Innovation, Beer, and Cuisine · Feb 27, 05:30 PM by James Martin
When I was a kid I had a chemistry set. In the 1960’s, you could go into the back of just about any “hobby” store and stand in front of a display with little square bottles of just about any chemical compound you could legally buy. They were all marked with different prices. You took your meager allowance, counted it twice, and determined what to buy: maybe six little bottles of cheap chemicals or one bottle of exotically overpriced chemicals.
I was an innovative chemist. Meaning, of course, that I wasn’t a chemist at all. I just mixed stuff in the set with stuff I bought in the back of the hobby store to see if it would blow up the house, or clean a penny, or make the dog puke. Walking past the foo-foo dollhouse stuff was initiation enough into this special breed of innovative chemist.
Later I turned to brewing beer. It was much the same process. First you throw a bunch of stuff together, but then, after trying to drink it without wrinkling your nose, a little light goes on—the ancients knew what they were doing!—and you read up a little, got some education, and made a decent beer, guided by good sense. It was a whole lot more satisfying then just throwing crap together and then spending days trying to find a use for it.
I got to thinking about this while reading the interesting Slate article, What Beer Can Teach Us About Emerging Technologies: The home-brew movement serves as a lesson in DIY innovation
The article investigates the with the way students make beer in an Arizona college unfettered by rules of any kind compared to the way they made it in Bavaria when “Duke Wilhelm IV and Duke Ludwig X of Bavaria decreed that the only ingredients to be used in making lager were water, barley, and hops.”
The results were awesome, dude. Arizona wins! They threw gobs of stuff in the wort! It was all good!
Of course, that’s because in America, innovation trumps just about everything, including knowledge and common sense. It may be the only thing we do well. Hate that pizza from Italy with only three toppings? Throw on 35 more and a block of chocolate! Now you’re talkin’!
What the author ignores is the fact that Germany isn’t exactly known as a country of beer slackers, despite the handcuffs they’ve had to wear in the form of the Bavarian purity law. There’s plenty you can do with all the variety of hops and the toasting of malt. Then there’s even more you can do with various yeasts now that we know of yeast (they didn’t at the time the purity laws were written).
My point is that restrictions aren’t necessarily bad. Not unless you filter all results through the lens of “innovation”. (Or, perhaps, what I might call “macro innovation” because we only look at huge jumps, like adding chocolate to your anchovy pizza, rather than looking at the small “micro-innovations” inherent in things like cooking it at a slightly different temperature, or making a “looser” crust.)
Take Italian cuisine. It’s all cucina povera, peasant food. Peasants were limited to the cheapest cuts of meat, often from the internal organs (well, also including the external ones of which we are forbidden to speak—in polite company anyway). These restrictions made those “innovative” mothers look for the absolute best way to prepare the cheapest (and tastiest) cuts of meat. Instead of the “taste of the day that will knock your socks off” they eventually came up with a codified cuisine, a cuisine that wasn’t based upon the idea that the cook could do whatever the hell she pleased but based on a very limited pantry and a group of consumers who were dead set against any major deviation from the regional chow. It became art like poetry became art, because the restricted form they were forced to use was a prison from which only the very clever could ever escape—and those were the people who you counted on for great poetry or food.
Is complete freedom all it’s cracked up to be?
Innovation, Beer, and Cuisine originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Feb 27, 2012, © James Martin, 
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The Genius of a Place · Dec 22, 10:10 AM by James Martin
The Genius of a Place is a film in progress. It’s about the rapid rate of change possible in our industrial times, change that inevitably drives out a town’s substance, turning it into kitsch in the blink of an eye. It’s about Cortona, but it could be about any “cute” little Tuscan “gem”. Heck, it could be about Carmel, California:
Today the town overflows with visitors, eateries and boutiques. Artisans have disappeared and so have most stores that served local residents. Population in the town center is dwindling as locals sell to foreigners willing to pay high prices for a vacation home. Residents feel disenfranchised and no longer collectively care for their community the way they did in the past. It risks becoming a no-man’s land, with no one looking out for its long-term interests.
I haven’t seen the movie, which isn’t made yet. But the question is, “how do you stop it?”
The answer always seem to involve brute force. You just step in and demand that “progress” stop on a dime, demanding that folks go back to making their own food and raising their own barnyard animals instead of living well off the 40,000 Euro house they sold to a tourist for 500,000.
Good luck with that.
But I can’t help feeling the queasiness that comes with thinking I know the hard answer. I see the problem being centered around the influx of moneyed and clueless folks who “fall in love” with a place at the drop of a hat. When you experience an instant crush on a thing you know only peripherally, you accept its faults while hedging your bet by living selfishly. You’re likely to “love” your little city of clustered little houses as it is, but you need to knock out that wall so you can have that 2000 square foot bathroom you’ve seen in some Tuscan designer magazine, no? Nothing you do can hurt anything, can it? Well, it does.
In short, my answer to the problem is to encourage politically incorrect behavior.
Take the celebrated butcher of Panzano, Dario Cecchini. If you go to his shop, you’ll see him as a man justly proud of what he does; he’s funny, engaging, and a perfect spokesman for the good life in Tuscany—which involves eating “cucina povera” made with local ingredients.
Let me tell you though, the average reader is likely to come away appalled at one of the stories about Mr. Cecchini as it appears in Bill Buford’s Heat —in which a group of locals sits down at a local restaurant to peruse the offerings. Dario spots duck on the menu. He goes ballistic. Loudly. The owner rushes out of the kitchen to quell the tirade.
“Look out the window, do you see a duck? No!” Dario’s rant continues. He slams the menu to the floor as folks start running for cover. The owner stands before him, embarrassed. He explains timidly that the tourists want duck, so he has to serve it. Dario does not relent.
The night is ruined. Cecchini has been a hard-ass about eating local, if not a complete ass for ruining the evening.
Appalling behavior—until you examine the facts of the case. Giving in to tourists whose demands are quite likely to make Tuscany into a rural anyplace-else is easy. Teaching them the joys of letting go is hard. Forcing them to do so seems cruel. Sometimes you have to be the hard-ass to get people focused on the enormity of the issue.
Tough love—that’s what is needed here. “Dammit, you’re going to eat the local chow and you’re going to love it or you can take the first train out.”
I know it’s hard. I know folks will have to suffer with that fire-seared Cinta Senese chop or with that cramped little village house and its little terrace open to the piazza and (egads!) without the huge swimming pool. Folks will have to get used to yapping with the locals (there’s no word in Italian for “privacy” you know).
Eventually, in my ideal vision, folks will come to actually enjoy the slow life they found when they first discovered it. Maybe they’ll come to enjoy talking to the neighbors from the terrace. Maybe they’ll try their hands at slaughtering a pig and making salami out of it. Then they can be free to love it, because then, like a good time-traveler, they haven’t changed the cultural landscape, they’ve embraced it—for better or worse.
And isn’t that what love is, in the end?
——
You can actually contribute to the finishing of this independently produced film, The Genius of Place, over at IndieGoGo by following the link. This behavior is encouraged by the curmudgeon who wrote the above, who has contributed. He’s not Scrooge you know.
You can meet Dario in our video: Inside the Antica Macelleria Cecchini
The Genius of a Place originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Dec 22, 2011, © James Martin,
Sartiglia Remembered · Nov 28, 05:56 PM by James Martin
There are two Sardinian Festivals you shouldn’t miss. Both of them rely heavily on horses. L’Ardia di San Costantino turns a man grateful for the grace of God in his life into Constantine, a saint in Sardinia, where he and his two flag bearers take on all comers in a daring and dangerous route on dirt roads around a Sanctuary devoted to Constantine.
Then there is Sa Sartiglia, which I attended earlier this year. If you go and see everything, you’ll be drained. From the one-hour dressing of the leader, Su Componidori, to to parade, to the competition in which riders at full gallop try to skewer a star with a lance, and then to another parade, and then, as the sun sets, a stunning display of horsemanship takes place with riders doing things on the backs of horses you never would think possible, called the race of ‘pariglie’.
And yes, congratulatory kisses happen even to masked men.
In any case, I was reminded of Sartiglia when Antonio Sanna friended me on Facebook and told me of his films.
One of them, Aspettando La sartiglia, is all about dreaming and waiting for the spring event, with some of the things we’ve been talking about. You should watch:
And he gave me the link to some of the television coverage of Sartiglia
And below is my video of Sartiglia, starting at the dressing of Su Componidori:
The reason I’m bringing this up is that if you want to see this amazing spectacle, you’ll need to start planning now. The dates should be in February, but they haven’t been set yet, so check with the foundation linked below.
The Foundation of Sa Sartiglia website has a lot of information on the festivities.
Here is a list of user-rated hotels in Oristano. We had a pleasant stay at the Mistral II and it was close to the action but not too close to be noisy.
Sartiglia Remembered originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Nov 28, 2011, © James Martin,
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Abbey of Santa Croce in Sassoferrato · Sep 23, 09:37 AM by James Martin
Sassoferrato—I’ve mentioned it before—is quite a place. There are lots of things to see and do in the little village in the little-touristed Marche region of Italy.
Just outside Sassoferrato is the Abbey of Santa Croce, dated to around the second half of the 11th century, and probably the work of craftsmen from Lombardy. The bell tower you see in the picture is later, and was possibly added to protect the church; it appears as if a “shell” has been built around it.
Many of the columns in the Abbey church come from the nearby Roman site of Sentinum, which you can easily visit on the same day (see below for a visitor guide and an article on the delights of “hidden Italy” in Sassoferrato).
In the middle ages there was a pilgrim’s hospice nearby, and the church displays a terracotta statue of the Pilgrim St. Rocco with the characteristic scallop shell attached to his coat. St. Rocco is a protector against the plague and all contagious diseases.
There are signs that the Knights Templar protected the church, and carvings attest to their presence.
There’s lots of evidence that the spot the abbey sits upon has been sacred for a long while; the church was built over a Temple dedicated to Mithros.
The protection this abbey got is evident in its incredible state of preservation. The brilliantly colored altarpiece you see above hasn’t been restored, only years of candle soot has been removed.
The portal, which you see to the right, is hidden, the stone frames carved with floral, animal and geometric motifs—quite interesting animals, as you’re likely to find on nearly every Romanesque Church!
Below are some more pictures of the column capitals and a detail of the door frame. The first picture, I’ve been informed, is a carving depicting a knighting ceremony.
While we visited, we found out that another part of the abbey was planned to be built into a spa.
Sassoferrato Visitor Information
Finding the Hidden Italy in Sassoferrato
Where from here? The Frasassi Caves are nearby.
Check out Hotels in or near Sassaferrato
Abbey of Santa Croce in Sassoferrato originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Sep 23, 2011, © 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,
News from the Trimming of the Phallus Tree · Aug 19, 10:40 AM by James Martin
Certainly by now you know of Massa Marittima’s famous Phallus Tree. It’s part of the Fonti dell’Abbondanza, the Fountain of Abundance.
The phallus tree is a medieval depiction of a tree that seems to spout phalluses—along with all the associated bits would make one functional in “real life.” Those other bits were recently the subject of a bit of bickering by “experts and connoisseurs” according to an article in Corriere della Sera.
The just completed three-year restoration of the 1265 fresco seems to have trimmed the size of some testicles, some even appearing to have disappeared altogether, according to experts. A “castration” of the art, according to the article.
I mention all this because living in a puritanical culture brings out the desire to see things that would be hidden from view by a society that believes that knowledge can hurt them badly. But here at Wandering Italy we are bold. We know that now that you know the truth you are hooked. You want to go to Massa Marittima and see these dangerous shrunken testicles yourself, do you not? (You will go while your womenfolk are shopping, won’t you?)
So I have compiled some interesting things for you to do on your little secret excursion to Massa Marittima. First off, you’ll want to know that there’s a whole substructure that was created to make sure the Fountain of Abundance was always abundantly supplied with water—tunnels, wells, stalactites, those kinds of things. And you can visit them with the proper authorization and equipment. See: Fonti dell’Abbondanza Tunnel.
Kyle Phillips has a good article on a walk through the city that includes the Palazzo dell’Abbondanza and the fountain: Massa Marittima, La Cucina Ebraica, Rice & More
Casina di Rosa has a nice article on visiting the area as well: Massa Marittima and the Metalliferous Hills
And of course, if you’re too darn lazy to go there yourself and just want to satisfy your curiosity with a lascivious collection of pixels (close-up dirty picture) and a scholarly discussion, see Got Medieval
News from the Trimming of the Phallus Tree originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Aug 19, 2011, © James Martin,
Vinca, Italy - A Fascinating Village on the Edge of Nowhere · Aug 18, 08:47 AM by James Martin
I spend much of my time in Italy searching for the past, which, like most romantics, I assume to be superior to the present. Forgotten mountain villages and the work of forgotten artisans, like woodcarving and baking bread, are the prizes of my wanderings. There are usually surprises as well.
The tiny mountain village of Vinca in northern Tuscany had all of these.
Vinca sits at the far edge of the Lunigiana. Stone houses lean against each other on the steep slopes. The road ends in what you might call “downtown” Vinca. You know you’re there when you smell the heady fragrance of the bread leaking from the seams of Panificio Rita. The bread from this tiny mountain village, Pane di Vinca, is famous all over northern Tuscany.
A few steps down the road you notice a man leaning over his work on the marble windowsill, his chisel releasing spiral peels of wood from what would become an intricately carved window box. He keeps his notes and measurements and does his math in pencil on the marble, which you can see if you click to see the larger picture. His finished work, including a bundle of carved walking sticks, is displayed in an open alcove. There are no signs, no enticements. He looks up at us only when I ask him his name. Federicci.
Then at the end of the road is the alimentare, which also serves as the town bar. It has a single communal table out front, a thick slab of marble polished to a high luster, its brilliance enhanced perhaps by years of scrubbing and card playing.
Your only choice, at the end of this road, is to head up a steep set of stairs to see the village. No cars can circulate, so there wasn’t the need for a fight over pedestrian zones. Passageways snake between stone houses, little homemade terraces catch the mountain breezes. There are fountains and a communal wash basin, a lavatoio.
Choose the right street and you might come upon Mario’s little store, where he will sell you Miele Apuano Vinca, local honey. But not just any honey! It’s: extra vergine integrale super energetico honey. Mario recommends his honey for “sportsmen, moms, grandparents, kids, and convalescents.” The medicine you need.
Across the street someone, perhaps Mario himself, has kindly fastened a gigantic map of the hiking trails to his garden fence so anyone can consult it. That’s good, because just up the street is a very well marked trail-head for sentiero 190, leading you toward the peaks of the craggy Apuane Alps, recommended for expert and well-equipped sportsmen.
We poke around a bit then head down the hill. There’s a spring; someone’s thoughtfully built a little marble shelf for the communal glass tucked away from the glaring sun. Then a few steps on there’s a more sober bit of Vinca history. A monument of marble inside what appears to be a sheep pen.
This is the other thing Vinca is noted for. It’s not a nice thing. On the 24th of August, 1944, barbaric and aggressive Nazi-Fascist soldiers brought 20 young people into this pen and slaughtered them, according to the sign, a remembrance as moving and thought-provoking as that found at a similarly remote but better known outpost in Tuscany, Sant Anna di Stazzema. These mountain villages, remote as they were, became hotbeds of resistance in the war—successful ones, enough to evoke the ire of the enemy no end.
The past is not all roses. Arbitrary hate is infectious; we must not forget.
Vinca, Italy - A Fascinating Village on the Edge of Nowhere originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Aug 18, 2011, © James Martin,