Semina (whose real name is Francesco) likes to hunt and is good at it and usually very successful and known around here as the go-to person if you need any sort of wild game, but especially wild boar, which is his specialty.

A couple of days ago, a chef at a high-end traditional restaurant in town asked if Semina could get him some boars' heads for some sort of ancestral Tuscan delicacy he was planning. So Semina went out and was very lucky, actually getting three boars, very fat from having spent the holidays gorging themselves on the last of the fallen chestnuts.

The chef only wanted the heads, so Semina severed those and put them all together in a bag, but then had to figure out what to do with all the rest of the boar meat. He kept some for himself and some undoubtedly went to Daniele at the pub to be roasted with red wine and wild herbs.

But Semina also knows three Albanian brothers who are sharing a house up here in the hills and could use a little neighborly generosity, so he cut off a couple of nice fat pork haunches and put them in a bag for the brothers as a little New Year's gift and then headed out to make his meat deliveries.

He stopped at the house of the three Albanian brothers first and dropped off their bag of boar meat, for which they were quite grateful, and then continued on towards the restaurant in town. He was only halfway down the mountain when his cellphone rang and it was the eldest of the Albanian brothers.

"Semina," he said, sounding serious and a little scared. "Are you sending us a message? Is this a threat? We don't understand what we have done."

Semina opened the bag of meat still on the floorboard of his car and saw that it had the haunches in it. He had accidentally given the three Albanian brothers three severed boars' heads in a bag.

When he told us this story last night in the pub, Jonathan laughed and laughed and laughed. He is still laughing this morning.

As we were leaving, Semina said to us, "Now remember -- if you don't let me help you move, then we are no longer friends."

So sometime at the beginning of February, we will have a moving party and invite our friends from the pub to help us carry boxes of books to the new house and then eat lasagna and drink wine together all afternoon.

I have been away from lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea for a while, but I'm back now. After a long, hot August working almost every night in the pub and then sleeping as late as we could in the cool mornings with all the windows open and all the sheets pushed off the bed onto the floor, we left to go to the US and visit our new baby grandchild.

We have decided not to rate him with regard to beauty ("the most beautiful baby ever") because my own two tiny sons were, of course, breathtakingly gorgeous. But we have agreed that this child is definitely "top five." He is laughing now. Baby laughter is my favorite sound in the world.

But the US seems like a scary, angry place now -- a place where everyone is on the edge. With Putin's lapdog sitting in the White House, it is looking more and more likely that there will be a war here in Europe, but it is still not as frightening as daily, violent life in the US.

When we got back, I left again almost immediately to go to England to see Fiona, who had a health scare a couple of weeks ago during which I bought a plane ticket. But she had recovered by the time the visit actually happened. (Which is, after all, the best outcome.)

While I was gone, some of the ladies from the village came over to show Jonathan how to find the wild porcini mushrooms in our woods. They waited for him on the terrace while he was inside putting on his boots. When he came out, Gilda said to him, "So, we're here to teach you how to hunt porcini mushrooms?"

"Yes," Jonathan said.

"Well, we might start with this one," she said and pointed to a giant one growing straight out of the mossy wall of the terrace, smack in plain sight. "Shouldn't be too hard around here, apparently."

It's good to give your neighbors a source of amusement. Makes you more part of the community.

 

Today marks 1000 days that we have lived in Italy. When we first came here to our rustic farmhouse in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea, we knew no one and understood almost nothing. We were so dazed (by the move) and so dazzled (by the beauty) that it took us a while to get our bearings. We are still getting them, still dazzled.

But we know people now and understand, if not the post office, at least how the grocery store works. We know our butcher and our greengrocers and the people at our olive press and our flour mill. We know our neighbors and their families. We know the old men down at the pub who sit under the shade tree and drink wine and gossip all day. We know Alice and Daniele and are happily waiting for their baby to arrive. We know the baby's name.

Yesterday, Jonathan ran into the owner of the lovely house next to the belfry that we hope to rent for the next ten years. He says that they are happy to rent to us -- so all is well there. We still don't know what the rent will be, but we have our fingers crossed.

We also spoke to our immigration attorney yesterday and she says everything is good to go for my citizenship application even though only one of my state-level non-criminal records has come so far. She is going to check in person today to make sure that is true and get back to us.

The poppies are blooming in our olive groves now and the olive trees themselves are covered in flower buds that are just about to open. The chestnut trees are starting to bloom. The cherry tree is alive with joyous songbirds eating all the cherries. I have an Italian lesson later this morning. Jonathan is busy right now baking bread.

 

Here in the last dregs of winter, we are celebrating Carnevale with dancing and drinking and masquerades and parading through the streets. The upshot of this is that the car and the house and the pockets of my winter coat all have little sprinklings of confetti in them.

We went to the big parade in Viareggio two Saturdays ago and to the little one in Pietrasanta last Sunday and to Ireland in between, first stopping in Pisa to see a Hokusai show at the Palazzo Blu, which is a museum now, but once was the house where Byron lived by the river. My favorite piece was a painting on silk called "Tiger in a Bamboo Grove Looking at the Full Moon." I would like to live my life in such a way that my biography could also be called "Tiger in a Bamboo Grove Looking at the Full Moon."

Ireland was windy and wild and romantic, if you can still feel romance after eating so much fried fish and chips. We went briefly insane at Aillwee and bought kilo after kilo of Irish cheese that we have now in the refrigerator.

I almost had a nervous breakdown driving the microscopic almost-but-not-quite-as-wide-as-one-car roads that were nevertheless two way streets among the encroaching hedgerows in Western Ireland on our way to the Cliffs of Moher and then on to Galway. I has assumed the driving-on-the-left-side-of-the-road skills that I picked up living for a year in the Cook Islands 20 years ago would come back to me. It is always entertaining to discover that you have assumed incorrectly while driving at high speeds through a mirror-image roundabout.

But we survived the hedgerows and the baked beans for breakfast and the incipient scurvy and the pints of Guinness and the wind that made me buy a hat and ended the serviceable life of our umbrella. Besides cheese and hats, we bought books in English and Irish seaweed snacks. We listened to traditional Irish music in a traditional Irish pub and also even managed to see a second Hokusai show in a museum in Dublin.

Our Moldovan cab driver on the way back to the airport our last day in Dublin, having lived for a while in Italy himself, exchanged emails with us so that he could send us info about making our own grappa (we had given a rousingly vivid description of our life here in lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea). Yesterday, we got this email from him:

Hello Jonathan and Jonathan's wife :),

I hope you had an easy flight back to the Italian community and the big family!

Above all, I want to mention the moment that touched me the most. After you got into the car, you both exchanged a glance and smiled at each other with such deep respect and love. In that instant, I saw that you were truly united and happy as one. I’m so glad I witnessed that.

I hope that one day, when I reach your age, I will experience such a moment with my own wife.
Thank you for the inspiration! 

To this letter, I am attaching the books we discussed about self-distilled spirits.

 

Unlike last week, when we were wrapped in tragedy, this week we've been beset by smaller disasters largely of our own making.

Jonathan read an article online touting the health-giving wonders of intermittent fasting. It was on the internet, so it must be true. On Mondays and Thursdays, we are only allowed to eat a quarter of our usual calories. Since our usual calories lately have included consuming entire bags of mini Snickers bars (thus the need for drastic action like fasting), you would think that eating only a quarter of them would be a cinch. But (in the spirit of taking ourselves firmly in hand) we are interpreting this as having one scrambled egg for lunch and a very small plain green salad for dinner. The rest of the week, you can eat normally (as long as your "normal" doesn't include entire bags of mini candy bars -- see above.) They say the first few times you do this are the worst and then it gets easier. All I have to say to that is, dear sweet Mary Mother of God, I certainly hope so.

So last night (a non-fasting night) we got very excited about trying out our lovely salt-cured lemons for the first time. We found a good sounding recipe on the internet (where, you will recall, everything you read is true) for salmon with salt-cured lemon, parsley, and olive pesto. It smelled great! 

It turned out that it smelled great because you can't smell salt. You can taste it, though. In fact, salt was ALL we could taste. So. Much. Salt. It was like we had made Dead Sea sauce. We scraped the pesto off the fish as best we could and tried to eat the remaining salmon because when you are going to be fasting the next day, you do not throw out your dinner -- no matter what. Last night's Festival of Salt is a testament to that. 

We are also reluctant to waste any food (although we may make an exception for the salt-cured lemons) because we are feeling rather poor lately. We got our first tax bill from the Italian government and it was slightly more than my entire take home pay for all of last year. Our friends in America keep saying that this must be a mistake, but it is not. It is this year's taxes, the advance payment for next year, and the Italian wealth tax to punish us for having squirrelled away all those American 401K nuts for the American winter of our old age. We should have just spent it all on hookers and blow when we had the chance.

But this is the price we pay now for living the life of grasshoppers who sing all summer. The good news is that our tax dollars support things like maintaining the terrifying-but-at-least-very-well-maintained vertiginous road up to our little mountainside haven, the pub where we eat and drink so cheaply (it is somewhat tax-supported because it is technically a social club for workers and pensioners), and the free national health care that we receive.

And we are certainly getting our money's worth with that. Jonathan went to the physiotherapist last week for his back. They massaged him and stretched him. It is sometimes hard for us to completely understand all of the unfamiliar medical terminology in Italian, but it seems that the national medical establishment has determined that Jonathan's problem is that he is both too tightly wound and too short. I said that I could have told him that. He has another appointment tomorrow. When this is all over, I expect he will look like Mike Teevee at the end of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

With Jonathan and I both less mobile because of our injuries, it takes us a long time to get the basic housework done. We hobble down to hang out our laundry in the back. We hobble from the car into the veg store and then hobble back to the car with our haul. (Fortunately, the veg store is so tiny that we can reach almost everything in it with just a few steps.) We hobble to the kitchen with our dirty dishes after meals. (Again though, fortunately, there aren't very many of them on two days each week.) Last night I was hobbling back to the house after putting our trash out at the street for pick-up this morning, when some animal very distinctly growled at me from inside the roof of the cantina as I went by. Given the way things have been going lately, this is probably no more than I should have expected. In any case, my rate of ambulatory speed suddenly increased quite dramatically. It was a miracle.

And, to complete the small disasters of the week, we are of course both angry and morose about the political situation in the US. But, to be fair, that one is not our fault.

 

After it rained for two weeks straight in Italy, we went off to Paris for a few days to be rained on in France.

I had transcendent experiences in a couple of museums and one art supply store. Walking into the relatively unoccupied and quiet second room of Monet's waterlilies in L'Orangerie made me gasp -- like falling breathless into cool water on a hot day, not knowing which way is up, unable to find the surface and not wanting to. And the glowing Chagalls we stumbled on unexpectedly in the Pompidou changed the whole way I see the world now. But the only place I actually cried was in the Maison de Pastel, where they have been making pastels since 1720, and where they bring out ancient wooden cases with the sticks of color laid out on cotton like delicate jewels.

But after five days of big city life, I was happy to come back to lovely Capriglia-by-the-Sea, where we were just in time for the Festival of the Big Chicken at the pub.

"I'm putting you at the table with the beasts," Alice said, which we took as a great compliment. Sitting among the beasts, we pass the dishes around family-style and pour each other wine from big carafes with great abandon. I was so abandoned, in fact, that when the plate of actual chicken heads passed by, I accidentally took one. (Spoiler Alert: the photo of it is at the bottom of this post, just past the pomegranates.) Then when I tired to stab it with a fork, the head spat juice out its beak and actually hit Jonathan in the face. An eyeball squirted out, too, but it only flew as far as my placemat. I did not continue my attempts to eat the head, but let it just sit there staring at me from the edge of my plate for the rest of the meal. When Alice tried to convince me to eat something made of chicken tongues by telling me it would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, I declined. It was a gorgeous feast and ended with roasted chestnuts from our yard, which made us feel very loved.

Here are six random recent pictures. The last one is the chicken head. You have been warned.

One year ago today, Jonathan and I arrived in Italy, exhausted, wild-eyed, and crazed with emotions that I didn't even have words for. Of course, I also didn't have the words for "rental car," "reservation," and "parking lot."

We had hatched a plan, Jonathan and I, to buy a bottle of wine, a loaf of bread, and some cheese and to immediately head up to our then-unseen house for a little impromptu picnic outside the gates (we didn't move in until the 5th because the house was being cleaned for us after the departure of the previous tenants.) But we never ended up doing that because of being exhausted, wild-eyed, etc. etc.

So tonight we have a vaguely heretical bottle of Veuve Clicquot, a loaf of bread that Jonathan is baking right now, and a cheese that we bought yesterday at the once-a-week market from our friendly cheese-seller who has the best cheese that we've found.

Then we will go down to the pub to bring Renata some of the green fig and Cointreau jam I made yesterday. It tastes great, but looks like snot. (The Italian word for snot, incidentally, is "moccio" -- oh, the vast swathes of useful vocabulary I have picked up in the past year!)

When we were buying figs yesterday at the Frutta D'Oro, we told Barbara about our Italian anniversary. "It seems like you arrived just recently and also long ago both at the same time," she said. This is how it feels for me, too.

The rain finally came last Monday night -- drenching, torrential, windblown -- taking the godawful heat and the roof of our parking area with it. Temperatures are supposed to go back up again starting tomorrow, but we have taken advantage of the respite to use the oven, which we had been avoiding during the sweltering dog days. Jonathan, as I said, is baking bread and I have a roast marinating and another batch of snot simmering. Wandering around our grounds to survey the storm damage, I discovered that our apple tree is covered with big red beauties.

 

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.

 

This one time in college, my friend Katrina had a gigantic fight with her boyfriend. She says that afterwards it was like a red mist rose up and the next thing she knew, she was standing in front of the bathroom mirror with a disposable razor in her hand and only one eyebrow. 

These things happen. The eyebrow eventually grew back and, in the meantime, Katrina looked really rather chic.

In a not completely dissimilar episode, I gave myself a haircut last Tuesday. I, however, do not look rather chic. I look like someone who gave herself a haircut in the bathroom mirror without really thinking things through. I comfort myself with the knowledge that, like Katrina's eyebrow, it will grow back eventually. In the meantime, I am happy to say that I recently bought a hat.

We met with the immigration lawyer on Monday and learned that I will have to pass an Italian language test sometime soon. If I am tested on things said by drunken marble workers in bars, I am set. If not, I am toast. So my new Italian tutor came up to the house on Friday to meet with me and assess my skill level. She had quite an entertaining drive up the hair-raising Via Capriglia and eventually just abandoned her car at a convenient stopping place by the side of the road and decided to walk the rest of the way up to the house. The Via Capriglia can have that effect on people. We have decided to meet via Skype from now on. (There are major doubts about my language skills, but my driving nerves are clearly Grade A.)

The poppies have reached our grounds now and a rose bush has appeared out of nowhere covered in deep red blossoms. The jasmine all around the house has begun to flower. It is blooming all over the village and tonight we saw the first honeysuckle.

 I worry.

I know that it doesn't do any good, but I worry anyway. One of my big worries about moving to Italy, where I don't know the systems and don't understand the logic behind the processes by which things happen (and I am not alone in this, btw) is what would happen if we had a medical emergency.

Now I know.

Some friends from the US came to stay with us for a couple of days and one of them had a medical emergency their first day here -- not life-threatening, but incredibly painful and needing real medical attention.

So we went down to the little hospital at the very foot of Via Capriglia, where there is an after-hours walk-in clinic. The doctor warned us that since we are not Italian, we would have to pay upfront for the care. Being Americans, of course, we are used to astronomical medical bills. I once had to pay upfront at the emergency room in Colorado Springs when one of the boys had broken his arm, even though I have medical insurance, because the other boy had broken his leg (jesus!) the weekend before and my insurance payment had not made its way through the system yet. If I had not been able to instantly cough up several hundred dollars, they would not have treated my child because his injury wasn't life-threatening.

This is the reality of US health care and so we were prepared for the worst -- especially because we were so carefully warned. The doctor there treated my friend and then the bill came.

Twenty bucks. The entire, uninsured cost of the visit was twenty bucks.

We went to the all-night pharmacy to get his prescription filled thinking, "Ah, now -- here it comes! Prescription medicine with no insurance -- this will certainly cost a pretty penny!" Once again, we were carefully warned that because we are not Italian, we would have to pay.

Thirteen bucks. Entire, uninsured cost -- thirteen bucks.

The whole process took less than an hour. There was no waiting anywhere. The total cost was 33 euros. My friend is doing well. We dropped them at the Pisa train station yesterday to continue their trip.

Jonathan pointed out that the reason for all of the careful warnings about payments was because an Italian would have paid nothing. Ever. So that is what happens when you have a medical emergency in a country with socialized medicine. Just fyi.

We also discovered that in the duomo down in Pietrasanta, you can take communion, should you wish, with the gluten-free version of the Body of Christ. Again, just fyi.

And I have tried out egg tempera painting using the pigments that I got from Zecchi and a traditional recipe from the early Renaissance for mixing up the paint using egg yolks and white wine. It just takes a splash of wine, but since you then have an open bottle, you can have quite the relaxing time while painting. I painted a tiny artichoke. I think I'm in love (with both the paint and the produce.)

We have made reservations for Easter lunch this Sunday at the pub. They are holding a raffle to win the big chocolate egg that didn't get sat on. We are number 49 -- our hopes are high!

I wondered how it would feel to be back in the US for our first visit since moving to Italy. I wondered if I would be overwhelmed with nostalgia, sink into the comfort of understanding everything being said around me and of knowing how everything works. I wondered if I would feel regret.

Um, no.

America seems gritty and frenetic and angry. There are many consumer goods and I was glad to be able to buy them, but people eat their lunches too fast -- it is not good for the digestion. And afternoon naps are frowned on for everyone over the age of four -- no wonder there is so much rampant crankiness. And the political scene is a chaotic dystopian morass that would be bizarrely fascinating, in a freakish circus sideshow sort of way, were it not in the global center ring, threatening to take the rest of the world's economy down the drain with it. That cretins such as the American Republicans (who by rights should be relegated to carefully controlled institutional settings out of the way of decent people) should have such global power makes their clown act no longer funny. It is horrifying.

But.

It was lovely to see the people I love. One cannot make an old friend over night. And to be with my boys, however fleetingly, is a piece of heaven.

One of my relatives asked me what I miss about America. I miss the people I love. I miss the boys being little and asleep, tucked into their beds at night in the quiet of our house and me as I was then, in those late evening hours of serenity. But all of that is gone and moving away to Italy had nothing to do with its loss.

So we did the slog of 23 hours of travel and arrived at last back to our little house  on the hillside just in time to see the sun setting blood red into the sea. The wind was very fierce last night -- these are the winter winds of the Mistral.

But the famous Tuscan sun is out this morning, drying all of our travel laundry. The winds blew the air so clear that right now from our windows we can see the snow on the mountain tops of Les Alpes-Maritimes across the Ligurian Sea in France.

 

We are back in the US for a few days and I have some thoughts.

-- Customs and Immigration at JFK Airport is perhaps not the very most congenial place to get a good first impression of these Great United States. More of a shitstorm hellhole of bilge water. I once accidentally fell into an open sewer in Jakarta, Indonesia, during a cholera epidemic. (Long story.) A dead body was down there already. I looked back on that experience fondly while changing planes in JFK.

-- Signs here even in places like the International Arrivals area of major US airports are strictly English only. This is bizarre and contributes at least somewhat to the point above.

-- There is lots of space in the US. It is all over the place. There are hotel elevators in the US that are bigger than some hotel rooms in Italy.

-- Every single thing in the Walgreen's Drug Store in San Francisco is locked behind protective plastic to prevent shoplifting, including the toothpaste and toothbrushes. Apparently, this is common in big city drug stores all over the US. It speaks poorly of general standards of morality in the US, but quite well of general standards of dental hygiene.

-- Although the people we have encountered have been without exception kind and friendly, everyone seems very beaten down, just struggling to make it through the day. I blame the lack of good cheap wine, a culture that frowns on two-hour lunches every day followed by two-hour naps, and postindustrial neoliberal capitalism.

-- There is no food anywhere in Italy, under even the most extreme circumstances, that would be allowed to be as bad as the free breakfast at our hotel. Them's shootin' eggs.

-- On the other hand, you can buy things in the US that you can't (or at least we can't) in Italy -- like baby aspirin. But it is locked behind protective plastic.