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 Out of date now though.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.