All done

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

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

Living room, March 2018

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

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

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

Bedroom in progress. Addio, tree mural.

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

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

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

A beautiful blank wall.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That border is painted on, not structural.

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

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

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

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

Comments welcome!

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

I'm always open to reader comments.

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

Being tourists 3: Faenza

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

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

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

The Piazza del Popolo in Faenza, during lunch.

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

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

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

Clearly architectural photos aren't my forte.

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

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

Not surprisingly, food was a frequent theme.

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

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

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

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

And whatever was this jar for?

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

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

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

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

Urban renewal

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

...and Cristiano prepping the bathroom.

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

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

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

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

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

Being tourists 2: Ferrara

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

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

Several surprisingly interesting videos described the Jewish diaspora in Italy.

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

Little Simon greets death with saintly aplomb.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This way out.

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

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

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

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

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

(To be continued.) 

Being tourists 1: Bologna

Last week we took a break from trying to be Italians and instead acted like tourists for a change. We met our friend Valerie in Bologna, about an hour from here, and rented an Airbnb apartment for a few days. In addition to exploring a little of Bologna, that wonderful city, we took a train to Ferrara one day and Faenza the next.

The apartment had the air of being someone's grandma's house. Most Airbnbs these days feel like Ikea showrooms, but this place, while beautifully kept up and very clean, felt like it had been preserved under glass for the last fifty-plus years.

Danny putting on his shoes and getting ready for another long, long walk.

It was a fourth-floor walk-up (third floor in Italian), which meant we had some lovely views, as well as cool breezes when night fell. (Which was a good thing, since temperatures were in the high 80s during the day all week there.)

There was at least one more floor above us. I was very taken with this dusty but determined houseplant on the landing above ours.

We ate very well in Bologna, especially at Da Cesari, where we first went some thirty years ago and which we stumbled upon again not far from our rental apartment. Our serious tourist-ing was reserved for Ferrara and Faenza, however.

(To be continued.)

Quick visit

Our lovely niece Lucy came to visit for a couple of days, en route to a summer art-history program in Florence. She spent some of her brief stay with us getting used to the time change, but while she was conscious we showed her around town.

We had a drink on the piazza with Pam and Romano and torta fritta and tortelli at the Antica Trattoria. We had pizza at the Astoria, visited our local supermarket, and strolled around the side streets

I was reminded that part of Fidenza's charm is that there's not much here that's a conventional don't-miss experience. The town itself, its day to day, is where the thrill lies, but it's an incremental sort of thrill.

Of course we took her to Fidenza's one real sight, the 12th-century cathedral, where she met San Donnino, the town's headless patron saint. His statue has been moved to a more prominent spot since we were last here, but his bones are still enshrined in the crypt.

The next morning Danny warned Lucy about how Italians start the day with nothing but coffee and a cookie or a croissant and made her a good American breakfast of bacon, eggs, and toast, in hopes of tiding her over for a while.

 Then we put her on the train to Florence. Buon viaggio!

It was great to spend a little time with her and to vicariously share the excitement of a young person being on her own in Italy for the first time. I hope this is her first visit to us of many. 

How does our garden grow?

Danny has always been a dedicated gardener, and he's always been particularly dedicated to two kinds of plants: things that grow in the desert, and things you can eat. Decades ago, when we lived in an apartment in upper Manhattan, Danny filled the windowsills with cactus and succulents. In later years, when we had property in various places, he created cactus gardens, fruit orchards, and vegetable patches wherever space and climate allowed.

Here in our Fidenza apartment all he has to work with is a few windowsills and the balcony off the living room. But one of his first purchases was a small selection of cactus, and they've managed to survive and thrive even during the many months when no one is here to look after them.

Those buds in the bottom center have opened since I took this.

The other thing Danny started planting was basil, parsley, thyme, oregano, and other herbs. They did very nicely while we were here, but when we came back to Fidenza five or six weeks ago after six months away we found that most of them had pretty much died. It probably didn't help that the area had an unusually dry winter.

The chives from last fall were among the casualties.

The only survivors were the rosemary and sage on the corner of the balcony, overlooking the gelateria. Recently Danny added a lemon, for which he is plotting to get a much bigger pot.

Lemon on the left, sage on the right, rosemary in the middle.

Once Danny started watering, some of the holdover plants revived. It also started to rain, and rain, and rain, so maybe that helped, too. The parsley's ability to come back from the dead was particularly impressive, but then the oregano started putting out leaves as well. The thyme on the end appears to be irreversibly dead, though.

Recently Danny invested in a bunch of new plants--that lemon, plus more cactus and more herbs. On the dining-room windowsill are oregano, a new thyme plant, mint, and basil.

And out on the balcony we have fresh attempts at chives and cilantro, both of which are hard to find in the markets here. They aren't used in Italian cooking, so why would anyone want to buy them?

That's cilantro on the left, chives on the right.

When we first got here earlier this spring, after a long and arduous journey, we discovered that Pam and Romano had arranged for their son to clear the cobwebs out of our place and had left us a columba, a (vaguely) dove-shaped cake that's the Easter version of panettone, but with sugar-and-almond icing, no raisins, and extra candied orange peel.

I swiped this off the internet because we ate ours too fast to take a picture.

Buttery, sweet, and delicious, it more than made up for the sad discovery of our dead herbs. Really, they are wonderful friends.

Even before we got in the door, though, we found another present from them: a new doormat.

It makes me smile every time I come in the door.  

On not voting

Some may be wondering if or how I myself voted in the Fidenza elections of a few days ago. The answer is that I didn't, because unfortunately I couldn't. Although I am an Italian citizen, and therefore entitled to vote (even though I'm also a citizen of the USA), currently I can't vote here in Fidenza, much as I would have liked to.

In Italy citizenship is arranged around one's comune, one's home town, which is defined as where you were born or, if you move, where you reside. My comune is Montagano, the tiny village down south in Molise where my Italian "blood" and that of my children was legally recognized two summers ago. In effect, I was born as an Italian there, and now it is my comune, even though I live in California and (slightly less than half the year) up north here in Emilia-Romagna. And because my legal residence is still California, as far as Italy's concerned I'm a Montaganesa who's registered as living overseas.

Montagano and a fellow Montaganesa

Now as an overseas Italian I ought to have been able to vote (by mail) in the European Parliamentary elections that also took place this week. I wasn't paying attention to all this back at the beginning of the year, at which time, as I understand it, the Italian consulate in San Francisco should have sent me my ballot. But no ballot ever arrived, and I didn't notice, so I lost my chance to vote from abroad.

Alternately, I could have gone to my home comune last week and voted there, both for the European Parliament and the Montagano mayor. In fact, a month before the election Montagano sent me a postcard reminding me that I could come and vote. It was sent regular mail and arrived in California about three days before the election, so a little late to make travel plans, even from within Italy. Anyway, the nine-hour trip from Fidenza didn't seem worth it. I am civic-minded, but not quite to that degree.

As a result, I was unable to do anything but watch from the sidelines and wring my hands. It surprised me how much not voting bothered me. It seemed anti-social, like littering or spitting in the street. I want to be a good citizen, in both my countries.

A Fidenza street, where I do not spit.

And the winner is...

The results of the election held in Fidenza on Sunday were announced the next day. The tallies from the European Parliamentary elections were posted early on, and for those of us who aren't looking forward to a return to the 1930s, they were pretty discouraging. Across Italy the right-wing Lega, headed by Italy's Trumpish interior minister, Matteo Salvini, came in number 1, with 34 percent of the vote, while the center-left social-democratic Partito Democratico (PD) polled a discouraging 22 percent. Add in the other nationalist parties (Forza Italia, Fratelli d'Italia und so weiter) and the far right's share of the vote comes scarily close to 50 percent.

Here in Fidenza (as in much of northern Italy, historically the Lega's stronghold) the Lega did even better. In Fidenza it racked up 40 percent of the vote, while the PD received only 25 percent. Combining the Lega's local votes with those for Berlusconi's Forza and the Fratelli, over half of Fidenza voters chose the far right. Pretty grim.

These results were posted early on Monday by the Fidenza administration

All day yesterday we waited to hear the bad news about the mayoral election. Would the PD's Masari be turned out in favor of the Salvini-ish Scarabelli?

Late in the afternoon, the results went up on a screen set up at the front of the town hall. They were also available on the internet, but despite the rain a lot of people came by to see them in person, as it were.

Usually these town elections happen in two phases: the initial vote, and then the two most successful candidates have to go back "to the urns" (the Italian equivalent of "the ballot box," presumably because back in Roman times votes were collected in large jars) for a run-off contest. Rarely does anyone get a clear majority the first time around.

But Masari did, with a stunning 58 percent of the vote. According to La Repubblica, it was the first time in the town's history that a mayor won election on the first ballot.

In an interview with the paper, Masari noted that last year Salvini held one of his innumerable rallies in Fidenza and promised to return after the election to greet the town's new mayor--clearly hoping that the winner would be his party's man.

"I'm expecting him," Masari said. He added that since he's eager to talk to the interior minister about the national government's withdrawal of funding for one of Fidenza's schools and its new police barracks, "I'm also available to go to Rome."

That evening the sound of singing and excited chatter floated up from the street. Masari's election office is just across the way from us, and despite the lousy weather his supporters were celebrating.

I'm no Nate Silver, but it looks to me like quite a few of the same Fidentini who voted for the Lega and the other right parties also voted for Masari. Perhaps they wanted to cast a symbolic vote against immigration, against the status quo, against Europe--the European Parliament is more symbol than governing body, after all. But when it came to how their own town was being run they were apparently happy to keep the status quo in place.

The size of the right-wing vote here isn't entirely a surprise, either. I have heard complaints from several people in town that "we"--we in Fidenza, we in northern Italy--are being taken unfair advantage of by immigrants, by the crooks and layabouts in southern Italy, by the European Union bureaucracy. The tone is similar to the grousing about "welfare queens" and "illegals" that we in the United States heard during the Reagan-Clinton years. It hasn't yet blossomed into the venomous hatefulness we're experiencing now in the Trump era, at least not among the people I've encountered (and have been able to understand--this is a ridiculously small sample). But unless something changes, it seems all too possible it will.