La gioia del Signore

Goji Bear, Splot and Schu-pin climbing our host's refrigerator in Torino

We're back in the US for a month or so before our move. Oh, there is so much more I'd like to tell about our trip, but I need to take care of finding a mover and packing, finding at least a temporary apartment, and handling a letter from the IRS before the middle of August. So it might be a little while before I blog again.

I'll just leave it at this for now: The trip renewed my faith in the country of Italy. Despite the bureaucracy, it's a lovely place, and I do think we'll like living there. And I can think of no better symbol of our transition than the three little animals in the photo above.

As I wrote before, we took two teens along with us on our trip to Garfagnana and Torino, a sister and brother. By the end of the trip, they and CZ had bonded to the point where they had their own inside jokes, and knew the others' pet peeves. And despite having to deal with various travel inconveniences (namely lugging suitcases on trains, traveling in full sun, and keeping enough clean laundry in these conditions), they really got along beautifully. I think they helped CZ realize that she liked Italy. And I can honestly say they never met a gelateria they didn't like.

The last day in Torino, while I was looking at apartments and Bob was visiting his new employer, the three of them explored the center of the city together. They had intended to do some shopping, but most shops in Italy are still closed from Sunday on Monday morning. So mostly they window shopped.

At the end of the day, they went into some little IKEA-like store where everything was cheap, which suited their budgets just fine, and bought the three little "friendship animals" above. Their names are Goji Bear, Splot and Schu-pin, which are all inside jokes and I can't explain them except that someone was very tired once and combined Schubert and Chopin, resulting in the third name.

The other item in the photo is a little card that was on our host's refrigerator. It says, "La gioia del Signore e' la nostra forza (Neemia 8,10)." The joy of the Lord is our strength. Italians are to skilled at doing much with little, and for the most part, they are full of joy. And I've met some who are full of the joy of the Lord. What better thought to take home for our last month in the United States?

A quick post about chocolate and coffee

During last year's festival in Castelnuovo, our family became big fans of the macchiato at the pasticceria in the center of town.

We're still big fans of macchiato, but this morning we tried something new, and it definitely gets added to the list of favorites: caffe fondente!

Caffe fondente is a coffee with steamed milk, but it also has dark chocolate sprinkled in it and a bit of steamed milk in a little cup-shaped chocolate on the side. Ours were delicious and attractively presented. The saucer was even slightly assymetrical to hold he spoon and tiny chocolate.

While at the pasticceria this morning, I also took some photos of the other chocolates the pasticceria hand crafts, including a set of tools, a Bialetti moka pot, and a sheet music cake (for the festival CZ is participating in). The owner greets us familiarly now, so I figured it wouldn't be too obnoxious to take photos of some of our favorite items.


Perfectly detailed paint brushes, wrenches, locks, and scissors, all made of chocolate. They even look a little rusty.

A chocolate Bialetti Moka pot, one of the symbols of Italy. It's a little hard to see because it's wrapped in plastic, but inside the plastic, it's perfect!


A special display window for the music festival, showing a mannequin in a pink feather boa, playing a masonite violin while sight reading from a chocolate sheet music cake.


A typical morning macchiato, about to be gone.

(At the top: caffe fondente.)

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Location:Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, Italy

Waiting for zucchini flowers

Remember the basket of vegetables that Sig.ra Bertolani brought? Sig.ra Bertolani had given CZ some instructions about how to fry the zucchini flowers, but CZ didn't understand them, so Sig.ra Bertolani promised yesterday that she would show us how to fry them sometime during the afternoon. The only problem was that we didn't really know what time. It's not the Italian way of doing things to make an appointment.

Meanwhile, it was supposed to be audition day and the kids also had rehearsals and lessons. In typically Italian fashion, there were no time slots; one simply had to wait in the hot piazzetta until the directors called one's name. CZ had a bit of an excuse to leave, because she had a lesson. But we had an idea that might get all three kids an early slot: We taught CZ's friend L to say, "Alle due di pomeriggio, la Sig.ra Bertolani ci insegnera' come cucinare i fiori di zucchini." She went over it several times, reading from the back of an envelope amid much laughter, and then she went off to charm the Italian director of the program, with CZ acting as backup. It worked, sort of: "I understand that you have an important cooking lesson," he smiled. "Come back tomorrow."

Then the three kids thought about busking, but they didn't have their trio music, so CZ busked alone and made 2€ in about five minutes. This proved a good excuse to go get gelato before going back up to the house.

By three p.m., Sig.ra Bertolani still hadn't arrived, and we had to go back into town for rehearsals and groceries, so we thought we'd missed our chance. But when we returned at six, she was ready. She brought over an iron skillet (padella) and tongs (pinze), mixed together a batter of water and flour (this was the part that we hadn't understood), and poured about an inch of olive oil (sesame is better, but olive is what we had) into the skillet. Meanwhile, we pinched the stems and the prickly bottoms out of the flowers and coated them in the batter.

Into the sizzling hot oil went the flowers, where they quickly hardened and turned lightly golden. Only when they hardened were we allowed to move them around with tongs. You had to put them in with your fingers, I think to keep the hot oil from spattering. And the minute they came out, you had to put in the next batch, subito!


Pretty soon we had a batch of zucchini flowers ready, but of course these first ones only lasted a few seconds. Sig.ra Bertolani confessed that she usually ate them as she cooked them herself, because they were better that way. She left me to finish the job, and after a while I had fried two heaping plates of zucchini flowers. We had some bruschetta ready as another appetizer, and fully intended to have pork chops as well, but somehow after two plates of zucchini flowers and a couple of pieces of cannelini bruschetta each, we deferred on the pork chops. This morning Sig. Bertolani brought over some charcoal and newspaper, so we intend to try cooking them tonight on the concrete grill if it stops raining. Even the weather here is unpredictable.

Most people in this music program stay in one of the town's hotels, where they have all their food cooked for them, but because we are in a house and cook for ourselves most nights, we are getting to know the shop people all over town, getting to know the Bertolanis, and are eating some great food with fresh ingredients, fairly cheaply. And after dinner, the kids pull our their instruments and practice their Mozart trio. We've already been told there will be another performance party for the Bertolanis' friends. But of course, this being Italy, we don't know when yet.

One seemingly never knows when things will happen in Italy. But it's easier to wait when you know that something is worth waiting for.

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Location:Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, Italy

Roving Reporter post: We return to Castelnuovo

I am sitting on the gazebo of Il Palazzetto at the Bertolanis' house, perhaps my favorite place in all of Italy. I am listening to the disorienting, but happy sound of a violin, a viola, and a cello all practicing different scales and etudes at the same time. We have brought two friends with us to the music festival this year, and though CZ and L have been practicing for two days, M has just picked up his rented cello. Once they get warmed up, they can start practicing together. (Which they did, after lunch, of course.)

This morning we walked down the hill and into town for a morning cappucino and a trip to buy groceries. But we couldn't find just the right kind of zucchini for tomorrow evening's dinner, so we came back empty-handed, thinking we'd try again tomorrow. When we got to the top of the hill, Sig.ra Bertolani was just walking around the corner of the house where she had been talking to the kids.

"Ecco la mamma," she said to me. "Here's the mama."

"Lentemente," I replied, smiling, because no matter how hard I try, I'm always about 25 yards behind the others when going back up the hill.

Sig.ra Bertolani had just delivered a gorgeous basket of vegetables, with just the zucchini we had been looking for, zucchini blossoms (which she told CZ how to fry); green, purple and white beans; a bit of basil; and two kinds of greens, one bitter (a type pf arugula, perhaps?) and the other sweet. With three days worth of four people carrying groceries up the hill, and now this gift, our small refrigerator is delightfully full. This year I'm cooking off the New York Times pasta section and a Mark Bittman cooking app, plus a few recipes from home. With no measuring devices in either English or metric, I'm improvising, but it works.


All the kids are very helpful, and after dinner they play cribbage, chess, and, last night, Settlers of Catan. When the sun goes down at 10 p.m., it gets cool enough to put on a jacket. Then the stars come out (so many more than in New York!) and we watch the town's lights glittering down below. It's so delightful that we can't seem to go to bed before midnight. Thank goodness for siesta!

Unfortunately, there are some things I can't do well from the iPad, and fixing photo margins and inserting links are among them, so I trust that if you have no idea what I'm talking about and somehow want to, you can find my posts from last year's music festival in Castelnuovo di Garfagnana.

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Location:Castelnuovo di Garfagnana, Toscana, Italy

Roving reporter post: Nostalgic food

A real Southern meal is called "dinner," even when it's eaten at noon. Clockwise from top: fried green tomatoes, candied yams, butter peas, flat green beans cooked in pork, collard greens, and fried chicken livers.

I've been in Georgia visiting our relatives for the past nine days. Yesterday my sister and I took my parents to lunch at the Blue Willow Inn in Social Circle. Don't you love that name for a town?

The Blue Willow Inn is, naturally, in a big Southern house with lots of Blue Willow china. It may be a slightly exaggerated version of the Old South, and the food may not have quite the freshness that a foodie would prefer, but I did see lots of foods that made me homesick for my grandmother's kitchen--butter peas, collard greens, the flat kind of green beans that are cooked with a piece of pork until they fall apart, cornbread, biscuits, fried chicken and livers, fried green tomatoes, candied yams, one of those Jell-O salads that remind me of neighbors bringing food after a funeral, banana pudding, lemon meringue pie, and more.

When we arrived at the restaurant, the entire elementary baseball team of Athens Academy was sitting in the front yard listening to a man play Christmas carols on a plastic keyboard. A young woman was roaming around in a dress that was a cross between antebellum and 80s prom, serving lemonade. Flags were flying, and a bit of everyone, wearing a bit of everything, was lined up at the buffet.

We were there to celebrate my parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary,
which will actually occur about the time we move to Italy. We would have raised a toast of sweet tea, but no one could have heard us in that festive atmosphere, least of all my hard-of-hearing dad. Nevertheless, as they say in the South, a good time was had by all.


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Location:Athens, GA

Growing up in the Metropolitan Museum: Part II

The view from the balcony

As I mentioned in my last post, every Friday and Saturday night, a group of chamber musicians play on the balcony of the Metropolitan Museum lobby. Museum-goers can sit at little round tables along the balcony and enjoy an apertif while listening to the music.

When Bob and I first listened to the music, we would just sit across the balcony for a few minutes during our weekend evening trips to the museum. We didn't expect a four-year-old to be patient or quiet enough for us to sit down and order anything. But soon we started to wander timidly through the area, child in tow. (I've seen many, many parents doing this since.) Then one weekend Bob and I went there by ourselves and tried out the bar itself.

Eventually we ventured to take CZ in to sit with us. To keep her entertained Bob had her play "guess the century" with the music. CZ, age five, barely knew what a century was. But her friend from the Chinese Scholars' Court played violin, and it turned out CZ liked the music. It may have also helped that the first violinist was a woman. For the next year, CZ begged me for lessons until I decided she was serious.

CZ, age six, watching the pianist at the balcony bar

The balcony bar became a part of our Upper East Side weekend routine. You could tell the musicians had seen everything: One night someone's napkin caught fire right next to the musicians. At the same table, soon afterwards, a man fell flat on his back as he started to leave. Another time, still at the same table, a tipsy group of women clapped loudly, not only between movements, but every time the musicians played a whole note. The most reaction any of this got were some politely raised eyebrows for the applause--the first couple of times, at least. Bob's mother remains the only person I ever heard actually get shushed by the musicians. She was right up next to the velvet rope explaining something to CZ, because our table was rather far back that night, and she had insisted that they go closer. Her voice does carry.

Once by the end of the first year or so, the cellist leaned over to the violinist as we sat down and muttered, "Here comes your fan club," indicating CZ.

There were other regular listeners, too, including a man we called "the cormorant," because he always sat listening to the music with his head cocked up in the air. There was a disheveled man who always carried a bag of papers that looked like a long-awaited dissertation. And there were people we saw only once, but were memorable, like a little boy who'd busked with his fiddle for a train fare to the city; a Mennonite woman and her daughter; a Mary McFadden look-alike wearing a long, wrapped crepe dress; and a man in a long linen caftan with a mandarin collar whom we dubbed "The Future," because he looked like a character from a science fiction movie. But these are just a cross section of the typical crowd.

We learned a lot about chamber music while listening to the balcony bar musicians over the years. During this time, CZ's skill on the violin was growing, as was our collection of CDs. "Name the century" grew into "Name the composer," and then "analyze the music." I discovered Dvorak's kinship to Brahms, and that I liked Brahms' chamber pieces even better than Dvorak's.

At least for me, the experience of listening to the balcony bar musicians was always somewhat synesthetic. I was coming at this experience from many years of enjoying drawing and painting, so my understanding of the music was colored by what I had just seen in the galleries. And after we'd make our escape before the final flourish (the group had a habit of ending with a waltz, which we never liked as much as the previous piece), the colors in the galleries (especially the Degas pastels in their darkened rooms) seemed more vibrant from the music.

The Singer in Green, ca. 1884

Edgar Degas (French, 1834–1917)

Pastel on light blue laid paper

23 3/4 x 18 1/4 in. (60.3 x 46.4 cm)

Once we moved to Morningside Heights, though, the museum was too far away to visit every weekend. And once CZ started music school on Saturdays, our museum experience was almost eclipsed altogether. We'd mostly go once or twice during the summer. CZ was also becoming a teenager, and once while we were looking at Chinese ceramics, she confided, "This gallery reminds me of wanting to go home." It seemed we were moving on.

But this weekend, knowing that we'd be literally moving on soon, I asked to go back to the museum for one last Saturday evening. When we got there, CZ wanted to wander through the galleries by herself with a camera. Bob thought it might mean she didn't like us, but I understood that it meant she wanted one experience of the museum that was entirely her own. We agreed to meet at the balcony bar at 7:15.

When Bob and I got there, it was almost as though the musicians were waiting for us. We got a table very close to the group (minus the first violinist, who was on vacation), and they were just playing the first notes of my favorite Brahms piano quartet (No. 2). There were no noticeable patron antics that evening, and we simply sat and listened to the whole quartet while CZ took some photos.

As we left, I wanted CZ to go up and thank the musicians for introducing her to chamber music. "Otherwise we'll just disappear, and they'll never know why," I said. I didn't think it was my place to tell them for her, as I've spoken for CZ too long already and I think it's time for her to speak for herself. But she didn't want to, so we left without saying goodbye.

Maybe we'll go back one more time before we move to Italy. Maybe we'll move back here one day. Maybe CZ will move back by herself. Or maybe the years will roll by, everything in the museum will be remodeled, the balcony bar will be discontinued, and our ghosts will be exorcised altogether. But in my mind, the Metropolitan Museum will always be an important part of our family memories, one that spanned three apartments and may have, in the long run, been the place our daughter grew up.

Growing up in the Metropolitan Museum: Part I

CZ, age four, in the Venetian Rococo Bedroom at the Metropolitan Museum

If I had to pick my favorite place in New York City, I'd have to choose the Metropolitan Museum. The reason is partly that it's one of the best art museums in the world, but it's also because of personal history. When we first moved to the city, we lived on the Upper East Side, only a few blocks from the museum. I was a portrait artist who had never been in regular contact with master oil paintings, and besides, we lived in a one-bedroom apartment with a three-year-old. Almost immediately I bought a membership to the museum so that I could take CZ for a short visit whenever we wanted to see a bigger, grander space.

So that CZ wouldn't get bored, I used to let her take me by the hand and lead me where she wanted to go. I liked the whole museum, so it didn't matter to me where we went. Little CZ, on the other hand, had a clear favorite: The Venetian Rococo Bedroom. It featured a brocade bed that would have been the envy of any princess. Gentle afternoon light shone eternally through false windows, lending an appropriate sense of luxurious ennui. But the best part was the ceiling: It was supported by about a dozen painted wooden putti, holding up something that looked like an inverted soap dish over the bed, a painting over the antechamber, and some sort of shield that looked like a bit of insubstantial rococo exuberance in between. We called the room "Flying Babies." Naturally, CZ wanted one. We even found some in an antique shop once.

"They're $15,000, dear," said the gently smiling employee, to CZ's inquiry.

Bedroom from Sagredo Palace, Venice, 18th century (ca. 1718)

H. 25 ft. 2 in. (767.1 cm), W. 18 ft. 2 in. (553.7 cm), D. 13 ft. 2 in. (401.3 cm) Rogers Fund, 1906 (06.1335.1a-d)

Of course I had my favorite works, too, much appreciated after my own museum-free childhood: The five Vermeers, the Sargents, the Degas pastels of dancers and women bathers, the flat Manets, the Van Dycks, the Rubens painting of The Holy Family with Saints. All the Byzantine jewlery. The medieval manuscripts and a certain bejeweled gospel cover on loan from the Morgan Library. And a tender statuette of a Madonna and Child from 13th century Paris.

During this time I also discovered that I liked Asian ceramics and calligraphy. Sometimes we'd go to the Asian wing with a friend of CZ's who was adopted from China and the two girls would play in the Chinese Scholars' court. The friend was fond of playing "office," so they would use the railing to print out pretend documents under the skylights. They also liked to try to coax the oversized koi in the back of the fish pond out of hiding. Once a group of tourists came in and the girls scowled at them. They were willing to share the city playgrounds, apparently, but not the Chinese Scholars' Court.

After about two years of museum-wandering, one day CZ led me up a flight of stairs to a part of the museum I'd never seen before, a collection of Early Americana with a beamed Puritan meeting house ceiling in the main room. It was surrounded by a suite of period rooms, several of which no longer exist. By the time we started reading about American history, CZ was intimately acquainted with open hearths and iron spiders, crewel work, rugs on tables, and the old habit of carving one's name with a ring or penknife into the bedroom window. Not that she had any particular interest in history. She breathed it unnoticed, like 70 degree air.

And of course no Christmas season was complete without a visit to the Angel Tree.

But at some point within the first two years, CZ's focus at the museum began to shift to the balcony over the entrance lobby. There, every Friday and Saturday night, a group of chamber musicians would play from 5 until 8. Museum-goers could sit at little round tables along the balcony and enjoy an apertif while listening to the music. I remember having been mildly annoyed the first time I noticed the musicians because they were right in front of some of the best cases of Chinese ceramics. Little did I know how symbolic that displacement would become.

The balcony and lobby at the Metropolitan Museum from the grand staircase.