Giovinazzo and The Octopus Slappers · Apr 25, 11:52 PM by James Martin
Giovinazzo is a small, seaside village north of Bari. It has a very long history and was once home to all the major monastic orders. In spring, outside of holidays, it transforms itself into the little fishing village tourists never seem to come across any more but yearn for.
Each morning I head out to spend time with the other old geezers who watch the tiny wooden fishing boats ease into the little harbor with their catch. Just around the corner are what I call the octopus slappers, the divers who bang their catch against the rocks to tenderize it before it’‘s sold. The acrid smell of fuel, the sharp slap of octupus on the rocks, the pealing of church bells in the distance, the men greeting each other—that is my morning. it’s a simple morning like the food. It’s all the goodness of the sea-bounty, you just have to know how not to wreck it.
Giovinazzo has been very nice to me. Go, but go in spring or fall for this experience; summer is a madhouse they tell me.
More Puglia: Lecce Weather & Historic Climate | Puglia Hotels | Puglia Vacation Rentals
Giovinazzo and The Octopus Slappers originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Apr 25, 2012, © James Martin, 
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Touristic Trains in Italy · Apr 3, 01:45 AM by James Martin
Got a bit of nostalgia for some slow travel on restored steam engine driven trains? Want to eat on a tram? Well, there are a few programs for you.
Ferrovie Turistiche Italiane – FIT – operates out of the Val di Orcia and Lombardi. Watch their home page for the latest trips, often scheduled for Italian holidays and in peak tourist times in Summer. FIT operates the following trains:
- Treno Blu (Lombardy, Lago Iseo)
- Ferrovia Val d’Orchia (Tuscany)
- Ferrovia Turistica Camuna (Lombardy—Brescia-Iseo-Edolo, 103km)
Green Train Sardinia – Trenino Verde – is how to see Sardinia like D. H. Lawrence did, according to Italy Chronicles. The routes are found on the Sardinia Rail Map at Wandering Sardinia
Torino’s Servizi Turistici GTT offers special dinners on trams and tourist boats. Cena in Movemento or “dinner while in motion” provides special dinners on the “Gustotram” and the “Ristocolor” as well as on the boats Valentina II e Valentino II that ply the Po river.
I hope this give you a little idea of some special (and legal) things you can do on trains, trams, and boats on your vacation.
Touristic Trains in Italy originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Apr 03, 2012, © James Martin,
Terme Tettuccio: Taking the Waters · Aug 25, 11:41 PM by James Martin
Fantastic journey: we have left the City of Consumption but are squarely within it. We have emerged above the City of Italian Pop Music, alive in the Montecatini Terme evenings with screaming voices and the loud and obnoxious cure for idle hands: toy boxes bulging with Tinny Things to Bang On Like a Madman.
Inside the compound, the lush vibrations from a violin envelop us like a cocoon.
We are clearly in the City of Shuffling Gray-hairs, glass mugs tightly clasped in bony fingers, held occasionally under the glass spigots from which flow the warm and sulfurous waters doctors have proscribed.
As we settle in, a man at the next table removes papers from a manila envelope and we can see the steady beat of his heart graphed in blue.
Tables and chairs are very neatly arranged. Later they will be scattered. Trees have been pruned to look like column drums. For shade. Not many computers; the man in front of us reads from a book—loudly. In the background a workman wrestling with a huge hose sends a backlit plume of water over the lawn around the marble statues.
RAI television cameras are here, resting on the lawn while a blonde, spaghetti-legged ragazza is getting greased up and her eyes charcoaled. They must not like her much. Perhaps she is too beautiful for them in her natural state.
The quest for Miss Italia is being held here.
Terme Tettuccio, an anachronism in Liberty style. Participatory time travel: 14 Euros a day. Thus paid, you become not a tourist gawking at the past but a participant in it. Money well spent.
Sniff the waters. There are four: Rinfresco, Leopoldina, Regina, Tettuccio. Of these, Leopoldina is the most vile; stinking of sulfur, warm and salty. No wonder it works its magic on the bowels. It is at one with them.
All the waters are diuretic. The number of toilets is amazing. There is a small City of Toilets.
Does it all work, you might ask? The National Health Service thinks so; it pays for treatments.
You should go when you have a chance. See: How to Take the Waters at Terme Tettuccio
Terme Tettuccio: Taking the Waters originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Aug 25, 2011, © James Martin,
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Italian Cooking School Video · Aug 7, 10:06 AM by James Martin
Can a man survive in the immaculate kitchen of a cooking school when there are two women present to taunt him at each and every squeaky turn of the pasta flattener thingy?
You decide:
This is, as they say, the blooper reel. The real reel will be a while coming, as it is long and I can’t upload it until I have a faster connection.
Thanks to Flavor of Italy for allowing me to express myself. It’s Wendy’s kitchen, and she can yell at me all she wants. It’s Martha I’m mad at.
Italian Cooking School Video originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Aug 07, 2011, © James Martin,
Working with Felt in Sarzana · Jul 24, 10:56 AM by James Martin
It’s called feltro in Italian. Felt, like in my hat. But Ruth Bucci-Baumer makes it fancier. Like in the picture. And she makes it near Fivizzano, in the Lunigiana.
Ruth had an exhibition of her work in the old lavatoio in Sarzana recently, which is quite unique in the configuration of its marble washing stations. Evidently it’s being opened for exhibition space, especially for women artists.
The exhibition was held concurrently with the medieval festival in Sarzana, called Anno Domini 1495, so we popped in, mainly because I’d never been inside and really wanted to see it. (The festival was fantastic, see the Video: Medieval Sarzana.)
It was a fine place. Light poured in from above. The surrounding houses had little terraces overlooking the lavatoio. It was a gathering place, not just a manual Maytag, part of the social structure.
I was glad I went to see it. But here’s the thing: Ruth Bucci-Baumer gives felt working classes. Yep, you can check out her web site. It’s quite colorful, as is her work.
Felt, or feltro, is coming back into style. And the Portuguese version, slightly different, is called Burel. Burel is really just course woolen cloth, which went out of style but is being brought back by an innovative hotelier. See Handicrafts and Healthy Food in the Serra de Estrela to find out more.
I leave you with some found work as we walked to the lavatoio (our search took us down many alleyways as the neat-as-a-pin urban grid of Sarzana baffled us uncommonly…) I like the colors and the laundry.
Sheesh, is everyone an artist around here? That’s what I felt as I walked through Sarzana.
Oh, and here’s a picture of the exterior of the lavatoio. And notice how, like the picture above, the colors of the bicycle are perfectly matched to the color scheme of the lavatoio.
Working with Felt in Sarzana originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Jul 24, 2011, © James Martin,
Is There Any Reason To Travel? · Jun 25, 08:11 AM by James Martin
I’m hooked in to many sources of information, especially from the Lunigiana, where we live, work and play about half of each year. We love “discovering” things about our little wedge of far-northern Tuscany. Of course, we’re not really discovering them any more than Columbus “discovered” America. These things were always here, or so it seems. Now, with the Internet, they are exposed to the world, so that you don’t have to grip that steering wheel tightly in anticipation of guiding your car down a twisty, hilly, badly maintained road that will barely allow two cars to pass. When the bus comes, there is trouble, I can tell you.
Zeri, of which I speak, is a remote place, a loose federation of tiny villages, a part of La Lunigiana. It is perhaps the most remote part of a remote province. Zeri is known for the fine taste of its lambs, who feed upon the lush herbs and grasses of the sparsely populated mountainous locale.
Yesterday I found a video of the coro, or chorus, of Zeri, set against the backdrop of the mountains there. The members of the coro are dressed up, their feet firmly planted in the mealtime herbage of the legendary sheep. You can see and hear this all without leaving your chair. It’s quite impressive, actually. The video is here.
It’s a bit commercial, and whoever edited the video chopped off the ending, but you can hear one of the local traditions that you won’t hear on your local radio station. Ever.
So, why even travel? All you ever do is to slog through the underbelly of the place in search of things other people have already discovered. You could just sit at your computer and zip around the world as long as your internet provider will tolerate your use of your “unlimited” bandwidth.
Those of us who’ve been there and done that know that experience is a whole different thing. When I show you a video, I have cut the experiential part. Really. When I’m filming and somebody comes up and taps me on the shoulder and says he can show me something interesting that isn’t the subject of my video, I don’t put that in. But I follow him and devour the little bit of unusual life he allows me to see.
So, experience is what is found on the cutting room floor—if digital video had a cutting room floor, that is. For example, you know what tapas are if you research the country of Spain for a bit. You might even have experienced tapas in a sit down, dress up restaurant in the US. But tapas are not about sitting down or dressing up. They are about a set of social customs that require a participant. They are about a social occasion, a bringing together of diverse people over a bite of food and a glass of wine. If you do not go to Spain and experience this, you will never discover the meaning of tapas.
Our tiny village in the Lunigiana has its own local coro. We’ve seen them rehearse, or rather we’ve experienced them rehearsing. When you see the video, you do not see us tasting the home brewed grappa everyone brought for break time. Who would want to hold a camera when one could get happy happy on grappa with enough hebal infusion action in many that we were forced to try everyone’s grappa so we could be even happier?
We’ve also attended a concert that included other choral groups and a guy who read poetry that got raucous applause. Imagine that in America. It wasn’t the concert experience you get in the US; afterwards there was a free buffet dinner put on by the local women. No jello molds with bits of fruit floating sadly in oddly colored gel, but real, stick to your manly ribs food. Free. (See: We Won a Torta for details of the experience.)
So here’s the video: Il Coro Lunigiana in Rehearsal
I hope you’ll view it. I also hope it makes you long to experience it. It’s a whole different thing.
Is There Any Reason To Travel? originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Jun 25, 2011, © James Martin,
On the Fringes of Italy · May 3, 10:54 AM by James Martin
When I hear of exotic locales that few people want to visit, my heart quickens. It’s not just the old age. It is a commonly agreed upon lie that there are places one just must visit. The antidote to such nonsense is to not speak about your trip to anyone who is prone to think judgmentally about destinations. This one’s bad, that one has good pork but angry people and waxy toilet paper, Florence—oh my God Florence!—is glorious, you must go! If you are smart you will turn away from all that drivel if you desire to truly discover the diversity of the world.
But then, what happens when a fringe destination, say the region of Calabria, becomes a hot travel destination? Do you champion it? What if the news comes from The International Business Times? Ah, we must invest in it! Well, check this out: Calabria, Italy: Rising New Hotspot for Tourists & Investors
43.2 million people made the trip to Calabria last year! Up a staggering 2.2 percent. Ok, so staggering isn’t such a big deal these days, but it’s still five times what the average savings account makes on a deposit at a time when the bank makes its money the new fashioned way: by gambling with food production and your mortgage. But I digress.
You’d better join this flood of people before the restaurants start hiring chefs. One can only imagine what harm could be done to cucina povera when somebody with a culinary degree comes to mangle it.
But really, my travel tip of the day: go somewhere nobody in your neighborhood has ever been. Or heard of. Calabria is good. Maybe Trieste, championed by Jan Morris (a good look at the city: Exploring Trieste, a quietly captivating Italian city). Or Cuneo.
The Renaissance isn’t the only period of history the thinking traveler might drool over you know.
On the Fringes of Italy originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com May 03, 2011, © James Martin,
Italy: Dig It! · Apr 20, 11:36 PM by James Martin
Last night we had a twitter chat with @SaveRome, and it reminded me—fondly and hotly—of “doing” archaeology in Italy. In the intense heat of summer, of course, because that’s when professors can get off to to do the things they love, like hanging out in Italian cafes while their students labor at moving earth in the hot sun leading an excavation.
In any case, an interesting volunteer opportunity in Umbria also showed up on my twitter feed yesterday—the Vicus ad Martis Tudertium Project. Imagine the look on your friends faces when they hear the name of the project you went on!
All kidding aside, volunteering for one of these things gives you a great insight into Italian culture. You get to stay in a small town and the people will be very curious and you’ll drink beer at the bar in greater quantities than they’ve ever seen people drink before and they’ll be suitably impressed.
When we did an archaeological survey of Puglia one summer many years ago, we had the opportunity to stay in a school for very young children. It was a challenge because the bed sheets were about 3 feet square and it was mosquito season.
The school had a kitchen to die for, all in gleaming, professional stainless steel. They were so proud of it they wouldn’t let us touch it. All for heating up pap. But that’s one of the things you learn. Italians are serious about food at all age levels. No “heat it up in the microwave” industrial crap food for the little kids of Puglia, I can assure you.
And on our day off on Sundays we hung out with the old guys in the piazza where they set up a huge TV and everyone watched formula uno. Great fun. You’re part of the crowd.
For you armchair archaeologists (it’s way easier on the back, let me tell you) the Umbrian excavations have a blog called Under the Umbrian Sun you can follow. And Save Rome has an interesting page as well about archaeology in Roma. Also, May is Maggio dei Monumenti 2011 in Naples, with lots of activities near cultural heritage sites.
So, if you’ve ever thought of getting a little deeper into Italian life, volunteering for an archaeological project, even if it costs a bit (or a lot) can be an experience you’ll remember for years. A long time ago I wrote an article on the skills you might want to develop to be a good dig bum: A Guide to Volunteer Success, a bit pretentious and oddly formated, but, like a pick-up game of rugby, you might get a kick out of it.
Italy: Dig It! originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Apr 20, 2011, © James Martin,