It has been a long hot summer, and I loved it. No drizzle or grey skies for weeks. A real summer, a bit too hot at times but I felt I needed it after such a cold winter and unstable spring. My flowers bloomed in the back garden and I had ripe tomatoes for salad and caprese, and zucchini to make frittata. I must say in Rome it was definitely too hot, 35-40 C most days with an average of 50% humidity. My mum has air conditioning at home and fans too, so we survived, but at times I felt dizzy and had headaches. The only way to get through the day was staying still in front of a fan or go to bed and have a nap.
patterns but apparently she prefers the cartoons of Thomas the Tank engine at the moment.
We also visited my autistic daughter Valentina before leaving. We had such a good time outside in the garden with her where the staff of the house organised a barbeque. We played with her inside too, blowing and hanging balloons and making drawings of her favourite cartoon characters, Leela and SpongeBob. She loves doing craft stuff so I always try to find new things she can use and be creative with.
Little by little I started to relax from the busy year, enjoyed the long days, the sunshine and the light clothes I could finally wear without feeling too cold. It took a few days to change my routine and recover energies once the school year ended. I still had some house works to do that I had left behind and some writings to complete before going on holiday but eventually I met all the deadlines. Before flying to Italy, I felt I really needed to be disconnected from all my commitments for a while.
My daughter, my husband and I spent a day in London before leaving. We visited exhibitions and attended an evening performance of the Proms 2022 at the Royal Albert Hall. The concert featured the ‘Miners’ Hymn’ by Jóhann Jóhannsson, a haunting dark piece that evoked the miners’ sufferings and hardships. It was followed by Sergey Rachmaninov’s ‘Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor’, romantic then suddenly dramatic with a grand finale. After the interval they played ‘The Fact of the Matter ‘by Hildur Guðnadóttir, a BBC commission, and ‘Fantasy-Overture ‘Romeo and Juliet’’ by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky which alternated the joy of dancing with a beloved, revealing the love blooming between Romeo and Juliet, and the drama of the reality they lived through in tragic notes and clashing sounds.
We attended the Citi exhibition at the British Museum, ‘Feminine Power: the Divine and the Demonic’, which impressed me for the variety and amount of artefacts and artworks on display. The captions and comments were engrossing too and covered all the possible sides of how feminine power is seen all over the world and throughout centuries. Here is the link to my review on London Grip: https://londongrip.co.uk/2022/08/feminine-power-the-divine-and-the-demonic-review-by-carla-scarano/
I also visited the summer exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. I was flabbergasted by the diversified quality of the artworks with more than 1,400 pieces on display from about 15,000 submissions. I submitted a piece too, a crochet installation inspired by global warming, but it wasn’t selected. I will try again next year. Here is the link to my review of this impressive exhibition: https://londongrip.co.uk/2022/08/royal-academy-of-arts-summer-exhibition-2022-review-by-carla-scarano/
At The Lightbox in Woking the wonderful exhibition ‘Canaletto and Melissa McGill: Performance and Panorama’ was on (and will be open until the 13th of November). I was lucky to have the chance to meet the American artist Melissa McGill when I visited the exhibition and had an interesting conversation with her in Italian, as she lived in Venice for two years and knows the language. The show explores Canaletto’s (1697-1768) pictures of Italian and English landscapes alongside Melissa McGill’s (b. 1969) art project ‘Red Regatta’, presented in Venice in collaboration with Associazione Vela al Terzo. Here is the link to my review: https://wokingwriters.wordpress.com/2022/08/06/canaletto-and-melissa-mcgill-performance-and-panorama/
At the end of July, both Italian and English politics were in a mess that lasted throughout summer. In the UK the forced resignation of Boris Johnson started a race in the conservative party for the leadership. In Italy, Mario Draghi’s government lost the vote of confidence of part of the coalition and consequently fell. The Five Stars party voted against Draghi and then split in two parties, the Five Stars led by Giuseppe Conte and Insieme per il futuro (together for the future) led by Luigi Di Maio. What seemed a good agreement was therefore broken despite the fact that the economy was recovering and the government was coping well with the fuel crisis and the Ukrainian conflict. The political crisis triggered early general elections, which will be on the 25th of September 2022. As a consequence of this political turmoil, both in Italy and in the UK, most of the newspaper articles and TV programmes were about politics, candidates, coalitions and proposals on how to tackle inflation as well as price and fuel rises, though the war in Ukraine was still raging and refugees flocked to European coasts (about 2,000 in Lampedusa only in August). Apparently, people need change or just feasible solutions. Liz Truss seems the favourite though her plan to cut taxes was labelled as unrealistic and should go together with the reduce of spending, according to some commentators. Sunak fell behind and more and more MPs supported Truss, Johnson included.
At the end of July I reached my mum in Rome facing the heat and a period of total rest, which I really needed.