Overnight in London, and then home.

I woke up the morning of our departure with a painful neck and shoulder, from some unfortunate convergence of pillow dimensions, mattress tension, and anxious dreams; with a 5 am wake up call, more hours in security at the airport, the flight, and getting loose of Heathrow, by the time we reached our Sheration in London my only thought was to find a decent massage. This I finally achieved by way of an expensive foray over to the Hilton; Nancy got herself into town for a bit of sightseeing and some personal shopping. We both were suffering a bit of cultural shock, by now being unaccustomed to speaking to strangers in anything but Italian. This difficulty was compounded by the fact that many folks in the services occupations of London are now speaking a heavily-accented English (Pakistani/Indian) which was at times completely incomprehensible to us. By next morning things were looking better and we delivered ourselves into the relative familiarity of American Airlines Business Class.

A Dash into Milano.

Although we have several times landed and taken off from Malpensa airport outside of Milano, we had always steered clear of the actual city, owing to it's reputation for heavy traffic, high prices, and a relative lack of cute and perky tourist attractions. But with 2 nights left to burn before our departure from Italy, we steeled ourselves and went for it anyway. With some late advice and research received via mobile phone from cousin Vivienne (the Casalis lived in Milano for a time years ago) we miraculously found our hotel ( a four-star place with all the amenities) and got our vehicle stowed away in the underground parcheggio. The staff was generally courteous, if not always actually friendly - on par for a big city - but with a change: some of the staff did not actually speak Italian very well, apparently having been hired on the strength of their English (being from Nigeria, or ?)
We were close enough to the our intended places of interest to reach them in a long walk. Despite the busy traffic, it was a welcome relief, actually, to be walking again on wide sidewalks instead of the "pedestrian" streets of Tuscan old towns (where the passing vehicles of residents, officials and businesspeople still force walkers to flatten themselves against walls fairly often).
We hit the Brera Art Museum (very nice) and walked by the La Scala opera house (cool) hung out in the fashion-shopping mecca Via Torino (good people watching) and did the full-official-audio-stick tour of the Duomo (pretty amazing). After a nice lunch we heading back to the hotel; on a side street we found ourselves passing a very upscale, traditional gentlemen's barbershop, and I ended up going for the full treatment: a full head and face shave, with a straight razor. It wasn't cheap, but it was a royal experience.
That evening we sought out a "Mexican" restaurant near the hotel (also Vivienne's tip). The cuisine was a bit off target culturally (my "taco" was delivered as a very nicely prepared thin steak sandwiches between two flour tortillas) but delicious nonetheless. We revealed ourselves as Californians and paid our compliments to the house, and the owner insisted on treating us - and himself - to shots of some rather good tequila at the bar.
The next morning we re-traced our path back to the autostrada and drove out for our final night at a hotel near the airport.

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.