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Good Friday in Toronto

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I took these photos in Toronto around 2005, put them in an envelope and found them again a couple of months ago.

They show the Good Friday procession in the city’s Little Italy district. With lots of shots of the marching band and the women and the crowds. But, alas, it seems I didn’t take pictures of the focus of attention – Jesus dragging the huge cross, the centurions wearing helmets, the women in shawls. Those images have stayed in my memory, even if not on film, but finding these photos in a box have helped to jog my memory.

Like New York, it’s a city of distinct neighbourhoods, but with a clear difference. Toronto’s city villages were populated with new arrivals from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean much later in the 20th century, than the US. It feels more like a mosaic than the American melting pot.

We lived at Queen and Bathurst, close to the vibrant, globally-epicurean Kensington Market and right between two neighbourhoods – of Portuguese and Italians. With, apparently, half a million first and second generation people from Portugal and Italy living in Toronto, we had a lot of great bakeries and old-men bars around. And the day when there was a World Cup match between Portugal and Italy… well that was a sight.

Every year Toronto’s Little Italy hosts a Good Friday Procession, apparently the largest Catholic procession in North America. We decided to check it out one year, expecting… what, exactly? The Italian-Canadian version of an Irish-American St Patrick’s Day parade? A quiet display of people in odd hooded hats ringing bells?

We didn’t expect this huge, solemn, 3-hour long event that was clearly a cornerstone of this neighbourhood and the communities living there for over 50 years.

I don’t know which part of Italy most of these communities came from: no doubt, from the south. The parts where women still wear black today. But even if they have moved on, these 1960s emigrants still did, still holding onto the old ways.

I remember standing in that crowd, feeling the stillness and deep feeling of devotion among the people participating and watching from the side as they lined along the tramlines. No-one had a camera or did anything other than just watch. I looked carefully at the faces of these local Torontonian men, women and children who chose to dress up and walk the streets for hours as a centurion or a Philistine. Year after year. The Jesus taking very seriously the carrying of the cross, berated and shouted at. Each one marking this day of sorrow just as their parents had before them, and their grandparents before them, back in Italy.

My husband and I were so dressed in normal, bright colours among the crowds of black-clad women and men. I towered self-consciously over them with my discrete camera. The 1990s Irish woman among the Italian women still dreaming of 1960s Puglia.

10 years later, when we lived in Tuscany, we never came across anything quite like this show of devotion – that went beyond just the religious. Where the motherland is part of your religion.

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Here’s a link to a lovely collection of photos of the Procession by a local photographer, from the 1960s to today. There’s also the wonderful film of another Canadian Easter story with a more French Catholic twist, Jésus de Montréal.

The view from the roof

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I took this photo in 2000 from the rooftop of my workplace near the Flatiron building in Manhattan, on 19th Street between 5th and 6th. We worked long hours at our vibrant little web agency, and we’d often pop up to this rooftop for some air, a chat, a look at this view and to remember why we were in New York. Standing on the roof we were 17 stories up, at the level of the water towers and the birds – we were floating high above the streets in this vertical city. Down below us, New York and its people, from all over the world, flowed on through the streets, underground, up and down buildings. Living their lives.

On September 11th 2001, my boyfriend (now-husband) and I stood on another rooftop – 4 stories  up on our apartment building in Brooklyn. We scrambled up the fire escape when we heard that something was going on. We had been listening to the radio while getting ready to go to work but the signal had died: our local NPR was beamed from the twin towers, and this was long before mobile internet. We stood on our rooftop and on the skyline a few miles away we watched another plane calmly, quietly fly straight into the second tower, and soon after, the whole thing collapsed in on itself. It was completely quiet around us on that beautifully sunny morning and I looked down over the edge of the roof to the street below. Instead of scenes of panic, people of all nationalities walked or drove down the street with their groceries. Living their lives. And that continued during the days that followed, people moving forward, not being afraid. And that will never change.

(I shot and printed this photo myself. It’s been hanging on the wall of all the houses we have since lived in, from the US to Canada to Norway to Italy and now in Ireland).

The Beaches of Dublin

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Dublin, and the whole of Ireland, is currently melting in an amazing heatwave. The beaches are as busy as they ever get, blankets out, old bottles of sun lotion tossed around, feet gingerly dipping into the water to cool off, 99 ice-cream vans at the top of the path.

My family and I actually started to spend time – and fall for the charms – of Dublin’s beaches back at the end of last summer, when we moved here from Italy.

“Like a decent pub, an Irish beach is full of chat: people talk to each other from their picnic blankets, teenagers make a show of not having fun, parents yell at (or shout for) the children they’ve lost track of. Skin tones can vary wildly but with prolonged sunshine such an obviously rare commodity here, you can feel the genuine joy-which is even better with a 99 in your hand.”

Here’s a link to the full piece I wrote in last week’s Irish Times.

We went to the parade… and no-one died

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Last week I needed to figure out what we should do for our first St Patrick’s Day in Ireland (full story in last Friday’s Irish Times). I asked around for tips and a fellow mum told me she was at the Dublin parade last year and it went fine: “it was busy,” she said “but no-one died”. She was the one who told me that our best bet to avoid the crowds (and their stepladders) was to stand at the beginning or end of the parade.

The parade was due to start at 12pm on Saturday. As is normal for us, we left the house about 10 minutes before that. It was really really cold, almost enough to put you off going out and by the end of Saturday night we had snow in Dublin again. But our Norwegian-raised kids decided to buy an ice cream before catching the bus into town. That caught the eye of the bus driver: “Jaysus girls, it’s soup you need on a day like today, not ice cream”.

It turns out we were well in time. Walking around St Stephen’s Green towards the end-section, town seemed to be free of traffic and strangely quiet. We saw the Lord Mayor’s coach had already finished its run, and the horses were being used for a photoshoot.

We asked one of the (many) gardai standing around if we’d be in time to see the parade. “Sure it’s only half past one, they won’t be down here by now. You’ll probably catch the whole thing.”

And sure enough we did.  And it was brilliant. It had started up at the top of O’Connell Street and that was where the serious crowds were. By the time it had snaked around Dame Street and St Patrick’s Cathedral I thought they’d all be dog-tired and freezing by the time it reached us. But every performer put in a great effort right to the end, with lots of cheering from the crowd.

 

Saint Patrick is a bit different from ones I’ve seen before.

We got to wave to Liam Cunnigham, from Game of Thrones. The main guest of honour – Mark Hamill – had already hopped out of the blue car at this stage. Must have had a good reason to do so.

There were all sorts of creative floats, the type that have been a mainstay of the Irish parades for years now though I’ve never seen any of them before – from arts groups like Spraoi, Dowtcha puppets, Bui Bolg and lots of community associations.

But I was almost more interested in watching the watchers.

These army veterans were charming, waving at the families watching from the flats above.

 

Women cyclists marked 100 years of women’s votes in Britain and Ireland.

I’ve never seen a real US college marching band before and there were 13 bands in this parade, including a few from Ireland and Australia. There’s a two-year waiting period for a band to be admitted to the parade and it can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to get them all here.

 

Family and friends of the band members seemed to be traipsing along beside their bands, all 3km of it.

Everyone around us – whether locals, people up from the country or tourists – was excited and happy, and dressed up in any bit of green. Plenty of people were going about their business and ignoring the parade. And the streets were quieter for a couple of hours while the pubs were packed with the rest of the population that was watching the Ireland-England rugby match. It all felt very relaxed, normal, festive and fun.

And then it was over.

Temperatures were plummeting further as we spent an hour at Merrion Square at the festival’s fun fair – what we call a “mini Tivoli” in our family. Definitely not on the same scale as the Copenhagen experience but great for kids who don’t often get to these things.

We had no drunken encounters, saw lots of green and many smiling faces (Irish and not Irish), felt no sense of panic or worry, the buses kept running. Yes it was really freezing.

But no-one died.

 

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.