A sense of hospitality

We could see our temporary home from several points in town, but perhaps we were most surprised to see what it looked like from the highest point, the Fortress of Mont'Alfonso. Due to the Italians' effective use of visual screens for privacy, we really didn't know how many other properties lay around it. But in this photo, you can see the Bertolanis' land just to the right of center, at the top of the hill with the zigzagging road. Their property is the cluster of three brownish houses.

Sr. Bertolani was a gracious man, older than we were, but not old. He still had children at home. He spoke with a soft voice and a lilt (which I can still hear and hope to remember), and while he said he was trying not to bother us, he would appear now and then on business and linger a while to talk. I think he both liked to practice his English and to convey his enthusiasm for his home. We were so glad when he did! Once, when he was giving us a tour of the whole property that he and his wife had restored, he explained, "It gives me pleasure when other people enjoy what we've done." It's a sign of his hospitality that I can't remember whether he said this in Italian or English. Usually he used a mixture, and spoke slowly enough so that we could understand. We tried to respond in kind.

His grandparents had bought the property at the turn of the last century from a banker who had built it for himself. Next to the main house was a smaller house for the farmer who worked the surrounding land. The other half of the farm family's home had housed sheep. We were staying in this house. The other building, now the more luxurious of the two vacation homes, had been the barn.

The Bertolanis' courtyard, showing the back of our house, two structural pins, and some brick grillework.

The Bertolanis were very gracious about CZ's practicing. We tried to close the windows on the courtyard side of the house, but I'm sure they could hear it, and this being a music festival, she practiced a lot. But they seemed to enjoy it, and in fact held a small party for family, friends and the other vacation guests to come hear CZ play.

The Bertolanis' party. In the top photo, you can see our little neighbor friend sitting in his mother's lap. In the bottom photo are Sr. and Sra. Bertolani, sitting next to one another. Unfortunately, none of my photos of them are very clear!

The family vacationing in the other house had a small boy, not quite three, who liked to sit at the top of the steps on the side of his house and wave at us when we were sitting under the gazebo. (And I can't say we didn't start it!) They were from Scotland. During the concert he was sitting on his mother's lap, and the violin piece being long, she leaned over towards the end to ask him how he was doing.

"SHHHH!!" was the reply.

He's now wanting violin lessons.

This being an Italian party, of course it went on long into the night (our new little friend having been excused to go to bed). In the course of it, both Bertolanis told us some of the history of the area, from the ancient Ligurians and the numerous towns in the area named for the Roman general Sulla (whom they call Silla), through the wars with Lucca, and on to the bombing during WWII, when Sr. Bertolani's father took his two oldest siblings (the only ones born by the time of the war) to a nearby town to stay with relatives, walked back, and as he reached the top of the mountain, saw his hometown devastated below.

One of the casualties was the home where we stayed, which explains why only half of it has brick stripes mixed in with the stone. That was the surviving half. The whole building has been renovated since.

Houses in the Garfagnana region (and to some degree in all of Italy) have some interesting and special features.

I noticed right away that the outside walls often have large pins anchored into them, and when we toured the former barn, I noticed some interesting cables as well. Sr. Bertolani explained that they were added to most of the buildings after an earthquake in the 1920s, and he left them there because he liked how they looked.

A page from my trip journal, showing the different kinds of structural reinforcements in the houses.

Also, if you've ever seen photos of barns in Italy, you will notice that they almost always have a brickwork grille, often in a triangular pattern like a house of cards. This was for ventilation, and while many barns have now been converted to vacation homes (the new family business of Italy!), the grilles remain a nice way to get some air and retain shade and privacy.

Shutters are also an interesting feature of Italian homes. The old homes have wooden shutters, often on the outside, that people partially close at midday to keep in the cool. Our shutters had very clever clamps to hold them open. Flipped up to hold the shutters, they were shaped like the bust of a man. But if you flipped them down, they looked like a woman! The back and shoulders of each formed the head of the other.

Inside the shutters was another set of glass windows that pushed inward. They were also side-hung. We only closed the glass windows when CZ practiced. There was also an iron grille over the windows on the ground floor, so you could leave them open even when you were gone. The walls were so thick that with some ventilation the house would stay relatively cool even during the heat of the day.

As a whole, the house was extremely energy efficient. We had a small washer, but dried our clothes on a rack outside. This did require some special timing, however. You had to start the load early, as it took over an hour, and then hang it out as the sun came over the fence in the late morning. Then the trick was to make sure you caught every last ray of the sun during the three hours after lunch, which was perfectly fine if you were home, but tricky for us, since most of CZ's lessons were scheduled for those hours. There was a strong tendency for showers to develop by mid-afternoon, and if the clothes got caught in the rain, we'd have to start over! It was a nice bit of rhythm to our day, though.

Another nice rhythm was that of meals. Our house came with three Bialetti Moka pots, in different sizes, so we'd start with a cup of espresso with milk. (There was a little pot for heating milk, too. I loved it so much that I bought one.) This was usually with some bread I'd bought the day before, along with butter and jam.

One of the many kinds of bread we bought from a panificio.

I'd shop in the morning and we'd have either prosciutto or mortadella for lunch, along with mozzarella so fresh that it squeaked between your teeth, and fruit. Now this is the mozzarella I remember from my first trip to Italy! Nothing I've had in the U.S. even comes close. Afterwards we'd often have another cup of espresso. Not that it really forestalled sleep...

Everything in a small Italian town, and even most of the bigger ones, closes after noon. If you walk through a town at this time, you can hear the clink of silverware on plates, and lunchtime conversation. So unless it was chamber music day (CZ's rehearsals were at 2 p.m.), we either napped or used the time to catch up on cleaning, writing, or planning the rest of the trip. I'd hand wash the dishes and put them in the cabinet above the sink. The cabinet shelves were open at the bottom, like a drainboard rack, and the counter below was metal and grooved to direct the dripping water into the sink.

Drip-dry cabinet shelves, and the kitchen of our house. There were more cabinets under the stairs.

At about four, you could feel a breeze start to stir (or something stronger, if it was a thunderstorm day), and things would start to come back to life. Shops would reopen, and people would start walking around and socializing again.

Dinner was often at about 8:00, and no one showed up at restaurants until at least that time. I had pre-shipped a new copy of The Art of Simple Food to the house (along with Bob's work papers) to give to a friend here as a hostess gift later in the trip. It turned out to be a real help. Since it used so many ingredients available in Italy, I very carefully used it a couple of times to cook dinner.

Dinner with produce from the ortifrutticolo (farmers' market), and Bob eating dinner under the gazebo (you can see the rack for drying clothes, too). We always ate our meals outside under the gazebo, because of the view.

We also had a couple of restaurants that we enjoyed in town. One, Ciule', had particularly good gelato. Another, Triti, had food as good as that at my favorite New York Italian restaurant, Spiga, for half the price. We enjoyed talking with the wait staff at both restaurants, though once I messed up with my Italian and ordered three plates of bruschetta appetizers instead of one. No ice cream that night!

Triti was across from the theater where some of our concerts were held, so we'd occasionally run into other people from the festival (they usually ate at the hotel). The night of the final concert, knowing by now that the program was sure to start much later than the published time, we watched the World Cup game between Spain and Germany with the wait staff and one of the cellists (who was also counting on a late start).

And once, when a couple of girls from the program came in late with a Russian/Italian dictionary (they were Russian), tried to order things that weren't on the menu, gave up trying to order them in Italian, and then tried English instead, Bob played translator:

"I'd like some fruit," stated one of the girls.

The waiter gave her a blank look.

"Frutta," suggested Bob. The waiter's face lit up. Bob started laughing. "Fruit. Fruit-ah. Now I'm a translator!"

The waiters bantered with us, even given the little Italian that we knew, and they'd usually bring us a little something extra during the meal. I'm pretty sure Sr. Bertolani had something to do with that.

By the time we left, in addition to the people in the program, we knew the woman at the phone store, the woman who ran the pasticceria near La Rocca, the woman who ran the formaggeria (where we'd get the squeaky cheese), the women who ran the bread stores, the man behind the deli counter at the supermarket, the men at the Saturday produce market, the wait staff at two restaurants, the Bertolanis, their children, and several of their friends. Knowing some Italian helped, no doubt, but we think the people were also extremely hospitable.

Even though we knew we had the superficial outlook of people who were on vacation, we'd occasionally remark that Castelnuovo seemed a bit like The Busy World of Richard Scarry. By saying that, we weren't meaning to discount the complexity of life in the town. (We knew, in fact, that one tragedy had occurred while we were there.) But in all honestly, the town really did hum with a vibrant sort of community life that was a little bit reminiscent of the Richard Scarry word book we used to read with CZ when she was learning to talk. Maybe it was because of all the greeting going on in the streets, or the tiny cars, or all the individual shops for different kinds of food.

Or maybe it's that just we were always pointing to things and asking what they were.

It finally got dark around ten p.m. Life in Italy encourages lingering over dinner.