Venice Storm! · May 16, 05:14 AM by James Martin
Sometimes (actually quite often), a storm allows you to see a city in a whole different way. Photography is just the capture of light bouncing willy-nilly from objects and molecules, and a storm can change things in a big way as in:
But walk out to the end of this Cannaregio canal and look at the snow on the mountains across the Venice Lagoon:
All this after a fine meal at Osteria Bea Vita, the first that didn’t have a bit of seafood in it. Also a first for Italy: Waitresses that smiled! And often!
Must be the weather. Or my Italian.
Venice Storm! originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com May 16, 2012, © James Martin, 
Italy Travel Toolbox
- All About Italy Rail Passes
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Gutsy Grouper Turns to Crime in Rialto Fish Market · May 15, 12:36 AM by James Martin
The Rialto Fish Market in Venice and the adjacent vegetable market was the scene this morning of a disturbing, hackle-raising crime. A large cernia or Dusky Grouper, was caught red-handed, er, red-lipped with the goods, a string of pre-season pomodorini clearly in the process of being consumed. He is being held on boxes in the market and ordered to pose for tourist pictures. His attorney is appealing the sentence as being too harsh. He’d rather be sauteed, according to a close source.
Gutsy Grouper Turns to Crime in Rialto Fish Market originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com May 15, 2012, © James Martin,
The Whistles of Rutigliano · May 2, 09:36 AM by James Martin
Rutigliano. You’ve probably never heard of it. Rutigliano is a village near Bari in Puglia that has always been a village devoted to pottery; its name derives from “Rutilius”, the reddish color of the local clay. It has become very famous indeed these days for its artisanal terracotta whistles. They’re not just little whistles you give to kids. Art is involved. Adult themes, satirical elements, toilet humor, hens…all involved. I’ve sprinkled this post with representative whistle pictures so you don’t think I’m just blowing smoke.
I’ve even included a picture of one of the local whistle producers about to blow a whistle over there on the left. That’s so you can see that no matter how intricate, how enormous, or even how complex the whistle is, there’s always this little nipple in the back of it that you blow on and sound comes out. Them’s the rules.
(By the way, if you want to buy a whistle, Mr. Samarelli has some rather nice and inexpensive ones in his shop in Rutigliano on Via Noicattaro, 245. See: Terracotte Samarelli)
The little Museo del Fischietto in Terracotta is found inside the library in Palazzo San Domenico in Rutigliano. You can go in there and see if they’ll open it up for you, but you might have to call. If you get in, it’s worth it. Trust me on this. There are rows and rows of little plexiglass cases full of whistles. The cases are designed to make photography interesting.
Carabinieri, priests (and large breasted women confessing their sins), as well as political figures are the most represented amongst the satirical whistles. Seeing Silvio Berlusconi rising up out of a toilet bowl creates little incentive to wrap your lips around the little nipple in back so you can blow the whistle on him. Or perhaps they’ve all been blown already. We suspect he has.
Whistles have, of course, been around for tens of thousands of years. According to tradition, the terracotta clay whistle is believed to be a message of love, a symbol of fertility. It is believed to bring good luck and to have the power of chasing away negative energies and the evil eye. It’s got a lot of responsibility in a world gone mad.
The best way to visit the Whistle Museum of Ritigliano? Well, you can go to the library and see if they’ll open it, or you can stay at a nearby bed and breakfast where they’ll call and arrange a visit for you.
(There is another museum devoted to whistles, the Museo dei Cuchi in Cesuna di Roana near Vicenza. Cuchi is just a variation on the word for whistle.)
By the way, you can click any of the pictures above to see them bigger. If you want.
More Puglia: Lecce Weather & Historic Climate | Puglia Hotels | Puglia Vacation Rentals
The Whistles of Rutigliano originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com May 02, 2012, © James Martin,
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Restoration Sexy · May 2, 06:29 AM by James Martin
If you’re like me, you go absolutely giddy when you hear of something you’d like to see in it’s original state being “restored.” I felt that pit-of-the-stomach tickle when I read of 4.5 million euros being freed up to the restoring of 33 Romanesque churches in Portugal and Spain.
Then it hit me. What? This:
Ok, so the church needed a wider door. So let’s chip away at that really cool bit of ancient art. Let’s not look for alternatives, a hammer and chisel is always faster.
So maybe “restoration” isn’t really something one should wish for. What we’d like is resurrection—things to come back the way they were only cleaner and with decent roofs.
Then I started reflecting on all the European restorations I’d witnessed. Even in simple places of lodging, it was hard to look back upon 30 years of staying somewhere in Europe without thinking, “You know what? I’ve stayed at country houses, farms, apartments and hotels grand and not, and yet very few of them, in fact nearly zero of them, looked like the places where I’d seen people living.” Few were even “homey.”
Generally, folks “restore” most tourist things to look like something they’d put in one of those designer magazines named something like Tuscany Style for the 1%. It’s a fake of something someone’s thought of after buying a hulk and painting a bit: “hey, that would make a great fake old Tuscan room!” And so they sponge paint on some fake, sun-faded walls, lay in some rustic designer tile, put up some fake wood beams and bingo! The tourists will never know—but it’s sexy. And that counts oh, so very much. And you get a lot of money for a room. Bingo. Sexy!
It’s like they do with women in fashion magazines. It turns out men are attracted to women with long legs. After all, you’ve probably never heard of a construction worker who shouts out, “look at the stubby gams on that one!”
See, God, in her infinite wisdom, made women’s legs longest at puberty, after which time the body grows more than the legs. So, to get you to buy the purple eyeliner, all the pics of beautiful women are altered in Photoshop to stretch the model’s legs—all because it would be a bit too much to advertise something sexy using a real 11 year old. And what does this “restoration” of mature flesh do? It “makes” you buy the eyeliner thinking it’ll make you as sexy as the model. Most of the time. Every once in a while it seems to force women into eating disorders, if you believe in the veracity of the lawsuits flying into courts these days.
Sexy. We’re stuck on the concept of it. But what about comfortable? Authentic?
So then I saw this:
This is the dining room at Tenuta Pinto, a Bed and Breakfast country house nearing the end of its restoration period, located just outside of Moli di Bari in Puglia. I was shown it by Dominico Pinto and his wife Isa, who are very enthusiastic about the project and determined not to alter the footprint of the place. That’s why this dining room is here. They couldn’t bring themselves to gut the 1792 villa and install a rabbit-warren of little tourist rooms that had the Tuscan influence everyone seems to crave. So the upper story is how it was only better. It’s a sympathetic restoration that allows for a suite of rooms that reflect the age and dignity of the original place.
Outside there is a huge garden and rows of table grapes, from which the Pinto family has made a living for many years.
It’s nice when someone has the sense to turn aside the frantic huffing and puffing of sexy for the long, slow sigh of longing and remembrance. I like that. It’s like when you were a kid and you first went into the strange, shadowy place inhabited by your grandparents and ran your fingers over the strangely colored photographs in their ancient frames and everything was so quiet you thought you could hear your heart beat.
And then, of course, mom came up to you and slapped your hand for touching stuff and that was that.
More Puglia: Lecce Weather & Historic Climate | Puglia Hotels | Puglia Vacation Rentals
Restoration Sexy originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com May 02, 2012, © James Martin,
Lace Making in Sardinia · Mar 30, 01:38 AM by James Martin
Giovanna Ledda is an amazing woman. She’ll be 92 in August of 2012. She makes lace. Not just any lace, but a particular type of Sardinian lace called “Bosa Filet Lace” from the town where Giovanna lives on the west coast of Sardinia between Alghero and Oristano. It is a lace born out of a fisherman’s net making, an endeavor well known in Bosa.
Today Giovanna’s hands fly through the stitches, but perhaps not as fast as they used to. She told us that in her prime (shortly after she learned how to make lace at age 12 in order to help feed the family) her hands were so fast you couldn’t see them while she worked.
We made pictures. We made a video. Her hands were still fast enough to blur in both.
So I asked her what was the secret to her long and productive life. Her advice? “Eat everything. Get some sun. Walk everywhere.”
Guide Paola Loi stepped in to ask, “but what of your worries? What do you do if you have them?”
“Tell them to take a walk, too!”
And to watch Giovanna looping her needle through the grid of thread, it’s apparent her strategy works, even on an island known for its longevity.
See the video and learn more about Bosa: Bosa Filet Lace.
Lace Making in Sardinia originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Mar 30, 2012, © James Martin,
You Gotta Love DuVine Bike Adventures · Mar 18, 12:48 AM by James Martin
You know what I’m sick of? Cheap. The very word nauseates me.
That said, I will tell you how to write a blog that will make you immeasurably rich. Here’s the tip: Write incessantly about cheap. You know, spin stuff like “The Ten Cheapest Crap Pizza-By-The-Slice Hell-Holes in Rome Where You Can Save Several Euros On Your Roman Vacation!” People eat that sorta thing up. Do it over and over. It’s what passes for travel journalism on the web.
The problem is, it doesn’t add up. You spend $1200 on your flight. You spend 100 euro on your “cheap” hotel room every night. Then you torture your digestive track by making it try to digest crap food because it’ll save 2 euro.
And of course being a “free” market, the demand for cheap crap food encourages others to use short cuts in creating this junk and thus it proliferates. Ick.
Let’s stop that right now. Let’s talk about….no, let’s shout about:
Value!
Here’s a new mantra for you. Value, not cheapness! Say it until is sticks in your brain.
Ok, now imagine this:
On DuVine bike tours in Italy we make a great point of introducing our guests to this most-Italian obsession with quality. Our favorite Tuscan winemaker, Vittorio Innocenti, produces a Vin Santo so sublime that his town, Montefollonico, is now referred to as the Borgo del Vin Santo (Vin Santo-Ville). But despite all the accolades, he has never tried to capitalize on his renown and continues to sell his Vin Santo at cost. When asked why he doesn’t try to profit from his top wine, he shrugs and says that he enjoys carrying on the tradition of Vin Santo production and the quality of the product is its own reward.
So it turns out that DuVine bought some nifty, light, carbon fiber bikes from an artisanal frame-maker in Florence. Who does that kinda thing? It’s like throwing away your money. Just give the people some badly screwed together bikes made by Chinese political prisoners, will ya? I mean, think of the profit!. But no:
Not only did Renzo offer us a great deal on his newest carbon frames, but he represents everything that I love about Italy. He was generous with his time, patiently working with us as we customized the paint job and each component while seemingly unconcerned about the profitability of our order. I’m sure the end result will delight DuVine guests for years to come. ~ DuVine Gets New Carbon Road Bikes in Italy
Whoa, baby! It’s a new dawn! Somebody thinks about value.
I’m telling you: you wanna start a revolution? Take a DuVine bike tour. Vote value. Craftsmanship. Employment for passionate and talented people who do hard work on things people value, the kind of people who don’t get rich make gambling instruments out of people’s mortgages. The kind of business that doesn’t have a CEO making 20 million a year screwing up so he can get his 100 million golden parachute (how much value do you think that adds to the product?).
We can turn this thing around. Really, it’s as easy as gliding through a downhill bend in your 17.5 pound, hand-built bicycle and seeing a Tuscan hill town shrouded in fog and thinking, “dammit, this is what a good life is all about!”
Just do it: DuVine Adventures
[Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with DuVine Bike Tours. I haven’t taken one. I do not profit from you clicking that link. I just read the blog post and became immediately convinced of the value these guys offer.]
You Gotta Love DuVine Bike Adventures originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Mar 18, 2012, © James Martin,
Finding the Hidden Italy in Sassoferrato · Sep 12, 04:02 AM by James Martin
These are bad economic times in Italy. But there’s always good in bad—even beyond the fact that the dollar is rising against the Euro (finally!). Tourism is important in Italy, and regions you’ve probably never considered (and probably know nothing about) are primed and pumped to show you that Italy has interesting cities besides Rome, Florence and Venice—and interesting regions besides Tuscany.
Take le Marche, for example. What the heck, let’s even drill down to a town with which you are perhaps not at all familiar: Sassoferrato, a town whose symbol is a bunch of rocks wrapped with a band of iron, as the name implies. A town of fewer than 8000 people. Now you know why you’ve never heard of it.
What’s in Sassoferrato? An important Roman archaeological site called Sentinum, on the Via Flaminia road system, historically important because the Romans defeated the combined forces of the Samnites and Gauls here in 295 BC, allowing the Romans to unify central Italy right up to the Adriatic coast.
In Sassoferrato there are 12 churches and a castle, along with the usual palaces. There are ethnographic, archaeological, and mineral museums. There is an ancient book cover in the museum with a micro-mosaic picture made out of the tiniest tesserae you’ve ever seen, many of them in gold.
In Sassoferrato. Population 8000.
The folks are friendly here. You’ll see things you wouldn’t see in other places even if they existed there. Why? Because this is a small town, a village, where people don’t have to pretend that everything they are going to show you is precious beyond belief.
Ok, so we’ve all looked through the thick grate in which a church’s relics were to be found. In the murky darkness we may have seen a fragment of holy phalanx (finger or toe bone). What if your guide marched you behind the big reliquary and, with particular relish, flung open the rear access door to where you could really see the scatter of saintly bones?
They probably don’t do that in Rome.
Or maybe your guide ushers you out of the church and through another unmarked door. You’re now in a place the church uses for its records. There are handwritten diaries from the 18th century. Your guide grabs one and flips it open.
“Guarda!” he implores, “look! There’s not a single error, not a cross-out.” He flips through the pages like they were from a fifty cent comic book.
And he’s right. Written in a steady hand, the account of the writer is without apparent mistake.
And you touch the book. On a corner. Lightly. And you remember all the books you’ve seen in other museums open to the cover page under a glass that’s wired so that if you press too hard, people with guns and rabid dogs will descend upon you in an instant.
Not in le Marche. Not in Sassoferrato. Here history lives. Here history has texture you can feel.
But there’s more. You notice a tiny window leading to a small room. Your guide explains it’s a jail.
But it’s not just any jail. It’s not for townspeople who’ve violated some statute or another—it’s for errant priests.
Your guide takes you around the corner, where there’s a heavy door that opens upon a tiny room. In one corner there’s a box with a cover. It’s the toilet. It still works. It doesn’t, of course, flush—but the depth of the “plumbing” below is over 3 meters. I wonder if anyone has tried it?
The walls of this little cell are covered in writing. You can’t read it, of course, but your guide can. It turns out that one priest had been turned in for doing something unpriestlike, and blamed…the “bitch” that snitched. He was innocent, of course. It was written in 1792. Evidently this particular priest couldn’t contain himself, because he got turned in a second time, and his dated response, written on a different part of the wall, again proclaimed his innocence.
I love these little slices of life from way back. Religion hasn’t always been the staid practice we’ve been lead to believe. Or maybe it never was.
Then your guide takes you to the Church of San Francisco, Chiesa di San Francesco. In it he points out yet another unique visual element. One of the rich families of Sassoferrato once commissioned a huge painting. Its subject is circumcision. Its graphic subject, that is.
Turns out, according to the guide, that this is the only representation of its type in a church in Italy. The Vatican evidently has one, but somewhere in history they’ve erased the evidence by painting pants in the inappropriate place.
Yes, there was lots of circumcision art, but evidently none of it is currently on display in a church.
So, you want to see this? Without the glare that seemed to get in my pictures of it?
Well, you’ll have to come to little Sassoferrato in le Marche.
What will your friends say? Probably “Sasso…what?”
If you’re worried about that, then I’m sorry you got all this far in reading. Get thee to Florence. See the things other people insist you see.
As for me, I won’t deny it: I meant to lead you astray. It’s the meandering path to the best stuff in Hidden Italy and it’s my job.
(I visited Sassoferrato with the help of the Pro Loco, who have a Facebook page with contact information. Get your guide through them and have fun in Hidden Italy.)
Finding the Hidden Italy in Sassoferrato originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Sep 12, 2011, © James Martin,
Roman Roads · Sep 9, 04:59 AM by James Martin
Roman Roads are rather amazing bits of ancient construction. They surface in various places in Italy; tourists may encounter them anywhere from Rome, where a trek to the ancient Appian Way makes a fine walk out into the Italian countryside (especially on Sundays when traffic is forbidden) to roads in the south and east that linked distant port cities to Rome.
The Via Flaminia links Rome with Adriatic ports, and was known in the Medieval as the Rimini Road. In the Marche region, a part of the Flaminia system passes through the ancient Roman site of Sentinum near Sassoferrato, where these pictures were taken. The modern road which parallels it—the SS3 is nicknamed the Flaminia.
Reading the Roman Road
In the first picture (click to see it larger) we look down a stretch of Roman road that links the Flaminia to Roman Sentinum and runs past the thermal baths in the center of town. The road looks bumpy, but in antiquity it most certainly would be smoother; the cement between the visible blocks here has worn away with time—2000 or so years of it. So imagine yourself to be an observer in Roman times, looking down a relatively smooth road.
At the end of that road there is an intersection, a tee. Thru traffic passes to the left in this view. How do we know that? Let’s look at the next picture.
See the tracks? We’ve turned around, facing the opposite way that we faced when taking the first picture, so the tracks would tend to send a carriage off to the right in this view. The straight part of the road lacked tracks, but the curves have them. Why was that?
Early Roman carts and carriages didn’t have articulating front wheels. Send them through a sharp turn and the carriage and its wheels would be all over the place (and since just about all Roman roads followed compass directions, most of them had 90 degree turns) so tracks were carved to take the wagon on a gentle curve that hit the apex perfectly, just like the line a skilled Formula One driver might take in the same situation.
Did all wheels have the same axle length so that they fit these twin tracks? Not necessarily; since speeds were slow it was enough to find a single track to sink a wheel into to make the curve.
And why does the road to the right in this picture lack tracks? Archaeologists surmise that this was a driveway to a private residence, so there wasn’t enough traffic to warrant the work of making tracks.
In a twitter exchange with archaeologist Bill Thayer, it appears there is some disagreement over the tracks and their function: “The ruts are another matter. I’ve never got to the bottom of them, and there is much disagreement. I’ve seen and photographed ruts that can’t be what you suggest (1 or 3 on the same stretch; some interrupted, or curved on straight road).” So there is some mystery in the working of these roads!
In any case, Sassoferrato has an interesting museum where you can learn more about the ancient Roman city of Sentinum. Not much of the city is left, but there are some excavations of the city center and baths, and another on the other side of the modern via Flaminia that uncovers the larger baths which were built when the smaller city center baths became inadequate for the growing population. There is a stretch of the wider ancient Flaminia on the site, but it is covered to protect it, since there isn’t money to preserve it.
Roman Roads originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Sep 09, 2011, © James Martin,