05 Wednesday Nov 2008
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Having assiduously avoided using this blog as a forum for my political leanings, I must now say that, for the first time in a very long time, it feels great to be an American. Yes, we can!!
02 Sunday Nov 2008
Posted in Customs, Food, gardening, Italian habits and customs, Italy, Liguria, Uncategorized
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‘Tis the season to be harvesting olives. All around us the hills are festooned with colorful nets, principally orange and yellow. They are wrapped around the trees and are attached one to the next making the steep terraces look like a brightly colored slopes. The olives drop into pockets in the low parts of the nets, whence they are easily collected.
Our friends T and J have 51 trees which have been beautifully pruned and cared for. They do not use nets, but instead hand-pick the olives, which is easy to do with their trees, none of which is much taller than we are. The pruned and umbrella-shaped trees are much more productive than trees which are ‘let go.’
Our trees are in the latter category, very much in need of a pruning, which they will receive this winter. They had been untended for at least 20 years when we bought our place. Just after we moved in a friend sent a friend over who pruned some of the trees, but none of them very dramatically, and we’ve done nothing about it since. This means the trees are huge.
We use a system that falls somewhere between the Old-Timers’ and T and J’s. We have one net, which we carry from tree to tree (we have only about 15 trees). Then we spend a very long time positioning poles to hold the net in place and form a bowl under the tree we’re working on. There’s usually a fair amount of good-natured discussion about the placement of the poles, but eventually the net is positioned in a more or less stable way. 
Then the Captain takes a long, thick bamboo stick and whacks the trees to make the fruit fall. This is a time-honored way of removing fruit, but it’s fallen out of favor with modern olive-culturists. The preferred method for removing fruit these days is the olive rake, a plastic rake with tines spaced just less than the average olive. You attach the rake to the weapon of your choice (bamboo stick for us, this year as in photo) and comb out the branches. The tines pull the olives off and send them spraying all over the place. With luck a large percentage of them end up in the net. The Captain alternates whacking with a stout stick and whacking with the rake on a long pole. Meanwhile I use a rake on a small pole and wander around looking for low branches to strip. I’m also crazy about finding olives on the ground and putting them in my basket – treasures!
This year the weather has not co-operated with many Ligurian harvesters. We’ve had heavy rains and very strong winds, the heaviest since the great storm of 2000. A lot of olives have come down, and the weather for several days was just too nasty for gathering those that are still on trees. Those who got their nets up in a timely fashion are doing very well (it’s a stand-out olive year). Those who waited will have lost a lot of the crop unless, like me, they like to creep around on their hands and knees under the trees – not an efficient way to gather.
Once the olives are collected it’s good to get them to the mill, the ‘frantoio’, within three days. Our favorite frantoio over the mountain in Val Fontanabuona went out of business while we weren’t looking last year (there was no olive harvest for anyone in Liguria last year – no olives). So instead yesterday we went to a different mill here in Rapallo. Stay tuned for the report. In past years we’ve gotten a liter of oil for each 7 or 8 kg of olives. We had 111 kg this year (we also didn’t get all of our fruit picked before the weather turned on us).
If you’re really interested in olives, Mort Rosenblum has written a delightful book called ‘Olives’ and subtitled “The Life and Lore of a Noble Fruit,” which is stuffed with history, culture and even some recipes. If you enjoy Life-in-Italy tales, Extra Virgin by the Englishwoman Annie Hawes is an engaging account of her purchase of a rustico and grove of olive trees above Imperia some twenty years ago; she writes appealingly and amusingly of her neighbors and of the land itself.
31 Friday Oct 2008
Posted in Animals in Italy, Cats, Italian habits and customs, Uncategorized
Luciano is an old cat, but at 16 not exactly ancient. He has, however, a panoply of interesting ailments that keep us in frequent contact with his doctors. He has three: Ralph Siegal, Fausto Finetti and Veronica, who is a brand new vet and whose last name we have not yet learned. Ralph has been waiting for Luciano’s kidneys to carry him off for three years now, but the cat keeps cashing in his extra lives and fooling all of us. Luciano’s other main diagnosis is hyper-thyroidism.
As prescribed, Kitty eats special food that is kind to kidneys – high in fiber and relatively low in protein. It is available commercially for E 2 a tin, of which he can eat two a day. Rather than bankrupt ourselves any sooner than absolutely necessary, we decided to make our own cat food, using an excellent recipe we found (of course!) on the internet. Here is a link to a site with cat food recipes for cats with various ailments. We’ve been making a variant of the Hills kidney diet food.
There is no perfect cure for the thyroid problem, according to Dott. Ralph, but there is a pill that can help. Unfortunately it is not available in Italy, but can be found in France. So we have prevailed upon our friends who travel that way to carry back the cat’s medicine.
Which brings me around to the subject of medical care, the approach to which is much the same for animals as for people: caution! don’t over-medicate! wait and see! Poor Luciano developed a big bump between his eyes last week. When we took him to the vet (Dott. Veronica this time) she suggested that since the cat is pretty much blind (left that out, didn’t I) he had probably run into something and had a great big bruise. So we left the office with instructions to ice the lump and administer cortesone pills. Have you ever iced a cat’s nose? It’s interesting. Actually, Luciano is quite patient with it, but I sure wouldn’t want to try it on a cat with teeth (I forgot to mention he’s toothless, didn’t I).
I believe that had we been in the US that an X-ray would have been taken on our first visit. Instead we spent five days icing the cat’s nose and watching the lump grow. Then we took him back and Dott. Fausto recommended an X-Ray, given the following day in a different office. So, after three trips the cat’s lump, which proved to be an abscess, was X-rayed, opened and cleared up. I’m not in any way saying that we don’t all receive excellent medical care here, but sometimes I think the caution is less than helpful. The poor old cat had to make three trips to accomplish what, in the States, would have been done on the first trip. And if it had been a bruise? There would have been one wasted X-ray. And that’s one difference between Italy and the US. Here waste is anathema – you don’t want a test unless it’s 99% certain to tell you something really useful, and only if other less expensive approaches have failed. Is it dangerous? No, because doctors and vets here are just as smart and well-trained as they are in the US, and they are careful. Is it inconvenient? Frequently. Is it frustrating? Absolutely! We’ve been back for one aftercare visit, and will return again Monday for another, making a grand total of five visits. We haven’t been billed for anything yet, but one aspect of cautious care is that it does seem to be less costly.
We’ve seen the same approach in our own medical care here. Problems are discussed for ages and curative steps are incremental. But then, Italian doctors don’t have to worry about the malpractice suits that threaten American doctors. Eventually (so far!) we always get better. And I have to add that when one of us had a very serious acute condition the initial care was immediate and excellent. Once danger was past, however, caution was again the watchword, and a condition that was treated in three days in a US hospital took twelve days for the exact same outcome in Italy.
I’m not sure what any of this proves. Socialized medicine certainly has its pluses and minuses, and this is not an appropriate forum for that topic. I guess if we’ve learned anything new from the last week’s experiences it’s this: it’s really hard to ice a cat’s nose.
28 Tuesday Oct 2008
Posted in Driving in Italy, Uncategorized
And here I thought the written part of the driving license would be the hardest. I’ve been driving for more years than you’ve been alive – many of you (ha!) – and am famous amongst my friends for being a smooth and confident ‘autista.’ Here in Italy I am a Loser behind the wheel. Here are the things I did wrong in my first driving lesson:
That’s all I can remember at the moment but I’m sure there were other transgressions.
Every cloud has its silver lining, though. Here is a picture of my driving coach Ivo:
26 Sunday Oct 2008
Posted in Food, Italian habits and customs, Photographs, Uncategorized
The opposite of fast food. That’s the premise behind the organization Slow Food, which was started in 1989 in (of course!) Italy.
Every two years the organization sponsors a Salone Internazionale del Gusto in Torino which, for the first time, was joined this year by Terra Madre, an organization that promotes sustainable agriculture and food production, with a focus on the small producer and preserving taste and biodiversity. The two groups have much in common in that they both have an interest in the responsible production of delicious food. Terra Madre focuses more on the agricultural side of the equation, Slow Food on the side of finished food products. Terra Madre had a much smaller group of exhibitors than did Slow Food, but they were much more interestingly attired (see web album). One theme of this year’s Salone was environmental protection. Everything was recyclable or made from already recycled materials.
The Salone ran from Oct. 23-27 in the Lingotto Fiera, a HUGE group of pavilions which are a part of a former Fiat manufacturing site. The whole Fiat plant there has been redesigned as a exhibition center, including the Fiere halls (70,000 square meters) and an auditorium, museum, and exhibit spaces.
Imagine two long aisles of nothing but cheese producers! A beer hall with at least 10 different beers on tap. Aisles and aisles of meat products. Chocolate! Pasta! There’s not much that you can eat that wasn’t at the Salone del Gusto… except fast food. And there were not many fresh foods on view; some fruit, not many vegetables, and the meat was all cured in one way or another. One aspect of the Salone which we didn’t take advantage of (nor did many others I’m sure) is the great number of classes, conferences and so forth on various aspects of food, its growth, its preparation and presentation. Over 250 Presidi (chapters of Slow Food) from around the world had exhibits (or something?) – we never got to that pavilion.
Many of the exhibitors were from Italy, but there was a good representation also from Germany and Austria and even someone from Mexico. And almost all of them gave little tid-bits of their food to taste (except for the caviar and chocolate people, darn it). You can eat enough for a week on your E 20 admission ticket (and if you’re very lucky, as we were, friends will give you a brace of tickets). Even the wine was available to taste in small amounts. (Mysteriously all the wine-tasting ground to a halt between 12:30 and 2:30, a great inconvenience to our friend Frank who had developed a powerful thirst.) Beer of many types was on tap for E 3 for a generous glass.
I truly can’t single out what the very best thing we ate was, it was all fabulous. We were very careful though, and came home with only one salami and one cheese. It got easier to resist temptation as the day wore on and our stomachs filled with all our tasting.
Two years ago there were 160,000 visitors at the Salone. It felt like they all came back on Friday when we were there – it was mobbed. I can’t imagine what Saturday and Sunday must have been like. The food people were all unfailingly friendly and pleasant – big smiles and no hard-sell.
It was a fabulous day, but a sensory overload. There was entertainment in the background almost constantly, and the pavilions are not designed to cut down on sound bouncing around. There was so much to look at, and to taste, that it was hard to take it all in at once (literally and figuratively). Will I go back in two years? If you’d asked me on Friday I’d have said Never! Too exhausting. Today? Well I’d certainly be tempted. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my life.
Here’s a photo album you can look at if you’re interested. It only scratches the surface of what we saw, but it does give… the flavor.
23 Thursday Oct 2008
Posted in History, Italian men, People, Uncategorized
Giovanni Castagneto, aged 87, died on Sunday.
He was already an old man when we met him. We caught glimpses of his sister (she of the long skirts and kerchiefed head) and of him from time to time when we moved to San Maurizio, but it wasn’t until we’d been here for about 5 years that Giovanni decided it was safe to make our acquaintance.
There was a knock on the door one day, and there was Giovanni, paying an official call. With him he brought two small pages, on which he had carefully written the first names of everyone in his family. He introduced us to each in turn, lingering over the cousin, “I should have married.”
He never did take a wife, and lived always with his older sister. She never took to us, at least not to the point of actually meeting us. But then, she had not had his cosmopolitan experiences.
Giovanni served in the Italian Army during World War II. He was sent to Russia, where he suffered terrible hardships during the failed winter siege of Stalingrad. (You can read about the Italian Army’s Russian misadventures here). We don’t know what befell Giovanni in Russia, but we know this: he walked back to Italy. That’s a hike of 2,680 kilometers (1,665 miles), undertaken in appalling conditions. In his old age it was those battles and that long walk home that filled his mind. Whenever we met, the conversation invariably turned to Russia. He would get a distant look in his eye and say, “I was in Russia,” almost as if he couldn’t believe it himself. Was he 8th Army? Alpino? We don’t know, the conversation never got beyond the fact that he’d walked back, that most of those walking with him died on the journey, and that it was cold winter.
Giovanni was, in the years we knew him, a contadino. He took care of his vines, his olive trees, his chickens and his garden. He was too old to be a fast worker, but he was steady and efficient. And he was generous. Frequently we would open our door to find a little basket filled with grapes or figs, or just some flowers. Whenever he gave us something we’d try to use it in a way we could share with him. Grapes became grape jam (not the staple here that it is in the US), erba Luisa (lemon verbena) became liquor. It was the only way we could think of to repay his kindnesses. That and when, as always happened, a conversation turned to Russia, showing honest interest and a truly felt amazement at the transformative experience of his life. I wonder if, as he drifted away at the last, he was once again in a snow-blind day putting one foot in front of the other, walking home.
20 Monday Oct 2008
Posted in Uncategorized
I passed!
Gruesome details have been posted over in Driving School Diary…
18 Saturday Oct 2008
Posted in Customs, Driving in Italy, Italian habits and customs, Italian men, Italy, Liguria, Photographs, Rapallo, Uncategorized
Many of our friends deplore the number of scooters on the streets, and the abandon with which they are driven. To which we reply, Think how crowded our already crowded streets and parking areas would be if every one of those scooters was a single-occupant car. It would be day-long gridlock – a nightmare.
Having said that, there are some scooter drivers who give the rest of us a bad name by being reckless and thoughtless. And there are scooter practices which car-drivers find annoying; for instance, all scooters will move to the front of any line of cars, and will pass any slow-moving column of cars. Personally I think irritation at this practice is just envy on car-drivers’ part! I was stranded in a long line in down-town Rapallo a while back; here’s a photo of a few of the scooters who made their way past me and up to the front of the line:
We’ve been making a years-long study of the various driving styles of the Italian Scooter Drivers, and herewith we present our findings.
First of all there are the Wild Young Men who ride with their helmets on the back of their heads, sometimes unfastened (though this is illegal so you don’t see it so often), and always, always, their elbows bent out. What is it about leaning forward and sticking your elbows out that makes you go faster? I don’t know, but they all do it, so it must work. You know if you see someone coming at you on a scooter with arms akimbo that you’d better watch out, because he won’t be. And yes, it’s always ‘he.’
The counterpoint to the young boys is the Straight Young Girls. They seem always to be reed-slim, and they sit absolutely erect, with their knees and elbows tucked demurely in. They don’t necessarily drive more slowly than the boys, but they make a neater package. I have to say here that I had a hard time getting the photos to illustrate these styles – the scooters go by quickly, so many of my attempts were blurred failures. The example of this riding style is a woman a little older than the teens of whom I’m speaking, but she has not lost her youthful Style.
Then there are the Young Bucks out cruising. They’ve learned to keep their elbows in, but haven’t yet learned to watch the road all the time. There are more important things to look at!
Time passes, young men age, and through some bizarre rule of body physics the elbows go in and the knees go out. I was able to capture a rare elbows AND knees out gent. This is uncommon; usually the Old Guys simply put their knees at right angles to the scooter and hold their arms in.
Smoking levels are down in Italy, but many people of both genders enjoy smoking as they scoot along. The Captain has noted that most smokers like to light up immediately after putting on their helmets but before they’ve started the motor. (Only yesterday I watched a man put on his helmet, then pull out his papers and tobacco and proceed to roll a big fat cigarette before setting out; that was a first for me.) The Captain wants to invent a ‘sigaretta finta’ (fake cigarette) for those trying to quit – something they could keep in the scooter and put a match to when they set off, and then clench between their teeth as they drive. He thinks it’s an idea with real financial potential; I think we should keep our day jobs. I was unable to capture the not unusual sight of someone driving, smoking AND talking on the cell phone all at the same time. It’s a rather terrifying sight.
Another oddity of the older gentlemen riders is the One Foot Dragging style. I’m not sure what this accomplishes – maybe it serves as a sort of outrigger in case balance should suddenly vanish.
I felt very fortunate to be able to capture a photo of the almost-never-seen Two Foot Dragger:
Perhaps this driver had an especially wiggly passenger?
Before showing you the last two photos, which are of everyone’s favorite scooter style, I want to mention three important styles I was not able to document with pictures. The first is highly illegal, but still often seen. It is the Entire Family of Four on One Scooter. Dad drives; Mom sits pillion; between them, smooshed to near invisibility, is the smaller of two children. Standing between Dad’s legs and arms, between him and the steering handles, is the larger of the two children. Phew!
The Chat is an amusing illustration of the Italian national past-time of sharing information. It’s not unusual to see two scooters zooming along side-by-side as the drivers engage in animated conversation involving, of course, lots of hand language.
You go years without seeing something and then, boom, three times in one week: last week I saw the ever-rarer Side Saddle Passenger, not once, but three times. This style gives me the jim-jams because having tried it once or twice myself I know how completely unstable the side-sitting passenger feels. And if you’re wearing a slippery skirt it’s just a short slide from the scooter seat to the pavement. Ick. Give me my jeans and let me straddle that seat, please. This riding style is favored by older couples, the woman in her sweater and matching A-line skirt, which is too tight to allow her to ride modestly in any other way.
Everybody’s favorite motor-scooter sight has to be the Dog on the Floorboard. We frequently see the older men up here on the mountain transporting their hunting dogs to the woods for a good run. These dogs seem all to be liver-spotted spaniels, and they are excellent passengers.
The other day I rode behind a scooter which had an unwilling lab as passenger. It was hilarious; the dog was all over the place and howling at the top of its lungs. It’s owner was driving very cautiously, but it was still all too much for the dog who sounded more like an air-raid siren than a dog. Perhaps they had come from the vet; or perhaps it was a training exercise. In any event, it had Fail written all over it.
Of course, the smaller your dog, the easier it will be to carry it on your scooter:
If you don’t trust your pooch to balance on the floor, and he’s small enough, you can always tuck him into a basket:
This last is a bit of a cheat because the scooter is stationary, but it’s clear they will soon be on the move:
Have I left anything or anyone out? Let me know if I’ve missed any Moto-Riding styles and I’ll update the catalog.
15 Wednesday Oct 2008
Posted in Uncategorized
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Blog Action Day, Global Fund to Fight Aids, Heifer Project, Kiva, Literacy Volunteers, Poverty, TB and Malaria
This is not the blog I had planned to post today, the one about amusing scooter-riding styles, but my conscience has been stirred, and I’d like to try to stir yours as well.
This blog is nothing more than the musings of a highly advantaged woman on the difficulties and humorous aspects of living a bifurcated life. The USA and Italy… who wouldn’t want to live in either of them? How lucky can a girl be?
The financial crisis of the last months, if nothing else, has pointed out how much so many of us have to lose. We are so fortunate! And it places in even starker contrast the differences between the rich and the poor. If you’re reading this, you are in the ‘rich’ part of the equation – you have a computer, you have some time in which to noodle around, and you can read. And if you’re hungry it’s probably only because you’re on a diet (as I should be).
Over 3 billion people, more than half the world’s population, live on less than $2.50 a day. 1.4 billion live below the World Bank’s poverty line of $1.25 a day. No one I know has tried to do that since Frommer’s Europe on $5 a day was outdated. Would we care to try to do it now? I don’t think so.
As a retired librarian (at the prettiest small library in the world) the fact that over 1 billion of the world’s population is absolutely illiterate (that doesn’t count the functionally illiterate) is every bit as disturbing. In the U.S., 20% of the adult population reads at or below 5th grade level, which is below the level needed to earn a living wage. Basic reading and writing skills are closely connected to leaving poverty behind.
I don’t want to be all preachy in this post (oh all right, I want to be a little preachy). The fact is that you and I are rich, and we are rich because of the pure accident of where and when we were born. With luck we’ve taken the good cards we were dealt and are making something of our hands. But we started from a point so far above the truly poor that we probably can’t even imagine what their lives might be like.
I once took a psychology class where I was introduced to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. The billion or so people living in poverty cannot think about anything above the lowest level, or perhaps the second lowest level of the pyramid, while we rich people get to think about love and self-actualization and what to read next and which fabulous pasta dish we want for dinner tonight. What a world! How did it get so out of whack?
I haven’t the skill to discuss the underlying economic and political theories of poverty intelligently. But I’ve got eyes and I know what poverty looks like when I see it, as do you: it’s not an idea or an issue. It’s a small person with huge eyes and a swollen belly. Thanks to Blog Action Day I can give you a several links to sites where you can do something that will make a very big difference in the lives of the world’s poor, one person at a time. I can’t think of anything else that can make us feel so good for such a small investment of time and money. So won’t you join me?
The Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria is the official charity of this year’s Blog Action Day. The name says it all.
Kiva makes very small loans ($25, for instance) to help poor people start very small businesses.
Heifer Project (which commenters below reminded me of) helps feed people by giving them food-producing animals, such as goats, sheep and chickens. They tackle hunger on the very front line.
If you live in the United States, please think about supporting your local Literacy Volunteers, either with a donation or as a volunteer. If you live in the UK, check out what you can do here. Share the joy of reading and give someone a leg up to a better life!
And stay tuned for that post on scooter-riding; it’ll be along soon.
12 Sunday Oct 2008
Posted in Driving in Italy, Italian habits and customs, Italian men, Italy, Uncategorized
There has not been time to post fascinating entries about Life in Italy because of the time-gobbling demands of Learning to Drive in a Foreign Language (foreign to me, that is). To make up for it, I have added two recipes on the right (Fish in the Ligurian Style and Adriana’s Fruit Torta) and have added to the Driving School Diary in Elaborations.
Above you see my present nemesises. These four lads sit behind me and chatter away through each lesson. Professoressa Elena intersperses her lecture with many a “Silenzio!” but to no effect. These guys have a lot to say and it’s all really important and can’t wait 30 minutes until class is dismissed. Evidently it is all hysterically funny, as well, because it is all punctuated with frequent snorts and giggles.
The Italian word for ‘chatter’ is wonderfully onomatopoetic – it’s ‘chiacchiera’ (kee-ah-kee-yehr’-ah), and that’s what it sounds like behind me during driving school classes. I’m not really grumpy about it, to tell the truth. I remember giggling for about 4 years running when I was their age. In fact they seem like really nice kids. I just wish it weren’t so distracting as I try to focus on what Elena is saying; my problem, not theirs.
The text for the driving exam is 250 pages long. I think it’s kind of pathetic that the first book I’m reading in its original Italian is the Driving Manual, rather than, say, The Divine Comedy or the poetry of Montale. I have managed to read 200 of the pages; what lies ahead? First Aid – that will be fun! I have already learned from practice exams that we do not want to peel cloth off burn victims and that we do want to immerse their limbs in cold water if possible to alleviate pain. I can hardly wait for my first accident! Then, last but hardly least, there are the engine parts – that will be a sort of maze for me, I think – there are lots of parts that run with oil (brakes, engine), and other parts that run with water (radiator, window-cleaning), leaving out gas for the minute. Fortunately the questions on engines are rather basic, and Elena has already told us that any question including the words ‘change the tire pressure’ is false. A useful clue.
Let me leave you with the most interesting thing I learned in my reading yesterday (insurance (which was incomprehensible), and driving under the influence (equally dangerous in any language)): we really do not want to get behind the wheel of a car if we’ve just eaten a heavily spiced meal, or one heavy in fats or fried foods. Who knew?
An Ex-Expatriate 