Italian immersion

As mentioned, our friend Valerie came to town for a few days from her aerie in the beautiful hill town of Orvieto. We have no comparable scenery, so instead I tried to wow her with immersive Italian experiences. Valerie is also working hard on learning Italian, so one day we had coffee and Italian conversation with my dear friend Franca, who took this photo of us. You can see that Valerie jumped right in when it came to speaking la bella lingua. 

I look like I am trying to remember a word, which is how I often look when listening to Italian. 

We also played chamber music with cellist Luisa, who taught us several musical terms we ought to know. (Music Italian--the way they say things like "Let's try it again from the repeat" or "Who else has an upbeat?"--is dismayingly different from music English.) For additional immersion, we had an entertaining coffee date with my upstairs neighbor, Pia, discussing politics here and in the U.S., and saw the movie Parasite, which was, like all movies in Italy, dubbed into Italian. We were both pleasantly surprised by how much we understood of the movie, and by how good it was, since we'd ignorantly assumed it was some sort of monster flick. Which I guess it is, but not in the way we expected.

Although she's done a lot of Italian travel, Valerie had never been to Parma, so a trip there was our big outing. It's only a 12-minute train ride from Fidenza.

Our first stop was a traditional restaurant, Trattoria Corrieri, where we had torta fritta (fried bread), giardiniera (lightly pickled vegetables), two big platters of prosciutto, salame, deep-fried pork skin, pancetta (raw bacon), and other pork delicacies, and then--although none of us had room left--a tris of tortelli: potato (the green), cheese and chard (the white), and pumpkin (the red). By the end of the meal we were ready to sing the chorus of the Italian national anthem: "Siam' pronti alla morte!"

I was particularly keen to visit Parma's Galleria Nazionale, which I'd never seen. It's inside the gigantic Palazzo della Pilotta, which isn't actually a palace but a complex of very big, not very attractive buildings originally intended to house armories, stables, barracks, and other accoutrements of the ruling Farnese family's power.

In 1615 Ranuccio Farnese ordered the construction of a spectacular theater inside what had been an armory, in order to celebrate an upcoming visit by Cosimo de' Medici and a planned marriage uniting his son with a daughter of the Medici family. Both Ranuccio and Cosimo died before the marriage and the theater's inauguration both finally took place in 1628.

Built of wood so that it could be constructed quickly, the theater was originally decorated in lavish splendor with paint, plaster, and gilt. During World War II the theater was bombed and went up in flames, but it was immediately rebuilt and is now part of the museum. 

Today it's plain wood, undecorated, which makes it even more beautiful, at least to modern eyes. I'm sorry my little phone camera can't do it more justice. It was literally breathtaking to walk into that vast, gorgeous space. Especially since no one else was there.

I took a photo of this portrait thinking it depicted Ranuccio I, who built the theater. It's actually his grandson, Ranuccio II, the offspring of the above-mentioned Medici-Farnese marriage. Wouldn't you think that someone so rich and powerful could commission a more flattering likeness? And what's with that awful dress? The dog is cute, though, and maybe shows that Ranuccio II was not as evil as he appears.

Ranuccio II, Duke of Parma, by Franz Denys, 1662

We left much of the museum unexplored--there's an archeological section, a museum devoted to typesetting, and rooms full of paintings we didn't get to--but I snapped photos of a couple of canvases by Lionello Spada that spoke to me. 

One is his 1612 Capture of Christ.  The faces of the young men taunting and torturing Jesus are delightful, so full of stupid malice.

The other, from around 1610, is titled The Executioner Gives Salome the Head of the Baptist and was part of a whole room of paintings of people being beheaded, an interesting curatorial approach. 

I love the way the executioner, the servant, and John the Baptist's head all cast such sadly disapproving looks at Salome, who is too lost in lust to notice.  

Of course we also visited Parma's famous baptistery, the number-one sight in the city and, according to Wikipedia, one of the most important medieval monuments in all of Europe. The weather report said for once we'd have a day with no rain, but it started to sprinkle when we got there. Parma still looked great, though. This is the street leading off the piazza in front of the baptistery.

Here's a photo of the baptistery that I swiped from Wikipedia. It's a strange building, eight-sided and very tall, unlike anything else in the city, or anywhere else, for that matter. How did someone in the 12th century come up with the idea of a skyscraper for baptisms? 

The fellow who designed it was Benedetto Antelami, who also did many of the sculptures outside and inside the baptistry. He's the same Antelami whose work is all over Fidenza's own cathedral.                                                                          

Here is one of the baptistery's three doors. The receding arches are like an overture, signaling that there's something spectacular inside.

The baptistery ceiling, so far away.

The interior is one vast room covered in frescoes depicting the lives of saints, religious proverbs, apostles and church fathers, and various animals, stretching all the way up to the top of the domed ceiling. You could spend all day looking at all of it, if your eyes and your neck could stand it. Like the Farnese Theater, its scale and its beauty are awe-inspiring, even if you've seen it before.

Here's the baptismal font in the center of the room. Note the frescoes in the background. (Also the tourist.) Perhaps because of the weather, there was no one else visiting for most of the time we were there. 

Next door is Parma's Duomo, a typically huge cathedral full of frescoes and side chapels, with a famous Assumption of the Virgin by Coreggio filling the main dome. It shows Mary from below as she wafts into heaven, so you see mostly just her feet. After the medieval sincerity of the baptistery the cathedral, with all its gilt and Michelangelo-esque muscles, frankly seems a little crass.

There weren't many people in the cathedral, either, so we mostly had it to ourselves as we walked around. Suddenly I heard a woman's voice raised in loud lamentation. In between sobs, she cried out, "Per favore, per favore, ti prego. Ti prego!" ("Please, please, I beg you!" or, literally, "I pray to you").

I walked toward the side chapel whence the voice came, hoping to perhaps witness some genuine religious fervor amid the cathedral's ponderous and not very convincing performance of same. A man who seemed to be the sexton was moving in the same direction, and with much more purpose.

He strode up behind the woman, who was facing the chapel altar, and tapped her on the shoulder. "Keep it down," he told her in Italian. 

I was shocked until she turned toward him and I realized that she had been talking on her cell phone.  

She lowered her voice for a few minutes but soon she was yelling and crying just as loudly. I had no compunctions about taking a photo. But despite all that Italian immersion I couldn't understand much of what she was saying, beyond that she seemed to be having a fight with her mother. 

When dreams come true

On the day I flew back to Italy from New York I stopped off in Brooklyn to have lunch with my son at a wonderful ramen restaurant near his house, ramen being something I'd been hungry for but hadn't had a chance to eat for many months. Then I headed to Kennedy and as usual got there ridiculously early. And I realized that I might as well realize a long-cherished fantasy of travel luxury: getting a manicure at an airport spa.

It was a pleasantly meditative experience and more reasonable, relative to real-world prices, than most airport food. Moreover, the polish is only now starting to look really ratty, two weeks out, and I'm cheered every time I notice my screaming scarlet nails.

Interestingly enough (to me, at least), red fingernails have a particular significance in the long friendship between me and Pam, my Fidenza co-conspirator and guardian angel. Many, many years ago, in another time, place, and psychological state, the two of us were part of an ensemble that performed a Mozart quartet in Carnegie Recital Hall. (Not Carnegie Hall, the little for-rent auditorium next door.) The day of the concert all of us were hideously nervous, and one way I soothed myself was to carefully varnish my nails bright red.

The rest of the group was disapproving when I turned up with my garish manicure. No one in our social circle ever painted her nails, including me. But to me that nail polish felt like a lucky talisman. I was playing viola, an inner voice instrument, while Pam was on violin, with a part that was far more challenging and much more exposed. In that moment of high anxiety my red nails seemed like a small way of transforming myself from the terrified screw-up I feared I was into the confident show-off I yearned to be.

In my memory our performance went smoothly, though not brilliantly. But Pam remembers that at some point during the proceedings she panicked and dropped out for a measure or two. Afterwards our cellist, of the four of us the most severely opposed to frivolity of any kind, opined that my nails were a deliberate effort to sabotage Pam's performance. Pam never believed I'd done something so malevolent, but she claims to still have a bit of a phobia about red nails.

I eventually abandoned the viola, which I'd taken up only grudgingly, and went back to what I really wanted to play, the violin. Over the years since then I've continued to play, at an amateur level but with tremendous pleasure. Meanwhile Pam switched in the other direction and took up the viola for a while; it turned out she'd envied me the viola as much as I'd envied her the violin. But then, under the pressure of work, family, and her dozens of other creative hobbies, she stopped playing. Twenty-five years went by.

One of the great joys of my California life is playing chamber music with a network of friends and acquaintances, from casual get-togethers sight-reading Haydn quartets to intensive workshops on the fine points of playing Milhaud and Shostakovich. Once Danny and I had more or less settled into the Fidenza half of our lives,  chamber music began to seem like a missing piece. I needed to build up an Italian musical network, and Pam and her dust-covered viola were an obvious place to start.

Pam adores music but at first she balked at the prospect of starting to play again. Even being away from a string instrument for a few weeks means your hands lose a little strength, the callouses on your fingertips start to soften, and you sound noticeably crappier than you did before you took the time off. She was certain that after 25 years whatever technique she'd had would be gone for good.

Her anxiety proved no match for my determination, however. I badgered her relentlessly to just come over for an hour, play easy duets with me, no practicing required. She succumbed and, even though at first her sound was indeed pretty rusty, as soon as she began to connect with the music her playing improved by leaps and bounds. "Just don't paint your nails," she joked.

Then my mom died and I had to go to New York, and while I was gone Pam retreated back into not playing. After I got my airport manicure I sent her a photo of my nails and the message, "Look out!"

I don't know if it was the manicure, the ripple in the continuum Pam and I had already created by playing together, or random luck, but soon after I returned to Fidenza chamber music suddenly flooded into my life. First, my friend Valerie put me in touch with Birgit, a Viennese violinist who was visiting Bologna (about an hour from here) for a few days and looking for folks to play with while she was in the area. Birgit recruited a Japanese cellist who lives in Milan and they met up with Pam and me at my apartment a week ago. We played Mozart and Haydn all afternoon and then had dinner together, and despite some bumpy musical moments we all had a great time.

Kazuhiko, me, Pam, and Birgit. Photo courtesy of Kazuhiko's wife, Maria.

At around the same time I heard from my friend Ornella, a pianist in Fidenza with whom I've occasionally played violin-piano sonatas. Ornella works a lot, is renovating an old farmhouse, and is caring for her mother, who's quite ill, so she has not been able to play with me since I was in Fidenza last summer. But she put me in touch with Luisa, a local cellist, whom I was not shy about wooing.

So a few days after our international quartet extravaganza I invited Luisa over to play trios with Pam and me. She turned out to be a strong player as well as a delightful new acquaintance--moreover, one who doesn't speak much English, and so provides another opportunity to practice Italian. And I noticed that the more Pam played, the more confident she became and the more beautiful she sounded. I was dizzyingly proud of all three of us.

The next day my friend Valerie arrived from her part-time home in Orvieto for a visit, bringing along her brand-new and very lovely Orvieto-made violin. On Friday she, Pam, Luisa, and I played Mozart, Haydn, and even an early Dvorak, and we sounded mostly terrific.

Danny took this photo while we were playing Dvorak.

The day after that--the day before yesterday--Valerie, Pam, and I got together again to sight-read terzetti by Fuchs and Dvorak for two violins and viola. It's a funny combination of instruments for which not much has been written, but these pieces were delightful.

I don't expect to keep up quite so intensive a pace going forward, especially since Valerie has now returned to Orvieto, so I no longer have an in-house violinist. But we already have a date to play piano quartets with Ornella, and more trios with Luisa are highly likely. Moreover Pam has thought of a few other musicians she knows who might like to join us.

Ploughing through the classical repertoire and struggling with problems of intonation, coordination, and ensemble might not sound like everyone's idea of a good time. But for some of us, amateur chamber music provides a whole buffet of pleasures. First is the stunning beauty of the music itself and the excitement of being part of making it. Also, a surge of communal "We did it!" elation happens whenever the group manages to stay together through a challenging passage or a tempo change. And you feel a personal champion-athlete electricity when you pull off a difficult run or get a high note in tune. I am incredibly lucky that this is something I am now getting to do on two continents.

While we were playing quartets the other night I also realized that my mom is responsible for much of the happiness I was feeling. An amateur cellist, she played music with friends all her life and she and I often played together, especially in recent years. Now I was carrying forward what she'd given me and feeling tremendous gratitude.

Dot (on cello) at a music workshop we attended in Vermont last year, shortly before she became ill.

I have not felt a lot of sorrow since she died, but last night I was sad that I couldn't call her up and tell her how my musical life in Fidenza has taken off. She would be so pleased. And so much more interested in all the fascinating, tedious details of it all than anybody else on the planet will ever be.

Meanwhile, Pam is thrilled to be playing chamber music again and admits that after all she isn't half bad, even after that long hiatus. She is not ready to give my red nails any credit for her success, however.

Post-mortem

I realize that my long silence after announcing the death of my mom a few weeks ago may have created the impression among my faithful readers that I have been paralyzed by either grief or the weight of post-mortem responsibilities.

The truth is that, having managed to get everything done in New York that I needed to, at least for now, I've been back in Fidenza for well over a week. It has been cold and rainy here, but despite the gloomy atmosphere I've been feeling entirely cheerful and pursuing my usual Italian-side activities with great pleasure, even though my duties as a blogger seem to have fallen by the wayside.

I think these lights are for Christmas, but maybe they're permanent.

Not that there wasn't a lot to do back in New York. In addition to the usual legal business and the canceling of subscriptions, phone service, cable TV, and so on, we all faced the challenge of dealing with her stuff. We'd already moved her three times since our father died 15 years ago--once to her new solo apartment, then to the retirement community where she'd been living for the last eight or nine years, and last summer to a new apartment in the same building--and each time we helped her whittle down her heap of possessions.

However, the heap was still piled pretty high. Dot was a prolific artist and a dedicated shopper, and she was loath to throw things out, especially things she'd made. We her progeny already had as many of her paintings, pottery, and sculptures as we had room for, sometimes more than that, but she held on to many of her best works till the end. When she died these coveted items became available, and most of us decided we could find room for at least some of them.

I'm happy to report that who got what was settled amicably. There was some contention at first, but once we stopped trying to discuss things via social media and talked to each other face to face, we were able to resolve issues quickly and with good humor. Both my kids wanted and adopted a lot of things linking them to their grandparents, which pleases me more than I would have expected. And I'll be eternally grateful to my New York sibs and their spouses, who bore the brunt of clearing out Dot's last apartment and handled that difficult job with generosity and aplomb.

My sister took this sad last picture of Dot's place minus Dot.

The obvious takeaway from that experience would be to accept the transience of life and the emptiness of material things and get to work disposing of a lot of our own stuff now, rather than leaving it behind for our kids and other relatives to deal with. This point was driven home to me when I first arrived in New York and my brother and daughter greeted me by exclaiming, "You're the oldest one now!" As if that hadn't been occurring to me all during what my sister referred to as our mother's "endless farewell tour."

Like most Americans, however, my reflexive response to reminders of my own mortality is a desire to shore myself up with things, lots of them. In addition to bringing some more of Dot's paintings back to Italy with us, plus quite a few of her ceramics, some costume jewelry, a raincoat, a set of place mats, a nutcracker, a wine stopper, and even a few pairs of shoes, I've been obsessively thinking about the Italian winter wear I ought to be buying and the Italian tchotchkes we need. We're also embarking on a construction project, a second bathroom, which will require all kinds of additional purchases beyond the obvious fittings.

So instead of pondering the grimly inevitable, I'm deliberately not thinking about what will become of our ever-growing hoard when Danny and I pass over to the other side. (Sorry, kids.) And in the meantime I will be cataloging a good deal of what we're accumulating here. Please stay tuned.

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.

Time to go

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. 

Heard on the balcony

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.