Tag Archives: Italy

Venice: Don’t Hate Me ‘Cause I’m Beautiful

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Venice. The name inspires wonder and envy from those who have never seen it, but if you start asking about the city with your seasoned traveler friends, they tend to give a dismissive sniff and say with upturned noses, “Oh Venice, it’s totally overrated. Such a tourist trap. And so overpriced. You’re better off spending your time in Florence.”

While there may be some legitimacy to some of the complaints (there are a hella lot of English-speaking tourists, the mosquitoes are wicked), I found Venice to be delightful and full of hidden charms. If you play your cards right, you can escape the heaving masses to areas blessedly free of foot traffic, with only the slow slap of waves to break the silence. It probably helped that I had a few Veneto locals to steer me around. (Valeria, we love you.)

Some basics: Venice was historically one of Italy’s most powerful city-states, and with the strength of its navy, the Venetian empire conquered and sacked various parts of Croatia, Constantinople, Greece and the Near East. You can see Byzantine and Muslim influences in the architecture even today. The city is well-known for its system of canals, which crisscross and connect the six sestiere (city wards) of Venice. At the front of each gondola, there is a piece of metal that includes six notches, one for each sestiere. If you look at a map of Venice, the islands form a fish-like shape.
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Arqua Petrarca: Love, Wine and Petrarch

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Clockwise: the entrance to Petrarch’s home; 13th century Venetian school fresco inside the Santa Maria church; Petrarch’s tomb; pomegranates growing on a roadside tree

Se ti agita sacro amore di Patria, t’inchina a queste mura ove spirò la grande anima il cantor dei Scipioni e di Laura. If you are moved by the sacred love of country, bow down before this wall where a great soul, the singer of Scipio and of Laura passed away.
-Inscription at the house of Petrarch

One of the best parts about living in Italy is that the country has immense historical and cultural wealth, simply by virtue of having advanced civilizations living here for eons. You can drive into almost any random small town in Italy and discover a Baroque church, a medieval castle, a Renaissance marble sculpture…try doing that in the United States and you’ll find a McDonald’s parking lot. Thus, I am often afflicted with country-envy when I speak to Italians, who don’t even bat an eye as they point out the astronomy tower that Galileo conducted research in, while my jaw drops in excitement. On the other hand, the other day I started grilling Valeria on the history of the Italian republic and it went something like this:

V: You know how every other street is named Garibaldi? That’s because Giuseppe Garibaldi was the one who led the drive for the unification of Italy in 1861.
Me: Oh, 1861? To me, that year signifies the start of the American Civil War. Wait a minute, modern Italy was founded in 1861? Then I shouldn’t feel bad, my country is older than yours after all!
V: …I guess you could look at it that way.

Rivalries aside, Valeria was kind enough to act as a guide and host her flatmates in Veneto for a few days. Veneto is a region in northeast Italy, where Valeria and several previous generations of her family grew up. It is most famous for the canal-lined city of Venice, but we were taking some time to explore the Colli Euganei (Euganean Hills), known for being a center of moscato wines. We wandered through Monselice and Este, paused to ogle at the castles, and eventually made our way to Arqua Petrarca, so named because it is the deathplace of Petrarch.
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Scenes from the Palio di Siena

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Liberamente nel Campo di Siena / Ogni vergogna deposta, s’affisse.
(Freely upon the Campo of Siena / All shame being laid aside, he placed himself.)
-Dante, Purgatory, XI 134-135

Having been born in Louisville, home of the celebrated Kentucky Derby, I was pretty keen to hear about another famed horse race in Italy, the Palio di Siena. This race is generally held twice annually, on July 2 and August 16, and takes place in the town’s main square, the Piazza del Campo. A dirt track is laid out on the ground, bleachers are thrown up and the town takes a day off to carouse and carry on a centuries-old tradition.

My WWOOF host family was also curious and intrepid enough to venture into Siena, so we drove out and managed to land a parking spot not too far from the center of town. The city was in a festive mood, buzzing with energy, packed with gawking visitors and locals happy to have the day off. Many people were waving flags or wearing them around their necks to show their support for one of the 17 Siena contrade, or city wards. To delineate the borders between the contrade, colorful flags and lamps lined the streets and buildings. Residents take a lot of pride and identify with their contrada, which functions as a center for baptisms, marriages, deaths, festivals and other celebrations. It is advised that you do not marry out of your contrada!

Inside a tabbachi shop selling flags, I asked the clerk which contrada he thought would win. He pointed to the goose (oca), dolphin (onda) and turtle (tartuca). “The tortoise, I really think this one has the best chance,” he said. Turtles winning the race? I scratched my head but we followed his advice and purchased a tartuca flag, vividly colored in blue and gold, with a turtle emblazoned in the center.
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Turning Back Time in Florence

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The clock inside the Florence Duomo runs counterclockwise and starts its days at sunset (it is 4-6 hours fast). This is because when the clock was designed in the 1400s, sunset was the point at which the city gates were closed and all residents had to be inside the city walls.

It was the worst of times possible to visit Florence.

August 15 is the height of ferragosto, or summer holiday season in Italy. It also marks the Feast of the Assumption, and is a public holiday in most Catholic countries. The word comes from Latin for feriae Augusti (August vacations), and any proper Italian worth their salt jets to a beach (or possibly mountain) resort and spends the month surrounded by sand and surf. The cities are vacated and left for the hordes of tourists who descend upon Rome, Florence and Venice, wondering why the storefronts are dark and empty. To be fair, things are a lot better now than they were a few decades ago, when Italian news channels would televise shots of hapless tourists wandering outside closed museums, and elderly residents struggling to find an open pharmacy or bakery to buy a loaf of bread. These days, local authorities have mandated that a certain number of businesses need to stay open, so that basic needs can be supplied. Still, my 36 hours in Florence were one disappointment after another, as almost all the independent retailers not geared towards tourists displayed the ubiquitous “chiuso per ferie” (closed for holiday) sign. Did I mention that it also rained all day?

No matter, good weather is not required to partake in Florence’s greatest assets: Florentine cuisine and Renaissance art. Florence is famed for being a center of Tuscan cuisine, with a diverse range of vibrant markets, neighborhood watering holes and high-end restaurants. And with over 60% of the world’s most important artwork in Italy, over half of which is in Florence, the city probably has more Renaissance marbles per capita than any other place in the world. You pretty much can’t throw a rock without hitting something bankrolled by the Medici family.
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Soaring Through Centuries: Falcons and Farms in Tuscany

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A falcon catches a lure mid-air.

After a 7 hour battle for seating on a hot, overbooked train, I stepped off the platform in San Miniato and took a good look around. This was Italy’s famed Tuscany, the stuff that Hollywood movies and expat marriage dreams are made of. All was quiet, and I paused uncertainly as I looked at the empty train station waiting room. If I were a WWOOF host, where would I be, I thought to myself. My worries were allayed however, when I spotted a woman waiting around the corner. She approached me with a smile and said, “Hi, are you Crystal? I’m Amy, nice to meet you, I’m glad that you made it!”

Amy quickly introduced herself and told me about the Barbialla Nuova farm, where I am volunteering through WWOOF for the next couple weeks. In no time, we were trading life stories and discussing how the shape of bread across cultures is influenced by the way it is used (flatbreads for curry in India vs round disks used as bowls for stew in England). Amy moved from Australia to Italy with her husband and two young children about 9 months ago, after deciding that they wanted to spend some time living abroad. Ken, her husband, is a very talented bread baker and they both have extensive experience as WWOOFers around the world. After sending out inquiries to the WWOOF network, they stumbled upon Barbialla Nuova and haven’t left since. “It’s really neat to be on the other side now as a host!” commented Amy.

Barbialla Nuova is a 500-hectare farm in central Tuscany, and the project aspires to govern the land as a holistic living organism, with knowledge from the biodynamic, sustainable and Fukuoka schools of natural agriculture. The farm holds a herd of 60+ Chianina cattle, pigs, a lake for fishing, and some of the most valuable natural white truffle beds of the Val d’Elsa. More than half of the property is wooded, and much of the remaining land is set aside for grazing animals. Wild boars, deer, hares and porcupines are some of the animals that are commonly seen on the grounds. At one point, there were about 50 farmhouses on the property, and the 1861 census records state that 382 people lived on the estate at that time, with each family given a house and some land in exchange for half of the profits. Even further back in history, Barbialla was underwater during the Pliocene era, and in some of the layers of rock, you can find marine fossils of gastropods and bivalves.
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The Italian Work Ethic

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Me: “I’m sure Italians are very hardworking people!”

Italian: “Don’t be silly, all the hardworking Italians are already in the U.S.”

After I announced my move to Italy and the initial excitement had subsided, the jokes started rolling in about the work ethic of Italians and southern Europeans in general. I reassured myself that I’d be living in northern, rather than southern Italy, and surely it would be nice to take a break from the frenetic pace of American work habits? I mean, who needs to run errands between the hours of 12:30 and 3:30 pm anyway? (Most Italian businesses are closed closed in the afternoons, on Sundays, and often on Saturdays and Mondays as well.)

Anyway, I try to keep an open mind and not simply exaggerate stereotypes, but had to lol (with chagrin) at the NYT’s latest article on Italian work culture, “Fiat Pushes Work Ethic at Italian Plant.” Read it and weep:

Even some workers here in Pomigliano, Fiat’s lowest-producing plant, complain of ingrained bad habits, citing peers who call in sick to earn money while working another job or skip work with a fake doctor’s note — especially when the local soccer team is playing.

Now, fresh from rescuing Chrysler in the United States, Sergio Marchionne of Fiat is pushing these workers to be more devoted to their jobs, mirroring a larger effort by the government to improve Italy’s competitiveness and reduce its debt through austerity measures.

But shifting a culture toward work and closing the divide with Italy’s northern neighbors won’t be easy. Embedded for generations here — and on other parts of Europe’s often-sweltering southern rim — is a lifestyle that values flexibility for workers.

To some, Fiat is drawing the curtain on a humane working life.

“He wants to impose American-style standards,” Nello Niglio, a factory worker, said of Mr. Marchionne’s requirements to work longer hours and cut back on absences. “But too much work is going to kill our workers.”

Oh No, American-style standards! Pomigliano is near Naples, in the southern half of Italy, where poverty levels, unemployment and mafia strength are much higher than northern Italy. When I jokingly asked (northern) Italians why they don’t simply secede and leave their poorer southern cousins behind, they replied seriously that the separatist party Lega Nord was effectively trying to do just that.

And in case you think Fiat is trying to make too many changes at once, they do acknowledge the importance of Italy’s national past-time:

Just last month, Fiat erected large television screens inside the factory when Italy played in the World Cup to encourage employees to come to work, said Mr. Nacco, the longtime worker there. Still, some people did not show up. “And Fiat was paying us to watch the game,” he said.

The productivity of GM workers is starting to look pretty good right about now.