In Lucca it’s a common joke that the mountains between Lucca and pisa keep the people from having to see each other. A tunnel now leads to the Pisa side but the ideological separation is still felt by football fans, graffiti artists and ordinary citizens. In Lucca e read Dante’s story about Count Ugolino della Gherardesca as the potrait of a power-hungry Pisan at his worst. Dante froze Ugolino within the deepest circle of Inferno because he betrayed his homeland and his political party.
In Italy, where peope identify with their hometown very strongly, this story’s theme is not at all archaic.
According to popular legend, Ugolino cannibalized his children.
Archbishop Ruggieri locked the father and sons in the Torre della Muda ( forever after known as Famine Tower ), leaving them to starve to death.
Part of the tower still stands on the northen side of Piazza dei Cavalieri. This is one of Pisa’s most beautiful piazzas and site of Pisa University’s Scuola Normale, where the brightest students are admitted to study.
A corner of the original tower is within Palazzo dell’ Orologio and a plaque on the wall refers to Ugolino. However, scientific literalism demolished the legend in 2002.
A Pisan paleoanthropologist excavated Ugolino’s body and examined some DNA from his ribs which showed he had not eaten meat ( let alone human flesh ) before dying. However, ” truth ” should never get in the way of a good story from history…
Ugolino belonged to an important Ghibelline family. The Ghibellines supported Papal authority, unlike the Guelph city-states Florence and Genoa which favored more local control.
Ugolino was both Podestà ( supreme civil authority ) and Ghibelline leader. During Pisa’s battles with Genoa and other Guelph states, Ugolino aligned with Giovanni Visconti, a Guelph.
The alliance was discovered, Ugolino imprisoned and Visconti exiled.
With the help of Florence and Lucca, however, Ugolino escaped and become a Guelph, again betraying the Ghibellines! In 1284, he returned as head of a Pisan fleet. He again betrayed his countrymen when they were at war with Genoa, feigning surrender and causing their defeat.
When Ugolino returned to power, he gave away Pisan castles to Lucca and Florence as a political expedient. Ghibelline fortunes improved, and Ugolino, then a Guelph, allied with the Ghibelline Archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini. Ugolino exiled his Guelph grandson in 1288 and consolidated his relationship with Ruggieri. Soon Ruggieri betrayed Ugolino by inciting the public against him and then ordering the imprisonment of Ugolino, his two sons and two grandsons.
Finally the Archbishop threw away the key and left him and his children to starve to death.
In Canto XXXIII, Dante has Ugolino gnawing on the Archbishop’s head for all eternity. ” You are to know I was Count Ugolino, and this one here, Archbidshop Ruggieri; and now I’ll tell you why I am his neighbor.” For Dante, the concept of neighbor becomes an unholy alliance in the depth of Inferno!
With ambiguous words, Dante ha Ugolino say, ” After they were dead, I called them for two days; then fasting had more force than grief.”
This line may be interpreted in two ways: either Ugolino devoured his offspring’s corpses after being driven mad with hunger, or starvation killed him before he died of grief.
The more ghastly interpretation is more popular and Ugolino was sometimes known as the ” Cannibal Count “. The corpses were buried in Pisa at in the Church of San Francesco.
For Dante, however, eating one’s children may have served an anagogical ( religiously – significant ) purpose.
All the happenings in the Inferno are reverse-images of happenings in Paradiso. The Eucharist ( celebration of the Mass ) thus becomes a horrific reverse Eucharist in the Ugolino scene.
Soon we will visit also Dante’s Paradiso to present a more positive character – Matilde the Church-Builder, Contessa of Tuscany, famous in Lucca for having built the Ponte della Maddalena ( also know as the Devil’s Bridge ) during the Middle Ages.
Category: About Tuscany
Tuscany, The year of the Olive
Olives, those beautiful silvery trees, have today become a visual metaphor for Italy.
Nevertheless, seldom does anyone come to Italy solely for the purpose of growing olives and making olive oil. Most foreign-born cultivators naively back into it somehow. Olives usually enter their lives on a ” bit of land ” just beyond the garden of their dream home, whether it be a humble farmhouse or a full-blown villa.
Those gnarled trunks look so expressively romantic.
The delicate leaves gently sea basking in the Mediterranean sun. The terraced groves are so suggestive of a living link across time to departed generations. Yes… but, wander into any local bar and take a look around at the old tuskers playing cards or arguing over this year’s olive crop and you’ll notice they’ve grown as gnarled as their trees.
Olive farming is indeed lovely work with long hours spent in solitary meditation, but it is also year-round hard work.
The year starts in Februarywith the cutting down of the undergrowth in the olive grove and fertilizing each tree. March and April are pruning time and burning of the cuttings. In May the trees go into bloom, dropping their tiny white flowers on the ground like a summer snow. June the undergrowth is cut again to prevent fire in the olive grove.
July and August is quit time while the olives are left to grow in the hot, dry summer. In late September, some additional light pruning and cutting undergorwth is again on the agenda.
October brings the laying of the nets. November, December and beyond is harvest time and taking the olives to the frantoio to make olive oil and January is clean up time – taking up and putting away the nets and equipment and, of course, enjoying the fruit of our labor!
Tuscany, The Soul of an Actor at Dynamo Camp
It was September 27, 2008, 1:44 pm. At the Dynamo Camp, the thatre was full up for the open-day party. Enzo Manes, Chairman of the Dynamo Foundation, was about to conclude his presentation to the attentive gathering when he said, ” I had prepared a different speech for this occasion. I wanted to thank the wonderful man who gave us the idea of setting up this camp but this morning at 7:30 I received a mail from the States saying that that man is no longer among us,” There was no need to spell out the name and surname of the person he was referring to – we all understood he was talking of Paul Newman.
The emotion stirred all the assembled guests who spontaneously stood and applauded.
Dynamo Camp is a totally free summer camp, located in the hilss of Pistoia, an hour’s drive grom Lucca and 25 min. from Florence. It is open to children aged between 7 and 16, who live in Italy and are affected by serious and chronic pathologies, currently undergoing treatment or in post-hospitalization convalescence. Here they spend 7-10 days, without their parents, lovingly looked after by specialized doctors, qualified health personnel and volunteers, whose main concern is to let the children experience a special holiday in the countryside, mixing with children with similar illnesses.
There are plans to open the camp to children coming from other European countries as well.
The idea of creating this sort of camp, called ” A Hole in the Wall “, came to Paul in 1998 and he started one just next to his house in Connecticut.
He eventually opened twenty of these camps around the world in which he invested all the million dollars gained from his food business. This one, located in the middle of Tuscany, inside a 20-hectare WWF oasis, is the only one in Italy.
When the children arrive at the camp, after long periods of boredom and surrering in hospital, they’ re quite indifferent to the beautiful place.
But within a day or two, they discard their hospital clothes in favour of Sioux costumes and get involved in the activities that have been carefully planned for them. The goal of the camp is to give them a week of fun and laughter, so once their morning treatments are over, they have a full day of games ahead. They recover energy and sef-confidence, they smile again and they want to try everything, from performing on stage, to climbing and playing Indians in a camp.
The friendly arms of the volunteers allow them to quit their wheelchairs and even ride on a horse.
Feeling safe in their protective embrace, they forget their hardships and squeals of excitement testify to their enjoyment, later reported in the daily diary they keep.
Money is the ” mother’s milk ” of any voluntary association. So we can be mothers to any of these camps but also contribute in many other different ways.
This year 230 children have been hosted in Dynamo Camp and 7 million euros were raised. The foundation’s goal for 2009 goal is to host 400 children.
Paul Newman visited the camp in May 2006 and said, ” It’s a magic place. ” He too was a magic person, not just for his aura of charm and seduction but also for the beauty of his soul. Thank you, Paul, for having started all this.
To find more about Dynamo Camp, www.dynamocamp.org. For horse riding and guided tour inside the WWF oasis, email oasi.ilcestodellupo@kme.com.
Tusscany, The “Modi” Practical Joke of Livorno
My friends, to let you understand and feel the spirit of Livorno and people who lives in this incredible city, I thought about an old, very old story that for sure you cannot miss. Too funny!
This is the story of a huge practical joke involving one of Livorno’s most famous personalities, Amedeo Modigliani, and four ordinary young men, which took place 20 years ago in one of the nicest areas of the city, the Medici canal which flows in front of the indoor market.
The joke took place back in 1984, however to fully understand how it came about we must first go back to 1909 and discover a bit about the events which led up to it. It was in 1909 that Amedeo Modigliani, a young artist and sculptor who had just turned 25 years old, was hugely disappointed by the negative reviews that he had received from critics about his work and as a result decided to leave his hometown forever. His sculptures, which were completed in a figurative style of the beginning of the 20th century, that he had seen in Paris, and which were inspired by African art, were not to the taste of the local art critics and one critic even told the young artist that he would be better off just throwing them all away.
The general story goes that it was these criticisms which forced Modigliani to leave his town, dumping all of his failed works of art in a ditch in the process. His failed work actually consisted of sculptures of human heads, which were harsh and elongated in style and sculpted into the stone in a style for which his work was to become famous following his death. The ditch in which he dumped his sculptures (the name of which indicates the canals of Livorno which cross through the historical centre) would have been Fosso Reale, a ditch of the Medici Canal which goes from Piazza della Reppublica to Piazza Cavour, where you can see one of the city’s most well-known monuments: the 18th century Chiesa degli Olandesi, with its spectacular Neo-Gothic, yellow, stone facade and the impressive General Food Market with its tall, big windows which feature greek style colomns.
Now, in 1984, it is 100 years after the birth of Modigliani and Vera Durbé, the manager of Livorno’s Progressive Museum of Contemporary Art, decides to organise an exhibition of Modigliani’s sculptures, to celebrate his 100th year. Her idea, however, prompted an interesting challenge: The search for the legendary heads since they had been previously thrown into the canal by a young Modi. The quest was supported by the administrative council, who approved the dredging of the works from the ditch.
The excavation work took place in the sunny month of July, under the watchful eyes of many who stood waiting excitedly for any news of the recovery of these long-awaited works of art. Their wait lasted a week and on the eighth day three stone sculptures, scultped in the harsh, elongated style for which Modigliani was by now famous for, were successfully excavated, one after the other. They were presented to the many art critics of Livorno, who claimed that the heads were the original work carved by the hands of Modigliani immediatly after examining them closely.
At first, it seems that the story has a happy ending: Durbé’s dream was realised and art lovers from all over the world flocked to Livorno… but they were forgetting that Livorno is a city famous for its pranks and practical jokes and here it is always possible that things are not always as they seem. Therefore, after a month of much talk and awards regarding the three newly-recovered sculptures, three Livornese students: Pietro Luridana, Pierfrancesco Ferrucci and Michele Guarducci, came forward claiming to have sculpted one of the three heads, in the garden of one of their houses, using drills and other tools bought from a local hardware store. They presented photos of themselves in action and the splinters of stone pertaining to the sculpture in question. Then, on national television they re-enacted the creation of the masterpiece.
Not long after, a sculptor named Angelo Froglia laid claim to the other two heads. Angelo Froglia was, in fact, just an ordinary dockworker who was passionate about art and was a talented sculptor. He claimed that he came up with the idea to pretend to have sculpted these pieces as a way of showing how art critics are led more by market trends rather than their own perceptions and the true worth of each individual piece of work. Both the three students and Froglia achieved their goals as in the end the joke was on the art critics who had previously slammed the work of Modigliani.
Talk of these events lasted a while. Mainly due to the fact that too many acclaimed art critics had already declared the authenticity of the three heads. However, although it was, in fact, the three students and Froglia who had, separately, sculpted the heads which had been excavated from the canal, there were still those who thought that they were liars who had conspired together to pretend to be the true sculptors of the heads, and so continued to believe that the sculptures were the original work of Modigliani. The reality is that only in Livorno could two completely different, unrelated groups of people have come up with exactly the same successful practical joke.
Tuscany wine help
Ok, going on talking about Tuscany and Wine…
As you know I’m from this region so what can I do for you today? Easy, try to help you discovering any kind of information about Tuscany wine that I consider helpful for your trip, holiday or visit you will have here in Tuscany. So, dear Friends, feel free to be in touch with me asking all that you need to know about this beautiful region… No one knows Tuscany like me!
Tuscany is one of the most romantic and culturally vibrant wine regions in the world. After all, it was in Florence that the Renaissance was born and the place is still a haven for all sorts of artisans, from the sculpturer to the winemaker. Tuscany is packed with endless villages and hill towns that seem untouched by time. The country roads, by now mostly paved, are twisting and more suited to horses and scooters than to smart cars. No road even resembles a straight line. Signs are many, so a good advice is to go very slowly and pay attention to signs that may indicate anything from towns to museums and wineries. Indispensable even for an Italian is a good detailed road map.
Wine estates vary immensely in size, from tiny family run farms to colossal wineries owned by coops. Whether large or small, a Tuscan winery is almost always a challenge to find. Sometimes there are no signs or street addresses on the properties themselves. You simply have to zigzag around a “comune” (township) and with a little luck (or by asking for directions, which is not a guarantee either) you will bump into the winery which is much likely to be found hidden at the end of a gravel road.
Useful info:
– English is often spoken, but you shouldn’t expect it. If English is not spoken, you’ll normally get by with a little basic Italian or by signing – Italians are generally extremely helpful towards foreigners – and most wineries will have a brochure written in English.
– Some wineries have small shops where you can just pop in and buy the estate’s wine, as well as extra virgin olive oil. These are usually signed with the words: “Vendita Diretta”.
– Wine tastings are either free (but then you are expected to buy) or offered at a fee which can vary from winery to winery. Some do organized tastings and tours, but you should inform yourself before going as you normally will have to book.
– Bigger wineries that have a shop/reception room are open to the public and you can walk in at any time during the day. Most places close during lunch, so from 1 – 3 pm, so relax and go and have lunch.
– And a lot of wineries require that you phone to make an appointment or let them know that you are coming.
– To know where to go and which wineries you can visit – and when, it might be useful to pay a visit to the Consorzio of the area first to get maps, directions and guidance on wineries to visit (see the Links page).
– Very few wineries do not accept visitors, but bear in mind that it is possible and not because the winery is hostile to foreigners!
– If you don’t have a lot of time to visit the wine country, a good idea might be to work out a tour with a specialized company that will take care of the necessary appointments in the wineries.
If you are going to Tuscany, but you are not going into the wine regions for some reason, a good idea might be to visit one of the many Enoteca’s (wine bars/shops) in the bigger towns. Many have wines by the glass to try and a wine expert (sommelier) available to explain the wines. Often you can have crostini (toasted bread with toppings), local Pecorino cheeses and selected cured meats to accompany a wine. The most famous Enoteca in Italy is placed in the Medici Fortress in Siena, Enoteca Italiana, and is definitely worth a visit.
Last but not least, a word on “drinking and driving” in Italy. Remember that it is no different from home – no more than 1 unit before you drive, even though controls are scarce. But the roads are windy and the pace of traffic very different in Italy. So make sure to “taste and spit” or choose a designated driver for the day.