The trip south to Martina Franca

Our plan

We planned a drive south from Florence that would include three stops before we would finally arrive at Martina Franca where we would stay for a week. The three stops are shown in red on the map. 

We drove from Florence to Castello di Semivicoli on a Wednesday afternoon and stayed at the Castello overnight. Thursday afternoon we drove 75 miles to San Martino in Pensilis, mostly over country roads. Friday afternoon we drove to Trani, and easier drive of 110 miles along Italian superhighways where the speed limit is 81 mph ... and people really drive that fast. The final leg of the trip on Saturday was an hour and a half drive to Martina Franca and an apartment on the edge of the old town.

Street in the old town

From our base in Martina Franca, a town of 50,000, we visited the small towns of Alberobello, Ostuni, and Matera by car. To visit Bari, we took a regional train and saw the countryside at a leisurely pace and arrived in the center of Bari without having to find a place to park.

Martina Franca was not a tourist destination so we thought that it might make a quiet place to stay while we took day trips to places in the area that were tourist destinations. We think that our plan worked well.

Martina Franca has an old town that is full of white buildings. The old town is generally well kept and there is a busy promenade between the religious center, the cathedral, and a lively civic center, Piazza XX Settembre. On the weekends and on the weekdays in the afternoon the street between these two locations were full of people walking and checking out all the shops and restaurants that are found along these streets. The other streets in the old town were very quiet.

Basilica of Saint Martin

The new town that surrounds the old town is not impressive. The new town consists of five and six story apartment buildings, tightly packed, with cars parked everywhere. We were fortunate; the apartment included gated parking but the apartment was situated on a busy ring road that hugged the edges of the old town.

The cathedral, dedicated to Saint Martin, was impressive with an odd shaped piazza in front. A second piazza connected to the cathedral piazza that made a pleasant, active public space. On our last evening in Martina Franca a movie was being shot in the piazza. We watched the production but it moved at a snail’s pace. It can’t be that glamorous a life to spend so much time waiting for the director to yell, “Action” of whatever they say in Italian. We gave up waiting.

The civic piazza

The civic piazza was a treat. Full of people, benches, and trees, it was a nice place for the Martinesi to stroll, shop, and talk with friends. The piazza was called XX Settembre, the 20th of September and we’d notice that lots of piazzas in Italy are named for various dates. We checked and this was the date in 1870 when Rome was finally added to a unified Italian state. At that point the capital of the new state was moved from Florence to Rome.

A baby girl lives in this house

The old town has it charms. The architecture is more Baroque, intricately complicated but often pointlessly so. This doorway was pleasant because it announced that a baby girl had been born to the family that lived within. This is a common thing to see in all of Italy where children are so highly prized.

Bari

Bari is the largest city in Puglia, a little over a 325,000 people. The approach to the city is typical of Italian cities, smokestacks and industry give way to five and six story apartment buildings, and finally a modern commercial center. Then, tucked in a small area very near the shore, is the old town. The medieval town. That was our destination.

We took the railroad from Martina Franca, where we were staying, to Bari. Martina Franca is a small town and secure parking was included with the apartment so driving in an out of Martina Franca was possible. But driving into Bari seemed like a really bad idea. Especially when the railroad ticket to Bari 45 miles to the northeast was only 5.60 Euro each way.

The train was leisurely, stopping frequently to pick up and drop off passengers. As we got closer to Bari there were more young people, presumably students, hopping on and off.

Roman road

Finally we arrived at the rail station which is set in a handsome piazza. We crossed the piazza and walked along an wide street reserved for pedestrians toward the shore and the old town.

The first interesting thing we noticed as we approached the old town was a section of walkway that was chained off. This section revealed a Roman road that lay below the modern streets and walkways. If you look closely, you can see the grooves that were worn in the store by the carts that drove over this road. The rest of the Roman road remains covered -- and protected in a way -- by the modern streets and walkways.

Sailboat

Fisherman

A sunny day with clear blue skies made the harbor even more pleasant to admire. There was a sailboat passing through an opening in the breakwall out to a calm sea. There was a fisherman returning with his catch.

Bari Film Festival

On the pier we could see a handsome 19th century building whose windows were oddly all closed up. On our way to the old town we eventually walked on the other side of the building and noted that the Bari Film Festival was ongoing. The windows were sealed off, evidently, for viewing movies.

Crypt of St. Nicolas

The old town was a warren of narrow streets but the little community was a real community with small grocery shops and housewares stores and little evidence of souvenir stands. We did get inside the Bari cathedral and took a photo in the crypt which houses relics of St. Nicolas. We were more interested in the light cast by the fixtures.

Stone walls everywhere

On our way back to Martina Franca we were struck by the many, many stone fences. Puglia is an agricultural area but the soils appear to have lots of rocks mixed in. We remember that the New England farmers, in an effort to improve their soil, took the glacially deposited rocks from their fields and made store fences. We had to wonder if the Pugliesi farmers had done something similar.

Ostuni

Ostuni is a small town of 30,000 about 15 miles east of Martina Franca. Everything in the town is white and it feels like a seaside town though it’s a few miles from the Adriatic Sea.

Ostuni cathedral

The old town is located high above the modern town below. You enter the winding streets and climb to the cathedral at the top. From here the view to the sea was wonderful. You could almost smell the salt air.

Adriatic Sea in the distance from the top of the old town

Clearly, it's a whitewash

On our way down we got a sense for how things stayed so white. A bucket, a drop cloth, and a roller on an extension handle and you could make your own white city.

We visit the sassi in Matera

From our apartment in Martina Franca it is a short drive to Matera, a city in the eastern part of Basilicata, the region of Italy that borders Puglia. As you enter Matera you see a modern town with familiar street names such as Via Nazionale and Via Dante Alighieri but the reason why people come to this remote town is to see the sassi, the caves that people here have lived in since prehistoric times.

Caves in the limestone cliffs opposite Matera

A river flows along the edge of Matera called the Torrente Gravina. A “torrente” is a body of water that rushes during the rain season, the winter, and dries up during the hot, dry season, the summer. Though the stream flows only part of the year, it’s had millennia to dig a deep canyon in the limestone that the city rests on.

On the side of the canyon opposite the city you can see the effect of the action of slightly acidic water on the limestone over the years. The raw, ragged slope is dotted with many, many caves. The closer you look across the canyon, the more caves you see. The canyon is protected as a national park.

On the city side of the canyon the stream has carved a bowl into the limestone, a deep bowl with the same large number of caves formed by the action of water and carbon dioxide. This has happened in other parts of the world, too. See eight Corvettes that fell into a sinkhole that suddenly opened up in limestone of Florida:  Sinkhole Swallows 8 Cars At National Corvette Museum.

Panorama of the sassi

Structures added to cave entrances

People have always lived in these caves. As the years passed, the caves were “improved” by adding entrances and the entrances have become more elaborate. But the homes were quite small. The only benefit of the cave-homes was as an escape from the brutal heat of the summer.

Lunch break

We started on the opposite side of the sassi and descended to the bottom and walked up to the Matera cathedral with is just above the sassi. The air was cool but the sun was brilliant and the climb back up was tiring. (There is so much walking to do in Italy!) We found the three-sided steps of the cathedral and noted that only one side of the steps was in the shade. We sat down there to enjoy the shade and to catch our breath. After a few moments a group of Italian middle school students came around the corner led by their teachers and chaperones. The kids were told that is was time for their lunch break. The kids made the same choice that we had made; the sunny portion of the steps remained empty and the kids surrounded us. They were nice kids; they offered to share their cookies and potato chips with us. Their teacher laughed when we told her we retired teachers and volunteered to take our photo. It had been a while since we'd shared lunch with young students.

The sassi have had an interesting recent history. In the 1930s in his book Christ Stopped at Eboli, Carlo Levi described the sassi and the primitive conditions of the people who lived there. In the 1950s the Italian leftist parties described the sassi as the “shame of Italy” and demanded action. Government officials visited the city and action followed. New housing was built and the sassi were evacuated. (See the bottom of this page: Reconstructing Italy: The Ina-Casa Neighborhoods of the Postwar Era - Dr Stephanie Zeier Pilat - Google Books. Scroll to the top of the next page for a description of what followed Levi’s damning description of life in Matera.)

After we were revived by resting in the shade and laughing with the middle school kids, we continued back down the sassi to an address called Vico Solitario (a vico is an alleyway though this alley is quite open and on the side of hill.) Here there is a museum, of sorts, that shows what a sassi home looked like when people were living in them. A family of 11 people lived in this sasso until the mid-1950s. 

Main room

The museum opens to a small room dominated by a bed which is raised high off the ground in an attempt to get away from the high humidity on the cave floor. Chickens were kept under the bed. The electric light was for the convenience of visitors; there was no electricity in the sassi. The youngest child slept in a crib at the base of the bed. Small children slept in drawers that were pulled out.

Kitchen

There was a small kitchen off the main room. The kitchen appeared to have been carved out of the rock. Perhaps this was an “improvement” made by some earlier inhabitant of this sasso.

Storage = large animals, straw, and manure

In the back was space for larger animals, straw, and manure. All of these were valuable to the inhabitants of the sassi.

The sassi became a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1993. Since then tourists have come to Matera in large numbers and the sassi have been developed into homes, restaurants, and hotels. This gentrification is jarring considering the history of the place.

The trip south to Puglia - Trani

Finally we're in Puglia.

Trani cathedral

Trani is a small city on the Adriatic and the first of many “white” cities that we’ll seem in Puglia. We stayed in an apartment in the center of town, an apartment that was close to the places that we wanted to see.

We walked from our apartment to the Trani cathedral, a majestic, tall building built within a few feet of the Adriatic Sea. The cathedral is the third church built on this same site. Inside the cathedral one can see pavements from the earlier churches that were buried under the current structure.

A "monster" fish

To get to the cathedral we walked past a fish market. The fish was being sold within a few steps from the boats that had caught the fish. The bargaining was constant and lots of fish were sold. This fisherman saw me taking a photo and held up a fish that he called a “mostro”, a monster. Then he smiled.

Whose boat is this?

One of the pleasure boats in the harbor has a familiar name.

Follow the black

The old town was a warren of a narrow streets and even with a map, it was easy to get lost. Of course, how do you drive in such a place. The town fathers of Trani may found an interesting solution. The twisting back alleys that led nowhere were paved with white stone and the twisting main thoroughfares, such as they were, were paved with black stone suggesting that such a street actually led somewhere. Interesting system.

The trip south to Puglia - San Martino in Pensilis

After a short stay in Semivicoli we drove south, first to San Martino in Pensilis in the region of Molise and then onto Trani in the region of Puglia. Each of these drives was brief, about an hour and a half.

Leo, the hotel manager

On one side of our family the grandparents emigrated from San Martino in P (as it is always abbreviated here.) We’ve visited the town briefly before and we’ve found friendly people, some specific information, but no relatives still living here.

The last time we were here, Leo, the hotel manager, knew that we must have been looking for information on relatives. He recognized the last name as being part of the history of the town. He asked his mother, who was in her 90s, for what she knew and shared that with us. Leo remembered us and welcomed us back.

The people in San Martino in P are proud of their town and its traditions. This is entirely normal, it seems, in Italy; the strongest possible attachment, after the attachment to the family, is to the town or city. But because the town is not prosperous, it is obvious that many young people have left and the population of the town is largely older people who’ve stayed and older people who’ve returned.

Dramatic scene; they must be friends

There is drama on the sidewalks of Sal Martino in P just as there is everywhere else in Italy.

Three local guys

As we about to step into a coffee bar, we met three men. One man spoke English well and asked us to wait on the sidewalk while he went to his car. His two friends stayed with us and the third man returned with a little booklet describing the towns annual Carresse, the 5 mile race of carts pulled by teams of oxen. Constantino, the man who had fetched the booklet, insisted on us keeping it. We were touched.

Constantino had spent years working as a hotel manager in St. Louis. His English was very good but his friends only listened. Perhaps he was showing off, perhaps he enjoyed speaking English to Americans. There aren’t many Americans who ever visit this town.

Leo walks with us down Via Puglia

We stepped into the bar, were recognized by the barrista from our trip years ago, and had our coffee. We were surprised when Leo, a man we had met years before, came into the bar. We told him that we had secured a grandmother’s birth records and that she had lived at 62 Via Puglia, the very street on which the bar was located. Leo said that he’s take us to the address.

The last house on Via Puglia was number 52

We walked down the street but the last house on the street was 52 Via Puglia. Beyond that was a park and perhaps the construction of the park years ago had involved taking down some buildings on Via Puglia.

We appreciated that we had been remembered by the hotel manager, the barrista, and another guy named Leo who happened to be walking by on the street. San Martino in P is rich, indeed, in its warmth and generosity.

Castello di Semivicoli and Masciarelli wines

Castello di Semivicoli

We left Florence on Wednesday mid-day last week and drive south in our rented Volvo 40. It’s less sporty than an Alfa-Romeo Giulietta but it’s perhaps more practical for our purposes as we carry four suitcases from place to place. The Volvo has a turbo diesel so it has good pick up and it’s pleasant to drive at Italian superhighway speeds. (The speed limit on the superhighways is 81 mph. This limit does not seem to appear to apply to Mercedes, Audis, BMWs, or red Italian sports cars.)

Our plan was to end our drive south in Puglia and stay in an apartment in Martina Franca for a week. Instead of driving there directly, however, we wanted to break the trip up into some pleasant side trips to some in between places. Our first side trip was to Castello di Semivicoli about 4.5 hours south of Florence. The Castello is owned by the Masciarelli family and is operated as a small resort.

Masciarelli Montepulciano d'Abruzzo

Masciarelli wines

At home we enjoy Masciarelli wines, two in particular, Masciarelli Montepulciano d’Abruzzo (a red, DOC, 100% montepulciano d’abruzzo; typically $8) and Masciarelli Trebbiano d’Abruzzo (a white, DOC, 100% trebbiano d’abruzzo; typically $9). These wines are reliably good and not expensive. The company has a reputation for making good wines.

We had understood that Masciarelli produces a number of wines that are available in larger cities in the US. We were curious to try some of these other wines in order to see if Masciarelli’s good reputation applies to these wines, too.

Castello di Semivicoli is a castle in Abruzzo that was purchased by the Masciarelli family in the 1980s and which has been extensively redone into a place to welcome visitors and host festivities. We stayed at the castle one night and during the first evening a wedding and reception were held on the property.

La Brocca

The Semivicoli property is in a rural area and does not include a restaurant. After we arrived we asked for a recommendation for a nearby trattoria. Reservations were made for us a La Brocca, a small brick and store farmhouse that has been made into a small handsome restaurant. We asked the host for a light meal and she offered us a mixture of wild greens, boiled and cooked in garlic and oil, and served with chunks of corn bread (though not the sweetened version of corn bread that we have). The greens were bracing and the corn bread chunks gave the dish substance. 

The wild greens were preceded by some locally produced sliced meats and cheeses and accompanied with the host's homemade red wine. This kind of cooking is called cucina povera or peasant cooking. This kind of cooking uses the freshest ingredients that are cooked in a straightforward way. In Manhattan cucina povera, despite the humble name, is incredibly expensive.

We’d recommend La Brocca but you’d need to put coordinates into your GPS or your smart phone to find the place. Here are the coordinates: N 42° 13.537' E 014° 13.099'. The phone is +39 0871 809100. Here is the restaurant web site: La Brocca home. Here is the recipe for pizze e foje, the dish of wild greens and corn bread that we had:  recipe for pizze e foje.

The wine tasting

Near the end of the wine tasting

The next day we sat down at mid-day for a wine tasting at Castello di Semivicoli. There were the two of us and Valentina, the hotel manager and a marketer of Masciarelli wines. We were served a number of hot and cold dishes to sample from and seven wines were opened and offered to us for tasting. We talked about food and wine for about an hour and a half. Then she left us to return to her work and we stayed to consider the food and the wine further. We enjoyed to food with gusto and tasted the wine with responsibility. After the wine we had coffee and enjoyed the view of the mountains.

We asked to sample only wines that we can purchase in the United States. Here are the wines that we tasted over the course of several hours. All the wines were very good. We especially liked the first, second, fifth, and seventh wines.

1. Villa Gemma Bianco Colline Teatine, 2015 IGT, white wine. Floral in the nose, nice acid. One of our favorites wines in the tasting. Wine-Searcher shows this wine at about $14 a bottle. This is a blend of 80% trebbiano d’Abruzzo, 15% cococciola, and 5% chardonnay.

2. Villa Gemma Cerasuolo d’Abruzzo, 2015 DOC, rosé wine. This is a pleasant wine with a nice little bite that would go well with food. Wine-Searcher shows this wine at about $13 a bottle. 100% montepulciano d’abruzzo.

3. Marina Cvetic Trebbiano Riserva, 2013 IGT, white wine. A more sophisticated white wine that can be aged. The wine spends 22 months in small oak barrels. Wine-Searcher shows a bottle from 2010 vintage for $12 each. 100% trebbiano d’abruzzo.

4. Marina Cvetic Chardonnay, 2013 IGT, white wine. Another sophisticated white but not in an highly oaked style. The wine spends 23 months in small oak barrels. Wine-Searcher shows bottles from 2011 vintage for $50 each. 100% chardonnay.

5. Marina Cvetic Montepulciano d’Abruzzo Riserva, 2011 DOC, red wine. A fine dinner wine, not too complicated and matches well with food. This wine and the chardonnay above actually matched will with the artichoke pasta we were served. This wine spends 12 to 18 months in small oak barrels. Wine-Searcher shows this wine at about $20 a bottle. 100% montepulciano d’abruzzo.

6. Marina Cvetic Iskra Montepulciano d’Abruzzo Colline Teramane, 2009 DOCG, red wine. A hearty wine that matches well with chocolate. Sophisticated. This wine spends 12 to 18 months in small oak barrels. Wine-Searcher did not return any prices for this wine; is this available in the US? 100% montepulciano d’abruzzo.

7. Villa Gemma Montepulciano d’Abruzzo, 2007 DOC, red wine. This was a stunningly good wine, as good as any wine we’ve ever had and calls for the best cut of beef that you can imagine. This wine spends 18 to 24 months in small oak barrels and is aged further in the bottle. Wine-Searcher shows a bottle from 2008 vintage for $80 each. 100% montepulciano d’abruzzo.

Mont Amaro from Castello di Semivicoli

Marina Cvetic has her name associated with many of these wines. She was the wife of Gianni Masciarelli until he died suddenly and unexpectedly at 50 in 2008. Her name had appeared on these wines before his death and she has taken over the operation of the business. For more on Martina Cvetic, see Celebrating 10 Talented Women in Wine: Marina Cvetic From Italy's Masciarelli Winery.

The hospitality shown by the Castello di Semivicoli staff to us was outstanding. They have a small hotel with places for a small number of guests. The grounds of the hotel are well kept and the surrounding area is beautiful. And, finally, the wines are a great value. For more on Castello di Semivicoli, see Castello di Semivicoli: A Hideaway in the Highlands of Italy’s Abruzzo.

Basketballs

This year we failed to pack anything orange; no orange t-shirts, no orange sweaters, nothing orange. Orange never seems to be completely out of place in Florence; people wear orange here occasionally. We packed out suitcases in late February and the normal reason for our interest in wearable orange things, the success of the local basketball team, was at low ebb.

What a mistake!

The SU women made their tournament and the SU men squeaked into their tournament. Both teams surprised us.

Sadly, the women’s games were not available on TV here. The men’s games were.

Because the first men’s game against Dayton started early in the afternoon, we were able to view the game at a college bar called the Red Garter (formerly The House of Sizzle). The game was the day after St. Patrick’s Day, a holiday which passes by Italians without notice but which is celebrated by the American students in Florence with enthusiasm. Since the students were probably still recovering from their Irish-oriented celebrations of the day before, the Red Garter was quiet the next afternoon. We watched a close game in the first half that turned into a triumphant success in the second half.

A few days later we watch a similar game against Middle Tennessee State though this game began at 2:40am local time. Again Syracuse and their opponent played close games in the first half and SU dominated the second half.

The third and fourth games were similar in that they were played in the middle of the night but different in that both times SU found a way to a miraculous victory over a worthy opponent. And after both games we woke up the next morning confused about what had happened a few hours before. Had they really won? Really? How did they do that!?!

Fortunately, through the wonders of YouTube, we were able to review the ends of those games to make certain that SU had won each of them. And we were without any orange to wear. Shameful.

We’re leaving today to drive south. We’ll taste some wines, visit the home town of grandparents, and finally arrive in small town in Puglia Saturday afternoon. This morning (Wednesday) we emailed the owner of the apartment to make sure that the internet connection that had been advertised was actually functional. You can’t be too careful with the next big game starting at 2:45am Sunday morning.

Go SU!

A little more music in Florence

It’s surprising that the music establishment in Florence is performing so little this year and that so many other excellent performers are. Yesterday we took in a standard classical musical program in a stunning musical space. We heard the the premier of a commissioned piece by a composer who was present in the audience, the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, and the Beethoven 7th Symphony. The performance took place in the second story of a church.

The “second floor of a church”? The musical space doesn’t sound impressive, does it?

The church is in the center of medieval Florence where the buildings are crowded and almost all the traffic is on foot and on bikes. Because the area is so crowded, there is no space to step back to view the church building from the ground. Here is a photo of Orsanmichele from the top of the town’s main bell tower:  Orsanmichele,_view.JPG.

Vaulted brick ceiling

The ground floor of the building is a 700 year old church built on a site where miracles were said to have occurred in the 1300s. The second and third floors served to store grain against a time of troubles such as a famine or a siege of the city. The Florentines are very practical people.

As you can see the ceilings must be very high. Once you are inside you see that the ceilings are vaulted and are a warm color of bare brick.

In the 1400s the guilds of the city employed sculptors to create likenesses of their patron saints. The sculptures they produced were placed in niches around the four exterior sides of Orsanmichele about 15 feet above street level. The sculptures projected the wealth and the piety of the guilds.

Soloist takes a bow

In more recent years the 14 statues have been moved indoors and have been replaced with copies. Most of the originals are now on display on the second floor of Orsanmichele. The statues are on platforms that form a square about 60 feet on a side. The placement of the statues reflect their original placement on the outside of the building.

Last night the orchestra performed on an inner platform that was surrounded by the original 14th,  15th, and 16th century sculptures. Here in our photo, the violinist is taking a bow after his performance of the Mendelssohn. He is bowing while he stands between Saint James, put in place by the furriers guild in 1415, and the Madonna of the Rose, put in place by the doctors and apothecaries guild in 1399.

The room acoustic was good, the setting was intimate, and the live orchestra playing among the ancient statues was a memorable experience.

Music in Florence

Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of music from the established artistic community in Florence in the weeks coming up to Easter. Finances have been difficult in recent years.

Two weeks ago we took in a chamber music concert with the Jerusalem Quartet, a group of four Israeli string players. They played Beethoven and Bartok. They were excellent. 

Before the players came onto stage there was a brief announcement but the public address system was garbled and we weren’t clear what was going on. The Italians who did understand the announcement chuckled. Then the players came onto the stage to polite applause, the two violinists and the cellist dressed casually in jackets and turtlenecks. Finally, the violist appeared wearing sneakers, sweatpants, and a sweatshirt. He had made the trip but his suitcase had not. He didn’t have his concert attire and he didn’t have his own marked up score. A musician who was with us said that the poor guy had to work hard using a borrowed score.

Two US college choirs performed this week, Monmouth College and Concordia College. Both sang in ancient churches where final notes hung in the air for many seconds. Singing among the frescoed saints had to be an interesting experience for the students who were on tour. The Concordia College choir is well known and has recorded many CDs. Their performance under a new conductor was excellent.

The Concordia Choir sang the Randall Thompson Alleluia. One of us had sung the piece under Randall Thompson himself. She told the conductor that she, the Concordia conductor, had used the same slow, stately tempos that Randall Thompson had used when he conducted the piece many years ago. The conductor was pleased. It is a challenge for a conductor to hold their ensembles back as they perform the piece.

Alleluias sung with a little too much swing and sway are common. Here are two examples. Alleluia - Randall Thompson - by Octarium is a little too fast. This performance is a little more restrained:  Alleluia - Randall Thompson - OU University Chorale. The Concordia version was even more settled, more stately, exquisite.

There is a music competition in town for young people. We’ve heard a Serbian choir, an Italian choir, and a string orchestra of adorable young Italian kids. A highlight of the competition for us was Filipino high school string orchestra. Here’s a short clip of their impressive performance:

Of course, there are musicians who earn their living by busking, by playing in public places and asking for donations. There is a team of two accordions and a trumpet that parade around the streets. A young woman sings arias in the main square accompanied by an accordion. The person in the clip below played a interesting instrument, something like a steel drum. He chose a great spot, next to the Palazzo Vecchio and in front of the famous Uffizi Museum. It’s a crowded space with substantial stone buildings that contain the sound well. 

Do you know what this instrument is called? Let us know if you have an idea.

Same tie score, different opponent, different reaction

Players take the field

Sunday afternoon was cool and windy. Quite cool and very windy.

The soccer game this day was against Hellas Verona. While Florence has had a good season, Hellas Verona is stuck at the bottom of the 20 team league. This game did not stir as much anticipation as the excellent home game against 2nd place Naples two weeks ago which ended in a 1-1 tie or the away game a week ago against 3rd place Rome which ended badly for Florence, 4-1. Hellas Verona looks up from the bottom of the Italian soccer world.

Single game tickets to soccer games are available only in the week immediately before the game. Interestingly, the prices of the tickets are market-driven. If both teams have good records, the single game tickets are priced higher. If one of the teams is poor, then the tickets are priced lower, perhaps a third of the price of the tickets to the more competitive games.

Kids take the stands

The ticket prices for this game were inexpensive. As a result there were many, many young children with parents, mostly fathers, in the stands. Also as a result, there was much less “interesting” vocabulary and no rude gestures aimed at the opponents. But also many of the children seemed to be only dimly aware that there was a game going on.

"Viola disaster

Overwhelmed by boos"

Tie flop with Verona

Boos at Franchi stadium

And the coach (Paola Sousa) says, 

“The team deserved the boos”

Florence scored late in the first half. Verona scored late in the second half to tie. The play seemed sloppy and disorganized. The locals groaned and the children made paper airplanes out of booklets handed out as advertising. Not an impressive game.

Here is a link to the ESPN story on the game:  Fiorentina 1-1 Hellas Verona - ESPN FC.

Two weeks ago Florence played a crisp, focused game against a good team and tied. Local people were pleased with the game even though Florence moved down slightly in the standings. This game also ended in a tim but the local people had expected better. There was some catcalls. The local newspapers hammered the team.

Two tie games with the same score but very different reactions.

The Festa della Donna

The day began cool with white patches in a blue sky. Before the day deteriorated to a steady drizzle, we walked around to view how Italians were celebrating the Festa della Donna, that is, the Celebration of Woman. This is Italy’s observation of International Women’s Day which is celebrated on March 8 around the world ... but a lot less noticed in the United States.

Curious. The Italian name for the day is singular, "Donna" or “Woman”. The equivalent in English is not equivalently singular; it's “Women”. 

The minimum way that Italian men mark the Festa della Donna is with a gift of mimosa. No, not that mimosa! No, not a bubbly drink with some cut up fruit. Mimosa are delicate little yellow flowers that bloom here in the early spring, just in time for the Festa della Donna. On March 8 mimosa are sold or given away everywhere.

Congratulations!!!   Source

The tiny mimosa flowers are so delicate that the last only briefly. By the next day the flowers are browning and by the day after that, the flowers are withered and sad looking. Is there some special meaning here about how women are appreciated?

Everyone get involved in giving mimosa bouquets, even the Simpsons.