The Sacred Forest

 

 

For years, our friend Valerio Trufelli had a photo in his shop...his then four-year-old daughter Anna standing in the mouth of a huge stone scupture.

The sculpture, Valerio told us, was in a park full of sculptures both fanciful and grotesque.  There was nothing else quite like it.

 So when some friends from Siena asked us if we wanted to take a field trip with them, we jumped at the chance.  Carol suggested the Park of the Monsters at Bomarzo...more properly know as "the Sacred Forest."  

It's a collection of 38 basalt sculptures carefully placed along a winding path through a 7-1/2 acre forest packed with creatures from mythology and literature.

 

Wait a minute!  This doesn't look at all like any Italian art we've seen before.  Whose idea was this, and how did it get here?

 

 

 

This all started with Pier Francesco Orsini.  The Orsini are one of the great noble families from Rome, dating back to the 12th century and boasting 34 Cardinals and three Popes.

Pier Francesco spent his teenage years being tutored in the classics and contemporary literature.  In 1546, he joins the army Holy Roman Emperor to fight in the religious wars and is taken prisoner.  When finally released, he retires to Bomarzo.  After years of conflict with the Colonnas, another Roman family of equal status, he secures the property for his forest.  He dedicated the park to his late wife, a member of the noble Farnese clan.

 

This is the era of the High Renaissanc, typified by the portrait at the right. 

 The fantastical and grotesque forms Orsini had in mind for his sculpture garden stand in stark contrast to the prevailing fashion of his day.  To fulfill his vision, he hired Pirro Ligorio, the architect who worked on St. Peter's Basilica in Rome after the death of Michaelangelo. 

The sculptures at Bomarzo proved groundbreaking, transforming into stone the style of frescos found in Nero's villa.  They became immensely popular among the upper classes in Italy.

 

 

Let's start with the grotesque.  Here, a dragon slays a lion...a direct reference to a scene from the epic poem Orlando Furioso, which was one of the great literary achievements of Orsini's time and is still mandatory reading for today's high school students.

The purpose of Ligorio's sculptures was not to please the viewers but to astonish them.

From the same poem, the hero Orlando has just been spurned by his beloved Angelica.  He crosses paths with a poor woodcutter and in an insane rage he dismembers the man.

This statue of Neptune was once a fountain.

Neptune, the god of the sea, was in Roman times also considered the god of the Tiber River...which runs through the valley where Bemarzo is located.

In this sculpture, the goddess Fortune balances on a ball atop a tortoise...symbolizing how precarious good fortune can be.

The tortoise measures more than ten feet long, consistent with the larger-than-life size of most of the pieces in the park.

And here we are with our friends Ellen and Lenny, standing at the most famous of all the sculptures in the park...Hell's Mouth.  It's Orsini's homage to Dante's nine circles of Hell.  The inscription above the door is an intentional misquote of Dante's famous line, "Abandon all hope, ye who enter."

This sculpture is commonly known as the Orc (Ogre), from whence JRR Tolkein got the name for his villains in Lord of the Rings. 

 Unfortunately, this sculpture garden was not well treated by time.  For three centuries it lay abandoned, until just after WW II the Bettini family bought the property and restored it to its present state.

 Who'd think, a small snapshot of a four-year-old girl would open the doors and lead to us discovering something so groundbreaking?

Giro d'Italia 2021

 

 

 

May in Pienza is notable for two things:

 

 

The wild poppies are in full bloom.

...And Carol wears her pink hat to celebrate the Giro d' Italia.

The Giro is one of three grand tours on the professional bike racing circuit.  Grand tours are three week races...twenty-one days of racing, covering 3,500 Km (2,100 miles).

 

The closest this year's Giro got to Pienza was 9Km away (6 mi), passing by the town of San Querico D'Orcia.

This day's stage started in Perugia and finished in Montalcino.  It was notable for the four stretches of gravel road and the final stretch through the heart of Brunello wine vinyards.

 

Carol and Roger camped out at the mid-way point of the race just outside the medieval walls of San Quirico.

In past years, they had to rent a car, drive for hours just to get to the race, and then had to fight the crowds at the finish line.  They had to get there hours early just to wedge in between the thousands of other race fans and then wait, and wait, and wait for the few seconds the racers took to sprint past.

This year was much better.  Carol walked a popular hiking trail to San Querico.  Roger rode his bike.

 

 

 

 

By early the morning of the race road closure signs we up everywhere.

 

 Along the race route itself, the organizers had put up directions to make sure none of the riders took a wrong turn.

 

Roger and Carol met up in San Querico's main piazza, and found a great restaurant, where they had a leisurely lunch.

There, they met an American from Poughkeepsie, who played in a Milan chamber orchestra for 40 years and now runs the San Querico Summer Music Festival.

This was proving to be a much better way to see the Giro.

Instead of waiting for hours along the race course, we sauntered right to the perfect spot a few minutes before the race was scheduled to pass.  Carol and Roger knew the spot well.  It was right near the top of a steep rise approaching town.  

 

We knew it was a good place to wait, because the Lotto-Soudal team van was right behind us, ready to hand out fresh water to their riders as they crested the hill.

It's always easy to tell when the race is approaching.  The referee's car, with flags flying, pass by a few hundred meters ahead of the leading racers.

Less than a minute later, here comes Testa di Corsa...the lead group of racers.  Notice the front rider with the water bottle.  He's from Lotto-Soudal.  As soon as he passed us, he flipped aside his water bottle and grabbed a fresh one from the driver of the team van pictured above.

It's a common tactic in bike racing for a small group of riders to break away from the peloton...called la fuga (the escape) in Italian...and get far enough ahead that main body of racers, who are trying to pace themselves for the sprint finish, can't catch up.

The tactic rarely works.  But today it did.  The break-away group eventually stretched its advantage to 10 minutes and produced a stage winner in Swiss rookie Mauro Schmid.

After what seemed like a long wait, the peloton blew past.  Nobody seemed to be breathing hard.  When Roger rides this stretch of road, he's gasping for breath as he reaches the top of this rise.

 

One great thing about this spot, though.  Never have Carol and Roger been this close to a professional bike race!  It was a thrill.

For those of you wondering, race leader Egan Bernal finished two minutes behind the day's winner...but added half a minute to his lead over his main competitors.

The question of the day was, who was that bald guy taking photos of the approaching peloton?

Ercolani

When Mt. Vesuvius blew it's top in 79 AD, Pompeii got buried under 14' of volcanic ash.

But Pompeii was not the only town to get destroyed. 

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A day after Pompeii, the seaside resort of Ercolano (Herculaneum) got buried by a wall of lava and mud moving at 50 mph.  Geologists estimate the thermoplastic flow measured 950º F and instantly killed everything in its path.

Because of the difference in the ways the Pompeii and Ercolano were destroyed, what archeologists have discovered is different in each town.

The green swath of grass in this photo used to be the Mediterranean shore.

The gray wall is the depth of the lava and mud that buried Ercolano.

To give a sense of scale, on the left hand side of the picture is an arch in the wall.  Those little specs in the arch are people.

The lava and mud were so hot, they instantly burned all the oxygen out of the air.  Any wood in instantly carbonized.

Wooden items, like this door lintel, turned to charcoal.  The lava quickly encased and sealed everything, preventing it from decay.  Consequently, much more was preserved than in Pompeii.

Like this fresco....

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...or this mosaic (note the white clam shells that border the bottom of the mosaic).

At Ercolano, you get a much better sense of what peoples' homes looked like and how they lived.

Many homes were in multi-story apartment buildings.

Painted plaster covered nearly every wall or column.

Mosaics on the floors, explained what the room was used for.....in this case the women's public bath.

Kitchens in the home were very small.

Only the very prosperous had "Banquet Rooms" in which to eat their meals.

But fast food restaurants that served stews and porridges were on nearly every street corner.

The town gymnasium had been one of the largest buildings in town.  Its entrance was amid what must once have been a beautiful colonnade.

Ride With A View

One of our favorite events each Spring is L'Eroica...an amateur bike race restricted to classic bicycles built before 1987.  It covers 153 Km (96 miles) over mostly unpaved roads

This year's race was promoted as "Ride with a View."

This morning, the actual view of the Val d'Orcia wasn't quite as advertised.

As the racers pulled into Pienza, it was evident what riding on a rainy morning on dirt roads was like.

And this was only about a quarter of the way through the day's course.

Of course, a glass of red wine...at 9:30 in the morning...makes things more tolerable.




Classic bike collectors came from across Europe for today's race.  We spoke to two Brits and an American who had come down from Geneva to participate.

This was Roger's favorite bike, built before derailleurs were invented by Tullio Campagnolo in the 1930's.



On this bike, you changed gears by removing the rear wheel and turning it around.  It had one gear on each side of the axle, one for the flats and one for climbing hills.


....which there were plenty of.

Una Avventura nell L'Ospedale

On Thursday, May 11th Roger went for a bike ride, one he's done dozens of times before.  As he neared home in Pienza, he hit the climb called "Rampino Val d'Orcia" (Ramp up the Valley of the Orcia).  With 3.3 km left to go, he started to feel really punky, so he did something he's done only once in his life before...got off the bike and walked.  By the time he reached his apartment in Pienza, he was so light headed he could no longer walk, his face was covered in a sheet of sweat, and his breath was coming in racking gasps.

Next day, when the town doctor's office opened at 5:00pm, he went and sat (for over an hour), waiting his turn to see the doctor.  He got a thorough exam...and was instructed to go directly to the regional hospital in Nottola, about 18 km away.  We got there about 8:00pm and went directly to the emergency room (called Pronto Soccorso in Italy).  We were triaged promptly and then sat for more than two hours before a nurse came and got Roger.

This is where the real adventure began.

Roger immediately got an EKG and was diagnosed with auricular arrhythmia...an irregular heartbeat. The cardiologist said he would have to be admitted and undergo further tests.  It was well after midnight when the cardiologist performed the ultrasound that confirmed the arrhythmia and 2:00am before he got situated in the cardiac ward.  The nurses were great; they brought pillows and a blanket for Carol, so she could sleep what was left of the night on a nearby couch.  Before they let Roger try to get some sleep, they performed another EKG.

Bright and far too early the next morning, Carol left for Chiusi to pick up a last-minute rental car.  Minutes after she left, a second cardiologist came by for a consult.  Based on the EKG, she said Roger needed atrial fibrillation...but before they could do that they had to scope the interior of his heart (called transesophageal ecocardiography) to make sure there was no coagulated blood lurking there to precipitate a stroke.

Note that Roger was not offered any options.  He was told this is what they were going to do.  But he first had to sign a permission that the cardiologist explained exempted them from liability if anything went amiss.  He was administered anesthetic, and when he woke up the cardiologist told him the results of the heart scan were inconclusive.  She was calling in a gastroenterologist to repeat the procedure.

An hour later, the GI doc arrived and explained how his scan would be different.  Then, more anesthetic and when Roger woke up a second time, the cardiologist was smiling.  She said the scan went fine, so they went ahead and the shock to the heart.  That corrected the irregular heartbeat....as confirmed by yet another EKG.

Roger had to stay another night in the hospital for observation, but if all went well he would would be cleared to go home the next day.  After an uncomfortable night, he had a fourth EKG, a second consult with the first cardiologist, and was released from the hospital....tired and sore but with a clean bill of health.

Let's review the bidding here....

• an ER visit
• a heart ultrasound
• blood tests
• four different EKG's
• two anesthesias
• consults with two different cardiologists
• consult with a gastroenterologist
• two scopes of the heart
• the electric shock to correct the heartbeat
• two nights in the hospital's cardiac ward

In the USA, the bill would be how many tens of thousands of dollars?

At the Nottola Regional Hospital the bill was 124€ ($132.33 at the current exchange rate).  Here's the bill:

To be fair, everybody realizes there's no way a health care system can sustain itself by providing that many services for so little money.  The Italian health care system is supported by a tax on income (separate from the hated and oft-evaded general income tax)...the rate slides depending on total income.  For example: a family earning 100,000€ per year would pay 4,900€ to support the healthcare system.  How does that compare to what you...or your employer...pays for your health insurance?

One final point:  In its last ratings of national health care systems, the World Health Organization ranked the Italian health system second of 192 nations (behind only France) at delivering effective health care.  The USA placed 37th.

Ringraziamento (Thanksgiving In Pienza)

Thanksgiving is a quintessential American holiday.  Here in Italy, most people have heard of it, but they don't what it's all about.

I walked into La Posta, my favorite bar in Pienza, this morning for an espresso just as the Italian version of the Today Show was running a story on preparations for the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade.


I was peppered with questions about why Thanksgiving was such a bid deal, since it was nothing more than a department story promotion for Christmas toy sales.

This, then, is the average Italian's understanding of American Thanksgiving.

This is our first Thanksgiving spent in Pienza, and we decided to invite friends over for a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner.


The local macelleria (butcher shop) does not normally sell whole turkeys.

But Marco was more than happy to special order us one.

The big question was, did we want a tom or a hen?

When the turkey arrived, the tag...the part in English...made it perfectly clear who was going to buy whole turkeys.

From perusing the local grocery store last Spring, we knew cranberries were not available in Pienza.  In fact, in Italian cranberries are called "mirtilli rosso," red blueberries.

So, we brought cranberries with us from Seattle.
(Nobody said this wouldn't take advance planning.)

The big question was whether our tiny oven was big enough to hold the 6.8 kg (15 lb) turkey we purchased.



Had the turkey been one kilogram bigger...there would have been no way.

The apple pie presented another challenge.  Pies are not part of Italian cuisine (The closest thing is a crostata), so a pie plate is impossible to find.

Carol made due with a rectangular baking dish.

Then there's the conversion...pounds to kilograms and degrees fahrenheit to celsius.

Does it matter, since the oven thermometer reads a different temperature than the dial on the oven's controls?

There was considerable risk things wouldn't turn out.

But it all did.

Our guests arrived, perhaps a bit anxious about having a meal with neither pasta nor cheese.

But they soon got into the swing of things....

...like inventing new ways to eat cranberry sauce.

Italians rarely pick up food, other than bread, in their hands to eat.  (For instance, they wrap a cornetto...a croissant...in a napkin before picking it up).

Anna started out trying to eat the drumstick with a knife and fork.  She had to be prodded into eating with her hands.

Eventually, she got into it and thoroughly enjoyed the turkey leg.

We needn't have worried about whether our friends would accept these strange American foods.

All had seconds.  Everybody belonged to the Clean Plate Club, thereby making them eligible for dolce (the apple pie).

So......

If you think uninitiated Italians find the concept of Thanksgiving alien, how did they ever come up with this?