Pranzo di Natale

Il Seffalice, modelling a Christmas present, practising a goal celebration. Not sure how purple will fit into the Clapham Common team colour schemes

Our British-Italian fusion Christmas lunch (using the Seffalice Multiplier regards quantities):
Aperitivi: Fry-up of spicy Italian sausages, scrambled eggs, mushrooms and tomatoes
Antipasti: Smoked Salmon on Italian sliced bread
Primi: Ravioli ripieno con ricotta e spinaci
Secondi: Roast beef, yorkshire pudding, roast potatoes, veg, gravy

Cheese course: Cheese
Dolce: Tiramisu
Fruit course: Clementines
Dolce 2: Pandoro
Dolce 3: Assorted chocolates


Shaking the Christmas pandoro

La clima della musica pop

Italian's seem to love their pop music to be comprised almost entirely of dreary ballads. Most of all they seem to love Biagio Antonacci's Il Cielo Ha Una Porta Sola (roughly translated, I think, as "The sky has one door only". The fire marshals will be onto him sooner or later.)

You can guarantee to hear it on any radio station if you wait for up to ten minutes. You can also guarantee that The Seffalice will be squawking along, "Tuuuuuuu mi piaceeeeeeee, tuuuuuuuu mi diceeeeeeeeee". If you want to be able to sing along with us when gathered round the campfire you can learn the lyrics here.

The remainder of pretty much all radio stations' playlists are composed of English-language limp efforts from usual suspects Coldplay, Killers, Dido, Beyonce and James Morrison, plus these Italian-language favourites that are played over and over again:

- Novembre is as upbeat as it gets for Italian artists who steer away from the road marked 'Eurohouse'. La Seffalice doesn't like this one but I find it pretty catchy in a The-Woman-Singing-From-The-Meatloaf's-Bat-Out-Of-Hell-Album-Does-Eurovision way. "A novembre, la città si accende in un istante". Brilliant. It's all about November, you see. Out of date now though.

- Alla Mia Età by Tiziano Ferro. Don't bother listening to this one.

- This fellow Jovanotti is like musical mogadon but he does sport a unkempt beard which gives him one free pass. But not two.

- Ligabue looks like he's trying to be Correggio's Jimmy Nail but according to Wikipedia he's actually Perugia's Tim Healy.

Il presepe di gusci di noci

Nativity scenes (presepe) are a big deal here. Lots of churches, shops, civic centres have large ones for passers-by to stop off and coo over, and there's no shortage of shops and stalls supplying the ingredients for people to make them at home too. In addition to the tradition wood and cork-constructed stable and clay characters, we've also seen some more elaborate and expensive scenes available to help you keep up with i Jonesi, involving waterfalls, mountains, lakes and shooting stars.

We saw particularly special one at Pistoia cathedral yesterday: c.4m x 2m in size, encompassing what could only have been the entire Nazarene council district, and made from discarded nut shells.

The other church visitors admiring the presepe delle noce seemed disapproving of my taking photos, but more fool them for not carrying a camera with which capture the scene.

Given the lack of background information, I hestitate to speculate on how Franco Milani conceived the idea, but he must really really like nuts.

La vigilia di Natale

Christmas greetings vocab: "Buone Feste", "Buon Natale", "Auguri"

The Christmas markets here have generally been pretty disappointing: normal markets selling their regular tired mixture of junk and tat, but transplanted to a more prominent spot for the few weeks before Christmas.

The exception has been the one in the square in front of Santa Croce church in the center of Florence, though they had to import some Germans to do it properly, proving once again that Central Europe is the only place that really knows how to do a Christmas market.

Stripy wooden Christmas market cabins? Check.
Hot wine? Check.
Cured meats in a bun? Smoked meats in a bun? Hot meats in a bun? Check. Check. Check.
Special Christmas-themed junk and tat? Check
Prices double those of the nearby shops? Check.
Strudels, pretzels, cakes, biscuits, chocolates? Check.
Merry-go-round converted into bar and sausage stall? Check.

Le cose camminare come i italiani

La Chiesa di San Giovanni where we watched La Traviata on our first Saturday in Lucca and La Boheme last night.

One of the things we've found most foreign to us here is a very different (i.e. complete absence of) concept of sharing space whilst walking.

We've noticed it a lot of the places we've visited in Tuscany but it seems most prevalent in Lucca, which has a semi-pedestrianised centre (only cars with the right local permits are allowed in) and a somewhat over-confident air born of a more peaceful and monied history than the rest of the region.

I can see it makes sense in a very pragmatic way: 'I look out only for myself, you do the same, and everyone gets on with things, with no effort wasted trying to anticipate how to help someone else'. But it leaves no room for alternative approaches and begets the same attitude in everyone else; anyone who tries, say, moving to one side slightly so two people can pass through the same space finds their frustation boiling so often that in the end they give up trying and go native in their walking style.

Maybe there's a silent majority of Lucchesi suffering under a tyranny of the minority, walking around bubbling with the rage of unwanted obligation as they feel compelled to march head on towards someone else who, unbeknownst to them, wants only to pause and say “After you” too. But if they acted on it then they'd suddenly find themselves as transported to England, gridlocked with politeness, and I don't suppose any of them want that.

So here are some guidelines for passing as a local when out and about in Lucca, and passing as Lucchesi when around the rest of Italy.

1. Never show any intent to move aside when walking directly towards someone else. If you are heading towards a fellow Lucchesi, the discreetest of last-second avoidance may be required. Either way give the appearance of remaining oblivious to their existence.
2. Creating a little space so two people can both fit is plain weird; the domain of tourists and weaklings. Never acknowledge or cede to anyone who tries, you'll be doing them no favours in the long run.
3. The pavement is yours. Fan out.
4. People expect you to step directly into their path.
5. Walk at your own pace, even if that pace is so slow you're travelling backwards through time. Feel free to combine with guidelines 3 and 4.
6. When leaving a building (and the same principle goes for backing out of a parking spot when driving) just launch yourself through the doorway into the street. People already standing in the street or about to walk past the doorway will miraculously avoid you.
7. Do not move out of the way for cars. They can travel behind you at your pace until your routes diverge or, if they are heading towards you, stop until you have passed them, no matter how long that takes.
8. Regarding cyclists, see guidelines 4 and 7 in particular.
9. Road = pavement. See guidelines 3 and 7. Below is a photo we took recently at Lucca's bus station.

La tartaruga e la lepre

The square in front of San Frediano church, located a few seconds from our flat in Lucca. On the left is the outside seating for the bar that we've adopted for our nightly aperitivi

The slope that begins our daily cycle ride up on Lucca's city walls is, and I don't want to be too melodramatic about this, killing me. In the The Discovery of France book that I was banging on about in earlier postings, the author Graham Robb credits the invention and popular adoption of the bicycle as one of the most important factors in France's development. He writes also on the practicalities of cycling in the late nineteenth century:

Simple truths have been forgotten. As almost everyone knew a hundred years ago, the secret of riding a bicycle as an adult is to pedal just hard enough to keep the machine upright, then to increase the speed very gradually, but without becoming too breathless to hold a conversation or to hum a tune. In this way, with regular intake of water and food, an uncompetitive, moderately fit person can cycle up an Alp, with luggage, on a stern but steady gradient engineered for an eighteenth-century mule.

Having spent several years cycling around France to research the book he mostly likely knows his stuff, but I still find getting some speed up the best way to get up a short slope. I've not tested this theory on the longer slopes of an Alp yet. The old dog-like wheezing sound my bike gives out when only on the flat makes me think I'll need to trade up before I can be competitive on the Col du Tourmalet.

Habakkuk

The Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (Museum of the Works of the Cathedral) in Florence sounds like one it's going to be one of the dullest museums going. Actually (and this may be the first genuinely useful Tuscany travel tip posted on this blog) I'd say a trip to the Museum trebles the value of a visit to the Duomo; the Duomo being, along with the Uffizi, the thing a visitor to Florence is most likely to go to.

The museum is brilliant for several reasons:
- The Duomo is enormous, there's no way you can see all the statutes and details placed high up on the facade, the museum has them all displayed
- In addition, those statues, reliefs and bits and pieces in the facade are mostly copies now for reasons of wear and tear, and changing fashion (more below), so what you see in the museum are the originals
- It has genuinely interesting details of the building of the cathedral and its facade. Despite the cathedral standing since before the Middle Ages the current facade was only built in the twentieth century because every time a prolonged commissioning period or competition approached completion, the person in charge would change their mind, die or be replaced, the commission would be cancelled and the years would pass before anyone could agree to try commissioning it again. The same went for the interior of the cathedral - it was cleared out several times to be replaced with more fashionable works.
- It includes explanation of Brunellschi's incredible feat of engineering to get the enormous dome to the cathedral designed and constructed, and added to the existing structure
- It contains numerous pieces of art that are worth a visit on their own account - Donatello and Della Robbia's brilliant choir lofts, Michelangelo's Pieta, Donatello's Mary Magdalene and Ghiberti's original bronze cast baptistry doors, The Gates of Paradise.

Della Robbia, above, and Donatello, below

- Finally, it includes my favourite piece in any of the museums and exhibitions we've seen so far: Donatello's Habakkuk, a sculpture of one of the Old Testament prophets. Below, even my shoddy camera phone can't completely detract from an astoundingly powerful piece of art.

Pienza

Not a heat haze, just that The Seffalice is not a born photographer


Pienza is a walled hilltop town on the route between wine capitals Montalcino and Montepulciano. It's known for Pope Pius II employing Bernardo Rossellino to architecturize the perfect (in conception, at least) Renaissance town in the mid-fifteenth century. Lots of grandness and symmetry ensued and very pretty it is too in Piazza Pio II.

The rest of the town is also worth a wander round and to follow the passeggiata route along the outside of the walls. Set high above the surrounding valleys it's a very picturesque if currently waterlogged view out from the town.

We also visited many of the numerous local produce tourist traps, and were seen coming by Ghino who flattered us in Italian into buying a couple of bottles of wine ("Sure you pay a little more here but it's worth it for the quality is assured. Have I told you about what the Italian prime minster bought here?"), and by the shopkeep low on tourist trade who didn't take long to convince us that we needed a carboot full of the local pecorino (by refusing to cut it any smaller and insisting that we still buy it) and a slab of lardo (which is just as it sounds, marinated in herbs and oil, then vacuum-packed).

Above: lardo.

Pecorino is a sheep's cheese common all over Tuscany, in many varieties, but originating from the Pienza area so noblesse oblige ensured we had to pick up a respectable quantity. La Seffalice will let you know how the Pecorino Rosso and Pecorino Nero work out for us when she posts the next installment of her cheese blog.

Chianti-shire

A Christmas-themed Lucchesi shop window.


Having already brought out enough bags for easyJet to charter a second plane, The Seffalice has decided that its Christmas present to itself will not be a breezeblock, a Chesterfield, or a teaspoon of ununoctium this year, but instead a couple of days holiday from our, well, holiday.

So we are currently staying at an agriturismo (farm that also does accommodation) just outside Montalcino, the home of Brunello wine. Even in the land of super cheap wine, Brunello doesn't seem to go for less than €20 a bottle, so we've come to source to test it out.

On the way through we stopped off at San Miniato, a small hilltop town (actually read "small hilltop town" for just about any place mentioned in the next couple of days) surrounded by truffle-rich forests that supply Italy and Kensington with a massive proportion of their truffles. The main truffle hunting season has just finished (it runs September-November) and their truffle festival was held a couple of weeks ago, so the souvenir shops are well-stocked with high-priced truffle-infused foods, including the truffle salami we've picked up for our aperitivi di Natale.

The drive from Lucca yesterday was marked by low clouds and torrential rain and it turned out to be near impossible to find anywhere in the heart of Chianti to sell us an expensive bottle of wine as everywhere had closed up in despair of seeng another tourist in low season. But wait, what about The Seffalice? We want to give you our valueless sterling.

Fortunately, one restarant in Castellina in Chianti (Antica Torre) was still open and turned out to be particularly nice, providing a hit of my now staple dish, pappardelle con cinghiale, and some local red.

Radda in Chianti turned out to be a ghost town, with nothing open other than estate agents.

Our last scheduled stop before we just googled for an outpost of Majestic Wine Warehouses was Gaiole in Chianti, where there was one shop open that agreed to fleece us in return for a bottle of local Chianti. We picked one from the estate of Barone Ricasoli, centered on the nearby Castello di Brolio. Bettino Ricasoli (the 'Iron Baron') was the person who pushed Chianti wines into prominence in the nineteenth century.

Today we test out some Brunello and visit nearby Pienza hoping to make away with some of their delicious pecorino cheese.

L'Albero di Natale della Lucca

Immediately after the visiting comic geeks left Lucca in October, taking their geek marquees with them, a large concrete slab was laid in the square outside out our window. A month later, excitement! They're putting up the Christmas tree!

1. How curious, they're caging the tree. It must be one of those EU Common Market regulations.


2. Mama mia! What crazed vision of robot trees from the future is this?


3. La Seffalice, dig out last year's letter to The Telegraph about the Turner Prize and take down the following amendments.

Oh, I see. They're just testing the electrics before...

4. ...attaching the coloured tubes.


5. Hang on lads, it's lunchtime. See you in three hours.


6. The finished article. Actually it doesn't look so bad from down here.


7. The view from the mind of confused winter bird, such as a robin, who's been told there's a new tree in town to nest in.


8. And finally, the turning on of the lights. Our flat is now warmed at night by a glow in the fashion of Kramer's apartment in the chicken roaster episode.

Correggendo il mito dei treni italiano

Livorno, some street or other leading away from the harbour

There is, I think, a widespread belief in the UK (one that I subscribed to before coming here) that Italian trains are the epitome of a comprehensive, efficient and punctual train network. Something to do with "At least Mussolini got the trains to run on time..." etc. Was that Thatcher? Anyway, it's bollocks.

We must have been on about 30 trains in the last seven weeks and can recall precisely two that left and arrived on time. The delays are rarely short, more normally approaching half an hour. The Seffalice's field trip to Livorno yesterday should have taken 50 minutes (Lucca-Pisa 25 minutes, a 10 minute wait at Pisa then Pisa-Livorno 15 minutes), but ended up taking over 2 hours both there and back.

The most frustrating thing is that you'd have thought that if all the trains were late it shouldn't make any effective difference to travelling; the whole timetable should push on so you could arrive knowing that your scheduled train was probably running late but that the previous one should be arriving in its place. But for reasons that science can't explain time is bent, squeezed and stretched so it never happens that way.

Nor are the trains particularly quick (the bus from Lucca to Florence is faster than the train by about half an hour), and while they approximate regularity they're not frequent - twice an hour on any route is as good as you'll get. There's also a curious mid-morning lull between roughly 9.30-11.30 during which you should have no expectation of a train on your route at all, certainly not one that falls in with the timetable pattern earlier or later in the day.

The Seffalice's advice on Italian public transport is to take the bus whenever possible.


In other news, our iTunes briefly slipped into some easy listening yesterday evening. I was already aware that the lyrics of Louis Prima's Just a Gigolo were pretty damn depressing, in contrast to its jaunty tune, but had never paid attention to those of Scott Walker's Jackie before. They're temporarily my new fourth favourite lyric, after Positively 4th Street, Your Revolution, and Goody Goody. Not that I keep lists.

Bollito misto

So on a visit to Florence a couple of weeks ago The Seffalice tried another Italian speciality – bollito misto. Mixed boiled meats. So not particularly specialised in fact as we could all do that if we thought it a good idea, but it's on most restaurants' menus here.

It wasn't all that mixed in the event, though thoroughly boiled, comprising of three pieces of meat: one a normal piece of boiled pork (mmmm); the other two might have been some cut of pig too. They were both the same and my guess would have been that they were tripe if they hadn't been so grey. As things stand I'm still not sure what they were.

[N.B. Tripe is a local Florentine delicacy, tripe stalls do a brisk trade on street corners.]

It would have been unseemly to take photos at lunch so here's a local artist's impression:

It came with a delicious garlicky salsa verde that helped me forget the unsettling texture of the unknown meat for the whole of the first piece and about half of the second, after which it all began to pall somewhat.

Does Hugh F-W do a bollito misto in his MEAT book? I'm sure Mrs Beeton or some 1950s rationing guide has it covered if not. I suspect each kitchen would just use the cheapest local cuts rather than there being a hard and fast recipe.

The Seffalice's guess at the tasty salsa verde would be parsley, garlic, capers and oil. It was very good with the chips also. Does the combined cookery library offer anything on a recipe?

Anyway, in summary, it wasn't too bad. Not a glowing recommendation I'd be the first to acknowledge but there you go. I was pleased to have tried it but probably won't be ordering it again.

Dieci cose ne Siena

So The Seffalice was really impressed with Siena. Here are bullet points of all you need know.

1. There are at least three really really nice restarants in Siena. We can thoroughly recommend La Taverna di San Giuseppe (Via Giovanni Dupre. Try the liver. Seriously. I'd be there all week for it), L'Osteria (Via dei Rossi), and another one whose name I can't remember. But it's on Pian dei Mantellini and has "nonni" (grandmother) in it's name.

2. It's stuck in a medieval time-warp.

3. It's built up a hill, so all the inhabitants have thighs like Lothar Matthäus. It reminds me a little of Bristol in a relaxed-once-important-but-now-content-to-go-at-its-own-pace sort of way, but much more picturesque. It's a very beautiful city with lots of winding alleyways up and down the hill and imposing gothic architecture as it's stuck in a medieval time-warp.

4. Unlike Florence etc it doesn't do so much Renaissance art as it's stuck in a medieval time-warp, instead it has lots of the glittery gold 2-D altarpieces, the type in which everyone has those long tortoise-like faces so all the men look like Mike Atherton wearing a beard and all the women look like Mike Atherton.

5. It's all a sham as the place is bankrolled by the Monte de Paschi di Siena banking group (through disproportionate employment and gifts to the city) allowing Siena to remain in a medieval time-warp, rather than funding itself through holy relics, simony and tribute from the competing Holy Roman Empire and Papal state as it wants you to believe.

6. Hire a car to get there if you're visiting from the UK and flying in to Pisa. It's curiously badly connected to airports and any useful public transport.

7. It's divided into 17 medieval districts (le contrade) who presumably normally co-exist peacefully enough without pillaging each other given Siena really isn't that big, but then burst into crazy longheld rivalries and alliances at various points of the year. Each contrada has its own iconography to mark its district in the form of statues, reliefs, flags, signs, etc. We noted panthers, eagles, dragons, giraffes, hedgehogs.

Here is an elephant. We assumed it's the symbol of one of the contrada.

The biggest time of the year for the contrade is The Palio, a bareback horse race around the main square in the city, run twice during summer. It featured at the beginning of the recent Bond film for your cultural reference point.

8. Donetello again, with another kickass relief. This time to the astonishing font in the baptistry.


9. It has a centuries long rivalry with Florence. It was once a very important trading city but got beat up in the thirteenth century and never really recovered.

10. That's it.

11. Go to 10.

Amiamo mangiare la Mortadella

Today The Seffalice will mostly be recommending mortadella.

The sliced cooked and cured (e.g. Parma) hams are relatively expensive here (at least at the rate we go through them), as is braesola. And, while La Seffalice adores prosciutto crudo, I find it too sweaty-flavoured a meat for my tastes at the best of times, moreso when it's been sliced some time ago, cased in plastic and left on a supermarket shelf to think about what it's done.

Mortadella has done the job. It originates from Bologna, is made from minced pork, lard and pepper, and is the cheap and tasty option from the supermarket. I'm not convinced that it doesn't share a cousin with the great British saveloy, and I had always steered away from it in the UK because of it's spam-like appearance, but I'm definitely not mentioning that to La Seffalice. Check out this link for more and the animation of the pretty lady with the big meat.

I don't know that Hugh Chomondley-Featherstoneshaw gives any instruction in his otherwise fine book, so if any of you meatheads want to have a crack at it here's a recipe, there's still time to make the Christmas present that keeps on giving.

Pronto a Portare

The Seffalice has been in Siena for the last couple of days, being generally wowed by the place.

More on the city another time as it's almost time for la nostra cena, but recommendations will be flowing forth. As you'd expect we hobnobbed with the local blue bloods, enjoying aperativi that were very generously-hosted in a grand flat in the right end of town, at which The Seffalice ingratiated itself with extensive/spurious knowledge of British orders of chivalry.

While discussing the merits of a recent Venice ball we learnt some useful tidbits on how to dress molto elegante in Italia, to pass on for you hobos to use:
lo smoking = dinner jacket
i frac = morning coat

I've also got some vocab in case you need visit I Fratelli Moss on the morning of a smart event:
le bretelle rosse = red braces
il cilindro = top hat
la cravatta a farfalla = bowtie
(for added background: farfalla means butterfly)

I' ve not cracked cummerbund or dress shirt yet.

La prova che siamo andati in biciclette

Having spent a month or so cycling within town and a daily jaunt atop the city walls, we were intimidated off the walls last Sunday by a bike race and so ventured out of town properly for the first time.

We chanced upon a nice route along the river thanks to The Seffalice's instant memorization of local maps and instinctive sense of direction that definitely didn't start by taking us in the wrong direction onto a busy main A-road.

Here is the route marked in regal purple (click on the image for a bigger version), the numbers below marry up to those on the map:


1.
The beginning and end - our flat at Piazza Anfiteatro. There's no part of the amphitheatre itself left; after it fell into disuse locals took the stone from it, bit by bit, to build stuff elsewhere. Now there's no trace of it other than: (i) the elliptical shape where homes (including our apartment) were built against its walls before it was dismantled; and (ii) the arches to get into the piazza (through which gladiators, animals and now Seffalices have entered since Roman times).


Not from our cycle ride yesterday but proof that Il Seffalice can be on a bike with both feet off the ground without falling off for at least the split second it takes to take a photo.

2.

At the start of the route proper, facing the home straight on the other side of the bridge: Monte San Quirico.

3.

Off the road and onto the cycle path. “Wait there for a picture”, I say. Sure thing.

4.

Arty and eerie. The Commune di Lucca is renowned for its luminous haunted woods in which the ghosts can only move in straight lines. It's where Pacman retired to.

5.

Oooh, a church. Through the trees. Let's have a look at it.

6.
Oops. A wrong turn into someone's back garden as The Seffalice tries to get to the mysterious church.

7.
The village of Nave, too small to be named even on this ridiculously detailed map. And as you might guess, there's nothing here of interest. Not even the church which turned out to be nothing more than an campanile. As you can from the purple tracks see we explored it thoroughly before writing it off, never to return.

8.

In the distance, the bridge at Ponte San Pietro, the halfway mark. Being Lucca it's raining now, of course.

9.

The closest we've ever been to the what looked like the end of a rainbow, just in the neighbouring field. The local leprechiauni wouldn't let us near though for fear we'd steal their fascini fortunati.

10.

Soaked, exhausted and verging on hysteria as we approach the end, you'd have thought, from her expression, that La Seffalice was going downhill. It was as nearasdammit flat.

New Writing Internet Theatre Showcase

I thought I'd post a scene from a stageplay I've been working on.

[INTERIOR.
A VERY HANDSOME AND CHARMING MAN AND A WOMAN ARE PLAYING CARDS. IT'S EVENING, OR MAYBE THE SHUTTERS ARE JUST CLOSED.]

MAN: I've always said "uno".
WOMAN: I've always called it "uno".
MAN: Really? I've always called it "uno".
WOMAN: I've always called it "uno".
MAN: I've always called it "uno".
WOMAN: I've always called it "uno".
MAN: I've always called it "uno".

[PAUSE]

WOMAN: No, I've always called it "uno".
MAN: I've always called it "uno".
WOMAN: I've always called it "uno".
MAN: Uno.
WOMAN: Pick up four.

I call it, Peter Mayle's Three Months in Italy. Obviously it'll need a strong directorial hand, but I think it's pretty much there, though I'm toying with the idea of adding another pause.

Michel Thomas

The Seffalice has been on a two-track Italian-learning programme with La Seffalice frequenta la scuola ogni mattina da due settimane (oggi è il suo ultimo giorno), and Il Seffalice trying to be cheapo with a hare-brained scheme of autodidacticism.

Having started at least half a dozen different teach-yourself courses, I (Il Seffalice) am coming to the end of my Michel Thomas tapes. I find them brilliantly useful in building up confidence and understanding of the basic structure of the language, and very different in method and effect from the other courses.

The course is comprised of an extended lesson in which he teaches two other students, with you “sitting in”. His method uses no writing, learning by rote or attempts to memorise, but builds up knowledge bit by bit and using slight variations on the same core phrases to construct sentences, conjugate verbs, etc.

It isn't concerned with areas or themes as other courses are (i.e. there's no division into sections on travel, family, food, shopping, etc) and doesn't provide a huge amount of vocabulary, but there's no shortage of other places to find that sort of thing. Incidentally, the Usborne picture book series Your First Thousand Words in... may be for children but they're the best thing I've found for memorising vocabulary.

Michel Thomas himself has more interesting background than you might expect, at least in his early life. The rather hagiographic leaflet accompanying his course gives some brief biographical detail, and there is also a full biography, A Test of Courage published, though it seems there are some doubts over the veracity of some of the stries in it.

Having grown-up in Germany and France, he spent two years in French concentration and slave labour camps during World War II. Having escaped the camps, he fought for the French Resistance, during which time he was captured and interrogated, and tortured by the Gestapo.

The leaflet says, unnecessarily mysteriously, "his mastery of languages enabled him to adopt many identities (the last one being 'Michel Thomas')". Following French liberation he joined the US Army as an intelligence officer; he interrogated the Dachau camp executioner and interviewed survivors, and was later involved in operations uncovering war criminals.

Having moved to LA in 1947 he set up his language institute and developed his teaching method after which it all gets less fascinating.


Would you buy a used-language course from this man?

But of much fun is the list of celebrities he's helped with language learning and the non-alphabetical order in which he/the marketing bod at The Michel Thomas Language Centre has listed them. You can keep your Hello! spreads and Time Man of the Year awards, this is as valid a way to test the rank of celebrity as any other. I've repeated the list below. I wonder how Otto Preminger and Max von Sydow feel about being listed after Herb Alpert, or Diana Ross and Tony Curtis after Mrs George Harrison. Feel free to use the comment section to cut and paste your prefered rankings.

Mel Gibson, Emma Thompson, Woody Allen, Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty, Melanie Griffith, Eddie Izzard, Bob Dylan, Jean Marsh, Donald Sutherland, Mrs George Harrison, Anne Bancroft, Mel Brooks, Nastassja Kinski, Carl Reiner, Raquel Welch, Johnny carson, Julie Andrews, Isabelle Adjani, Candice Bergen, Barbara Hershey, Priscilla Presley, Loretta Swit, Tony Curtis, Diana Ross, Herb Alpert, Angie Dickinson, Lucille Ball, Doris Day, Janet Leigh, Natalie Wood, Jayne Mansfield, Ann-Margaret, Yves Montand, Kim Novak, Otto Preminger, Max von Sydow, Peter Sellers, Francois Truffaut, Sophia Coppola.

Cheese glorious cheese

My second blog is again food based, Seffers and I have decided to add a third circuit to our daily cycle of the walls as the battle with the bulge seems to failing. We can't seem to get enough of the food here, and as our confidence with the language grows so does our confidence in helping ourselves to the free bar snacks served at every bar after 6.00pm!

The theme of this blog is CHEESE (sorry Charlie and Graham).

Along with the weekly purchase of mozzarella we add a renegade cheese to our shopping basket, these are the one's which we have tried so far, and our thoughts on them.

Tomino Del Boscaiolo – €1.52
We're not sure if this is related to the French cheese, Savoie du Tomme (which is delicious) but this is different, it came in a pack of 2 small rounds, and has the texture of a firm brie, it doesn't seem to ripen. It is creamy in taste, and has a slight goats cheese tang to it, but is made with cows (or Mucca) milk.

Mascarpone
This is one of the main ingredients of Tiramisu in which it is delicious, and in the interests of this blog I've tried a spoon of it on it's own. Yum Yum, a cross between clotted cream and cream cheese!

Mozzarella – from €0.35
I don't know about anyone else, but whenever I have it at home I find it a bit bland and tasteless. It could be the fact that we're in Italy but I swear it tastes better here! We've been eating as part of the classic Caprese Insalata (Pomodorro, Mozzarella, Basilico, Olio Extra Virgine d'Oliva e pepe), and we've not even tried the buffalo mozzarella yet!

Grana Padano – €3.50
I keep trying to buy Parmigiano Reggiano, but the Seffalice is on a budget, and I keep getting swayed by firstly the price of Grana Padano or picking it up by mistake as they are shelved close to each other. Grana Padano is delicious, either grated on your pasta, or by slice. If we ever manage to purchase Parmigiano I'll do a comparison.

Pecorino Romano
One half of the Seffalice is not so keen on this one as it is very salty, however the other half finds it delicious and salty, but then he does like the salt.

Soft Pecorino
Pecorino is one of the many Tuscan specialities, and they do all sorts of varieties. We found one in the market which was soft and runny like a ripe camembert, with a very creamy and delicate taste and texture, we thoroughly enjoyed it, we have not been able to find it or any other sort of soft pecorino since.

Bra Topana (or something similar)
A hard cheese, can't remember too much about it, but we liked it, because it was cheese and the older it got the cheesier it got.

More cheese reviews to follow as and when we try them



Tiramisu 2
I made my second Tiramisu, tweaking with Valentina's original recipe. It was bigger, boozier and better. It seems that when it comes to Tiramisu size matters, and using more ingredients and putting it in a bigger dish improves it – poor Seffalice has to eat a Tiramisu for 6 now (I think we're going to be looking at 4 circuits of the wall fairly shortly). I've ignored her quantites for coffee and booze and now just add a lot, this seems to work, I will keep testing to see whether one can add too much.

The Whistling Language of Aas

-There's gold in them thar hills. -That's not gold, it's snow. -It's cold. It's white. It's formed when tiny supercooled cloud droplets freeze. What would you call it? - Snow.

The view looking out of Lucca from our daily cycle on the city walls

I quoted yesterday from Graham Robb's chapter on the French language in his book, The Discovery of France, but omitted his account of the whistling language of Aas, partly on the grounds that I'd already included very long excerpts in the blog entry, but mostly because it seemed a bit too Beavis and Butthead. It's a brilliant little nugget, however, so here you are:

The Pyrenean village of Aas, at the foot of the Col d'Aubisque, above the spa town of Eax-Bonnes, had its own whistling language which was unknown even in the neighbouring valleys until it was mentioned on a television programme in 1959. Shepherds who spent the summer months in lonely cabins had evolved an ear-splitting, hundred-decibel language that could be understood at a distance of up to two miles. It was also used by the women who worked in the surrounding fields and was apparently versatile enough in the early twentieth century to convey the contents of the local newspaper. Its last known use was during the Nazi Occupation, when shepherds helped Jewish refugees, Résistants and stranded pilots to cross the border into Spain. A few people in Aas today remember hearing the language, but no one can reproduce the sounds and no recordings were ever made.

It all sounds a bit like one of the April Fools stories the newspapers feel obliged to come up with every year, but presumably he's done his research without being overly gullible. Anyway, there's probably more to be said about the whistling Aas language; I'll leave it to you to abuse the comment facility. If it turns out to get the most comments on the blog, however, I'll be upset.

Late breaking news...
The Signora Seffalice has just said she read something similar in the easyJet inflight magazine when she popped back to London last month. There's something incredibly disappointing about that that I can't quite put my finger on but probably has to do with my need to feel superior about the contents of my reading material. She doesn't think this whistling language was in France; wherever it was has apparently put it back on the local school curriculum as it was dying out. Please could one of you start composing a letter to The Telegraph on the subject of the new GCSE in whistling being easier than it was back in the fifties.

Ottante, Novante e di Oggi

We've settled on a local radio station here that has a sufficiently odd mixture of 80s synth pop, boy band ballads, classic soul and disco oddities to keep all parts of The Seffalice equally happy/unhappy. It's also useful for our picking up bits and pieces of Italian as the DJs' inane patter is very recognisable (does Chris Moyles run a correspondence course?) and they repeat themselves endlessly (and drop in occasional bits of English).

Everyone who calls up is asked "Come stai?" and then "Quanti anni hai?" and then they move onto the next person. Incisive stuff; if they don't ask the difficult questions who will?

We think it's called Radio 101. It plays music from "Ottante, Novante e di Oggi", as we're told every few minutes, and is on 94.1 FM if you're passing through Tuscany.

If you'd like to listen along with us from the UK they've an internet feed here.


I've been quoting overlong excerpts from Graham Robb's The Discovery of France throughout the blog, and today will be no exception as it's a brilliant book and I've not enough incentive to edit the sections down properly.

It seems appropriate, as I went stir crazy for adjectives yesterday, that today I go to the chapter on language, my favourite in the book.

Amongst many other things, it touches on the occasional concern of the various governing powers to impose the French of Paris onto the multitude of dialects that predominated across the rest of France into the last century. Meanwhile, the rest of France was managing perfectly well despite the preponderence of dialects.

By the end of the nineteenth century about fifty-five major dialects and hundreds of sub-dialects had been identified, belonging to four distinct language groups...Many more were unknown or unrecognized...

The known dialects of France can all be placed precisely on the tree of languages... Naturally, to a cross-country traveller who lept from one branch to the next, the effect was obscurity and chaos. The title of this chapter [O Òc Sí Bai Ya Win Oui Oyi Awè Jo Ja Oua] lists some of the major forms of “yes” in clockwise order, starting with Provence and ending with Savoy. But even this is a simplicfication. In mid-nineteenth century Brittany, a person who walked the five miles from Carnac to Erdeven could hear three distinct pronunciations of the word ya (“yes”): iè, ia and io. Along the Côte d'Azur, from Menton to Mons, fathers ten miles apart were called païre, père, pa, pèro and papo. As the sun travelled over the Franche-Comté, it changed its name to souleil, soulet, soulot, s'lot, soulu, sélu, slu, séleu, soureil, soureuil, sereil, s'reil and seroille...

However, while tourists and government officials far from home may have found it unintelligible, the dialects were effective over a very long range.

Mutual comprehensibility rather than isolation was the norm... [In Carcassone it was noted that] a person could travel twenty or thirty leagues (fifty-six or eighty-three miles) and understand this multiplicity of dialects despite only knowing one of them... Provençal shepherds who walked two hundred miles from Arles to the Oisans could converse with locals all along the route and, when they arrived in the Alps, negotiate the rental of summer pastures with people who, from a linguist's point of view, spoke a different language.

By the end of the nineteenth century, government policy had firmed up:

The eradication of patois as a first language became a cornerstone of education policy. Schoolchildren were punished for using words learned at their mother's knee... For the the non-French speaker on a school bench, the experience was often tramatic and humiliating... Years later, when education and an ability to speak French were taken for granted, the missionary efforts of the Third Republic would look to some people like a colonial campaign to erase local customs.

Robb isn't convinced by this "colonial campaign" though. Many teachers were local historians too and had no wish to see the local dialects die out. They often taught both dialect and French, but

...forced their students to use French, not because they want to stamp out minority cultures, but because they wanted pupils to pass examinations, to have the means of discovery the outside world, to improve the lot of their families...

The retreat of Basque, Breton, Catalan, Corsican and Flemish before the tide of French belonged to a much older, more complicated process of social and material change. Standard French was carried all over the country by conscription, railways, newspapers, tourists and popular songs.

Presumably many of the French dialects are still in use locally but I don't speak nearly enough French (i.e. any) to recognise when people might be speaking in dialects. In fact, I'm not at all sure of the definition of a dialect. The UK has a lot of regional differences for a fairly small country with a very well established national language, but while an accent may change the pronunciation of a word the spelling normally remains the same; does this come within the remit of a dialect?

Standard Italian is based on the Tuscan language originally disseminated via Dante's work, but apparently dialects are still spoken throughout the country, especially as you go further south. Being a very young country, regional identification is still very strong, often stronger than national identification. I think loyalties tend to run in the order town-district-region-nation, with a lot of local rivalries still festering, certainly if you go by the grafitti. Lucca is well represented on Pisa and Viareggio walls but is plainly too small for Florentine graffiti-ists to be concerned with.

Ice-Cream Review #2: Carabè (Via Ricasoli, Florence)

It's turned bitterly cold in the last couple of days, and Carabè didn't seem optimistic for custom, having just two-thirds of their ice-cream tubs in operation and those only partially full rather than the heaped-to-overflowing that we've seen in other places. I imagine it would be very different in summer; situated just around the corner from the Accademia, they'd likely be packed with tourists on their way to queue for David.

They are owned by Sicilians so, in addition to the usual gelati, they are best known for stocking some Sicilian specialities: sorbet and granita (which is similar to sorbet but has a gritty texture).

We had between us a nocciola (hazelnut, pronounced, as you'll remember, "no-cho-la" with a long "ch") gelato and a mandorla (almond, pronounced, unusally, with the stress on the first syllable) granita.

The nocciola gelato was "Acceptably" Tasty and Delicious, though no Kelly's Cornish Clotted Cream vanilla, and as sweet as we've come to expect from Italian ice-cream.

"Refreshing" isn't a standard rating on The Tasty and Delicious Scale so can only be used unofficially but the granita was very Refreshing indeed, giving a Refreshing feeling for some time afterwards too. It would be very good on a hot day in a hot part of the country, say, Sicily.

Piove di nuovo, perciò guarderemo i libri

Given The Seffalice has little understanding of English grammar, getting to grips with Italian grammar has proved tricky. In an effort to spread the confusion we'll be posting some tips here, particularly for the aid of those visiting us for skiing in Italy in January. I'll expect all instructions to the blood wagon to be given in perfectly constructed Italian.

The BBC-published Italian Grammar has the most comprehensible explanations we've found so far, so I'll be paraphrasing from it liberally.

In Italian, where adjectives and nouns are next to each other, adjectives normally (but not always) follow the noun (and change their ending to match the gender and quantity of the noun, so "il vino rosso", "i vini rossi", "la scarpa rossa", "le scarpe rosse").

There are some rules as to which adjectives always go after and which always before their noun.

After:
- colour, shape, nationality
- those with an adverb (adverb = very, too, so, rather etc)

Before:
- demonstrative (this entrance, that direction),
- possessive (my food, your bill, his fault, etc),
- ordinal numbers (first class, second wind, etc)
- the following pairs of common adjectives: bello/brutto, buono/cattivo, lungo/breve, grande/piccolo

Still with us? Anyway, now we get to the really interesting bit. An adjective that normally goes before a verb can be placed after it for emphasis (and vice-versa), so "Che penne breva!" means "What a short piece of penne pasta!" (be careful to pronounce this one exactly).

But, before you all go hogwild with hyperbole, beware!: some adjectives change their meaning depending upon whether they are used before or after the noun.
From Italian Grammar:
- "un grand'uomo" is "a great man", but "un uomo grande" is "a big man"
- "la stessa cosa" is "the same thing" but "la cosa stessa" is "the thing itself"
- "un vecchio amico" is "an old friend" but "un amico vecchio" is "an elderly friend"

Qui ha finito la lezione di oggi.

Filippo Brunelleschi

We had a Brunelleschi-heavy day in Florence yesterday with the Spedale degli Innocenti (an orphanage/foundlings hospital founded in the 15th century [language note: the Italian for “wetnurse” is “balia”]), San Lorenzo church and and a peek over the top of piazza-worth of roadworks to see what we think was a Brunelleschi-designed loggia opposite Santa Maria Novella church.

In fact, it's difficult to see much of Florence without witnessing a Brunelleschi-designed or inspired building. He was a leading light of Renaissance architecture and nuts for re-establishing the classical ideas of carefully calculated geometry and symmetry in buildings, with lots of circles on squares and arches on squares and squares on squares.

San Lorenzo has a very plain exterior (though it had an abandoned plan for a Michelangelo façade) and a Brunelleschi-designed interior, plus two awesome bronze pulpits by Donatello that were used by Savonarola to fulminate against the corrupting influence of Medici-commissioned Renaissance art. I got one picture on The Shoddy Camera Phone before continuing my record of being told off for taking photos where we shouldn't. I'm find myself sympathising with those 1990s aeroplane spotters banged up in Greece more than I used to.


The Seffalice is in two minds about Brunelleschi. One mind can't get enough of it, the other finds it a frustratingly reined-in, restrained way of designing. The former mind has, admittedly, a much greater grasp of the historical context and importance of his work which which to appreciate it.


Talking of restraint, The Seffalice watched Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood for Love again and for the first time respectively. It's a briliantly conceived movie – think Remains of the Day meets Sky 3's The Best is Yet to Come meets the scenes with Bruce Willis's wife in Die Hard set in Hong Kong. In the 1960s.

Set in 1960s Hong Kong, a man and a woman move into spare rooms in adjoining flats, with their respective wife and husband, and are incredibly polite to each other. It has only the two main characters, a handful of locations (a couple of rooms in the two neighbouring flats, the corridor connecting the two flats, the street and noodle bar outside and a couple of workplaces), and a very minimal script. It could easily be a stageplay, but is made into a movie - in the way that, say, the movie of Glengarry Glen Ross is not - by the editing, the speed of turnover between scenes and the outstanding set and design. The camerawork is brilliant making even the exterior scenes feel cramped, with Mrs Chan's clothes, a different colourful slinky dress in every scene, rebelling against their lack of space.

The highlight for both halves of The Seffalice was the incidental music, in particular a phrase of very beautiful violin and cello that was repeated several times during the first half of the film. Michael Galasso was credited with the original score, but there was several pieces of licenced music (including a Nat King Cole version of Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps recorded in Spanish. Have pop stars stopped doing that now? The Beatles used to record versions of their songs in at least German and Spanish). I think the one we liked most is the theme by Shigeru Umebayashi. Definitely worth looking for emusic or iTunes. Anyone else heard any other of their work?

Suffice to say it's not a quick-paced movie, lots of sitting quietly looking askance. If you're in the mood for a slow movie, however, you'll love it. Beware though, if you can't speak Cantonese as fluently as The Seffalice you may find irritation in the use of white subtitles in film in which most of the male characters wear brilliantly white shirts. The Mighty Reptile, do you have any influence in the world of international subtitling?

Which reminds me, good news from before The Seffalice left the UK from Tesco's Cooked Sliced Meats Packaging Department: they've finally hired someone with enough gumption to realise that packing the meats with the toppermost piece of meat stacked at the opposite end of the pack to the pack's opening tab is madness. One fewer reason for The Seffalice to spend its lunch hour angry.

Barga

Barga is a good day trip to take from Lucca, about 40km north (taking a picturesque hour on the local bus), on the edge of the Apuane Alps as you head up into the Garfagnana hills.

Barga is built around the peak of hill, at the top of which is the cathedral with narrow alleys running down the hill between the houses to the old town walls. All in all, exactly what you'd imagine a Tuscan hilltop town to be, with views of the surrounding countryside to match.


The cathedral is quite spare inside, with a large open area at the back, some pews on a raised section, and the normal frescos and decorative fanciness around the altar and the chapels on either side. The stand-out piece is the large 13th century pulpit; you could see how the Pisano pulpits in the Pisa cathedral and baptistry were derived. It was lit very well through swirling yellow stained glass set high on the walls, though I imagine on a less sunny day it could be quite gloomy. In fact, while we visited in blazing November sun, the wind fairly whipped up the narrow streets and across the top of the town, and being as isolated as it is I'd guess it could be miserable in mid-winter. You can well see why Barga is The Most Scottish Town in Italy.

It even has a museum to its Scottish links, plus an annual fish and chips festival, and holds the highest rates of obesity, heart disease and teen pregnancy in Italy in tribute. I may or may not have made the last part up.

Apparently a lot of Bargians emigrated to Scotland in the 19th century and since, so now a disproportionate number of Scots with Italian ancestry trace their roots back to here. Some Scottish Bargians have since moved back to Barga, plus there seems to be a largish additional English-speaking population here (see www.barganews.com). Either way they seem to be proud of their Scot-osity in a way that escapes the English, see the Scottish-Italian high-fliers they trumpet in the museum:


I'm still dipping into Graham Robb's The Discovery of France, and will continue to post bits and pieces here in an effort to pique your collective interest. It's a very bottom-up account of life in France – his concern is to describe the life of the silent majority in pre-20th century France; which translates as everyone not living in Paris or a couple of other major cities.

His chapters on travelling in France in the 18th and 19th centuries are very good; essentially travelling any distance at all was a horrifically jarring experience, for both rich and poor. While improvements were made to the transport network during this time, the benefits that we now suppose to be instantaneous were not necessarily experienced by most people then; in fact the new roads were often not much used at all. Bear this passage in mind next time the BBC show their adaptation, Jane Austen and the Brontës Visit Provence:

...the experience of individuals was not arithmetically linked to increasing road length and diminishing journey times. Historical dramas usually show the most efficient technology of the period – healthy horses pulling shiny carriages on slightly bumpy roads – but not the most ordinary scenes of daily life: a cow munching peacefully on a main road near a city; two carriages stuck facing each other for hours on a road so narrow that the doors could hardly be opened; a horse, with wooden planks placed under its belly, being hoisted out of a mud-hole; a farmer ploughing up the road to plant his buckwheat and potatoes....

The Bargello

So it turns out that I deleted the photo of the statue of the unnamed 15th century Genoese gentleman who looked like Marty Feldman, but if you go here you'll see exactly how the statue looked.

That disappointment doesn't distract from the Bargello being my favorite Florence museum so far. We found out at the end that we weren't supposed to take photos, when I was reprimanded for trying to find the best angle for Michelangelo's bust of Brutus (the contemporary context for the piece being one or other of the Medicis then recent assassination of one or another local despotic ruler). But I captured a number of nuggets before then.

Anyway, the Bargello is the old Police Chief's headquarters now used as the major gallery for sculpture. Its big name pieces are some early works by Michelangelo, but it's stuffed with other treasures too. My highlights were:
1.the several Donatello works. I'd not seen much of his so far except an awesome bronze of St Ludovic in Santa Croce basilica.


The imposing St George in the Bargello seems similar the to St Ludovic but does a better job of holding your gaze and worrying you that if you turn your back he may step down from his perch and start smiting.


I particularly liked this impishly deviant looking raver of a Cupid. He's got the underdressed but smart look that the early hours rump of last year's Berlin stag party needed when they were turned away from the gay club.


2. The numerous Giambologna pieces, every one of which worth as long as you can spare. His superiority to his contemporaries demonstrated amply by a collection of a dozen or so studies of birds; half of which made by him, half by rivals. His are riven by movement and rough edges, the others are smooth casts with feathers and details scored onto the surface. Foolishly I didn't take any comparative shots.

A Giambologna turkey

As with last year's trip to the Prado in Madrid and Goya, Velazquez, Bosch etc, I was naively taken aback that such work was being done so long ago.

3. The incredible reliefs sculpted/carved(?) by various artists. I'd never though much of them until this trip, and following the Pisa cathedral doors last week we saw the Ghiberti and Brunelleschi sketches for the Florence Baptistry doors competition this time.
My favourite relief was the one below, a section of the Barbarians versus the Romans by Bertoldo di Giovanni:


4. Finally, the intricately carved ivory from across Europe from the 10th century onwards. You could well imagine someone spending their extra cash on some tiny carved trinket with a religious scene on it then inviting the Grande Formaggio from the next parish to come round to spend the evening admiring it. I'd have thought that to have so many as the Bargello does in one place would probably astound your average medieval bigwig more than all the paintings we've seen.

The only disappointment, as such, was that I really couldn't get into the glazed terracotta of the Della Robbia clan, of which The Bargello has an ample collection. The technique really sucks the life out of what might otherwise be attractive sculptures. Maybe in context, on the wall of a parochial church or the townhouse of some local burgher they might seem more appropriate, but to be displayed alongside genuinely vibrant works here their restraint makes them seem a pale waste of time.

But the Bargello was well worth the €4 entrance fee several times over. It may not have the grandstand pieces of other museums but it would be the one I'd recommend to a Florence visitor looking for something more interesting than the usual suspects.