Wouldn't you know it? The heat started to break our last night in Fidenza. It was the first really pleasant summer evening in weeks.
We'd spent much of the day getting last-minute estimates for a new bathroom and for an awning over our sun-baked balcony--projects we hope to take up in the fall. The combined stress of decision-making, money-spending, and figuring out the Italian for "heated towel rack" left both of us eager for what Italians call "il relax."
Pam and Romano met us at our favorite bar on the piazza, N'Ombra de vin, which offers shade, breezes, and very generous free snacks of pizza, chips, and mortadella with your drink. I didn't remember to take a photo until it was almost time to say good-bye.
(We didn't consume a can of tomatoes as part of our evening--the bar uses those cans as napkin holders.)
Admitting publicly how many things I'd intended to do while in Italy this time but hadn't gotten around to spurred me to actually do a few of them. The night before Danny and I stopped by the Cantina del Bugiardo (the Liar's Cellar) and had a drink. It was a charming little place and they claim to make a genuine dry martini. We'll have to go back in the fall and see if it's true. We've looked for dry vermouth without any success and I have yet to encounter a cocktail here that isn't sweet. I'm not usually a martini drinker, but all these sugary spritzes make me thirsty for an American one.
I also gathered all my courage and went into two women's clothing stores that I've been eyeing every since we moved into the apartment. One is Pinko, a local Fidenza brand that is now a national one, and the other is Fiammingo Workshop, which seems to make many of its own clothes. As I suspected from their window displays, the clothes were a little too young and a little too Italian for yours truly (a black sweatshirt with white breasts drawn on it? A sequined halter top? A python mini-skirt? Um, no.) Still, I felt like I'd accomplished something just by going in, and the clothes were certainly fun to look at.
This morning we finished closing up the apartment and packing our bags. We washed the sheets and towels. We gave Pia, our lovely upstairs neighbor, the tomato and banana and onion we hadn't gotten around to consuming and asked her to foster-care Danny's lemon tree while we're gone.
Everything will be ready for us when we return. But seeing the place all tidied and no longer lived-in, with all the shutters closed tight, always hurts my heart a little.
Just as we were heading out to the train station a thunderstorm broke, so we had to run the couple of blocks in pouring rain, trying to simultaneously huddle under a shared umbrella and push along our giant suitcases. (They're mostly empty but we need them for the stuff we'll be hauling back in the fall.) I wish I had a video of that. By the time we got to the train station we were pretty soaked. Here's the piazza in front of the station.
And this was our last sight of Fidenza this time around.
It seemed appropriately sad.
I have to keep reminding myself that we'll be back in not too long. And that I have so many people and activities and other pleasures in California to look forward to.
Last Saturday was a "Notte bianca" (white night) in Fidenza, meaning that the downtown stays open late and there's music or other entertainment in the streets. This time the theme was "Rock che passione!"--an expression of Italians' apparent devotion to American pop hits of yesteryear.
There were booths all over the piazza selling vinyls and CDs, and bars, stores, and gelaterie stayed open till 10, 11, or later. Each block in our immediate vicinity had a band or DJ playing "Proud Mary," "Heard It Through the Grapevine," or "Bohemian Rhapsody," and the music, if live, was, it must be said, really bad--amateur karaoke accompanied by equally unskilled instrumental playing. But everyone was having a great time, and the event drew a crowd.
At around midnight things were beginning to slow down, but the party was still going. I filmed a few moments of the uproar from our balcony. Due to the lousy sound-recording quality of my phone, you can't really hear the thumping music on the video the way you could in real life, just the overall roar.
Things didn't settle down for another hour or so.
On a normal night the bars shut down around 9 or 10 pm and things are pretty quiet. I made this video a few days later, also at around midnight.
The three people walking down the street were singing, not raucously, in Italian, which unfortunately also doesn't seem to come across. It was very sweet.
Those of you who get email alerts about new "Quanto? Tanto!" posts should be aware that videos embedded in the blog can't be accessed in those emails. You have to go to the blog proper to see them. Mi dispiace! (Sorry!)
Ever since I got to Fidenza I've been intending to get to a zumba class. I am a regular at Sunday morning zumba in El Cerrito; it's a lot of sweaty exercise and also a lot of fun, because I love jumping around to the class's Latin-pop music. Zumba is one way I burn off some of the extra wine and pasta that keep my life enjoyable, and it's also a real mood enhancer. I don't know who or where these people are, but their video gives you a little of the flavor.
When we got to Fidenza three months ago I didn't jump right on my Italian zumba project because soon after arriving here we went to New York, and then I spent a few days in London, and then my exercise-seeking energies went into getting my aqua aerobics life organized. Keep in mind that doing anything here like finding a class or signing up at a gym is a big project, because (a) they seem to do most things differently than I'm used to and (b) they do everything in Italian. So it's easy to feel that maybe I should put this off a day or two.
Thus we were already well into June when I finally got around to scoping out where zumba classes were offered in my neighborhood. Happily there's a gym only a third of a mile away, next door to the supermarket, that has zumba on Wednesday evenings. Their web site offered monthly passes, though, and I only wanted to attend a few times before I'd be heading back to California. It took me another week or two to get up my courage (and assemble the necessary vocabulary) to go to the gym and ask if they allowed drop-ins. I was assured that they did, and I wrote in the next Wednesday's class on my calendar.
When the day arrived I squeezed into my spandex capris and a T-shirt and headed over to the class. The full heat wave hadn't hit yet, but it was already plenty warm and I didn't even think of putting on a jacket. But as I walked down our street I was suddenly aware that people were giving me looks as I passed by, of the "what the hell is she wearing?" variety. And it occurred to me only then that in Fidenza you don't see many people strolling around in the kind of workout gear that you actually work out in, especially not women in the "nonna" (grandma) age group.
I scuttled shame-faced to the gym, only to be told by the young lady behind the desk that, for reasons unknown (or possibly just not understood), there would be no class that night. And so my spandex capris and I had to endure walking home five minutes through the same gauntlet of mildly disapproving people.
The following Wednesday was the day we went to Pontremoli, and I didn't get back to Fidenza in time for the class. The week after that we had our successive wave of visiting friends and relatives; I spent that Wednesday evening eating mortadella ravioli and fried salt cod in a local eatery with my friend Jean and her niece Kiki.
The whole time we were running around with company I kept telling myself that I still had several more weeks before we'd be flying back to California. Only after everyone left and the laundry was done did I allow myself to realize that in fact we were leaving in just one week. If I was going to get to an Italian zumba class, it was now or--well, not never, but sometime in the autumn. .
So a few days ago, on Wednesday evening, despite the godawful heat, I got back into my zumba togs, threw a skirt over my ensemble to placate my critical neighbors, and headed back to the gym. The gal at the front desk told me the zumba class had already started 40 minutes before, which gave me a quick burst of cardio activity. But then she realized that this earlier class was not regular zumba, but something called "Zumba Strong." She invited me to go take a look while I waited for the later, less intensive class. Less intensive than zumba?
The gym held about thirty women and one man and had a temperature of about a thousand degrees. Just looking in the door made me sweat. They were all young and fit and, at that moment, doing burpees--jump up, go down into a plank, do a push-up, repeat--with the addition of a two-legged donkey kick into the air after the push-up. And they were doing dozens of them, before moving on to other, equally impossible moves. I silently gave thanks that I hadn't accidentally turned up for this class, which would certainly have killed me.
Eventually they were done and the room emptied out. Meanwhile the instructor for the vanilla zumba class arrived, and it was none other than Ilaria, the same blonde Amazon who teaches aqua aerobics. At least there would be one friendly face in the room.
And perhaps only one, because it looked like she and I were the entirety of the class. I snuck a photo.
"Usually there are a lot of people," Ilaria said. But maybe no one was coming because it was not only horribly hot, but a thunderstorm was starting outside. I probably would have stayed home myself if I hadn't been up against a deadline.
By 7:30, our start time, two more women had turned up and the class got underway. I wish I had the dance vocabulary to explain how Italian zumba differs from Californian--or at least how Ilaria's differs from that of my El Cerrito instructors. For one thing, most of the music seemed to be in Italian, rather than Spanish, insofar as I could pay attention to such details while hopping around and trying to figure out which foot went where. For another, Ilaria's style seemed to me to be a bit less liquid, a bit more martial. Perhaps it was the lingering influence of the beasts of Zumba Strong.
Anyway, we danced and sweated and had a great time, despite the awkward moment when another woman and I ran into each other and it appeared I might have broken her ankle. (She turned out to be okay.)
Afterwards we took a selfie together. Ilaria's the one on the left.
(The third member of the class isn't there because she wears a hijab when she's not dancing in an all-woman setting and didn't want to be photographed bare=headed. She's also the one I inadvertently crashed into, but I don't think she holds it against me.)
There are so many things I put on my to-do list when I got here but that I still haven't gotten to. I wanted to make pig liver with caul fat, but the market doesn't seem to be selling it now. (Maybe it's a spring dish?) I still haven't found my way to the "Rover Joe" Museum or the one dedicated to the author of the Don Camillo novels. I haven't yet gone into the bingo palace or dress shop downstairs or the "Liar's Cellar," a bar near the Duomo whose looks intrigue me.
But at least I've made it to one zumba class, and I have the photo to prove it.
Fidenza is not famous for much, but apparently one thing it's known for is the sound the locals give to the letter r.
Americans, who generally pronounce their r's up against their teeth, often have trouble with the trilled r of Italian and the throaty r of French and German. I can manage a trilled r (if I concentrate) or a throat r, but I can't figure out how to do the Fidenza r, which combines the two.
Romano sports a Fidenza r and so do Franca and many other Fidentini. But our lovely banker, Debora, has perhaps the most pronounced Fidenza r of anyone in our acquaintance. She allowed me to video her saying an Italian tongue-twister (or more properly, throat twister) that's an r-centric variant of our familiar "quick brown fox": "Un ramarro marrone correva nel erba verde." (The brown lizard ran through the green grass.) Here she is:
She's turning up her r here; in normal Italian conversation it isn't so extreme, and when she speaks English she doesn't trill at all. But when she talks about that brown lizard her r is so liquid that she sounds like she's talking underwater. The only way I can get anywhere close to that sound is by gargling.
Some people say this linguistic anomaly is concentrated in Fidenza, others that it's more of a regional thing. But there seems to be general agreement that it reflects the influence of the French, who ruled over Parma and its surroundings from the early 1800s until Italy was unified in 1861. And invariably Maria Luigia, second wife of Napoleon Bonaparte and, after his death, the Duchess of Parma, is mentioned as part of the story.
Maria Luigia during her reign as Empress of the French
She is one of the more glamorous historical figures of these parts, a decorative, much-loved, and oft-married monarch of the little duchy, and I think people like the idea of being connected to her linguistically.
Despite being a French empress, though, Maria Luigia was born a Hapsburg princess, a German-speaking Austrian, and French only by marriage. But perhaps that combination of French and German r's, stirred into Italian, is where the Fidenza r comes from. It's as good an explanation as any.
The same day that we visited Federico's dairy we also organized an afternoon outing to Ozzano Taro, a hamlet a half-hour away, to see the Museo Ettore Guatelli. Our friend Dana had alerted me to its existence and we'd discussed going there last August, but the trip hadn't materialized. Now Dana was in the neighborhood and my brother and sister-in-law were happy to come along. (Just as important, they had a rental car and were willing to drive.) (And Dean took most of the photos accompanying this post, since his were so much better than mine.)
We met up with Dana at a nearby restaurant, ate a meal of torta fritta, salumi, gnocchi in Parmesan cream, pumpkin tortelli, and donkey with polenta. (Everything was good, but the donkey at last summer's festa was better.) Then we headed over to the museum.
Ettore Guatelli was born in 1921. His parents were farmers; he became an elementary-school teacher and a member of the local literati while continuing to live in his family's capacious barn-cum-farmhouse. Sometime in the 1960s he began collecting tools, household items, toys, and other artifacts from his neighbors and in the surrounding countryside. As Italy's peasantry began to emerge from the desperate poverty of the preceding centuries, people were discarding their old, handmade, hard-used, oft-mended things in favor of new, machine-made substitutes, and Guatelli eagerly swept up everything they were getting rid of. He continued to collect for his museum until he died in 2000.
It seems undeniable that Guatelli had a form of hoarding disorder. Equally undeniable is that he channeled his compulsion into an overwhelming installation that's an artwork in its own right. As the members of his family moved away or died, he filled one room after another with his collection, carefully curated and beautifully arranged on every surface, including the ceilings.
Many of the things are handmade, so even spades, scoops, baskets, and wheels that are very similar are also, as Dana put it, "as individual as snowflakes."
Guatelli seemed particularly drawn to objects that had been repaired or repurposed, mute testimony to the scarcity and hardship that ruled rural Italians' lives.
A vast room at the top of the house is the biggest and most delirious installation, with pattern on pattern spreading across and over the space, a tsunami of textures and forms.
In the photo above, the huge accordion-like thing on the lower right side is a church organ's set of bellows, repurposed for a blacksmith's forge before ending up with Guatelli.
There were quite a few stuffed or otherwise preserved animals, including a collection of dried-out rats and mice from various barnyards, the skin of a performing bear alongside a poster advertising his tricks, and this indignant monkey holding a mirror, a backwoods memento mori.
Guatelli's painstaking arrangements were breathtaking, and so were the individual objects, all speaking of a history not so far from us in time yet extraordinarily distant. It took us more than two hours to go through the museum, helped along by our guide, Lino, who knew Guatelli while he lived and is now part of the foundation that keeps the museum going. We knew we weren't managing to examine everything we wanted to, but it was a warm day (the heat wave was starting to move in) and we were all suffering from a combination of overheating, overeating, and visual overload.
While most of the museum had a graphic and monochrome air, the final room on the tour was an explosion of color--Guatelli's collection of tins and cans, their labels still cacophonously bright.
Guatelli called his creation "a museum of the quotidian" and "a museum of the obvious"--that is, of things so everyday that no one notices them. "Anyone can make a museum of beautiful things," he wrote. "It's more difficult to create a beautiful museum with humble things like mine."
I peeked inside some of the cans. They were all full of more cans.
We asked Lino to take our picture as a memento of this wonderful place. Can you see how simultaneously exhilarated and exhausted we were by this whole experience?
Since our visit we've been telling anyone who will listen about the museum. I want everyone I know to go see it, but I'm not sure I want to go back myself. It's a little too overwhelming. In a while I'll probably be hungry to see it again, but for now remembering it is enough.
It is still punishingly hot here. Today's high is going to be 96 Fahrenheit, my phone says, and outside it already feels even worse than that. The sunlight is scorching and presses down on your shoulders like a lead weight. Everyone is indoors who can be, with their blinds drawn, the air-conditioning on if they have it, fans if they don't.
People have been going out for gelato, though.
What makes it worse is that this is our last week here. Only a few days left, but it's too hot to cook anything fabulous, too hot to go for pleasure outings. Our usual three-mile round-trip trek to the big supermarket is unthinkable. Moving from one continent to the other is always a wrench, but I suspect the mid-70s temperatures waiting for us in California will make the transition a little easier this time.
Weather like this makes me appreciate our tapparelle, the exterior blinds that have replaced shutters on many buildings here, part of the array of protective household armor that Italians can't feel safe without. (Fidenza is a quiet town without a lot of crime, but our apartment came with a steel door with multiple locks reminiscent of the barricades people used to live behind in the East Village in the 1970s.)
The blinds roll up and down on the outside of the windows, and when they're shut tight they function like blackout curtains; when they're up they disappear into a box above the window.
You can also lower them but not shut them tight, allowing some air flow and making a pretty polka-dot pattern. I love the way they look when they're at half-mast like this.
Our sedentary life is also giving me time for a last-minute flurry of blog posts. I've had a number of things I've been wanting to record before they stop seeming strange and interesting to me (for example, our polka-dot blinds), and so I'm planning to do a lot of writing as I sit here in the dark. Those of you who aren't trapped by climate change can catch up with me at your leisure.
My friend Ornella, with whom I sometimes play piano-violin sonatas, recently moved to a sweet house in the countryside just a few minutes outside of town. She and her husband are renovating it. She says the holes in the shutters were made by woodpeckers.
Her neighbors include a farmer who rows tomatoes for Mutti, another who raises wheat and hay, and the smallest caseficio (dairy) in the Consorzio del Parmigiano-Reggiano, the consortium that guards the quality and reputation of the cheese we call Parmesan. So when my brother and his wife came to visit and expressed a desire to see a small cheesemaker, Ornella kindly put me in touch with her neighbor Federico, and one morning we went over to visit.
First Federico introduced us to his cows. The dairy has 90 of them, which seemed like a lot to us city folk, but Federico told us that a lot of the bigger operations have something like a thousand animals.
Not that long ago there were lots of small farms in the area with five or six cows each, he said. They sold their milk to bigger dairies where cheese was made. But the milk quality wasn't consistent and anyway most of those little farms haven't survived. Apparently nowadays you need your own herd to be even a small-scale cheesemaker in the Consorzio big league.
Federico's dairy is family-owned. As we came through one of his uncles, Giorgio, was pitchforking hay (or is it straw?) into the grinder they use to make feed for the cows.
After showing us the milking room, with its ten milking machines, Federico took us into the spotlessly clean room where the milk is mixed with rennet and whey and allowed to curdle in giant copper vessels.
The curds are then packed into forms and allowed to set. Federico cut a slice off of one pre-cheese for us to taste. It was unsalted, fresh but bland, with a teeth-squeaking texture.
Here's Federico rewrapping the new cheese after we'd sampled it. That big pot in the background is full of whey. The forms on the metal table are cheeses a day or two older than the one he's wrapping.
The cheeses are imprinted with a form that identifies them as Parmigiano-Reggiano, from this particular dairy. In addition, each cheese gets a unique identifying number.
Across the way was a chilly room with a giant tub of very salty water in which the firmed-up cheeses bathe for 28 days.
They have to be turned several times a day to make sure they're evenly salted. Then they're allowed to sit and dry out for a while before moving into long-term storage.
This was another small outbuilding full of shelves that were full of cheeses. The white ones are the youngest. As the cheeses age their rinds turn golden and then reddish brown. In the lower corner of the photograph is the machine that keeps the cheeses clean. As they get older they sweat oil, to which dust and bugs would stick if the cheeses weren't regularly brushed off.
The tour ended with a taste of Federico's delicious two-year-old cheese. Two to three years is the preferred age range for most uses of Parmesan. (The redder ones in the photo are three years old.) He showed us how as the cheeses age and lose moisture the grains of naturally occurring monosodium glutamate get more prominent, giving the cheese greater flavor and crunch.
Of course we wanted to take some of this stuff home. We bought a hunk of the 24-month cheese and also a piece of a youthful one-year-old, what's known locally as "table cheese" because it's mild and sweet and good eaten in chunks at the table, rather than just grated into food.
I can't claim to have enough of a palate to notice that Federico's product tastes different from the other high-quality Parmesan I've had in the neighborhood. Federico, though, is nothing if not a lover of cheese as well as a maker. He told us he can taste the difference between his own summer and winter cheese. In fact, he says that each cheese they make tastes a little different, that each has its own personality. Looking at them en masse, I can kind of see it.
Since our visit I keep thinking about how much work this dairy requires, work that has to be done every day, all year long. The cows have to be milked at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. every day, the milk has to be processed, the cheeses have to be moved from this stage to the next, turned, stored, cleaned, on a rigid schedule. How fortunate that people like Federico are still willing to do all this so that indolent slobs like me can have the pleasure of eating well.
