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.