Posts by giovanni tiso
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'So, y'all have Christmas in July?'
I was asked this month by two separate and equally intelligent persons whether in NZ we called the northern winter months "winter" or "summer".
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re: Colin Powell - while generally agreeing with you, I personally find it very difficult to forgive him for the part he played in the run-up to the current Iraqi mess.
Undoubtedly, although he was not the hawk in that particular room.
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If it comes out any good, I'll hand-deliver.
Hah! You, sir, are a living legend.
I'd like to cook more international food, but often I'm just lacking somebody to tell me if a given dish Tastes The Way That It's Supposed To Taste... I guess that could be my job here.
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I'm on a big Piccioni kick at the moment.
I have absolutely no idea who that is. And I know, I could Google it but why not ask you to enlighten me instead?
(I didn't buy a single CD while I was there, which is just shameful)
Can I recommend, if your mother/grandmother etc is too old for the writing, that sitting down with them and looking through photographs with a tape recorder running is a valuable resource.
She's not up to that either, really, although we did have the odd snippet of conversation, the gist of which I duly wrote down. A couple of reitred family friends are getting high school students to do the very thing you're talking about with old folks in resthomes, and the interviews are being recorded and archived for a history of the province of Crema. A lovely project, they gave me some of the printed materials to take home.
Isn't Ferarra in the Dolomites?
No, smack in the middle of the Pianura Padana, along the Po river. Although by that stage the Po water does include some dolomitic water. But, more importantly...
I'm having a crack at the bread this weekend.
How did it go?!
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Local water as a key ingredient - I've just bought a ginger beer plant from the US, and the instructions on that say not to use chlorinated tap water as it interferes with the yeast growth. It's not something I've ever considered in making either bread or ginger beer, but it seems logical given chlorine's effect on other organisms.
That's very good to know, but in terms of this bread the water in Ferrara would have changed quite a bit since early last century, though, and was probably chlorinated at times, if it isn't so to this day (I don't know that). Plus for all we know, the key ingredient might in fact be a local poison... But I'm inclined to think it's all myth circulated by the local bakers and that it ought to be possible to make it anywhere, once the art has been mastered.
My mum is currently writing the story of her childhood for my kids. It's the most wonderful thing and is bringing us all enormous joy.
I bet, your kids are very lucky. Mum is past such endeavours, she toyed with the idea a while ago but it was all a bit too much.
Venice brought back memories.
Like my lovely wife commenting:
"Isn't it nice how all these men have brought their daughters to visit this place"
Heh! I would have brought my actual young daughter too, but she's second cousin to godzilla and I harboured fears for the city's survival.
and the music!
Luigi Tenco (arr. Ennio Morricone), "Quello che conta", 1962
That's indeed very lovely, Tenco's own personal story is even saddder than that song sounds. But you really, really, really don't want to get me started on the music. Suffice to say that, since we loathe most kids music, we're raising the children on a steady diet of old Milanese cabaret songs, many of which have decidedly adult themes - but then of course if they sing them around the place nobody understands them so the bad parenting doesn't register.
A few years ago I visited Israel. I remember my Dad pointing out that some area was named after the plain where David fought Goliath. And then we both realised, it WAS the plain where David fought Goliath.
I cannot begin to understand what that must feel like, sacrality adds a whole other layer. Sometimes I'd like to believe in the relevant religions just so I could take the communion, or be part of the rebuilding of the Ise shrine. But I don't, and the Jewish cultural kinship - which I greatly admire - isn't available to me either. A European atheist perhaps can draw some inspiration from standing on the acropolys, or in campo dei fiori where they burnt Giordano Bruno.
I'm due to leave the country in the morning, although they scheduled almost every strike possible (buses, trains, the very airport we're using) - but I think we'll manage. At any rate, I'd like to thank everyone for the very kind comments, to which I haven't responded except in the form of private blushing. I'll be back in New Zealand in three days and by the time I touch down the trip is going to feel like a distant memory - as it always does. -
I may have misunderstood the sacrament but holy crap you met Jesus in Hastings?
We did stay at the Fantasyland Motel, but I don't think it was a vision. Plus I believe Jesus turned water into wine, not wine into bread. Had he done the latter, he would have been kicked out of the venue I would think.
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Can I just take the opportunity to thank Russell for suggesting that I post this here? Sharing the trip with you all has been a thrill.
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I have to add a post scriptum, something I have just learned after visting mum's village, near Mantua, the grandmother patch from my first post two weeks ago, which is also where my father is buried. Dad died less than two years after Justine and I moved to New Zealand, and mum visited us a year later. I suspect she embarked on that adventure mostly on his behalf, since he had been the keener of the two, and during her stay she wasn't often kind to my adopted land, lamenting especially its lack of old stuff, which she exasperatingly equated with 'lack of culture'. And yet she now tells me that she picked up a native rock before leaving, so that she could put it alongside my dad's urn when it was moved next to her parents to its final resting place.
I find it very touching, all the more given her decidedly mixed feelings towards New Zealand. And it must have been quite an adventure for the rock, too.
I wonder if a history function is part of Streetview's design?
Not as far as I can tell, thus far at least. I've fantasised in the past about setting one up, when GPS cellphones become more common. You could have a forum where people know to take pictures of a given place at such and such coordinates, facing, say East, and then upload them. Some vistas would never change, others would change with relative frequency, is my guess.
I bought this great book at the mission sale in Wellington last year, a cameracolour photo book of Venice from the 1960s. The pictures are fantastic and they could have been taken yesterday, except for what the people in them are wearing.
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Speaking of photography, it's been a recent hobby of mine to collect a digital photo essay of Wellington's evolving cityscape, for better or worse.
Streetview is a fine idea, but a Streetview in time would be great.
She said the drawers were chock full of rubber bands, short lengths of used brown parcel string and suchlike.
Ah, yes, there was a ritual after Christmas at nonna's of neatly folding the wrapping paper and sorting out the ribbon that I greatly enjoyed. I wonder if it's depression era upbringing of something more deep rooted than that, though, in Italy at least I suspect that whatever time or relative (urban) wealth there had been was the deviation from the norm. I was sharing some numbers with our frugal friends just the other day, from what is now one of the richest farming areas in the country: in 1922, a male farm labourer earned 2.4 liras per day; a woman and a child doing the same work earned 1.2 liras per day. A kilo of sugar cost 2.6 liras.
I don't mean that in a Yorkshireman-like spirit of competition. As I think Umberto Eco might have pointed out once, when farmers got rid of their beautiful bread chests to replace them with formica cupboards, to the horror of the urbanised middle class, they thought they were (finally) upgrading to something new and easy to clean. Getting rid of some of the old stuff must have been to some extent liberating, and although I'm glad my grandparents never felt that way it might have something to do with the fact that they were (relatively) better off.
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Although when I say Danielle I mean Robyn. See the other thread...