Siena.

We showed up without a booking for our two nights, which was probably a mistake, and we compounded it by spending some hours to park and walk into town to get advice from the visitor information center. They were nice enough, but in the end they could find nothing for us in town and we were sent to a outlying village for our lodgings. The "agriturismo" there turned out to be more like a small hotel in a country setting - just far enough out in the country, it turned out, that we were miles from any place to buy our lunch or dinner. The owner was a very nice gentleman who quickly decided we possessed enough Italian to be worthy fairly lengthy conversation, and after showing us our apartment (out of rooms, he said, so take this flat for the same price) he introduced us to his hunting dogs and we made small talk about my italian heritage, etc. Our rooms were clean and modern, with a full living room, kitchen, and full bath with tub/shower; the drawbacks - there must be some, always - the TV had no sound; but the upstairs neighbors had plenty: apparently a family with some number of small children who bawled well they were unhappy (usually) and ran back and forth across the floors when they were pleased. The wife had a sharp tongue, with which she would berate someone (her husband?) for long periods in the morning. Fortunately we weren't around too much.
Ah Siena. It is now celebrated as the number 2 destination in Tuscany, after Florence, and it shows. Here in late September, there are still huge crowds, mostly German and Americans, many moving through the city in bus-sized tour groups. Although it does not process the same numbers as Florence, it seems to do it less gracefully: in the historical center of town it feels as though the function of the place is given over to the service of tourism, most especially with the shops and restaurants, and it is difficult to see any normal city life taking place. It is essentially tourists watching tourists.
Unlike Florence or Venice, it is a bit unclear what exactly the tourists have come to see. The city itself is attractive enough, but not in any unique way, really; it's quite like a huge Volterra, or Orvieto, or a large version of any of a dozen hill towns. Certainly, as an historical political entity, it ranks right up there, but...what else? Well, to be fair, the Duomo is amazing. Nancy and I had seen it on a previous trip, and we elected not to stand in line again, but to concentrate instead on the "important" museums.
What to say about Sienese painting? Volume over quality? A well-spring of mediocrity? At best, it succeeds in being naively charming by some accident of primitive draughtsmanship or a curious and arcane subject matter; normally, though, it seems a half-hearted imitation of Bottecelli, or Titan, or Caravaggio, and almost invariably stiff and graceless - sometimes even grotesque and cartoonish. We didn't like it.
In the end we tracked down a few things that intrigued. They weren't featured in the literature, really, and mostly they were underground in one sub-basement or another. First, we found the works of the Duomo museum, where they put the worn original statues from the cathedral (now replaced with fakes) and cast-off altarpieces, prayer books, chalices, robes, hats, etc., and some nifty reliquaries (skulls, and various body parts of saints, in silver-and-glass containers -strange, because one would think these objects would forever rate being inside a church somewhere). Then, in a basement of the Muncipal buidling, we found a couple rooms with some good 19th-century italian realist painting. Lastly, we found some pots. The "Antiquities" museum, several levels below one of the standard tourist venues, was remarkable not so much for its contents but for the amazing underground labyrinth in which they were housed - cool.
Nancy bought some shoes and we got out of town.

Pots.

One can suppose modern man began making pots soon after perfection of the hand-adze and the spear-point, and that these accumulated millions of pots must have gone somewhere - surely many thousands were knocked off the table by children pursuing family pets through the kitchen, and many thousands more shattered against a wall, just having missed the heads of an insolent slaves. Still millions more doubtlessly survived beyond their usefulness or fashion, and would have required renting storage space outside the city walls, except that another solution was hit upon: that everyone would be required, upon embarking for the afterlife, to take along at least a pot or two, or perhaps a pot and a few oil lamps, or a pot and a character mug and then, best of all, to be actually interred inside yet another, somewhat bigger pot.
Of course, as we all know, much later, closer to our own time, it became a fashionable pursuit, and later an established science, to discover these discarded pots and to collect and admire them. Tuscany, having been inhabited territory for quite a few years, is possessed of ground chock-full of pots, and a large fraction of them have already been dug up and cleaned up, and when necessary, reassembled; and gentlemen aristocrats built giant collections of them, large enough to irritate their wives; subsequently they were obligated to turn them over to whatever provincial museum would have them. Windy Volterra, perched high on a rocky promontory, appears to have been an especially safe and secure place to make pots, which would explain why their museum is so richly endowed with them; so many, in fact, that beyond room upon room with large examples, the curators are obliged to stack row upon row of smaller ones on shelves that reach to the 25-foot ceilings, well beyond where it would be credible that visitor could appreciate their qualities; add to this, glass cases of what might what appear to be various finger bowls, egg cups, ointment jars, flower vases, wine jugs, candy bowls, chargers, salad plates and assorted Etruscan and Greco-Roman bric-a-bric of the sort that must have had Legionnaire husbands rolling their eyes when they got back to the house after a long campaign.




Which is not to say that we didn't a have swell time in Volterra. We found a small family-run villa-hotel outside one of the main city gates, and choose a very small but clean room built into the attic space (provided with a partial area of standing-height by the device of a dormer-roof-balcony construction). Our visit coincided with that a large cycle-touring group from Seattle, whom seemed to be occupying half of the rooms. The staff were very kind to us and understood - or let pass - some fairly ambitious Italian-speaking on our part.
One of the surprises for us was the cathedral at Volterra, a fairly elaborate affair that was scarcely mentioned in our tour-books. Although there were a lot of tourists in town, largely American, there was enough space to so that we didn't feel crowded; it rained or threatened to rain during most of our visit, but after many weeks of warm humid weather it was a welcome relief.

Parting.

And so we leave our stone farmhouse of the last month, with a salute to Sig. Dazzi. We remember our days with our house-guest Jeanne; the late night suppers after long days of touristing; the beautiful views morning scenes laid out under our upstairs windows: the terraced hillside of Pontemazzori and the rising mountains behind Camaiore: long mornings spent in bed, reading trashy novels and great literature. Above all, we carry with us memories of the four successful reunion of the extended Casali family, from old folks to giggling children, camped out under the huge pine tree on improvised tables and an odd variety of chairs and benches.
We leave behind also the ceiling crossed with heavy rough-hewn beams, and the red-painted rough tile floor rolling like a wave under mismatched furniture; the damp upstairs, and especially the terrycloth-covered living room set (which felt perpetually damp), and our mini-TV which could supply only the lowest of the RAI broadcasts. We leave the set of Italian motor-touring magazines, 1950-1954, inclusive; expansive sets of cast-off kitchen utensils and tableware; and the vaguely malodorous "modern" bathrooms with their hissing commodes and unused bidets. Above all we bid farewell to the resident life of the house: the scampering rodents in the attic upstairs; the pheasants in the fields, the foxes, and the passing hunting dogs, curious but skittish without their masters; and the insects which joined us inside: the moths, gnats, worms, ants, and one out-sized brown spider - and le zanzare - the tiger mosquitoes -and the accompanying ritual of repellent sprays, red VAPE burners and hydrocortisone ointments. One last time we drive down the 300 yards of high-centered gravel-tracks to the paved road- piano, piano - all the way in a whining first gear.



Did I remember to say that it IS a lovely place?

Puccini in Lucca

Saturday might, after a goodbye snack with Luana's family at their place outside the walls in San Concordio, we met Gabriella, along with Vivienne,her son Giacomo and her mother-in-law Lidia in town to see a performance of La Bohemie. It took place inside the deconsecrated church of San Giovanni, a very old church which now normally serves as an archeological display, as several layers worth of Christian- and Roman-era excavations are now available for viewing under the church floors.
The performance itself was spartan but very effective. For 30 euros, we had only expected a standing recital of the opera; instead, it was acted in total, on a minimalist set, with modern clothes for costumes (it felt a bit a bit like a non-dress rehearsal). Background actors/singers appeared on stage in the form of small choirs; Over the small stage hung a large screen on which was projected a live video of close-ups of the actors and the orchestra, or sometimes a slide or short piece of footage of a Lucchese scene (like a bar or a public building) which related to the scene at hand. Our seats (cafe chairs) were just 30 feet from the stage, and a one point the players exited their scene by walking up the center aisle and standing right next to us, which was great fun.
The singing and music was first-rate, Nancy and I thought as good or better than we had seen at the L.A. Opera; the tenor had a little trouble being heard over the orchestra, but this seems to be a normal thing in La Boheme.
We drove Gabriella back home to Guamo, where she insisted on feeding us a late-night snack.

Firenze ancora.

We set off early on a second mission to Florence, this time with a parking stragety and a timetable in mind. We visit for the first time the large-ignored "Arte Moderne" gallery of the Palazzo Pitti, which yields several rooms of huge Academia-style portraits and battle-scenes, but also a good selection of 19th- and early 20th-century genre and realist painters of Italy ( and a single wonderful Sargent, a portrait of his friend, sitting on a stool, holding a paint box, with the alps as a backdrop). After a tourist lunch we re-visit the Uffizi, and giving attention to many of the rooms we breezed through during the Dryden visit, and with special discrimination according to our our tastes.

Barga.

Around midday we drove in into the local mountains behind Lucca, part of the Appenines, to drive along the river Serchio and to visit the hillside town of Barga. This proved to be a pleasant place with a nice large church on the top of a hill, with wide vistas. The presence of America visitors, though not in large numbers, was evident this day, and there was a large group of older women making tentative watercolors under the guidance of a weary-looking middle aged man. We had a nice lunch at a local bar where the owner/waiter was intent on exercising his English with us (normally we take small offense at this, but he clearly hoped to be helpful). In the end, we served the ball into his court by asking for directions - in English - but in his response he was obliged to switch back to Italian, so we won a small equalizer there. Such is the stuff of our linguistic adventures.

Dinner on the Hill.

We had a wonderful visit with Illaria, Gabriella's sister, and her family, who live high on a hillside overlooking Lucca, in a restored (or perhaps rather - adapted) farm building. The metamorphosis was nearly complete, and Nancy especially was quite inspired; " i could live here." The building remained from the outside a conventional farmhouse, but inside the layout had been transformed as some walls had been removed, creating large bedrooms out of small multiple rooms, creating a larger kitchen, and a combined dining and sitting room area, while retaining the typical huge overhead beams, plaster walls and tiled floors.
Illaria herself proved to be a wonderful chef, and for once we were not pressed to overeat; her husband Raffello was an extremely outgoing and talkative fellow who told us of month-long trip through the United State that he had made as a young man, which provokes many comparisons of things Americans vs. those European. The language was almost entirely italian (though something an English word or phrase was tossed out to us by way of confirmation of meaning), but either by habit or kind intention the pace of words was relatively easy for us to handle, and we found ourselves pressing the limits of our Italian abilities in response to the friendly atmosphere.
illaria and Raffello's two sons, about 12 and 18, had both had English studies at school, but were mostly too shy to try their skills in front of us, except the younger of the two, who would spontaneously burst out with 2 or 3 perfectly pronounced English phrases ("Good Evening, Good Morning, Good Night!") only to bury his head under a couch pillow or to run from the room afterwards.

Gatherings.

We've had a nice week-end of events with the family. Saturday we celebrated our young cousin Giacomo's 14th birthday, along with some of the Casali's neighbors and friends, at the oft-frequented Pizzeria Europa on the beach in Lido di Camaiore. The Casali's downstairs neighbors seem to be especially nice people, with a handicapped son and an exceptionally cute young daughter, all of whom understand English to a large degree, having lived abroad for a while. Despite the on-and-off rain, we had a lovely evening which lasted until nearly midnight.
Sunday virtually the same family group as attended our picnic at the farm re-convened for lunch at the country home of cousin Franchesca and her husband Gianni. This house was perched very high on the hillside, in a small village in the Garfagnana; it had been a residence and studio of Franchesa's father, who had been a sculptor of some repute, and was now being restored after some years in a state of near-ruin. The family ate at long tables assembled in the large downstairs room, surrounded by a small library of old books, many of which were Italian interpretations of Marxist political theory (someone joked that Nancy and I wouldn't be allowed to take any of these back through U.S. Customs; we might have argued the point, but limited language skills precluded this - just as well.) Franchesca's family, as we have known for some time, are or have been members of the Communist Party since the war. That party, now just a small force in Italy politics, regularly embraces ardent pacifist and liberal social welfare issues, and so could be considered similar to the far left segment of the democratic party in the U.S.
Young Giacomo had certainly become the subject of much attention from his younger cousins - all, save one, girls - who seemed to be making a sport of deciding which of them might make him a suitable bride. Giacomo, for his part, dutifully resisted (or made appearances to resist) these advances, as befitted his station.
After the meal a group of us went for a climb up the church for a look-see at the small church and cemetery. This adventure ended somewhat badly, as Luanna received a very bad gouge from an iron cross that was at shin level: it was not serious but enough blood showed so as to her feel faint, and to panic her daughter Isabella a bit. We held her a a comfortable position there, lying in the cemetery (I don't think the irony was lost on anyone) and waiting for the volunteer ambulance from the Misericordia to take her down the hill to have a few stitches.

Oh Poo...

More thunderstorms today.
An oft-repeated television commercial here informs us that young Italians can now download their favorite pop tunes directly to their mobile phones. We recognize among the Top 30 List such recent hits as La Squadra Bellissimi, a tribute to the newly-crowned Italian World Cup (Soccer) Champions, which my cousin's husband Lucciano insisted on playing for us during our evening at the their home the other night. It is a bouncy tune, with lyrics delivered at a machine-gun pace (far beyond our capabilities) and apparently employs many and compounded grammatical errors - for instance, the lack of gender/plurality agreement between noun and adjective- to great comedic effect. We are not sure exactly why this should be so funny, but we are assured that it is.
Another hit now tracking through the charts is titled Poo Poo-poo-poo. We have run to our dictionaries in the hope that it would translate as something like "La La-la-la" or something similarly innocuous, but we came up empty. Those of you with 10-year-boys at home might consider referring the problem to them.

Calci.

Rousting ourselves late in the morning we drive to the hillside town of Calci, in the jurisdiction of Pisa, to visit a monastery which Nancy has heard about. It is a huge complex, mostly vacant, and a ticket entitles us to be lead in a small group by a small man who opens selective doors for us, and closes them as we move on, but does not actually volunteer any commentary. This irks the one Italian in our company, a lady who has brought ten or so German tourists in tow; she complains to the man that on her last visit there was a running description provided. I find, though, that he is willing to answer simple questions posed in Italian, and towards the end he evens attempts to throw in a few English words for my benefit.
Photographs inside the building were not allowed, though this proved to be less of a disappointment than one might imagine: for although the founding of the place reached many years back, most of what we saw, apart from the stucture itself, was endless faux-painted Rococo-style decoration. The body of the complex, apart from the church, chapels and offices, was a series of 15 monks "cells" which opened on a cloistered walkway and a huge garden. The cells were remarkable in that each unit possessed 3 rooms, a bedroom, sitting room and workroom, as well as a private garden. Not a bad life, celibacy not withstanding!
Bizarrely, the monastery's huge barns had been converted into a local museum of natural history. We had to take a look, of course, and so another set of 5-euro tickets. We spent another hour or two wandering through this exhibit, which seemed to consist, in large part, of a collection started in the 1700's by some local aristocrat and added to throughout the 1800's. One should picture huge wooden cabinets and cases, glass-fronted, with a Noah's-Ark variety of skeletons, stuffed and mounted animals (with a particular fascination for poses involving killing and eating), sea creatures soaking in tall jars; dioramas of the ascent of man (this, surely obsolete); and upstairs in the former hay loft, its wide arches now glassed in, enormous skeletons of several species of whale suspended from the ceiling. We left exhausted; and in all our explorations, we had been alone and unguarded, and saw only 2 other visitors.
We returned for a late lunch in Lucca. We might have stopped sooner, at a bar or pizzeria somewhere along the road, but we were everywhere within Pisa's territory confronted with such graffiti as "Lucca merda" and out of loyalty to my grandfather's origins, we moved along.

A cultural note: we are informed that, as a general rule, folks from Lucca do not especially like people from Florence, considering them to be self-important, loud and obnoxious, and to have strange speech patterns, and not know how to construct a decent sugo for their pasta (also of an inferior quality). The Florentines, for their part, are sure in their knowledge of being superior in every respect, and certainly in comparison to the inhabitants of Lucca, who are well-known to be reserved to the point of coldness, and very clannish. Yet in one judgement the Lucchesi and Fiorentini are agreed: that the population of Pisa is of the lowest type, mean, duplicitous and prone to thievery; and that they subsist mainly by exploiting the gullible tourists who show up to see their silly curiosity: a tower which tilts to an extravagant degree (being a product of incompetent Pisan builders and insubstantial Pisan soils). No doubt these attitudes descent from ancient rivalries, in which Pisa was rarely the victor (and then only by some treachery, one would think).

First Rains.

As if on cue, the warm weather broke the new day, and we spent it indoors reading and napping, listening to the rain and wind outside. I am very conscious now of a new level of relaxation of which I am now capable (or of which I had become incapable in recent times), namely, to be able to close my eyes but not to sleep, and to think of nothing in particular, planning nothing, rehearsing nothing, contemplating nothing. I hope that it is a place I can revisit in our new life in the country.
I might theorize that it is the lack of television-watching - now largely displaced by reading - that allows this state of mind. Our small TV here at the house receives only a handful of Italian broadcast channels, and is not nearly as seductive as our cable television set-up at home. For starters, of course, it is only Italian-language, and watching requires some high-level mental engagement for us, something like attending a college lecture, or at least that of solving a crossword puzzle. There are news broadcasts, of course, which we monitor for major world events. And most every morning there are dubbed episodes of Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (called here La Signora del West) which are relatively easy to follow, since both plot and dialogue are very predictable; still, one cannot escape learning a thing or two (about Italian usage).

Festa.

In the afternoon we went into Lucca for the festa. On this date each year, traditionally, a huge wooden crucifix, called the Volto Santo, is taken from its place of honor in the Duomo Cathedral and carried through the streets at dusk, preceded by a long procession. These days, unfortunately, the actual artifact is deemed too precious to be risked outdoors, and in its place is carried a huge cross-shaped box festooned with flowers, rather like a large box of valentine's day chocolates. We had experienced this event before, and knowing that watching the parade in it's entirety is an exercise in patience (consisting as it does not only of religious officials and representatives of local parishes, but also dozens of local marching bands, costumed renaissance re-enactors, flag throwers, police and emergency workers, Lucchesi expatriate clubs and - inexplicably - hundreds upon hundreds of volunteer blood-donors) we elected to watch and take photos only at the assembly area and at the departure point at the church of San Frediano, where the initial invocations are performed. We went for dinner at an outlying restaurant, and then walked around town and up on the city walls, and were surprised to discover many thousands of people celebrating apart form the parade itself, strolling the streets, embracing in the darkness of the city parks, and waiting for the fireworks that would be exploded over the river at midnight.

Jeanne visits / Family Picnic.

We've had a busy week-end. Nancy's friend Jeanne from Washington DC arrived late last week to stay with us for a few days. She had courageously travelled alone on this her first trip to Europe, spending one day in Rome and the next in Florence before taking the train to Lucca. We did our best to help her recover from the initial shock of those bustling places and to ease her into the easier pace here in Lucca and Camaiore. Vivienne, Nancy and Jeanne did quite a bit of shopping in the first 48 hours; then we all stayed here



The picnic was quite a success, although a few folks from last time were not able to come this year, we added Vivianna, one of my mother's first cousins, who we had not met before, as well as her son Sergio (a recent college graduate) and her 90-years-old mother. Altogether, we numbered 26 persons at the table under the big tree.
We saw Jeanne off at the train in Viareggio on Sunday; Monday Nancy and I took a daytrip to Pistoia, a fairly large city near Florence, which despite not having received any particular recommendations from our local relatives turned out to be a fairly pleasant place, at least in the old center of town.
We have today received an invitation to lunch at the country home of cousin Franchesca (other first cousin of my mother's) who having missed the picnic is hoping to host a family gathering of her own.

Around town.

We've spend a few fairly calm days around our neighborhood (Camaiore). The Casali family in Lido di Camaiore had us over for dinner last Saturday night, and Roland's mother Lidia made her now-famous gnocchi dish. The following night we all met again for pizza and a evening stroll along the promenade in Lido. (Lido di Camaiore is a beach town, part of a string of communities along the coast which include Viareggio (a favorite hang-out for Giacomo Puccini in the the 1920's) , Lido and Forti di Marmi. Most of the actually beach front is controlled by private beach clubs which offer chair and umbrella (along with various other amenities) by fee or subscription. There are many large hotels, which sport various "star" rankings - though by general impression it would seem most were in their prime before the 1970's.
We took ourselves into Lucca for a day on Tuesday, mainly with the intent of taking photos. I stumbled while walking along the road at the top of the city walls, and by trying to protect the camera on my chest received a fairly good scrape on my forearm. Although we were in "pausa" we managed to find an open pharmacy were a nice man patched me up, and refused any payment. Perhaps he was charmed by my marginal Italian.
We re-visited the church of San Michele and also the Duomo; For whatever reason the town was full of American tourists that afternoon, probably delivered by bus for a few hours look-see. Also though, Lucca is gearing up for the annual festa, which comes in a week or so.