A day on Lake Como

Mr. B and Vera

(This post is continued from The Hobbit House, below):

Vera's dad, Sr. B, met us down at the lake by mid-morning on Saturday. Vera had hinted that he wanted to take us out in his boat, but he didn't really tell us what we'd be doing exactly. I think he liked the surprise element! And like Sr. Bertolani in Castelnuovo, I think he liked to practice his English.

So first Sr. B took us to the western side of Lake Como as far as Bellagio, where we had stayed in 2003. He had told us about the way each town along the way earned its livelihood. He also pointed out every villa and told a bit about its history. At least one of them had been the setting of an old film. Almost all of them were grand.

During the previous parts of our vacation, every time we had told someone that we were going to stay with friends in Como, they would inevitably ask, with a mischievous grin, "Is your friend George Clooney?" Apparently George's residence on Lake Como is quite well-known, so it got to be something of a joke. Sr. B picked right up on the joke. Every time we saw a villa on the lake, he would say, "Many people think this is where George Clooney lives, but it isn't." (Occasionally he did know the person who lived there, though.)

As we circled back around at Bellagio, I thought we would just head back to Argegno, but this is where Sr. B revealed his surprise. We were going to a friend's restaurant, by boat! The restaurant was in the town of Careno, on the shadow side of the lake. Sr. B explained that the shadow side was where the locals who worked supplying the rest of the towns lived. Because it didn't get as much sun, the vacationers didn't flock to that side. Also, there wasn't much room to build, because the hills rose straight up from the water. But we liked Careno immediately.

This restaurant was apparently one you had to know about by word of mouth. It was meant to be approached from the water, where the proprietor's wife would go down to welcome the boats. You could possibly find it while in the town, but you'd have to go out of your way, down a steep hill. The restaurant had a name, but there was no sign outside, and even Sr. B himself didn't know it. He just knew the proprietor. And it didn't have a menu--they just served whatever they were cooking that day.

I must say that being taken by surprise to this restaurant, by boat, and hosted by Sr. B was one of the most special, fun, and quintessentially Italian things we did during the whole trip! The courses were all fish from the lake. There was a fish pate' appetizer, a salted fish almost like a large sardine, small friend fish with risotto, and finally, an apricot tart (thankfully, without fish!). This came with a bottle of wine and some limoncello. I was dubious about the limoncello, but it wasn't strong like the kind sold in the U.S. And this being an Italian meal, we sat talking for two hours, in the lazy afternoon heat.

After we were finished with lunch, Sr. B had another surprise. He got a set of keys from the proprietor and took us to a tiny church next door. It was only one room, with a couple of pews, a vaulted ceiling, and some frescoed decoration. A crucifix stood in a window near the back. Some markers on the portico outside the church were carved with the family name of the proprietor. This was apparently his family's ancestral chapel.

As we walked back down to the boat, we came across a bocce court, and Sr. B took some time to explain the basics of the game to Bob. They even rolled a few balls. I gather that it's a little like outdoor bowling.

Finally we motored back across the lake (where Sr. B at last pointed in the direction of George Clooney's estate), and everyone went home for an afternoon rest. But we met again for dinner. This time Sra. B came too, and we went to a mountain-style restaurant. Sr. B explained that there were two distinct regional cuisines, one lake and fishing-oriented, and the other mountain and game-oriented. (I kept forgetting that we were only two miles from Switzerland!) At any rate, the mountain restaurant was much more upscale than the lake one. We also enjoyed meeting Sra. B, and although she spoke exactly two words of English the entire evening (repeated verbatim and without comprehension from something Vera said), we found that we understood enough Italian that we felt she was part of the conversation. She reminded me just a little bit of Zsa Zsa Gabor, with slightly disheveled (in a cute way) red hair.

The next day was Sunday, and I took a walk through Argegno, not exactly knowing where I was going. Down by the water, I found a large church that was not meeting for the summer. Instead it had a sign directing people up the hill to the church with the bells that played songs. But as the sanctuary itself was open, I sat down. There I found a psalter in Italian (two different translations) and read psalms for a long time. It worked well to sort of whisper them aloud. Since they were all familiar to me in English, I had no trouble reading them.

I haven't been to the Riviera, but I would imagine Lake Como is sort of the Italian equivalent. It's where well-to-do Milanese go to spend the weekend. While having breakfast by the water, Bob and I decided that Argegno must be the part of Lake Como where young families who couldn't quite afford the fancier towns went, because there were babies everywhere! But we decided that for all its glamour, we liked Castelnuovo better, because it really felt like someone's home.

During our lunch in Careno, Sr. B told us about his friend Bruce from Miami. "He is a good friend, Bruce!" he would laugh as he told stories. Bruce liked big hotels and cigars from Havana. Once the Bs went to visit him in Miami. But one thing puzzled him: "Bruce lives a 'click' life. He stays in his house, with air conditioning. He goes to his car, with air conditioning. He goes to the pool. He washes the dishes, click. He turns on the TV, click. Everything is a button."

Perhaps it was trying to explain what he meant in limited English that made him stick to concrete descriptions, but whether he knew it or not, he had vividly captured one of the main differences between Italy and the United States. Whereas Italians prefer beauty of all sorts at the expense of efficiency or even comfort, Americans tend to prefer the opposite. Not always, but often. Sr. B was, wittingly or unwittingly, describing dependence on technology and luxury of a particularly American type.

Not that I'd want to turn off my air conditioner in Miami, either! But Sr. B did show us a lovely alternative to a life that goes click.

Homeschooling post

I have two more Italy posts to do, but life intervenes. This is a post about our upcoming academic year.

There's been a pile of books waxing and waning on our living room radiator for a month now. I've been ordering textbooks and classics, and putting things into the pile or taking them out as I see fit.

Here's our plan:

I'm holding classes in my home this year, for math and physics, with our favorite math tutor, Steven Tenney. He will teach physics using Hewitt's Conceptual Physics as his main text, supplemented with math problems from other texts. They'll also be doing some combination of algebra and precalculus. I really don't know! And that doesn't bother me, because I know they'll be learning. I just hope I can get enough compatible students to keep the cost down.

Music continues to be the passion that eats all free time. We'll continue with the conservatory program on Saturdays, with private lessons, orchestra, chamber, composition, ear-training and theory, and possibly music history. CZ continues to read everything she can find about Sibelius. Plus she will likely be entering at least two competitions, one of which requires that we make another recording next week. Yikes!

Oh, and did I mention that she found a piano in our building basement and paid the super (with the money she gets from giving lessons) to help her haul it up on the elevator? It's now in her 7' x 13' (one one side, shorter on the other) bedroom.

Italian. Having finished Rosetta Stone through Level 3, CZ will continue to have la bella lingua shoved down her throat by her well-meaning, yet tyrannical parents, and also by one really nice tutor who will, eventually, come back from Italy. We miss you, Paola!

The truth of the matter is that CZ knows way more Italian that she wants to admit, and her accent is better than ours, so it would be a real shame not to continue, even if she has stuck Post-It Notes to every object in her room in Finnish right now.

Sports. (I hate the phrase/acronym P.E.) Cycling and skiing, I hope! And maybe ice-skating.

You see what I'm leaving out, don't you? History and literature. CZ will read something, somehow. I'm not too worried about that, even with all the music. But I wasn't too sure about the history. In all honesty, we rather dropped the ball last year, which made me doubt my usual intuition that it will all get done somehow if we get into a productive routine.

For couple of weeks, I went into something of a tailspin and did something that I never do: I planned out a history curriculum on a spreadsheet--two lecture series coordinated with readings and a history spine and some written responses. Lots of people do that, and if it works well, fine. But it typically doesn't work well for us. We needed some structure, but not this much.

Finally I found what seems to be a workable solution from what, to me, seems an unlikely source--The Well-Trained Mind. I used to fight against this book when CZ was small, partly because I thought it was too much for a reluctant writer. Or maybe it was just the word "Trained." Or those schedules, which Ms. Bauer herself says the publishers made her put in there.

But at any rate, I happened to pull this book down from the shelf a week or two ago to look at the book list for ancient history, and while I was at it, I re-read the plan. It looked so doable. It was basically just reading and taking intelligent notes, and then having discussions. And I really do like Ms. Bauer's new history series for high schoolers/adults.

I do have one reservation, and it's that I'm not sure CZ wants to stick with ancient history and literature (her original choice) for the whole year. Nordic sagas beckon, as do the Russians. At any rate, the plan isn't written in stone yet. And if we use Ms. Bauer's method, it doesn't much matter whether we substitute some books for others, as long as she gets the idea of reading carefully, analyzing and discussing, and writing, for a couple of hours each day. Yes, I know Ms. Bauer would rather we be reading in chronological order, but if we do so more or less, I'm not terribly worried about it.

Or are we, as usual, veering off towards unschooling?

The Hobbit House

We drove into Como on Friday evening, after leaving Castelnuovo in the morning and stopping for the afternoon in Cremona. Our friend Vera came straight from work to meet us in the main piazza, and then we all went to have dinner and a walk around. It was dark by the time we finished dinner, and as is the case every evening in Italy, there were crowds of people, of all ages, walking around and having a social hour. On one piazza people were setting up for a rock concert, while in the next piazza a brass ensemble was playing. We looked around for a while, but Vera had to go to a wedding party in Milan, and we were tired from a long day, so we all drove on to nearby Argegno, where the three of us would be staying in Vera's vacation house.

When we got to Argegno, we followed Vera's car way uphill to a tiny parking lot above the town. There, her dad was waiting with another, smaller car. We piled all the suitcases into this car and he drove into the town itself--down a very steep hill (we're getting used to this by now), between very narrow streets. Occasionally we'd hear a thump. We were driving down steps!

But before we got nearly to the bottom of the town, Vera's dad stopped at a little door and got out. As he opened it, he made some polite excuses of the "Oh, it's nothing!" sort, and lead us into Vera's townhouse, which he had renovated himself. Perhaps it was partly that we were so tired, but we were especially delighted by its coziness. "It's a hobbit house!" CZ and I exclaimed, because the first floor was all stone and almost completely underground. There was even a small cupboard with runes on it! In fact, the whole place was a storybook conglomeration of little salvaged odds and ends attached to the walls and hanging from the ceilings. It could have been a hobbit hole, or Badger's home, or Mr. and Mrs. Beavers', with an Italian accent.

As we climbed up the flights of stairs, CZ revised her opinion somewhat. "It's really more like a treehouse, so it's for elves. Hobbits would never live on this many floors." She was right about the treehouse aspect, because the apartment consisted of four storeys, each of them a tiny room, except that the main bedroom (on the third floor) was paired with a bathroom--so the order was living room, kitchen, bedroom/bath, loft. But the name "hobbit house" had stuck, and that's what we call it now when we talk about it amongst ourselves. (Although CZ, being a stickler for accuracy, sometimes mutters, "Elf house!")

The hobbit idea might also have come on because we were so tired from traveling that we felt like hobbits after a day's march, so we went straight to bed.

But here are some photos I took the next morning:

Top to bottom: The front entrance to the townhouse, a view from the entrance, some alpine momentoes (we're only two miles from Switzerland), and two views of the kitchen, one through the wrought iron stairs.

Top to bottom: The main bedroom, with a little window that had to be opened from a ladder, stairs to the loft, and me taking photos of myself in the bathroom mirror.

Top to bottom: The main bedroom as seen from the loft, and the loft itself, which is above the bathroom.

The next morning we woke up to bells and the usual crying swifts. These weren't just any bells, though, but bells that played various complete songs at different hours. CZ went around humming them and wrote a couple of them down in her notebook while we were there. (She also practiced in her loft, and once, after a pause, there was applause from the street below!) After the bells, we started hearing people walk by, and occasionally we heard motorcycles and even a car or two. (Thump...thump.) I was so curious that I had to get up and look! (And besides, I was hungry and there was no food in the house.) When I opened the window, we were in the middle of a tiny hill town, and yes, there was a stepped street below. A few houses down, the street narrowed even more, so much that even the ubiquitous Italian Panda couldn't have gotten through it.

We went out early and found a cafe by the lake for our morning coffee and brioche. Our weekend at Lake Como had begun. But more about that later...

Vera's house, as seen the next morning

Cremona

The scene in this photo is what I was looking at when I realized I really liked Cremona. It's a park in the middle of the city. I liked the way the light filtered throught the trees. It might have also helped that I was eating lunch.

We'd stopped in Cremona as a side trip on our way from the Garfagnana region to Lake Como. We thought that since the city was famous for its violins, we'd see if anyone knew anything about CZ's violin. It's old, but no one knows who made it or where. It's kind of a fun mystery.

So we went straight to the Stradivarius Museum. We meant to go in, but we didn't get that far. We asked the lady behind the front desk if she knew of any shops where someone might be able to help us with our violin. She recommended someone right away, and American who restored the museum's violins.

The shop's address was only a couple of blocks from the museum, so we went there right away, met Mr. Carlson, left the violin with him, and went to get some lunch and have a look around.

You'll notice that there's a sort of bicycle motif in these photos and also in other ones throughout the trip. This is partly because Italy is so bicycle-friendly, and Cremona, being flat, was especially so. But it's also just because I liked all the different kinds of bikes. I think this rubber ducky one, above, was my all-time favorite, though. While we were having lunch, I also saw a baby squeezing a rubber ducky on his dad's bike. (Not the one above!)

When we returned to the violin shop, Mr. Carlson has some interesting things to say. First of all, our violin likely wasn't Florentine, as we had thought, but French. He gave us the name of a maker whose violins were similar, and an approximate year.

He told us the likely reason for the hole in the back of the scroll was not for a processional, as we had been told, but either just to hang it up, or because strings used to be really long and violinists would let the extra length poke out the back (somehow--I never quite understood completely).

He also said that the f-holes hadn't been so much repaired as purposely recut. The French maker's violins had a thin sound, which someone had tried to fix. And since most violins are identified by the cut of the f-holes, we had lost a big clue as to the maker. The conclusion: Our violin had a good sound and was probably worth what we paid for it, but it wasn't like we were sitting on a winning lottery ticket--an unidentified violin by a famous maker. Which was fine with us, because we bought it for CZ to play.

We got to talking about what it was like to be an American living in Italy year-round. Mr. Carlson said that Cremona was a beautiful city, but it had an unfortunate tendency to stay foggy and rainy in the winter, and to retain pollution, because of its location in the Po valley. "If Cremona were in Tuscany, everyone would be here!" So I guess Mr. Carlson choose his city for much the same reason as we chose our violin: For his own musical enjoyment.

The marble mountains

The main piazza in Sarzana, right outside Lorenzo's gelateria

It was the last day of the festival and CZ had already had her last violin lesson two days before, so we decided go exploring. We went west, high over the Alpi Apuane (those craggy mountains we had seen the first day we drove in to Castelnuovo) to the Ligurian town of Sarzana, where our Italian tutor Paola had grown up.

Paola had left us with instructions to visit a certain gelateria and to ask for Lorenzo, saying, "La Paola ci manda." That means, "Paola sent us," but in a way that only Ligurians would say it, sort of like saying, "Hey, y'all" in the southern U.S. Lorenzo gave us a warm welcome and joked with us, but I didn't take his picture, because it didn't seem quite right. Here's the gelato, though:

As you can see from the photos above and below, there's something sun-bleached and beach-like about Sarzana. The buildings are whiter and include pastel colors. There's more marble (I wonder why!). And there are palm trees.

It was extremely hot in Sarzana, though, and there was a market taking up most of the town, and besides, there was something else I was really curious to see, so after lunch and a walking tour of the town, we got back into the car and headed to Luni.

Luni is an ancient Roman port that eventually lost its luster because the harbor silted up and moved a couple of miles outward. But at one time it was an important city. It had so many brilliant marble buildings that the barbarians, sailing by in their ships, mistook it for Rome--or so the story goes.

One practical reason the buildings in these photos (some temple steps and an amphitheater) don't look so lustruous anymore is that the Romans only put a veneer of marble on their buildings. Underneath was concrete made with rubble. So the marble was recycled long ago, likely to build the nearby towns, like Sarzana, that replaced Luni.

We eventually found the ruins and a small museum in the middle of some fields, past marble-year after marble-yard. As in Lucca, it took some archeological thinking to sort out what was what, but it was fun (if a little hot) wandering around along in the fields among 2000-year-old ruins. This is a spot that doesn't get a lot of tourism, unlike the nearby Cinque Terre, so the museum staff were very friendly. They even told us which was the most scenic route to take home.

So, why do I keep talking about marble, anyway? Because the Alpi Apuane mountains are where Carrara is. And you couldn't miss the marble even if you weren't looking for it, because the small coastal plain between the mountains and the coast is crammed with marble waiting to be shipped all over the world. If you looked east, you saw the high, mining-scarred face of the mountains. The marble dust runs down the crevices of the mountains like snow.

As we drove up the mountains to return to Castelnuovo, we had our most intensely "Are we supposed to be here?" experience of the trip. Not only did our car seem too big for the tiny roads, but once we had to make a three(or four)-point turn up a steep switchback just to keep going! And we kept meeting big trucks. At one point, a gas truck's reflector barely scraped by under our sideview mirror. But the people who drive these roads are used to narrow passes. Every time we met another car or truck, everything would slow to a crawl while both vehicles figured out how to pass each other.

As we approached the second town on our way up the mountain, we saw a place to stop, so we got out and looked towards the coast. It was hazy, and at first we thought we were just looking at a white, cloudy sky on the horizon. But when we got out the binoculars, we noticed boats in the whiteness, and glimmering sun on water. We were looking at the Mediterranean sea!

As we kept going up, the landscape began to resemble something out of The Lord of the Rings. Eventually there was so much marble that there wasn't even enough soil for trees to grow on, only shrubs and some (usually sparse) grass. We saw enormous cuts that looked like doors in the sides of the mountains. We went through tunnels of marble. (There's even a giant hole, a natural formation, at the top of one of these mountains.) And finally, when we started to come out the other side into the Garfagnana region, we found a beautiful little medieval town, Isola Santa, in the middle of the river.

So on our last day in Tuscany, we travelled in altitude, we travelled in culture, and we travelled in time.

1. Looking down the Alpi Apuan foothills towards the Mediterranean Sea 2. A turn in the road that wasn't even all that sharp (and gave us a place to take photos) 3. A door-like cut in the side of a mountain. 4. So much marble that nothing much can grow 5. One of my many attempts to take a photo of a tiny roadside shrine from a moving car. 6. Santa Isola, not far from Castelnuovo.