Scioglilingue

I've being struggling to learn Italian verb endings today, which has scrambled my brain somewhat.

For light relief here are some Italian tongue-twisters courtesy of my very useful Lonely Planet Italian phrasebook:

O schiavo con lo schiaccianoci con che cosa schiacci? Schiaccio sei noci del vecchio noce con lo schiaccianoci.
(Oh, slave with the nutcracker what are you cracking? I am cracking six nuts from the old walnut tree with the nutcracker.)

Orrore, orrore, un ramaro verde su un muro marrone!
(Horror, horror, a green lizard on the brown wall)

Trentatre Trentini entrarono a Trento, tutti e trentatre trotterelando.
(Thirty-three Trentonians came into Trento, all thirty-three trotting.)

For the benefit of pronunciation:
Double letters don't change the sound but make the same sound longer.

Ca, Co and Cu are pronounced Ka, Ko and Koo
Ce and Ci are pronounced Che and Chee
Che and Chi are pronounced Ke and Kee
If there is an I between a C and an A, O or U, the I is not pronounced, but is used to make a Ch sound. So Cia, Cio and Ciu are Cha, Cho and Choo.

Gs similarly; a hard G with Ga, Go and Gu, a soft G (like a J) with Ge and Gi, Ghe and Ghi to make a hard Ge or Gi sound, and the invisible I rule applies here too.

Tutto chiaro?

Mornington Crescent.

è nubile?

What's the convention with posting about different things on the same day? I'll split them up this time but fancy the idea of a single pot pourri posting.


The Italian words for single (i.e. unmarried) are "celibe" for a man and "nubile" for a woman. I'm presuming the English connotations apply here too. It's a very neat summary of the conflicting expectation and tempatations of the unmarried (at least historically) and an indicator of where blame would once have laid if anyone strayed. I think these terms are used only when completing forms rather than in spoken language, though I like to imagine them in a conversation at a singles bar.

- Hi, I'm Giacomo. Are you nubile?
- Yes. Are you celibate?
- Yes. Damn.
- Damn.

Francesco, giullare di Dio

The fourth consecutive day of torrential rain today - they don't put that on the postcards. Our regular internet cafe was immediately flooded and shut on day one, and the groovy internet bar I've using in the evenings since didn't seem to bother opening at all yesterday.

So a day of internet-free wet weather activities yesterday: more Discovery of France, Michel Thomas tapes (of whom more another time) and some leisurely cooking.

We're managing to stick to only local ingredients so far without the routine growing stale. The photo above is my regular breakfast: local salami (lots of big bits of soft succulent fat in it), local cheese (maccagno riserva at the moment, a strong soft cheese tasting on the point of being blue) and a fresh focaccia from the deli downstairs. Not much skilled prepartion involved admittedly, but I over-garlicked the lunchtime gnocchi con aglio e olio (e pecorino e basilico) and didn't care to reward it with a photo.

Roberto Rosselini's Francesco, giullare di dio (Francis God's Jester) is vaguely local film - he tells his followers to go off and preach on their own and they ask how they should know where God wants them to go; Francis has them spin around until they're so dizzy they fall over. When he asks them, in turn, in which direction they fell over they reply "Siena", "Florence", "Arezzo", "Pisa", "Spoleto". The Seffalice will be trying this method today at the train station and hoping God points us towards Castelnuovo di Garfagnana as that's where we'll have bought tickets for.

It's an episodic movie (co-scripted by Fellni and made with amateur actors), with little plot as such, but very engaging for all that. It consists of a series of scenes from a short period in St Francis's life, when he gathered his first followers together. I think it's pro-Church or at least pro-Francis, but find it difficult to be sure. The Franciscans are depicted as a bunch of man-child simpletons and Francis in the manner of The Sphinx from Mystery Men. The world outside their commune is worse, however, and is influenced positively by their actions, so I guess I'll have to see some more Rosselini to work it out.

Rather than Francis, the most featured character is the dimmest monk of the lot, Ginepro. He stars in the best episode of the movie in which, having finally been allowed to preach (having been previously restricted to camp) he approaches a band of barbarians besieging a city, led by "the tyrant Nicholas" (played magnificently by Aldo Fabrizi, a 1950s Italian Brian Blessed). After being literally thown between the barbarians (all seemingly in one shot) he's summarily sentenced to death. I couldn't find the scene itself on YouTube but it's worth putting the movie onto a LoveFilm list or similar.It's not too long but be warned, it's a slow one with little action or conventional plot.

If you have five dollars and Chuck Norris has five dollars, Chuck Norris has more money than you.

It's probably just coincidence rather than Italian legislation, but every time I've turned on our TV a Chuck Norris movie is showing on one of our six channels.


Off topic today but I've just started Graham Robb's The Discovery of France which I've been anticipating since reading a review of it eighteen months ago that included mention and photograph of the Landes shepherds on 8 foot stilts who could run as fast as horses.

I picked up a copy of the new paperback edition before leaving the UK and am trying to limit myself to a few pages a day so as to savour it. The first half dozen pages are croppings from adulatory reviews, so it turns out its not my little secret. I shan't let that spoil it for me though.

Anyway Graham Robb's starting point is that the France we know today and assume to have existed for a good while is the result of

...the metropolitan view of writers like Balzac and Baudelaire, for whom the outer boulevards of Paris marked the edge of the civilised world...

and that even a hundred years ago most people in France would not be able to speak or understand French.

So he's spent years cycling around rural France noting, I hope, mind-blowing customs and facts; I'll be dropping these in to postings here when I'm short of other things to say.

To start off from the first page when talking of Le Gerbier de Jonc, the mountain at the source of the Loire and, from the top of which, one-thirteenth of France's land surface is visible:

...phonolithic rock [is] so called because of the xylophonic sound the stones make as they slide away under a climber's foot...

A Viareggio

The view from our balcony at 9.30 yesterday morning.

Repaid in full today for my e-mail and SMS smugness about yesterday's blazing sunshine.

Despite being serially drenched I really liked Viareggio, a seaside resort forty bus minutes from Lucca and the major town on a stretch of the north Tuscan coast called the Versilia.

Reputed as a big party town in the summer, it's on its way to shutting down for the winter now, but still good for a visit. The too-cool TimeOut guide went heavy on Viareggio's kick as a gay hangout but I'd guess you'd need to know where to look; nothing was apparent unless heavy rain has been claimed by the gay community.

It has a lengthy promenade of two- and three-storey Art Nouveau buildings now housing ice-creameries, bars and shops. At the southern end is a marina and a couple of dockyards good for a half-hour meander amongst the boats, and then a large nature reserve/woods running out of town alongside the beach. At the other end of the the promenade are apparently more woods and a huge collection of workshops for carnival floats, though I didn't get that far as the volume of rain became farcical. I tried taking photos of it to prove something or other, but couldn't do it justice.

Anyway I'll definitely be back to Viareggio on a dry day. Sadly we'll be gone by February when it holds its four-week carnival (hence the floats mentioned earlier). It's described in one of guidebooks as second only to Venice's Mardi Gras. Not that I know what that's like.

N.B. At some point I'll be getting photos up on here, though it'll probably have to wait till I've got our internet dongle to play ball; I've not mastered the technology to get images from my phone to my e-mail account. Don't go sitting by your computers though, the camera on my phone is particularly shitty.

A Palazzo Pitti, Firenze

The view of Florence from one of the upper floors of the Palazzo Pitti. If you look closely, at the bottom is a statue of Cosimo I's court dwarf, Pietro Barbino, riding naked on a turtle.

The modern art gallery at the Palazzo Pitti is much underwritten in our various guidebooks, talked down and included as an afterthought to the effusive praise given to the main gallery of Medici commissioned and collected Renaissance paintings.

Of the hundreds of (mostly Italian) artists displayed - all new to me - Raffaello Sorbi and Alfredo Muller particularly caught my eye. The whole gallery was outstanding though, with works from the 17th to 20th centuries included as 'modern' in Florentine eyes, and worth a visit on its own. If you prefer post-Renaissance go round the modern art display before the main event - the sheer volume of works packed into every room of both galleries meant we'd hit the wall after a couple of hours before even getting into the modern gallery.

The scale and skill of the Renaissance works are plain, but I find it difficult to get hooked by the biblical and mythical scenes without a full history and context of artist and subject in each case.

The combination of subject matter and style of the later works makes a much more immediate impression on me, and gives a much deeper look into the character of the subject. Do all art newbies feel this way? I'm hoping our weekly visits to Florence will broaden my palat(t)e. What's the etymology there?

Back to the Palazzo Pitti - it swapped ducal hands a few times after the Medicis, eventually ending up with the Bonapartes during their romp through Europe, aiding the influence of the French on Italian artists during this time.

Apparently French 19th century landscape artists used a black mirror to clearly show light and shade, removing intermediates, when considering their scene. Does everyone already know this?