Early morning, second last day

Photo taken by Helen Tuesday, from another ridge,

of the castle and old town of Soriano nel Cimino.

Our apartment is inside the walls,

directly facing a clock tower above the inner gate.

You can, if you click to enlarge the photo,

see the clock tower behind the top of the power pole.

Having a cold and perhaps also because in reflective mood I have yet to put up that report on Viterbo (but it now appears below this one, drafting commenced earlier). We leave Italy in 35 hours and there is much to do, also much to think about.

Here is the view from this kitchen window at 4am this morning. There are only three things I can see there that would not have been there over hundreds of years.

We don't know the history of who has lived in this apartment, but you will see from the photo that we can see through the inner gate to the outer gate of the old city, through walls protecting a castle built in 1278, never taken by force, only by popes. If I were the boss around here, through any of that period, I would want this window in the hands of someone I could absolutely trust. Imagine, just imagine, conversations and mutterings and dark night awake wonderings about who is watching the gate.

Helen the other night was reflecting on the fact that our neighbour's family, in a small apartment, have been there for seven generations. Then she the feminist social worker, focused in how short generations have been, how young many mothers... how many generations in 800 years.. and thus, in utter contrast to how we feel in relation to death in a house in Australia, how many have died in these walls, how many ghosts are here with us. And woken to discuss this, my mind fell, eventually, to reflecting on how many died before the age of say 3 (being conscious that among my father's father's six siblings, one other lived to the 1950s, two died in World War I, and three died before eight years old. So, and I had never thought about this before at all, nor does it seem to enter literature, a high proportion of the ghosts out there - and in here - are tiny tots. Age is a rare and mainly modern privilege...

There is a risk of romanticising Italy entirely, especially in such a place, look back again at the top photo and at our travels. But there is also a lot of blood on walls, and a lot of physical grief for ordinary people, however salved by religious belief.

We watched last night Ermanno Olmi's wonderful 1978 film L'Albero degli Zoccolli (The Tree of Wooden Clogs) which won virtually everything at Cannes 1978, and which presents the life of peasants in northern Italy as it was 100 years ago. And I have been reading again Eric Newby's book Love and War in the Appenines, which presents life as continuing and slightly updated from then, in World War II.

And you see the continuum of history if you look and inquire, everywhere. In Viterbo I took the liberty of politely asking a couple opening their front gate, to beautiful courtyard and home (geez they must get fed up but I actually asked the question while saying politely no, to his invitation to come in for a look):

"Per quanto tempo sono state qui, vostra famiglia"

"Dal trecento."

How long has your family lived here? From the 1300s.

We may say wow, but this, here, is life. (We also had families alive (I suppose) around 1300, but we most of us come from such a vagabond and upheavaled horseback-horsewhipped place as England that we have no clue about our past - and we often scoff at Aboriginal claims to history, huh.)

And it is continuing life. Ian laments that the young generation will not keep places like Soriano intact, they are captive to globalisation. I am less sure. At least away from the big cities. The rhythm of life is powerful.

Last night Helen and I agreed that among the many ways we are still outside (and we are 96% outside, really) is our failure to adjust to the daily rhythm. We look from our window in the evening and say "oh", once again we have missed it. The kids go to school 8.30 to 12..30. Shops open 8.30 (earlier for food, later for fashion) and everything shuts at 1pm, except the bar (coffee, juice, alcohol, there are no drinking hotels, no sign of gross drunkenness, at least outdoors) and the restaurants. And then everything is open again at 4pm or maybe a snoozy bit later (and after 5pm in summer) and closes again at 7 or gossips on a bit longer (or at 8 in summer). The gelateria just past the church is there late if we need a little palate cleanser later. But we have failed to adjust to this rhythm, this very sensible business of siesta and revival and going out for the passeggiata in the evening.

Passeggiata?

This is no great help:

Pocket Oxford Italian Dictionary © 2006 Oxford University Press:

passeggiˡare intransitive verbwalk, stroll

Glen catches it nicely:

http://www.passeggiataitalia.com/

in fact, just glimpsing that site now, you can see we are not alone.

We failed in this month to get even the rhythm of the passeggiata. Of course, this has been winter and the fact that it has been quite cold has kept us and locals off the evening streets; now my wretched cold cancels our plans to do the Viterbo passeggiata...

fa niente, possiamo tornare, la lasciamo per un'altra volta.... forse

No matter, we can come back, we can leave that for another time ... perhaps.

We are also very conscious, and this is more important than attachment to a place where we will always be outsiders, we know more about ourselves and about each other from this trip, and we carry away from it not just such a wonderful body of new knowledge but also new eyes to what we have at home and what we can do in our own spaces at home.

Helen had been on a brief visit in the late 70s. I had been here for two years when really very young in 1968-69. It has been wonderful for me to find that naive understorey of understanding has enabled me to be more confident and fluent than before, to slip into so many conversations so easily, to see so much more than then (because I have seen so much more life than then).

For Helen it has also been wonderful, I know, though the language cliff has been enormous, not least coming directly from her management role with ten fleas under ten fingers, as the Chinese would say, back home. For her the adventure has been enhanced by her outings alone, as yesterday to Viterbo, in this non-English-speaking world. I leave it to her to write more - when she may have a chance - but it is evident that she can hear it and say it, even in this place where language is complicated because accents are local and speech interwoven with dialect. (I smiled at the point in Olmi's film where at a local fair an earnest young bearded socialist is giving a speech to a crowd of peasants about the rights of man, in Italian; the film otherwise in Bergamo dialect, full of sloshy sounds and words derived from French.

Viterbo: who needs a museum?

At dinner at their apartment we had said to the owners of this apartment, Noelene and Ian McBride, that we had developed some kind of aversion to Viterbo (20km away, the provincial capital) because we knew nothing of it other than traffic snarls.

"That's what happens to everybody," said Ian. "We are going to London in the afternoon, but we'll take you to Viterbo in the morning." What amazing and lovely people they are. After protestations we accepted. In another life, on another planet called Brisbane, Noelene has retired from lecturing in early childhood education, continues with voluntary roles, Ian still has a veterinary practice. I suppose people focused on small children and small animals should be good with people too, but they also have this extraordinary still-learning love of this area.

So here they are in the Viterbo spring sunshine.

It is a city with a huge history, of which we can only offer fragments.

This below, located on the loggia, at least I think it's a loggia, yes, it's not a portico, in the picture above, is the lid of an Etruscan coffin, the lady in question has her hand around a drinking glass which is not there any more. This is from perhaps (I did not look for detail) 2600 years old. We don't hear much about the Etruscans because they lost to the Romans, after providing the first Roman kings, before Rome became a republic, and the victors write history. Viterbo still offers that sense as in imperial Rome (and imperial Sydney for that matter) that really anything worthwhile is something invented here. Anyway, you get from this image below that life had its comforts a long time ago here. Noting also that the Greeks and Romans were actually scandalised by the Etruscan inclusion of women in events like eating which were meant to be men's business.

Here, not far away, at the entrance to that loggia, are a number of plaques.

This one deserves a doctoral thesis alone. I cannot begin to imagine (nor do I really so wish) all the complicated considerations which led Napoleon III to give Viterbo to the Pope in the latter part of 1860. Click here to know more about this figure in history. Go back in this blog to Buonconvento, south of Siena, to see how close the kingdom of Italy is, in the north, with the vote of Tuscany to join the kingdom. There is another thesis no doubt in how and why this plaque was erected in 1910

... and here next is the 1872 monument to some of those who died for Italian independence from 1848 (when a socialist revolution briefly succeeded in Rome, as in other cities in Italy and Europe)... we know nothing about this generally in Australia, but might here record that Raffaello Carboni of Eureka Stockade fame (not mentioned in Viterbo, this is a minor diversion, scusi) had fled to Melbourne after the collapse of the Roman Republic. It is little known in Australia that after getting off a treason charge for his incitement of the Eureka Stockade events in Ballarat he returned to Italy and had a role of some significance in Italy's reunification, ending his days writing in Naples.

Here, across the Piazza del Plebiscito from the castle where those plaques are located, is the entrance to the Palazzo Governo, of the province.
and here, just a step away, left of photo, photo not knowing its future historical importance, is the door of the Caffe Leonardo, in via San Lorenzo... the bar where I left the car keys not the toilet key on Tuesday!!

and one proceeds through urban beauty

This remarkable little church was site of a major historical event.

Here on the outside wall is a not-easy-to-photograph plaque which records a great and enuring disgrace on the city of Viterbo. Here, on the morning of 12 March 1271, Guido e Simone di Montforte (the brothers Guy and Simon de Montfort) assassinated during Holy Mass none other than Enrico Cornavaglia (Henry of Cornwall, come on pilgrimage to see the pope, then resident in Viterbo). The monstrous nature of the crime was of course that they did it in the church and during the mass! Though if you read how Henry's dad had done in Guy and Simon's dad, and if you care a thought for the fact as the sort of plug-and-play King of England for a bit in the thirteenth century their dad actually convened the first vaguely representative parliament, you might have gone to help. If you wish to understand life in such luscious times, do not fail to read the text at this link. The wars of Murdoch and Berlusconi for the world are but metaphorically to the death ... but such a terrible, terrible punishment for a bloke who wanted a parliament, dirty little socialist.

... and so on through blissful sunshiny streets we proceeded...

Those of you seeking to replace your washing machine consider (this photo leaning over a parapet) the cold springwater Bash'n'Bash system, free replacement workers as and when...

... before entering this delightful piazza before the cathedral.

before having a peek at the place where cardinals met in conclave to select their popes. Indeed, this is where the practise began, and initially disgusted the populace. You can see the holes in the floor where poles were put up to support the tents erected inside for the non-agreeing popes at the first conclave, after the locals ripped the roof off, to tell the cardinals they were fed up with feeding them. The second source of this story, first told to us by Noelene and Ian, is impeccable, to say the least. And hey listen, if you go to the end of the news release at that link you will see that last year the pope went on to Bagnoregio... when we decided just a few minutes that we would go to Bagnoregio today, for less holy purpose! Must fly!!


But, before we fly, here, photo from the piazza outside the cathedral: all please pay homage to another most important historical item in Italian history, the Fiat Cinquecento which brought the postwar nation, riding motorscooters, indoors in the late-1950s and 60s.

Viterbo, before the big report, something special!

Forty years ago I had bought and treasured, through the 1970s until time crashed with their extensive use and they were lost, two cups, two saucers and a sugar bowl of a particularly cheerful kind with simple pattern, at modest price. Looking in windows this time, ceramics have become so much more complex and at times overwhelming. Viterbo is a wealthy and sophisticated city and the shop windows spectacular.

You will understand that we found this window item, after the style of Guiseppe Arcimbaldo, breathtaking but not tempting - there was no urge to ask the price!!! (It's huge, click image to see photo enlarged)

But I had come upon a tiny hole-in-the-wall shop of old stuff with a lovely lovely man in attendance...

and he had almost precisely what I had had, as a sugar bowl, back then; now marked with the price of '5' ($A 7.55). It had a little chip, but no crack, under the edge of the lid.

"E rotto." [It's broken] he said, simply. His style continued as very economical.

"Si," I said, "E rotto ma e poco e fa niente. Ho comprato quasi lo stesso, a Tivoli, quarant'anni fa..." [yes, it's 'broken' but it's a tiny thing, nothing to worry about. I bought almost the same thing in Tivoli forty years ago]

He cut me off with a twinkle and a grin and said quietly "Addesso e rotto." [And now it's broken]. He wrapped my replacement carefully.

... and here it is.

I had not known the meaning of the 'DERUTA' on the bottom of this ware in the past.

Now, thanks to the internet, I know. This is where it is from (click). And you will learn from that web site that this item, rotto or not-o is genuinely Deruta Raffaellesco

Deruta Raffaellesco

The birth and and name of this style can be traced back to Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio). He habitually adorned the borders of his frescoes with symbolic decorations depicting dragons and mythical animals. The craftsmen of the late 16 C copied and adapted these decorations from the engravings of contemporary artists, giving rise to one of the most famous Deruta styles. Today Deruta is still widely identified with this style.

This site identifies the sort of Raffaello work in question. Different price bracket!

It's interesting that in making the original purchases and in this one, my eye has been on what I had regarded as simple, local craft, not knowing this connection to one of the greats. It is all reflective of the complexity and attention of the Italian eye; the greats are interwoven with the everyday. Eric Newby writes, as I read again last night, regarding the difficulty if one escaped from a prisoner of war camp in Italy, of fooling Italians compared with Germans.

"The Italians are fascinated by minutiae of dress and the behaviour of their fellow men, perhaps to a greater degree than almost any other race in Europe, and the ingenious subterfuges and disguises which escaping prisoners of war habitually resorted to and which were often enough to take in Germans [long list omitted] ... were hardly ever sufficiently genuine-looking to fool even the most myopic Italian ticket collector and get the owner past the barrier, let alone survive the scrutiny of the occupants of a compartment on an Italian train."

Eric Newby, Love and War in the Apennines, Picador Edition 1983, p 31

Yes, as now we are observed daily intently, curiously, not unkindly, except in the tourism-shark pools. Not obviously as in China, gawking; not never-looking, as in Japan, here with some kind of social intent as well as measure, it seems.

Part of the interaction, as part of establishing 'where can this relationship go' in fact (push the limit in more ways than in the manufacture of ceramic turkeys), as yesterday, in our third visit to our local, the Tre Scalini restaurant, when with the very smart, 40 something, practical shirt-sleeved proprietor we had been discussing ingredients and he had picked from an empty plate a rosemarino twig, and was commenting on the use of rosemary in many dishes and I ventured the beginning of a sentence, "tutto il mondo e rosemarino" [all the world is rosemary, which is so in Rome-region cooking] and he cut me off and launched into a love song beginning "tutto il mondo.." closing his eyes, open arms; opening them, he saw my extended-arm rapture and he danced off down the side of the restaurant, singing and pirouetting, to a point when, near the kitchen corner he fell into an arms-extended-to-me pose, now with everyone looking, so then, feigning embarrassment, he looked in all directions. I called gently "Dopo, dopo!" [Later, later] and he jumped with feigned delight and disappeared into the kitchen.

There is an interwovenness of colour and taste and life and fun and image; food, life; music, life; art, the art of life ... and love, you can't walk the Italian street and not know love.

The graffito below is near our front door:

"AMORE TI ASPETTO" = "My love, I am waiting for you"

Yes there are more words, now obscured,

beginning "TRA" = "between"

Public health, public transport and silly bloke!

Photo: the Soriano nel Cimino Health Centre and Hospital

- the pink building at the end on the left, with the ramp,

about 150 metres down the road from us.

The building is many hundreds of years old but the centre is wonderful

.... why are we so obsolescence and inadequacy prone in Australia?

A cough turned nasty last night so I put on overcoat to go to the health centre and, looking in the pocket for keys, discovered the key of the toilet of the Caffe San Leonardo in Viterbo... and no car keys, which were supposed to be there!!

So... when I thought I had lost the iPhone at Bangkok airport that was not true. When I thought I had left my wallet on the Orte-Roma train, that was not true. But a phone call this morning to the lovely bar where we had coffee and beaut eats with Noelene and Ian in Viterbo yesterday established that I had kindly left them our car keys, not their toilet key. No worry, they said (in Italian, you do need that here), the keys are here.

No asking Noelene and Ian for a lift, they ducked off to London last night in their peripatetic way, so with me stuck at home with aching cold dreading the Friday plane, Elena has taken the treno to Viterbo, an adventure by herself, which should be fun.

I will next put up some photos from yeaterday, Viterbo is extraordinary. As for the train, it's very much like taking the little train from Kiama to Nowra, the same local train feel, but the scenery quite different. There is a timetable here. An art deco style to the main stations (others have some platforms at ground level and two feet wide!) and (some ancient) carriages. The Roma-Viterbo railway was put in, quite separate from the regular state rail system, by Mussolini. And yes, the trains do still run on time!

A spectacular route to travel. Cost for a day ticket in the Viterbo province on public transport Euros 2.50.

The other important thing to report is that I had learned earlier that while foreigners are not able to access health services (as distinct from private doctors) here during the day (we would have to go to Viterbo to access this under the Australia-Italy health agreement), we can go to the local health centre between 8pm and 6am when an emergency doctor is on hand. You do need to be able to speak to the doctor in Italian, or have someone translate for you. Service was instant and excellent. As I have no lung trouble and as antibiotics are given in Italy only when infection reaches the lungs (sensible, really) the doctor (the on-duty doctor, from his prescription pad, appears to be otherwise in general practice in this town) prescribed what would probably be called a complementary medicine in Australia acetilcisteina, for mucolytic therapy.

Dispensed by excellent farmacia this morning.

Wonderful health system in this town of 9000 or so. Fancy being able to go and knock on a door and 9pm and see a doctor instantly!!

Helen also commented yesterday on roads and transport. This region is rather like the Shoalhaven in having a scattering of small villages. The roads are not as good here as in the Shoalhaven, there is not the same (Helen's words) anal preoccupation with repair of roads; on the other hand (also Helen's observation) the public transport system is remarkable, fast bus links between villages and connections to rail services. Yes, Italy has any number of political issues, and does have public debt, but there is such focus on quality and care of life, in ways and with sensitivities we scarcely comprehend let alone expect in Australia.