I have been distracted from this by severe viral infection and by the incessant intake of stuff to write up, which daily could enable more than 24 hours writing. So there is a great log jam in my head which I will try to find a way through by recording a few encounters and conversations.
We are now in Rome, coming upon the conga lines of mainly-unseeing tourists, but have been away in places very different. Offering here some conversations, snatches of this and that. To record the conversations dulls them down. It can be a torrent, especially when people say "we can practice our English while you practice your Italian" when things can get in a great jumble and the business of recording is a bit overwhelmed by the mental concentration on gush and mood.
I had my hair cut in Genova. Helen often enough says "you should get your hair cut" but I say that's a ludicrous idea, they'll laugh. Deep in the bowels of old Genova we went past a Moroccan barber shop and Helen said "there" and I said "no" admiring the stylish and hair-endowed young persons in and exiting the establishment. It did not help my attitude that it was busy. Then turning uphill, in one of the lanes less well endowed by working women angularly decorating walls, there was a tiny place bereft of decoration and customers. We went in. "I only do women's hair" she said and then I lifted my 41 year old Borsalino off my head and she exclaimed "oh I can do that" and proceeded to give me the best haircut of my life, taking time to do so. The conversation moved to politics, her hopes for deliverance not only by the Cinque Stelle, but also by the right wing Lega. Her family with three children a physical and psychological mirror of the national situation of one in three under 30 unemployed, two daughters working, a son who has been repeatedly been hired and then put off in favour of younger less expensive workers. I wrote here about different class circumstances in Genova and its main cemetery.
In Chianti we were guests of Silvia and partner Christoph Fischer, Silvia's daughter Olivia with us part of the time.
Christoph and I had not conversed in earlier encounter in Sicily where Christoph was the driver on wet and rainy day and Silvia taking us to meet Aldo Palazzolo and others, vast table of prawns on paper for lunch.
Finally, while giving modest help with setting up a piece of electric fence I asked Christoph about his history, which is complex and fascinating. He sent me this link to a piece of his writing in English, from when at the University of Munich. This on the rise of scientific method, but more widely on the nature of cultures, what builds and what binds them. We were agreed that we are in a massive era-change right now. We had little time as he had to hasten to his fairly new venture into organic wine making, for harvest of grapes.
I shared with Christoph the writing of Giuseppe Felloni, who here gives the most extraordinary account of the rise of Europe at the beginning of the last millennium which is now my foundation perspective on the current massive shifts. Just read section 1.1. Christoph's father had been a German infantry brigadier general who had survived into Russia and back and the final battle in Berlin. Christoph determinedly environmentalist, who has lived at Auroville for a time. When Helen asked later what Auroville was I suggested it was a place where people did not need to walk on water as their feet did not touch the ground. Christoph by then off to his grape harvest, Silvia laughed and said Christoph would agree.
In Piacenza our apartment host spontaneously (as she wrote in her review of us at airbnb) invited us to dine with family, next door, via a narrow veranda, with two cats thereupon. To enter a wonderful home, Claudia and Francesca with two young daughters, a torrent of discussion of life and politics, which feeds into my consciousness....though not wanting here to write much about it, it will come out in political writing when I have more perspective on that hopefully next week. Life as women working with people with disability, teaching basketball and netball (one tall, one short, excellent combination in working together) working with daughter's school to establish a sports program at EUR40 a year to assist in harmony between Rumanians and Albanians who fight each other, Italians, Rumanians and Albanians who fight Africans. Succeeding, also influencing parents. Such interesting and positive people, also anxious about their daughters as they go forward as a modern family in not entirely modern world.
I wrote a bit about the day trip group from Milano who wrapped us among them for a short while in the Palazzo Farnese in Piacenza. Inclusive people, their initiative.
I have no photo of the white haired lady who opened a conversation with us as we waited for a bus in Bobbio, to return to Piacenza (just as I have yet to write about stunning Bobbio). I don't recall on what point she took the initiative to talk with us. While we were going an hour on the bus, she went only three village stops along the way, waving and smiling and farewelling warmly when eventually getting off the bus. She spoke of life having lived around there, except for thirteen years in which she had gone far away to work in a supermarket on the other side of Piacenza. She spoke of the beauty of Bobbio, of how it was small, a paese really (a village, but this is a complicated word in Italian as it means nation as well as village, reflective of the historical realities and current complexity of Italy). And a place troubled by globalizazione, meaning Bobbio was so beautiful but there were so few jobs.
In Piacenza in the cathedral square on Sunday afternoon Helen was taking photographs of people when an interesting man on a bicycle suddenly parked his bike near us and whipped out his camera to photograph us. And conversation began... he is a leading doctor in the town, also socially active in articulating concern about water quality by establishing D-Day on 6 June, a landing in the Po river, swimming some distance. As we learned later, researching this modest, lively engaging man, Carlo Mistraletti. He was born in 1944, a hard year in Piacenza with its strategic position in the maintenance of Kesselring's Gothic Line. "There was a bomb right there at the corner of your street." Francesca told us later he was also a great advocate for people with mental health issues.
Helen had been seeking a simple pasta cutting tool, a wheel with wiggly edge. More special if acquired in Italy. And there near the corner of our street, by the cathedral [duomo] square, was an old shop packed to the rafters with kitchen stuff, staffed by mother and daughter, the mother old enough to have been right there when the bomb had gone off on the corner. High and large on the wall opposite the counter was a photo of a young man in uniform, his uniform as a soldier in the brutal First World War Italian campaign against the Austrians. The father of the mother now in the shop. When he came back from the war, he first sold kitchenware from his bicycle before he established the shop. Lovely people.
Piacenza very close to the little world of Don Camillo
From Piacenza we rolled comfortably on an Intercity train to Arezzo. Of which we need to write about the charm. Though there we were rafreddati a useful past participle meaning knocked sideways by a raffredore, a cold.
On our way towards the train, leaving Arezzo, we stopped in a phone shop to top up the SIM for another month, in Helen's iPad. While we waited in queue, a man came from being attended and opened conversation with us. We discussed our and his affection for Arezzo, his view that Roma was faticosa [wearisome] these days. He said he was a poet, his grandmother was a peasant, and a poet, a peasant poet. We had to go in different directions, he gave me his card, asked me to write: Pier Ferruccio Rossi. I will do that soon but first my research turns up a couple of little gem movies of his acting performances, from Youtube. You will find more researching his name on Youtube. This encounter exemplifies how life is: you need to be open to moments of unplanned magic, sparks that suddenly happen when you have not much time, opportunities for sudden sideways insight not available if everything is planned. Napoleon believed in luck. You get no luck if you don't hunt it. I have remained influenced for a long time by reading in a biography of Napoleon at Belle Helene, aka Waterloo that he had said, as the Prussians arrived and saved the day for the British: "Have I abandoned my luck?"
I want somewhere soon to record a conversation yesterday in Rome but will for now end with these two movies for you. Apart from general magic it is wonderful to see his 80 year old now portrayal of being old, in real and amusing ways, subtle and wise.
We are now in Rome, coming upon the conga lines of mainly-unseeing tourists, but have been away in places very different. Offering here some conversations, snatches of this and that. To record the conversations dulls them down. It can be a torrent, especially when people say "we can practice our English while you practice your Italian" when things can get in a great jumble and the business of recording is a bit overwhelmed by the mental concentration on gush and mood.
I had my hair cut in Genova. Helen often enough says "you should get your hair cut" but I say that's a ludicrous idea, they'll laugh. Deep in the bowels of old Genova we went past a Moroccan barber shop and Helen said "there" and I said "no" admiring the stylish and hair-endowed young persons in and exiting the establishment. It did not help my attitude that it was busy. Then turning uphill, in one of the lanes less well endowed by working women angularly decorating walls, there was a tiny place bereft of decoration and customers. We went in. "I only do women's hair" she said and then I lifted my 41 year old Borsalino off my head and she exclaimed "oh I can do that" and proceeded to give me the best haircut of my life, taking time to do so. The conversation moved to politics, her hopes for deliverance not only by the Cinque Stelle, but also by the right wing Lega. Her family with three children a physical and psychological mirror of the national situation of one in three under 30 unemployed, two daughters working, a son who has been repeatedly been hired and then put off in favour of younger less expensive workers. I wrote here about different class circumstances in Genova and its main cemetery.
In Chianti we were guests of Silvia and partner Christoph Fischer, Silvia's daughter Olivia with us part of the time.Christoph and I had not conversed in earlier encounter in Sicily where Christoph was the driver on wet and rainy day and Silvia taking us to meet Aldo Palazzolo and others, vast table of prawns on paper for lunch.
Finally, while giving modest help with setting up a piece of electric fence I asked Christoph about his history, which is complex and fascinating. He sent me this link to a piece of his writing in English, from when at the University of Munich. This on the rise of scientific method, but more widely on the nature of cultures, what builds and what binds them. We were agreed that we are in a massive era-change right now. We had little time as he had to hasten to his fairly new venture into organic wine making, for harvest of grapes.I shared with Christoph the writing of Giuseppe Felloni, who here gives the most extraordinary account of the rise of Europe at the beginning of the last millennium which is now my foundation perspective on the current massive shifts. Just read section 1.1. Christoph's father had been a German infantry brigadier general who had survived into Russia and back and the final battle in Berlin. Christoph determinedly environmentalist, who has lived at Auroville for a time. When Helen asked later what Auroville was I suggested it was a place where people did not need to walk on water as their feet did not touch the ground. Christoph by then off to his grape harvest, Silvia laughed and said Christoph would agree.
In Piacenza our apartment host spontaneously (as she wrote in her review of us at airbnb) invited us to dine with family, next door, via a narrow veranda, with two cats thereupon. To enter a wonderful home, Claudia and Francesca with two young daughters, a torrent of discussion of life and politics, which feeds into my consciousness....though not wanting here to write much about it, it will come out in political writing when I have more perspective on that hopefully next week. Life as women working with people with disability, teaching basketball and netball (one tall, one short, excellent combination in working together) working with daughter's school to establish a sports program at EUR40 a year to assist in harmony between Rumanians and Albanians who fight each other, Italians, Rumanians and Albanians who fight Africans. Succeeding, also influencing parents. Such interesting and positive people, also anxious about their daughters as they go forward as a modern family in not entirely modern world.
I wrote a bit about the day trip group from Milano who wrapped us among them for a short while in the Palazzo Farnese in Piacenza. Inclusive people, their initiative.
I have no photo of the white haired lady who opened a conversation with us as we waited for a bus in Bobbio, to return to Piacenza (just as I have yet to write about stunning Bobbio). I don't recall on what point she took the initiative to talk with us. While we were going an hour on the bus, she went only three village stops along the way, waving and smiling and farewelling warmly when eventually getting off the bus. She spoke of life having lived around there, except for thirteen years in which she had gone far away to work in a supermarket on the other side of Piacenza. She spoke of the beauty of Bobbio, of how it was small, a paese really (a village, but this is a complicated word in Italian as it means nation as well as village, reflective of the historical realities and current complexity of Italy). And a place troubled by globalizazione, meaning Bobbio was so beautiful but there were so few jobs.
 |
| News report of Carlo Mistraletti swimming for the tenth time this year in his annual event promoting the need to improve river health. |
Helen had been seeking a simple pasta cutting tool, a wheel with wiggly edge. More special if acquired in Italy. And there near the corner of our street, by the cathedral [duomo] square, was an old shop packed to the rafters with kitchen stuff, staffed by mother and daughter, the mother old enough to have been right there when the bomb had gone off on the corner. High and large on the wall opposite the counter was a photo of a young man in uniform, his uniform as a soldier in the brutal First World War Italian campaign against the Austrians. The father of the mother now in the shop. When he came back from the war, he first sold kitchenware from his bicycle before he established the shop. Lovely people.
Piacenza very close to the little world of Don Camillo
From Piacenza we rolled comfortably on an Intercity train to Arezzo. Of which we need to write about the charm. Though there we were rafreddati a useful past participle meaning knocked sideways by a raffredore, a cold.
On our way towards the train, leaving Arezzo, we stopped in a phone shop to top up the SIM for another month, in Helen's iPad. While we waited in queue, a man came from being attended and opened conversation with us. We discussed our and his affection for Arezzo, his view that Roma was faticosa [wearisome] these days. He said he was a poet, his grandmother was a peasant, and a poet, a peasant poet. We had to go in different directions, he gave me his card, asked me to write: Pier Ferruccio Rossi. I will do that soon but first my research turns up a couple of little gem movies of his acting performances, from Youtube. You will find more researching his name on Youtube. This encounter exemplifies how life is: you need to be open to moments of unplanned magic, sparks that suddenly happen when you have not much time, opportunities for sudden sideways insight not available if everything is planned. Napoleon believed in luck. You get no luck if you don't hunt it. I have remained influenced for a long time by reading in a biography of Napoleon at Belle Helene, aka Waterloo that he had said, as the Prussians arrived and saved the day for the British: "Have I abandoned my luck?"
I want somewhere soon to record a conversation yesterday in Rome but will for now end with these two movies for you. Apart from general magic it is wonderful to see his 80 year old now portrayal of being old, in real and amusing ways, subtle and wise.
this second movie has no subtitles, but you will enjoy it without understanding all the language,
both as a beautifully made story and a glimpse of life. Made in Lucca.
A partita is a game, or a match in a continuing game.
He is continuing a continuing game with a friend, to catch up his score.
He is succeeding; his friend has died.
A partita is a game, or a match in a continuing game.
He is continuing a continuing game with a friend, to catch up his score.
He is succeeding; his friend has died.
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