Time out

My father took this picture of Dot and me. It says a lot about our relationship.

My mom, Dorothy DeCarlo, died on Sunday. She'd been seriously ill for more than a year and her last weeks were tough, so her death when it came was a relief to us and I hope to her, too.

She was 95 years old and lived a life that allowed her to mostly do what she liked doing--painting, sculpting, drawing, making ceramics, playing the cello, giving and going to parties, reading, attending theater, movies, and concerts. She raised four children (although "raised" is maybe overstating things a bit) and had a large circle of relatives and friends for whom her sharp tongue and bluntly expressed opinions were usually more than compensated for by her energy and enthusiasm, her often salty sense of humor, and the pleasure she took in art, music, food, drink, gossip, dogs, and being with people she cared about.

She was in some ways my biggest fan, even though I often disappointed her. "I always thought you'd get one of those MacArthur genius awards," she recently told me, with evident sadness. I have never done anything to remotely qualify for such an honor, but her expectations of me were always more ambitious than realistic.

I spent a lot of my life pushing away from her and then trying to reach back across the gulf I'd created, which I suppose is the story with a lot of mothers and daughters. Now we are separated by an even vaster distance, but her disappearance as a fact is allowing her to be reborn as a story, a meaning. And the distance is only temporary, since we are all heading that way sooner or later.

I am on my way to New York to help my siblings sort out and wrap up what Dot left behind and clear the way for our next chapters. My guess is that the blog will be inactive until I get back to Italy in ten days or so.

Scusatemi.  A dopo!

Return to Pontremoli

Our visiting friends had seen the Quanto? Tanto! post from last summer about the mysterious Bronze Age totems in a nearby town and were eager to see these marvels for themselves, so one day we hopped on the train to Pontremoli, which is on the northern tip of Tuscany and about an hour from Fidenza. 

We couldn't find the picturesque bridge our friend C. had led us over when we visited last June, so we blundered around the town's outskirts for a while.We stopped into a bar on the main road for a coffee and encountered this gentleman enjoying a morning glass of wine and intently watching the news with his companion.

When we tried to pet the dog it snarled in a most unfriendly manner. It must not be Italian.

More welcoming was the entrance to a school for dental hygienists we happened upon as we wandered around. 

Eventually we found and made our way across another, equally picturesque bridge...

....that led us to one of the old gates to the town's historic center.

Pontremoli still strikes me as a bit dour, with its narrow streets and lack of any greenery. Even window boxes are scarce. Maybe there just isn't enough light.

We took our friends up the hill overlooking town (via elevator) to the Museo Statue Stele, which they much admired. The little figures are great-looking, but I can't help feeling a certain skepticism about them.

Don't they look like a not particularly sophisticated person's idea of what Bronze Age sculptures should look like? (And here I speak as just such a person.)

However, the museum has photos of similar figures that, centuries ago, were treated as pagan-junk-cum-recyclable-construction-material and incorporated into walls and buildings, even a church. That scotches the idea that they're some kind of modern-day fraud, a theory that still appeals to me for its literary qualities, if not its accuracy.

The castle that houses the museum is interesting in its own right, but we were hungry, so we gave it only a cursory look and headed back down the hill. 

Down below we found a "slow food" restaurant that served us an excellent lunch. Our friends ordered testaroli, the flabby pancakes topped with pesto that are the local specialty, despite our advice to order something less insipid. They both cleaned their plates and claimed to have enjoyed every bite. I was happy to leave them to it while I enjoyed my farro pasta with roe-deer-and-mushroom ragu, but I couldn't help admiring their capacity for enthusiasm. 

Which was even more in evidence during our tour of Fidenza's Duomo, the subject of the next post. 

Music to my ears

Last week two old friends whom we hadn't seen for almost six years came for a visit, and in addition to catching up on each other's news and bemoaning the state of the world, we ate a series of excellent meals at some of our favorite restaurants and visited a few other local points of interest.

One of them was the town of Salsomaggiore Terme, where, by a happy coincidence, Romano was singing in a little concert one evening. Danny was feeling under the weather, having inherited the cold I'd been suffering from before we left California, so he stayed home while our guests and I took a quick train ride to Salso (as it's known locally), which is about six miles from Fidenza.

The town's name means, literally, "major salt baths," because its salty, mineral-rich water has been a tourist attraction since the beginning of the 19th century, when visitors first began coming to marinate themselves in the town's naturally occurring brine. To attract still more visitors, a dramatic new bath facility was constructed starting in 1912. By the time this grand mash-up of Moorish, Art Deco, and Asian influences was completed in 1923, Mussolini had come to power. Although it wasn't designed by fascists, the facade definitely has an authoritarian vibe.

According to online reviews I've read, the inside is extravagantly decorated, too, but rather shabby. Anyway, by the time we got to Salso the palazzo delle terme had closed for the day, while the concert, like many musical events in this part of the world, started late, in this case 9:15 p.m.

The grand spa and the square in front of it seemed deserted as we walked through, and the massive four- and five-star hotels we passed did, too, with no lights visible in their upstairs windows. October is probably the slow season, but Pam and Romano had told us that Salso and other spa towns have fallen on hard times since the Italian government began tightening its belt a couple of decades ago.

Once upon a time Italian workers received not only a generous paid vacation, but several weeks of spa treatment, all expenses paid, if their doctor prescribed it. And doctors did, for everything from heart trouble to respiratory ailments. The Italian health service still pays for a few weeks at the spa, but now your days taking the waters are subtracted from your vacation. Most people apparently decide they'd rather go to the beach with their families or take a trip than spend a big chunk of their time off sitting in hot mineral water. And that has Salso and other spa towns feeling more than a little underwater themselves.

Nevertheless, the place still has a certain grandeur. The venue for Romano's concert, the "Caryatid Room," was formerly a ballroom in a very grand spa hotel.

The mural dates from the 1920s, so I assume the rest of the decor does, too. I loved that the caryatids holding the ceiling up all have little bellies. Back then "spa" didn't mean "starvation diet."

The evening's program was the Italian version of a pops concert. First Romano and one of his students, a young tenor, sang a series of 19th-century salon songs and Verdi arias, accompanied by a cello-clarinet-piano trio. The pianist and the clarinetist, brothers, also contributed a couple of pretty compositions that sounded uncannily like 19th-century salon songs. Here's Romano (on the right) giving us some Verdi. He was, as always, great.

Then, ladies and gentleman, the Salsomaggiore Terme city band! It appeared to be made up equally of high-school kids and retirees, all in matching blue blazers. They collectively took this gig seriously enough to have invested in white shoes, which may not have been a stretch for some of the pensioners but was surely not something most of the kids would wear in any other part of their lives. Although maybe teen style in Italy is more Italian than I realize.

The band was tight and excitingly loud, but their program consisted almost entirely of American tunes, including Frank Sinatra and Stevie Wonder medleys of songs so old that I remembered hearing them on the radio when I was still in school. The only Italian number in their set came at the end, when the band launched into the national anthem and the audience stood to attention. 

As I listened to this rollicking tune--it sounds like one of those village-band numbers in an Italian opera--I was shocked to realize that despite all my fussing and fluttering about learning Italian and taking my new Italian citizenship seriously, I'd not only never learned the Italian national anthem, I'd never even listened to it.   

Click here and you can listen to the first verse (like the U.S. national anthem, it has many more) and chorus and see the lyrics. I'm grateful to have had this musical treasure finally brought to my attention, because everything about it tickles me. The slightly preposterous oompah music, the over-ripe classical references, the cheerful death-cult lyrics ("We are ready to die, we are ready to die!") that the tune assures us aren't to be taken too seriously, the happy "Yes!" at the end--it all seems delightfully Italian to me. It's one more reason 'm glad I have some claim to be one of them.

More of our adventures in my next post. This one's already too long. 

Before and after

The piazza on Saturday night:

The piazza on Monday morning:

After almost two weeks of partying, Fidenza is settling back into everyday routine till the Christmas celebrations start. Unless there are some intervening holidays we haven't heard about yet.

"Quality Street Food"

The day after we flew in, still woozy from time-change-induced sleep disturbance, we had cappuccini and panini at our favorite bar across the street, loaded up on basics at the local Conad supermarket, and undertook various household chores, including taking a long nap.

I ventured out in the evening to join Pam and Romano for "What Big Eyes You have," billed as an evening of stories about wolves. We were expecting a diverting exploration of the wolf's role in myth and fable,. Instead we found ourselves trapped in a small but crowded auditorium listening to environmentalists describe, in mind-numbing detail, the habits and habitats of wolves in our area. (Yes, it turns out there are quite a few in the Po Valley.) I'm emphatically pro-wolf, but after being subjected to what felt like hours of night-vision film of wolves wandering through the woods and acres of projected maps showing the whereabouts of every wolf that's ever lived in this part of Italy, all three of us were entirely out of sympathy with both the wolves and their long-winded human admirers.

The program started at 8:30 and as my watch edged toward 11:30 it showed no sign of ending. The hall was still packed, which baffled me. In the U.S. at least half the audience would have gotten up and left by the nth time the speakers explained all the marvelous things they've learned from studying wolf shit. (I didn't understand a lot of the presentation, which was of course in Italian, but "escrementi di lupo" came through crystal clear.) The three of us finally bulldozed our way past a dozen sets of knees and fled into the cool night air.

"Are Italians always that polite?" I asked them. "In America most people wouldn't sit still for that after the first hour."

"I think the World Wildlife Fund is a cult," Pam said darkly. Perhaps she's right, and they're all still sitting there, watching endless video loops of wolves with Children of the Damned eyes pissing on trees.

When I got back home the street party around the food show was going strong, a dj at the Strega coffee bar competing with a dj 50 feet away in the piazza. Our bedroom is in the back of our apartment, well protected from street noise, so normally I wouldn't have noticed the ongoing merriment. But thanks to my disrupted biorhythms I was sleeplessly reading Elena Ferrante (in English, I confess) while dulcet strains of the Ramones and Limbo Rock wafted through our closed windows, until the celebrants finally called it a night a few minutes before two in the morning.

Tonight, Saturday, we decided to venture out and examine the "Quality Street Food" on offer. Once again the piazza was full of tents and tables and people and blaring music.

That's our historic city hall in the background.

The food on offer was surprisingly eclectic--Indian curries, Thai noodles, caciocavallo cheese melted onto french fries, Cuban cocktails, pasta amitriciana made by "a real chef from Amitrice," giant hamburgers, giant slabs of beef ribs.  

American cuisine was proudly represented.

Of course there was lots and lots of fried stuff, which I guess is a universal fair attraction. But the Italians don't seem to have caught up with the American penchant for deep-frying candy bars and cookies. Just meat, seafood, and vegetables.

Saint Potato, patron of arterial blockage.

We already had dinner waiting for us at home, but we couldn't resist trying one booth's Florentine-style tripe. 

It was delicious, proving once again that Italians (unlike, say, the French) know how to cook tripe so that it tastes rich and meaty, with just a hint of innards, instead of like a cow's backside. 

As we headed back home, the bar across the street was just getting rolling. 

It's almost midnight now and they sound like they're good for at least another few hours. This time I hope to be unconscious for most of it.

Postscript: They actually shut down not long after I wrote the above, but the festivities continued the next day. Pam alerted me to the fact that the weekend's events also included a market south of the city center selling sequined backpacks, furry sweaters, roasted chestnuts, and all kinds of other desirables...

...plus a streetful of games of so-called chance and amusement-park rides, many of them gut-wrenching.

Then on my way back to our place I encountered a crowd of people dancing the cha-cha in the piazza. These people seem to have a bottomless appetite for fun.

As Danny and I sat down to our ravioli at home the loud music started up, but when I went out for gelato at about ten (chestnut and sour-cherry--so, so good) they were getting ready to close up. (I've noticed that Proud Mary often signals that the party's running out of gas.) By eleven all was quiet, and I suppose the town will now settle down to regular non-fair life for a while. 

Ben tornati!

Which means "Welcome back!" And despite gray weather and a bit of morning-after disarray, Fidenza felt delightfully welcoming when we arrived a few days ago.

Pam made this sign for us the last time we came. I keep it in our guest room. 

We left California Wednesday at about seven in the evening. The nonstop flight was only eleven hours long, but thanks to the magic of time zones and some truly awful highway traffic around Milan, we arrived in Fidenza a little more than 24 hours later on Thursday night. We'd deliberately arranged to get here the day after the end of the San Donnino Fair, the town's annual five-day blow-out in honor of its decapitated but still ambulatory patron saint. We were in Fidenza for the 2018 edition of the fair, and enjoyed it thoroughly, but we didn't feel we needed to repeat the experience--the noise, the crowds, the overeating--quite so soon.

As we headed to our apartment there was still some fair garbage in the streets, waiting to be picked up, and the main piazza was still full of tents. Although the fair ended on Wednesday, we discovered that the piazza was to be the site of a "Quality Street Food" exposition all weekend. ("Quality Street Food" is not a translation; apparently  the Italians can find no adequate words in their own language for curly fries, odd variations on the theme of pizza, deep-fried olives, greasy samosas, and other delicacies eaten out in the open.) But nothing much was happening on Thursday night and the streets were mostly empty.

Above the quiet street our apartment was waiting for us, so lovely and large and free of historic clutter, dark behind tightly closed blinds but eager to be brought back to life. That had to wait, though, because we were starving--we hadn't eaten anything since Air Italy's rather repulsive breakfast offering hours before--so we dropped our bags and hurried out to meet Pam and Romano at a local pizzeria.

I was exhausted, after sleeping only three hours on the plane, but catching up with Pam and Romano and wolfing down a ricotta, prosciutto, and arugula pizza and a large glass of fizzy red wine temporarily revived me. Our friends, the food, the happy Italians all around us filled me with quiet happiness. How lovely to be back.

I can't entirely explain why the homesickness for California that I felt so acutely, albeit momentarily, when we came here last April isn't at all in evidence this time around. In fact, I was kind of astonished when I reread it just now. I still hold my California friends and my California activities in my heart, but with no sadness, just pleasurable anticipation, knowing I'll be back with them in a few months' time.

I decided a while ago that one point of this bi-continental lifestyle of ours was to teach me to be a bit more willing to accept and even welcome being pushed out of my routines, to worry less about what I'm losing and focus more on all that's being given to me. I realize this sounds preposterously self-pitying; my sufferings, after all, involve the luxury of shuttling between two of the world's best-loved places and, once I'm in either one, doing pretty much exactly what I want. Spoiled brats suffer, too, however, and a temperamental aversion to change is something I struggle with. What better way to force all kinds of change on myself than periodically moving to another country?

In fact I have been working at improving my mindset, trying to use gratitude as an antidote to anxiety and sidestepping (at least sometimes) the temptation to feel that all this moving back and forth is something that the universe or my husband has imposed on me, rather than a choice I've willingly made. So perhaps I'm actually making progress, a pleasant thought.

Or maybe I'm just getting used to this half-and-half life we now seem to be living. Maybe this is my new routine.