The enigmatic town of Pontremoli

Last spring, when we took the train to La Spezia, Danny noticed the town of Pontremoli as we passed by and announced that we had to go back sometime, because he thought it looked interesting. (I was of course reading something and hadn't noticed the place.)

Recently we heard from an old friend, C., who turns out to be living in the hills above Pontremoli. None of us has a car, but if we were willing to take a train to Pontremoli, she said, she could take an early-morning bus down to the town and meet us there for lunch. Now we had two reasons to make a day trip there, and so we went, bringing Pam along with us.

Pontremoli is a medieval town about an hour from Fidenza, on the northeastern edge of Tuscany. It takes its name from a "trembling bridge" across the Magra River. Magra means skinny or slender, and the river certainly doesn't look like much in the summer.

But C. tells us that the winter rains swell the river to the point where it regularly floods the low-lying parts of town and forces the evacuation of many residents. At least the bridge is now a sturdy stone one that doesn't tremble at all.

Pontremoli seems considerably less modernized than our town. There are plenty of beautiful old palazzi but the streets are dark and narrow. Our friend says that many houses are still heated with wood. (Hers has a more up-to-date pellet stove.) One household was chopping up fuel for next winter as we went by.

It was too early in the season for chestnuts or mushrooms, but Danny was eager to try testaroli, another local specialty--large wheat-and-water crepes that are eaten with pesto or olive oil. We had some at lunch, an experience I don't feel we need to ever repeat. The testarolo was flabby and flavorless, even slathered with pesto--and both C. and Pam assured us that this was evidence not of the restaurant's incompetence, but its authenticity. 

Testaroli are sometimes called the earliest form of pasta, and it does seem primitive compared to tagliatelle or spaghetti, both in texture and taste. Some people love them, though I have a hard time imagining why. I've even noticed vacuum-packed testaroli for sale in the wonderful cheese and salumi shop downstairs from us, looking like large brown plastic place mats. 

Speaking of primitive, we also visited one of Pontremoli's main attractions, the Museo Statue Stele, a collection of Bronze Age sculptures believed to be divinities or totems carved by people who lived in the area five thousand years ago. The carvings were unearthed relatively recently, and the details of who these people were and what these stelae meant to them remain mysterious. 

The collection is small but the museum has wisely made it extremely photogenic.

 The earliest specimens have no necks. 

Later versions have shield-like heads. Throughout, the male figures are distinguished by daggers held at crotch level, the females by prominent breasts.

The collection is housed in an 11th-century castle on a hill overlooking the town. It's called Castello del Piagnaro, named after the piagne, the sandstone slabs used to cover the roof, which seems like a very casual style of shingling, but evidently a durable one.

After admiring the stelae we wandered around the castle, which was mostly empty. When I looked in one open door, though, I found myself staring at a darkened room full of bunk beds which were in turn full of scantily clad men, who laughed as I scurried away. I can't imagine what they were doing there. Pontremoli is on the Via Francigena, so perhaps they were pilgrims resting up before pushing on to Fidenza. Or maybe, like so many Pontremolians in days of yore, they were seeking sanctuary inside the castle walls.  

From the castle ramparts we could see the town and the dome of its cathedral. Which we stopped into on our way back to the train. It's an adorable baroque candy box...

...with a black Jesus...

...and a mummified nun.

I couldn't find any information in the cathedral or on line explaining any of this. By then it was becoming clear that this was a day of mysteries.

While in the cathedral I was struck by how much the escutcheons you see all over Catholic churches, gazing down at us from above altars and doorways, look like those little Bronze Age divinities. 

Could there be a connection? Is there any way to know?

After a late afternoon gelato we said good-bye to C. and headed back to the train station and home. 

Our stomachs were happy, but my head at least was heavy with unanswered questions.

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. 

Zumba italiano

Ever since I got to Fidenza I've been intending to get to a zumba class. I am a regular at Sunday morning zumba in El Cerrito; it's a lot of sweaty exercise and  also a lot of fun, because I love jumping around to the class's Latin-pop music. Zumba is one way I burn off some of the extra wine and pasta that keep my life enjoyable, and it's also a real mood enhancer. I don't know who or where these people are, but their video gives you a little of the flavor. 

When we got to Fidenza three months ago I didn't jump right on my Italian zumba project because soon after arriving here we went to New York, and then I spent a few days in London, and then my exercise-seeking energies went into getting my aqua aerobics life organized. Keep in mind that doing anything here like finding a class or signing up at a gym is a big project, because (a) they seem to do most things differently than I'm used to and (b) they do everything in Italian. So it's easy to feel that maybe I should put this off a day or two.

Thus we were already well into June when I finally got around to scoping out where zumba classes were offered in my neighborhood. Happily there's a gym only a third of a mile away, next door to the supermarket, that has zumba on Wednesday evenings. Their web site offered monthly passes, though, and I only wanted to attend a few times before I'd be heading back to California. It took me another week or two to get up my courage (and assemble the necessary vocabulary) to go to the gym and ask if they allowed drop-ins. I was assured that they did, and I wrote in the next Wednesday's class on my calendar.

When the day arrived I squeezed into my spandex capris and a T-shirt and headed over to the class. The full heat wave hadn't hit yet, but it was already plenty warm and I didn't even think of putting on a jacket. But as I walked down our street I was suddenly aware that people were giving me looks as I passed by, of the "what the hell is she wearing?" variety. And it occurred to me only then that in Fidenza you don't see many people strolling around in the kind of workout gear that you actually work out in, especially not women in the "nonna" (grandma) age group.

I scuttled shame-faced to the gym, only to be told by the young lady behind the desk that, for reasons unknown (or possibly just not understood), there would be no class that night. And so my spandex capris and I had to endure walking home  five minutes through the same gauntlet of mildly disapproving people. 

The following Wednesday was the day we went to Pontremoli, and I didn't get back to Fidenza in time for the class. The week after that we had our successive wave of visiting friends and relatives; I spent that Wednesday evening eating mortadella ravioli and fried salt cod in a local eatery with my friend Jean and her niece Kiki.

The whole time we were running around with company I kept telling myself that I still had several more weeks before we'd be flying back to California. Only after everyone left and the laundry was done did I allow myself to realize that in fact we were leaving in just one week. If I was going to get to an Italian zumba class, it was now or--well, not never, but sometime in the autumn. .

So a few days ago, on Wednesday evening, despite the godawful heat, I got back into my zumba togs, threw a skirt over my ensemble to placate my critical neighbors, and headed back to the gym. The gal at the front desk told me the zumba class had already started 40 minutes before, which gave me a quick burst of cardio activity. But then she realized that this earlier class was not regular zumba, but something called "Zumba Strong." She invited me to go take a look while I waited for the later, less intensive class. Less intensive than zumba?

The gym held about thirty women and one man and had a temperature of about a thousand degrees. Just looking in the door made me sweat. They were all young and fit and, at that moment, doing burpees--jump up, go down into a plank, do a push-up, repeat--with the addition of a two-legged donkey kick into the air after the push-up. And they were doing dozens of them, before moving on to other, equally impossible moves. I silently gave thanks that I hadn't accidentally turned up for this class, which would certainly have killed me.

Eventually they were done and the room emptied out. Meanwhile the instructor for the vanilla zumba class arrived, and it was none other than Ilaria, the same blonde Amazon who teaches aqua aerobics. At least there would be one friendly face in the room.

And perhaps only one, because it looked like she and I were the entirety of the class. I snuck a photo.

"Usually there are a lot of people," Ilaria said. But maybe no one was coming because it was not only horribly hot, but a thunderstorm was starting outside. I probably would have stayed home myself if I hadn't been up against a deadline.

By 7:30, our start time, two more women had turned up and the class got underway. I wish I had the dance vocabulary to explain how Italian zumba differs from Californian--or at least how Ilaria's differs from that of my El Cerrito instructors. For one thing, most of the music seemed to be in Italian, rather than Spanish, insofar as I could pay attention to such details while hopping around and trying to figure out which foot went where. For another, Ilaria's style seemed to me to be a bit less liquid, a bit more martial. Perhaps it was the lingering influence of the beasts of Zumba Strong.

Anyway, we danced and sweated and had a great time, despite the awkward moment when another woman and I ran into each other and it appeared I might have broken her ankle. (She turned out to be okay.)

Afterwards we took a selfie together. Ilaria's the one on the left.

(The third member of the class isn't there because she wears a hijab when she's not dancing in an all-woman setting and didn't want to be photographed bare=headed. She's also the one I inadvertently crashed into, but I don't think she holds it against me.)

There are so many things I put on my to-do list when I got here but that I still haven't gotten to. I wanted to make pig liver with caul fat, but the market doesn't seem to be selling it now. (Maybe it's a spring dish?) I still haven't found my way to the "Rover Joe" Museum or the one dedicated to the author of the Don Camillo novels. I haven't yet gone into the bingo palace or dress shop downstairs or the "Liar's Cellar," a bar near the Duomo whose looks intrigue me.

But at least I've made it to one zumba class, and I have the photo to prove it.