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English Writers' Diary - a monthly reflection on life in ItalyBread - March 2010 As a rule of thumb, the shabbier the outside of the shop the better the bread inside, and a hole in the wall will do just fine if the baker knows his job. People want freshly-baked bread twice a day and they want it just right. The signora in front of me has to have her loaf golden brown and crunchy but not too crisp, and three white flour rolls with just a little sprinkling of sesame seeds. That man’s torcilliato loaf has to be very lightly-baked because he wears dentures, and he wants one slice of that pizza over there, but mi raccomando - don’t forget - without any of the salami, because …. And so it goes on. After I’ve bought my own little bocconcini rolls ( “rose-shaped
or oval, signora?”) and chunky freshly-baked breadsticks, there’s
the press round the till to negotiate. With no pretence at queuing,
its best to go in all guns blazing, and may the best woman win. In
the end, it’s worth all the jostling and shoving as the taste
of Palermo’s bread is celestial, its consistency perfection.
And who blames the elegant tapering Sicilian signorina loaf if she
looks with scorn upon her English counterpart wobbling inside its
cellophane on the supermarket shelf? She’s dead right. Foraging – February 2010 When I arrived in this corner of eastern Tuscany many years ago
and wound my way down the mountain to my nearest town, I was often
intrigued to see plastic-bag toting ladies of a certain age halfway
up a steep roadside bank, eyes glued to the grassy ground, bending
and plucking with the sure movements of the expert. I stopped once to ask a forager what she was gathering. “Erbe,” was the reply, and she promptly displayed the cushion of greenstuffs in her bag. Some for her family and some for her rabbits, she went on to explain, telling me how delicious the leaves were when eaten in salads, or lightly cooked. I envied her the inherited country lore she and so many people in this area take for granted, and which led her eye to swiftly single out the plants that are not only food-for-free, but delicious and nutritious into the bargain. This same woman would have known her wild mushrooms too, and, when the time came, how to kill and skin the rabbits she nurtured so carefully. So when the leader of the local nature group I now belong to announced that foraging for edible herbs was to be our next lesson-in-the-field, despite the cold, rain, and sodden winter countryside, I donned my wellies eagerly. If you have never delighted your palate with a plate piled with fresh, pale green budellina (Stellaria media) with just a hint of fresh thyme and drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil, well there’s really nothing to stop you since budellina is nothing other than common chickweed: “very nutritious, high in vitamins and minerals, can be added to salads or cooked as a pot herb, tasting somewhat like spinach. The major plant constituents in chickweed are ascorbic-acid, beta-carotene, calcium, coumarins, genistein, gamma-linolenic-acid, flavonoids, hentriacontanol, magnesium, niacin, oleic-acid, potassium, riboflavin, rutin, selenium, triterpenoid saponins, thiamin, and zinc. The whole plant is used in alternative medicine as an astringent, carminative, demulcent, diuretic, expectorant, laxative, refrigerant, vulnerary.” ! We examined, identified, gathered, photographed, washed, then ate some of our pickings at lunch –a cooked, flavoursome mix of dandelion leaves, Jerusalem artichoke, narrowleaf plantain, wild garlic (leaves and bulbs), the super-food comfrey and a host of others. Naturally we came across less friendly greenstuffs too, the spotted hemlock used to kill Socrates for one, but a good guidebook is a neo-forager’s best friend. So in times of crisis perhaps it’s worth thinking twice about those expensive dietary supplements or fancy “natural” cosmetics: you may well find they can be replaced by the beneficial herbs you can find for free on a brisk and healthy walk in your local park, or on the heath, or maybe even strolling around your own back garden! Don’t forget the guidebook and the plastic bag. Patti Garvin Capodanno - January 2010 The other side of the damage is material rather than bodily. I remember one capodanno in the centre of Rome many years ago. As the bells tolled midnight the destruction began. I peered nervously out of the window. The street below was deserted, and a good thing too: from windows all along the road bottles were flying out and exploding on the basalt setts below. Along with the bottles went anything people wanted to replace in the new year – chairs, tables, old washing machines. Rome has been sacked many times in its long history, but on that occasion it seemed that the Romans had decided not to wait for the barbarians to turn up. When we left for home an hour or two later we picked our way gingerly through a litter of broken glass and smashed furniture. It was like the debris of a civil war. Maybe things are better now, I don’t know. We live outside the city and these days spectacle tends to win over destruction. But still there’s always the hint of danger. A few years ago we saw in the New Year at the apartment of some friends on the outskirts of the city. They were quite high up and had a balcony looking south towards Anzio. On the stroke of midnight the whole horizon exploded. It was like the Anzio landings all over again. Star shells, flares, rockets, mortars. Doubtless some enterprising people had an old German 88 somewhere in the back garden and were sending shells down onto the beachhead. But we were safe enough in our vantage point, or rather, we would have been were it not for the two girls – beautiful, spiky-heeled, elegantly made-up, micro-skirted and black-tighted – who were standing beside us on the balcony. They were launching rockets. They were holding the things in their sharply manicured fingers, lighting the blue touch paper and then letting them go as you might release a whippet when hare coursing. And smoking, they were smoking. But then, I guess everything was. Happy New Year. Simon Mawer
The Dove and the Doer – December 2009
Switch now to Florence’s Santa Maria Novella Railway Station which apart from being a mouthful to get out, is a hive of hurrying human beings all either trying to board or get off one or other of its grubby trains. Prudently, I came early for mine and am already ensconced in a window seat gazing out at the teeming platforms with unkindly satisfaction. My eye is caught by a harassed, clearly foreign, woman bent almost double under a massive backpack. There would be nothing out of the ordinary in this except that despite a youthful, almost girlish, figure she is clearly well into her seventies. This interests me immediately and I am glad when she struggles into my carriage and chooses the seat opposite mine, for now I’ll be able to observe her better and perhaps strike up a conversation. I spring up to help her heave the enormous piece of luggage onto the rack but we are beaten back by its weight and have to enlist the help of a Japanese student from across the aisle. The broken and equally monstrous suitcase she has lugged on board stays at her feet – large northern European feet in mannish open sandals. She is Hungarian-born, Argentinian-raised and has been travelling the world for the past six years, two of which have taken her the length and breadth of Italy. She stays in youth hostels and when possible, offers to crew boats, thus saving money and squeezing even more of the planet. Into her breathless itinerary. Why does she do it, I want to know. She is fired, she says, by a yearning to see. Looking at the exhausted features and nervous movements I wonder at the wisdom of this, but say nothing. Why for instance, can’t she be like the dove in the tree and sit, observe and contemplate, and which of the two is the happier? Gay Marks Waterproofing - November 2009Late October. Other parts of Italy start thinking of mushrooms, chestnuts, getting the wood chopped and stacked. There is, I assume, a satisfying feeling of building the stockade against the traditional enemies of cold and hunger.
It’s an idea that I explore in my forthcoming novel, The Book of Human Skin, set at the end of the eighteenth century. Inside the Palazzo Espagnol, proud painted apartments slowly turn into dismal grottoes. The parasitic aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces who inhabit them have inherited those apartments without any effort on their own part. So they no more think of saving their home than a tapeworm thinks of sprucing up its human host. When a room finally dies in blaze of mould, they simply shut the door on it. More doors shut; whole floors are handed over to the humidity. ‘And so,’ observes the (semi-literate) servant Gianni, ‘Our whole city lay a-rutting, cankered with meanness and indolents.’ These days, no-one can afford to shut the door on Venetian damp. It’s more pleasurable to confect metaphors about this than to live it: metaphor does not usually involve plumbers. The cold mists, rain and acqua altas of autumn traditionally find us shivering and unwashed, crouching by a small electric heater, bleating into the telephone. The boiler always fails as soon as the central heating is turned on, because of the build-up of sediment. Eventually you lure a plumber to the house. But Venetian plumbers are like teenage girls. They can’t do anything for more than an hour without getting bored and needing a sweet drink and to go shopping. Mentally calculating the number of bars between San Vidal and the plumbing supplies shop at San Barnaba (seven) you go back to your desk to write some more metaphors about water. You know you’ll have plenty of time to work up a poetic idea before he gets back. For Venetians, late October also means time to get the water-gates resealed with fresh rubber. Last year I forgot. Then came the historic tide of December 1. The rugs, curtains, legs of antique furniture were all thoroughly marinated in filthy floodwater before I could get back to the house. The first thing I did on arriving was wade through our hall to lift the gates to let the water OUT. The Watergates had failed because the rubber had dried out and become friable. It crumbled like a macaroon at the first lick of the tide. The spectacular high tides have their corresponding dramatic low ones. Sometimes those profound lows do a mysterious thing: suck the water out of the lavatories and replace it with primaeval stink. And the damp brings out my least-favourite insects, the scolopendre. These scuttling, lurking, biting creatures blend all the least charming characteristics of millipedes and cockroaches. I had them join the army of Venice’s arch-enemy, Bajamonte Tiepolo, in my children’s novel, The Undrowned Child. There’s one behind my spice-basket right now. I saw his whiskers this morning. Then there’s the problem of frozen water that inserts itself in cracks of antique stone, expands, and enlarges the fissures. The stone parapet above our balcony has become our sword of Damocles. It’s now a serious danger, raining delicate stone flakes in a constant, lyrical fashion. Our neighbours know, but this building dates to 1355, and is vincolato vincolato – protected to the limit of the law. You cannot undertake even urgent maintenance without planning permission. We’re still waiting. The flakes are still falling; bigger ones now. Like a high-tech ancient mariner, you listen to the shrieks, not of an albatross, but of the acqua alta sirens. They tell you whether the tide’s going to be a nuisance, a damned nuisance, a worry or a crisis (100cm, 120cm, 140cm, 155cm above the base tide respectively). You also adjust your footwear accordingly: galoshes, wellies, fisherman’s thighboots. Or slippers, because there’s no way you’re going out in that. But would I live anywhere else? An emphatic no. As a pale blue mist sighs in from the lagoon, and as the water laps gently into the hall, an egret wades along our submerged jetty on its yellow star-shaped feet. Water is an enemy you can’t help but love. Michelle Lovric Italian Writing Style - October 2009Why so many ordinary Italians choose to write in a convoluted and wandering style has haunted me for years. Last week I asked a linguist her take on this. Silvia is an Italian studying at the University in Trieste to become a translator/interpreter. Her first foreign language is Portuguese, her second is English. These are followed by five or six other languages, including Ancient Greek and Latin. She is at the moment in the throes of writing a thesis comparing Portuguese translations of the novel Il Gattopardo by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. She is studying English translations of the same work just for fun. I am telling you all this so that you will understand that she is an intelligent, thoughtful young woman, whose analysis of the Italian psyche should be considered.
Patricia Guy Sfratto! - September 2009My wife cried and the landlord’s solicitor laughed at her. He’d been trying to get us out of the beautiful, overpriced flat in Parioli for more than a year before he turned up with a woman bailiff, two armed policemen and locksmiths ready to break down the front door. Now he was savouring his moment of victory. The slippery slope to our first eviction began when I received a call on my mobile from London one day saying simple that I had been “axed” as part of a budget cut. I discovered quickly that there was no unemployment benefit for foreigners in Italy and no social security to cushion us as there might have been in the UK. It was vital to buy time to put off being chucked out as I was battling to meet a deadline to hand in the final version of my first book based on my work as a war reporter in the Balkans. A forced move before it was finished could have scuttled the whole project by putting me way behind deadline. A lawyer took up our case and my Mum lent me some of her precious savings so we were able to pay much of the back rent and satisfy the judge handling our case that we warranted a stay of execution. But as soon as one writ had been biffed back the tough lawyer acting for our landlord, a retired ambassador and pompous count, issued another one. Then our own lawyer mysteriously declined at last minute to represent me at another hearing, saying only that she would not be in Rome “for personal reasons.” Almost the last thing I did before the bailiffs arrived and sealed
up the flat with our belongings inside was to attend the launch of
my book in London at the Athenaeum Club. The thrill of becoming a
published author only partially compensated for the ordeal of being
homeless, however. It was a case of clawing our way back to normality.
For two and a half months we four – two adults and two saintly
children – lived in one room, an artist’s studio rented
us to by an Irish painter. Her excellent collection of dvds helped
to pass the time though the studio reeked from varnish drying on a
huge oil she had painted of illegal immigrants in a boat on their
way to Lampedusa – in some ways an appropriate comment on our
own situation, I felt. There followed three months in a two room flat,
affording everyone a little more privacy but not much and an Orwellian
game of cat and mouse with the rascally landlord who lived on the
floor below us. The newspaper died after a year and the writs began arriving for a second time. This landlord was in no mood to compromise whatsoever. His son was getting married and wanted the flat to live in. How the hell did we ever get in this mess? I found some solace in reading “Nora,” Brenda Maddox’s biography of James Joyce’s wife, which recounts how the Joyces were evicted from their flat in the Via Frattina. By now my new publisher was nagging me to finish my second book, which was way behind deadline. However I didn’t think I could truthfully tell my wife, as Joyce told Nora when she asked him what he was doing, that I was “finishing a masterpiece.” A close Italian relative who I asked for help said simply “why don’t you find somewhere more appropriate to your means.” Sound advice, no doubt, but hurtful. At last an American friend came up with an introduction to a place in Trastevere that sounded like a real home but before we could move the police were banging on our door again. This time I was really angry and wanted to make a fight of it before giving in. “Go ahead and break it down then,” I snarled at the cops. It was a solid door and the locksmiths had been attacking it with hammers and an electric drill for an hour before I was promised we’d be given daily access to get our furniture out. Pulling back the heavy bookcases I’d piled up against the front door, I drew the bolts and let in the siege party. That landlord’s lawyer didn’t sneer like his colleague, but a tubby locksmith couldn’t resist a laugh and a joke at our plight. My main fear as we waited for the knock on the door had been that
we would be thrown on the street as my eldest daughter Suzanne did
her final bac. exams at the French Lycée. In fact she got the
highest marks in science in her year and went on to win a place at
Oxford university that we heard about a few weeks before the bailiffs
arrived. The bastards never really got us down. Umbria Jazz - August 2009
I go to Umbria Jazz each year with my cousin Mike who has failed at Rock music, acting and marriage but is great company in small doses. He’s just had an humongous cancer operation, which, when I had my day job as a surgeon, was designed to kill but seldom cure. But it seems to have left Mike even better than before and keeping strictly to his diet of campari, gin, crisps and occasional pasta; he tells me that this is compatible with his chemo. Burt Bacharach played the sound track of our young lives, George Benson and James Taylor sang songs for elderly hippies and McCoy Tyner, Ahmed Jamal and Bill Frizell reminded me why I stopped liking any jazz played after Sonny Rollins. Fortunately jazz for the elderly was played for free each afternoon in the shaded Carducci Gardens. When you read Patricia Clough’s new book on Umbria (whad’ya mean you haven’t bought it yet – what are friends for?) you’ll find out that Perugia is full of bad people. At 2am in Corso Vannucci when you can hardly move for wall to wall teenagers, you can see the reason why – Nonnas and Mammas don’t seem to care when their children get in at night. But what is very different from the mouth breathing football shirted Brit counterpart is that they seem to have the capacity for enjoyment without being drunk. Mike is at present touring Britain with his new show on Chet Baker and is planning to do it in Perugia next year. I hope he makes it but if not I’ll go to our favourite bar, order a campari with gin, munch a crisp and hum a tune from Les Miserables – Empty Chairs and Empty Tables. Arnie Maran
Absolute Nonsense – July 2009In July 1847 Edward Lear was trudging through Sicily
and not enjoying it at all. Well, you can’t please everyone and I put Lear’s unhappy experiences down to bad luck rather than intolerance. He suffered from epilepsy and depression, and to be fair to him, Sicily can be pretty unpleasant in high summer; all those flies for one thing. One of his sketches shows him trying to paint in Agrigento’s Valley of the Temples wreathed in a cloud of fiercely buzzing dots, and in yet another, he’s being pursued, limbs flailing, by a ferociously grinning band of beggars. A landscape painter and illustrator, the twentieth of twenty-one
children, Lear is remembered above all for his gorgeous nonsense limericks
accompanied by a suitably dotty collection of figures, many sporting
outsize noses and stilt-like legs. And as proof that he loved Italy
after all, not only did he spend the rest of his life here, he also
introduced a delightful gaggle of Italian oddbods into his rhymes.
There’s the young woman of Pisa for instance, whose daughters
did nothing to please her, and the old person of Florence who held
mutton chops in abhorrence, not to mention the guy from Aosta who
had a large cow but then lost her. Even the despised Sicily gets a
look in with the old man of Messina whose daughter was named Opsibeena
And as for the young lady of Lucca whose lovers completely forsook
her... well, she ran up a tree and said fiddle-de-dee which embarrassed
the people of Lucca. I bet it did. There was a young girl from West Hampstead, Gay Marks
June - Home Thoughts from AbroadWriting for children is wonderful: you can make rats talk, you can
you can make cats fly. And you can bring back the dead. In my forthcoming children’s book, The Undrowned Child, I revivified two controversial characters from Venetian history – Marin Faliero, the decapitated traitor Doge, and Enrico Dandolo, the blind warrior Doge who led the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople in 1204. Unfortunately, amid the glorious capture of the enemy fortress and the rich looting, Dandolo’s men also slaughtered around 50,000 innocent civilians. The irascible Dandolo himself died a year later, still at war, this time in Bulgaria. He was buried in Constantinople – modern-day Istanbul – in the former church and mosque of Aghios Sofia. When I was in Istanbul recently, I found myself feeling a little sorry for poor old Dandolo, despite his wicked deeds. He would have hated to be buried so far away from his beloved Venice. (I know how it hurts be homesick for Venice and to feel that one is living and dying among the infidel …) So I begged a flower from our hotel and took it to Aghios Sofia. Enrico’s tomb is high up in the airy dome, watched over by serious-eyed mosaics of the Christian God and local saints. A small stone in the floor, marked only by his name, the grave looks humble and lonely. I waited till the guard wasn’t looking and I put my little red geranium on Enrico Dandolo’s gravestone. My husband worried that this would cause an international diplomatic incident, but I managed to be staring innocently at the next cluster of mosaics by the time the guard turned round. Some say that his victims, the Turks, actually destroyed the tomb of the hated Venetian when the old Byzantine Empire fell in 1453, throwing his bones to the dogs to chew. It’s also claimed that Italian restorers laid the remembrance stone much later. But I prefer to think Enrico’s there under my flower. Michelle Lovric
Atishoo, atishoo we all fall down - May
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Palermo
is famed for its bread. No other town or city in Italy can hold a
candle to it, or at least I’ve never found such as place. What’s
more, buying it is a therapeutic experience with stress and anger
magically melting away and the senses deliciously lulled. It’s
the sheer spectacle and variety of the bread: its aroma, the wave
of comforting warmth from the ovens, the sound of loaves and rolls
being tipped into their wooden bins, the crackle of paper bags and
the scrape of the metal spatula as sizzling hot pizza is lifted from
the tray.
It
means “head of the year” – capo d’anno
– which seems sensible enough; but it could just as easily be
“chief damage” – capo danno. The latter
might be more appropriate. Italy is a great place for tradition and
one of the New Year traditions in Naples is getting out your old revolver
– yes, you’ve actually got an old revolver – and
firing it off into the night sky along with all the fireworks. Occasionally
the weapon gets pointed in the wrong direction and someone in the
family gets shot, but hey, they’re already blowing bits of their
limbs off with illegal fireworks, so what’s the fuss?
Have you ever seen a persimmon tree close up, I wonder, or indeed
a persimmon? Not a particularly attractive fruit as far as I am concerned
with its oversweet flesh and slightly repugnant feel to the fingers.
But at the height of its maturity the tree itself is a glorious array
of smoky pink globes which from the bathroom window this November
day I can see harbours a very corpulent and complacent-looking dove.
A collared dove to be precise or Streptopelia decaoto, a
species which for some years now has been moving into Italy’s
cities in a big way from the countryside. This quiet grey creature
is sitting stock still, looking straight ahead of it and seems reluctant
to move ever again. In other words it has found its ideal niche, its
raison d’etre.
But
in Venice, we have only one true enemy: water. As the year wanes,
damp is our condition, our mood, our destiny. It’s not just
the streets that are weighted with water: so is the misty air, so
are the bricks, which bloom a white efflorescence of salt. It’s
picturesque, but the truth is that it’s eating at the stone
like a cancer. Eventually, even the bricks have their deaths in Venice.
I
finally got fully dressed in an under pass which is part of Perugia’s
wonderful scala mobile system. Just as playing tennis in Doc Marten’s
is unacceptable so is attending a jazz festival without wrap around
shades and, after losing mine, my life was saved by a Chinese hawker.
“How
ridiculous…” I mutter to myself, driving in town on a
beautiful spring day with the windows down. I search for suitable
parking place and pull up sharp. Handbrake on, handkerchief out…
a total of eight sneezes, not quite my personal record. "…planting
Tigli (lime trees) along the main avenues in Florence. Darn right
dangerous. You can’t sneeze without shutting your eyes, and
you can’t drive without looking.”
A
cruise ship rising from a meadow is an unsettling sight, but to anybody
familiar with the city, it’s just one of many contradictory
images. Admittedly, ships don’t generally sail on grass and
you don’t often find two-foot high skittles standing in rigid
rows on the pavement either. But then this is Palermo’s Foro
italico, or seafront park, created some fifteen years ago as a haven
for its sorely-tried citizens. To build it they relocated a traditional
fairground and demolished a hideous circle of religious statues. I
love fairs and still miss the roundabouts but had absolutely no regrets
about losing the statues. 