3rd in my series on visiting art with kids in Florence – the others were about the Bill Viola show (now closed) at Palazzo Strozzi and tips on visiting the ancient church of San Miniato al Monte.

Forte Belvedere

High up on a hill south of Florence, you can walk here from San Niccolò, over from Piazzale Michelangelo or through the back of the Boboli Gardens.

There’s plenty of trivia to impress your kids child about this old fort along Florence’s city walls:

It was partly designed by Michelangelo and by Buontalenti (inventor of gelato). The Medici used to stash their treasure here. Galileo (whose home and observatory are on the nearby hill of Arcetri) made some discoveries here. It’s full of secret passageways, not many of which you can explore now but you can still feel the atmosphere. And of course, it’s also where Kanye West and Kim Kardashian were married in 2014.

Forte Belvedere

There is a basic bar/café inside, prices are reasonable and the surroundings pretty darn nice.

Safety

Keep a close eye on your kids here: there are some high walls and passageways and a plaque at the west entrance marks where two people fell to their death in recent years.

What is Ytalia?

It’s a show of contemporary Italian sculpture (100 pieces by 12 artists) spread all over Florence, with the main part here at Forte Belvedere.

Forte Belvedere is an ideal location for outdoor sculpture – and for kids. There are indoor and outdoor spaces, a cafe, and lots of space to move around and nooks and crannies to explore.

Ytalia highlights, according to my kids.

“The Big Skeleton”, official name Calamita Cosmica (Cosmic magnet)

How did it get here? How did they put it together again? What’s it made from? Look, there’s dust – like you get from real bones. What’s the pointing thing sticking out of its arm, is it meant to be there? What’s it got to do with a magnet? What does cosmic mean?

As we were looking at it (and at other people trying to catch the perfect angle) we watched one exhibition guard rush up to the other to point out some pigeon poop on it. They call someone on the walkie-talkie to get advice, but no-one seems to know what to do.

Gino de Dominicis – Calamita cosmica (Cosmic magnet)

The artist, Gino de Dominicis was quite a mysterious figure and died in 2007 at the age of just 51. The sculpture is 28 metres long and weighs about 8 tons.

Gino de Dominicis – Calamita cosmica (Cosmic magnet)

Jumping stones

Yes, you can step up on these and jump off them again! That’s what the artist wants you to do. The piece is actually called “Where the stars come a little bit closer” so maybe this is a humble effort to help us all reach the stars.

Once you’ve done that a few times, you’ll probably want to go on to something else. Depending on the ages of your kids.

Me, jumping. Giovanni Anselmo – Dove le stelle si avvicinano di una spanna in più

The Marble Benches

We had been watching the guards steer people away from other artworks so one of us was therefore especially preoccupied with these marble benches. They looked inviting to sit on and it was only when we looked down at them from high up inside the Fort, did we see people sitting on them. So if you go, make sure to sit on them.

Domenico Bianchi – Undici Panchine (11 Benches)

Mummy, Mummy, come and see this one!

What is it about kids and balls? Was it the reflections in this one that made it their favourite? The broken glass, the thought that someone else had got a chance to smashing something up?

Giulio Paolini – Dopo la Fine (After the End)

They also loved this coiled steel rope on the floor – called Continuous Infinite Present (though most of the titles didn’t mean that much to them). This reminded us of ropes along a harbour wall, but they’re not coiled up, they’re like rings.

“I’m imagining those biggest rings could be the rings of a giant. Imagine how big that giant would need to be?”

Remo Salvadori – Continuo Infinite Presente (Continuous Infinite Present)

We drifted past various pieces and I let the kids stop at what interested them. Most pieces had long notes beside them in Italian and English, but they were at a pretty high level and best suited to someone with a passing knowledge of art theory.

The daughter whose thumb appears below, had been doing a lot of geometry at school all year (in Italy it’s a separate class to mathematics). I could see she was trying to measure something with her thumb but she didn’t want to explain what it was.

Nunzio – Peristilio

We talked about sculpture

What makes sculpture art? How is it different to drawing or painting? Do you make it before you know how big the exhibition space is going to be? How do you build it?

 

Smelly sculpture

Are you meant to walk around sculpture or touch it or smell it? Actually this piece below did send out a smell as well as a sound – the sound of a frog. I had to read the information plaque to start explaining this one.

 

Marco Bagnoli – Ascolta il flauto di canna (Listen to the reed flute)

Me: Because the artist thinks a frog represents metamorphosis. Hmm, this is getting confusing.

Daughter: But I know what that means, when one thing turns into another. Like a caterpillar that turns into a butterfly. 

Both: But what’s that got to do with these stones and the big pointy thing?

Me: But look at that fabulous view over to San Miniato al Monte!

We enjoyed watching these two Frenchmen carefully examining this piece – and the guard shouting at them to leave it alone, in Italian and then in English, while they completely ignored him. Called Zephyr (like the god of wind) we liked how the stone looks so heavy though it’s all about wind and air.

Luciano Fabro – Zefiro (Zephyr)

This piece, a self portrait by artist Alighiero Boetti, was really popular with photographers. We talked about why it was placed right there, as if the man were walking away from the building and not towards it. Where was he going?

Because this part of the fort has the best views, Mum.

I’ve read a few comments that the 12 artists in the show are all men.

Taking photographs

This exhibition is pure Instagram fodder. It’s hard to resist pointing a camera in and around these three-dimensional creative pieces as well as the location with its fabulous views over the city and the countryside to the south. I have to admit I’d much rather see more people look first before they point and shoot, especially kids who already spend enough time with their screens. But it’s hard to deny that the outdoor space is especially good for working on some photo techniques together – light, composition, background, people, waiting for the ideal shot.

If nothing else, have fun!

The Ytalia exhibition runs around Florence until October 1st 2017. Website info here.

There’s something about Elba

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What do you know about the island of Elba? Probably that it’s where Napoleon was exiled and has some nice beaches. Anything else? Well, after a trip there both this summer and a couple of years ago I can gladly tell you that it’s a summer paradise. You might not have known that it’s actually in Tuscany, just off the mainland and one of the most popular holiday spots for the good citizens of Siena, Florence and Pisa. My article in July’s Florentine magazine tells how my own little family went from being beach novices to experts thanks to our first visit to Elba. But I also long to visit in the spring or autumn and enjoy more of the nature, less of the visitors.

Less fancy than the Amalfi coast and quieter than the holiday towns along the Tuscan coast, Elba is a jewel of an island. The waters are clear, with few unwelcome sea creatures, the light is strong and beautiful as it reaches the different types of landscapes. Even though it’s just an hour-long ferry ride from Piombino, it can feel a world away. Some areas have restricted development and many of the villages retain their old atmosphere.

Elba is actually the 3rd largest island in Italy after Sicily and Sardinia and it’s part of the “Tuscan archipelago”, a national park of seven islands. It’s quite cool to spot just over the water the tiny islands of Montecristo (not easy to visit) and Giglio (car-free, beautiful beaches and now famous for the crash of the Costa Concordia in 2012).

As well as arriving by ferry you can fly here (on very tiny planes) from Florence, Pisa, Milan and (oddly) Switzerland – which will explain why staff in shops and restaurants often start speaking to you in German.

East-West

Elba is all blue sea and beaches along the edge and hills on the inside. It doesn’t take more than an hour or so to drive all the way around it. Generally, the western part of the island is quieter, less developed and retains more atmosphere in its villages. Traditionally an agricultural and mining centre, the island started being developed in the 1950s, when the main coastal road was first built. The busier areas are in the centre and eastern parts, around the main towns of Portoferraio, Procchio and Cavo. The big resort beaches (and noisier night-time towns) are Marina di Campo, Lacona, Fetovaia and Porto Azzurro.

Elba’s coastal road winds around many edges of hills and it can be hair-raising for novice drivers not used to Italian driving styles. There are bus services but it’s easier to get around with your own car. Plenty of cyclists seem to enjoy the length and condition of the roads and there are many hiking trails. And as for water-based activities, well lucky you if you have your own yacht! But there are plenty of options for hiring kayaks, diving gear and all sorts of one-day trips.

Bakery in Marciana Marina

Towns

Elba might not offer the same insane abundance of artistic heritage found in the rest of Tuscany, but it has plenty of history – Etruscan, Roman, Medieval, Napoleonic – and some interesting archaeological sites and museums, churches and other spots to explore. The towns are worth spending time in and not just for picking up some beach towels at the markets. Here are a few we’ve enjoyed, away from the beach towns. Bear in mind that you often need to park just outside the centre and walk up, and that the lunch hour (between 1 and 4pm) seems to be strictly enforced.

Marciana Alta is the older, sister town of the seaside spot of Marciana Marina on the north shore. It’s a real Tuscan hilltown with a ridiculously-long history (founded in 32 BC), charming narrow streets, cute boutiques and it has a particularly nice terrace lined with cafes overlooking a fabulous view down to the sea. Follow the road up above to the fortress where they do archery and falconry demonstrations in summer. And if you take the main hike down from the top of Monte Capanne (see below) you’ll end up in the back streets of the town. Not far away is the even cuter town of Poggio.

Marciana Alta

 

Marciana Alta

 

Marciana Alta

Capoliveri

This handsome town dominates the southeastern part of the island and is a very pleasant stop for lunch and shopping. It also has one of the only theatres on the island (which doubles as a cinema) that hosts some interesting festivals. I really liked the dedication written on the outside wall: “to the Elbans around the world”.

Teatro Flamingo, Capoliveri

Pomonte on the west coast is a small village with lots of its old features, and it has all the basics (butcher, market, cafes, excellent pizzeria) and it’s a good location near the popular beaches of Fetovaia, Chiessi and Cavoli.

Pomonte

It also offers a shipwreck beach, called Ogliera. Look out for the crowd of diving boats gathered around the spot of a 1972 wreck, or you can swim the few hundred metres from the beach and touch the boat at 12 metres deep. More info here.

Pomonte/Ogliera

Beaches

With my stubborn Celtic skin and historic curiosity, I am not a natural beach person but Elba’s 40 or so beaches offer such a wonderful variety – sandy to rocky, very-public to almost-hidden – that it’s hard to resist them. It can be smart to ask the locals for their recommendations as some of the best ones are reached only by boat or by leaving your car on the upper road.

All the beaches are free: even if some seem to be taken over by umbrellas and bars, the strip right at the water is free and you will find even a very small public section. Have a look at my Florentine beach article for tips on how Italian beaches work.

Here are a few favourite family-friendly Elba beaches:

Sandy beach – Procchio

Often overlooked for more popular beaches along the north shore, this beach right in the town of Procchio is perfectly nice and great for small kids. In between the bagni (sectioned-off areas) after the sailing club there is a good-sized public beach. The water is clean and shallow and you could easily forget the world during an afternoon here.

Procchio beach

Rocky beach – Palombaia

When driving south along the coast road between Cavoli and Marina di Campo, park the car along the edge where others are parked and down another small road to the right you’ll find some paved steps down to this small but lovely and quiet beach. There are a lot of steps down but unlike other off-the-track beaches, this path really is easy and doesn’t involve brambles, confusion, and a steep uneven path that might put off some kids.

Palombaia

Other beaches to mention are: Patresi, Cavoli, Sant’Andrea, Le Tombe, Capo Bianco, Zuccale.

Drinking Water

When you get thirsty on Elba you can spend money on bottled water from the corner shop. Or you can do like the locals and fill up at the local water source – and some of the fresh spring water here is wonderful. To find the closest fonte, ask the locals or just keep an eye out for cars parked randomly along the road (and people carrying bags of empty plastic bottles).

This is the fountain just outside of Marciana Alta, heading towards the fortress.

Some of the fountains are nicely-decorated, like this one down a path near the pizzeria in Pomonte.

Hiking

There are tons of trails for beginner and serious walkers, there’s an excellent list on the InfoElba website.

Pomonte, trail up towards Monte Capanne

With friends and kids we tackled Monte Capanne which is – at 1,019 metres – the highest point on Elba. The easiest day out would be to take the cableway up and down, but we decided to take it up and then hike back down. With our bunch of kids and hot temperatures it took about 3 hours, but it felt great at the end and was definitely one of the summer’s best-earned ice-creams.

Monte Capanne

 

Monte Capanne

Here’s a link to the cableway/cabinovia which is a standing-only version of a cable car. It’s not for the very faint-hearted and the 8 year olds in our group were nervous as they dangled high up over the mountain, but they were very proud of themselves once they’d gone through the experience.

Napoleon’s Villa

The French emperor – born in Corsica, just over the water from here – was indeed exiled on Elba in 1814, the island having been under French possession since 1801. For the 300 cushy-sounding days he spent here, he lived in this beautiful villa, with a chosen guard of 600 men, and essentially acted as governor of the island. He did a lot of economic and social reforms for the locals (long before the hotel industry took off 150 years later), and is fondly remembered all over the island through statues, cafe names and an annual commemoration and parade in May.

Marciana Alta

Napoleon’s villa is near Procchio and though it is, unsurprisingly, quite rundown, it’s worth visiting for its location and to get a sense of the life he might have led here (and the Demidoff family who lived in the villa later on). Napoleon escaped from Elba, caused more havoc back in France and Waterloo and was eventually exiled more effectively to Saint Helena in the south Atlantic, expiring there in 1821.

According to a contemporary writer: “Though his wife kept away, his Polish mistress visited. He apparently also found comfort in the company of a local girl, Sbarra. According to a contemporary chronicler, he ‘spent many happy hours eating cherries with her.’”

Most of the furnishings are reproductions or equivalent pieces but you can get a sense of the comfort.

Elba Info

Ferries: There are two main ferry companies – Toremar and Moby – which seem to be interchangeable. There are different ways to buy tickets but in my experience the price is the same, either buying online or from the Biglietteria (ticket office) right at the port.

Local specialities: Regular readers know that I don’t claim myself to be a foodie. So for Elba I’ll just say go for fish! Plenty of good options on the menu and fresh fish at the markets. We often passed a cute local hole-in-the-wall place in Marina di Campo but never got to try it – Aclipesca. Wine – the local speciality is rosè and the sweet dessert wine Aleatico goes down nicely. Here’s some more info on Elba wine.

Markets: Each morning from Mon-Sat there is a market in a different town so you might find the same vendors in each place. Procchio also hosts a food market. Here is a list of markets.

Aquarium: There is a small aquarium just east of Marina di Campo and it’s not a bad spot to spend a rainy afternoon with the kids.

Shopping: Prices for basic goods are higher than on the mainland so you could do as many Italians do and stock your car up at a supermarket on the mainland (except for ice cream and chocolate, speaking from experience). That said, it’s good to consider supporting the small local businesses on the island that rely on seasonal business, and there are plenty of food shops, cafes, restaurants and petrol stations. The main towns for nice boutiques are Marciana Marina, Portoferraio, Capoliveri and Marina di Campo.

Other links

Here’s a nice weekend visit described by Georgette at GirlinFlorence.

And the excellent food writer/photographer Emiko Davies has some tips on the Tuscan coast in general.

Swimming pools of Florence

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I’ve been enjoying contributing to Florence’s wonderful English-language monthly magazine The Florentine with some stories about family life in Italy.  My latest – in the July issue – gives a taste of the outdoor city pools around Florence, which many visitors and even residents are not so familiar with.

From Costoli with its big diving board once tackled by my daughter, to the beautiful Pavoniere pool in the Cascine park in the west, these pools offer an easy way to beat the heat all summer in Florence.

Here is a link to my story in The Florentine.

If you’re travelling with kids to Florence you might want to check out some of these pools for an inexpensive afternoon to cool off and get to see how the locals live.

Costoli has one big pool for serious swimmers, a wonderful deep diving pool, and a smaller pool for kids. And of course a bar.

You can read more about how my daughter beat the local boys to jump from the top!

Functional changing room area

With the inevitable turtles

The “Magnificent Le Pavoniere” in the Cascine park is a lovely pool and restaurant during the day, nightclub by night. There is a playground adjoining it and of course plenty of space in the park outside for rollerblading, or you can enjoy the Tuesday morning market, the biggest in Florence.

 


It’s called Le Pavoniere after the peacock motif you see in the mock temples around the pool. Classy!

Hidron pool is further out from Florence, in Campi Bisenzio, further west from Ikea and the airport and not far from the huge shopping centre I Gigli. You can reach it by bus but it’s easier by car. In winter it’s a great indoor pool/water park and in the summer this fabulous outdoor pool is open – no slides or anything fancy, just a lovely big, relatively-shallow pool. I guess this nice little bar opens sometimes?

This gorgeous pool, Rari Nantes, is right on the south side of the Arno river just east of central Florence. Unfortunately it’s not usually open to the public, but reserved for members, waterpolo players, and swimming classes. My kids did a June intensive course here and I got to enjoy a bit of sun and views while waiting for them (in the bar).

Learning on the Land

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I published a story about my daughter’s Montessori school in the woods in this month’s edition of the Florentine, the English-language newspaper of Florence. It’s always nice to hold in your hands a printed copy and the story is now also online.

You can read the story on the Florentine here. The school is called Elementari nel Bosco and you can also visit the Facebook page of the school which has lots more photos and information (in Italian).

Here are some extra photos to give a fuller sense of the school.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 




 

Manhattan in Florence

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I was excited silly to pass this movie poster yesterday morning at the Stensen in Florence – for shows this weekend of a revamped version of Woody Allen’s Manhattan, in English – and as my kind co-parent was with me, he agreed to mind the kids that evening so I could go to and see it. And I did!

This really is a treat for me. As a parent I don’t get to see many movies at home, and I definitely don’t get to the cinema very often. As a parent abroad I don’t get to see many films in English, that is, subtitled and not dubbed – “in v.o.” or original version. And in glorious black and white? A Woody Allen classic? On my own?!!

Italians are very serious about their cinema. Everyone seems to have studied the great masters, know all about Italy’s place in neo-realism, key directors and movements. When I studied in Florence back in the early 90s I took a course on the history of Italian film. Needing a break from Antonioni and Pasolini I felt a strong need to attend each week’s English-language programme in Florence, Hollywood specials. I had no TV then nor, oddly, any internet either – so what did I do?

On Thursday nights I’d cycle across to the other side of the Arno and join the other temporary foreigners outside the Goldoni Theatre (now thankfully back in service as a theatre). The ticket was, I think, 4,000 lire and there was a bar, which still seemed out of my studenty capacity. There was usually a double-bill and a couple of us were known to find a way to stay out of sight, with the help of the enormous red velvet curtain in the foyer, to ensure we got to see the second film.

This was 1993, the year of Schindler’s List, Fearless, The Age of Innocence, The Fugitive, The Piano, In the Name of the Father. Wasn’t I lucky?

I’m a middling Woody Allen fan and it’s been years since I’ve seen any of his films – they never showed up on Norwegian tv, are in the local library here (see my other blog post on that experience) and I’m too old to be a downloader. What I’ve been craving about him, or at least his old classics, is the New York spirit only he can endow us through his words, images and neuroses. I lived for 4 years in New York and studied some photography courses, going to many movies there too, so it’s in my bones.

So how was the film?

Someone from the cinema stood up to give the requisite Italian lecture before any public event. He was younger than me and I was younger than the rest of the audience, but he was the expert in the room. He explained that this was a digital version made from the original negative: “I can see there are a lot of movie buffs in the cinema, I’m sure you’ve all seen this classic many times on TV, but you should know the story well so you shouldn’t have any trouble following the subtitles … the people in Bologna offered us a dubbed version, and we all of course love the great Italian dubber from the original … but I’ve watched the first bit and I’m sure you’ll find the dialogue easy to follow … and the philology fits with this overall genre, such as it is …”, more waffle and then shuffling of feet “…. anyway let’s roll the film“.

Seeing a Woody Allen classic after many years, and now as a parent, I saw it in a different light. It turns out I am now the age Woody Allen was in the film, 42. Imagine! I found the story to be very tender, not much happens except relationships folding and unfolding. I’m sure many have found it dated, out of whack, hard to relate to, but I enjoyed its honesty and simplicity

“I think people should mate for life, like pigeons or Catholics.”

I was surprised to find the female characters to be just as interesting and grownup as the men, it wasn’t quite as sexist as other old movies we’ve been watching with the kids at home, although everyone in the cinema (and most of the characters in the story) seemed a bit squeamish about Woody’s 17-year girlfriend. The main supporting character is of course the gorgeousness of New York, shown off with a lush Gershwin score. The style of filming is amazing, the photography fantastic and the city is still fresh after all these years.

“Why can’t we have frankfurters?
– Because, this is the Russian Tea Room.”

No-one in the film has a cellphone or laptop, Diane Keaton (who’s amazing) has one up on Woody Allen by having a typewriter in her apartment (smoking while she taps away at it), and people went for walks, sat at the movies, got bored, and most of all – had long conversations. Do they still do that in New York? They ceratinly do here in Italy and that was the most old-fashioned thing about it. It wasn’t dated though, the anxieties, feelings, confusions of the characters feel just as fresh to me, though no doubt many other updated viewers will disagree.

“I can’t express anger. That’s one of the problems I have. I grow a tumor instead.”

The Italians in the audience chuckled as much as I did, mostly at the same jokes. They were a very appreciate audience, one of the best parts about going to the cinema. I noticed that almost all the superlatives in the film – terrific, wonderful, amazing, awesome – were translated to Italian as perfetto (perfect). That’s quite a task for a translator – Woody Allen.

“It’s an interesting group of people, your friends are.
– I know.
Like the cast of a Fellini movie.”

Call me when Annie Hall is showing.

Nothing Phoney about Bologna

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On my first visit to Bologna, as a poor student visiting from Florence ca. 1993, I visited some Irish friends and we stayed up all night, walking the long, meandering streets eating and drinking. Before we knew it, morning had arrived and I left soon after, not having visited a single museum, church, shop or market. But Bologna left an impression as a lively, tasty, interesting, real city and in the last couple of years I’ve been trying to visit it some more.

Last weekend I brought the husband for the first time, the kids staying behind with friends, and we got to explore all those streets and alleys by bike (a rare treat for us). Below are some shots of places we did get to visit, a little sense of what we saw in about 24 hours! There’s an (unusually) excellent visitor website called Bologna Welcome with loads of tips and routes and this being a young and studenty city, you’ll find plenty of visual material on Instagram.

And the word Baloney? Bologna sausage in North America is pronounced baloney, a corruption of the original pronunciation. As a term for “fake” or “low quality” it came into use in New York in the 1920s, rhyming nicely with phoney.

Bologna seems to hold great esteem among Italians all over the country – which is quite an achievement – and has a few well-known nicknames.

La Dotta (the learned one) referring to its university which is the oldest in the world and still fills the city with students, making it a very lively city with a sense of modern life living with history you don’t get in many “museum piece” Italian cities.

La Grassa (the fat one) as it’s famous even in Italy for its fantastic cuisine, offering Bolognaise sauce to the world, as well as tortellini in broth. You can’t go too wrong with the restaurant offerings here.

La Rossa (the red one) as most rooftops and porticoes are a lovely red but referring also to the strongly communist direction the city has mosty followed since the war.

These days Bologna is only an astonishing 30 minutes by train from Florence. As the rail hub for central Italy, I spent many long regional trips in and out of it 20 years ago but now it’s all fast trains and underground platforms. We’d almost forgotten that its train station was the target of an horrific terrorist bombing in August 1980, probably by neo-fascists, in which 85 people were killed. Italy’s often bloody recent history is something you’re never too far from, living here.

I spotted this in the window of a student bar/squat. A mafia version of Monopoly.

Bologna’s history is as long and interesting as any Italian city and even though it seems so close to Tuscany, it is as separate from Tuscan history as you can get, as the city was aligned with the Papal states rather than any of that Medici crowd.

 

The most famous landmark in Bologna is the wonderful Neptune statue by Giambologna, but it’s covered up for renovations at the moment – that’s it to the left of this cafe.

The historic centre is one of the largest in Europe and feels very circular, partly as there is no obvious river running through it. There are many towers to see, some of which you can climb. These two leaning beauties are  known as the Due Torri, a serious landmark if ever I saw one.

The porticoes cover about 38 km of the city streets, and I’ve heard that the locals don’t usually carry umbrellas.

Food is really the thing in Bologna.

There are any number of fantastic trattorie, restaurants, aperitivo bars. This place is a heaven for eating well. You’ll find plenty of info online about local dishes, recommendations.

We found the Mercato di Mezzo very handy – a small renovated covered market in the middle of things, and I have to admit that the pizza we had at RossoPomodoro (“Neapolitan style with the heart of Bologna”) was probably the best I’ve ever had in Italy! Just look at that beautiful oven!

I don’t usually take photos of my food, but this was exceptional! A white slow-risen pizza with little sweet yellow tomatoes (datterini gialli) and slivers of hard ricotta. Actually we just really need to get to Naples.

And we had extraordinary gelato at this little place we stumbled on, Galliera49 . We joined the queue once we noticed all the locals patiently standing around.

The main piazza is dominated by the Basilica of San Petronio – its size is a surprise when you walk in and then you learn it was meant to be as large as St Peter’s in Rome, until the building money started being diverted to building the university instead (or maybe for St Peter’s itself). The church asks visitors for €3 to pay for a paper wristband to allow you to take photos, a good idea for basic fund raising.

The chapel of frescoes by Giovanni da Modena (the €3 entrance is completely worth it for this chapel alone) contains some of the most amazing and scary images of hell: amazing what they got away with all those years ago.

 

 

My husband is a bit of an astrology nut and was entranced by the sundial running through the church – turns out it’s the longest in the world and was built in the 17th century by Cassini, famous these days for being the name of a space probe heading towards Saturn, even having a Google Doodle made in its honour. And it works! We waited until 13 minutes past 1 (we had no kids with us) and got to see the beam of sun projected through the small hole in the roof hit the meridian. Great excitement!

We also visited Santo Stefano – a charming church complex made up of several churches from different periods and which was definitely the busiest tourist attraction that day.

The Town Hall, just off the main piazza, seemed mostly busier with people grabbing free wi-fi than visiting anything interesting, but we had a poke around this charming spot and stumbled on a show of drawings by the great Italian artist, illustrator and theatre designer Luzzati.

 

I taken by this impressively high-profile plaque outside the town hall in memory of the many Italian women who die every year, victims of domestic violence.

Worth a visit is the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAMbo), a dynamic centre housed in an old flour factory which attracts interesting exhibitions, like last year’s David Bowie show from the V&A. Excellent cafe and bookshop too. Good for an aperitivo.

Other art spots include the Palazzo Albergati which had a wonderful Breughel show last year and has a Mirò exhibition until this September. I’ll just have to go back for that!

 

 

 

My Morning Cuppa

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It was lovely to see the Irish Times publish my story last weekend about daily habit of drinking Irish tea. The exact same brand of tea, for over 20 years.

Photo taken in Dublin and sent to me via WhatsApp before being treated in Instagram

The story started as a way to work out why I still drink the same tea, carrying it back with me in my suitcase or having my Dad post it on from Dublin. In whatever foreign country I’ve been living in.

Order it online and you get it nicely bubble-wrapped

Tea is a big drink in Ireland, with a history that’s similar but a bit different to that of England. There was an interesting article about it in the Times a few years ago – how the Second World War changed habits and routes.

This tattered, old tea-cosy was knitted about 20 years ago by my auntie Meldy. My mum also attempted to make one from the same pattern but it took her 2 years (and would probably take me about 5). The cosy rang a bell with an Irish friend who saw the picture, she also has one made by her Aunt, also a Loreto nun. So we figure this is a Loreto pattern and probably adorns teapots around the world. Anyway, it keeps the tea warm.

I have a few other tea cosies – maybe their history deserves its own blog post. Stay tuned!

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!

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.

 

 

 

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 starting 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 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.

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.

————–

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

Luciano
Waiting for our turn at the press, it was a busy day

Press
No quaint methods here, all noisy machinery

olivedrawings
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.

img_6160

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.

485_fotobig

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!

fiesolewine

 

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:

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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!

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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.)

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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.

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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.

Quebec

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!)

Calcio
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.

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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!