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.

Ice-Cream Review #1: Festival del Gelato (Via del Corso, Firenze)

The Seffalice and Ma and Pa Seffalice had the following flavours between us: caffè, ciccolato fondata (sp?), mango (sp again?), vaniglia, zuppa inglese (cf. posting of a few days ago). These reviews aren't going to be very scientific: we didn't like the Festival del Gelato's ice-creams so much as they were not tasty and delicious.

We've had quite a few Italian ice-creams now (I'll be back-dating some reviews in due course using The Seffalice's Cast-Iron Tasty and Delicious rating system), and while they can be tasty and delicious, their reputation seems a bit overblown. They're certainly not a patch on the Devon and Cornwall vanilla.

If any publishers or TV production companies want to advance The Seffalice to hire a refridgerated van from Woollacombe, fill it with best West Country clotted cream ice-cream and drive it around Italy The Seffalice would be most approachable. One half of The Seffalice can't drive and neither half speaks anything approaching comprehensible Italian. Think of it as Jamie Oliver meets Die Hard meets Death of a Salesman.

'Uffa!

A hiatus in blogging for a few days while hosting the visit of Ma and Pa Seffalice. I'll post more fully later on The Most Scottish Town in Italy, pushiness and a statue that looks just like Marty Feldman.

As I always maintained, Seffalices are natural cyclists. We have photos to prove it. But, a question: if a Seffalice was to leave a second-hand bike outside in torrential rain for four weeks and the various knobs and bits round the wheels were now looking a lot rustier than before how significiant woiuld that be?

Update on useful Italian words we pick up:
'Uffa! - either "Come on", if said in an exasperated tone, or "Damn", if said with more resignation or sarcasm.

Tiramisu classico al caffe....the story so far

The equipment in our kitchen could be described as basic at best. However armed with a new barbantia whisk from our local supermarket Esselunga, which had made it back in the basket of my bike, I made my first attempt at the classic Italian 'Dolce' Tiramisu (literally translated as Pull Me Up).

Valentina Harris (this plus the River Cafe vegetable cook book are the only ones that we have with us) calls for the following ingredients:

400g Mascarpone cheese
4 eggs seperated
4 tablespoons caster sugar
2 teaspoons espresso coffee
8 tablespoons weak coffee
6 tablespoons rum, brandy or Marsala
about 20 bourdoir or saviardi biscuits
2 teaspoons cocoa powder
2 teaspoons finely ground coffee

This serves 6, I reduced the quantities by half, because as you all know The Seffalice has a small appetite.

Thank goodness she uses spoons rather than weights (except bizarley for the Mascarpone, as we don't have any scales). Firstly the Mascarpone is softend and the beaten egg yolks and sugar are gradually added, using my shiny new whisk, during this process at least a quarter was dropped on the floor, due to the shallowness of my plastic bowl which is also melted on one side, presumbably during some culinary catastrophe experience by a previous tenant.

The espresso is then added to the Mascarpone, the coffee here ROCKS, there are no starbucks, and we have one of those stove top coffee pots, apparently the same as one that Rol had at Burnley Rd that always made the stove dirty when he forgot about it and it overflowed. It's good stuff, very strong!

It was at this stage that I read the recipe properly and realised that I had to whisk the egg whites to stiff peaks....by hand! I would like to think that doing this is the 'proper' way, and a sign of a true chef, in reality not having an electric whisk rather annoyed me, and my arm got tired. This is then folded into the cheese mixture.

Then the bourdoir biscuits (if you're Emily and Graham you can make your own boudoir biscuits in your antique tin – you will need to find your own recipe) are dipped into the weak coffee and, we opted for Marsala – mainly because it was the cheapest one in Esselunga, and layered onto the bottom of the tin followed by a layer of the cheese mixture, a second layer of biscuits and another layer of cheese mixture, the cocoa and coffee are sprinkled ontop the dish is then 'bashed' to settle the layers and left in the fridge for at least 3 hours, prefferably overnight.

The verdict
Very delicious, needs more booze and coffee – will continue to experiment until I've found the perfect quantities!

Exciting news from the world of Shithead

Ever innovators, The Seffalice has developed a new rule: playing a joker means you swap cards with (one of) your opponent(s). We call the new rule The Seffalice and are realising it free of charge under a Creative Commons licence. Prepare to have your card-playing world turned upside-down.

Sculpture Schmulpture Vulture

Visits to Pisa and Florence in the last couple of days have seen The Seffalice's mind blown by the sculpture on view.

As ever, The Seffalice Shoddy Camera Phone does the opposite of justice to its victims in the photos following.

Florence's Piazza della Signoria was the stage for the monk Savonarola's Bonfire of the Vanities in 1497 (and his own death at the stake a year later). Savonarola briefly took charge of Florence amidst an austerity backlash against the culture of the Renaissance and the Medicis following the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent and the consequent (temporary) fall of the main Medici reign (the Medici family later regained power in Florence and limped on until the 18th Century but Florence had lost its position as Renaissance hub to Rome and Venice with Lorenzo's death).

The fascinating thing about this is that Savonarola's back-to-Medieval-basics campaign had the active support of the artists and patrons whose work and lives he preached against; Michelangelo and Botticelli were said to be amongst those who threw their 'blasphemous' works onto Savonarola's fire. Were those who patrons who bought and sold art to gain influence, and those artists available to be bought and sold, so flexible that they just bent with the prevailing wind?

The Piazza today hosts a large number of awesome statues, including a copy of Michaelangelo's David, and a couple of supposed duds (supposed because I'd have assumed they were good if I'd not been told otherwise). Michelangelo is supposed to have said of Ammannati's Neptune fountain (in prominent place in the piazza): "Ammannati, what beautiful marble you have ruined." Presumably a major put-down in 15th Century Florence, and apparently even Ammannati thought it sucked.

A major cause of the problem with it was that the original slab of marble was too narrow for the height (and hence intended width) of the statue, so Neptune isn't as broad-chested as a god should have been and also has to take an odd stance with his arm tucked-in to his torso.

Imagine taking however long to carve a major commission from an expensive slab of marble then realising halfway through that you've started it off too big. I often do similar when trying to fit some writing onto one line then having to write smaller and smaller as I head towards the edge of the page.

The second 'disappointment' (fenced off for restoration at the moment) is Bandinelli's Hercules and Cacus; disparaged by the snooty Florentines and described by rival sculptor Cellini as looking like "a sack of melons".

At the head of the piazza is the Loggia dei Lanzi (named after Cosimo de Medici's bodyguards, The Lancers); originally built as a raised, covered area so the Charlie Big Potatoes could be sheltered while the hoi polloi milled around in the Tuscan sun and rain, Cosimo later installed his bodyguard there to intimidate the masses.

Amongst the numerous statues installed in the Loggia today are two worth coming to Florence for on their own: the first is Cellini's Perseus, holding the head of Medusa;

the second, Giambologna's attempt to outdo Cellini, The Rape of the Sabine Women.


Pisa had its own sculptural marvels, of a different type. While the two statues pictured above astound as single pieces because of the combination of their scale and twisting lines that give life to their scene from every angle, the two works that stood out in Pisa were series of scenes carved into the essential framework of the building.

Nicola and Giovanni Pisano (father and son) produced the two pulpits in the baptistery and cathedral respectively. Both tell biblical stories scene by scene in incredible, intricate detail. Below is the pulpit from the cathedral. I didn't have a dinosaur to hand to demonstrate scale but, if you can imagine it, it would come roughly halfway up the thigh of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

Best of all were the three enormous doors to Pisa cathedral, the work of Giambologna (he of The Rape of the Sabine Women, above) and his workshop. I was too sheepish to try and capture them in a photo – this site has some.

Credit where it's due

So just us as the French have "creme anglaise", Italian credits Britain with:
(a) Zuppe inglese
(b) La chiave inglese
Answers at the bottom of the blog.



Florence's kickass Santa Croce church has numerous attractions that I'd have thought mean nothing in a list if you don't know the pieces (Cimabue's Cruxifixion, Brunelleschi's Capella de'Pazzi, Giotto's and Taddi's frescoes, Ghiberti's Baptistry doors, Donatello's Crucifix - see, means nothing to me and I've seen them.) Anyway, you can read about them on the link.
The bit I wanted to pick out were the masses of important people buried there (like St Paul's in London I guess). Below clockwise from top right, in shoddy camera phone style: Michaelangelo's tomb, Machiavelli's cenotaph, Galileo's tomb and Dante's memorial.



I'll post on Pisa another time, but as it relates to the above, here's a picture of the most important chandelier in science:



It hangs from Pisa's duomo and was what sparked Galileo to come with his pendulum theory.

Someone or other has declared 2009 the International Year of Astronomy in honour of the 400th anniversary of Galileo's first astronomical observations, so if astronomy's your thing next year would be a good time to visit Pisa and Florence as they'll be hosting lots of events.


Answers to the English question:
(a) Trifle (Lit. "English soup"). Or at least as far as the Italians can bear to approximate. Their version sounds much tastier than ours, and is available in geleteria. I'll be giving it a go as soon as I can face forgoing one of the other flavour gelati.
(b) The spanner ("the English key").
I'll post more as I come across them.

In bocca al lupo

Italy was as excited as everyone else about Barack Obama winning the US presidential election, so excited they had a full-blown colonel read out the weather forecast at 7.00 in the morning.

It's odd how what must be a relatively common word can completely escape your attention, then keep cropping up.

Shortly before we left the UK, Alberto wished me "in bocca al lupo". Which befuddled me as I thought I had least mastered the common hellos and goodbyes of Italian at that point. It means "In the mouth of the the wolf", and is a charming Italian expression for good luck (in the same way that we have "break a leg"). The correct response is "Crepi" or, in full, "Crepi il lupo", I think meaning "kill him" or maybe "kill the wolf". It comes from when people would go out to hunt and were wished luck before leaving.

Then on reading further Graham Robb's Discovery of France, he talks about the time when following the French Revolution, the common people got to list their long-held grievances:

Hunting rights were the sorest point: to see a furry feast scampering across a field and to know that catching it might mean death by hanging was more than a hungry peasant could bear. If the local lord spent all his time in a city or was not very keen on hunting, the area might be overrun by deer, boars, hares, rabbits and pigeons. To many foreign travellers, the characteristic sound of the French Revolution was the constant crepitation of muskets in the countryside exterminating the animals that had once enjoyed aristocratic immunity.

So "crepitation" is today's special word.

Incidentally, Alberto also advised me of some other less well-known Italian sayings for good luck, though I'm not sure if he was fooling with me:

In culo alla balena (answer: sperando che non caghi!)
In the arse of the whale (I hope he doesn't take a shit)

In groppa al riccio (answer: con le mutande di ghisa!)
On the back of a hedgehog (With iron trousers)

Aliche's first blog

London - Lucca, Lucca - London, London - Lucca

After spending 1 week in lovely Lucca, exploring the apparently Renaissance walls on our bikes and trying to burn off the vast amounts of cheese and pasta lready consumed, I got the offer of work for a week in London, so I abandoned Seffers and headed back to the big smoke, to help out at the Quantum of Solace junket and premiere. Whilst there a took the oppurtunity to reacquaint myself with some home comforts that we had found ourselves missing in our first week, namely burgers and curry (sorry Seffers!)


Having done my bit, I was looking forward to returning to quiet peaceful Lucca and getting back into the routine of cycling the walls, eating pasta, and wandering into churches trying to look I know the difference between Renaissance, Romanesque, Neo-classical and gothic architecture. However this had to go on hold as in my abscence the town had become over run with comic and games fans. It appears that teenage and not so teenage Italians take their geekery VERY seriously, and for the past 3 days we have been enjoying watching them dressed up as all sorts of characters from Lord of the Rings, Power Rangers, and other things which I wasn't too sure about, and planning and conducting battles on the walls - it's not so easy to cycle through a crowd of elf's attaching orks and battle axes!





Thankfully the geekery hasn't rubbed off on Seffers whilst I was away. Then again he did suggest that we visit Pistoia, which along with being where the pistol was invented is also the world manufactorer of trains......

Le lezioni imperato

The Seffalice is not yet used to the Italian custom of shops, museums and services being shut between 12.30 and 3.30 for lunch; typically we arrive somewhere just as everyone is closing up for several hours. Plainly it's a nice relaxed way of living and, restaurants being the only places tht stay open, it wouldn't be a problem at all if the Seffalice wasn't being such a cheapskate and making packed lunches.

Another thing learned over the past couple of weeks is that it's usually better to take the bus than the train (on short excursions at least), particularly to towns with old centres; the train stations are invariably outside the city walls whereas buses drop you in the middle of town.

Case in point: Castelnuovo di Garfagnana in the Garfagnana hills, and on the edge of the Apuane Alps national park. I headed there last week to have a nose around, but mostly to buy some walking maps from the national parks office there. My thousand-mile trek from the train station into the town proper meant I found everything had shut up by the time I got there. I ate my packed lunch in the drizzle and gave up when the drizzle became a downpour and I still had two hours left before everything reopened. Lesson 2:there is no shortcut from Castelnuovo old town to the station, and trying to find one is fruitless. Lesson 3: nor are there pavements.