Meal planning

The classic Italian meal includes a primo, the pasta course; a secondo of meat; a contorno, a vegetable side; and fruit and coffee to finish. Special occasions--holidays and Sunday dinners at Nonna's house--may call for an additional antipasto of ham, salame, and cheese, fritters, little salads of meat and vegetables, and other delicacies at the beginning of the meal, and perhaps a dolce, a sweet dessert, to bring the meal to a close. 

Two of our favorite restaurants, Trattoria San Giorgio and Ristorante Ugolini, serve a pared-down version of this menu for their fixed-price lunches every weekday: a primo, a secondo, a contorno, water, wine, and a coffee, all for 12 or 13 euros, or about $14 or $15. That still seems like a lot of food (as well as terrific value). These places are full of working folks, mostly men, filling up before they get back to the job, but I've been left wondering how many Italians really eat this way all the time.

The San Giorgio menu--it's different every day.

So I started asking some of my Italian friends what their usual daily meal plan is. My sample skewed heavily older and female, but the answers were very consistent. No one eats that traditional mult-course meal on a daily basis, which didn't surprise me. But the way they do eat did. 

Breakfast (colazione) for most is coffee, or sometimes tea, and toast or one of those not-very-sweet cookies that crowd the breakfast aisle of the supermarkets here. 

Colazione di campioni.

Lunch (pranzo) was universally pasta or occasionally risotto, with a side of salad or other vegetables. Further evidence that this is standard: a lot of the bars around here offer a "Pausa Pranzo," or lunch break, with menus heavy on pasta, and I enjoy walking by and ogling the bowls of pasta their customers are tucking into. Almost always these folks aren't eating pasta with meatballs or sausages or even ragu bolognese, just a simple sauce with perhaps a few cubes of pancetta but more often no meat at all. 

Pasta at San Giorgio.

Dinner (cena), also pretty universally, is meat or fish, vegetables (the latter sometimes including boiled potatoes), and bread. This seems to be the only concentrated protein of the day, and they don't generally get to it until eight or nine at night.

In the interest of fairness, I should note that there was considerably less unanimity about la colazione than about the other meals. While no one admitted to regularly indulging in a cappuccino in the morning, which is the usual thimbleful of espresso coffee with about a third of a cup of hot milk added, a few have yogurt with fruit and perhaps some oats or nuts, or a rice cake with nut butter instead of a cookie. Eggs were never mentioned, and only one person in my unscientific survey, a young woman, has meat for breakfast, specifically ham and cheese with her toast. (Maybe this signals that younger people are eating differently, but I hesitate to generalize based on an n of one.)

 

Now I am not only an American, but an American raised on the precepts of mid-century nutrition guru Adelle Davis, whose preaching about the virtues of consuming handfuls of vitamin and mineral supplements and huge amounts of protein I followed until I was well into my thirties. When we were young, Danny and I often consumed an entire chicken at a sitting, and breakfasts of eggs, bacon, cheese, and yogurt with fruit were pretty standard. (Strangely enough, we weren't particularly fat in those days. Ah youth!) 

Two kids high on life and protein.

Although we now eat relatively normally, compared to our youthful excesses, to me a meal without some kind of serious protein still seems a little too close to starvation. (Those New York Times "main" dishes of spaghetti with zucchini, for instance.) That this whole country is running on no more than a splash of milk at breakfast and maybe a little grated Parmesan at lunch strikes me as baffling, if not alarming.  Why aren't they out cold by the time dinner and some meat finally arrive?

Years ago I started having oats or other cereal for breakfast with fruit and yogurt, plus coffee with a lot of milk, because getting a generous quotient of dairy first thing in the morning makes me feel well nurtured. So I'm not that far off from some Italians in the breakfast department, although I suspect my heaping breakfast bowl is considerably larger than what my friends are having. But at least it's not a plate of eggs, pancakes, sausages, and grits.

I haven't been interested in following suit the rest of the day, though. When we got to Italy this time Danny and I agreed that we'd try having our main meal midday and a light supper in the evening, instead of having a small lunch and a big dinner. I like this new eating pattern a lot, and we've both lost a few pounds, which is maybe why Danny isn't quite so keen on it. Be that as it may, I suppose we could have considered an inverted version of Italian meals by having meat for lunch and pasta for dinner. But as is often observed, nowhere are cultural prejudices more inflexible than in the food arena. I find myself deeply resistant to not having some kind of protein, preferably animal in origin, at every meal.

  

Therefore we usually eat something closer to the traditional Italian primo-secondo-contorno as our main meal of the day, though being Americans we throw it all on the table at once instead of graciously spacing it out. Here's documentary evidence of a recent lunch.

That's bucatini with Danny's tomato sauce upper left; I'm happy to have vegetarian pasta as long as there's meat elsewhere on the table. Also part of the spread: some young (aged 12 months) Parmesan as a table cheese, plus 24-month Parm in the grater; pickled eggplant that we bought in a store and that I don't much like; romano beans with garlic and mint from the Saturday outdoor market; prosciutto crudo and spalla cruda (raw cured ham and pork shoulder) from the Latteria downstairs, plus some salame from the supermarket; and salad, because it's against my religion to have a main meal that doesn't end with salad.  

For the record, we didn't eat all of this. It took us several days to finish off the salumi and the beans, we've still got a lot of the cheese, and the bucatini were already leftovers. And aside from the disappointing eggplant, it was all scrumptious. 

For supper that night I had a little tuna with some pickled vegetables, a piece of bread, and some vegetable minestrone. Light, but with enough animal flesh to get me through to the morning. (That's another thing that surprises me about my Italian friends' eating habits: nobody seems to eat sandwiches. So who's buying the panini I see on offer at all the bars, and when are they eating them?)

Here is yet more evidence that, whatever my citizenship documents say, I am really not very Italian, nor very willing to give up my American ways. But as I write this, I'm starting to wonder if I really need that night-time protein boost, and why I'm so prejudiced against meat for lunch and pasta for dinner. If I load up on protein during the day, easing into the evening with some carbo-loading might be both satisfying and relaxing. 

Maybe I have something new to learn from the Italians, even if I'd be turning their culinary plan a bit upside down. Maybe I'll get up my courage one of these days and give it a try.

Get in line

On Sunday, after Pam and I had finished playing some violin-viola duets and she headed home, I stepped onto our balcony. In the street below I was surprised to see dozens of people, maybe as many as 150, standing around, all masked, all clearly waiting for something, but I couldn't imagine what.

The next afternoon there weren't as many people waiting around, but it was more obvious what they were doing: forming a long line to get into the pharmacy across the street. 

Then I remembered that the preceding Friday, Oct. 15, Italy had announced an expansive new vaccine mandate. By law, no one can enter their workplace without a Green Pass showing they have been vaccinated or have had a recent negative COVID test. Those without a pass must stay away, and won't be paid. If they show up anyway they face stiff fines. 

So evidently the folks in line for the pharmacy were there either to get tested or to update their Green Passes, both services that most pharmacies here provide. Without the pass, they couldn't go to work.

That same day the town hospital was helping out by offering vaccinations to all comers. The mayor reported that more than 900 people got jabs that day. "Meglio tardi che mai," he said. ("Better late than never.") That's a significant number of vaccinations in a town of 27,000. According to the mayor's very active Instagram account, 84.3 percent of the town's residents are now vaccinated, including more than 81 percent of teens between 16 and 19. Italy overall is about 80 percent vaccinated.

The horrifying death toll of the pandemic's first wave in Northern Italy probably encouraged people to take COVID seriously and protect themselves. Aside from one ultra-right-wing riot in Rome, protests against the new mandate have been small. 

Meanwhile, we are now two weeks out from the San Donnino festa and its happy, often maskless crowds, and there doesn't seem to have been an uptick in COVID infections here, at least not that anyone's reporting. Maybe it's because so many are vaccinated. Or maybe being out of doors makes the virus less effective. Or maybe San Donnino was watching over the celebrants and adding COVID prevention to his roster of miracles. 

It seems like a good omen that when I looked out this afternoon, what people were lining up for was gelato.

Video, second try

Here's the San Donnino street scene, hopefully in a form you can read on your phone.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xzqzzbJ19wytV7KqlDf8eHxhKTA05TlY/view?usp=sharing

San Donnino part 4: E basta

Over the San Donnino festa weekend we did our own bit to honor the saint by having several bowls of anolini in brodo. One batch we purchased at the Antica Trattoria del Duomo, the best restaurant in town. Later we got another helping from the Latteria delicatessen downstairs. 

Compared to the other pasta specialties of this area--tender square tortelli filled with cheese and herbs or pumpkin, served with melted butter--anolini are a rougher dish. The pasta is a bit thicker, and inside is a mix of little more than breadcrumbs and Parmesan. The anolini are served in a simple, not very rich broth. This is something you can imagine poor peasants dining on when there was not much else to eat.

The last time I had anolini in brodo was during the festa back in 2018, when I bought some from a busy stand just outside our front door. I hadn't liked them much; the broth was over-salted and watery and the filling was harsh, the bite of the cheese untempered. Not surprisingly, the anolini we got from our two upscale local sources were vastly better, although each had its own character. The Antica Trattoria broth was light but flavorful, and the filling of the anolini had just the right balance of starch to cheese, so that they tasted almost creamy. I gobbled them down before I realized I should have taken a photo. 

We had enough broth left over to use with the Latteria's anolini, which had a bit more bite and an interesting, slightly funky overtone. I'm not sure if the Latteria puts a bit of prosciutto into their filling, or the anolini just picked up some of the store's intoxicating smell, but either way they were delicious, too. That's them in the photo above.

On Saturday, Oct. 9, the saint's actual feast day, the party continued. As afternoon gave way to evening the music swelled outside, and the crowds got bigger and more raucous. 

Supposedly everyone in the town's public areas had to have a vaccination green pass, enforced by spot checks. Anyone caught without a pass would face a fine of anywhere from 400 to 1,000 euros (about $450 to $1,150). But we never saw any spot checks going on, and masks weren't worn much, either, especially later in the evening.

Some were cautious.

Many others, not so much.

Once again the music got louder as it got later. I took this video from our balcony at 11:15. Turn your volume up to 11 to get the full effect.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xzqzzbJ19wytV7KqlDf8eHxhKTA05TlY/view?usp=sharing

The playlist that evening included "My Sharona," "Despacito," "YMCA," "Highway to Hell," and, hilariously, "The Song of the Italians," the Italian national anthem, which the crowd was just as happy to dance to and sing along with as all the other oldies. It was adorable.

Thanks to my walk that morning I didn't wake up until after eight in the morning, so I can't report how late the partying went. When we emerged on Sunday the streets were once again tidy and ready for the third and final day of San Donnino.

But the really orgiastic side of the festa seemed to have run its course. On Sunday there was a mass and it's also the day when traditionally everyone goes to Nonna's house and has anolini with the extended family. I went on a walking tour of the city, and later several hundred of us gathered in the main square for the presentation of the annual "citizen of the year" awards. This year our friend Romano was honored for his many contributions to the social and cultural life of Fidenza, and we were happy to be part of the crowd applauding him. Everyone in town loves him, and so do we. Hooray, Romano!

Here's Romano accepting his award, flanked by Fidenza's mayor and the assessore for cultural affairs. Note the mayor's green, white, and red sash, which Italian mayors don whenever they carry out official public duties. 

That evening there was still music and drinking and hubbub, but the crowds were smaller and the music less populist and more random. It sounded like someone's friend's brother had been given a chance to DJ. By midnight the festa was over.

The next morning men and trucks began to remove the benches and tables, the tents and loudspeakers. 

The "urban forest" in front of the town hall will stay up for a while, but otherwise things were pretty much back to normal by Tuesday.

San Donnino, like a lot of really fun things, feels good when it stops, 

The street in front of our place was not exactly quiet--there are always kids crying, dogs barking, and people calling out greetings, talking laughing, talking some more, the usual hubbub of exuberant Italian street life--but now there was just the normal level of tumulto. Actually, it was perhaps a bit quieter, because La Strega, which would normally be doing a brisk business in coffee and breakfast brioche, was closed for the day. 

Their red tent is the same one you see in the video above and a lot of the other photos of Fidentini partying in the streets till all hours. After being at the center of the action all weekend, the Stregans needed a day off. I suspect they were even more glad the festa was over than we were.

San Donnino part 3: Dead man walking

Since the annual San Donnino festa is likely to be part of our life, and therefore of this blog, for some time to come, it seems like a good idea to present the details of his story all in one place, instead of continuing to dribble them out a bit at a time, as I've been doing. Here, then, is the man behind the holiday.

San Donnino, a.k.a. St. Domninus, is a distinctly minor figure in Catholic hagiography, pretty much unknown anywhere but Northern Italy. Therefore there's very little solid information about him; this is more legend than history. Domninus was born in Parma sometime in the second half of the third century CE and became a high official in the Roman hierarchy, serving as chamberlain and keeper of the royal crown to Emperor Maximian. 

A bas relief on the front of the Fidenza Duomo, below the figure of St. Simon Peter pointing the way to room, shows Domninus placing the crown on Maximian's head, apparently one of his daily duties.

You can see Domninus crowning Maximian in the lower right.

Maximian and his co-emperor, Diocletian, were pagan conservatives and in 303 CE they launched a vigorous campaign of persecution against Christians and other religious minorities. Christians were purged from the military, their churches were destroyed, their property was seized, and those who refused to make sacrifice to the Roman gods were sometimes put to death.

This didn't stop Domninus from secretly converting to the Christian faith. But in the year 304 Maximian discovered his chamberlain's heresy and ordered his execution. Domninus fled but Maximian's troops caught up with him just outside of what was then the Roman town of Fidentia as he was about to cross the river Stirone. They seized him and cut off his head.

But empowered by his Christian faith or some autonomic nervous response, Domninus rose up, picked up his severed head, walked across the Stirone. and lay down on the ground on the other side, cradling his head in his arms--a rather pointless gesture, but clearly miraculous. 

Another bas relief on the front of the cathedral shows Maximian wielding a sword on the left, on the right Domninus crossing the river with his head in his arms, and, in the center, the headless martyr being elevated to sainthood by two angels.

Interesting use of non-chronological storytelling.

The Roman soldiers, no doubt fearing that this was the start of a zombie apocalypse, apparently left the saint where he lay. Local Christians snuck out and hid the body of their latest martyr under some stones. 

A few decades later the bishop of Parma dreamt that a saint was buried in a spot by the Stirone, next to a brick inscribed, "Here is hidden the body of St. Domninus, martyr for Christ." With the assistance of this rather obvious clue, San Donnino's relics were found. The persecution of Christians having eased under the new emperor, Constantine, a small church was erected in that place to house what was left of the saint, whose name by now had been Italianized to San Donnino.

One day a man came to where San Donnino was buried to pray for help. His horse had been stolen and he wanted it back. Lo, the horse was returned. 

Walking while decapitated is certainly impressive, but not particularly endearing, and the miracle of the stolen horse seems to be neither. Nevertheless, San Donnino attracted enough devotees that the church had to be enlarged. over the next century or so. In the process it was noticed that, although the church had been built over the saint's remains, no one had kept track of exactly where they were. But a priest, inspired by divine intuition, discovered the saint's relics underneath the church in a sarcophagus labeled, "Here lies the body of the most blessed martyr Donnino." Again, this seems more obvious than miraculous, but perhaps you had to be there.

A more recent portrait of San Donnino inside the cathedral.

Donnino's posthumous popularity grew and more and more pilgrims began coming to pray in his church. So large were the crowds that one day as a group of pilgrims crossed over the Stirone the wooden bridge collapsed beneath them.  "But--a miracle!--thanks to the intercession of San Donnino no one was hurt, including a pregnant woman on whom numerous other people had fallen," reports the Fidenza cathedral's website. 

The pregnant woman and the collapsing bridge, also on the cathedral facade.

Perhaps because these miracles are a little underwhelming, in later centuries San Donnino developed a reputation for being able to cure rabies. It was claimed that sufferers who drank a mix of water and wine from a chalice after invoking San Donnino's aid were cured. A slightly more macabre version of the story said that the drink's efficacy was enhanced because one of the saint's teeth was embedded in the chalice. However he did it, curing rabies is definitely miraculous, since a rabies infection, once established, is usually fatal. 

This painting, by Cristoforo Savolini, shows Saints Borromeo and Appolonis (two other C-list saints) flanking Saint Domninus, who wears the outfit of a Roman centurion. I assume the dog is there because of the Fidenza saint's anti-rabies powers, although to me he looks not only non-rabid but like a very good boy.  

Poor San Donnino's remains were once again mislaid when some unspecified enemies of Catholicism razed the church in the 600s or so. But in the eighth century Charlemagne was en route to Rome to be crowned Holy Roman Emperor when (the story goes) his horse abruptly stopped at a spot by the Stirone and refused to go any farther. An angel appeared and told the soon-to-be emperor to dig for treasure in this spot. The treasure turned out to be San Donnino's relics. 

In a smart piece of medieval marketing, the village (borgo) where all these things occurred renamed itself Borgo San Donnino, and the structure housing the saint's remains became ever grander. In the 1100s construction of the present Duomo began and continued for a century and more. The cathedral became an important stop on the Via Francigena pilgrimage route, and the sculptures decorating the facade include not only images of the saint and his martyrdom but also numerous depictions of pilgrims making their way to Rome and the Holy Land.

Inside the cathedral is San Donnino's sarcophagus, which also features bas reliefs of his martyrdom and his miracles. Below the statue of the headless saint, the panel on the right shows, again, San Donnino crowning the Roman emperor. I'm pretty sure the panel on the left depicts the man praying for the return of his horse.

But the saint's actual bones (or what purport to be his bones) are housed in this more modern, more transparent crypt elsewhere in the Duomo.

You know it's him because his head is on his chest.

In the 1920s, when Mussolini's regime was seeking to rebrand Italy as Imperial Rome 2.0, the town fathers decided to change its name from Borgo San Donnino to Fidenza, a phonically updated version of the old Roman name. 

The saint and his cathedral nevertheless continue to loom large in the city. The Duomo is the city's most distinguished architectural feature, and although it's quite ascetic compared to the gaudy cathedral extravaganzas in many other Italian towns, here in Fidenza it's one of the few things of any interest to tourists. San Donnino's legend is part of the cathedral's appeal, and the town's, if only because it's so old and so odd. And the annual festa in the saint's honor is Fidenza's biggest event of the year and a source of community pride and pleasure. 

Whether or not San Donnino really carried his head across the river, whether or not he cured rabies or restored stolen horses to their owners, nowadays he is certainly doing a lot for Fidenza. It's no wonder they love him for it.

San Donnino part 2: Francigena interlude

Early Saturday morning I came out of our door a little after eight and was astonished to see the street clean and La Strega sedately serving coffee. Fidenza knows how to party and how to clean itself up afterwards.

I was out at this early hour to join Pam and a few other local exercise buffs for a walk along one small part of the Vig Francigena pilgrimage route, an event left over from the Via Francigena Festival a few weeks before. We gathered at the Piazza Grande, had our green passes checked, and took a van out to the little village of Castione Marchesi, about 8 kilometers (5 miles or so) away  There we disembarked and headed south to Fidenza on foot. 

We had excellent hiking weather that morning, overcast and a bit cool. As the Via Francigena heads across the Po Valley it's also ideal for us older trekkers, since the land is mostly flat as a pancake.

I think those are the Appenines in the distance, but don't quote me.

Almost all of our walk went through the farmland that surrounds Fidenza and other towns in this part of Emilia. We passed fields of alfalfa and cornfields that were being turned for next spring's crop. The crane by this barn is for an irrigation system.

Urban sprawl doesn't seem to be happening here, but it may start happening. We passed several barns and farmhouses that appeared to be abandoned.

No one home?

A railway station falling into ruins.

One thing I love about Italians is that food always seems to be on the agenda. Along the way our guide, Antonio, spotted some edible mushrooms he wanted to show us. ("I'd never eat anything growing along the road," the lady next to me sniffed.) 

We also saw a couple of hunters and their dogs out in a field, fortunately pointing their guns away from us. Others in our group, who sounded knowledgeable,  said they were hunting for pheasants or hares.

Although we were out in the country, we weren't on an unpaved track. The photo below is what a pilgrimage road in the country ought to look like, right? But it was just someone's driveway.

Instead pretty much our whole walk was on paved highways with no sidewalks and altogether very little room on either side. Despite their centuries-old history as routes for pilgrims and other foot travelers, these roads are not pedestrian-friendly.

Luckily there was very little traffic. But crossing this narrow-shouldered bridge over the busy autostrada was a little unnerving. Antonio took the lead and waved his neon-yellow vest whenever a car or truck came by to make sure they didn't accidentally mow us down.

Soon we could see the tower of a Fidenza church up ahead--not the Duomo, but St. Michael's at the other end of the oldest part of the city. It's poking up right in the middle of the photo below. 

A little while later we came out into the parking lot behind the train station. That's the back of the cemetery on the left. I found this juxtaposition--life and death, the excitement of going places and the tedium of stasis, the exhaustion of travel and the soothing prospect of eternal rest--a fitting finale to our excursion.

Back in downtown Fidenza we found the San Donnino festa once again in full swing, even though it was only 11 in the morning. Aperol spritzes (those bright orange drinks) are pretty low-alcohol, but still... 

After we thanked our guide and said good-bye to our fellow pilgrims, Pam and I made our way to a bar a little less central to the action. Even though there'd been no altitude involved, this was more walking than I'm used to and I needed a treat.

Our barista was happy to oblige with something a little less dionysiac than what the celebrants up the street were enjoying, though doubtless more caloric. I felt I'd earned it, though. I'd received my dispensation, and truly I felt blessed.

San Donnino part 1: Fidenza unleashed

Every year Fidenza marks October 9, the feast day of San Donnino, with a multi-day festa. We were last here for this event in 2018, and were amazed at how big a deal it was. The party for the town's patron saint was at least five days long, with additional events days before that, and what seemed like the whole population turned out to eat and drink and cram together to joyfully scream at each other over booming pop music late into the night. Our friends told us that San Donnino is bigger than Liberation Day, bigger than Christmas, the most significant public holiday on the town's busy calendar. And our street in the center of town is also the epicenter of the festivities.

Last year, with fear of COVID keeping everyone cowering behind their own doors, we were stuck in California and in Fidenza the festa was sadly truncated. There were a handful of art exhibits, a couple of outdoor talks and tours, a few food booths in an outdoor space where only a limited number of people--masked, of course--could be at any one time. It was hardly San Donnino at all.

In 2021, despite the threat of COVID still hanging over us all, people--particularly younger people--were ready to let loose again. And although this year's festa was shorter (the meat of it was really only three days long), smaller (with many fewer booths selling food, drink, and tat of various kinds), mostly outdoors, and strictly controlled (at least in theory), the party, while it lasted, was quite the bacchanal. 

This year's theme was the environment and climate change, always a major concern of the town's center-left government. To that end, a forest--a temporary and very tidy forest--was summoned into existence in the town's main square. A crew quickly rolled out sod to cover one end of the piazza and unloaded dozens of trees and plants.

The festa officially opened on the evening of Thursday, October 7, with a ceremony in the Piazza Grande at the other end of our street. We strolled down to watch, but after 45 minutes of speeches from the mayor, other officials, and a local priest we got tired of waiting for something to happen and went off to get ice cream. We later learned, from the mayor's Instagram account, that we'd missed seeing various people juggle flaming torches and light fountains of kerosene. I'm not sure exactly how that jibes with the environmental angle, but it looked pretty spectacular.

One thing that often strikes me when I'm here is how fuzzy the boundary is between government and the Catholic church, or at least the church's less institutional, more folkloric aspects. The festa is an unabashedly religious observance, complete with a special mass in the cathedral, and in addition to pyromania the opening event included a procession with banners emblazoned with a bevy of Catholic martyrs. Yet this party in honor of a Catholic saint is also an entirely civic event which welcomes atheists, Muslims, fallen-away Catholics and everyone else to participate--and with no evangelizing. I wouldn't want to see anyone's religion become part of our civic life in the U.S., but the Italians' willingness to deal with these contradictions in a spirit of lasciare andare--letting it go--seems charmingly on brand to me, particularly at a time when some of my fellow Americans are consumed with shoving their religion (or hatred of religion) down one another's throats.

On Friday afternoon loud music began pumping out of big loudspeakers in the center of the piazza, mostly American oldies interspersed with a few Italian chestnuts. In other neighboring piazzas other loudspeakers played competing music, and occasionally a live (and not wildly talented) band popped up. As afternoon turned into evening the volume rose. By 10 pm we could clearly hear every word of every familiar tune through our closed double-glazed windows. Amid all this, the forest, by now up and running, wasn't a particularly tranquil spot.

Selfies, anyone?

But the rest of our street was even less so. The bars' outdoor tents were crowded with people who were clearly thrilled to finally be all together again. The street outside our front door was almost impassable.

Che bella figura!

The stalls lining the other half of the piazza were selling beer and wine, cheese and sausage, and the official pasta of this holiday, anolini in brodo--little round Parmesan-and-breadcrumb ravioli in broth--at a terrific clip. And of course everyone was yelling at the top of their lungs to be heard over the music.

All eating, all drinking.

We retreated to our apartment and watched the final episodes of a silly Italian detective show, turning up the volume so we could hear the (mostly incomprehensible) dialogue over the roar from outside. The bar across the street, La Strega, where we often go for a morning coffee, attracts a young crowd in the evenings and usually plays loud music until about midnight on weekends. But during San Donnino it's  city loudspeakers that are booming out the hits of yesteryear, and when I fell asleep at around 12:30 the music was still going at top volume. Luckily, our bedroom is on the courtyard side of the apartment, but I felt sorry for our neighbors who aren't so lucky.

I woke up a little before 4 am, as I often do, and could hear that the party wasn't over. The music wasn't as loud, but someone still had a loudspeaker going. Peeking out our front windows, I could see that the bar was closed but thirty or forty people were still out in the street, talking, laughing, dancing, and embracing each other. If I had to guess I'd say they were pretty drunk, but they also seemed very happy. The street was a mess, though, with cigarette butts, discarded paper anolini cartons, and other trash strewn about. I went back to bed and fell asleep wondering whether Fidenza would have the stamina for another two nights of this.

To your health!

When we arrived here I was impressed not only that people were wearing masks pretty universally indoors, but that everyone seemed so good-humored about it. Ditto the rest of the COVID protocols here, which are a little different from what we were used to in California. 

Doing the right thing.

The small shops that line our street all have signs saying that only two or four or some other (usually single-digit) number of people can be in the store at one time. Additional customers dutifully wait outside, masked and spaced more or less six feet apart. And the staff inside are masked, too.

There don't seem to be maximum occupancy rules in large stores, like the Conad supermarket a few blocks away, where any number of people can go in whenever they like. But there, too, customers and staff are all masked. When we took a train to and from Bologna last week, to have lunch with some American friends who were passing through, I didn't see a single person on the train who wasn't masked. This despite the fact that there was no one official to enforce the rules; on neither our outbound journey nor our return did anyone even come by to punch our tickets.

I thought that we'd mostly given up worrying about catching COVID from handrails and countertops, but here both large stores and small ask you to sanitize your hands when you enter, and there's always a stand with an automatic dispenser or a pump bottle of disinfectant near the front door. It's a bit reminiscent of people dipping their fingers in the font of holy water when they enter a church. 

An even more mystical belief in ritual's power to defend against misfortune seems to hold sway in the nonprofit that sponsors our weekly qi-gong class, which is held in a public building that used to be a quite lavish Jesuit monastery. In addition to having their staff check everyone with a temperature gun when we arrive (a bit like being shot in the head), the nonprofit requires Pam, who's our teacher, to walk around the cavernous classroom before class begins spraying a heavily scented Italian version of Lysol into the air. What good this does in a large hall with open windows and thirty-foot ceilings baffles Pam and me and probably everyone else. But that's the rule and we follow it. 

Our qi-gong classroom, fully disinfected.

As an earlier post detailed, restaurants, theaters, and other places where people gather indoors are also supposed to check everyone's Green Pass to make sure they've been vaccinated. At the first restaurant we went to the waiter met us at the door to check our vax status, and I even had to show my Green Pass to go on that moonlight walk, which was entirely outdoors.

However, this is Italy, and Italians are suffering from pandemic fatigue just like the rest of us. Now that we've been here for a while, I am noticing that a lot of people are following the spirit of the regulations but not exactly the letter.

Take masks. Yes, everyone wears them indoors, and many outdoors as well, but an awful lot of people sometimes leave their noses hanging out. (This seems particularly true of the older men, though I haven't done a rigorous tally.) I myself have occasionally been guilty of this when my glasses fog up. I've also repeatedly strolled into a store or the railway station without remembering to put on the mask that I'd tucked away while I was outside. Then I realize my faux pas and scramble to remask before I'm mistaken for a Trump voter. 

Taking a breather.

Likewise with hand sanitizing. I see that not everyone stops to do it, and frankly often neither do I. If you're making several stops, and you've resisted the urge to pick your nose or suck your thumb en route, it seems silly to cleanse your hands each time you enter a store when you haven't touched anything or anyone since you sanitized them at another store a few minutes earlier. 

Clean hands, clean conscience.

The Green Pass isn't universally enforced, either. Yesterday we visited a rather fancy pizzeria where they checked our passes at the door very officially (albeit very hospitably). But a high-end place in neighboring Salso Maggiore that we went to last week asked to see our QR codes but didn't bother reading them. And two other favorite restaurants here in town didn't even ask, perhaps because we'd been there many times before, or maybe because they're pretty relaxed in general. Apparently so are we, since we sat down and ate without any hesitation.

If there is another outbreak here this month, as some fear there will be, all of us who are being less than perfectly rule-abiding will bear some responsibility, and perhaps some of the consequences as well. But so far that doesn't seem to be happening. How lovely if being merely sort of careful and doing only mostly what you're supposed to turns out to be enough to keep us all safe. 

Pilgrims' progress

Shortly after we arrived we discovered that Fidenza was putting on a festa--actually, they used the English word "festival"--celebrating the town's role as the midpoint for the Via Francigena (fran-CHIH-geh-na), a pilgrimage route linking Canterbury Cathedral in England to Rome and thence to southern Italian ports where the devout could embark for the Holy Land. This sign was part of the festival decor.

In medieval times the Via Francigena was Christians' primary way to get from England and France to Rome and beyond. A statue of the apostle Simon Peter on the facade of Fidenza's Duomo points south and holds a scroll reading, "I show you the way to Rome." It's often described as the world's first road sign. 

They went thataway.

Later the Italian road faded in importance and today it is much less well known than Spain's Cammino de Santiago. But both were part of a harsh spiritual discipline. Devotees were required to travel vast distances on foot and endure bad weather, disease, discomfort, and worse in order to affirm their faith, do penance, or petition for a cure.  

In recent years international tourists' interest in a slightly less strenuous version of playing pilgrim has not gone unnoticed. Offering a mix of exercise, spirituality, and pedestrian adventure, these walks--now with better shoes and Airbnbs, at least in some parts of the journey--are becoming increasingly popular. And so Italy and towns along the Via Francigena have begun publicizing its history and improving its accessibility.  

Fidenza has a lot of civic spirit, and it was already proud to be a stop on the Francigena. So it's no surprise that the town fathers have now decided to make an even bigger deal of celebrating the ancient road. Held this year for the first time, the Francigena Festival Fidenza is a big new addition to the town's busy calendar of festas, conferences, and other events. 

The festival included a lot of high-level discussions of history, architecture, food, and travel, featuring such luminaries as journalist and TV personality Beppe Severgnini and architect Mario Botta, plus a series of concerts and other performances. Jet-lagged as I was, I didn't attempt any of the talks. But one evening we did go to a lovely concert of medieval music, much of it pilgrimage-related, in the Duomo.

Singers were accompanied by a harmonium, a lute, a hurdy-gurdy, and scallop-shell castanets.

The next day, the piazza in front of the town theater was the stage for a troupe of professional flag-wavers, exponents of "the noble art of bandiera." Sporting medieval costumes and accompanied by drums and brass played by the town band, the sbandieratori put on an eye-popping display of color and coordination as their brightly colored flags flared in kaleidoscopic patterns and flew into the air. Even in an age of computerized special effects, this was pretty spectacular to watch.

Town notables were on hand, including an officer of the carabinieri (I think).

Like juggling, but with flags. 

The weekend also included several walks along local bits of the Via Francigena. One afternoon outing was canceled because of the threat of rain, but the next evening a night-time walk went on as planned, despite a chance of storms. Our neighbor Pia and I joined the moonlit walk, which went into a regional park just outside of town, a park whose entrance, hidden at the end of a little side street, had previously eluded all my attempts to locate it.  

We were given tiny flashlights to help us avoid tripping over roots and rocks. In the distance we could hear dogs barking and what sounded like the howls of wolves--and there are wolves in the wooded areas around Fidenza. Occasional flashes of distant (we hoped) lightning lit up the sky. It was beautiful out there in the dark but also rather ominous.

Pausing en route for some music.

The guide leading the walk talked about what it must have been like to travel the long pilgrimage route by yourself in the days when most of the countryside was as unpopulated as this park, and asked us to imagine the kind of spiritual reckoning that feelings of smallness and aloneness might provoke. We were hardly alone, though. There were about 35 of us, including several visitors from other parts of Italy and one each from the United Kingdom and France, as well as a local singer-songwriter who entertained us along the way with some traditional and original songs. We were modern pilgrims, pursuing the new grail of experiences.

Heading back to civilization.

Having often heard the expression "climbing the greasy pole" used to describe the struggle to succeed in politics and business, I was excited to see that the festival program included the source of this metaphor: a "palo della cuccagna," a Cockaigne pole, in one of the smaller piazzas. 

The name refers to the mythical Land of Cockaigne, where roast geese fly into your mouth and wine flows in the streams, a medieval European version of our Big Rock Candy Mountain. The game challenges contestants to climb a tall pole slathered in grease--lard in this case, I believe--and be the first to reach the prize at the top. The prize is usually a ham, and in this part of the world that means several prosciutti di Parma. 

At the top of the pole.

That day four teams competed for the prizes. These weren't random folks but men (mostly, plus one 12-year-old girl) in matching coveralls. They took turns trying to get up the pole, flinging as much lard off the pole as they could during the 30 or 45 seconds they were allotted in each round. In between attempts the players rubbed sand on their increasingly greasy coveralls, to make themselves a little less slippery. 

Little by little the teams crept higher on the pole by climbing onto the shoulders of the person above them. There was a net, but still it was a little horrifying to see people scrambling over each other to get at a ham, particularly since these hams were probably plastic.

Horrifying but also tedious as the event dragged on, despite the efforts of two loud-mouth announcers to inject excitement into the process. Well before a winner was announced, Danny and I gave up our seats and went on our own brief pilgrimage in search of refreshment. We settled into a bar near the Duomo and had some prosecco and a plateful of ham. All we had to do for it was present a credit card.