Towards the end of last century Linda and I saw a movie – either with Scotty  or on his recommendation – Life is Beautiful. The plot is partly a biography of the father of the main actor, Roberto Benigni . The story was set in 1930’s- 1945 and is of an Italian Jew who was sent to an extermination camp with his family, but who is determined to keep his son alive.  It is a wonderful movie, one that won a large number of awards.  Most of the filming was done in a beautiful city called Arezzo. Yesterday we went to Arezzo.

The town has about 100,000 inhabitants and is about 1hr south of Florence by train.  It is one of the major Etruscan hilltop towns, the Etruscans predate the Romans and give Tuscany its name of course.  There are still remains of Etruscan walls in the town.  The town went through such a period of economic decline after the mid 16th century that not much in the centre was touched- and so it is still stunning.  It was also one of the cities aligned with Siena when Siena was a republic.  Florence and this part of Italy were at war for centuries without the Florentines having much luck in the invasion-of-their-near-neighbourhood project.

However in 1555 Philip of France owed so much money to Florence, originally borrowed from Cosimo de’ Medici, that he invaded and captured Siena, Arezzo and the rest, then sold it to the Medicis to help pay off his debt.  The Sienese and the Inhabitants of Arezzo STILL hate Florentines and French with a passion.  In another 500 years they may be able to begin the first tentative steps toward reconciliation.

The cathedral is beautiful.  I was brought up going to Congregational churches, – no hierarchy, no permanent officials, women in every role, very simple buildings.  This church wasn’t anything like that. It does have a plaque in memory of some members of the congregation who converted from Judaism, but were burned at the stake anyway – antisemitism goes back centuries in this part of the world.  They still run a tournament in Arezzo each Summer that features local ‘Knights’  from each of the major churches on real horses in competition to knock down a ‘Saracen’.  The festival finishes with a bonfire that burns figures representing a Saracen king and a Jewish moneylender.  Long memories.  I’m glad the locals here never had a problem with my Rosewood people.

There is also a Marconi museum in the town. The museum has the radio set that was set up on the local coastline that helped transmit the distress call from the Titanic, and one from the ship that went to the liner’s aid.  I know Marconi won the Nobel Prize for physics, I understand the countless lives saved by his invention.  But Marconi was a fanatical Fascist – Mussolini was best man at his wedding.  I think a better festival  for Arezzo would be an annual screening of Life is Beautiful, followed by knights jousting at a Mussolini figure.  I’d go to see that one, except it could take another 500 years –  and we leave for Turkey tomorrow.

Would we go back to Arezzo?  Linda has already looked up apartments in town.  It has great food, great coffee and 2500 yrs of history to be explored.  I’m already looking forward to that trip.

I have a dream. A transport dream. I know I will never be given the opportunity to ride a Vespa through the streets of Toowoomba with my grey locks flowing freely in the wind. I will never have Linda holding on to me tightly while the 100cc motor scooter transports us for an al fresco lunch at, say, Picnic Point or the Tallegallah Cemetery.  I have had to come up with an alternative strategy.

When the United Nations establish a willingness to negotiate, their fist position is always an ambit claim.  From there they work backwards. Natalie used the same tactic.

Dad, I’m thirsty, can I have a drink?
Yes
OK I’ll have a large chocolate thick shake
No
OK,  just a milk shake
No
OK, a soft drink
No!

But then, by doing this, Natalie would get herself an orange juice instead of some tap water from a plastic cup provided by a kind old dear who works behind the counter in a coffee shop.

I’m going to use the same tactics!

I don’t want to be limited to one of these:

I know I’ll never get to own one of these:

And this one’ll get knocked back for sure:

As will this little red baby:

Even I think this is stupid:

But with a bit of work – and support from friends,  I think Linda WOULD DEFINITELY settle for one of these:

In fact I can see a whole fleet of these three-wheelers in Fairholme colours!  They could be used for so many occasions.  Imagine the Fairholme Board and the guest speaker turning up to Presenting Fairholme in the back of a convoy of open tops!  With a bit of perspex work done by Pete Sutton even  a copy of the Pope Mobile is not impossible.  Imagine how Celia and Margie’s people would go for that!!!!

Hired out for the Formal, rides at the Spring Fair, Carnival of Flowers – how the list goes on.  We might need crowd funding, but I think if we all get behind the project it can happen.  Italy is, after all, the land of miracles.  There must be a St Piaggio or St Vespa here we can enlist for support?

It’s just one man’s dream – but with your help it could  happen!

Watch out Fairholme, I have just interrogated a 10 year old Italian boy and learned the secrets of schooling Firenze-style.

This afternoon Ross and I meandered our way to Via Giuseppe Garibaldi to share tea on the terrace top of our best (and only – the brackets are for you, Scotty) Italian friend’s apartment. Celia – you would have had marble envy climbing the 80 steps to the fourth floor. Here on the terrace of this beautifully renovated apartment were panoramic views of the Duomo, Basillica, Pitti Palace, the hills to the north- west – a very special glimpse of Tuscany.

We were treated to tea and biscuits with Philomenia who lectures in English at the Florence University and we shared the pleasure with her 10 year old son Luccia and 5 year old son, Orlando. For avid blog followers, you might remember that we met Philomenia early on in our stay, at the magic Cafe Rainer; the location of coffee and white chocolate pastries to dream about. Not backward in coming forward, we invited ourselves to tutor Philomenia’s First Year English group, that same afternoon. Fear not – we were invited to afternoon tea today, we did not invite ourselves, though with the Rossco that may have been a reasonable deduction by the presumptuous amongst you.

Some scene setting at this point ….. Philomenia is an Aussie, of Italian heritage – born and bred in Melbourne, her husband is Italian and she has lived in Florence for the last 18 years – with a short two year sojourn to Paris somewhere in that time. At such points in a conversation one can feel a little like a Philistine, though of course Ross can always boast a Rosewood heritage. I sense Philomenia craves a little for Australian company, so we were able to oblige most willingly.

Her boys are fascinating –the products of being truly bilingual and bicultural (just made that term up). Orlando commandeered Ross for a protracted game of Power Rangers Memory … Ross lost. He maintains that Orlando cheated but I wasn’t a witness to his defeat at the hands of a minor. While Ross was reacquainting himself with the might of the Power Rangers, Luccia was filling me in on Italian education – or certainly schooling for a 10 year old boy in Florence. His school day runs from 8:25 until 4:00 pm, he often has 2 hours of homework, study, projects and of course studies English, daily. Lengthen that school day Stewart! The clincher for me was the discussion about ‘the interrogation’. …. and I was seriously fascinated, once I recovered from the name of the process, that is.

Luccia was interrogated in Science yesterday. That means, he was randomly selected by his teacher to stand in his place whilst his 21 classmates listened intently (actually Luccia said it’s incredibly boring) to his responses to an interrogation on the reproduction system. He had studied but did not know the questions that would be asked. The level of questioning is determined by the depth of the answers and at the end of 10 minutes the teacher awards a result out of 10.

The result matters, it’s cumulative over the semester and will ultimately determine Luccia’s pathway into middle school. He said it’s a bit scary but he enjoys it. His mother says after some whole-hearted Aussie scepticism, she is sold on the benefits – Philomenia believes the depth of understanding required to do well is quite phenomenal and the fact that it’s oral makes it very challenging and very public! Sometimes the teacher seeks volunteers to be interrogated – Luccia says there are two girls who always get their hands up first, they are after the elusive 10 out of 10. Go the girls! Now we know why Italians are such good oral communicators. Yet if their education is so thorough and discerning why is their economy so dismal? Too much time spent talking perhaps?

Another magic Florentine day, the highlight was our rooftop experience; a small glimpse of life as a Florentine and of course, learning the art of a good interrogation … I’m sure Lyn will love it!

(Better let you go to your next interrogation, Scotty)
Ciao, Linda

Sometimes a traveller can miss a dog left at home.  Don’t think Charlie could live in an apartment though.

Is it A?

Or B?

Or C?

Or D?

or E?

The correct answer of course is E.  This is Francesca who makes our coffee every day.  All the rest are photos of Roman ruins.

The Tour Di Toscana enters its final stages, the Tour d’Turkey is about to commence!

Natalie and Mitchell are always telling me not to wear my hat strap done up under my chin.  They say that only my ASD boys wear a hat like that.  NOT TRUE MI BAMBINI!  I have seen quite a few middle-aged Japanese women who also wear their hat the same way.  So there!

And by the way children, yes they did like me getting up close to take these photos – even if they pretended not to, and then tried to scamper away. I know they were very comfortable and were laughing on the inside – totally inscrutable!

Sayonara

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

(The Road Less Travelled – Robert Frost)

‘Don’t line up, this isn’t Switzerland’

When I was in Year 6 for ‘Show and Tell’ most kids would just bring in a piece of crap they found under their house, say a bullet or an old Victa mower blade. There was a boy in my class named Kenny Kennricks. The boys admired him because he was the first boy in our year to have pubic hair, the girls admired him because he had an electric guitar. One day for his turn at ‘Show and Tell’ he bought both to school and during class he played his unplugged guitar and sang an Elvis number (Wooden Heart perhaps?). It was the most hysterically funny thing our class had ever experienced. Even Mr Wilkie got the giggles.  His voice was breaking and he was terrible at guitar, and in just ninety seconds Kenny Kennricks completely destroyed half of the respect the class had for him. Last night, however, Linda and I were fortunate enough to hear a magnificent guitarist, part of a trio of Romanian Gypsy musicians who were recording a concert in a theatre that had once been the church of a convent.

The Teatro del Sale is near the markets where we shop each morning. Linda found it in one of her wanders and made the enquiries. If you join their club for 7 euros, which we did, you are entitled to sit down to a meal before each concert. The concert and meal cost an extra 20 euros each – the meal alone made the night worthwhile. It was a buffet and the audience obviously included foreigners like us.  We were told ‘Don’t line up this isn’t Switzerland! – Just take whatever you want.’ So we didn’t and we did.

The food highlights? Many. The first course was all vegetable dishes – baked gnocchi with goats’ cheese was special.  The pasta was with a bolognaise sauce, the soup was a beautiful clam broth, the meat was a mixed grill from a huge wood-fired oven and the desserts were an Italian version of petit fours with coffee. There were mountains of breads baked in another wood-fired oven and the house wine was included in the price.  What was also special for us was seeing Michael, a young man with Down’s Syndrome hard at work with the chef.  The owner has another restaurant and employs 5 staff with disabilities.  Michael has worked there for 10 years – so the owner has an obvious long-term commitment to his staff, to good food and to great music.

The theatre had been trying to contact this trio for some time.  They are from Romania, but had been touring Spain.  By coincidence the group had contacted the owner because they wanted to do a recording in his theatre as the acoustics in the church were so good.  We were the beneficiaries.  The only downside of being at a live recording is that no drinks were allowed during the performance (in order to reduce background noise), and the audience was asked not to clap or stamp in time.  The last request was fine for Swiss-like guests such as the Evans’ in the audience, but totally wasted on Italians.

Apart from their musical abilities the amazing thing about the band was that they were all perfect dopelgangers.  The double bass player looked EXACTLY like Michaelangelo’s David. Even though fully clothed I thought he played the huge double bass as some sort of Freudeun compensatory mechanism, Linda thought it was because he played the double bass.  The violinist was Adair Donaldon and the guitarist, without doubt, was Johnny Depp.  It was Johnny Depp who was totally mesmerising.  I have seen George Golla play live, I have seen plenty of rock guitarists and the occasional classical guitarist, but this guy was the best I have ever seen in person.  The whole night was one of those unexpected joys that never make it into guide books for tourists.

I doubt that Kenny Kennricks still plays the guitar.  Considering his development in Year Six I would say that he is probably now completely covered in hair, but his electric guitar has been put away forever. If somehow he has been able to overcome the embarrassment and keep practicing, and if he has become even half as good as the artist we listened to last night, Kenny could still regain the respect of the girls in Rosewood’s Year Six class of 1967 – respect lost on the day of his public debut.  I think Mr Wilkie would even risk an encore.  I for one would be there.

I love seeing people at a moment when they are completely transported – Linda reading Shakespeare or any beautiful piece of writing, Stephan cooking, Scotty talking ancient history, Pete and Sandy Hearnden camped in the desert, Thommo onto a fish, Catrina talking about the Stradivarius collection in the Accademia, Maryanne coaching her team in a final, or Celia and Margie when they see a nun. Today it was my turn. I spent the morning in the Galileo Galilei Museum next to the Ufuzzi.

As some of you know, I have two Science heroes – Charles Darwin and Galileo Galilei. Three if you count Phil Gardiner. Darwin and Galileo seemingly had little in common, Phil Gardiner had absolutely nothing in common with those two scientific giants, except that Mr Gardiner taught me about Galileo and Darwin in Year 8 at Rosewood.  Darwin was agnostic after the death of his daughter, Galileo had a doctorate in canonical law. Darwin married into the Wedgewood family and was ridiculously wealthy,  Galileo came from a relatively poor family. Darwin was an English speaking biologist – full stop, Galileo was multilingual and a polymath. However both men had one characteristic that was absolutely shared – incredible intellectual courage. Each was part of the Establishment, and each knew that the publication of his discoveries would be devestating to the societies in which they lived, but both published anyway. It certainly cost Darwin the last 30 years of his health, it came close to costing Galileo his life.

At the entrance to the museum is part of Galileo’s finger recovered when he was reburied.  My people don’t usually go for relics, but this one is special. The first floor is wonderful – an exhibition consisting of a series of maps from the first millennium onwards, a globe that leaves out Australia, Arabic maths books from 1000AD, and a huge collection of timepieces – all on the theme of an attempt to get longitude right, and therefore get maps right. But for me it is all about the second floor- the second floor is all Galileo.

They have three of his telescopes, case after case filled with instruments he designed or built himself for his experiments, and his hand-written notes and drawings.  They have original copies of his publications, some annotated by his own pen. (He had very neat writing considering Peter Pointer from his right hand is in a box downstairs) They have notes from his very first work on pendulums, including his observation when still a student at Pisa Uni that the swinging chandolier in the lecture theatre seemed to keep in time with his heart beat even as the chandolier gradually came to rest. This also proves that this particular lecturer in Canonical Law in seventeenth century Pisa University was at least as boring as any 21st century lecturer in Canonical Law 101, just that now we don’t even have chadoliers to look at and to time.

The best part for me was to see his original  books, including the page with the famous dedication of his work to Pope Urban. Crawling to the Pope didn’t work – he was tried  by the Jesuits for heresy, sentenced to prison and barely escaped the stake and the bonfire that went with it. He spent the rest of his life under house arrest, only being allowed out once in that time to seek treatment for a hernia.  By this stage he was old and blind, but still considered a real threat to established thought.  Nonetheless some of his greatest work was done during his incarceration.

Four hundred years after his death there was an attempt to get a Galileo a posthumous pardon. Cardinal Ratzinger – later to become Il Papa, was in charge of the process but would have none of it – Galileo was wrong. I suppose you have to admire Ratzinger’s willingness to support the 17th Century status quo four centuries later and at a time in history when the church was screaming out for forward thinkers. It must be hard appearing to be a resolute idiot when everyone expects you to show signs of rational thought, but Cardinal R succeeded gloriously on that occasion. At least the 19th century church allowed him to be reinterred inside Santa Croce Cathedral. His body had previously just been dumped in a small grave outside with the paupers, thankfully a marked grave at least.

I’m finding it difficult to imagine a better day in a museum for me.  Does Galileo Galilei desrve the title ‘Father of Modern Science’? Absolutely. The museum gave such a feel for the enormity of the man’s intellect and his thirst for knowledge, coupled with the willingness to share that with his world – no matter the personal cost.  Just to see his notes and calculations, his drawings and his equipment was so very special. To see the two telescopes he used in formulating his treatise on planetary orbit was, for me at least, spellbinding. It’s hard to think of a better museum experience.

Imagine Linda talking with Shakespeare, Catrina meeting Mozart, Stephan in the kitchen at the Ritz, Scotty discussing tactics with Alexander the Great.  Picture Thommo with a marlin, Maryanne coaching for gold at the Olympics, Pete and Sandy camped in the Sahara or Margie and Celia strumming along with Sister Jeanine Deckers – The Singing Nun from Belguim.  It was almost like that for me today. The only thing I can come up with that would be even better is seeing Galileo looking through his telescope and doing drawings of Darwin’s finches and those Galapagos tortoises, with Charles Darwin and Phil Gardiner chatting in the background.  Now THAT would be something very special indeed!

Io sono grasso, sono più grassi, io sono il più grasso!

I am fat, and getting fatter. I could get really, really, really fat before I even get to the Land of the Kebab. Damn you Francesca and your wonderful pastries that you give me each morning, damn you S’ant Ambrogio markets with your beautiful cheeses, and damn you all those places that have forced me to sample your wares. There is so much incredible food in this city that I’m even beginning to think that bulimia is not all bad. Anorexia is all bad for sure, but bulimia has its merits. I wasn’t doing so well weight-wise anyway. Then the Webers arrived.

The Webers are our good friends from Germany.  Stephan and Iris are wonderful company and both are great cooks – Mitch and Catrina will attest to that. Stephan and I have made a point of cooking meals with ingredients that are either unfamiliar or difficult for the other to obtain in their respective home cities. For example Stephan cooked roast pigeon and roast rabbit for us all the first night.

The pigeon was marinated, browned, then put into a very hot oven for just five minutes. The legs and wings had a faint liver flavour. The breast had a strong liver flavour. Strangely the livers, cooked separately, did not taste anything like liver -they were incredibly bland. It makes me wonder if pigeons have big livers under their wings and another set behind their knees.  Stephan assured me that pigeon grows on you, but then, so do warts. This is one bird that is definitely safe from my predation.

The rabbit, however, was a revelation.  I have only tasted rabbit once before – that was in Siena a number of years ago. Stephan cooked this rabbit the same way as the pigeon and it was absolutely delicious. We had made salads and roast potatoes Weber style to accompany. The wine was a prosecco  – and it was the perfect all-round dish.  Both the rabbit and the pigeon were memorable in their own way.

To farewell the Webers we ate at a favourite place called ‘Cippoli Rossa’ (I have a great photo from a previous visit of a VERY fat German family hooking into the food.  They had been in Eatily way too long.  How my children laughed when they realised that I had taken photos of complete strangers eating!). It was food that we can’t  get in T’ba – huge but tender grilled veal chops, soft salami, roast rabbit (again), and our new favourite; a round of warmed soft goats’ cheese served on toasted Tuscan bread and topped with proscuito and rocket. We have cooked risotto and pastas, eaten the simplest salads and the freshest vegetables.  The foods as we wander the streets have been gelato or panini or the ubiquitous pizza. And we have had the luxury of a few glasses of wine or Italian beer at lunchtime.

Every time I have been to Italy it makes me wonder why we don’t eat like this at home. Then I realise; it’s because we have allowed the death of the fresh food industry industry by not caring.  It’s because so many shopkeepers here are knowledgeable and ready to pass on that knowledge. It’s because most Australians are not passionate about their food and wine, the average Italian seems to be not just passionate but almost fanatical.  It’s because the same old Italian lady who hands over her bus ticket to a complete stranger would willingly trample her own disabled sister to get the best tomatoes or the last artichoke at the markets. She would tell the green-grocer exactly what she thinks of his lettuce – only then would she tend to her weeping sister she has left lying on the ground.

And it’s because if I ate like this at home I would be drunk at lunchtime. And also because I would get really, really, really fat.