Parking
lots.
Travelling
by car has the great advantage that you can leave when you are ready, without
being affected by train or bus timetables, and get the closest possible to the
place you are going to see. Besides, having an autistic daughter it is also a
much safer and less stressful way to go around, though Valentina has improved
her behaviour a lot since she has taken her medication.
But having a
car also means you have to park it somewhere. And often you need to pay for it.
The gigantic
white blades of a modern windmill impressed us as we came out of the ferry at
Rotterdam port on 28th July early that morning. We had had a good
sleep in pristine beds in a spotless cabin where the ‘voice of god’ in several
languages from the loudspeaker had allowed us about seven hours of peace and
silence, waking us up at seven, or eight o' clock CET.
Before
reaching the B&B my husband proposed a quick visit to the cube-and
pencil-shaped buildings in Rotterdam. We parked at €1 per hour: acceptable. Our
first family photo of the journey had the pencil building in the background,
renamed by my husband p**is house.
“But it
doesn’t look like a p**is,” one of my sons said.
“Don’t you
remember what a p**is looks like?” my husband replied.
Then we
moved to the statue De Verwoeste Stad (the devastated city) by Ossip Zadkine
commemorating the bombing of May 1940. It represents a bronze human figure with
a hole in the chest, its huge dark arms and hands stretching in the blue clear
sky in a desperate attempt to stop future devastations.
The B&B
was in the countryside, The rooms were spare and clean with wooden timbers on
the ceiling and whitewashed walls. Large windows let the summer light come in
and showed a typical Dutch landscape: flat and green, with cows grazing and
tidy rows of birches at the borders of the fields becoming progressively smaller
towards the horizon.
Amsterdam
was our main target so the next day we drove there in about half an hour. We
headed straight to the centre, avoiding by inches the horde of bicycles darting
everywhere. We found a parking place along a canal near Anne Frank’s house and
thought we needed to park there for a long time as there was at least an hour's
queue just to enter the house. My husband went to pay at the parking metre but
came back a minute later. He was shocked by the price: €5 per hour. This is the
reason why everybody cycles here.
“Let’s look
somewhere else, maybe further from the centre,” I suggested.
To be honest
we are quite spoiled here about the cost of parking places. In Rome it is €1
per hour everywhere, even in piazza Venezia or near the Colosseum and in
Lancaster there is enough free parking ten minutes walk from the centre.
After forty
minutes search we found a Q8 car park, new and polished, €3 for fifty-five
minutes, weird. And expensive, but we had no choice. We paid €17 for the first
day in Amsterdam.
Even more
expensive was the car park near Van Gogh museum, €4 for fifty-four minutes. But
we had a nice surprise when we came back: a shining black Ford Mustang with an
American plate picturing a cowboy on a rampant horse was parked near our
scratched Ford Galaxy. What an honour! We took photos: you don’t see a Mustang
every day.
In Alkmaar
the display at the entrance of the car park said ‘vol’ (full) but several cars
were queuing so we did the same. After a while we entered and started to look
for a place. It seemed truly full. And there were no places for disabled.
“Haven’t
they got disabled people in the Netherlands?” I said.
“They have
euthanasia,” somebody said, a nasty joke to keep our spirits up in a difficult
moment.
Eventually
we found a free space at the top floor. After all that, it wasn’t completely
full.
The
mentality and habits of each country must be mirrored in the price, location
and maintenance of car parks. Everybody says that Dutch people pay great
attention to money owing to their past of traders and sailors living in a
rather small and vulnerable country. They had to make the ends meet somehow
though they don’t have massive natural resources, the country is not protected
by mountains or big rivers and the sea is sometimes more a menace than a
defence. But they managed to become a powerful colonial power and keep their
country rich and independent. And making money is essential for independence.
So let’s pay the parking fares.
To confirm
my thesis about parking lots, here is an example from Germany. On our way to
Italy we stopped one night in Aachen (also called Aix-la-Chapelle in French and
Aquisgrana in Italian), a very German town at the border with the Netherlands.
The parking metre had precise but rather complex instructions, a sort of
mathematical quiz to test our preparation. It was €0,30 for the first twenty
minutes, then €0,05 each three minutes up to a maximum of two hours. How much
was it for two hours? They didn’t give the solution. I could easily have been
stuck there for two hours if it weren’t for my husband, a skilful Maths
teacher, who found it very easy and logical. It's typical of German people to do
things efficiently, he said.
In Italy,
the sunny land of pizza and mandolins, the parking places for disabled people
are free everywhere. We had the blue badge of Lancaster county council for
Valentina so we didn’t cough up. Otherwise only €0,50 per hour near the seaside
town centre. No wonder they often run out of money.
In Assisi,
where I had a day trip with my husband leaving the children to my
parents-in-law, the parking lots in town were full. The policemen led us to the
cemetery area where we parked on a lawn, fifteen minutes walk from San
Francesco’s church in an alley shaded by cypresses. This was unbelievably well
organized, and cost us nothing. Maybe the spirit of St Francis suggested it.
Art, Museums
and Churches.
My favourite
places when I am on holiday are always museums, especially art museums, and
churches. They tell much of the country we are visiting, and they also meet
with my own interests. But the children get easily bored by them so we have to
ration visits.
We couldn’t
see a good half of the masterpieces of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam because it
was under restructuring, but there was enough to make me enter into a sort of
trance pervaded by Dutch art. Besides, sharp-witted captions entitled
‘Director’s choice’ commented on some of the pictures, which made the visit
even more interesting.
Here are
some examples. The portrait of the nubile Maria Trip by Rembrandt van Rijn
showed a richly dressed lady with her hair loose: the comment was ‘personal
advertisement’. Regarding a landscape by Johannes Torrentius (whose paintings
were all burned except this one that was used as a lid of a barrel), the
painter was described as ‘a subversive rake’, who died aged fifty-five of
syphilis and was persecuted for blasphemy. The notice said he used to paint
women masturbating and a Mary Magdalene holding a skull in her hand and an
arrow in her mouth. A portrait of a young woman lifting her skirt and warming
her hands by a brazier by Caesar Boetius van Everdingen was appraised with the
comment: “Who quenches her burning desire?” Quite surprising considering the
demure, pristine Dutch tradition, though the proverbial Dutch tolerance must
play its part here. Good and bad mix…or at least lie side by side.
Of course, I
was deeply impressed by Rembrandt. He is a sublime master, one of the greatest
who have ever lived in this ungrateful world, ungrateful for artists most of
the time. And he did not have an easy life though he was rich and successful
for a period. Reading his biography I was moved by his passion and devotion to
his wife Saskia and bewildered by the distress he had to cope with after her
death. He is equal to the great Italian masters such as Raphael, Titian,
Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, but he hasn’t received equal reverence.
In his work,
the contrasts struck me as much as the dynamism of his characters and the
originality of his compositions. Contrasts between very bright highlights and
very dark deep elements, between thin and thick layers of painting, between
finely detailed parts and roughly sketched ones, between controlled skilful
techniques and loose free brushstrokes. He caught contradictions and
hypocrisies in portraits and self-portraits, as in the irony of his
self-portrait as the apostle Paul. His old, wrinkled skin and big nose give a
revealing image of the austere apostle Paul. It was also very human.
Another
great painter who impressed me was Frans Hals, famous for his portraits. Again,
one of the ‘Director’s choice’ was a wedding portrait of a wealthy Haarlem
merchant and his wife. The caption said there were a lot of symbols of love
everywhere, like the thistle referring to man’s fidelity. Looking carefully at
the man’s relaxed and sated expression (he seems used to every kind of
pleasure) and at the woman’s cheeky eyes (she seems to say ‘got him!’) it made
me think about probable future infidelities instead.
Jan Vermeer
stood out among the Dutch masters, his smaller-sized pictures showing a unique
attention to detail, psychological insight and subtle play of light and shade.
His most famous paintings describe silent woman's reveries where the position
of the hands, a gaze and slightly parted lips reveal a secret world of
emotions. And his work became famous two hundred years after his death. How
frustrating!
He was born
and lived in Delft, famous for its elegant porcelain, where his father was an
inn-keeper and an art dealer. Vermeer was an art dealer too, as he didn’t earn
enough with his art. His tomb in the Oude Kerk (Old Church) is simple and
dignified. A picture of the Girl with the Pearl Earring near the tombstone
seems to invite us into a mysterious world beyond it.
We also
visited the Nieuwe Kerk (New Church) in Delft main square. My husband had
vertigo climbing up the wooden stairs to the top of the tower, but he was not
following a blond woman as in Hitchcock’s film, or so I like to believe. The
church is on a remarkable site, that of the mausoleum of Prince William of
Orange, the father of the country. He fought and died for the freedom of the
Netherlands, deserving respect from all his people. The construction of the
church was inspired by a vision. Townspeople, including a beggar, saw a light
or a golden church in the sky above the present Nieuwe Kerk. As it was a marshy
area the light could have been only marsh gas fire. To be honest it wasn’t a
lucky church, not only because of the reed land sub-soil it was built on, but
also for several disasters it endured caused by fires, lightning, attacks by fanatics and the Delft
thunderclap, when in 1654 ninety thousand pounds of gunpowder exploded in the
Delft powder magazine.
We found two
other astounding churches travelling to Italy, the Palatine Chapel in Aachen
and the cathedral of Notre-Dame in Strasbourg.
The exterior
of Strasbourg cathedral is superbly decorated, all little columns, fine
sculptures and ornaments of sandstone like a laced dress…or laced underwear:
very coquettish. I prefer plain cotton things though I suspect my husband would
choose something different. Inside the church the stained glass windows reveal
a richer and more colourful garment. We noticed digital display screens and got
closer to learn more about the history of the church. But they gave information
about the Christian meaning of the different parts of the church, the Holy
Sacrament, the Baptism Font and so on, things we already know. but certainly
useful for others.
Charlemagne’s
bones rest in a silver and golden shrine in the choir of Aachen cathedral. I
was puzzled when I read in the brochure that he was canonized as a saint in
1165, but actually the Holy See never recognized this canonization, made by an
Antipope. I wonder what kind of holy deeds he could have performed in his life,
apart from forcing pagans to Christianity in various violent ways including
slaughtering. We couldn’t see much of the Barbarossa chandelier or of the
central part of the church, the octagon, because it was under restoration but
we read that for six hundred years emperors were crowned and enthroned here.
According to the legend good Christian people did not have enough money to
build it so they asked the Devil to help them, promising him the first soul
that entered the church. When the church was ready, thanks to the money of the
wealthy Devil, (who maybe expected the juicy soul of a devout girl or boy), the
cheeky Christians pushed inside a wolf. Poor Devil, so bad and so naïve! He
must have fought hard with the wild beast.
The Van Gogh
museum was unmissable. I entered feeling sorry for the great painter and with
the firm belief that he had been mistreated during his life. Just think: he did
not earn a penny from his artwork, neither did his brother, an art dealer who
supported and funded him and who died only six months after him. But after
their deaths Vincent’s pictures went up and up in value. His Sunflowers, 1889,
were sold for £24,750,000 in 1987 according to the biography by Melissa
McQuillan. It seems that the painting
did it on purpose. Other people throve on his artistic talent and undeniable
genius.
The beauty
and interest of the museum was not only in Van Gogh’s work but also in the way
it showed his development as a painter and the artists who had influenced him. His masterpieces were
concentrated in the last two or three years of his life, especially after he
had entered Saint-Rémy asylum. He became
free and unrestrained, capable of reaching a synthesis of everything he
had learned, practised and believed in. How dramatic and full his life was! Its
apex coincided with his death. Through art he explored himself and what was
around him, honestly and in-depth. Like the great poet and painter Blake, whose
art I was studying at the same time, he sought the meaning of man within his
own mind and soul. I couldn’t help thinking about Pablo Picasso as well, whose
work I had seen in July in an exhibition at the Tate in Liverpool. There was
personal research in Picasso as well, aiming towards love and peace along with
a sex-centred quest towards the end of his life, where male and female were
strongly marked both physically and psychologically. In contrast, Van Gogh
developed a spiritual quest that ended with the vibrant landscapes and still
lifes so alive with shapes, colours and strokes. A stream of life, or a
spiritual force, seemed to run through them.
In The Hague
besides Mauritshuis, where the Girl with the Pearl Earring is, we visited the
Het Paleis or Winter Palace where there was a permanent exhibition of all the
most important works by Escher. I did not understand his optical illusions,
metamorphoses or tessellations very much but my husband is a fan of him. At
home we have all the main books written on Escher and now a new acquisition of
three large posters my husband is going to stick somewhere if he finds any free
space. My favourite picture was the one with the artist's table in the
foreground developing and merging into the alleys of a village in the middle
ground and opening into a wider landscape in the background. Perspective
reversed. I wonder how he could think about it: a genius. It was a magical
world of extreme miniaturist precision and surreal imagination.
We also had
a photo taken. It shows the whole family inside a chamber subject to an optical
illusion, so that Valentina and I seemed the tallest of the group. Just compare
it with the other family photos.
The Het
Paleis was also beautifully decorated with crystal chandeliers in the original
shapes of a skull, a shark, a spider, a seahorse, an umbrella…as in a child’s
toy-room.
Before
leaving the Netherlands we decided to face the long queue and pay a visit to
Anne Frank’s House in Prinsengracht. It was like a pilgrimage, a way to pay
homage to the six million Jews murdered in the Nazi concentration camps. The
tour in the almost empty secret annexe ( the rooms where Anne, her family and
other four people lived for about two years) was most moving and the
inscriptions from Anne’s diary on the walls recreated the atmosphere of anguish
and fear of that time. In August 1944 they had been betrayed and deported in
Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen and other extermination camps. Only Otto Frank, Anne’s
father, survived and published the diary in 1947. On the walls of Anne’s room
there were still cuts from film-star magazines she had stuck there: Ginger
Rogers, Royal Families and Leonardo da Vinci’s self-portrait. On the ground
floor there were photos and declarations against racial and religious
prejudices. Also on display was the Oscar (amazing I had never seen one before,
so smooth, bright and full of life) which Shelley Winters had given to the
House when she won the Academy Award as Mrs Van Daan for her performance in The
Diary of Anne Frank in 1959.
One hall was
dedicated to videos with subtitles in several languages about today’s issues on
different kinds of discriminations. After each video everybody could vote in
favour or against it. Some examples: demonstration of the English Defence
League against Muslims in Birmingham; websites on facebook denying the
Holocaust; ban of headscarves in German schools; discrimination against Romany
people in Hungary; ban on Nazi symbols in Germany; the symbol of the cross in
Italian state schools. Surprisingly (for us) twenty per cent of the people in
the room were against headscarves for Muslim girls in schools and
thirty-eight per cent were in favour of Nazi symbols. Regarding the cross in
Italian classrooms, which I remember from my own schooldays, we were fifty
fifty.
In Amsterdam
we missed the diamond exhibitions, as none of us were interested in diamonds,
skipped the Hash Marihuana Hemp Museum, and did not go to the Red Light
District. My husband said it was dingy. I trusted his judgement.
Shopping and
shop windows.
We did not
indulge in shopping as much this time. Everything was so expensive, especially
clothes and shoes, that we preferred to stick to what we really needed…which
included books (art books of course, and we had to sneak in a trip to
Waterstone’s in Amsterdam as the children had run out of books) and nearly 300
tulip bulbs at the Flower Market. We didn’t mean to start a plantation of
tulips in Lancaster: most of them were presents for relatives. Though I can
easily guess what our garden will be full of next spring.
We also
needed to top up phone cards. We hunted out Vodafone shops everywhere because
our children needed to keep in touch with their friends and had thought they
could manage with a ten pound top-up each when they left Lancaster.
What
attracted me this time were the shop windows. They show the life style and
products of the country, but with an artistic slant. I learned so much from
them.
In Amsterdam
I was struck by cows and glass apples. Not ordinary porcelain or plastic cows,
but up-market, bright-coloured cows with a monocle and an aloof expression.
Near them were transparent, vermillion, ochre and olive green apples, certainly
not meant to be bitten into sitting on a bench.
The Flower
Market had a lavish display of plants, bulbs and blossoms. We couldn’t help
taking photos and buying a good share of them. Beside the tulip bulbs we had
about twenty packets of flower seeds, which will probably last for the next few
years. Everything was three or four items for €10, which was a bargain, but when you
buy a lot it becomes squandering. Even cannabis seeds were three packets for €10, but
we left them there. Although I enjoyed the film Saving Grace, I preferred to
not take the risk.
In the same
street there was a Christmas shop. How sweet! It was full of angels, shining
baubles, tinsels, lights and artificial snow. Sint Nicolaas (Santa Claus) was
in different sizes and materials. I chose one in a glass ball as the
hand-crafted wooden ones were no less than €50 each. At the till my sons noticed they sold condoms
as well. I wonder if there was a Santa motif on them.
In Germany
(we stopped in Aachen and Heidelberg) I was fascinated by the beauty of the
products in display. My mouth watered looking at the cake and pastry shops. The
decorations using coloured iced sugar on large biscuits, shaped like hearts and butterflies, were
works of art. Everything looked so rich,
intricate and expensive. I fell in love with a pair of silver earrings,
the ethnic style I especially like, but they cost more than a hundred Euros, so
I just looked at them longingly for a while and then tore myself away.
We could see
Heidelberg only by night and it was raining. Again I was fascinated by a big,
luxury Christmas shop. It was closed but its four windows had a fully decorated
Christmas tree, majestic angels, elaborate nativities and wooden toys in the
best German tradition. I couldn’t see if they sold condoms, but I daresay they
did not. The centre looked so quiet and respectable. My little son, who is
usually self-controlled, felt rebellious that night, or maybe he was cold.
“What
happens if you pee here?” he said.
“Are you
crazy?” my husband said. “They cut it off.”
In Assisi we
found the most strangest conundrum. The little town was pristine, worthy of the
cleanest Dutch town. Pastry shops were luscious. I would have tasted everything
if it wasn’t so hot that I was really thirsty. We bought our souvenirs in a
Fair Trade shop and thought that shops in general (including religious shops)
were quite discreet in Assisi, in keeping with the Franciscan spirit. This was
until we reached a grocery shop with highly original varieties of Italian
tricolore pasta. Near the traditional penne and farfalle they had ‘cazzetti
& fichette’ (literally meaning c**ks and c**ts). What about eating them? I
am sure St Francis would have understood, he was so patient with everybody’s
weaknesses.
The last
town we visited was Bruges, famous for its chocolateries. There were so many
that we finally entered one and bought a big packet of chocolates. Two or three
of them survived till Lancaster.
Bruges has
always been a rich, attractive town – in fact it was full of tourists from all
over the world – also famous for its tapestries and lace. We found a
picturesque Italian restaurant showing Laurel and Hardy in two poses, one
standing by the Tower of Pisa with a fierce-looking Italian cook holding trays,
and another wearing chefs' hats along with patriotic Italian cook holding the
Italian flag. Both cooks had black moustaches or I wouldn’t have recognized
them as Italian.
Looking at lace also included lace underwear. In shop
windows, I mean. No suggestions from my husband, I swear.
Holiday
reading
In spring
time I usually buy the books I wish to read during my summer holidays, already
savouring the long-yearned pleasure of idling in bed, or on a deck chair under
an umbrella at the beach, reading one of my books. It never happens but I like
to dream of it.
Of course I
always buy three times as many books as I would ever manage to read in the best
scenario possible when on holiday with a family of six. But I make an effort to
not be disappointed. I say to myself, being on holiday means having a break.
Reading is only part of it. After repeating it a few times I even believe it.
First of all
I had to finish The Subtle Knife by Philip Pullman. I couldn’t leave it
at home- I was too much taken into its fantastical allegory and magical
writing. But I made the unforgivable mistake of not taking the third book of
the Trilogy and I bitterly regretted this after a few days.
Then I
started the next book, Look Back in Hunger by Jo Brand. Cracking. I was
reading it at the Space Expo in Noordwijk where Valentina decided she wasn’t
interested in planets and spaceships and chose a children’s corner in which to
draw and colour from her collection of pens, always with her. I sat near her,
happy to skip the space museum as well, and opened the book. People passing by
must have thought I was nuts as I couldn’t help giggling and bursting out with
laughter every now and then.
Later on in
the car I read some passages from Jo Brand’s childhood to my own children. The
story became more serious as it went on and was quite scary when dealing with
her teenage years. Luckily she survived
and eventually won through.
I found the
second half impressive: about her experience as a nurse in the emergency clinic
of a psychiatric hospital. She is a smart but tough person indeed.
Blake as
an Artist by David
Bindman was my serious reading, ready for the first meeting of the Poetry
Society Stanza group in September. This links poetry and visual art. I chose
Blake because both poetry and art are in his illuminated books and also because
I have always found his work extremely original, both foreward-thinking and
honest. I am especially attracted by the strong lines, apparent simplicity and
essential symbolism of his works of art as well as his poems, and by the
profound wisdom of his visionary world.
I also read Between
the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga while I was in Italy, alternating it
with Italian newspapers and magazines of different political views.
When I
picked up Between the Assassinations from the bookshelves I assumed it
was a detective story. Ideal seaside reading, I thought. No way, it was a gritty collection of short stories about a
miserable Indian town where people who tried to lift up their heads or fight
corruption and discrimination had a very hard time. For a while I realized how
comfortable and even luxurious my ordinary life was compared to the life of the
poor of India. I felt guilty. I could have a shower, sleep in a bed, have food
every day, live in a house and go on holiday. Such privileges!
As soon as
we passed the border with Italy, news on the radio announced a crisis in the
Italian government. My husband tuned into Radio Radicale and Radio 24 channels
and we soon realized that not much had changed since we had left Italy three
years ago.
As it has
always been, the fight for power is harsher inside the party that rules (this
time a centre-right coalition) rather than between the government and the
opposition. This makes the Italian government unstable and unreliable and
eventually no-one rules the country.
The
summertime crisis had the flavour of a sceneggiata
or Neapolitan melodrama where the main weapons are gossiping and vendetta. But
who cares about Italian institutions, reputation and above all about Italian
people? We are proverbially used to manage by ourselves or arrangiarci.
In debate
was the use of a house in Montecarlo, belonging to the party, by the brother in
law of Gianfranco Fini, the Head of the Italian House of Commons (Camera dei
Deputati). On the cover of the popular magazine Oggi there was the photo of his
whole family, his partner Elisabetta Tulliani and his two daughters on the
front, grandparents, and the cause of all the trouble: the handsome Giancarlo
Tulliani.
As I said
above, the fight is always internal so the next attack was against the
ownership of a villa in Arcore by the President of the Italian government
Silvio Berlusconi. It seems he bought it from an orphan (an aristocratic orphan
though) and it was a real bargain. Were Italian people bewildered and outraged?
I don’t think so, just disappointed by the unchangeable course of Italian
politics. And amused by the summer drama.
The truth is
that most Italian politicians don’t work for the people or for the programme
and ideals of their party but only for their own interests and those of their
friends. There is no consistency between what they say and what they do and
most of the time they don’t even say what they would do if they won the
elections. They chat inconsequentially, or have rows one against the other. The
political atmosphere is so confused that it would be hard to compare the
results of a certain government with its initial policies (supposing you
understood what the policies were and can detect any results). There is no
connection between ordinary people’s problems and the political world. It is a
detached, privileged entity. I wonder if the collapse of the Belusconi era
would really change something. Now at least we have a scapegoat: it is his fault.
I also found
a few articles about the change in British government from Labour to
Conservative. Pictures always attract me. On the front page of a popular
Italian newspaper there was David Cameron with the British flag behind him and
a painting of Elizabeth I in the background. On page 27 the article continued,
the Prime Minister explaining his politics very clearly, and also on the same
page was an advertisement for the magazine L’Espresso. Its cover photo showed a
very young couple (she was wearing a bridal veil and little more) in a sort of Kama
Sutra position. Well, it jarred a bit with Cameron’s point of view.
The other
picture that attracted my attention was one of Tony Blair, a photomontage,
where he takes his own photo with his mobile phone while in the background a
bomb is exploding in the Iraqi desert with a plethora of black smoke and
flames. It was part of an exhibition of British Comic Art at Tate Britain.
Summer is
also the time to close the balance. The results were very good for Germany (GDP
2.2 %), the best in Europe, not bad for the UK (1.1%), so so for USA (0.6%) and
low for Italy (0.4%).
Smashing
progress for China, which became the second economic power in the world after
the US and overtook Japan. According to Il Sole 24 Ore, an Italian newspaper,
the proverbial work ethic of Chinese people coupled with a widespread tendency
to save money caused the rolling economical growth.
Reading an
article about the Shangai Expo I was impressed by its description of the UK
pavilion: a stylized porcupine in a desert. Each quill had the seed of biodiversity in the world. The warning was
that if we don’t keep biodiversity the result will be a desert. I would have
liked to see the display.
My children
had reading fever this time, which quite impressed me. They left Lancaster with
three new books each and in Amsterdam we had to look for Waterstone’s bookshop
to buy more. Worse luck, each book was about
double the UK price. Exciting, gory reading they call it.
Valentina
chose her books as well, a soft plastic one with a sucker she tried on different
surfaces and a glove puppet book with Old Mac Donald’s farm animals on each
finger. She liked them so much that when she dropped them by mistake one
evening in a restaurant we had to go back the next morning and pick them up.
Luckily no other little child had lifted them.
Food and
family dinners
As soon as
we landed in the Netherlands my eldest son asked for vla. He remembered tasting it in the past when he was only four
years old when we spent the summer in Enschede (Overijssel region), where my
husband had been working for a period.
It is a
gorgeously decadent custard of different flavours, made from eggs, cornstarch,
vanilla and sugar. Its taste is absolutely unique. I must try the recipe sooner or later.
The B&B
where we lived had a large fridge in the common room and the landlady reserved
a whole shelf for us. We started with a packet of one litre of double vla, vanilla and strawberry. It lasted
no time. The next day we hurried to the supermarket again and filled our fridge
shelf with eight more one-litre packets of vla,
chocolate, stracciatella, pineapple and orange, vanilla and chocolate, caramel,
and so on. We hoped to have enough for our six-day stay in the Netherlands.
We could
also cook our own food in the kitchen of the B&B. I bought some pasta,
passata, butter, garlic, parsley, salt, cheese and salad. The result was a
terribly bland dinner which we wolfed down all the same because we were
starving. Strange, I thought, I used the usual amount of salt. We tried again
the next day with the same outcome. On the third day I poured a massive
quantity of salt in the boiling water for the pasta and as much on the
hamburgers sizzling in the pan. It was slightly better. For some reason the
salt we had bought did not season. Then I recalled the famous passage from the
Gospel of St Matthew, referring to Christians: ‘You are salt of the world. And
if salt becomes tasteless, how is its saltness to be restored? It is now good
for nothing but to be thrown away and trodden underfoot.’ I also remembered the
comment of a very optimistic priest about this passage: the salt, he said,
can’t become tasteless. Well, it can.
Most of the
time we ate dinner out, usually in an Italian restaurant, a Pizza Hut (one of
my favourites: I love the variety of starters and sauces and Valentina always
finds what she likes) or a McDonald’s (my third son’s favourite).
The problem
with McDonald’s is that we always feel at a loss when we have to order. While
we are queuing it seems all right and we choose what we want , repeat the list and
check it again. But at the till something is always missing or misunderstood or
someone changes his or her mind. It happens every time. We can’t help it.
Here are
some examples of a typical conversation at the till.
“How many
chips?” I say.
“Five,” one
of my children says.
“Five
portions of chips, please,” I say.
“No, I meant
menu number five,” he says.
“All right,
how many menu number five?”
“Four.”
“And how
many chips?”
“Seven.”
Or:
“So one
cappuccino, three Mc Flurry…” I say
“No, four Mc
Flurry,” one of the children butts in.
“All right,”
I say. “Four Mc Flurry, one Kit Kat…”
“Kit Kat for
me too.”
“…Two Kit
Kat flavour,” I say. “One M&Ms, one strawberry, please.”
“Two
strawberry ones,” somebody behind me says.
“This makes
five,” I say.
“Five then,”
he says.
No wonder
that the guy at the till usually gets it wrong.
I also find
McDonald’s very clean and practical for toilets, especially when there are none
available except in museums. It happened in Amsterdam and it always happens in
Italy. You can’t go around a whole day without needing the toilet at least once
(I can’t) and you can’t enter a museum expressly for that purpose. So
McDonald’s does the job.
We usually
chat and laugh at dinner, especially when there is no TV on, and there isn’t
one in restaurants. We had a very happy dinner at Pizza Hut in Aachen where we
solved some paramount dilemmas.
1.How to
organize the dinners at the seaside and how to divide the family in the two
small apartments we had rented for a week (my parents were with us as well plus
another girl and another boy, friends of my children).
2.Do
grandparents look forward to having great grandchildren? We settled that: ‘yes,
they do’. My eldest son is first on the list though the second child, my
daughter, could overtake him at the eleventh hour.
3.Speaking
English in Europe. I suggested they did not speak too fast and avoid the
Cumbrian accent or people wouldn’t understand them. They replied that it was my
accent that people did not understand. All right, suit yourself. Later, when
they ordered their desserts, the ice creams had the wrong flavours.
Our best
breakfast was in Aachen and our best value-for-money dinner was at Strasbourg
at La Petite France.
I had
spotted gorgeous pastry shops and cafés and we made up our minds to fill our
bodies with thousands of kilocalories before leaving Germany. That morning we
chose an average of two pastries per person (Valentina had three) each the size
of a Cornish pasty, and a black coffee for me. Even the coffee was superb and
the creams, jelly, fruit and pastry of the cakes were indescribably delicious,
melting in the mouth with a perfect balance of flavours.
At La Petite
France, the touristy old part of Strasbourg, we fancied pizza and carbonara, as
usual, and chose a restaurant with a French name but with a hint of Italian
colours on the outside. We had one course each plus drinks (I chose an Alsatian
dish instead with baked potatoes, a white sauce, salad and smoked prosciutto:
very tasty). The bill for the whole family was only 74 Euros. And the carbonara
was just right, so abundant that my husband and my eldest son, who usually
polish off the leftovers, couldn’t finish it for the first time in family
history.
Entering
Italy in the early afternoon the next day, the Italian flag flapping at the top
of the custom building, its colours clean and bright against the blue sky, we
tuned into the National Anthem, Fratelli d’Italia, playing just the first line.
The Italian custom officers at the border looked suntanned and relaxed,
watching the cars passing by. One was absently chewing his fingernails. On the
radio there was a discussion about what to do with the olive oil you find in
the tuna cans. In order to dispose of it carefully and in an eco-friendly way,
the suggestion was to give it to your dog. Poor thing!
After a few
miles we stopped to have a snack, prosciutto and salami panini for everybody
and a creamy cappuccino for me: fantastic. I must say that in spite of all my
love for England and my wish to travel in different countries and taste different
flavours, sometimes I still find Italian food unbeatable.
We usually
stop for one night in the Po Valley at a B&B near San Secondo Parmense. We
found the level of the river Po quite high for the season and the air not too
sticky. We always buy one metre of pizza for dinner and eat it watching the
Italian TV in our big, air-conditioned room. In the morning we looked forward
to having breakfast with Italian coffee, fresh milk, homemade butter and jams
and homemade cakes. Yummy.
In my
husband’s little family village my mother-in-law always fills us with the most
appetizing food. This year, we talked about crops and they told me they had
only a few plums from the plum tree in the garden near the house. In the other
garden, a bit further away, the trees gave no fruit at all. The trees blossomed
in spring but because of the bad weather the insects did not have enough time
to pollinate them and the blossom fell without giving fruit. Coming from the
city, we found this very interesting. Similarly, because of the weather
conditions last year they had had thirteen hundred kilograms of potatoes but
this year there were only three. It was the same field. In the past, they said,
when people depended totally on the harvest and couldn’t rely on the
supermarket round the corner, they used to sow in different places so that they
had at least enough food to survive winter. They also spoke about the unusual
frost they had on 11th September 2001. Yes, 9/11. It killed all the crops
they had no time to harvest.
Coming back
home we had an unusual experience in Switzerland. We never stop there because
it is a short stage of the journey and because it is expensive. But it was
three pm and we were hungry, so we opted for a short break. We spent seventy
five Swiss Francs (about £50), paying with a credit card, on four sandwiches,
some biscuits, three cokes and three packets of candy. Then we needed the
toilet. We had to change €10 because to enter the toilet you needed one Swiss
Franc. In exchange they gave you a voucher to spend at the shop. We collected
four vouchers and had a quick family meeting to decide what to do with them and
with the rest of the change. Valentina wanted an ice cream. We bought one for two vouchers but it was
melted. Their freezer did not work, and we spent the rest on packets of candy,
which are never wasted in our family. A subtle way to steal your money,
somebody said.
In Bruges we
found a typical Italian restaurant in Market Square. We sat outside to enjoy
the evening sun and the view. The restaurant had an Italian name, Italian
colours and Italian postcards displayed by the entrance. But the waiter, the
waitress and all the staff I could see by peeping inside looked very Flemish. I
started to get worried about the food.
“They will
give us a Flemish version of Italian cuisine. Awful,” I said.
One of my
children called me racist. Actually the food was excellent. Valentina ate up everything and we had a very good
time. Never judge a book by its cover.
Assisi
Whilst still
in Lancaster, we had planned a child-free day trip during our time away. We
knew the frescos by Giotto, in the upper church of San Francesco basilica in
Assisi, had been recently restored so we chose them.
Assisi is
one of the most characteristic and unspoilt medieval towns of Umbria. For our
honeymoon, about eighteen years ago, we
had taken a tour of the old towns of the region. Besides Assisi, we also
visited Todi, Spoleto, Spello, Gubbio and Perugia, Umbria’s capital. It was
magical, a total experience, like all good honeymoons.
When we
reached Assisi in the late morning it was already hot. The simple yet elegant
buildings, made with white and pink stone taken from the near Mountain Subasio,
created an ambience in which I was dreamily immersed: the opulence of a wealthy
society that had thrived on trades in precious fabrics and local crafts.
In the
Middle Ages it was a town linked to the Dukedom of Spoleto. This belonged to
the German Emperor rather than to the nearby Church State , which eventually
managed to conquer the whole region taking advantage of the unstable and
fragmented Italian political situation. Elevated ecclesiastics often played the
part of rulers in temporal as well as spiritual matters, due to the absence of
a local or state government.
As often
happens in rich towns, there was a striking difference between the wealthy,
especially merchants but also high priests and nobles, and the poor, because of
unemployment, exploitation and illness. Some of them, like lepers - but maybe
also the mentally ill, disabled and wretched in general - were totally excluded
from society.
St. Francis
was the son of a wealthy merchant used to every leisure and pleasure. His
legendary meeting with a leper, and his act of embracing and curing him, marked
a radical personal change and was iconic from a social and religious point of
view.
Walking in
the pristine alleys of the graceful Assisi with its discreet little shops
selling local food, leather shoes, pottery and olive-wood religious images, its
crimson geraniums hanging from timbered balconies and ogival windows and its
white stone-carved churches, I couldn’t help thinking how clashing St.
Francis’s poverty, his rags and his bare feet must have been with that scene. He
would have mingled with the crowd in India (I was reading Between the Assassinations
by Aravind Adiga which depicts the Indian poor), but in affluent Assisi he
stood out.
The first
place we visited was the San Francesco basilica. There was no charge to enter
and admire the fantastic frescos of the great masters of the time: Giotto,
Cimabue, Lorenzetti and Simone Martini. Not an inch of the upper and lower
churches is left blank. Every arch, web, and even the lower parts of some
walls, which the visitors can touch by stretching out an arm, are exquisitely
decorated. What great effort and investment in honour of the poorest saint of
the Catholic church! It is such a pleasure for all the enthusiasts of visual
arts like me to have the opportunity to admire those masterpieces.
St. Francis
has a paramount importance in Italian cultural and religious tradition and
mentality. Just think: he is the patron saint of Italy together with Saint
Catherine of Siena and in Italian schools his life and his writings are studied
from the first years of Primary School. I remember my primary teacher made us
learn, by heart, St. Francis’s famous poem, Cantico delle Creature (The Song of
the Creatures) and we had to recite it in turns every morning for a whole term.
In middle school and high school we studied it again because beside being a
beautiful, profound poem, it is also one of the first writings in volgare, the language of the people,
that would become the modern Italian language later on.
In our
Primary school books there were pictures of St. Francis speaking with birds and
with the wolf of Gubbio, who was probably the personification of a ruthless
criminal with whom the saint had managed to come to terms. This was owing to
the saint's mercifulness and the promise of food from the people of the town,
Gubbio, which the wolf had previously ravaged.
What has
always struck me in the life, writings and deeds of St. Francis is not only his
extremely ascetic life – difficult to understand out of the historical context
– but also his profound humility, accepting the need for penitence. Before and
after him people who chose a pure, poor life were usually persecuted as
heretics because they challenged the corrupt and opulent life of a greater part
of the clergy. Ordinary people protected ascetics and considered them holy. St.
Francis felt too humble and sinful himself to judge or blame the priests and
focused on showing a holy way of living. He was one of the excluded and lived
with them and like them. In his Testament he says that living with the poor he
felt that ‘what was bitter became sweet.’
In a famous
passage about what is Absolute Joy he says that it is not in being successful
and in getting whatever you wish for, but, on the contrary, in being capable of
bearing and accepting with joy and inner peace every kind of abuse and trial.
This is quite crazy…or supernatural. His greeting was ‘Dio ti dia pace’ (May
God give you His peace), the most important thing for him and which money can’t
buy.
He showed us
a different way of living, perhaps an illusion: a life of brotherhood, joy and
peace, deeply rooted in the Gospel but also obedient and submitted to the
Church. A total abandonment to the grace of God pervaded his life. He struggled
till the end against any self-importance or manipulation of the gospel,
refusing any belongings for himself or his friars.
Two years
after his death the building of the magnificent basilica of San Francesco was
started and later on the humble small church of La Porziuncola, where he used
to pray, was surrounded and protected by the pompous basilica of Santa Maria
degli Angeli.
We also
visited Santa Chiara church. She was St. Francis’s friend and founded the
enclosed order of Clarisse. Her relics and her tomb are in the vault. When I
was a child what impressed, and also scared, me was to see her hair in a glass
casket. That heap of off-grey (maybe once blond) curls gave me the creeps. They
looked unreal and I felt that her sacrifice in cutting it was useless. Still
today I find it hard to understand out of a medieval context. Although I wear
very short hair now.
As we did
not pay tickets to visit the churches we decided to spend some money in San
Francesco basilica’s souvenir shop. We bought bracelets and key rings with the
Franciscan Tau, the Greek T which St. Francis considered the symbol of the
cross. We also bought a rough wooden Tau for us and two small pictures for the
great-grandmothers with the image of St. Francis by Cimabue (from the famous
fresco in the lower church) with the saint depicted as short, in rags and with
big ears.
I found two
books I bought as a present for friends: Francesco by Raoul Manselli,
and Vita di un uomo: Francesco d’Assisi by Chiara Frugoni. They had
opened my mind to the life of the saint when I had read them. Instead the
popular, beautiful films about him (Brother Sun and Sister Moon by
Franco Zeffirelli and Francesco by Liliana Cavani) are very free
interpretations of his life and his time.
Walking
about Assisi, discovering evocative glimpses of secret alleys and half-hidden
patios, taking photos of its flawless buildings, was such an enjoyment. Though
towards the end of the day we felt both dehydrated and sticky. Shuffling
towards the car to drive back home the witty opening words of ‘Consolation’ by
Billy Collins came to my mind:
‘How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer,
wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns…’
Though I shouldn’t say this as I tour Italy every summer, and
enjoy it. It was the heat that influenced me.
No more as young as in our honeymoon times, I and my husband
had a very pleasant day all the same. We were together and we could see things
from a more experienced and realistic point of view, which is not a trifle. It
is a blessing.
My husband
is the best driver in the world. He can run fast, or drive slow, but always
smoothly. He is patient in traffic jams, tireless in queues and on long hauls,
watchful and careful even after hours of driving.
As a passenger
in the front seat I can relax and have a nap, confident that everything is
under control. When I am not sleeping, which is rare, I can enjoy the view from
the car window or read. What bliss!
Driving to
Italy and back is not a big deal for him. He doesn’t feel tired or worried
about it. Whenever I ask him if he needs a rest and offer to drive in his place
he declines politely. The children are seriously worried every time I suggest
driving because I have got a name for driving slowly and getting lost easily.
The truth is I am no match for him.
When we
moved to Lancaster about three years ago he left first with our Ford Galaxy
packed to the brim with the essentials we needed in our new, empty home. He had
planned to do the journey in two to three days stopping for the night on the
way. But then he was so excited by the idea of arriving as soon as possible
that he forgot to stop and kept going all the way to Lancaster, arriving safe
and sound in about twenty-four hours. Amazing! When he rang me the following
day I couldn’t believe he was already there. Two days later, when the rest of
us arrived at John Lennon airport, he was there waiting for us fresh and
smiling.
This summer
in Europe, he had no problem in keeping to the right side of the road from the
time we landed in Rotterdam (whereas I still felt an awkward sensation we were
driving on the wrong side of the road after two weeks), but something got on
his nerves.
In Amsterdam
we soon realized we were part of a minority, the minority of spoiled people who
still used a car and who still walked. Cycling is the chosen way to move in
Amsterdam.
Everybody
cycles and bicycles are everywhere. You think it is your turn to cross at a
traffic light, but instead a bunch of cyclists cuts across your way. They ride without helmets and at breakneck speed.
There are cycle paths everywhere but most of the time the bicycles are on the
road. Besides, the cycle ways are close to the pavement and look similar to it.
So when you get out of the car, or walk, beware of the cycle path! Cyclists
don’t stop for a passerby, they don’t stop for anyone or anything.
Near the
station there are parking lots for bicycles as big and tall as those for cars,
except that they are full of bikes.
We came
close to having an accident quite a few times, especially when I paid attention
to cars and motorbikes instead of bicycles when I crossed the road, and
supposed naively they would give way.
On our last
day in Amsterdam we had a long walk in the centre among bridges and canals
hoping to reach a big market near the concert hall. After about one hour of
wandering we felt tired so my husband offered to go and fetch the car and come
back to pick us up. We waited in Rembrandtplein, a large square packed with
restaurants, cafés, hotels and clubs. In the middle of the square was an ugly
statue of the great painter. I felt that they could have done a better job.
We waited
for almost an hour under the sun, wolfing up spicy Doritos crisps. Valentina,
lucky her, found a fountain of water springing from the pavement and soaked
herself in it. When my husband finally turned up he was fuming. He said it was
an obstacle race to get to us. Beside the usual bikes and motorbikes darting
everywhere, two cars, one a cab, had stopped in front of him for ten minutes,
letting people getting on and off and blocking the way. It reminded me of Rome
and Naples.
In Italy we
found out that the air conditioning in our car did not work. It was
torrid; we opened all the windows and
then it became windy. So we partly closed them and suffered in silence,
sweating and drinking water. It was particularly hard going towards the seaside
resort on the Adriatic coast because the motorway A 14 Adriatica had queues and
hold-ups for about a hundred miles. From the radio came an endless stream of
bad news about political corruption, government crises, crimes and banal
interviews with people who insisted on saying that everything was going well
and everybody was good. We managed to reach the seaside after eight pm,
exhausted and starving. Luckily my parents were waiting for us and had got some
dinner ready.
The
following day we had a walk in San Benedetto del Tronto to buy some pizza for
dinner. My third son, who is a fan of cars and has watched every episode of Top
Gear twice or three times, spotted a dark convertible McLaren with cream
leather seats, and a black Bentley Continental GT. Wow! They looked so elegant, undisturbed and
aloof, like black panthers running in the savannah. I wondered where I was. Was
this the rough centre of a popular seaside town with graffiti on the walls and
huge holes in the streets? Somebody had made money hand over fist here as well.
Climbing to
my parents-in-law’s village we found the main road closed owing to a landslide.
We had to take a long, narrow detour with frequent bends passing near tiny
villages half hidden in the woods. I felt sick but did not complain.
Our worst
experience on the road was on the way back to England. We found a lot of road
works in Germany, though my husband was driving with his usual carefulness. The
motorway had two lanes bordered at each side with blocks of concrete. At a
certain point we passed under a bridge and the road forked. We were overtaking
a huge truck on the left lane when a dark green Audi overtook the truck on the
right side just before the fork, cutting across the truck’s path and forcing it
to brake. If the truck driver had swerved instead it would have crashed against
us. The truck driver blared his horn, the Audi shot away at full speed and we
felt somebody in heaven had been thinking about us. It could have been a tragic
accident, a family of six dead, or badly injured, on a German motorway. If I
wasn’t sure we are not important people I would have thought the manouevre was deliberate. And my husband
kept his composure as usual.
Our old Ford
Galaxy took us home once more in spite of some strange noises from the engine.
It held on till the end like a faithful companion.
Great-grandmothers
Going back to my
parents-in-law's little village is not my favourite choice. Though to
be honest, they are very kind to us and do everything they can to make our
week-long stay comfortable.
The house is spacious yet
cosy, but the village is very small. There are no shops, no bars, and nothing
to see or do. Being situated a thousand metres above sea level, amongst
mountains and woods, makes the weather rather changeable. In summer it can be
cold and rainy, or hot. When it is hot different kinds of insects (from
bluebottles to nasty huge horseflies) attack you as soon as you step out of the
village. Besides, family life requires us to be at home as much as possible.
I usually feel trapped and
try to not think about it. It’s only a week after all.
One of the few pleasures of
being there, beside the food, is meeting the great-grandmothers. Yes, my
husband still has two grandmothers: his dad’s mum, aged ninety, and his mum’s
mum, aged eighty-six.
They had a very hard life,
especially during WW II, and when their husbands died they each felt terribly
alone but managed to reach such an old age thanks to a healthy lifestyle.
His father’s mum is a small,
energetic woman with big blue eyes and short, straight white hair. Her father
died when she was a girl and her mother took both her daughters with her to
work in the family vegetable plot from then on. She developed a great passion
for sowing, growing and reaping grain and vegetables, harvesting chestnuts and
keeping farm animals: chickens and a pig. She became skilled at her work and
when she married, although she had three children, she never neglected the work
in the fields. She was strong, could work hard for many hours, and was quite a
bossy kind of woman, controlling everything that was going on at home. In a
different situation and with a better education she could have been a
successful business woman.
Last summer I noticed her
mental decline. She is still physically fit and healthy but unfortunately
dementia is affecting her brain. It has been developing for some time but the
noticeable effects have been sudden and unpredictable. She doesn’t recognize
anybody, forgets what you tell her and can be aggressive if something is not
done her way. None of her children expected her illness. Now she needs someone
with her all the time. Her children have arranged for a Romanian lady to stay
with her day and night.
His mother’s mum is a very
different person and has had a different life. She married a man from Northern
Italy during the war, when she was only eighteen, and had five children, one of
whom died when he was a baby.
They were so poor during the
war that she had nothing with which to
dress her first baby, who was my mother-in-law. So she went to where the
sheep used to pass close to the barbed wire. She gathered strands of wool the
sheep had left when their coats brushed against the wires. At home she spun and
knitted the wool to make a dress for her daughter; she said she looked very
pretty.
Her husband was an anti-fascist
so they had some bad moments when
Fascist or German soldiers combed the village.
After the war she moved to
Rome and had a busy but comfortable life with her husband and four children.
Unfortunately her husband died when she was only forty-one. He left her without
an income and she felt lost and alone. Again she had to accept her fate, and
adapt to what life sent her. However, she managed to keep the family together
and raise her children on the straight and narrow. My husband is her first
grandchild.
She is a sweet, kind lady
with a soft, pretty face. She is quite straightforward. She has always been my
favourite in my husband’s family. She keeps all the photos of her grandchildren
and great-grandchildren in her room and often talks with them, telling them the
story of her life and hoping they will cope with it as well as she did.
Though she still has a clear
mind she is failing in health. Last summer she was very weak but was recovering
little by little by the time we left.
She lives alone and is a very
independent person with her own mind and her own ways. She has a passion for
plants. Her small apartment in Rome has a lush corner on the tiny veranda.
Meeting the
great-grandmothers always gives me a greater zest for life, especially when I
feel a bit worn out. Because, no matter how hard it can be sometimes, there is
always residual strength to be found in a hidden corner, helping you hold on
and stand again.
Radio and TV
programs
Travelling
in central Europe we had to leave behind the English radio channels we love,
especially BBC 4, but we couldn’t yet tune into the Italian channels.
As soon as
we entered Switzerland we grabbed at Italian Swiss radio. The programme was about Locarno Film
Festival, awfully boring, but at least they spoke Italian. What struck me was their pronunciation. It sounded strangely posh. They pronounced the vowels in a ‘closed’
way. I could imagine their lips barely
moving. In the centre of Italy where I
come from, we pronounce the vowels in an ‘open’, generous way, which may be
felt to be a bit vulgar, as is often the way for everything that is ‘open’.
German words
were mixed with the Italian. This
phenomenon happens to us as well when English words come to our mind before the
Italian ones. They spoke German with an
accent that, according to my husband, sounded like Scottish compared to
English.
At our first
stop in Italy, at the B&B in San Secondo Parmense, we had a complete slump
in front of the television with a chunk of pizza margherita in our hands,
zapping Italian evening TV programs. I
opposed my usual refusal to watch dreadfully violent films. They showed women dragged by cars for miles,
tongues cut with electric saws and extreme body piercing. Not even the Nazis thought about this.
We changed
channel and chose a program about WW II, the battle of Montecassino. Still violent but less gory.
Montecassino
was a crucial battle in the liberation of Italy and the Allied forces took
months to conquer it. Thousands of
soldiers and hundreds of civilians died.
Italian people living in the area hid in caves to escape bombing and German
roundups. They were starving and dirty,
full of nits and unaware of what was going on.
They were dressed in rags, most of them were barefoot and the children
wore huge military jackets or coats.
The most
spectacular scene was the filming of the bombing of Montecassino Abbey on 15th
February 1944, the smoke and dust soaring like a special effect. The Germans
were not in the Abbey but had not allowed evacuation. One thousand defenceless civilians had taken
refuge there in the previous months.
About six hundred of them died, hit by the bombs or buried under the
ruins of the cathedral and the precious Bramante cloister. The eighty-year-old Abbot and about fifteen
monks survived because they took shelter in a cave under the Abbey, where the
original building founded by St. Benedict was.
Afterwards they were safely escorted to the Vatican in Rome. During the bombing they had their prayers and
Mass as usual.
I imagined
the desperate and useless screaming and crying of the hundreds of people buried
under the ruins of the monastery. There
was no rescue.
After the
destruction of the Abbey the Allies held back, giving time for the tough SS
forces to take hold of the ruins and reorganize the defence of Montecassino.
It took
three more months of fighting in chilly winter weather, the worst for decades, to defeat the Germans. The soldiers were exhausted.
Finally on
11th May 1944, American, Polish, British and French divisions
attacked on three different sides and succeeded.
The French
troops were composed of twelve thousands Moroccan Goumiers, who had the hardest task: to pass through the mountains
on the left of the Liri Valley. They
were highly trained and brave soldiers.
Half of them died in the battle to reclaim Montecassino. Before the battle their commander in chief,
General Juin, promised them fifty hours of total freedom if they won. After the battle they stole, raped and killed
freely in the villages of the area for fifty hours and more.
Thousands of
women and children were their victims, some men as well, though most of the
time men were forced to watch and if they rebelled they were killed. In the total chaos and slaughtering of the
war their cries were barely audible.
The novel La
Ciociara by Alberto Moravia, and the film of the same title with Sophia
Loren, give a clear idea of the terrible events.
One of my
husband’s grandmothers once told me the story of an innkeeper who used to serve
food and drinks to Goumiers during
the war. He had two daughters and hid
them in the cellar before the Moroccan soldiers arrived. But one day they arrived unexpectedly and saw
the girls. They chose the prettiest one
and abused of her in front of the whole family for hours. The poor girl was considered a pariah and no
man ever wanted her. When Italian
soldiers came back from war and knew that their wives had been abused, they
left them. Even today, in some villages,
they hold a day in memory of the Liberation and the havoc after it.
To end with
a lighter note, my children’s favourite TV programs were mainly cartoons. The mythical One Piece (a Japanese
cartoon about pirates’ adventures they used to watch in their childhood), Camera
Café (gags by two cheeky Italian fellows in front of a hot drink machine
talking about dates, girls and more girls) and Futurama. They could have followed Futurama in
all the countries we went, even in Flemish.
A global cartoon mania.
Deaths
Last August
death was a haunting presence from the time we arrived in Italy. Strange, because we usually forget about it,
especially in summer time.
On the radio
we heard the news of a group of Christian doctors (a British doctor was among
them) killed by the Taliban in Afganistan and of a Philippine woman battered to
death in Milan. The man, a doped-up
Ukranian boxer, had been dumped by his fiancée and decided to kill the first
woman he met. And he did. It happened in the street in front of a bank:
people did not dare to stop him and when the ambulance arrived it was too
late. It must have been a horrid scene,
indiscriminate, gratuitous, like a bolt of lightning. But much more painful and drawn out for the
poor woman, I should think.
Around
mid-August both national and family mourning swooped down like crows. On 15th August my mum’s brother
rang up my dad, a doctor, saying he felt a pain in the chest. He thought it was indigestion. My dad suspected a heart attack and told him
to go to hospital. My uncle lived in a
small village near Rome where the streets are so narrow the ambulance can’t
enter. So a friend brought him to
hospital where he died after a few hours.
At the funeral I met my cousins and some relatives from Tuscany I hadn’t
seen for ages. My uncle lived alone: he
was divorced and his four children live in Rome. He was a hard-working but grumpy man, very
skilful in practical jobs like most people in my mother’s family. He could mend, build and make everything in a
house from furniture to a new bathroom.
In the village where he lived he used to mend bicycles for children and
do other minor jobs for free. The little
square in front of the church was crowded the day of the funeral. I can’t forget the image of him in the
confined funeral chamber of the hospital.
His body lay in the coffin as still as only death can be. My dad told me he had dreamed of my uncle’s
younger brother, who had died in a car accident forty years ago, the night
before his death.
The day
before the Palio dell’Assunta (the
Palio of Assumption, on 16th August) and during the propitiatory
dinner of the Contrada della Civetta
(the area of the owl), which was in a square, a French tourist died. He was the leader of the delegation of Avignon
and was sitting under the balcony of an ancient building, recently
restored. The building belonged to Monte
dei Paschi, the Siena Bank. A sixty-kilo
piece of the balcony eaves came loose and fell on his head. It was a sudden,
fatal accident and everybody said it was caused by the bad luck persecuting the
Palio when four ‘green’ contrade, or
areas of the town of Siena, take part in it.
Believe it or not, in the four flags of four contrade of the Palio of the Assumption (Selva, Oca, Drago and Bruco, Forest, Goose, Dragon and Caterpillar) there is the colour
green, a cursed colour according to a superstitious legend. For me the
restoration of the old edifice hadn’t been flawless. And there is a good lesson to learn: never
sit under a balcony. The Palio was won
by the contrada of Tartuca (Tortoise).
Last, but
absolutely not least, on 17th August the life senator and
ex-President of the Italian Republic Francesco Cossiga died, aged
eighty-two. He was born in Sardinia and
joined the Christian Democratic Party in his youth. He was a strict Catholic, faithful to the
Italian Republic and to democratic values.
He was President of the Republic from 1985 to 1992, elected with a large
majority of the votes of the Parliament.
He had been considered an obedient, dull man but after five years he
started to voice what he thought, provoking political leaders and telling his
idea of the truth. Here are some
examples taken from Corriere della Sera,
the most important Italian newspaper.
Once he said that in Italy they (people? politicians?) had mistaken
solidarity with squandering and inefficiency, because they thought money would
never end. He also said he valued
comedians, but was afraid of people who, though they took themselves seriously,
were a standing joke. He called Silvio
Berlusconi ‘Pa-Peron’, playing with both the word Paperone (Uncle Scrooge) and
the name of the Argentinian President Juan Peron.
His remarks
were called picconate (blows with a
pick). He hoped to reform his party as
well as Italy but he was a lone voice. The scandal of Tangentopoli (political power based on bribe-taking), which split
the Christian Democratic party, was drawing near.
He was
willing to compromise with the Communist Party, but supported a hard line with
the Red Brigade when they kidnapped the president of the Christian Democratic
party Aldo Moro and murdered him after two months of captivity. He felt guilty,
as if he had killed him, he said. He was a fan of secret services, a defender
of democracy and loyal to Italian Republic till his death.
A star
compared to today’s Italian politicians.
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