MAREMOTO

In these last days of 2004, while everyone is waxing philosophical about the old year and making (probably) futile promises for the new year, there is a tragedy in our daily news that supercedes everything.
Southwest Asia, especially Thailand and the Maldives, is a place most Italians think of as a winter paradise. Distance wise, it is about what Mexico is to the northern US, heading due south into the equator. It is economical and there is a good infrastructure geared toward tourists. We see ads for the area all of the time. Thus for Christmas break, many Italians pack their bags and head south.
When the mammoth wave that followed the huge earthquake the day after Christmas (called a “Maremoto” in Italian) washed away thousands and flattened whole islands, we immediately saw photos of it. The TV and papers are full of eyewitness Italian accounts. Celebrities were vacationing all over the area, and all now seem to be accounted for. Not so lucky are the thousands of Italian tourists who, having escaped the wave, now wait for rescue to come from somewhere in the Italian government, since regularly scheduled planes are all cancelled. There are also stories of those lucky tourists, bringing back only the clothes they wore to the airport, who were able to take off from airport runways full of water.
Dramatic eyewitness accounts are so sad it is almost too much to read and watch them. Because of the incredible force of the water, many too weak to save themselves were lost. That means a big percentage of the dead are children, about a third. Many were swept away swimming or playing on the beach. Hospitals are full to non-functioning, and the threat of epidemics of catastrophic proportions is strong owing to the great number of unburied dead bodies lying about. Looting and the breakdown of civil law are reported in some spots.
One official said that an accurate count of the dead could not be made because so many bodies were still caught up in the branches of trees where they landed when swept away. Some ships at sea reported weathering the giant waves, and others are lost or out of communication. The number of missing grows daily as people realize they have not heard from someone vacationing in some tiny island, such as the one Leonardo Di Capra made famous in Blue Lagoon. That particular island was a thriving tourist spot, but is now no more. It is submerged and may not re-emerge. Travel agencies in Italy are reporting disastrous financial losses, and individuals report that no one will speak to them about refunds for vacations in the area that they did not take yet.
Somehow none of these material considerations seem important when you stop to really think about the vagaries of blind luck, of who was swept away and who survived. The workings of fate are illustrated in story after story. There is one which tells of the one man in a village near the epicenter who got away climbing atop corpses; another of a couple who clung to each other but lost hold of their tiny daughter; or of those on the top floors of a hotel seeing the bottom floors scoured of people and furniture when the wave hit and washed through it. What was it that determined that one should die and one should live?
And maybe this loss could have been minimized. Of course there is the cry for preventive measures. There was a headline today that stated thousands could have been saved. The technology exists in the Pacific Rim: the US and Japan have the ability to give early warnings to the public in case of this type of catastrophe based on scientific instruments. So vacationers could have been told to get to higher ground, to leave the warm noonday beaches and flee. I wonder if they all would have. I wonder how many could have been saved. And I especially wonder how those that did survive will live the rest of their lives, with the knowledge that they were somehow chosen to live while so many others died.

OMNASTICO

Today is Saint Stephan's day, Steve's saint's day, or Omnastico. He has received phone calls and gifts, and Paolo brought over a tremendous citron just now, with promises that he would make a graft on my citron tree from this tree of giants! Paolo also brought a bag of lemons, so now I can make lemoncello.

CHRISTMAS 2004

We have had a very quiet day, and we have heard from quite a lot of folks both here and in the states. The sirocco winds have started up so it is guaranteed warm for a spell (60s at night, 70’s by day). No snow in this part of Sicily (ever!). Wishing you and yours a wonderful joyous Christmas.

PALERMOII-ARCHEOLOGICAL MUSEUM, TEATRO MAXIMO

We spent a lot of time at the A. Salinas museum, and we would recommend it to anyone who likes the Greek and Roman antiquities of Italy and Greece. I especially wanted to see the hangings from the temples at Selinunte and Segesta, and I was thrilled to finally see some of them. The rest of them are scattered around the world in other museums. A good part of what the Italians have managed to hang on to is now more or less displayed in regional museums, although there is a great display of Etruscan antiquity bought from a private buyer from northern Italy. No doubt someday attempts will succeed in returning this patrimony to its original area. Of course this is a worldwide problem: the Byzantine treasures in Venice sacked from Turkey, all of the Italian masterpieces in the Louvre in Paris, the Egyptian temple of Dender at the Met in New York City, American Indian art treasures in various museums. Anyway…
There was a school group there watching a movie that I peeked at and that movie was the first place where I saw the panels from the temples at Selinunte. They are hanging in a large room and they are just wonderful to look at. Pictures do not do them justice, but I have tried. There are many other treasures there, but that was the highlight for me.
The Teatro Maximo has wonderful acoustics. The operas there are probably heavenly, but we are not opera fans so will probably not go out of our way to see one. We could have gone to an Italian version of “The Three Penny Opera,” but I did not think I could bear hearing “Mack the Knife” in Italian. Anyway, our nights filled with social commitments, so we went to daytime performances, again with school kids. We sat in the wonderful opera house and could not believe the chorus and orchestra that gave an hour performance for the few hundred people there. I think there were more people onstage than in the audience! Later we attended another performance of strings in a side saloon that was a bit deteriorated but charming. These concerts during the day are sponsored by the government arts branch and it is certainly money well spent.

CHRISTMAS IN PALERMO I

We have just returned from three exhausting days in Palermo. We saw friends, shopped, went to museums and concerts, and wandered the streets of the city taking pictures and taking in the sights.
We stayed at Giusy and Lili’s mother’s apartment in the near suburbs and took city buses everything. The first day we had pranzo at Melito and Giusy’s apartment and got to see her house, tree, and presepe. Then the next day we went to the other Giusy and Franco’s apartment for dinner and later got together with the Giusy-Melito whole family to see a concert of traditional Sicilian folk songs with traditional instruments in the gorgeous church if Saint Carmine in one of the poorest sections of Palermo, the Ballaro market section. And last night we got together with Angelo and Francesca and their friends and family for an exhausting dinner for twelve at a pizza restaurant that overlooked the city of Palermo. It was a spectacular view at night.
By day we saw incredible archeological treasures at the A. Salinas regional archeological museum. The Greek and Roman ruins from Selinunte and Segesta in our area, as well as Gela, Himera, Solunto, Tindari, and various other smaller excavation sites, were fascinating. I always tell people there are better Greek ruins in Sicily than in Greece, and now that we have seen the major museums, I would say that the treasures removed from them are just as amazing. We also got to see several short classical concerts daytime concerts with school children in the Teatro Massimo, which can be seen in the last scene of The Godfather 3. What an amazing venue!
Here then some scenes from the last three days.

RAINSTORM

We came home to two beautiful days of weather in which we got our laundry dried and settled down to the rest of the winter weather. Here that means wind, rain, and temperatures from the 50’s to the 70’s. And we got it all in one day! Between yesterday and today, there was a huge amount of rain, and the sky and sea changed color every minute. But at least we were away from those pesky sirocco winds that blew for a whole week at the beginning of the month.
The sea gets pretty murky with the sand and earth that gets washed into it, and the problems with rockslides and mud are universal. We walked over to inspect Paolo’s wall, and saw that the section that he did not reinforce is now cracking and coming down. And three “road dogs” came out to bark at us as we tried to move the boulder that fell from a hillside out of the middle of the road. The weather has gone back and forth all day and we have only managed to sight one partial rainbow. The lighting does get pretty dramatic at times, though.
But-it’s not snow and ice! Enjoy your weather today and appreciate that it is all kind of nasty wherever you spend your winter.

I FORGOT MY CAMERA!

Yes, we have a check list of things we have to do before we leave the house. And yes, we include all of the important things in there. But putting my camera in my pocketbook just never struck me as a thing I had to have in writing.
So these pictures are really bad. They were taken with a throw away camera developed on a disc. Bad!! It really was that dark and gloomy though. But they do not do any of the atmosphere of Amsterdam justice. I got an overall impression that it is the most “European” city we had ever visited, in terms of stereotypes of places that I have in my mind. For example, the train station is a most satisfying train station. It is not like the others I have seen and used, like the Gare de Nord in Paris, which is busy and 50’s looking, the Venice train station (which does have showers and haircuts [I got one] in the toilette area), and the modern and American looking Frankfort Germany station. In Rome, Naples, and Palermo, the stations are just the pits, so we do not even need to discuss them.
Every aspect of the canals of Amsterdam is fascinating. The leaning buildings and the art deco facades give it as much interest as Barcelona and Florence or Venice architecturally. Yes there is Baroque and rococco and much of the overemphasis on the size of the building and its grandeur, just like in Vienna, but not nearly as overwhelming as there, and the scope of the ornateness was concentrated mainly around the Dam, the government buildings and the royal palace. I think the tiny size of the area saved it from becoming ugly. In fact I was struck by the sense of style of everything just like I was the first time I was in Paris. The Dutch sense of design is everywhere, and to me, most charming in the way everyday things are designed. I am afraid I spent too much time and money in the kitchen shops, but I just could not get enough of affordable stylish kitchen gadgets. The shopping in general was fabulous and we had a wonderful time dropping into stores and leaving with “incredible” buys. Hey, it’s Christmas time!
As mentioned, in Amsterdam there is a huge problem with space. Since everything must be fit into the small area allotted for transport, pedestrians take a backseat to bikes. You must be very careful about crossing streets or coming into intersections. If the cars or trams don’t get you, the bikes will. Tourists overwhelm the Dutch in their pursuit of everyday life, so there are sometimes problems caused by lack of tolerance. Most of the people we met and talked to were just wonderful. It is a cold northern city that is mostly friendly and appealing to tourists.
The museums are absolutely wonderful. We got to three of them, and saw a good part of the city that way. The Rijksmuseum was my favorite, and most of it is closed for repairs except for one wing. What they did was concentrate in that one show area the master works of art that people would be coming to see anyway. And it was a truly satisfying experience for there was just so much wonderful stuff to see. If you see a lot of Dutch masters like Vermeer or Rembrandt hung, you will look over a room and see splotches of light here and there that represent the artist’s portrayal of light on each of his subjects.
On Sunday we took a train out to Harlaam, and there were no black people and no jazz! This area is about 5 miles from Amsterdam, and on the way, you see suburbs, small villages and farm lands as well as less tourists. The houses were farther apart and the streets wider and it looked like a small European city anywhere on the continent when you got away from the canals. The Christmas Fair in the middle of town was so crowded that we did not attempt to get into it. We watched an old fashioned band, saw Father Christmas, and bought some little pancakes made out on the street in little round grill containers and ate them with butter, powdered sugar, and plastic forks. I laughed and got powdered sugar all over my black coat! Of course!
Roz and Mike did a great job of leading us around the city and showing us all of the things they had discovered before us. Thanks, sis!

A WEEK OF SIROCCOS

We keep ourselves busy with this and that. This week we went for a ride and bought a crate of the tastiest oranges in the world, from Ribera, for $8 Euro. There were about 35 in the crate, and they were so fresh, the leaves were still on all of them. Later in the week, we discovered right in Sciacca one of the two distilleries in Sicily. If you get to try Ceria Birra, you will experience what we bring home in our bottle with corked tops. Sunday night we had the Fabrizio Ricottas for dinner and grilled sausage outside. They were so cute eating their first marshmallows over a fire!
We have survived a warm windy week of Sirocco winds. I can’t say my plants have liked it much, and it does remind me why I have the shrub fence all around the front garden. Besides giving the house the “Secret Garden” look, it keeps the wind off of the plants-usually.
But this constant south wind is gradually getting to things. I brought the Poinsettia plant in yesterday after plants on wheeled holders started sailing across the terrace and landing on their sides. It did not stop me from putting in asparagus, onions, broccoli, and lettuce, but the poor seedlings are buffeted in their little snail collars constantly. And that can’t be good. The snails are not faring well either, and if they did not eat all of my caper plant, maybe I would not be so hateful to them. But I manage to kill a good dozen or so a day since that fateful day I discovered how good it felt to tramp on them by the hundreds in the driveway (see the pictures of their dirty remains). I do worry about the lemon, orange, and citron trees in the wind, and today went out and picked their underdeveloped fruit so that they would not need to use their energy to ripen the fruit. If they can survive this second winter, their root system should be ok to withstand the wind and summer dryness.
We have seen huge eagles playing high up in the wind gusts, too high for a picture. Then we see them soaring down after prey in the fields next door. I used the field glasses and identified them using Peter Debes’ European bird identification book as Bonelli’s eagles (Hieraeetus fasciatus). There is also some kind of heron, who swoops onto sea prey sitting on the rocks at the shore, but he is not as big as the Great Blue Herons in the Adirondacks, and he does not sit still long enough to let me take his picture.
The waves churned up by this wind do not look all that dramatic from our hillside, but they are evident to us. We watch the boats near shore rock up and down until we can feel the seasickness that must set in for the people in them. And the beach is full of debris, unusual in that a bed frame and a mattress don’t usually appear in the same storm. Hmmm.
I normally do not like wind, but I do like warm. And the temperature has not fallen below 65 for a week, which makes life in December very comfortable. But wind makes me uncomfortable and antsy, and I had a migraine the first day of this particular weather group. Guess I’ll just have to get on a plane and meet Roz and Mike in Amsterdam day after tomorrow!