Everyone Goes to Florence, Italy · 8 days ago by James Martin
Who cares that Italy is going broke? Who cares that the economy everywhere that isn’t China or Germany is in the toilet? Folks like you and I have been hiding out in Florence hotels at a rate greater than ever before.
12 million hotel rooms in Florence province were filled with tourists and their spawn last year, according to The Florentine. Up over 8% from the year before. The city’s hotels did quite well, too. Over 8 million people slept in them. Or at least paid for them (dearly).
Perhaps tourism can save Italy. Of course, for that, there’d have to be a weak Euro, or better yet, a feeble Lira. Not only that, but every destination would have to be as popular as Florence.
It’s true that you can’t find as much art crammed into as small an area as the city that calls itself “Firenze.” But if you have a car and don’t mind narrow, curving roads there sure is a lot to discover in the rest of Tuscany. For real contrast, you could go up to little Sant Anna di Stazemma and find out about the massacre and what Spike Lee was trying to convey. If that’s too rural and remote, you could visit one of Italy’s most beautiful hill towns, Pitigliano, also spectacular in its setting. Heck, I’d stay a while and walk the Vie Cave, the Etruscan rock sculpted paths.
But enough. Yes, there’s art in Florence. But if you want to know a bit about the world, from the plight of Jews in Pitigliano to the plight of the resistance in Sant Anna, to the world of artisan cheese making, you’ll find it all within the friendly confines of Tuscany.
So spread out. Together we can stimulate the economy of Italy to make sure it lasts for a while without folks being forced to sell off ancient artifacts or pickpocket every last tourist.
But then, if you must go to Florence, we have Florence Weather and Climate Information just a mouse click away.
But you know, this is Italy, and even in Tuscany there are exotic islands awaiting your bags. Heck, you might think of renting a vacation house on Giglio and watching the cruise ships waddle by. Or maybe not. Still:
Giglio Island Vacation Rentals
Everyone Goes to Florence, Italy originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Jan 19, 2012, © James Martin, 
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Winter Food · 18 days ago by James Martin
Today, the internet has mounted an assault on my Italian food desires. Some days are like that. You’re thinking of those seasonal eats that Italians get and wham, suddenly the web is awash in people talking about such delectables as Puntarella and bollito misto.
This is the time for that Roman favorite puntarella—a type of chicory, a bitter green that sprouts in cold weather. It’s the harbinger of spring, a winter salad dressed with anchovies, spiky tastes the Romans relish.
Puntarella is the perfect foil for a bollito misto like the one Kyle Phillips reminded us exists at Trattoria la Baracchina, which I’ve spoken of before and put in the Tuscany for Foodies mobile app. Bollito Misto is one of those dishes that are deceptively simple. It seems you just toss in a great variety of meats and vegetables into a pot of simmering water. Not nobile meats either, the old hen and some cuts of beef that have to cook forever to be palatable. But timing is everything. It’s when you slide that particular meat into the simmering broth that’s important. A dish of a certain genius…
And the great thing is that when you go into a restaurant with your family and friends and an entourage of waiters ferries out this enormous wheeled cart atop which sits a silver pot with all this richness of flavor, these cuts of meat set like jewels in steaming broth, and the head waiter starts cutting pieces, and everyone is calling out what they want, what they lust after, and what the waiter doesn’t have to bother putting on the plate. You are witnessing the Italian contradiction, these throw-away meats in a deceptively simple peasant concoction served expertly with a flourish from a gleaming silver vessel by a waiter who’s been doing this forever and with pride. A grand richness from low off the hog. A social occasion calling for celebration; a dish you’d feel silly ordering alone.
I’m really hungry now. I wish there was an Italian bus from California to Italy. It would be fast and cheap. But when you wanted to take it, the drivers would be on strike.
The Italian contradiction. You gotta love it.
Winter Food originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Jan 09, 2012, © James Martin,
Do You Need a Car to Visit Italy? · 23 days ago by James Martin
It always amazes me when I see Internet writing types who’ve used bold text to spout loudly the unequivocal law of the Italian countryside, “you definitely need a car to see Italy right!” If you research, you’ll likely find that these are people who have bought a house in an agricultural wilderness and turned it into a Bed and Breakfast that train-riders can’t visit because the tracks don’t go anywhere close to there. It’s a vested interest thing.
There’s also a romantic side. Every Italian tourist’s noggin has been graced with a portion of memory devoted to an endless loop revealing a red car gloriously shredding the asphalt between idyllic Tuscan villages over and over again. The top is down, the exhaust note is throaty, and friendly folks wave encouragingly as you zip along with Italian verve. It’s a virus caused by overindulging in Italian Romantic Comedies and taking to heart the hyperbole found in tourist brochures. Really.
These days (sung sadly to a tune by the Duke), you “don’t zip along much anymore.” Not legally that is. Millions of Euros worth of autovelox cameras make sure that zipping is kept to something you do when your trusty steed, parked discreetly, is approached by the constabulary just as you’ve finished getting amorous with your sweet honey. “Nothing to see here, officer…”
Presumably the fees extracted from the jauntier drivers pay for the machines. It doesn’t often work out like that, but these days folks are increasingly willing to go into debt to keep everyone else in line. “God,” they will explain, “wants them to.” And so you will likely find yourself and your rental vehicle in frequent lines, except in Italy the line of cars you wait in is called a coda or a “tail”—except you don’t want a piece of this one…
There is another problem with driving these days. The price of fuel has skyrocketed. Taxes, you see, have been added to rebuild the towns that bad weather has crunched. And, remember, the prices have skyrocketed from stratospherically high prices we now think of as reasonable. We are a flexible people.
I’m not trying to scare you from renting a car and driving your butt off. It’s just that it might be time to consider the train. It’s (relatively) cheap. It lets you off near the center of cities—bypassing the industrial crap that rings them—and you don’t have to pay attention to anything you don’t want to pay attention to.
I mean, look at what’s on a single rail line: Torino to Trieste. It’s like a box of assorted chocolates, these sweet and compelling cities and towns: Torino, Vercelli (known for risotto with frogs!) Milano, Brescia, Verona, Padova, Venice. And you pay just a few Euros to travel between any two of them. You can spend weeks along this one rail line without thinking you’re missing the “real Italy.”
And in Italy you’ll find passes that integrate the public transportation experience, from boats to metro to buses and trains. In little-visited Lazio, for example, you’ll find the BIRG Pass that will save you money and make getting places darned easy. Check with the local tourist office wherever you land.
And don’t think the train stations themselves are seedy little stink-holes like some in the US. Both Venice and Florence stations have been named in one of those ubiquitous Top Ten lists of train stations in Europe.
So, no, you don’t need a car to visit Italy. You can get to some mighty sweet places on the train.
Do You Need a Car to Visit Italy? originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Jan 04, 2012, © James Martin,
Popular These Days
Rebuilding Vernazza, a pixel at a time · 26 days ago by James Martin
Vernazza is one of the 5 lands, the Cinque Terre, a series of cute and colorful villages strung out along the Ligurian coast and well known around these parts. The Cinque Terre was hit hard by devastating floods, as you know. Vernazza is still a bit dirty and needs cleaning up.
One of the ways I’ve been told that this cleaning up can be facilitated is by the donations of folks who remained high and dry through 2011, the old year, the one whose ringing out might make your head throb in pain on this solemn day after.
Would you buy some pixels to help the Cinque Terre? Well, you can. What can a pixel or ten cost, anyway?
Look here: A Pixel for Vernazza. Not only can you buy pixels in 10 by 10 blocks to bring color to the iconic photo, but you can also link your luscious box of color to your web site. If you don’t have one, perhaps you can link it to your favorite site. Perhaps that is Wandering Italy. I’d like to hope so, but I suspect other sites with neked babes or sleeping cats might be more popular. Use your own discretion. Or, if you have none, use someone else’s. It’s what I do.
I do not know if this avenue will produce a better Vernazza. Nor do I know where the money goes, exactly. But you might want to check it out. There are worse places to send your money, I suspect. Giving it to rich people is popular in America, but I think that’s nuts. I’m pretty much alone in this.
Rebuilding Vernazza, a pixel at a time originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Jan 01, 2012, © James Martin,
Instagram - Travel Pictures Oddly Rendered · 29 days ago by James Martin
Perhaps you’ve heard of Instagram. It’s a simple app for the iPhone and iPod Touch that makes your crappy cell phone pictures look like crappy old pictures through filters that change the color and framing. That’s an Instagram picture of yours truly up there on the right, looking all critical and curmudgeonly as usual. If you click the picture you can see it horrifyingly large. Do so at your own risk.
Picture sharing isn’t new, but Instagram does that pretty well, too.
So what’s special about Instagram and why would you add it to your travel story recording arsenal? I mean really, we live in a world in which a huge number of people on vacation choose to lug around massive SLR cameras with massive (and massively expensive) lenses screwed into them, a chiropractor’s dream. Most of these photographers are willing to debate the absolute perfection of their picture output right down to the last immaculate pixel. Who’d want manipulated pictures made to look like they were taken with outdated 1920’s technology?
Um, well, ok, look over there to the right. It’s a simple picture of a tree, reflected in a pond on a friend’s property. I’ve walked this property many times with a DSLR. I’ve never taken this picture with it. I’ve never even thought about taking this picture. Yet I love how it came out. So what’s that all about?
The combination of my iPod camera with its primitive, fixed-focus lens is like a comfort food we’ve enjoyed as children, a box camera un-boxed. Instagram’s filters are the gravy that links us from digital light storage back to chemical transformation of crystalline film coatings. Photography as a narrative medium is now reset back to its primitive beginnings. Images matter. Strong, graphic images—colors desaturated (or oddly oversaturated)—are the things of memory. It’s not about the beetles crawling on the tree’s perfectly rendered bark that you might get with $5000 worth of expensive digital photographic equipment, it’s about the soul of the tree, the symmetry of it, the power of it; it’s about nature as we might never have seen it before but nature as we remember it, low-def, dreamily unsharp. It’s your world, upside down.
The primitive nature of Instagram forces you to look at the common things around you differently. It’s not about forcing you to see in high-definition something you didn’t know you wanted to see—it’s about matching the environment of your own vision. It’s a whole different thing. The pictures, it seem to me, are evocative—if you think about it while you’re taking them.
That’s Martha’s fave on the left. It’s simply a tree hanging over Cache Creek. Nothing more. A darkness, the erotic and ominous dark of a winter’s day, is reflected in it. I hope it sends a shiver down your spine.
But what about this manipulation? It’s dishonest, isn’t it?
Art is all about matching the output to a vision. It’s never about the reality we believe in. Good art is about something else. It’s about different reality, a different way of seeing.
Take Ansel Adams. The magician with a view camera is responsible for getting a huge number of folks to believe that his output presented to you the absolute finest representation of reality you could possibly squeeze out of a big negative.
You can fool all the people all the time, you know. I once spent a day with Ansel Adams. There isn’t a photographer I can think of who didn’t spend more time thinking about new and better ways of manipulating a negative. The man spent an inordinate sum of money on electronics to measure what was going on in that chemical deposit altered by light. His dodging and burning instructions were legendary for their complexity. I’m not kidding, if you saw a straight print of “Moonrise, Hernandez” selling for $12 you’d probably walk right past. It’s not that good of a photograph. Really. Reality sucks sometimes.
So think what you can do with the limitations of a cell phone camera. It might make your eyes seek out better images. Who knows?
I can’t wait to get my low tech photo equipment to Italy. For now, here is the start of my Instagram gallery.
The app on the web: Instagram
(And, um, yes, I do seem to have a tree fetish. I’ll get that worked on. Promise.)
If you’re still convinced that high-tech is the way to go as long as it easily slips into your pocket, the Canon Powershot S100, a camera I’m lusting over, is finally available on Amazon: Canon PowerShot S100 12.1 MP Digital Camera with 5x Wide Angle Optical Image Stabilized Zoom (Black)
Instagram - Travel Pictures Oddly Rendered originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Dec 29, 2011, © James Martin,
The Genius of a Place · 36 days ago 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,
Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power · 38 days ago by James Martin
Martha and I recently attended a fab art exhibit called: Masters of Venice: Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power from the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. The snappy title titillates, doesn’t it?
But hey, the history of art is all about titillation! They cover it up, but it’s there. You aren’t supposed to know. But artists, and those who write blurbs about them, leave hints.
You see, after we had learned about the challenges of painting an aristocracy who’d taken to wearing black from head to toe (the signs pointing out that Venetian painters took to squeezing out so much detail in the faces that a viewer’s eyes couldn’t linger on the black hole of clothing but were instead coerced into focusing on the area of greatest detail right from the get-go) we snaked around the folks blocking the paintings, all spellbound with wires hanging from their ears as they listened to voices ping-ponging around their heads, and we finally made it to the end of the exhibit, where an erotic revelation awaited us. They always leave the erotic at the end so you’ll remember it.
So here you go, pumping toward the great end, the climax: Like everyone else, the Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power made a great deal of money painting scenes from mythology. That’s why there are so many paintings depicting them. When have you ever gone to any kind of historic art exhibit without seeing a plethora or two of paintings depicting a scene from mythology?
And it’s just any old mythology, either. You know what the big spenders were throwing their money away on, don’t you?
Come on! Mythology is full of it! Yes, sex! Nudity! People with arrows penetrating their soft and yielding flesh! (?!)
You see, in mythology, ladies of mythical bodily perfection were never far from the gods who manipulated them got manipulated by them. Crazy things happened of course, but you can’t really put that in a painting, so, you’re left with things like perfect breasts. Well, perfect for the Renaissance. Perfection changes. But whatever, the rich folks wanted to see sexual perfection on their walls. So they created a bull market for such things.
Rich people are such a hoot.
Berlusconi,
and a man named “Newt”…
Anyway, those rich guys studied mythology, looking for the nasty bits so they could have their favorite starving artist paint scenes full of breasts and other fatty things they liked to look so they could have them framed and slapped up on the walls of their inner sanctums. So now, hundreds of years later, museums everywhere bulge with pictures of naked women involved in some sort of odd relationship with muscular netherworld beings—and for balance, besides them will always be the glistening white flesh of frail Saint Sebastian festooned with many arrows, accented by the blood that couldn’t help leaking out…
And thus we have arrived at the end.
Renaissance Painters of Passion and Power originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Dec 20, 2011, © James Martin,
Sexy Food · 45 days ago by James Martin
The term “sexy food” is trending upwards in Google’s walled garden (we web-and-word-wonks live and die by those trends, unfortunately). Steven Poole, writing in The Guardian, evidently noticed this, too. He doesn’t particularly like the trend.
Nigella Lawson covering her face in caramel is the latest example of the sexualisation of our eating habits. Isn’t it time we abandoned this fetish and put our minds before our mouths? ~ Let’s end our obsession with making food sexy
I have to agree with Steven—despite the fact that I am often seen in restaurants with food running in multicolored rivulets from the corners of my mouth and have yet to notice a single person of either sex swooning in unholy rapture.
The thing is, I find simple, Italian food quite sexy. I yearn for it. I’ve written about Sexy food in Piemonte before. But now I’m wondering, is that pile of shellfish in the Guazzetto actually sexy to anyone but me?
Martha and I recently ate the “Weekly Beast” at the Michelin starred One Market Restaurant. The beast was goat; four courses of it. The main course was “Spit Roasted Goat Leg.” Your mouth waters. Spit is a sexy word, no?
Then it came to the table. Thin slices. Pink. Juicy. A tantalizing hint of smoke.
Are we masturbating yet?
But then there was this dollop of green on top, “ramp salsa verde.” Cheap perfume. Harsh on the tongue. Dollop-trollop.
And those slices? Lying in a puddle of red wine reduction—like the unfortunate characters of today’s murder mysteries (trending up!): pornographically displayed flesh, draining life-blood…
Bottom line: you couldn’t taste the goat.
So I’m thinking age has something to do with it. I mean, the younger folks to the left of us, when they weren’t taking pictures of this colorful assemblage with their cell phones (“Timmy’s never going to believe we’re eating goat!”), were fawningly rapturous over the meal.
Eroticism, sexual and otherwise, changes with maturity, it seems to me. When you’re a boy of 12, any ‘ol (ok, young) trollop with humongous breasts spilling from a too-tight bodice will make your head spin. Body parts, artfully squeezed, colorfully painted and perfumed, are characteristics that make the blood surge. In television as in life. In goats as in humans.
But then—to many—these characteristics become less tantalizing as maturation occurs. Maturation doesn’t look pretty in a mirror, but oh, what you can get out of it if you try! Suddenly you want to taste the real thing. You want to get to the heart of the matter. The end of pretty wrappings is the beginning of a deep relationship with the things that matter. The thing itself. Its unique qualities. Its shimmering perfection.
And the food on your plate, if wild in temperament, if joyously unafraid in its eating habits, if perfect in its succulence—will come to you perfectly unadorned. You will revel in its uniqueness, its character. If you dare. What could be sexier than that?
Sexy Food originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Dec 13, 2011, © James Martin,