Wednesday night was Nonno's 89th birthday party down at the pub. We were worried about arriving too early (we never know what time anything starts -- a cultural mystery) and so ended up arriving a little bit late. But we were greeted with affection and given instantaneous wine. 

There were probably 40 or 50 people there -- not only our familiar friends from our long afternoons in the shade on the terrace, but also a whole intertwined cabal of the Viviani family from Capezzano Monte -- cousins and in-laws and nieces and people whose multiple and over-lapping ties with Nonno were so dense and complex that is impossible to say who, exactly, they actually are.

It was lovely at the long table under the trees out back and the spontaneous singing of traditional drinking songs that burst out between courses of the meal were often hilarious (more so as the night and the wine went on) and always breathtaking. The clip below is a song about who is going to pay the tab for all this booze, but you would never know it if you didn't understand the words.

I felt very happy to be included in the crowd sitting at the big jolly table -- not a cousin, of course, but not so much a stranger any more, either.

The meal itself had course after course with the main dish finally being individual stuffed quails sitting in nests of roasted potatoes. I have seen Babette's Feast, so I know that I am supposed to crack open the skull with my teeth and eat the little brain, which is apparently a delicacy. But I myself am also quite delicate and blessed with a very vivid and visual imagination and once actually fainted out cold merely at the very thought of something particularly gruesome (long story), so I did not eat my brain. Now, days later, sitting safely in my house where the scariest foodstuff around is an elderly carrot in the back of the refrigerator, I am beginning to regret my timidity. But not much.

 

Daniele told me last night that I am going to have to stop crying every time he talks. But I can't help it.

We went last night to a little benefit they held at the pub for a local organization that helps people with eating disorders. Daniele gave a really beautiful speech about how food is love and that, in feeding others, we share love across time through generations and also across space when we think about all the people -- from the farmers on up -- who work so hard to feed us. When we eat together, when we do it with love and attention, we are part of a community and connected to the whole world. He made an analogy with a little piece of garlic that can seem so small, but when added to a dish, can have so much power to infuse everything with delight. He said it much more poetically and profoundly than I ever could, of course.

So it's not like I sobbed uncontrollably or anything, but I did get a little bit misty-eyed. This has happened on two previous occasions when he's been talking about food and love and feeding the soul and giving love to everyone.

I think the thing is that he reminds me of my dad, who also wanted to give love to the entire world. The last several years before he died, he used to volunteer once a week at the soup kitchen in my home town. He was in his late seventies and his eighties then and kind of past it as far as actual cooking was concerned. So he decided that his job would be to stand at the door when people came in and give everyone who came for lunch either a handshake or a hug (their choice). 

"No one ever touches homeless people," he said. "Because they don't get the chance to bathe or wash their clothes too often, so they're dirty and they smell bad. But every human being needs to be touched. They wither and die without it." There were people who came to the soup kitchen on his regular day as much for the hugs as for the food.

So you can see why I might get a little teary. Daniele told me to cut it out, but he also gave me his visual aid as a present.

One good thing about this relentless heat -- it has turned the loft in the guest bedroom into an excellent food dehydrator. We could make jerky up there, if only we had the meat.

Instead, I have been drying lavender -- some for sachets in the drawers with sweaters and the boxes with blankets stored away, some for making lavender and lemon cookies, and some for lavender oil to rub on our mosquito bites.
 

 

A tragedy is unfolding around us as the intense heat continues with no respite or rain in sight. A survey of our olive trees confirms that most of the baby olives have died. There will be no grand harvest this year -- perhaps not any harvest at all. For a while, the forecast promised rain for Saturday, but now that has evaporated. Jonathan and I stay mostly inside in front of the fan drinking ice water with the shades drawn against the sun. The birds are more silent than they were. The news now is of emergency rooms filled with heat stroke victims and of deaths. Only the little lizards seem happy. They do not understand the gravity of the situation.

 

Quite an uproar at the opera Friday night!

Jonathan and I went to Torre del Lago to see the premiere of this season's new production of "La Boheme" at the annual Puccini Festival. As one does.

It was a lovely evening. The theatre is open to the stars and the breeze comes off the lake. So elegant, so genteel, so sedate.

But no!

Apparently, a right-wing undersecretary of culture, recently appointed by the new Fascist Prime Minister, had denounced the production, whining that by setting the opera during the French student riots of 1968 (rather than its original setting of the French Revolution of 1830), The Puccini Festival Society was egregiously mixing art with politics -- something he only agrees with when the politics in question are right-wing.

The conductor of the orchestra, who had not been part of the production but was flown to conduct in only two days before it started, apparently agreed with the Fascist undersecretary. (When we told the regulars down at the pub about it, they were vociferously united in their disdain for the undersecretary, who is, they say, a buffoon. "Even a donkey," said Nonno, who is one week shy of his 89th birthday and, therefore, holds the place of highest honor and respect among the all-day drinkers, "Even a donkey, if you let it loose in the street, has sense enough to find its way home. The undersecretary hasn't got the brains of an ass!")

So the conductor, an apparent fan of the Fascists, to show his displeasure with the production, walked to his podium at the beginning of the show and put a black blindfold over his eyes, saying tat he didn't want to even see such a travesty. (There was also a fair amount of xenophobia mixed in here as well because the set designer was apparently French -- the horrors!) When he did this, the audience erupted in boos and catcalls. (Side note: one should not piss off opera aficionados -- many of them apparently have very strong lungs.) 

Jonathan and I were completely bewildered. We knew none of the backstory and only managed to catch the conductor's speech up to "I'm wearing this blindfold because..." We are so consistently clueless that Jonathan said later we are like the people who show up to the book burning with s'mores.

After the intermission, when the director reappeared for the second half, the screaming was even louder: "Vergogna! Buffone! Scemo! Vai via! Leccaculo!" ("Shame! Buffoon! Stupid! Go away! Ass licker!") "This is getting ugly," I said to Jonathan, still completely in the dark. "Is this where they start throwing things?" The chairs, however, were all attached to the ground.

At the end of the production, the cast on stage held up signs: "There is no Planet B," "Look Up," "Save the Earth" and other pro-climate-activism slogans. The crowd cheered and clapped for the cast and crew, but when the conductor came out to take his bow, almost all the clapping stopped, the yelling was deafening, and most of the audience very pointedly high-tailed it towards the exits. The conductor continued to take bows to a miniscule scattering of applause as elegantly-clad opera buffs stormed towards the exits.

Jonathan and I tried to eavesdrop on the conversations around us on the way out, but to no avail. We feared that this negative response was perhaps to the rather mild gesture towards climate change activism, but even for someone who just published a book about people going berserk over art, it seemed to be a disproportionate reaction to a sign saying "Look Up" (although I guess no more than the things I wrote about in "Outrage" -- people purposely stabbing Impressionist paintings with their umbrellas and fighting a duel over The Rite of Spring. I wrote a blogpost for Stanford about how the things I talk about in the book are back with us with regard to banning books, drag shows and abortions -- the link for that is here: https://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2023/07/anthony-comstock-rides-again.html#more )

The next day we went down to town for the newspapers and figured it all out. It is comforting to know that if there is going to be a rampaging mob of enraged opera-goers, they are rampaging on our side. (Another side note: Don't mess with ladies in spike heels -- you could lose an eye.)

We have changed to buying our bread at a new bakery because the (Swiss) owner of our former bakery re-emerged after having been absent for nine months and went on a pro-Trump rant when she heard our accents. The new bakery is a bit out of our way, but seems very nice. And someone has spray-painted "Fascista Merde!" on the front of the garden supply store that is run by people who are, in fact, Fascist shits.

We are still having an unprecedented heat wave, but the air is not all that is getting hot around here.

 

A podcast with me on it is up at the New Books Network is up at https://newbooksnetwork.com/outrage

I will never hear it because the sound of my own voice makes me retch. Also, God only knows what bullshit I said in the heat of the moment. Fortunately, it's all a blur.

It's a shame, though, because the host had a fabulous Irish accent and the whole time, I thought that maybe I was secretly talking to Saoirse Ronan, although the possibility that Saoirse Ronan has a secret double life as a scholar of (according to her bio) "post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with deep analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars" is admittedly slim.

 

Okay. So I don't want to belabor the point, but DAMN, y'all -- it's HOT!!! This is the report of actual current weather conditions as they are at 5:10 p.m. our time.

Now, I just want to say, by way of excuse in case I seem whiny about this, that we do not have air-conditioning here and also (to re-iterate) there was a big SNAKE sunning itself on my front porch last weekend. 

"What does the snake have to do with anything?" you may ask.

Look, it's hot. We are all just going to have to significantly lower our expectations with regard to productivity, comprehension, and coherence. 

 

We are waiting to acclimate to the heat now and lie together side-by-side in bed gently sweating through the night. The night air through the open windows is heavy with jasmine.

As a consequence, we are happy to hear the recent news about new studies which seem to indicate that afternoon naps have substantial health benefits. It is always comforting to have your vices affirmed by medical science.

 

The reception for my new book happened Saturday afternoon down at the pub, out on the terrace under the tree leaves. As Jonathan and I left the house to go to it, we ran into (not literally, thank god) a big snake sunning itself on our porch. We decided (not immediately, I admit) to view it as a good omen -- the adrenalin certainly helps to put you into the pepped-up party mood and the screaming warms up the vocal cords wonderfully.

Because I have truly debilitating stage fright, fortuitously combined with truly abysmal Italian language skills, I wrote out the presentation in English (and also, you know, the book itself), but Jonathan did the translation of the presentation into Italian and then gave the presentation speaking as me. It was lovely. He did all the labor while I just sat and gazed at him adoringly. Easy peasy. The we all ate a lovely buffet that Daniele and Alice had put out for the occasion. Also, I had my hand kissed for the first non-facetious time ever in my life by an elderly European gentleman. It was pretty swoony, I have to say. Not everyone could get away with it.

But now I am ready to go back to being part of the furniture, which is how I like my life best. In furtherance of this, I have been taking long afternoon naps so as to preclude any future achievements that would end up in public receptions. I can't accomplish too much if I spend all my time drooling into my pillow. A clever tactic.

Besides which it is very hot. Very, very hot. Mimmo is a bit worried about the olives. It is too hot too soon for them. The trees have lots of baby olives the size and color of peas on the branches now, but if we don't get rain soon, he tells us that the baby olives could all drop off. This would break my heart.

And not just mine. The weather made for a bad harvest around here last year and put a real strain on the olive farmers. Olives have been cultivated on this land for at least two thousand years, but global climate change may be bringing it all crashing to an end -- not just the olives, but a whole way of life. None of us had anything that we can do about it personally and individually -- it is beyond our control. So I just watch the sky for signs of rain and hope.