Italy A-Z

Last night was Notte Bianca in Italy — a relatively recent tradition celebrated in a number of towns. The shops stay open late and nearly every piazza has some kind of music. We walked around from 10:30 to 12:30 am and the streets were more crowded than I’ve ever seen them. Babies passed out in strollers, young children running around, lovers in dark corners, men peeing in the alleys and the streets absolutely packed with families, couples and groups. We had to hold hands and let Scott do the blocking to get through some particularly crowded areas.

Scott’s favorite was in Piazza del Gesù — four older gentlemen in a Beatles cover band called Strawberry Fields. They were methodically and enthusiastically playing every song from the Beatles “Help” album. Young women and children were dancing, older couples sitting around the fountain. Il Labirinto restaurant had tables around the piazza and people were enjoying dinner. (And, who knew?! The band has a Facebook page and Web site).

My favorite was in the piazza next to our apartment building — Piazza Dante Alighieri. However, here the celebration was actually organized by the neighborhood parish to celebrate San Giovanni. After a lot of activity during the day getting all the cars out of the piazza (the last one was towed about 6 pm) the neighbors set up a barbeque and served dinner in the piazza. Around 10 the band started — accordion and saxophone — with two female singers who changed costumes for nearly every song (Mexican hats, cowboy hats and guns, scarves…).

The best part was that nearly everyone danced — the old men and women, children, young people, middle age — and they all knew the steps. Some people danced with each other, but most people danced in a large group, each in step, all swaying and stepping at the same  moment. A friend just sent a blog post about the sangra, and it describes perfectly the traditional event next door last night. Here’s a short video from one of the songs:

My Italian has hit a plateau…I couldn’t keep up with the class and I’ve not progressed at all since January. I have a few phrases people understand easily, but everything else always results in a blank stare. I feel like people avoid conversations because it’s too much work to try and figure out my garbled mispronunciations.

Last night I had a very distinct dream that involved interviewing some pigs. And what I couldn’t get over was how good their English was. They said they just picked it up by listening to humans.

For those who think that Italy is always a warm, sunny land of basil and tomatoes, living through winter here has given me a new appreciation for the hardiness of peasants, Romans, and Etruscans. It is cold and damp; of course, the local Viterbese keep telling us that this is an unusual winter.

We did have two days of sunshine over the weekend which cheered everyone immensely. But this morning we woke to find a little snow on the roofs and by noon it looked like a blizzard had settled in to stay. Highly unusual!

The Italians of the 14th century were very much into gardens — formal gardens, and, I discovered today, highly unusual wild gardens as well. These photos are from Bomarzo, a ‘monster garden’ not far from Viterbo built in 1554. Wikipedia calls it “one of the most suggestive examples of late Renaissance art.”

What’s almost as good as eating great Italian food? Writing about it…taking pictures…talking about it…planning to eat it. The Italian cuisine teacher for USAC, Christina Thompson, and I have started a food blog. It’s a primary resource for her class but I’m enjoying blogging about some of the meals we’re trying and the beautiful fresh food in the markets. Check it out! Let us know what you try and what questions you have:

http://buonaforchetta.wordpress.com

Last Saturday we decided to make our Italian friends a ‘real’ American breakfast. Here breakfast consists of one very small, very strong espresso and a croissant or dry bread of some type. One of my travel writing college students described how that morning her mother had made her a cup of hot chocolate as thick as pudding, with whipped cream on top for breakfast. Ymmm.

To ease the cultural dissonance we started breakfast at noon, with two antipasti: blueberry muffins and a pastry my mother used to make, called Wells Stang. We then moved to the primo piatto, first plate: pancakes and then french toast. For the second plate we had scrambled eggs, fried ham and homestyle fries. Dessert was strawberries followed by Italian coffee (just couldn’t do the American stuff). It took a little over two hours and we’ve already had requests for an encore. Food exchanges are the best!

“Piccolo” is the Italian word for small. Since the streets are generally narrow and full of people and cars, maneuvering machines in for the nearly constant process of repair and reconstruction takes a lot of ingenuity.A couple of weeks ago they began tearing up the street in front of our apartment. At the current rate of reconstruction it will be a couple of months before all the cobblestones have been replaced. In the meantime, it makes for yet another entertaining project to watch from our windows. It gives the parking police plenty to do and I like watching how the workmen stop their work so the old ladies can walk slowly around the tractor or over the rubble pile to get down the street. They’ve also built a nice little platform to stand on in front of the closest ATM machine. When the street isn’t under repair it’s a rather dangerous place to stand; the bancomat is inconveniently set in a wall on a blind corner of a busy street.

There are a few drawbacks to living in a 500-year-old building and plumbing is one of them. The pipes aren’t 500 years old but everything else is, which poses challenges. Our landlady warned us to be judicious about not putting things down the drain. Despite my obsessive removal of even the tiniest particle of food the kitchen drain stopped working in early December. Her diagnosis: I was using too much cheap dishwashing liquid and that caused the pipes to clog.

The first plumber, who came with his son, was very cheerful. He opened up his small toolbox and took out a thing that somewhat resembled an accordion. He put one end down the drain and blew on it. After awhile some dirty stuff came shooting out of the pipe and into his face. His son cleaned it up and he blew some more. After awhile they disappeared and came back with a bottle of caustic soda. I had recently read a book by an English woman living in a village near Genoa who remarked on the many uses of caustic soda in the Italian household. They used it a few times, showed me how to use it, indicated that they didn’t think the problem was really gone, and left.

Over the next few weeks, we used the soda caustica treatment and the pipe would drain for a few hours and then plug again. We moved to a system that involved draining the kitchen sink into a bucket and emptying it into a sink in the bathroom.

A few conversations later our landlady suggested we try putting a snake down the sink. We had tried a short one but it didn’t seem to help much. We were somewhat baffled that the plumbers don’t seem to carry snakes but Scott managed to find a 10-meter snake at a store a few kilometers away. He and Alex spent one evening twisting it around and trying to get it through what apparently are a few twists in the pipe in its journey from the kitchen to the bathroom and beyond.

When it seemed fruitless to push any more, Scott tried to pull it out. Nothing happened. He pulled on it some more. Alex pulled on it. We went to bed. I pulled on it the next day. It snaked out of the hole in the wall and across our living room for the next week. We kept pulling. Finally Scott told our landlady.

The following week another plumber arrived. Very experienced, our landlady said, the person who could fix our troubles. He pulled on the snake for a couple of minutes, then pulled out his knife and cut it off so only the shortest stub was sticking out of the pipe. This seemed like a move we would regret, but he was very confident. He also had a device that allowed him to pump air down the pipe. He pumped a lot. He ran the water and said that the problem was solved. We just needed to remove the snake that was now stuck in the pipe with nothing that anyone could grab.

A couple of weeks ago the plumber returned with a helper. They pulled out the cabinets, the sink, and the oven. They took up the tiles on the floor and pulled a bit out from the wall. While we weren’t watching, they managed to pull out the snake. They tested the pipe, said it was fine, found replacement tiles, put them back in place, fixed the counter top they broke a little bit, reinstalled the cabinetry, the oven, the pipe under the sink, hooked up the water and it has been fine ever since. I did buy more expensive dish soap however, just to make sure.

Tonight we went to the Sacro Fuoco di Sant’Antonio Abate in Bagnaia, a small town very near Viterbo. This annual event includes a bonfire on the eve of Saint Antonio’s Day (and eating, of course) followed by the blessing of animals in the church the next day. Our friends Richard and Christina said that in rural areas they bring horses and cows to the church and in Rome they bring motorbikes for blessing. We enjoyed the bonfire a great deal because it was extremely cold and then went to Richard and Christina’s for a delicious Thai dinner. We’ll watch for the motorbike blessing in Rome tomorrow.

This video (1 minute) provides a little flavor of the event:

Flickr Video

Cars are small in Italy (and all of Europe) and so is most everything else. Refrigerators, for example, hold maybe a third or half of the typical American kitchen behemoth. It makes finding those hidden leftovers a real challenge for outsized Americans.