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English Writers' Diary - a monthly reflection on life in ItalyGelato - May 2012I scream, you scream, we all scream: GELATO! The swallows have returned and the gelaterie are back in
business. Although gelato is available all year round, many Italian
specialist shops that serve their own homemade selection close for
the winter period, opening their doors again to herald the start of
the bella stagione: the return of blue skies, the sun's heat and the
widespread consumption of ice cream. In the Bible there is mention of Isaac offering Abraham goat's milk mixed with snow, but the availability of cold refreshments beyond winter took time to achieve. As knowledge spread on methods of preserving snow and ice underground during the torrid heat of summer, so the contagion for cold, semi-solid fruit concoctions passed from the inventive Chinese to India, and on to the Persians and Arabs, the latter in their turn bringing their knowledge and the sugar cane plant to the Sicilians. Adding sugar syrup to the fabulous fruit juice of the island, snow hauled from the peaks of Etna and salt from the sea to help keep things cool, gave them – hey presto – granita! The Ancient Greeks reputedly got their taste for ices from the Persians they conquered, and high-ranking Romans were no less eager. Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) writes of a 'mixture of ice, milk and honey, which, with the addition of fruit juice, produces a thick cream.' In the 16th century, Caterina de' Medici did her bit. Travelling north to Paris and Versailles as the 14-year-old bride-to-be of Henri d'Orleans, she not only took with her a retinue of the finest Florentine chefs and pastry makers, but also her celebrated Florentine sorbet maker (an ex-poultry seller) in order to teach the French a thing or two. Although Catherine introduced the nobles of the French court to iced delicacies, it was a Sicilian, Francesco Procopio Cutò, who a century or so later at his Parisian cafe, Café Procope, brought the first taste of ice creams and ices to the populace. Indeed, when we think of gelato we rightly think of and thank the Italians. As the great French chef Auguste Escoffier (1846-1935) declared: 'Italy, the cradle of the arts in general, can be defined as the cradle of the art of ice cream.' Today, at least 25,000 specialist – i.e. made on the premises – gelaterie exist in Italy, so wherever you are, you're almost sure to be close to a cone. Our town has seen the stellar rise of one gelateria in particular, the best kind, the kind that has a queue that snakes out of the shop and into the square at warm weather, peak ice cream eating times – late afternoon and late evening – signalling the superiority of its wares. The queue is particularly long on Sunday afternoons when the passeggiata takes place and droves of people come into town to saunter up and down the main street and through the squares and park in order to parade their style, to stare and be stared at, and, by no means least, to seek out and spread gossip. Licking a towering ice cream cone is not considered at all detrimental to aplomb, and to assist the operation, you get a dainty little coloured plastic spoon to make sure it doesn't drip down your chin, and a paper napkin wrapped around the cone to use for dabbing your lips and wiping your fingers. I'd say the major difficulty with gelato is choosing flavours from the embarrassment of riches that glisten temptingly from their stainless steel tubs. Character is revealed in the selection process: there are those individuals who never veer from their long-established two, three or four scoop combinations, and at the other extreme, the ditherers who take ages to make up their minds and are still adding and subtracting even as the scoop sinks. Then there are the alla frutta versus alle creme leagues: people who prefer to savour discrete categories, either the tang of fruit, or flavours that are richly chocolatey, nutty, creamy or biscuity – or all of these at the same time. Lick and walk, sit and lick, lick and chat, whatever the preferred
mode, a sublime peace suffuses the faces of the partakers at the moment
the flavour makes itself fully known from within its cold creamy depths,
and the chilled tongue sweeps round again and again in ever decreasing
arcs, smoothing the shrinking mass. No one could conceive of or perpetrate
violence while eating homemade Italian ice cream on a warm summer's
day. It is one of Italy's most significant contributions to the momentary
(but deliciously repeatable!) happiness of mankind. Grazie! Spring inspiration - April 2012The more observant of you may have noticed this post went up a few days late. One of the reasons for this is that I have always found it hard to meet deadlines in the Spring and, well, once they put forward the clocks, I was done for. My third novel, The Namesake, came out the other day. The publishers say that for my type of novel, Spring is the best season for publication. Winter, apparently, is reserved for footballer biographies, while the Summer is the preserve of the beach-read blockbuster. Autumn must be for odes, or something. All I know is that my novels have really been Winter works, because that is really the only season in which I can write with any efficiency. I get up at 5 in the morning, in the dark, turn on the light on my desk, shiver, and feel virtuous and resentful all at once, which is a good state of mind for dealing with awkward characters who do not exist. I then spend the next five hours intensely reading on line newspapers and drinking. I try to restrict this to coffee. This iron discipline means that by 10 o’clock in the morning I really get down to it, and by the end of the day, something will have been done. Not so in Spring. The sun comes up too quickly and brightly, the air is too warm, the birds too chirpy and the sense of being hard done by for getting up early is harder to generate. Without the bleak cold of a winter morning to infuse me with a sense of sacrifice and purpose, I become far less efficient. To nip the inevitable sense of disappointment in the bud, I resist the impulse to leap out of bed before dawn. Spring is therefore a time for cleaning, painting the house, tidying up and for developing ideas for my next book, or disentangling the threads in the plot of the one I almost finished last winter. So, while my wife does the cleaning, painting and tidying, I have spent the past several weeks dealing with some seemingly intractable problems left over from my winter creativity. The other day, while I was lying down and considering a particularly tricky plot issue, my wife popped in to inform me that she was entertaining in the next room and that while neither the guests nor she expected the artist to interrupt his research for the sake of small talk, the loud snoring noises had disturbed their conversation. Naturally, I was furious with her, having been almost certainly
on the point of resolving the issue that has been plaguing me for
weeks. Nothing is quite as debilitating to a great creative intellect
as the reawakening of nature and a supportive wife. Roll on winter. Havens - March 2012In glaring contrast to the dilapidation and couldn’t-care-less attitude of Sicilians towards the state of their provincial capital, two places stand out a mile for their peace, order and cleanliness: chemists’ shops and churches. Which if you’re searching for a logical explanation probably reflects an atavistic yearning in a difficult world for the wellbeing of body and soul respectively. And I don’t mean any disrespect here, for depending on your state of health or mind, both are equally essential. To me, one of the small miracles on a Palermo weekday is to step from the chaos of an alleyway probably little changed since the seventeenth century, into the vast baroque magnificence of a church. No litter here, no crumbling masonry or graffiti, instead, just a few genuflecting women in silent communion with a venerated saint in one of the small side chapels. Churches are well tended no matter how ancient the building, have safe-to-sit-on chairs, and statues that don’t threaten to come crashing down on your head. Yes, perhaps kids do run a bit wild at weddings and christenings, but suffer little children... In fact, after a bit of tut-tutting and self-questioning I’ve come to the conclusion that respect as we intend it in the C. of E. really doesn’t apply here. There’s no need for hushed scoldings or keeping your eyes down in Palermo churches, God is part of everyday life. It’s as simple as that. “You don’t know how to give an injection?” I was asked incredulously, and up the stairs of the building would wheeze the old concierge to do it for me. Luckily I got the hang of suppositories by myself. Here, the figure of the chemist seems to rank slightly higher in people’s estimation than in Britain. With their five-year degree in pharmacy and with the national health service in the south struggling to operate efficiently, they’re respectfully addressed as dottore or dottoressa and frequently consulted on minor ailments. And it’s true that their smiling faces and immaculate white coats really do emanate optimism. Watch how they manage those smoothly sliding floor-to-ceiling drawers, taking mere seconds to find your prescribed medicine amongst the tens of hundreds of others. And if it’s a reassuring “over the counter” manner people seek (and get) from their chemists, then all is surely working well. Finally, the chemist’s shop or farmacia, is the only place
I’ve come across in Palermo where nobody jumps the queue. And
quite right too; after all, you wouldn’t dream of pushing in
church to be the first before God. So neither do you here for your
medication. All will be treated in good time and all, hopefully, feel
the better for it. Physically and spiritually.
My Kingdom for a Pen – February 2012My desert island luxury would be infinite paper and endless pencils
– the retractable kind with the all-important eraser tip. As
far as I am concerned, any place is a desert island without a pencil.
Even Venice. I’ve written before about the dumbing-down of Venice, the classic case being when Mondadori, the town’s biggest bookshop, the gracious host of 1200 book events, closed down to become a handbag shop. But I had an even worse revelation a few months back, when I walked out to perform some of those uniquely Venetian errands like tracking down the latest tide time-table and new fastenings for the blinds that have been rotted by humidity. On the traghetto to San Tomà, I was struck by one of those fleeting thoughts that must detained at all costs. To my horror, I found myself to be pencil-less. For a writer, once that lack is realized, the need to write something down is like an itch that must be scratched or an urgent call of nature. Immediately the most fantastic ideas rush into your head, all highly forgettable… I scampered through campo after campo without finding a shop that would sell me any kind of writing equipment. I could have bought a thousand masks, a hundred thousand garish pieces of ‘Murano’ glass made in China, and dressed one small child in designer clothes for slightly less than €2000. Marbled paper was available, and even reproduction quill pens – not ideal for scribbling a quick note to self while trying to keep one’s balance on a crowded vaporetto, even if they were actually functional, which I doubted. The news-stands could sell me small plastic figurines, umbrellas and porn, but not a pencil. I became increasingly fevered in my searches until I found a dusty tobacconists, where the proprietor, after initially shaking his head, rummaged in a drawer and produced a shabby object with a blunt tip. He didn’t even know what to charge me for it. We agreed on €1. As soon as the pencil was in my hand, all those ‘unforgettable’ ideas disappeared immediately, like melting dew, except for a vision that I wrote into my latest children’s novel, Talina in the Tower - Talina’s aspiring young writer, who decorates her bedroom with hundreds of pencils dangling from the beams on strings so that she never has to scrabble for the means to write down all the brilliant thoughts that come to her in the night. A drought of writing materials is something that should never happen in Venice, of all places. I’d argue that there is no city to which writing is more important. My second novel, The Floating Book, was about the beginnings of the print industry in Venice. In 1468, Johannes and Windelin de Speyer travelled over the Alps to Venice, bringing with them the precious technology that meant books could be produced not at the pace that one scribe could copy out the words but at a rate of several hundred at a time. That same year, the learned Cardinal Bessarion donated to Venice his incomparable library of manuscripts. Venice’s identity as a city of books was twice enriched and doubly confirmed. Within a generation, Venice was already at the heart of the European printing industry, a position she held for centuries. Her libraries and her bookshops drew scholars from around the world. Since then, the city has generated a sea of fiction, non-fiction, journalism and poetry. Yet … a novelist who lives in the city today cannot even find a pencil. Things have come to a sorry pass indeed. Michelle Lovric A Festive Trip - January 2012 Let me first introduce you to la Befana, the kindest but
not that good looking old lady who, on the night of Epiphany, skims
over the skies astride her broom-stick to fill the stockings of Italian
children with goodies. Legend has it that the original Befana
was a kindly old soul who had prepared her gifts to take to Baby Jesus;
she lost her way and never delivered her tributes. From that day she
vowed she would make up for her failing by giving small children small
presents every year to remember Epiphany and the lost presents. Christmas in Naples - December 2011Twenty-five, eighty-two and sixty-eight. They’re your lucky Lotto numbers in Naples at Christmas. In this city where dreams are translated into numbers, nothing is random, and congealed Saintly blood liquefies every week, everything has a numerical equivalent. Especially at Christmas. Twenty-five is Christmas, eighty-two is table and sixty-eight is soup (apparently another good Christmas food number). A woman who sells the lucky number index told me so herself. Called La Smorfia, the Neapolitans consult this numerical directory for their betting numbers. The Smorfia gives any object and every event in your life a digit. “Christmas is a great time to have a bet. It’s is a time for good fortune and gifts. Yesterday I found my cat, so that’s number seventeen and today I met you, a foreigner - number nine. I have the numbers I need now. You’ve brought me luck.” Standing on Via Gregorio Armeno in the heart and soul of Naples,
I certainly feel lucky. An ancient minaret tower looms above and I
am surrounded by thousands of beautifully intricate nativity scenes. “We love Christmas. It represents much of who we are and what we believe in. Catholic traditions, family, food. Our main past time throughout the year is getting the family together to eat. But when we gather around the table at Christmas it’s extra special because of the traditional food we eat.” According to Vittorio Mazzaro, the owner of a pasticceria (bakery) and coffee shop on one of the two main pedestrian roads in Naples’s historical centre, you’d need to eat a different ‘Christmas food’ every day in December to get through them all. “Here we make the biscuits rococo which are a bit hard on your teeth. The kids love mustaccioli because they’re dunked in dark chocolate. The grannies like the raffioli because they’re covered with thick icing sugar and are very sweet. The foreigners, however, enjoy the struffoli because they’re little cookies that are fried rather than baked. We drizzle them with a sticky toffee honey and serve them on a plate. Then we have all the Christmas biscuits that were created by the nuns and priests in our local convents and monasteries – divino amore (divine love), sapienza – wisdom, bottoni (buttons) and the serpi nasprati, which is the oldest kind of Neapolitan Christmas biscuit.” Not all the children in Naples are into the sweet offerings of Christmas in Naples. Twelve year old Rosaria Calabrese lives in a tiny home in the centre’s myriad of spaghetti thin streets. Her favourite dish is the traditional eel. "My nonna taught my mamma how to make capitone fritto (fried eel) and last year they started to teach me how to cook it. We cut it into slices, flour and fry it. We eat it only once a year. Just at Christmas. I wish we would make it all year round." Across the road from Rosaria’s home is a council owned room
that houses the tiny neighbourhood’s patron saint, the Madonna.
Around her feet is an enormous and extraordinary nativity scene, set-up
by the area’s children. I am invited into the locked and sacred
room and plied with coffee. By coincidence and within minutes the
Sampognari - bagpipe and flute players - arrive to play their
traditional Christmas songs. They perform to imitate the old shepherds
that apparently played for the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus. The Sampognari
only play these time-honoured songs once a year and again I feel extremely
lucky. Not just because I’ve had the privilege to catch the
Sampognari but because to be in Naples at any time of year
is special. Hallelujah – 12 November 2011
Can one wonder therefore that there is a feeling of relief at seeing him go? He and his party hacks complained about the celebrations that accompanied his resignation. They talked about communists and football hooligans but actually the crowd was made up of people – most of them young – laughing and smiling and cracking open bottles of Prosecco. It seems a civilised enough way to mark the passing of a shameful era. Perhaps the most devastating commentary of all was the presence among the demonstrators in front of the Quirinale, of a full baroque orchestra and chorus. What were they playing? The Hallelujah Chorus. Hallelujah indeed. You can see for yourself if you follow the link here, but I’m afraid you’ll have to wait for the advertisement to complete. Simon Mawer Agricultural Cart Show - October 2011 Back in the 1970s, the then younger inhabitants of this traditionally
agricultural area in the Valdichiana decided to re-evaluate their
roots, choosing as their symbol the old, often naively painted wooden
carts that were lying abandoned on the land or in barns. And thus,
what is perhaps the most popular and best-attended festival of the
whole commune was born. You can guess the weight of a pig, pick a cork and win a plant, admire the enormous but placid, porcelain-white Chianina cattle – an ancient breed and the largest in the world – buy a basket from the man who made it or a lottery ticket for local produce, take part in a debate, play cards in a 'briscola' tournament, watch traditional theatre in local dialect or visit the local history photo exhibition: the list goes on and on, and is as impressive as the energy and care that goes into the work of the week-long events, an example of stalwart community spirit in the age of Me. Each year a particular era is chosen, and on the closing Sunday afternoon, villagers in vintage costume mill among the crowds or provide spot entertainment in the form of period dancing and music at one or other of the outdoor locations. Yes, the sun is trusted to shine, and nearly always provides. And of course, this being Italy, this being a local community celebration, the delicious, comforting, unifying theme that runs through the whole proceedings is Food. In addition to the Sunday stalls selling a plethora of edibles, such as roast chestnuts, honey, ham, speciality biscuits and wine, every night and on Sunday lunchtime you can dine at noisy trestle tables and sample a varying menu of local culinary pride: prepared and served by teams of seemingly inexhaustible villagers. I know where I'll be on Sunday 9th: one of the post-prandial crowd
strolling among the attractions, purchasing the local shepherd's pecorino
and exquisite, still-warm schiacciata bread embedded with grapes,
ferried day-long in a speeding van from my neighbours' pizza oven
to the village stall. Washed down, of course, by a glass or two of
must from the fermenting grapes. Salute! Alto Adige? - September 2011I write crime, which has now become an amorphous and all-inclusive
genre. One of the primary subcategories within the genre is that which
some people refer to, usually disparagingly, as the “cozy”.
This refers to works by writers such as Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie
or, to cite a contemporary, Donna Leon, in which the action of the
novel is carefully abstracted from the rest of the world and unfolds
in an enclosed and isolated setting. Agatha Christie used large country
houses to remove her characters from society, Donna Leon uses Venice,
an excellent city for this purpose since it is exceptional and unworldly,
and small. Her Venice is presented to us as an extended drawing room.
It is not that Italian politics or social norms do not intrude, it
is that they are filtered and rarefied for the purposes of narration. The tropes of the cozy are castles, large houses, drawing rooms, hotels, islands - and snow. Snow is an excellent device for trapping and isolating your characters and restricting the influence of outside society, and it has the added benefit of rendering the setting uncomplicated and unreal, which has the complementary advantage of encouraging the reader suspend disbelief and stop seeking inconsistencies between the world he or she experiences and the one you have created. I think some of the success of Scandinavian crime fiction may be ascribed to this effect. The American crime writer Steve Hamilton and the Danish writer Peter Høeg have produced masterly works in which snow helps the reader feel at once absorbed, safe and removed – cozy, in other words. David Guterson “Snow Falling on Cedars”) used the device for his literary novel. I am writing all this from the Südtirol (Alto Adige), where I am in the process of setting up a new house. The buying of pots and pans, chairs, tables and a kitchen, the absence of a functioning cooker, the naked 40-watt bulbs and the unfinished floor all give the house the feel of a temporary site, an outpost in the mountains. Add to that the strange (to me) Tyrolese culture and language, the cold and quiet nights, the spruces, firs, larches, rowans, pines, birches and firs, the snowy peaks and freezing meltwater stream running through the village and the temptation to take my Roman Commissioner and place him in a difficult situation, adrift in the snow, pursued by baddies or wolves or something is very strong. But I cannot help feeling that to do so would be to jettison the essentially Italian character of my novels, which suggests that, as the locals have been insisting since the breakup of the Hapsburg empire, I am not really in Italy. And yet, it snows on Aspromonte in Calabria, it snows in Sicily,
it snows in Aosta, Piedmont and in the Veneto; and it snows a hell
of a lot a lot in the Marches and the Abruzzi. It snows more in Italy
than in Denmark, Ireland, England and Germany, but this fact seems
to be absent from the literary and film imagining of the country.
George Clooney made a recent brave (if dull) attempt to depict a bleak
and cold Italy in “The American”, but there are not too
many other examples. Sunshine and the seaside still dominate our images
of Italy, even for those of us who live here. Perhaps it is time for
a change. The Bowl of Olives - August 2011I understood him perfectly the other day, when unable to resist a gleaming bowl of green olives on the counter of our local supermarket, my husband took one in his fingers and popped it into his mouth. Shops turn a generous blind eye to this weakness in Palermo and I’ve more than once filched one myself. This time though, suddenly and uncharacteristically repentant but sure of a smile and dismissive wave of the hand from the grocer weighing out our cheese, he owned up.
“You shouldn’t have done that” instead came the stern reply, “I would have given you two or three of them if you’d asked.” Shaken, my husband nodded dutifully. “They don’t like you touching the food.” the grocer went on conversationally, peeling the cellophane from my wedge of primosale before slapping it on the scales, “it’s unhygienic.” On which, he seized the slab of cheese between greasy palms, at the same time blotting his perspiring forehead on his sleeve. “Anything else, signora?” I was thinking of this for no particular reason last week while waiting to undergo a small operation as an outpatient. “Occupation?” asked the fiercely chic young woman taking down my personal details in the clinic. Whenever this happens I don’t say “retired” because I’ve never worked long enough at anything to become retired and besides, it always sounds to me like throwing in the towel. “Writer” I said. This information was duly tapped into the computer with blood red fingernails, and it was only when I was in the waiting room glancing through my notes that I noticed: “writer” had been substituted by “unemployed”. My third story begins in the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum, which I’d always wanted to visit. It’s run down and in ruins of course like so much of southern Italy, but at least this time you feel there’s a valid excuse for it. And it is truly marvellous, its shops and streets still swirling with ghostly inhabitants who never bothered about the proximity of Vesuvius until it was too late. Tragically, when the volcano awoke round about lunchtime one day in August 79 AD, they were caught short and ended up buried under an avalanche of pumice, rock fragments and scorching volcanic ash. Some two hours later as we waited bored in the ugly modern town for transport back to Naples, I bought and filled in a Lotto coupon, and to my delight, once home in Palermo the following day, found out we had won. “Oh no”, the man in our local tobacconist handed back our coupon shaking his head, “you’ll have to take this back to where you bought it to get your money.” Now, the moral of all this seems to be: don’t do anything however much you’re tempted, because it’ll only come back to haunt you. In other words, I could have reported the unsavoury supermarket employee, but he would have countered by reporting our theft of the olive. Likewise, I could have insisted on preserving my dignity and appearing as a writer in my hospital records, but anyone who challenges bureaucracy in Italy does so at their peril, seriously risking their sanity. Lastly, the trip back to Herculaneum would have cost far more than my lotto winnings. I suppose one could say it’s been a fairly normal month. Gay Marks
Elections - July, 2011
The town, like most of Umbria, has been run uninterruptedly ever since the Second World War by what used to be the Communist Party (PC) and is now the Democratic Party (PD). Over the decades the party has dug itself in, creating jobs for supporters, paving roads, granting building permits to its voters and generally distributing favours in such a way that the locals would have been crazy to vote for anyone else. There is, it has to be said, a right-wing opposition, but they’re a pretty ineffective lot and over the years the PC/PD has been able to generate a strong sense of togetherness among its voters. However, failure to change one’s ruling party for 60-odd years, like failure to change one’s smalls, is - to say the least - unhygienic. What exactly goes on between the town’s politicians and the builders who get big contracts or the owners of the quarry who blast away huge chunks of a mountainside unchecked? Everyone who has lived in Italy can imagine the scenario. And the cast: we have a powerful Godfather behind the scenes without whom nothing happens in the town, and the Mistress, his much younger, comely companion and political protegèe; there is also the Arrivista, the ambitious careerist who will stop at nothing to get ahead. Common to all is a certain arrogance and an unshakeable belief in their divine right to rule. Yet something has started to change. It began some four years ago when those in power went too far. With a local builder they excogitated a plan for a vast “tourist village” to be built in the foothills below the town with over two hundred apartments and a large hotel. Of course it was a con. Urban planning regulations do not permit such massive projects here, but for “tourist” purposes they are allowed. Once completed, the builder would then, surprise, surprise, announce that he could find no-one to run the village and the Comune would be forced let the whole thing become a housing estate. Four years on and, thanks to a local protest group, the “tourist village” has still not been built, although it has not been definitively abandoned either. The builder even started talking of turning the area into a centre of alternative energy but maybe that is just an electoral trick, because local elections were approaching and for the first time since the war the PD saw that their reign was threatened. Several leading members of the protest group, including one or two foreign residents, formed a local branch of the new SEL party - Sinistra, Ecologia, Libertà. They campaigned for a fresh start in the town, an end to all the shenanigans and above all an environmental programme almost identical to that of the local protest group. The PD tried all the tricks in the book. More was at stake than the simple administration of a very small town. In a series of intense meetings they tried to smother the SEL by inviting them to join in a coalition and guaranteeing them a seat on the council. At the same time they also took on board the Arrivista, a youngish man who came from a far-right-wing party but who now disguised himself as a Socialist and was demanding the post of deputy mayor in exchange for the votes he said he would bring. Sticking to its principles the SEL refused to work with him, withdrew from the coalition and campaigned on its own. The result: although it had only existed in town for six weeks, had hardly a euro to its name and was being routinely slandered by the PD, the SEL won nearly seven percent of the vote - the best result for that party in Umbria and the second best result in all Italy. Its candidate for mayor, a lady, polled far more votes than the Arrivista, and the PD’s majority over the right wing opposition shrank to a humiliating 14 votes. But this is Italy. Local election rules being what they are, the SEL did not get a single seat, and despite its miserable 14 vote majority the PD has a two-thirds majority in the council. At the first council meeting, I am told, they were triumphant, and in the ensuing brawl for posts the Mistress ended up as assessore for town planning. So we all know what we have to expect over the next five years. A new wind may be blowing, even in deepest, darkest Umbria. But
it needs to blow a lot harder and longer before anything is ever going
to change. Consoling Consul - June, 2011The Florentine policeman looked at me sharply then quickly punched the side of my head. Perhaps I deserved it but it was not the brightest point of my two years as a graduate student living in Florence. The punch was punishment for protesting a severe kicking administered to a fellow student by a group of poliziotti angry because one of their colleagues had been killed that night by Red Brigades terrorists who escaped from the Murate prison. After a night exploring some of Florence's most inspiring bars we had missed the last bus to our digs on the outskirts of Florence. It seemed like a good idea to climb over a high gate into a villa close to Sir Harold Acton's residence where another student friend lived in an annexe he rented from a prominent Count. But a passing guardia giurata evidently thought the two long-haired young men clambering into the Count's villa looked more like terrorists than students. Anti-terrorist police were called and led us away at gunpoint to be interrogated. Hours later the police accepted that we were bona fide students at the European University Institute and told us to go home. My friend, Wilson Finney, now the august dean of Edinburgh University's law faculty, then made the silly mistake of grasping a policeman's jacket lapel to underline his claim that we deserved a lift home from the forces of law and order. The harmless contact provided the excuse for him to be pushed to the ground so that several officers could put the boot in to an obstreperous Scot - not an urban guerrilla but the next best target. A night in the police cells was followed by a night in the grim Murate prison with the prospect of a lengthy sojourn while we awaited trial for "resisting arrest and outrage against a public official." Everything ended happily, however, when Her Majesty's Consul appeared on the scene and listened to our account of rough treatment. Within hours this marvellous emissary had made representations to the authorities and we were released and celebrating our freedom over dinner with the Count and our friend Bertie in his villa. Sensing scandal the university authorities were not overjoyed and we were admonished to keep quiet about our adventure. Florence has of course long been a mecca for disreputable English youths to fritter away years studying in a tradition going back to Lord Byron's ennuis with the local authorities in Pisa. Romantics will continue to be attracted to Tuscany to let off steam but the sad news is that anyone ending up in the slammer these days is likely to stay there for a considerable period of time. The British Consulate on the banks of the Arno is closing its doors as part of Foreign Office cuts so the figure of the angelic Consul acting to bail out Britons in trouble will soon be lost in the mists of time. A friend at the British Embassy acknowledges that the closure of the Florence consulate and its' Venice counterpart reflect a continuing decline in services offered to Britons abroad. This was underlined to me last summer when I had to wait several weeks to receive a new British passport from the British Consulate in Paris. Until quite recently it was possible to renew passports at the Consulate in Rome in a matter of a few days but now the service has been outsourced to France. Had I known how long it would take I would have availed myself of the fast passport issue service available in London. Meanwhile anyone exploring Florence's finer nightspots in the company of a learned Scotsman would be advised to ensure they carry plenty of reading matter. John Phillips How much, how big and for how long? - April, 2011On March 23rd 2005, Venice lost another iconic view: that of Back in 2005, the contractors’ notice announced that the work at the Accademia would continue for ‘1100 giorni consecutivi’. I’m happy to report that in exactly double that time, the scaffolding has come down and the blaring maxi-pubblicità is no more. At least not at the Accademia. Sadly, elsewhere in Venice the billboards are still in place. The “Bridge of Signs” has been brutalised this way for years. A similar fate has befallen the facades of the Church of San Simeone Piccolo, the Marciana Library and even the Napoleonic wing of the Correr Museum. We have one next door. Our evenings are polluted by its strident lighting, and we can watch it reflected in the windows of the unfortunate residents opposite. Seeing the excrescence for the first time, our neighbour exclaimed, ‘It makes me ashamed to be Italian.’ The usual justification for the billboards is that they pay for the restoration of historic buildings. Venice is a high-maintenance city, and there’s zero funding from Rome. But this stance carefully avoids some painful questions. Sponsorship for restoration is not new. In better times, buildings under restoration were clad in photographs or drawings of their own facades, with a sponsor’s logo discreetly positioned. Why are these sponsors now allowed massive, invasive, floodlit images of their own product instead? Why the vulgar, often sexual imagery? In effect, the sponsors are dictating the visual culture of beloved parts of Venice, even when their tastes are not to Venice’s taste. Surely something is out of proportion here, when commercial sponsors are allowed to deface the very thing that they claim to be saving with their money? “No company sponsoring a concert would get its jingles played in the middle of a Mozart symphony," points out Nelli-Elena Vanzan Marchini, founder of the environmental and social organisation Venezia Civiltà Anfibia. The questions continue. Why does it cost so little for global brands to buy space seen annually by 17.5 million tourists? (One report says that the Bridge of Sighs costs just 40,000 euros a month). Why do these billboards stay up for years on end? Just how much work is actually going on behind them? Is extended advertising revenue in fact a disincentive to quick progress on restoration? Are we being deprived of Venice’s beauty and being forced to look at brash ugliness for longer than we need to be? Under the auspices of Venice in Peril, last October the Art Newspaper published a letter of protest from a group of the world's leading cultural experts, including Norman Foster, the directors of the British Museum, the V&A and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the heads of museums in Boston, Dresden, Stockholm and the Hermitage in St Petersburg. They reminded the Italian government that ‘Venice is a Unesco World Heritage Site and that a preceding government of Italy undertook to protect its essential nature in perpetuity when it accepted this nomination.’ And they asked the culture minister to outlaw the billboards, which "ruin your experience of one of the most beautiful creations of humankind". The petition pleaded the case of the tourists whose spending keeps the Venetian economy afloat, some of whom may have saved for years to fulfill their dream of seeing la Serenissima: ‘"They come to this iconic city with an image of it in their mind's eye, and instead they see its famous views grotesquely defaced." In response to the petition, there have been promises of a review, of more attention to be paid to the sensibility of the city and the length of time that the maxi-pubblicità covers up Venice’s historic facades. And maybe attitudes are starting to change in the right places. The new culture minister Giancarlo Galan has promised to take matters in hand. He says he wants to look at less impactful involvement by the sponsors. Moreover, he has recently wondered, as I do, if the hated billboards might actually have a negative effect on the companies who pay for them … that people might not want to buy products associated with ‘the degradation of the image of Venice.’ Now he’s talking. But Galan’s ‘cry of pain’ needs practical expression. What to do? Well, what was wrong with the former façade photos or drawings with the discreet sponsorship logos? If the sponsors’ taste can’t be trusted, it can and must be regulated. And someone needs to look behind the advertising on every one of these maxi-wrapped buildings – to see if there is any work going on there. If not, then the scaffolds must come down, dragging their billboards behind them. Personally I like the suggestion made by Roberto Ciambetti, the regional authority's public spending assessor, that assets sequestrated from the mafia could be sold to pay for Venice's upkeep. The mafia is the most discreet of big businesses. The godfathers may be global but they’re unlikely to want to raise their brand consciousness with massive posters of their ‘product’. It’s pleasant to imagine how quickly those scaffolds would come down if there was no advertising at all in front of them. Michelle Lovric To read the whole petition, see Venice in Peril’s website A Common Celebration for Ireland and Italy - March 17, 2011
Italy and Ireland have shared connections for a long time. Irish pilgrims, saints and scholars gravitated toward Rome while legend tells us that even the patron saint of Ireland - Patrick - was originally from Italy. In the ancient basilica of St. Stefano Rotondo set in the quiet of Rome’s Caelian hill there are curved walls frescoed with gory scenes of martyrdom and also a plaque commemorating Brian Boru’s son, King Donnchadh of Munster, who died during a pilgrimage to Rome and was buried here in 1064. Monumental graves in front of the altar of St. Pietro in Montorio on the Janiculum are testament to a group of exiled Irish Earls led by Hugh O’Neill who fled to Rome in 1607. The first printed map of Ireland appeared in Le Isole piu famose del mondo in 1590 where Venetian cartographer Tommaso Porcacchi showed Hibernia laying on its side. In the 18th and 19th centuries many Italians migrated to Ireland including Charles Bianconi who organized an entire transport system for Ireland including coaches which crisscrossed the country and a system of postal stations, inns and mail delivery. Even today Bianconi Inns can be found in smaller Irish towns. Among the Irish saints and scholars who were regularly “exported” to Italy many left indelible marks on the Eternal City. One was Franciscan Luke Wadding who set up St. Isidore’s Church and the Irish College. Dominican priest Joseph Mullooly excavated under San Clemente‘s Cosmastesque pavements to find an earlier 4th century church and, on a still lower level, a pagan Mithraic temple and Roman houses. Besides being an amateur archaeologist, Mullooly was also an important figure in a little-known chapter of the Risorgimento which gives Irish and Italians a common reason for celebrating this March 17. In 1860 along with Paul Cullen, head of the Irish College in Rome, Mullooly was the mediator between Austro-Irish officers and the papal government for the formation of the St. Patrick’s Irish Brigade. Prior to 1860 Pius IX and his counsellors had doubts concerning the enlistment of Irish soldiers to defend Papal territory. They feared the cheapness of wine in Italy might prove fatal to the Irish and England’s Foreign Enlistment Act forbade the recruitment of British subjects to fight for foreign heads of state. But by January 1860 Pius IX had changed his mind due to the seriousness of the situation in central Italy and sent Count Charles MacDonnell, an Austrian officer of Irish descent, to Dublin to organize the Irish volunteer movement. During the summer of 1860 over 1,000 Irish volunteers travelled from Ireland to Italy where they participated in the battles of Spoleto, Castelfidardo, Ancona and Perugia. Fighting valiantly against enormous odds they wrote a short but
glorious chapter in the history of the Italian Risorgimento to be
remembered during this year’s Unification celebrations. A Carnevale ogni scherzo vale - February 2011
An unbroken trail of transgression in high places on Italian soil
leads back to the rulers of Ancient Rome, who cannily legitimised
certain aspects by letting the populace join in. Both our February Valentine's Day and Carnival celebrations are thought to have evolved from the Lupercalia which, like other pageants of popular pagan fun, were later taken over and 'cleaned up' by the Roman church to fit Catholic rituals. The Valentine's Day link can be traced to dances held during the festival for all the single young men and women. A man would draw his partner's name from the girls' names placed in a bowl. Not only did the man dance with his partner, he was also bound to protect her throughout the following year. It's not hard to imagine how this could have led to lasting love matches, not to mention offspring. Plutarch's take on the Lupercalia festival focuses on a particular spectacle: a 'run' undertaken by selected 'Luperci', originally aristocrats, but as time went on the plebs also joined in the fun. 'At this time many of the noble youths and magistrates run up and down through the city naked, for sport and laughter, striking those they meet with shaggy thongs* And many women of rank also purposely get in their way, and like children at school, present their hands to be struck, believing that the pregnant will thus be helped in delivery, and the barren to pregnancy.' (*Strips of goat or dog skin from animals sacrificed at the start of the festival.) Mark Antony is recorded as running as a lupercus; 'naked, oiled and drunk' claimed Cicero in disgust. Riotous fun and transgression remain essential ingredients in today's legacy of the Lupercalia: the enormously popular Italian Carnevale, which over the course of history has spread across the world. This year, the nearby Tuscan town of Foiana della Chiana is gearing up to celebrate its centuries-old tradition of Carnevale, with ornate allegorical floats, costume parades, masked revellers and brass bands thronging the town on 4 consecutive Sundays up until Lent. Indeed, in every town and village the streets are scattered with colourful paper confetti for weeks on end, children rush about in costume, and every school concedes a carnival party on Shrove Tuesday during which kids gorge on gargantuan quantities of food and fizzy drinks brought from home. Of course, like any self-respecting festival, there is the special
food. To celebrate Carnevale, deep-fried cakes and biscuits are the
most famous – delicious, but definitely not for the diet conscious.
Every region has its own specialities and variations, but chiacchiere
(bits of gossip or chatter), known in Tuscany as cenci (rags),
are pan-Italian morsels which are simple, cheap and easy to make.
Here's a recipe... Home? - January 2011
One spring day in the early 80s I went to interview an English artist who had settled in a remote mountain village in Sicily. Talking about his life and work there, he told me that much as he loved the place, he periodically had to get back to Britain as he put it, “ to recharge his batteries”. I knew even then what he meant as it’s the same feeling, though in a different context, here in Palermo where every few years I’m seized by an almost uncontrollable need to escape and let super-charged batteries run dry. It’s the sheer racket and chaos I tell myself of what guidebooks struggling for a suitable adjective feebly call a vibrant or bustling city. Getting away or rather, getting back is something people who have spent the better part of their life in Italy tend at some stage to think about. Advancing years, financial necessity, family ties and so on are some of the reasons they give, but in fact it goes far deeper than that into our very psyche and the notions of displacement and belonging. But where and what is home anyway ? Anna Del Conte, the well-known food writer who came to England from Milan after the war and has lived there ever since, says she doesn’t feel at home in either country. Which sums it up perfectly for me as well: not feeling Italian here or English there. It’s not an unpleasant sensation, more an unsettling one, which in turn of course raises the question of identity. Who exactly am I? Neither fish nor fowl is the worrying answer. Going back for good, or at least giving it a try, means several things very soon become apparent. To start with, England quite clearly ain’t what it used to be; there were never bitter winters like this in the old days, and what’s this stuff they show now on the telly? A confident and hard-bitten driver, I find to my shame that I’m nervous about driving on the left. And I miss the sun terribly, more than I ever thought possible. Yet finding family and friends again is marvellous. I waver. As far as I know, both the painter and Anna Del Conte are still
living in their adoptive country and for the present anyway, so am
I. |
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As
to their physical wellbeing, Sicilians take their maladies and cures
extremely seriously, trusting in the pile of suppositories and syringes
placed in front of them on the chemist’s counter. Once home,
they’ll self-administer these with a nonchalance and confidence
that used to make this Englishwoman blanch.
Each one is a work of art, painstakingly sculpted and hand-painted
in one of the many Christmas decoration workshops that pack Via Gregorio
Armeno. Row upon row of shelves, bench tops and wide makeshift tables
groan under the weight of Christmas decorations. There are tiny, moving,
Jerusalem-like butchers, bakers and fishmongers that creak and tick.
Other nativity scene add-ons are complete with rivers of real running
water or pizza ovens with imitation fire and flames. People stroll
amongst the mangers and examine figurines of shepherds, wise kings
and mother Marys with close scrutiny. 
for seventeen years this man has done little more than reinforce them.
Buffone! people cried as he went to the Quirinale Palace
to tender his resignation to President Napolitano. But it was not
just as a buffoon that he will be remembered. Mired in suspicion about
mafia connections, accused of a conflict of interest as a result of
his ownership of the three main private TV channels, and, by magistrates,
of corruption, he has spent most of his terms in office mouthing about
reform while doing nothing beyond passing laws to keep himself out
of court. His sexual peccadilloes have been a matter of shame and
outrage throughout the country, finally even evoking the criticism
of the Church. And meanwhile, with the man at the helm denying there
was any crisis, Italy headed towards the financial rocks.
My
adoptive village's version of the annual fête is a truly indigenous
affair lasting seven days, no less, and culminating in a final Sunday
extravaganza of costumes, music, fair and food that draws crowds from
right across the area and makes the village cashbox jingle and swell.
It
is perfectly possible for a foreigner to live in Italy without ever
being really involved in the life of the country. But the minute one
dips one’s toes into local politics it starts to look a different
place. Very different. I imagined the recent municipal elections in
our town would be some kind of Clochemerle scene with bumbling but
well-meaning locals vying amiably for a five-year go at running our
little Umbrian community of some 8,000 inhabitants. Now it is all
over I have begun to understand what they mean when they say politics
is war pursued by other means…
the
beautiful gothic façade of Santa Maria della Carità,
which forms the most visible part of the Gallerie dell’Accademia.
First the structure was acupunctured with scaffolding. Then it was
swaddled in plastic sheeting. Large, powerful spotlights were added
to the scaffolding. It turned out that these were for the advertising
billboards. And these weren’t just any billboards. They were
the kind now known in Venice as “maxi-pubblicità”:
cinema-screen sized advertisements that often display a violent taste
disconnected with the contents of the historic structures they cover.
Churches, libraries and galleries have been plastered with the kind
of images used to sell alcohol, soft drinks, designer grunge, jewellery
and the city’s casino – nearly-naked women, garish art
in eye-scorching colours and visual innuendo. Some of Venice’s
most dignified buildings have been reduced to soft-porn pedlars or
eyesores, or both. And the brightest lighting in the city illuminates
the desecration.
Over
700 million Irish – and those of Irish descent – scattered
in all corners of the globe will be enjoying a long weekend on March
17th full of festivities and parades in honor of St. Patrick’s
Day. For the first time Italy will be celebrating the day too, for
March 17th has been proclaimed a National Holiday in honor of the
country’s 150th anniversary of unification.
Every
day so far in 2011 the Italian media has assailed us with new developments
in the corrupt, self-serving and licentious activities of certain
members of our government and those affiliated to it, with Signor
'Burlesque-oni' leading the pack, and the populace watching the spectacle
in a state of apparent awed paralysis.
