journal

1st entry – le marche 2011

The last time I was at the Paris airport was 20 years ago. I was with the Wertheimers and once we retrieved our luggage we headed into town.

The Charles de Gaulle airport is all renovated. Security is double what it is at any other airport. (Twenty years ago there were soldiers with machine guns walking around.) And the French are efficient, but miserably detached and non-friendly. (The Zingas are originally from France that may explain some of the family characteristics.) It’s the only airport where they had me take out all my camera equipment and put it into one of the security trays. And on the flight from Paris to Rome, the pilot and attendances would give these long explanations about Genoa, Torino, the Alps in French and then two sentences in English. At first I thought they just don’t have the facility with English that they have with French. Wrong! (It’s the French, F the rest of us.)

One of my anxieties about the trip was getting from Fiumicino – Rome Airport – to Stazione Termini – Rome Train Station. (The Roma Termini pic is something I found online.) I had all these concerns that I would get a rogue cab-driver. Instead I ended up with the airport taxi-group. The driver had on a shirt-and-tie and a jacket, very professional. The ride into town was 50 Euros, around $80. (That is what I had expected.)

Stazione Termini was the best. First there were support people everywhere. And the people . . . If it’s wasn’t my first time back in 40 years, and if I wasn’t exhausted from the flight, and if I was with someone else, I would have taken out my camera, assembled the lens and shot and shot. The place was crawling with humankind. These people were all real, they were alive. They were the regular-folk wrapped in their Felliniesque costumes and Italian manners – muzzled dogs leading owners, cigarettes dangling from red-red lips, stiletto heels holding Rubenesque calves, man-purses slung on narrow shoulders, left-over hippies looking for their euro-rail passes, and young kids slumming it, because it’s cool to take the train with the regs.

The train left on time and got to Fabriano on time. It stopped at Spoleto and I was nostalgic for that trip, because it was a great one. On the way I texted Rose and Derrick to tell them where I was and once got off at Fabriano, there they were on the platform.

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From Fabriano we drove through the country to the house in Isola di Fano. The landscape was magnificent.

We rented a renovated workers’ cottage. (When I told my dad where we stayed, he laughed. He grew up in one of these workers’ houses. It was home to some 18 family members who worked the padrone’s land. The first floor housed the animals; the sharecroppers all lived on the second floor. The sharecropping system, abandoned after the war, left many workers houses vacant. In modern times, these cottages have been reclaimed and rehabbed.)

The image below is the view from the kitchen window.

Rose’s comment was, “When you have this outside your window, who needs a painting?”

Large farms cover the northern section of le March. They crown the hills and the tree-lines serve as fences separating one farm from the next.

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One of the things that I’m doing in this set of journal entries is using larger images. I really like this one.

After getting off the train in Fabriano, I said to Rose and Derrick that I needed to do something that told me I was in Italy. (Up to then, I had interacted with traveling attendances – memorable are the nasty airport workers at CDG – but no Italians, no landscapes, no art, and no food.) Well, first came the drive back to the house in Isola di Fano. There was the landscape; nothing like it anywhere; yes I was in le Marche. The house – cale cerque – was the next surprise. (The branches behind Rose are le cerque the oak trees that give the house its name.) Set in the rolling hills, its beautiful yellow-orange stucco blended with the natural colors of the plowed earth that sheltered it. And finally came the food and the wine.

Rose and Derrick are always ready for meals. They spend time shopping for food, cooking it and then sitting down and enjoying it. Dinner was a simple affair. Pasta with fresh tomato sauce, cheeses, a salad and wine from the agriturismo they were at before heading to le Marche. The table is on the upper portion of the property, it’s under a pergola and back-dropped by rolling farmland. This is the northern section of le Marche.

As the moon silvered the twilight, we ate, drank and laughed. I had gotten there late, but I was in finally in Italy doing the things Italian do.

2nd entry – le marche 2011

On Thursday we decided to go to Urbino. From Isola di Fano it was a half hour ride. This hill-town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. (When I told Paul we had gone to Urbino, he announced that no one knows where that is. I hope it stays that way.)

I love Piero della Francesca’s painting of The Duke of Urbino.
(I want his hat.) How did he produce the red pigment that he used for the hat and the coat?

We approached Urbino from the south-east finding it on the horizon whenever the tree-line broke. It sat across the valley, its cathedral a blue crown.

We entered through one of its ancient gates to find a lived-in, medieval town absent of tourists. (For me that was the best. It’s hard to not find tourists in Italy, in August.) The rock-paved streets are wide letting the August sun in and the cars through without scraping the walls or the walkers.

Reminders of its Papal State status are everywhere in the city center. The cathedral and ducal palace are riddled with papal crests, statues and sacred liturgical artifacts.

Urbino is also the birthplace of Raphael. And that artistic legacy is embraced by the university. As we walked, hiding in the shade, students were going in and out of palazzos that have been turned into classrooms and offices.

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On our way home from Urbino, I suggested we go up to the monastery and then back down to the cemetery in Fossombrone. (I had noticed the signs and today we had some time.)

The road up to the colle dei Cappuccini was out of a Calabrian nightmare. In a province covered by round, cultivated hills, the road was narrow, scratched with 90 degree turns, and ledges that looked down and down and down.

Rose was beside herself. Derrick and I were surprised to find this mountain road. At one point we met a driver coming down. He had to back up and make way for us, because there were two cars going up. Also, we had no room on the right to pull over. The over was into the valley.

It took us a good half-hour to reach the top. And there was the Cappiccin Monastery. But the view was the thing. Before us was the valley of the Metauro and the terra cotta roofs of Fossombrone. (I am in front of the monastery, at an overlook and I am shooting into the valley.)

The monastery was established in 1528. I cannot image walking to the summit, let alone bring up building materials.

The expression in Italian for someone going into a monastery suggests that the person is going away from the world. Up here at the summit of the colle dei Cappuccini I finally understood the expression.

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The church, swaddled in green gauze, was part of the original Cappuccin complex before two monks left and went up to the mountain to find solace and solitude and ended up founding a new branch monastery. The old church and monastery cemetery are now the modern cemetery of Fossombrone. After years of neglect the old Cappuccin church is being restored.

The cemetery is one of the most efficiently designed and planned burial ground that I’ve ever seen. (In mountainous Calabria where flat land is a premium and the ground is rock, level expanses are given over to the fields of the dead. And tombs are wide-spaced, stand-alone and above ground.) Here in Fossombrone the cemetery is probably half the area of the one in Aprigliano, but holds double the number of dead.

The tombs are all underground crypts and the bodies are stacked one on top of the other. The mausoleum on the right already has 13 people buried in its crypt. And there’s probably room for another 10 or so. All the family crypts have a decorative marble/stone cover.

On the inside, the perimeter wall is lined with porticoes and under each arch is a family mausoleums; evidence of the wealth in the region. On a second ring of porticoes were many crypts in modern design. This was a surprise. And in the middle of the old cemetery were single graves with mounds of earth and stone. The grave-markers on these mounds were make-shift and temporary. (I would not be surprised if these are temporary graves and the family is waiting for room in the new, mausoleum.

There are so many shelves on the above ground crypts that the cemetery provides ladders so family members can reach the flower vases. (It looks like Home Depot with its ladders-on-wheels in the middle of the isles.) These modern hives are two stories and so well planned that the street-level is a piazza like space.

The emotional effect of this planning is a less morbid environment. I was more intrigued by the design, the traffic flow and the lack of funereal boxes than the atmosphere of a place of the dead. It all made for a neutral response. (I don’t know if families who come to visit their loved ones have the same detached response.)
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3rd entry – le marche 2011

We left Fossombrone and headed north-east to Ferrara. Our last visit to Emilia Romagna took us to Bologna. We went there to eat and were not disappointed. (We have now been in Emilia Romagna twice and the food is absolutely the best.) This trip, I suggested Ferrara hoping for the same eating options. And we found them in droves. And because it’s off the tourist route, prices were amazingly low and the food was amazingly great.

Also, Ferrara is the city of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and a memory in Stephen Sondheim’s dreamy Liaisons.

Is this the room and ceiling Madame Armfeldt (Hermione Gingold) was dreaming about as she remembered her life in A Little Night Music?

Liaisons
…
At the palace of the Duke of Ferrara
Who was prematurely deaf, but a dear.
At the palace of the Duke of Ferrara,
I acquired some position, plus a tiny Titian.
…
Liaisons!
What’s happened to them?
Liaisons today
Disgraceful!
What’s become of them?
Some of them
Hardly pay their shoddy way.

This is the ceiling of one of the street-level reception rooms of Palazzo Constabili. The corner frescoes represent the four seasons.

(The grand palaces of Ferrara are all brick-faced. Absent are the smooth, marble facades of Tuscany.) This Renaissance palazzo is beautiful even without external ornamentation. However, the interior of the Palazzo Constabili was amazing – the courtyard-garden rippled with thistle and hawthorn; cicadas sang in the pines; and the stone well was topped with lacey, wrought-iron sunflowers; on the main staircase, the risers were written with curlicues of inlaid black-marble; upstairs the piano nobile boasted the largest Etruscan collection in Italy; (The artifacts are from the ancient town of Spina an Etruscan port that flourished between the 6th and 3rd centuries.) and the ball-room had been re-decorated with murals of Spina, the old administrative divisions of the province and maps of the Nazi occupation of Emilia Romagna. (Talk about contrasts.)

last entry – le marche 2011

It’s been years since I was in Rome. (The Rome airport doesn’t count. BTW, I hate the Rome airport. It is one of the most difficult airports to begin a trip from; checking in is miserable. And the domestic terminals are over-run with passengers, and not very clean.)

We left Ferrara Monday morning and drove down to Rome. (We were going to return the car and stay overnight at the airport Hilton. My flight was at 7:30 in the morning and I headed over at 5:30. It took me an hour to check in. Why I hate the Rome airport.) Part of our plan was to take the hotel bus into Rome and spend late afternoon and early evening in the city.

This part of the return trip was the best. I loved being back in Rome. I had forgotten how great the city is. In Rome everything is exaggerated. The churches are grand, the streets are wide, the buildings are refurbished and elegant. And most of all, the city is big enough that you can avoid the tourists. Santa Maria in Trastevere was beautiful; Piazza Navona was over-run by tourists and we left quickly; the Pantheon was closed; Piazza Venezia was roped off, but still magnificent; and the Campidoglio was a wonderful surprise.

My favorite discovery was what has been done on the shores of il Tevere. I remember il Tevere in late August as a muddy trickle. I had never gone down to the river, because it felt unsafe. It was far down to get to the river and hardly anyone went down to the edge, especially when all that was down there was a muddy, shallow stream littered with garbage. (Different than Paris, where the banks of the Seine were full of people enjoying a stroll.) Well all that has changed. The water it high and the banks are filled with theatres, restaurants, walkways and people. The street noise if gone and you are surrounded by tents and tables; one restaurant had hookah pipes to smoke and pillows to lounge on as you watched the Romans and wannabes stroll by. Welcome to Lungo il Tevere … Roma.