Cortona, without a map

I took a day trip to Cortona last week. It may be my favorite place in Tuscany so far, which is saying something. I cleverly left my map at home, but the centro is small enough that it's pretty easy to find your way around. What would be a real help is a map in topographical relief, because even by the standards of Tuscan hill towns, these are some steep streets.

Cortona is at the southernmost point of Tuscany, near the Umbrian border, where the mountains get steeper and craggier. It's at the end of a road full of hairpin turns, on top of a formation that blurs the line between mountain and hill. I'm pretty sure it's at least as high as A Mountain at home (and for non-Las Cruces people, no, that's not a typo; people call it A Mountain and there's a big A painted on its west face).


The streets are full of the odd little tunnels and expressionist angles I've come to expect from Italian hill towns. And did I mention the streets were steep? Some of the grades have to be close to 30 degrees.


Even more than Assisi, Cortona feels like a quiet mountain retreat. St. Francis sometimes came there to pray and meditate. I found the 13th-century Church of St. Francis--sort of the antithesis of his grand basilica.

Inside are some masterpieces by 16th- and 17th-century painters, along with traces of the original frescoes and the relics of Brother Elias, who led the Franciscan order after St. Francis's death. I was the only visitor. The interior was entirely silent--and I mean the silence of pine woods, not the silence of cathedrals filled with tourists.

One of the things I really wanted to see was Le Celle, a ways outside the city walls, a combination of natural caverns and human construction that used to be home to a hermit. I didn't find it, but the walk was gorgeous. There aren't enough greens in any set of paints to capture a Tuscan hillside.

For all I love city life, I'm still a child of the Southwest, and my heart leaps like a mountain goat whenever I encounter a landscape like this.

On the way I passed the Chiesa di Santa Maria delle Grazie al Calcinaio (Church of St. Mary of the Grace at the Limepit). The collision of old and new in Italy is often jarring, sometimes funny (as when we saw a man in full Arezzo jousting regalia speed past on a motor scooter), but here it seemed perfectly natural for a Renaissance dome to be rising out of the terraced olive farms.




Yes, I'll be going back to Cortona.

Assisi

Looks like my picture-posting abilities are back, and not a moment too soon. Here's the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, which I was talking about yesterday:


From here I took the bus up to Assisi proper, which sits on the spine of what my Frommer's guide calls "the rise to Mt. Subasio." (I'm not sure if a rise is an actual geographical term or not, and I can't think of a better way to say it than that anyway.) In the noon sun the Romanesque city walls looked almost white--lighter and a bit pinker than those of Tuscan hill towns.

The Piazza di San Francesco is edged with Romanesque colonnades as well, though the Basilica of San Francesco is gothic. Currently the Piazza is occupied by an exhibit (or a sculpture?) consisting of a large group of black boulders, each bearing a rectangular groove that looks as though water might flow through it at some point. It's supposed to be some sort of monument to peace, I gathered from a poster. It does seem appropriately Franciscan.


Inside the Basilica there's an upper church and a lower church, both heavily frescoed, in true gothic fashion. These frescoes are masterworks by Giotto and Cimabue, though. The colors, especially the blues, are glorious. And it's wonderfully fitting that the cathedral for this saint, whose thinking helped pave the way for Renaissance humanism, should be adorned by the work of a painter whose frescoes helped pave the way for the Renaissance in art.

This week has been a study in what it is and is not acceptable to do as a tourist. In some cathedrals (such as the Siena Duomo), photography is fine as long as you don't use flash or tripod; in some places it's not allowed but the attendants grudgingly tolerate it; in some places the attendants take the rule very seriously. Most cathedrals also request silence. Some places (Santa Maria degli Angeli) get it; some places (San Marco, in Venice) don't. San Francesco has solved the latter problem by having an attendant say "Silenzio!" sternly into a lavalier microphone whenever people get too loud. A sound system seems decidedly un-Franciscan, but I suppose it's better than giving the place over to the tourists, Venice-style.

The place where the flashbulbs upset me was the crypt, below the lower church, where the relics of St. Francis are housed. I can understand wanting to claim that memory somehow. People seem to feel a special kinship with St. Francis (the Assisi tourist shops bear this out; they sell icons and olive-wood rosaries and crosses, not just typical kitsch). Maybe people feel a connection precisely because of his humanism. So many of the earlier saints seem not quite real. There's something close to glee in the reliquaries in Siena--ridiculously ornate arrangements of bones, and a jeweled gold case for the head of one saint--that brings into the high relief the medieval Christian desire to triumph over the flesh. Anyway, there's a pervasive reverence in St. Francis's crypt. Except when someone tries to sneak a picture and the red-eye reducing strobe goes off.

It seemed more appropriate to me to commemorate the visit with an act requiring silence and contemplation, so I sat in one of the pews and drew.

Obviously it's just a sketch, and the area immediately around the relics was blocked from view by the steady stream of visitors. You can sort of see, behind the main tomb, the darker vault that houses a tiny chapel. Around the tomb are three memorials to St. Francis's companions. In front of it are, appropriately enough, lilies and peace lilies.

Assisi is a lovely town to wander through. I spent a lot of time looking at menus and poking my head into food shops, trying to figure out the ways Umbrian food differs from Tuscan food, and also hoping to get a taste of wild boar (cinghiale) salami, a regional specialty. What I can tell so far is that Umbrian food seems to use meat more, especially game meats; that it looooves its local porcini and truffles (and after a taste of black truffle relish I knew why); that it uses tomatoes less than Tuscan food; and that it's more inclined to add fruit to dishes rather than serve it separately. Of course, this is all a highly subjective, unscientific analysis. I'm clearly going to have to get an Umbrian cookbook to know for sure.

In the Piazza del Comune is the building now known as Santa Maria Minerva, which was a pagan temple in the days long before St. Francis. It's glorious on the outside.

Stepping inside is one of the most jarring architectural experiences I've ever had, because the interior is now a Baroque church, and there's gloppy gilt scrollwork everywhere.

Many of the side streets are much like those in other old Italian towns, steep and narrow. Assisi's streets seem to have more greenery than the norm.


At the top of the town is Rocco Maggiore, the old watch tower.



It's quite a climb, but the view from the top is fantastic. The peak is exposed to the wind, and the air is full of the snapping of the banners on the ramparts. One local thought it was a good day for kite-flying, and he was right:

Below, you can just see the Duomo (San Rufino) and the basilica of Santa Chiara.

A test

I think I may have found a work-around to fix the photo problem. It involves using code, though, at which I am pretty much a novice. So let's hope this works.



If I did that right, this should be an image of the Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, in the valley below the medieval center of Assisi. It's a really interesting church--a combination of neo-Baroque and neo-Classical architecture, which makes it fairly restrained, as Italian churches go. The side chapels have frescoes, but the central nave is white and unadorned. It uses natural light beautifully; the interior is almost bright.

But what makes it really unusual is that there's another church inside it. The 10th-11th century Porziuncola Chapel, the birthplace of the Franciscan order, is under the dome. It's small, maybe the size of a portable classroom, and--apart from the typically medieval gilt art behind the altar--humble and rough. The threshold bears the legend "Hic locus sanctus est." People approach it with real reverence, too. There have been posted pleas for silence at every cathedral and church I've visited, but here they were unnecessary.

Postcript: Okay, that posted a photo, but not the one I was hoping to post. This may take some work.

Day trips

Lots of day trips through Tuscany this week. Internet at the Villa has been problematic this week, and I can't currently post photos to my blog. Which is a shame, because I have a lot of photos. Not just from the week's trips--Siena, Florence (to the Pitti and the Boboli Garden), and Cortona--but also from the class's excursion to Venice and Padua a couple of weeks ago. Tomorrow I'm heading to Perugia (whose annual chocolate festival is this week) and Assisi. I'd like to think that by the time I get back this website will be working as it should be.

An embarrassment of riches

Well, this is the sort of thing that makes people move permanently to Tuscany: the Arezzo international food festival. I'd have looked like a hopelessly touristy rube, but I wish I'd brought my camera all the same. At home, if you found food like this in one overpriced aisle of Whole Foods, you'd squeal with delight. If you found a specialty shop that carried it, you'd become a devoted customer. But here? Here it goes on for blocks.

Might as well start with the cheese. I've never seen so much Pecorino in one place. Giant wheels of it: staggionato (my favorite), fresco, crusted in herbs, crusted in hazelnuts, with bits of black truffles. There were booths devoted solely to goat cheeses. One booth had some of the best Gouda I've ever tasted, as well as the greenest cheese I've ever seen: Gouda made with basil.

Speaking of truffles, the Arezzo area has apparently had a bumper crop this year. This is the first time I've ever seen fresh truffles in the flesh, for sale by the kilo. Apart from that plenty of sellers had jars of truffles in oil, truffle-porcini relish to put on pasta or bread, truffle pate, and so forth. Truffles aren't prohibitively expensive here, so it's really unfortunate that I don't have a kitchen. One kind seller--after sharing a taste of a local red wine--took the time to explain that, to make a little truffle flavor go a long way, you warm tiny bits of truffle in olive oil, so the truffle aroma permeates the oil, and then you just make sure the oil has thoroughly coated your pasta (or whatever). This combination of flavor, simplicity, and economy is one of my favorite aspects of Tuscan food.

Then the honey. Varietal honey is a big deal here. You can get honey made from acacia, girasole (sunflowers), millefiori (which I think translates as wildflowers), orange blossoms, lemon blossoms, chestnut blossoms, and several others. Each variety has a characteristic color, aroma, and flavor. My favorite so far is lemon, by a mile, but girasole is quite good as well. Chestnut honey is quite dark, and the flavor is soapy and bitter; I wonder if it's close to the flavor of unroasted chestnuts, which I hear are pretty awful. Anyway, one way to eat honey is to drizzle it over a slice of Pecorino. No day can be bad in which you have tasted that.

The bread. Several of the forno booths had giant six-foot loaves of Tuscan bread (white, crusty, no salt) they were selling by the chunk. There were also olive breads, foccaccia, pastries, strudels, and crepes.

The meat. Prosciutto is relatively inexpensive here, a standard part of the diet (although on the whole Italians eat far less meat than Americans do). I have no idea what the term is for a large chunk of prosciutto--a hock?--but they were hanging everywhere, along with pancetta and sausages of every conceivable variety. At least two booths had boar's heads stuffed with raw sausage, one of those frank, sort of medieval reminders that meat was once living--the sort of thing you don't get in the more squeamish States. Somehow the effect wasn't grisly; it just heightened the sense that I was walking through a still life by one of the Dutch masters.

And oh, the olives. This area is the source of some of the best olive oils in the world. And the olives themselves--Diavolo Nero (large and black), Dolce (large and almost the same green as asparagus, with a light, mild flavor), al forno (oven-cured, black, intense and sweet), calamata, Sicilian (a meaty green, spicy, with red pepper)--make me wonder how anyone could possibly be contented with a wan American specimen stuffed with a limp pimiento.

What else? Onions. Garlic. Wine. Chocolate. (I avoided that because I'm going to the Perugia chocolate festival next week; I think it's possible I may never leave.) Preserves. The most beautiful dried fruit I've ever seen--kiwi, mango, fig, strawberry, orange, cherry, apricot, all retaining its color somehow. Chestnuts are a big part of local cuisine; several places had roast chestnuts, and I even saw sacks of chestnut flour. Chestnut trees, incidentally, grow up and down the street that leads into town. The nuts are encased in spiny sheaths that look like little green and brown blowfish:

It's the sort of thing that makes me marvel that anyone ever figured out it was edible.

And all that, in a place that looks like this:



How did anyone ever stop eating and admiring the landscape long enough to start the Renaissance?

Mask-making, part I

Our work at the Accademia this fall involves a collaboration with the Arezzo Liceo Musicale on a production of The Persians, by Aeschylus. It's quite an undertaking--between actors and musicians there are something like forty performers. It involves three languages (English, Italian, and Ancient Greek), dancing, singing, instruments, and possibly some acrobatics. And as far as I can tell Italy is a nation without a single stage manager. Nonetheless, the whole thing is really exciting. Not least because I'm to play Atossa, the Persian queen. And it's going to be a mask role.

This afternoon Zach (who's playing Xerxes) and I had plaster casts taken of our faces. We were working with Taylor, an alum of the Accademia who lives here in Arezzo now. He played Don Giovanni as he worked, and opened the windows of the mask studio to let in the late afternoon sun.

Certain aspects of mask-making are a study in repurposing. For example, you have to start by coating your face--especially the eyebrows and eyelashes--in goop that will keep the plaster from sticking to it too badly. I don't know what's traditionally used, but what apparently works very well is...well, let's call it lubricant of a rather intimate nature. (Taylor said he got some strange looks when he bought it in such quantities.)

Anyway, once we'd slathered our faces in it, we further protected ourselves by sticking bits of toilet paper to our brows and lashes--when your face is covered in lubricant it's no problem getting toilet paper to adhere--and then covering our hair, baboushka-style, in saran wrap. So there's another entry on the long list of Odd Things I Have Found Myself Doing Because of Theater.

And then Taylor stuck the strips of plaster to us and let them dry. This involves sitting very still, blind, not talking, for about 30 or 45 minutes. I've heard that it makes some people panic, but I thought it was terrifically calming, not unlike a spa treatment. (In fact, the soap with which you wash off residual plaster and lubricant has sand in it, so I did have something of an exfoliating scrub.) Taylor steered us into the sun to help the plaster dry. I know we looked strange, two motionless, featureless creatures, draped in aprons, standing at the windows of the villa.

When the plaster dried, he peeled it off us. That gave him two shells shaped like us. He'll fill them with plaster to create positives of our faces. Then, for stability, he'll mount them on boards.

But the really exciting parts are that I'll get to keep a duplicate of the Atossa mask, that I'll be able to take home the plaster positive for further mask-making, and that I'm going to have the sort of role that teaches mask skills you can use all your life.

A walk to the grocery store

Intensive classes and rehearsals and a couple of short trips have kept me from posting over the past few weeks. I have a lot to catch up on. Here's the first bit, a short photo essay. This is how we get to the grocery store:

Turn here:


Then, pause to admire nature...




And pass this:


Then, the way back:


Pause to wave hello (the yellow building is the Accademia):


Keep climbing, and admire some more nature:




Climb one last, very steep hill:


And turn here:


God, I love Tuscany.