Florence

Our trip to Florence was last minute. We had to maneuver chamber rehearsals for CZ to be able to go, and we didn't get it worked out until the day before--so no Uffizzi tickets. I'd been to Florence several times while staying in Cortona in 1984, but always in a leisurely fashion. All CZ remembered from 2003 was that Florence was hot, and that the line for the David statue was really long.

Florence does feel like a tourist trap, and I got my only bad coffee of the trip early during our day there, so I felt sort of sick until late afternoon. At eleven in the morning, we were standing in the Casa Dante, where it must have been ninety degrees, drenched in sweat and trying to speed read the commentary and distinguish Guelph from Ghibelline...in Italian.

How to you enjoy Florence in July on short notice?

Pretty quickly, CZ and I decided to forget seizing the city and just enjoy some small part of it. So we chose three churches and looked for the one that would be most comfortable to spend the afternoon in.

The magnificent Duomo, symbol of Florence, was closest. We got a nice look at the baptistry doors, some of which we'd also seen at the Metropolitan Museum last year. But the entrance line to the main church extended around the building. No, this was not the place to spend our limited time.

Then we walked to S. Lorenzo. Despite its unassuming exterior, S. Lorenzo is the church of the Medicis. Brunelleschi designed the interior. Michelangelo's Medici tomb statues and Laurentian library are within, but unfortunately they were closed. (This is a perennial hazard of touring Italy). The exterior only looks the way it does because Michelangelo had the job of renovating it and never got around to it. I rather liked it for being plain, yet housing such distinction within. Not that it's a secret!

Inside, there was a Florentine tour guide who asked each visitor if they spoke Italian, and if they said yes, she would proceed to explain the inside of the church. We listened for a while and asked a question or two, rather fascinated with her flat Florentine accent. And like a true Florentine, she didn't really pronounce her hard "c"s.

CZ sat in the pews for a long time, but eventually we both became quite hungry, so we went of to the Central Market, where we ended up with a hurried and not-so-great plate of farfalle, because the market was closing.

But I think we really started enjoying ourselves (or I did) at Sta. Maria Novella. This church is a regular storehouse of medieval and Renaissance art, with Masaccio's famous Trinita', a Botticelli nativity, a crucifix by Giotto, and an amazing fresco cycle by Ghirlandaio, just for starters. Even CZ (who insists that art is my thing) liked the frescoes.

After we had sat for a very long time, we had fun trying to observe the decreasing space between the piers as we approached the altar. It's a subtle effect, but it makes the nave appear longer than it actually is. And there's an interesting set of spheres on the exterior of the church whose shadows make the time of day and year, like an advanced sort of sundial.

In the refectory of the cloister next door, we were interested to see a medieval fresco nested in the middle of an incongruous, Mannerist Last Supper. A solemn Madonna attended by mermaid-like angels with trailing clouds for feet was surrounded by the twisting and turning, very solid bodies of severs carrying platters of food. The medieval fresco only survived because the bottom of the Last Supper had been painted on canvas and placed over it. No one bothered to remove the fresco underneath.

CZ and I were the only people in the treasury. The day was finally cooling down, and we were both feeling better. We left Sta. Maria Novella feeling like we had seen what we wanted to see, and enjoyed winding our way through the narrow streets to rejoin Bob after his day of meetings.

On the way we happaned to peek into Sta. Trinita' where we found another jewel-toned Ghirlandaio chapel to cap off the day. Someone had even just dropped in a coin to turn on the lights!

After our side track into Sta. Trinita', we had to explain to Bob why we were late, but he understood, and besides, he had had a productive day and was still pleased about getting a parking space right by the Arno. We each drank enormous quantities of bottled water on the two-hour drive back to Castelnuovo, admired the Florentine commuters on motorcycles, and decided we liked the city after all.

For instance, where else but Florence would you find a building facade like this one?

Even though the paint color in this alleyway is usually called "Naples Yellow," it reminds me of Florence.

How I think of Florence most of all: Imposing, brown buildings that look like they might be fortresses (and probably were).

Approaching the Piazza della Signoria, the tourist center of Florence, to meet Bob at the end of the day.

And various shots approaching and crossing the Ponte Vecchio, which is touristy and crowded but still beautiful.

The reason that there aren't so many photos of Florence as there are of some of the other cities is that we spent most of our time there inside churches, where no photography is allowed. But I've tried to at least provide some links to what we saw.

Lucca

The whole festival group went to Lucca on the first Saturday to tour the town and give a concert in nearby Altopascio. This was the concert where CZ performed her solo piece.

Lucca was originally a Roman town, which explains some things about how it's laid out. Medieval Lucca grew up over the original Roman town plan, and one piazza was even built up around the ruins of amphitheater. Eventually the ruins disappeared completely but the oval shape remained. And the church called S. Michele in Foro is called that because the piazza it's next to was originally the town's Roman forum.

What this means to the observer most of all is that the streets are narrow and laid out in something like a grid with little dead ends etched into the blocks here and there. But the grid also means that some of the streets are very long. The result is that it's easy to feel disoriented. I think that if you were a child growing up in Lucca, you'd either have a great sense of direction, or have nightmares about getting lost.

The town is very pretty, though. The old town is surrounded by stone walls so thick that there's room for a park on top of them. It looks a little like Riverside Park, in our neighborhood, and people walk and ride their bikes up on the walls between evenly planted rows of trees. The town walls are surrounded by a park-like grassy area, which in turn is surrounded by through roads and villas. The photo at the beginning of this post was taken just outside the city walls.

Piazza del Mercato, where the Roman amphitheater was

One of the long outer steets of the grid

Below is the facade of the town Duomo, S. Martino. Lucca is known for its buildings in the Pisan Gothic style, that is, with rows of arched colunnades carved in frothy white marble, giving it a wedding cake look. Each column is different, so it's interesting to stand outside and look at all the permutations. Inside, however, the duomo was mostly covered in scaffolding and there were no photos allowed.

Next door to the Duomo was a church that had been desacralized during the Napoleonic occupation. It had been the town's original duomo, SS. Giovanni e Reparata. But because it was no longer a sacred space, archeologists had dug under the floor and through several layers of previous building activity--Roman baths, an early Christian baptistry, and three different medieval churches. It was a little hard to decipher all that was going on in the one hour we had to look, but it certainly got across the point that the Italians tended to build on an important site again and again. In fact, many churches in Italy have remains of previous churches in their basements, and some, like St. Peter's and the Duomo of Milan, are of religious significance and therefore open to the public.

And what is that second photo? Admittedly it's hard to see, but if you enlarge the photo and look closely, two angels are taking a girl's head away from a monster. It's a graffiti version of the legend of Sta. Reparata, a child martyr from the 3rd century and patron saint of the duomo.

In another part of town, outside S. Michele in Foro, there was a Madonna and Child in a mandorla of golden rays, and on top of the facade was an outsized angel. There was a woman in the doorway wearing a white satin veil. She had painted her face white, didn't say a word, and was collecting money in a basket. People were dropping in money seemingly without even thinking about why she was there. We don't think she had anything to do with the church, and when Bob said something to that effect to me, quietly, she moved away from the door and into the shadows.

Though similar to the Duomo of S. Martino on the outside, the Chiesa di S. Michele was very different on the inside. It had bare stone walls with only a few artworks, so it wasn't nearly as touristy. The only employee was a woman arranging flowers at the altar. I liked the atmosphere, and there were no prohibitions against photos. I almost didn't want to take any. But since the insides of these churches are very much a part of what Italy is about and I hadn't been able to take many so far, I did take a few.

A side chapel dedicated to St. Joan of Arc, one of CZ's heroines

CZ took this photo of me. I think I have a funny expression, but as I've taken so many photos of her over the years, I figure turn about is fair play and I'm posting it.

The third church we saw in Lucca was S. Frediano. It had a brilliant mosaic on its facade and this statue, among others, within.

Don't you just have to wonder what's taught at a high school named for Niccolo Machiavelli?

The last photo is of tiny Altopascio, the town where the students played after their day of touring Lucca. I just like the photo because it's so classically Tuscan, with its striped and colonnaded facade, shaped cypresses, and dark blue sky.

I think this post has too many photos, but it was hard to decide what to cut! Next up, Florence, but I don't have nearly so many photos of it.

Higher up and further out

Our other Grafagnana excursion day (after Barga) was almost surreal at times. Perhaps it's a quality of the Italian afternoon...

Once again, we had to wait until after a noon lesson to leave, so we were traveling when few Italians travel, during the lazy hours of the afternoon. This meant that we felt like the Pevensies arriving in the land of the Dufflepuds--we'd hear sounds of life, but only behind closed shutters. We'd hardly see a soul. The towns we entered seemed to be as deserted as they'd be at 3 a.m., with only a few stray people out on unavoidable business. But no doubt the townspeople knew we were there.

Our first stop, and the only one where we walked around and took photos, was Castiglione di Garfagnana. The only thing we saw open was this tiny church right inside the city walls. It had two pews, facing each other across a middle aisle. The doors were open to the main piazza, just in case someone needed to pray, I suppose.

Many of the old paese were surrounded by stone walls, fortresses, since they were built in the medieval city state days when towns were constantly going to war against each other, usually under the banner of one or the other of the larger towns like Lucca or Florence. This wall was built (at least in its initial form) before 1000.

We walked up to the fortress at one end of the town. It was overgrown and there was no way to go in. A man from Castelnuovo told me that they only open it on Sunday mornings. There was a tiny church built into the side of the wall. It was locked.

I thought of this painting as I took the last photo above.

There was another church, San Michele, (above) at the other end of town, less than five minutes' walk away, but also uphill. Again, it was old, battered, locked and deserted. Clouds building up in the distance lent an eerie cast.

We got back into the car and followed Ms. Nuvi (as we affectionately called our somewhat robotic GPS guide) higher up into the mountains--so far, in fact, that we occasionally wondered whether Ms. Nuvi might not quite know what she was doing--but she never lead us astray. We also had a local excursion guide (written in Italian and English) that helped us to check our progress.

As we drove up towards the towns near the tops of the mountains, the roads became uncomfortably narrow for our rental car, which we had chosen to bring ourselves and three large suitcases from Milan. We'd noticed even on the initial drive into the Garfagnana region that we had to approach each turn carefully, checking for oncoming traffic (especially trucks), and that the turns were so constant that a trip of 18 kilometers could take over an hour. This mountain tour was even more remote and narrow. So we not only had to watch our turns, but our time. (We had a concert that evening.)

Some of the towns, like Sassorosso, were altogether inaccessible to our car. I got this photo off of Google Earth. It approximates the steep angle from which I saw the town, but I almost hate to post it, because it doesn't capture the imposing, austere mood of what I remember. It certainly doesn't capture the color, which was a mixture of red and grey. Sassorosso means "red stone," and the town was obviously built from the rock on which it stood. You can even see bits of stone in the foreground. We had to leave before I had gotten a good enough look, so I was left with a dream-like memory.

Also along these roads, we'd see markers memorializing WWII resistance fighters and marking the spots where they died. We didn't read them all, but one marker said, "Died under the brutality of the Nazis." The mountains were a haven for the resistance, but they were also a battleground towards the end of the war.

Finally, though we didn't take the turn for the Passo delle Radici (the old route across the mountains to Parma) for lack of time, we found a viewpoint near the top of the mountains that was wide enough for our car to pull over, and we photographed this view of the valley below. (Photos never quite capture a view, do they?) Castelnuovo is way off to the left on the valley floow. The air was noticeably cooler when we got out to stretch our legs. I almost wanted a sweater. The slope of the grass and trees was almost straight down, with little shelves and terraces along the way.

Some terraces had farms on them. This area is known for its chestnut flour, because the land is too hilly for wheat.

We passed through several other towns on the way down, some of them so small (a couple of houses and a church) that we were surprised they were on the map at all. At one such town, Chiozza, we found two women and come children cleaning the town church. Like Sr. Bertolani said, these towns make Castelnuovo look big and busy. They all have long histories, though, reaching back before the first millenium, and some further.

On a more recreational note, this whole area looks like very promising hiking territory, and I'd love to return in circumstances that are more favorable for a long day hike. Perhaps we could even stay overnight, and meet some of the people who live here, if we spoke better Italian. One thing I've learned is that Italian towns can feel completely different, and much more festive, at night!

Our touring area, from the town of Castiglione's website.

Barga, the most Scottish town in Italy

Barga was the first of many side trips we took during our stay in the Garfagnana region. With CZ's lessons in the middle of the day, it was a little tricky taking these trips, but we managed to get some in anyway. One reason we could do so was that the whole region is dotted with little paese, some of them less than thirty minutes from Castelnuovo. Barga was one of these towns.

I really don't think it's possible to do justice to an Italian hilltown with photographs. The experience is very three-dimensional, like being in a serendipitous sort of maze. Narrow alleyways open up unexpectedly into little piazzas (or big ones). You walk past another alleyway, happening to turn your head, and notice windows high above an archway. Some of the alleyways, or for that matter, some of the main streets, are stepped--you dip and climb. Finally you reach the highest point (where there is often a church), and you're looking at red rooftops, belltowers, and swifts all around, surrounded by more distant green valleys below.

Italian towns are very Pattern Language.

At the top of Barga was the Duomo (cathedral) which was begun in the 11th C. and renovated many times thereafter. Since we went to Barga on a Sunday morning, we wanted to worship in some way but couldn't take communion, so we stood at the back of the church and listened to the service. This was easy enough because the worshipers were on a raised platform and we weren't distracting them by standing down below. We couldn't understand every word, but we could clearly hear the priest proclaiming the gospel in his homily.

Also, we noticed on the back of our map of the town that Barga bills itself as "The most Scottish town in Italy." At first we thought it was just a sister city designation, but eventually we found out from Sr. Bertolani that there was a deep and lasting link. Several generations back, a group of men from Barga emigrated to Scotland to do heavy labor, thus establishing a connection between the Garfagnana and Scotland that exists to this day, with people emigrating and visiting back and forth. We even became friends with two of these Scottish Italians on our trip.

More paese coming up...

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.