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Published: November 1st 2006
From the Barrel
A sweet for lunch in Greve.The tracks clicked out of Roma Termini. The receding Italian capitol held our endless pace of exploration where a cocktail mixture of excitement and energy from the reunion of three traveling family members, kept us fueled. We were together again in a foreign land.
From the high walls of neoclassical architecture within the heart of Rome through the suburban sprawls of modern blocks of concrete, lines of pastel clothing hung from windows. They sagged under the weight of earth, air and water, and oddly, each smiled tranquilly above the fray. Each wall wore a face. They were smiling mouths upon an otherwise drab stack of brick, mortar and concrete. From their corners, lips tied to each end of a balcony and swooped down like broadening chops. In the early morning light, the soft pastels of the fabrics created an equally tranquil atmosphere. Images of brewing coffee and ovens of fresh bread warmed the mind.
Our train sped northward, windows passing the numinous residences with their smiles. Countryside unfolded toward the Tuscan hills. Within the train, our conversation increased and our smiles added to the capacity of mankind to laugh and take hold of a life stirred with inner joy. Our Italian
Contrasting Wine, Air & Moisture
The Winery's B&B in Chianti and our days between the vines Renaissance continued.
Train Control Like a melodic jazz beat of a tenor saxophone bellowing an emollient silk of emotion, the train ticked beneath our first class coach. Suburbs continued to morph into loping hills where sheep dogs rounded their white herds in fertile fields. A stubborn fog dressed the near horizon and dew descended with magnifying color. The scene before us was enriching: an autumn landscape of sprightly freshness.
Against the soft light as the lines of clothing and their smiles became less and less. Neon orange vests of manly aged hunters stood out like afternoon shadows on marble steps. Their long-barreled rifles slung from their shoulders as they trudged through knee-high crops where fowl tucked into their garden-forests away from trained hounds. Hillside towns and old brick homes flew passed on our determined line, entering and exiting the tunnels that cut through the lofty central Italian terrain.
Inside we giggled with the thrill of new adventure. But awkwardly, amidst drawing memories of retold tales, the cabin compressed from time to time with the pressure of speed through the underground passages. Each happenstance arose randomly, limited by our forward view in a solid-window carriage. Tunnels appeared without forewarning,
without any preparedness for the oncoming freeze.
Suddenly, as though struck with a wand or controlled by a switch or remote, our voices would freeze, the light of the train would yellow with the blackening of the windows and our faces would contort. Jaws dropped and rotated from side to side as if in the midst of an inharmonious roar. The eyebrows and eyelids flexed, bobbing up and down with the faces’ musculature. The eyes rolled convulsively. As the train’s pressure constricted within the echoing tunnel, a finger stuck in each of our ears, wiggling hither and thither until they decompressed, popping with a reemergence of the Italian countryside like a fresco within the windows.
These moments happened simultaneously. They spasmodically halted any conversation as if we were suddenly bewitched. The train and its environs cast a wand upon us or flicked a switch, clicking the remote of control. Albeit, with like rapidity, the light would return, and with the framed images abroad afresh, the pressure eventually released. Our voices alighted with renewed laughter as Rome receded and the land mollified a city-strewn consciousness as though we were serenaded by a late night jazz melody with wine and companionship our
sole concern.
Walled Behind History An hour-plus passed outside Roma Termini when we changed trains at Chiusi for the line bound for Siena. The new, modern train labored more arduously when compared to the Intercity from Rome. Its engines hummed mechanically as if the conductor grinded its gears through heavy city traffic. We lurched with resisting speed. We were spit out with a motion of jolting velocity. But we were given into the lenitive ways of Nature as the deepening bucolic landscape became slower, and old men and women were more worn with sun-stained wrinkles around a thick nose that molded with the clay-like viscosity of Playdough. Flocks of sheep and shepherding dogs appeared more magical and the hunters in their paradoxical garb of camouflage and hot neon lead by their hounds stalked wider fields and denser groves.
Siena; a walled medieval city once claiming a populace larger than Paris. It rivaled the neighboring republic of Florence, demanding a tall market in banking and textile trade. With their nearness, canons shot and foot soldiers paraded for the placement of greedy boundaries. All that was back before the Black Death, or bubonic plague in 1348, which decimated an
Chelsea's Place
A dream found, the path of the dream cultivating. estimated seventy-five percent of its inhabitants. It was the very epidemic bacterium
Yersinia pestis, which was transmitted by a sumptuous image of rat fleas, that created a pile of some sixty to seventy thousand corpses in the late 1300s. Today, like the olden days of times long passed, the walls remain and the brick town rises out of a hill like a reddening tomato on a small potted vine. The city of Siena has never again reached its height of magnificence as it once did in the Middle Ages.
From the train station we caught a taxi to our hotel lying just outside the heart of the city-center. Narrow streets of stone lead into
Piazza il Campo like a confluence of waterfalls. Here, the piazza beat to the underground past and the tradition rooting it within the present day.
Shaped as an amphitheatre, a semi-circular slope of brick centered round the old
Palazzo Pubblico, or Town Hall. Before the brick construct with its surrounding buildings where the fashionable
Burnt Siena originated in the Crayola box, a small white marble monument honored the dead during the Black Death’s rage. But it was neither the piazza nor the palazzo that captured
the imagination, but the
Duomo; a 13th century church of gothic proportions. Outside, like a circus madhouse of jailers gone on a creative spree, black and white marble stacked into a reverential oddity. Stepping back, or viewed from over the European brick architecture, the structure dedicated to the Virgin Mary looked abrasively unusual, though through the bars and into the confines of its sacred cellars, the sanctuary took on another light.
Dark, dimmed, preserved ten months out of the year; August and September were the revealing of the mosaics. Fifty-six panels of Biblical depictions mapped out a floor with pristine artistry. Images from the Old Testament came out of the marble flooring and appeared to the mind like Burt’s creations (played by Dick Van Dyke) in Disney’s
Mary Poppins. The Duomo’s collages lacked the color of Burt’s sidewalk fantasies, but there illuminated the like appreciation to the arts in mankind’s psyche with a full appreciation to the potentiality to create and live a life of faithful belief. The pastoral landscape of the Tuscan region with its widened land and bounding sheep dogs morphed into a dreamy image of internal thought and wonder.
Within & Beyond the Duomo And
so the three of us took our paths within the Duomo and strolled about with the absence of the insignificant. With mind candy diffused into the walls of piety, thoughts played out within their present surroundings:
If God, if the Universe, if Everyman’s own Heart and Soul provided one individual with a life of reverence, with the blessedness of purpose, belief, potential and strength for mightier pursuits; what beholds the individual today to draw away from the reverential? What captives the mind, body and soul to turn away from a search of Love, Truth and Light? Who decides but God, the Universe, the beat within the Heart and the Light within the Soul? Lost within the magnetic black and white walls of the Duomo, within the dark, dim, preserved confines—daylight impenetrable as if sheltering the inhabitants from the harsh reality beyond—it was hard to take recognition of the pain we seem to revel in.
It’s Mother Earth we reside upon, a gift presented to every human to create any life dreamed of. Yet, without the seem for care or concern, a brother and a sister here and there is cheated, harmed, burnt at the stake, hung from
our Mother’s branches, disposed of without emotion for the sole benefit of the immediate future.
The musing for Love, Truth and Light continued:
And isn’t it ingrained within the furthering of Everyman to seek these dreams and ever approach the source of this divinity? The Duomo, the Basilica di San Pietro and the Sistine Chapel of Roma—any temple, sanctuary and alter or shrine, along with the halls of Nature’s forests and Her fields of terrain—they present proof of this inner definition of Heart and Soul, of falling into humility toward the grace of a life without lived from the sources of Love, Truth and Light within. A hall of frescos wrapped the perimeters of the small
Piccolomini Library. They were 15th century paintings by Pinturicchio narrating the life of Siena’s very own humanist and pope-ascender, Aeneas Piccolomini who became Pope Pius II. Below, within reach around each border, were glass-encased displays of pages. Each yellowed manuscript were musical scores adorned with small, minutely detailed imageries. The eyes caught the lacing of a peacock with its tail feathers twisted in allegorical length. With as little as a fine touch, the mystical instantly pervaded the senses and the whole
Burnt Siena
Looking out onto Piazza il Campo of Siena. presentation brought the observer into that reverence for art and the emotion it stirs within that very source.
Back outside, the normal conscience spun around the works of Bernini, Donatello, Michelangelo and Pisano. Slowly we continued to float away from our realized realities within the 13th century church.
Better Than Bread From the Avis center outside the Sienese walls, three of us grasped our thoughts, words and actions and compiled them into one as we crammed into a rented Volkswagen Golf. Edging the roundabouts and downshifting each twisting bend, we sped out into the Tuscan hills.
Call it
Chianti, and there was a lot of it. Equally, we consumed like amounts. The region of Chianti within the Tuscan borders is a land latticed with wine vines and olive groves; a rolling picture of wineries, estates, townships, and monstrous basilicas cropping the highest land-point. In these scenic pleasantries, add these destined capabilities of energy: the region is home to the birth of the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo de Vinci, Michelangelo and Dante Alighieri (the poet responsible for
The Divine Comedy and the one considered as “the father of Italian language”).
As a Mother, Sister and Brother, the three
of us gawked. We drooled. We were inspired with this paradisiacal region (how many visits had Dante made?). We imagined a new home, albeit independent from one another, but wholly linked in relationship and happiness:
The Sister owned a vineyard. She worked the land, managed the estate, swooned the budding vines and aging wood barrels with classic Bach and Beethoven, and created new varietals of complexity and oaky-smoothness. The Brother wrote, he wandered and photographed. He taught and divulged his worth into the world abroad, but always returned home to those hills, that Chianti and the Tuscan hinterland of imagery and inspiration. The Mother lived among the two careers and created her own of international council to a crowd of burgeoning consciousness. It was a dreamy thought, but we reveled in it as the Riedel wine glasses twirled in our hands and spun the legs of the grapes within.
To add to the luxuriousness of fine taste to the retinue, we made our three-night stay at a winery, Casali della Aiola B&B in Vagliagli. Immersed within the landscape and its grape-growing culture dating back to the 8th century BC, and with normal habits and beliefs brought down (When
Spun & Whetted
Vagliagli, Chianti, Tuscany, Italy. in Rome, do as the Romans—When on a nude beach, do as a nudist), the squeamish Golf hit the dirt roads and drove north into the land.
Radda, Castellina, Greve—smaller, quainter villages and towns; we stopped to peruse, to aimlessly wander under our own guidance. At the grocers in Vagliagli, we purchased cheeses, bread, nuts and of course wine. And at the wheel, a picnic perched on the ridge as a misty sunlight drenched the verdant land carved into artistic taste. Together, we sat upon the hood, acclaimed, “Cin, Cin!” to the rims of plastic cups and laughed all the merrier.
Better than bread. The only deadening stimulation of being deep among the Chianti fields of Tuscany was the bread. Talk about a handful of bleached-white flour thrown into a cottoned mouth to later add the moisture of water and the sting of yeast. Tuscan bread is by far the worst bread, lacking the creativity that unfolds its miraculous landscape. Plain, without the addition of salt, the bread is the equivalent of the method mentioned above. Don’t go to Tuscany for bread, but if you do run across it, wads of fresh Pecorino cheese, a bottle of fine Chianti and
family and friends will wash away the doughy slime that results. Add a jar of Nutella? Heaven is reached.
Birthing Your Own Renaissance Tuscany was riff with wine tasting, Avis-cars turning down forest- and vine-laden roads, and most of all, an exploration of Italy far from the common road of the all-too-common tourist.
Rightfully ascending to the throne, one who takes such turns away from the Autostrada onto the meandering earthen pathways of this idyllic region, the label of “tourist” absolves and the “traveler” within is revealed. No tourists beckon the unapproachable hills. No buses, airports, taxis. It is an independent destination for the independent seeker of thrill soothed with the demulcent quietude and beatific nature of Nature Herself.
Enjoy Mother Earth cultivated with passion and care. Enjoy Mother Earth; one still lived upon today as it once was centuries ago. An Avis car, a picnic with fresh cheeses, fine wines, an assortment of nuts, a few plastic cups, some
Roman bread, (a jar of Nutella), and the laughter of loved ones atop a sun-trenched hill—the patterns and waves of vines and groves rolling through the Chianti of Tuscany—you’re doin’ fine!
Too many say, “All good things
must come to an end.” But Tuscany only elapsed into more joy, more beauty, more Italian Renaissance as we drove the Golf homeward. North into Florence, the Avis center was found closed, but the drop box with keys and documents sent us engrossed into the heart of Florence. More symbolically, we were led still further into the hearts of our familial journey.
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Israel
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Tuscan Faces
Loved the photography! Can't say the same for the writing. Sorry, everyone is a critic :-)