The enigmatic town of Pontremoli

Last spring, when we took the train to La Spezia, Danny noticed the town of Pontremoli as we passed by and announced that we had to go back sometime, because he thought it looked interesting. (I was of course reading something and hadn't noticed the place.)

Recently we heard from an old friend, C., who turns out to be living in the hills above Pontremoli. None of us has a car, but if we were willing to take a train to Pontremoli, she said, she could take an early-morning bus down to the town and meet us there for lunch. Now we had two reasons to make a day trip there, and so we went, bringing Pam along with us.

Pontremoli is a medieval town about an hour from Fidenza, on the northeastern edge of Tuscany. It takes its name from a "trembling bridge" across the Magra River. Magra means skinny or slender, and the river certainly doesn't look like much in the summer.

But C. tells us that the winter rains swell the river to the point where it regularly floods the low-lying parts of town and forces the evacuation of many residents. At least the bridge is now a sturdy stone one that doesn't tremble at all.

Pontremoli seems considerably less modernized than our town. There are plenty of beautiful old palazzi but the streets are dark and narrow. Our friend says that many houses are still heated with wood. (Hers has a more up-to-date pellet stove.) One household was chopping up fuel for next winter as we went by.

It was too early in the season for chestnuts or mushrooms, but Danny was eager to try testaroli, another local specialty--large wheat-and-water crepes that are eaten with pesto or olive oil. We had some at lunch, an experience I don't feel we need to ever repeat. The testarolo was flabby and flavorless, even slathered with pesto--and both C. and Pam assured us that this was evidence not of the restaurant's incompetence, but its authenticity. 

Testaroli are sometimes called the earliest form of pasta, and it does seem primitive compared to tagliatelle or spaghetti, both in texture and taste. Some people love them, though I have a hard time imagining why. I've even noticed vacuum-packed testaroli for sale in the wonderful cheese and salumi shop downstairs from us, looking like large brown plastic place mats. 

Speaking of primitive, we also visited one of Pontremoli's main attractions, the Museo Statue Stele, a collection of Bronze Age sculptures believed to be divinities or totems carved by people who lived in the area five thousand years ago. The carvings were unearthed relatively recently, and the details of who these people were and what these stelae meant to them remain mysterious. 

The collection is small but the museum has wisely made it extremely photogenic.

 The earliest specimens have no necks. 

Later versions have shield-like heads. Throughout, the male figures are distinguished by daggers held at crotch level, the females by prominent breasts.

The collection is housed in an 11th-century castle on a hill overlooking the town. It's called Castello del Piagnaro, named after the piagne, the sandstone slabs used to cover the roof, which seems like a very casual style of shingling, but evidently a durable one.

After admiring the stelae we wandered around the castle, which was mostly empty. When I looked in one open door, though, I found myself staring at a darkened room full of bunk beds which were in turn full of scantily clad men, who laughed as I scurried away. I can't imagine what they were doing there. Pontremoli is on the Via Francigena, so perhaps they were pilgrims resting up before pushing on to Fidenza. Or maybe, like so many Pontremolians in days of yore, they were seeking sanctuary inside the castle walls.  

From the castle ramparts we could see the town and the dome of its cathedral. Which we stopped into on our way back to the train. It's an adorable baroque candy box...

...with a black Jesus...

...and a mummified nun.

I couldn't find any information in the cathedral or on line explaining any of this. By then it was becoming clear that this was a day of mysteries.

While in the cathedral I was struck by how much the escutcheons you see all over Catholic churches, gazing down at us from above altars and doorways, look like those little Bronze Age divinities. 

Could there be a connection? Is there any way to know?

After a late afternoon gelato we said good-bye to C. and headed back to the train station and home. 

Our stomachs were happy, but my head at least was heavy with unanswered questions.

How hot is it?

We are in the midst of a Europe-wide heat wave, yet another effect of global weather weirding. In Fidenza the temperature reached 101 degrees Fahrenheit yesterday and is heading that way today. (I'm trying to learn Celsius but my brain is too warm for that this week.) When we went out for drinks in the piazza last night the bar was running low on ice.

We have no air-conditioning in our apartment and are making do with pedestal fans, closed blinds, and cold showers. It's pretty miserable. Even places with AC don't have systems strong enough to really make you feel cool in this weather--just a bit less hot.

My phone reminds me that the high in El Cerrito today will be 73 degrees. I love Fidenza, but this is making the prospect of heading back to California a lot easier.

Night life is the right life

For a small town without much tourist business, Fidenza seems to have a lot going on. Here are a few of the local events we've attended lately or at least walked by.

Beach volley
A couple weekends ago a big fenced-in patch of sand appeared in the middle of the main square. The town was putting on a tournament of "beach volley," which is what Italians call beach volleyball. I'm not sure they even play regular volleyball, but "beach volley" is a thing.

The team with the colored arm sleeves was sponsored by a local sporting-goods store.

Last year when we visited our friends down south, Fernando, who is a fireman by profession, was telling us that he'd been working seven days a week helping out after a big earthquake in a town not far from their village, Montagano. And the next week he was heading to Sweden. I asked if he was doing earthquake relief in Sweden. (Do they have earthquakes there?) His wife guffawed--he and the rest of the local fire department team were traveling to Oslo to play in a "beach volley" tournament. 

I have to say that the level of play in Fidenza was not terribly high, and there wasn't much of a crowd. Apparently "beach volley" is not a big deal here, at least not yet.

Basketball 
After a few days of beach volley the sand disappeared, replaced with a big blue plastic basketball court. Pallacanestro (literally "ball basket") is really popular in Italy these days; after decades of watching people move balls around with only their feet, it must be thrilling to see them passing, dribbling, and shooting with their hands.

I was alerted to the start of play one evening when vintage pop music began blaring from the piazza, followed by highly amplified voices that even a non-Italian speaker could have identified as excited sports commentary.

I am not a sports fan, but I loved hearing the announcer yell "Gran canestro!" and "Un blocco irregolare!" as the players rocketed back and forth across the court and the crowd whooped and cheered.

Like the beach volley teams, the basketball players included both men and women, although the beach-volley gender ratio skewed female and basketball the other way. (I wondered if there was a diversity requirement--in several basketball match-ups both sides seemed to have one rather short woman and lots of tall men.) And as with beach volley, the basketball players were amateurs, sponsored by local businesses. But the hoopsters were a bit more adept and certainly their audience was bigger and more engaged.

The games continued every evening for two weeks. I felt sorry for the folks who live on the piazza, because the blaring loudspeakers were aimed right at their windows, and the action went on every night till 11:30 or 12. We are about a block away and I was grateful our bedroom is on the back of the apartment.

Cooking contest
One night when I went out to get a gelato and watch some basketball I discovered that the other side of the piazza had become the stage for a cooking contest.

In front of the town hall, bleachers had been set up. They looked out over four or five camp kitchens that faced a long table: the judges. Two or three people in white paper toques were working away at each of the little kitchens, and every so often one team or the other would present a dish to the judges and then the young woman who was acting as master of ceremonies would read off the numbers on the Olympic-style cards the judges held up, rating each dish's presentation, technique, and taste. ("Sette, otto, sette, nove...")

I suffer daily frustration here because I am always missing the point of stories and being baffled by what people are saying. But rarely am I as frustrated as I was that evening. The mistress of ceremonies chattered away, the contestants and judges and members of the audience were all talking a mile a minute, but I couldn't understand anything about who these cooks were and what they were making. Nor was I able to find any mention of this event afterward on the town's web site or in the Parma newspaper. I guess it will forever remain a mystery.

La Corrida
One evening when it was still light and basketball wasn't yet underway, Danny and I noticed that a talent contest seemed to be underway. Some kind of dinner had been held in front of the town hall, and now a noisy MC was bringing a series of performers up to a little stage to perform for the assembled diners. One older man gave a slightly out-of-tune but throbbingly emotional performance of a ballad on the theme of love's grandeur and another read a poem that was, I think, about military veterans. A young lady warbled a more up-to-date love song, and then another older fellow gave a halting performance of yet another tune. All four were obviously amateurs, and when they were done the crowd at the tables was urged to determine the winner by their applause. (The first singer was the clear winner, and he was indeed the last weak of the four.)

As best I can remember, this was the winning performance.

I couldn't understand why a banner emblazoned "La Corrida" (The Bullfight) was hanging above these goings-on, since it didn't seem to have anything to do with bulls. (In the photo it's the smaller banner; the larger one above is an Amnesty International protest of the murder of Giulio Regeni, an Italian who was apparently tortured and murdered by the Egyptian authorities in 2016.)

Later I learned that the event in Fidenza was evidently a salute to a popular TV show called (in Italian) "The Bullfight--Amateurs in Jeopardy." (I hope this link works back in the U.S.) It's a bit like the old "Gong Show," with various peculiar individuals displaying their talents or lack thereof and the audience weighing in with applause if they like the performance and with noisemakers when they don't. It seems pretty horrifying.

Here again there didn't seem to be any information I could lay hands on afterward about who'd put this event on and who the competitors were. An awful lot here seems to be communicated by word of mouth, and I'm not in the loop. 

Festa medievale
Not everything happens in the Piazza Garibaldi. Earlier this month Pam mentioned that her choir would be singing one Sunday at a little church on the outskirts of town, and then we saw posters about a "Medieval Festival" and realized her choir was part of the festivities, which also included servings of tortelli and other delicacies made by a squad of church ladies. We couldn't stay away.

We walked out to the church along the path of the Via Francigena, a pilgrimage route that runs from London's Canterbury Cathedral to Rome and that dates back more than a thousand years. The tiny church on whose grounds the festival was held is surrounded by fields of hay and alleys of mulberry trees (silkworms were once cultivated here).

Pam's choir sang a short program of plainchant and sacred songs, accompanied by recorder and lute. For the livelier numbers Pam played the tambour. 

The little church is named after Thomas a Beckett who, as Archbishop of Canterbury, fought to maintain the church's power against that of King Henry 11. When Beckett took the Via Francigena to Rome--perhaps to report on King Henry's misdeeds--he is said to have stopped by this church along the way.

In 1170 the king had the "turbulent priest" murdered. Not long afterward Beckett was named a Catholic saint, and the church was named Chiesa di San Tommaso Becket in his honor.

The festa is an annual fundraiser for the little church and drew an enthusiastic crowd.

Indeed, their enthusiasm was so great that it was almost impossible to hear the second half of the choir program, a set of "tavern songs" performed on the church steps. Italians eating, drinking, and socializing create a mighty roar.

Youngsters in medieval costumes ferried pasta, grilled boar, wine, beer, and other comestibles to the mob of diners, including us. We opted for cheese tortelli, pisarei (a dish of pasta dumplings and beans), and spalla cotta, a local specialty reminiscent of corned beef.

The food was terrific, as expected. The church ladies knew what they were doing. But Pam and Romano wanted to go back to Fidenza proper for a post-performance drink, so I didn't stick around to take pictures of the medieval entertainment. A fire-eater and a snake charmer were promised on the poster, but I didn't see any sign of them. This youngster in knightly garb was the only image I managed to capture before we went off to drink spritzes in the piazza.

The festa was a big success. But tragically, the person taking the proceeds to the bank was reportedly mugged en route and all the money was stolen. This was a shocking development in a town that seems to have very little crime and so much civic spirit. Here again I haven't been able to find any news about when or how this happened, whether the crime has been solved, or how the church is going to recoup. 

Clearly Fidenza needs its own hometown paper. Maybe when my Italian gets a bit stronger...

All done

The painters started work on Monday. By Thursday afternoon they were finished. I am deeply pleased with the results. Now the apartment really feels like our space, and not a rental that we're squatting in.

When we bought the place, in December 2017, it had been rented out for years and the walls were covered with the kind of low-end white paint that's reminiscent of everyone's first apartment--a white that's both dead and too bright, and that rubs off on your clothes. Photos, at least mine, don't really do justice to how crummy that paint looked.

Living room, March 2018

But the zombie white was still vastly preferable to that godawful mural in the master bedroom.

By the way, in the course of this process I learned that in Italian painters of portraits and Renaissance murals are "pittori," but people who paint houses are "imbianchini"--whitewashers--even when they're not painting everything white.

Our imbianchini painted both our bedroom and the living room a pale peach.

Bedroom in progress. Addio, tree mural.

Marcello, il padrone, checking how the living room was coming along.

My phone camera doesn't seem able to accurately capture any of the paint colors, which isn't surprising, since in real life the color seems to change depending on time of day and where I'm standing.

Here's the finished living room, looking a bit peachier in the photo than it actually does.

A beautiful blank wall.

The color works well in the bedroom, too. Danny thinks it makes us look younger--an illusion, to my mind, but a pleasant one.

Another problem with my phone's photography skills is that it can't show the indoors and outdoors simultaneously. One thing I like about this color is the way it contrasts with the yellow building that the bedroom looks out on and with the bright gold building across the street from the living room, but I don't seem to be able to show you.

The two guest rooms are now a soft blue-green.

I'm only showing one of the guest rooms because the other one hasn't been tidied up yet.

The color that pleases me most is the green in the dining room, which sadly is the one that my phone seems least able to capture.

In real life the color is less minty and more olive. It looks great with our green table, which inspired the whole color scheme, and with that tile on the wall, which we inherited from the era when the dining room had been turned into a kitchen. 

As you can see, we haven't put all the pictures back up on the walls yet.

I was surprised by the hand-painted bordini (little borders) that the painters put around the tops of all the walls wherever color met white ceiling. At first I thought they'd used masking tape to make the juncture tidy and had neglected to remove it. Then I realized it was permanent.

This is the guest bedroom, which is not actually painted in two different colors.

They did the same thing around the doorways in and out of the dining room.

That border is painted on, not structural.

I like the way the little borders look but I wondered why they'd done it (and whether it was going to cost extra.) Marcello, the head of the company that did the painting, explained to me that this is standard procedure--no additional charge. 

The reason is that buildings in Italy are often crooked, That's obviously true of houses that are hundreds of years old, but it applies to our building, too. Even though it was built relatively recently (sometime in the 1960s or 1970s), it is not at all straight, as we realize every time we put in cabinets or measure the floors for rugs. I have not idea why this is, and probably don't want to.

Under those circumstances, when a colored wall meets a white ceiling, the resulting line can look noticeably wavy rather than straight. Ditto with the doors if their off-kilter-ness isn't concealed by door frames. Marcello explained that painting a straight border along the edges fools the eye into thinking everything is lining up properly. 

It makes me think of all those sculptures of cherubs and angels on old church ceilings that are actually not carved in marble but just much more economical trompe-l'oeil paintings. It also evokes the Italian expression "fare una bella figura"--the need to look good, to make a good impression, that is so central to Italian-ness. Our apartment may be all out of whack, but thanks to Marcello and his men, no one but us need ever know.

Comments welcome!

Several of my friends tell me that they've tried to leave a comment on one or the other of my posts but haven't been able to. I hate to think what pearls of wisdom or gems of correction I've missed as a result.

I'm always open to reader comments.

Now at last I think I've figured out what the problem is. So all would-be commenters, please try again. Also please give it a try even if you're a commenting virgin. And if it doesn't go through, please let me know via email. I'm determined to make this work. 

Being tourists 3: Faenza

On Wednesday, the third day of our outing, we took the train to Faenza. Six centuries ago the town was a leading producer of decorated ceramics; indeed, the term "faience" for glazed ceramicware comes from the town's name. This history is celebrated in Faenza's Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche, a gigantic collection of everything from pre-Columbian pottery to modern craft. The best part, though, is the vast display of Italian ceramics from the Middle Ages onward.

The museum was our prime reason for heading to Faenza, but on this sultry day we decided to reverse our previous day's itinerary: see the cathedral and a palace before lunch and save the museum (and its air-conditioning) for the afternoon.

The cathedral was impressive, but shortly after we arrived we began hearing the jingling of keys. The caretaker was letting us know it was lunchtime, and that he was closing up, and that we had to leave. We figured we'd do a little ceramics shopping, because surely there must be stores all over selling the stuff. We went all around the vast piazza in front of the cathedral and the surrounding streets and saw only one store selling ceramics. It too was closed for lunch.

The Piazza del Popolo in Faenza, during lunch.

There didn't seem to be many restaurants, either, or much evidence that many tourists ever come to town. Which is strange, because it's a lovely place.

We turned our steps to the Palazza Milzetti, a stately home that's now a museum, one that is open all day. It's an old palace that was rehabbed at the turn of the 18th-to-19th century, a monument to the rather stilted and frantically lavish neoclassicism of the enlightened Italian rich of that era. Mi dispiace, but I don't have many photos of the interior. Google it if you want to see some, but trust me, it's over the top. We weren't surprised to learn that as soon as the renovations were finished, the owner went bust and had to sell to some other plutocrat. 

One thing I did take a photo of was the stove and oven down in the kitchen. Not much was spent to make this part of the house look like a fantasy Greek or Roman temple, but its scale was impressive nonetheless. 

Clearly architectural photos aren't my forte.

There were also some sculptures scattered here and there from the city's collection. I liked this one of Venus doing her monthly self-exam.

After an excellent lunch at Clandestino, a restaurant near the ceramics museum, we headed there for the day's main event. Danny and I had visited it years and years ago and loved it. Since then it has grown even larger, so large that although we tried, we just couldn't see all of it. I spent most of my time looking at the medieval and Renaissance Italian ceramics, which are just great. 

Not surprisingly, food was a frequent theme.

That was true of the modern ceramics as well. This detail of a large wall piece by Giuseppe Ducrot looked very much like the dinner I'd had the night before.

There were also many references to music. Perhaps because I have several good friends who play the viola, I was very taken with this fellow and his viola da braccio.

I also liked this contemporary work by Sergio Gurioli, titled "Violini."

I would have welcomed more context for many of the pieces. Why, for instance, was there evidently so much demand for massive inkwells in the shape of the Judgment of Paris or (as here) a Pieta? 

And whatever was this jar for?

Back in Bologna, we had time to stop into the Basilica di San Petronio and admire both the saint's remains and the Chapel of the Three Kings, where one wall boasts a truly horrific Last Judgment, painted in 1410. Here's a detail.

Note how many of the folks in the lowest part of hell are wearing crowns. 

Inspired by this impassioned condemnation of gluttony and covetousness, Valerie and I went to a shop she'd spotted earlier down the street and we each bought a dress. Then we joined Danny for an ice cream before going out for a pizza dinner. 

Between the food and all the walking, that night I could barely climb the steps back to our Bologna apartment. We'd had a great time, but I was happy we'd be going home the next morning. Fidenza is short on world-historic sights and internationally recognized museums, but our apartment there has an elevator.

Urban renewal

This week the big news is that our apartment is being painted. Here's Marco starting on the kitchen...

...and Cristiano prepping the bathroom.

We're having both these rooms done in white--a nicer white than what's already there, which looks like whitewash and comes off on your clothes if you lean against the wall. I'm nervously waiting to see how the colors I picked for the other rooms look on the walls, as opposed to on one-inch paint chips. Danny said I could choose the paint colors--"Do whatever you want," his personal motto--but I know he's reserving the right to tell me how badly I screwed up once the painting's all done.

No matter how things turn out, I will be grateful to at last be rid of this awful mural in our bedroom. 

The wrongness of the rope on that tire swing irks me every time I see it. Marco and Cristiano will be doing that room tomorrow. Non vedo l'ora! (I can't wait.)

Postscript: They've already started on the dining room--the first room with color. I like it! Thank god.

Danny's comment: "Hmm. It's a little dark." 

Being tourists 2: Ferrara

On Tuesday of last week we took the train from Bologna to Ferrara, where the new Museum of Italian Judaism was our first stop. It's a work in progress; only a small part of the planned museum has actually been built, and it feels a little temporary. The exhibits (labeled in both Italian and English) lean heavily on videos and graphics, with only a few books, paintings, and other objects, many of them reproductions. 

Nonetheless, the story the museum lays out of the Jews' long history in Italy, beginning well before the Christian era, is well told, a tale of alternating acceptance and persecution. I was interested to learn that the Jewish presence was from the start particularly heavy in the land of my ancestors, southern Italy, which must be why so many southern Italians show traces of Jewish DNA. (I did myself for a while, until the Ancestor.com database got larger and more precise, at which point my Jewishness apparently dropped to a disappointing zero.) 

Several surprisingly interesting videos described the Jewish diaspora in Italy.

There is relatively little about the persecution of the Jews in Italy, and the exhibition doesn't get into the modern era. That made this carving of Little Simon of Trento all the more striking.

Little Simon greets death with saintly aplomb.

In 1475 a toddler named Simonino was found dead in Trento, a town in the mountains to the north. The members of Trento's small Jewish community were accused of murdering him in order to use his blood for their religious rituals--according to some, the first appearance of this notorious "blood libel." The Jews were tortured until they confessed. Then they were burned at the stake.

Simonino's body was put in a crypt in a local church and he was canonized as one of Catholicism's official saints, patron of victims of kidnapping and, grim irony, of torture. Moreover, the town held a procession in his honor every year that included a display of the torture implements the Jews had supposedly used on the child. It was only in 1965, in the era of Vatican II, that Little Simon was de-canonized, his body removed from the church (to where, I wonder), and his annual procession called off.

I suppose it's not entirely fair, but I felt there was something thematic in the fact that on our way to our next stop, the Castello Estense, we ran into a rally by the right-wing Lega party, whose candidate for sindaco of Ferrara was in a run-off scheduled for Sunday, June 10. Some of the signs read, "Prima Gli Italiani"--Italians First.

We were amused that the venue they chose was right in front of a McDonald's. That seemed somehow thematic, too. The multinational version of multiculturalism doesn't seem to bother the folks who like the Lega.

Turning our back on the ugliness of current politics, we headed to the castle, but found ourselves confronting a Middle Ages version of other familiar themes. The vast structure dates back to the 1300s, when a violent rebellion against the city's oligarchs led Nicola d'Este to build a fortress surrounded by a moat and outfitted with a maze of underground dungeons.

The dungeons were part of the tour, and were truly horrifying--dank holes behind heavy iron doors, with only a tiny window to the outside, or none at all. Some enemies of the castle's owners were kept in these places for decades.

This way out.

Having paid for tickets that included a tour of one of the castle towers, Valerie and I felt compelled to actually climb to the top of its 120 or so steps. The nicest thing up there was the orangerie.

We didn't think the vaunted view of the city was all that exciting, however. 

From the top of the tower we could barely see the Lega rally (it's at the far end of the big street in the photo), but we could hear it loud and clear. Although the crowd wasn't all that large, it turned out that Salvini himself, the attention-loving co-premier and right-wing poster boy, had arrived in support of the Lega's local candidate. I hoped that with McDonald's so conveniently nearby someone would milkshake him, but no one did.

Worse, we learned today that the Lega candidate won the run-off on Sunday, ending 70 years of local center-left Partito Democratico rule. "Italians First" apparently spoke to the Ferraresi in a way it hadn't in dear old Fidenza.  

Late that afternoon, when we got back to our Bologna apartment. our feet were sore and that four-floor climb felt more than a little onerous. But we rested up, had some wine and pasta, and the next day were ready to head to Faenza.

(To be continued.)