Category: About Tuscany

European Family Vacations – What to do in Italy

This article was written by: Ireland Flights.

Besides the book fairs, museums, art galleries, and festivities that Italy boasts of, there are lots of activities that you and your family members can engage yourselves into. You will never find a dull moment in Italy because of the list of adventures that you may love and die to try. Take a quick look at the following list for a much enjoyable Europe family holiday.

Hiking or climbing. The Italian official hiking season begins by June 20 towards September 20. The trails and hiking paths are totally marked for the individuals’ guidance. Trek guides may also be arranged for should you want to try out this adventure sport. For sure you know of the Alps which is held to be the most challenging and difficult to surpass hiking treks. The other less challenging trails are those found in Tuscany and Umbria. You may also try the climbing and hiking routes of Capri, Sicily, and Sardinia.

Skiing. There is a myriad of skiing locations which await you in this nation. You can take a choice from doing a country skiing or the downhill skiing. You should however be careful with the spots that you choose because some terrains may be quite hard to take. Experts in skiing will have plenty of choices when it comes to the skiing spots.

Diving and snorkeling. These are among the overly popular water sports in Sicily. The best spots to do snorkeling and diving are in Sardinia, Ustica, and in the Tremiti Islands. Diving courses are also offered by the diving schools in really cheap fees.

Swimming. In the heights of the summer months, the mainland beaches may be really crowded yet you can always opt for other beaches around Italy.

Sailing. The sailing maps can be purchased from the tourist offices all over Italy. For the beginners in the field of sailing, you can always figure out your skills in the Archipelago della Magdalena. Windsurfing is typical in Iseo Lugano, Lake Garda, Maggiore, and Lake Como.

Fishing. The sea waters are exceptional in Sardinia and Sicily. Umbria and Tuscany offer the best spots for fishing. Fishing boats may be rented out too.

Cycling. Bicycles are usually available for rent so that the visiting tourists can easily find their way in the city.

Golfing. For the golf enthusiasts, there are plenty of golf courses all over Trentino, Sardinia, Lombardy, Lazio, Tuscany, and Calabria.

Camping. The presence of campsites is among the attractions. The camping sessions are usually held in the holiday parks of Italy.

Canoeing or river rafting. The Alps in the northern hemisphere are best for the canoeing and rafting rides.

Cooking, arts, and Italian language courses are also offered in the Italian institutes. Thus, if you want to maximize your stay and create a remarkable experience for everyone of you, you can try enrolling in these classes.

A European family trip in Italy is indeed an adventure of a lifetime that you must never afford to miss. Tour packages for trips such as these are given in discounted rates especially that you are traveling in groups. It is now or never.

Check out a travel agent nearest your place and inquire on the cheap rates that you can grab. Usually, booking in groups will allow you to get the last ticket for free. Also, don’t forget to ask about free online term life insurance quote.

For additional info on traveling please visit: Havana Holidays.

Tuscany, Manon Lescaut

Puccini wrote Manon Lescaut between 1889 and 1892.
Neither of his previous operas ( Le Villi which has some charming music but includes spoken narration and rather a lot of hectic dancing, and Edgar with its huge canvas, huge chorus and undeveloped principal characters ) had had any real success.
Manon Lescaut, on the other hand, was a triumph. Its first performance ended with thirty curtain calls, hard-boiled critics confessed they’d wept and at the celebratory supper afterwards, Puccini was so overcome that he forgot all about the notes he’d written on his shirt cuff for his speech and could only stammer a few words.
What had happened? Two things, basically. The first is that for the first time it was he who decided on the subject of the opera.
His publisher, Giulio Ricordi, had already commissioned a libretto for a Russian subject but Puccini put his foot down. It wasn’t suitable for him. He’d been reading the 18th century French novel The Story of the CHevalier Des Grieux and Manon Lescaut and decided that here was his next opera. There was a snag. Massenet had written his opera Manon just a few years earlier, but Puccini brushed this aside. ” Manon is a heroine I really believe in, ” he wrote to Ricordi.
” She’s a woman who cannot fail to win the hearts of the public. I don’t see why there can’t be two operas about her. A woman like Manon can have more than one lover. ”
The second thing was the libretto. Puccini had accepted his first two libretti without demur but from now on he was much more demanding, engagingly so at times. His first idea, in fact, was to write it himself. Then two librettists were found and sacked.
In the end, at least five people contributed to it and since there were so many of them, they decided to put no names on it.
And with the right libretto, the composer was on song.
But to our tale. In act I, the beautiful ingenue Manon arrives in Amiens where she is to enter a nunnery. She’s accompanied by her  double-dealing brother, Lescaut. Two men are smitten by her – the rich old lech Geronte who is planning to abduct her and the student Des Grieux who has fallen in love with her. She leaves for Paris with Des Grieux.
Act II, however, finds her in Geronte’s house, having her hair done for a party and regretting choosing money over love.
Guests arrive and a madrigal is sung. Manon tells her brother she’s bored and he goes to look for Des Grieux.
There follows a dancing lesson and then the guests leave with Geronte.
Des Grieux arrives and Manon persuades him that she still loves him.
As they prepare to leave, Geronte returns briefly and departs with a menacing, ” A presto! ” Manon delays while she gathers jewels together. Geronte has reported her to the police and when she’s arrested, he laughs.
Offstage and during an intermezzo, Manon is convicted of being an immoral woman and a thief, imprisoned and taken to Le Havre from where she is to be deported to America.
Act III is set in the docks in Le Havre at night. Lescaut tells Des Grieux he has bribed a soldier to help Manon escape and he and Des Grieux go looking for her.
The lovers have a brief, anguished conversation through a window.
Officers are heard approaching. Lescaut appears and warns Des Grieux that the game is up.
Townspeople begin to crowd and stage. The sergeant calls out the names of the women to be deported, Manon amongst them, and they go on board while the chorus comments. Des Grieux begs the ship’s captain to take him too.
Act IV finds Des Grieux and Manon in a desolate place ( Louisiana according to the libretto ). Both are spent but Manon is dying. While he looks for water for her, she sings of her regrets.
When he returns, she tells him how much she loves him and dies.
He slumps over her body.

Tuscany, Ugolino – a Gruesome Tale

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.

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.