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 Out of date now though.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.