A Tuscan View - from Umbria

Spellbound.

23rd June 2008

It’s 5.45 on the morning after the longest day of the year.  It’s warm but the sky still has the soft pale blue, almost white, look of dawn.  The sun, low and hazy, has yet to stoke and build up her heat.  The brick steps are still cool and there is freshness in the shadows.  We are up, the whole family and, with barely a tussle, have managed to assemble - bleary and blinking - by the car.

We drive through the sleepy, breezeless countryside past putty coloured olive groves and inky cypress trees standing still, silent and spellbound as the Sunday morning bells ring in the day.  Soon we arrive at Citta della Pieve keen and hungry.  Here the streets are being carpeted with flowers and it is this that we have come to see, the Festa dei Fiori in honour of S.Luigi Gonzaga, protector of the Casalino Terziere.

These beautiful decorations are made once a year on the nearest Sunday to the Summer solstice.  The festival’s origins are lost in the mists of time but some say it marks the solemn procession of Spring.  Many of the designs are traditional, taking their inspiration from the Renaissance and the local master Perugino, but every year new designs are added in rich and subtle colours.

Flowers and scented herbs are grown in the surrounding countryside specially for this extravaganza and for 3 months prior to the day locals collect and dry the blooms and seed heads in preparation.  No money changes hands, it is simply the Italian way.

 We wanted to be in Citta della Pieve early in the day to see the work in progress, volunteers have been up through the night creating these vibrant scenes.  Ordinary people, nonnas and nonnos with their grandchildren, the man from the bar and another, the big gruff man who sells tickets for the Perugino and hides his broken smile. Today he walks up and down spraying the flowers with sugar water which will harden and set the blooms.

There is an atmosphere of hushed business and an up-beat vibe.  The whole place glows in the intensifying sunshine, the vivid colour of the petals radiant against the old stone and red brick of the town.

This wonderful show of dedication and artistry is made all the more fascinating by it’s fleeting nature, later this evening a procession of townspeople will walk over the flowers to the main piazza scattering the blooms to the gutter in their wake.

As we walk between the images taking photos, laughing with our girls, chatting with the old guys, restraining the dog and stopping for cappuccio and cornettos, I have to admit it was well worth the wake up call.

We so enjoyed photographing this glorious event that you can find more pictues of the flower designs in the side bar, just give me a day to sort it out...

The best thing I ate:
Risotto with roast fennel and peperoncino a casa

Yes it’s hot, but sometimes only risotto will do.  There is something so therapeutic about the making and eating of risotto, the ritual of adding the stock and stirring, watching while the little translucent grains grow plump and creamy.  Followed by the soothing balm of eating a bowl full of bliss.

  A good risotto can calm a frazzled spirit, comfort a fragile soul and even cure a hangover!  But for this magic to work it has to be made well and that means practice.
The rice should still retain a slight ‘nutty’ bite and the consistency be an unctuous oozing mass, not too soupy, not too stiff.

 Find a good recipe for risotto bianco and get practising, I suggest ‘The best of Anna Del Conte’.  It is this book that gave me a great tip for preparing risotto in quantity without having to stand and stir, red in the face, while others are knocking back the aperitivo.  ‘Jamie’s Italy’ also has a good variation.   Once you’ve got the knack there is no limit to the good things you can add to your risotto.

With a nod to Jamie (and for a big gutsy flavour) I stirred in soft caramelised roasted fennel and boosted it with crushed fennel seeds, lemon zest and the subtle hint of peperoncino and, what do you know, even marito’s hangover was cured!

Where to get it: 
Make it yourself. 

Zen and the art of the decespugliatore…

19th June 2008

 In London, when I used to hear a faint buzzing hum on a hot Summer’s day, it was more than likely a hovering helicopter, checking the congestion or searching for an escapee from the local prison.

When we thought of moving to Italy, one of the overriding sounds that I always imagined and hoped for was a similar faint, distant hum of Summer, but this time caused by crickets, bees, or simply the hazy heat rising.
Unfortunately I was wrong.

That sound here (especially at this time of year) is nothing to do with nature, it is the buzz of the ubiquitous ‘decespugliatore’. Americans know it as the ‘weed-whacker’ and, in England, it is simply called a ‘strimmer’.

To memorise and then to be able to pronounce this inexplicable word makes you an honorary Italian in my eyes and, despite the rising heat in Italy, my decespugliatore was hard at work today, along with so many thousands of others across the country.

Yes, grown men in orange boiler suits, you know the ones, spend hours each day strimming Italy’s countryside.

Some say Italians are a little obsessed with this method of weed control, I say no.
Once you’ve strapped on one of these beautiful machines with the correct mix of petrol and oil (‘miscela’ it’s called, available from country petrol stations on request) you can see why the hours seem to fly by.

You go into a kind of hypnotic trance, strimming away at anything that has the temerity to raise its head above about an inch off the ground. It’s mesmerising.

In England I used to feel quite sorry for anyone with that job, I just couldn’t see the attraction. Now I know that they are the lucky ones, not those fancy uniformed and sunglassed helicopter pilots.

The stupidest thing I did today;

Just got a bit carried away with my decespugliatore…now I have a little explaining to do.

Dyed hair and false smiles

8th April 2008

It would be hard to miss the election about to happen in Italy, not because our tv is filled with grey-suited, bespectacled men with dyed hair and false smiles, and not because the adverts are punctuated by explanations of how the complicated voting system works. It is simply that every public place; car parks, piazzas and municipal parks, has suddenly been filled with large, metal, grey election poster boards, presumably designed to keep the unsuspecting buildings poster-free.

I won’t pretend to understand anything about Italian politics or the machinations of the voting system, but suffice to say that after the election there are a lot of ‘conversations’ in smoke-filled rooms as the parties form tenuous coalitions with each other to achieve a working majority. This then results in a government which is quite soon held to ransom by all the smaller parties until the tenuous coalitions fall apart and the working majority is lost and we have another election and the large, metal, grey election poster boards come out again.

Someone once told me that if you go to a dinner party in England, the subjects to avoid are religion, sex, and politics. But in Italy, whether at breakfast, lunch or dinner they are the only topics of conversation.

Political manoeuvrings are an Italian tradition, they have been going on for centuries, and almost every fresco, sculpture and painting in Florence owes its existence to the blind ambition or overt gratitude of a benefactor with one eye on the heavens and the other firmly over his shoulder.

This goes some way to explaining the appearance on fresco cycles of the faces of so many wealthy Florentines. As many as five hundred years ago, a little advertising and a little publicity did you no harm at all, you could even carve on the façade of a church the fact that you paid for it and, more importantly, how much it cost!

The stupidest thing I did today;
Momentary lapse in concentration whilst holding a chisel and swinging a hammer

Tufa

18th March 2008

I made a rather foolish decision a few days ago. The job was to smash down a small building attached to the house to make way for a large terrace. At my disposal was a very nice, orange digger (see picture) which is designed to knock down small buildings in a matter of minutes, or, alternatively I could choose to spend the rest of my life taking it down by hand to save the bricks for later.

Me and my digger

That was the first bad decision. Then, yesterday, when deciding where the drains and septic tanks need to go, it was decided that the perfect spot would be where I had just spent 3 days piling up those 562 big, water-heavy bricks (trust me, I did count them)
So now I have to move them to the other side of the garden, by hand, which gives me another chance to count them, I suppose.

Tufa - beautiful, but heavy when wet.

Who would have thought that the main topic of conversation at my 6 year olds parents’ evening would be the fact that of all the children in her class, only Lorenzo eats his vegetables and absolutely no-one eats the minestrone. Those parents who weren’t busy chatting on their mobile phones looked most upset except, of course, for Lorenzo’s mother who almost felt the need to stand up in her moment of pride. This was, fortunately, the only moment when individuals were singled out. Most of the parents were cowering in fear of the public humiliation at the hands of a teacher who was literally foaming at the mouth as she explained her exasperation at coping with such an ‘unruly’ lot.
However I managed to escape unscathed from both sets of teachers, now I just have to work out how our two children manage to transform themselves into little angels between 8.30am and 4.30pm.

The stupidest thing I did today;
See above...

Vladimir and the villagers

13th February 2008

This ‘optimistic’ blog struggles to retain its optimism sometimes; red tape, ever escalating prices, never escalating temperatures and a dog whose diet of stolen foods makes for a vet’s bill much higher than it ought to be.

To give you an idea, last week he claimed; one pound of butter, a babybel cheese (including wax and wrapper), two pairs of sunglasses, various items from the cat litter tray, and as much of our rubbish as he could shove into his mouth before we caught him.

Having said all that. I was then privileged to witness the most extreme example of Italian’s love of their mobile phones. I have discovered that there is nowhere and no occasion in which you cannot or should not answer your phone. But there had to be a limit, and now I think I have found that limit. At the vets, taking the temperature of my dog, you might have thought that she could miss a call, but no. With one hand up my dog’s backside and the other ferreting around her white coat for the mobile, even the dog had to laugh.

Had a fantastic afternoon, without the dog, photographing the railway station in Florence, Santa Maria Novella. I put a few of the best ones in the sidebar…

The stupidest thing I did today;

Dipping out of my ‘theme’ for a change, I found out something very useful today which might stop me doing something stupid in the future. According to local legend, our builder, Vladimir, once ‘took on’ a whole village after a dispute in a bar. I must remember that.

Driving in Italy - a guide.

21st November 2007

I love Italians.
They are so kind, friendly, generous and forgiving.
So there has to be a dark side, and there is.
There is a madness inside every Italian, a madness which rears its ugly head each time he or she gets behind the wheel of a car. There is a serious side to this (see the death toll every year on Italian roads) but I prefer to focus on the more mundane aspects which affect your average foreigner on an average day on an average Italian road.

Some tips;

1. Do not say 'thank you' ever, it is a sign of weakness. If you do they will either think you're waving or you're weird.
2. If someone flashes their lights as though to 'let you in', do not be tricked, they are really saying, 'get out of my way!'
3. If you dare venture into the outside lane of a motorway do not let your mirrors deceive you, there will be someone there, someone so close behind you they may as well be in your back seat. They will also be flashing their lights (see above).
4. Do not stop to allow a pedestrian to cross (especially at a pedestrian crossing), they will think you are either an old friend or just weird.
5. Depending on your region of Italy, traffic lights can be any one of these three things; instruction, advice or just Christmas decorations. Be aware.
6. You must use your mobile phone at all times, otherwise other road users may think that you can't afford one.

In order to ensure the safety of both me and my family, I drive the type of car Arnold Schwarzenneger would be proud to own, but I drive it like a nun. It's a strange combination, unless you like musicals, but it seems to work, so far.

The stupidest things I did today;
1., 3. and 4.

Stamps

21st may 2007

Sometimes everything goes a little quiet here; the builder, the geometra, the man about the well and the guys building the gates haven’t called, no-one is visiting or is about to visit, and the battery on my Black and Decker drill goes flat.
It is at these times that you are forced to tackle the Italian system of bureaucracy. We came out here determined not to be critical of the country that gave birth to the Roman Empire, fostered the Renaissance, made the Word Cup final 16 times (and won it 4 of those times). But there is something peculiar here which seems designed to have you shaking your head and wrinkling up your eyebrows at every official office in the land.

Stamps are the key to success in Italy. You have to buy them to put onto each document you sign, and you get them from the tobacconist (unlike bus tickets which you get from the bar).
I carefully collected all the documents I thought I needed to apply for residency here, and went and sat in the queue with my ticket last Wednesday morning. Unfortunately I now need to go to Rome with my Marriage certificate and all our Birth Certificates to get them officially ratified, translated into Italian and stamped at the British Embassy. I then need to take these documents to the Prefecture of Police in Perugia to be officially checked and stamped as legal documents, and then I can take them, and all the other pieces of paper with stamps on, to the Comune to be stamped and to allow the application process to begin.
Fortunately my Black and Decker drill only takes an hour and a half to recharge.

The Stupidest thing I did that day;
Forgetting that Italy were very lucky to get to the finals on at least three of those occasions.