Arezzo - 30 April - Eremo Natura Il Giglione

Today I am writing this from my little room "La Grotta" the Grotto, at Eremo Natura Il Giglione, a BandB, on the Arezzo side of the hills between Arezzo and Sansepolcro. This is a very beautiful place, run by two very kind and simpatico people, Marzia and Antonio. The farm was abandoned in the 1960s, when many Italians left the land and moved to the cities, as they could no longer make a living from farming and the life was very primitive. Toni bought the farm and restored it bit by bit. It has the feeling of a mountain hermitage, but is only 15 minutes from Arezzo. The forest is regenerating oak and juniper (no chestnuts, Marzia says the soil is not acid enough). Toni and Marzia have several vegetable gardens, fruit trees, chickens and rabbits. Terraces are made of pietramala, called "bad stone" because it layers and shatters. 

The little self contained cottage.

Where would Tuscan cooking be without garlic?

My breakfast in the sun

Arezzo from the piazza of the Cathedral

Arezzo Cathedral - beautiful  Romanesque church

Gorgeous views from the city walls at the top of the town.

The town square of Arezzo.

Antique shop in Arezzo. The town is known throughout Italy for its antique fairs.

Orchid from the Eremo. There are many orchids here, it's like a little nature refuge. More pics below.

Toni and Marzia - lovely, lovely people. They met me at the station in Arezzo, cooked for me, took me back for sightseeing to the town, then put me on the right bus on my last morning.

Marzia is so tiny beside me. She has amazing energy; when I first arrived she took me around the property, up hill and dale. 

Toni's artistic tap-stand

Old terrace wall left over from the days of farming

Marzia cooked wild asparagus for dinner tonight. It's quite strong tasting, and looks unlike the garden variety, kind of a wiry bush which looks like a broom plant. The shoots look like a very thin garden asparagus, I would never have identified it as asparagus if I'd seen it growing.

My room

The amazing wash-basin! The rock wall is the original back wall of the building, which was built into a natural cliff. My room is underneath the main house, probably where the animals were kept in winter (but much more comfortable now). 

I really like Arezzo. It reminds me of my own city, not for any physical reason, but for the obvious pride that the citizens have in their town and their province (other New Zealanders call us One-eyed Cantabrians, such is our parochialistic fervour). Arezzo also suffered a devastating earthquake. In February 1796 a series of terrible earthquakes terrified the population, in the midst of Carnevale celebrations. The festival became a time of mourning and penance, and fires raced through the devastated city. After a miraculous intervention by the Virgin Mary, a chapel was set up in the Cathedral, dedicated to the Madonna del Conforto, the Madonna of Comfort. It is a beautiful chapel (I didn't take a picture of it as there were people praying there) and I found the story very touching, having been through a similar experience and remembering how we all needed comfort at that time.

Steampunky stuff

I've spent the last few days on a steampunk costume. We're having a Steampunk Runway at the library where I work. The idea came from some of my colleagues as a way of having an event that was for young adults, as we seem to have so many that are child-oriented.  I've got a bit sucked into it, always having a liking for historical costume, but this has a fantasy element as well, and does not have to be historically correct, thank the Goddess. It's a hard thing to define, steampunk; it's what the future would have been like if it had happened in the Victorian era. (Google it). There's steampunk literature, music, clothing and jewellery, a sort of subset of cosplay I guess. I've aimed to do it on the cheap, using things that are around the house or that I already have that can be altered.

Cheap plastic hat from Spotlight, hopefully will look more like a top hat with a paint job of matt black.

Bits of jewellery I already own, combined with copper wire to make

this not-so-unconvincing steampunk brooch.

I used wire a lot, in case I want to take the stuff apart at a later date.

Clothing I already have. These need a bit of tweaking to get the right feel. The beautiful skirt was rescued from the cheap rack at my local secondhand store. It's Laura Ashley, it was only $15.00! and such beautiful fabric. The black is a velvet jacket that I rarely wear now, and the green silk scarf I bought in India. It's a bit faded now as I used it as a door curtain, but I hope to make it into a sort of steampunk cummerbund.

Detail of the brooch - fake cameo woman trapped in spider's copper wire toils. The cameo has a lot of holes in its design, easy for attaching other bits and pieces.

This is going to be a hat ornament for the front of my top hat. Old sewing machine bulb, picture hanging wire, copper wire and brass curtain rings.

Lucky me, I kept all of Mum's sewing stuff. Hooks and eyes, elastic, bias binding and a ton of needles, and a lot of old bits and pieces like wire and curtain hardware, all useful for this sort of thing. I've still got to do the sewing/tweaking for my clothes, which does freak me out a bit as I am no seamstress.

My persona for the event is Lady Mary Wortley-Bollinger, an aristocratic plant-hunter and explorer. "The first European woman to penetrate the 'dark canyon' of the Tsangpo river, Lady Mary discovered the fabulous Red Flame Dragon Flower, previously thought to be entirely mythical. The plant now bears her name, as Rhododendron bollingerii. Armed only with her hat pins and her modified pruning shears (patents pending) her travels have provided us with many wonderful plants to enrich our parks and gardens".

(From Hansen's Modern Directory of the Great and the Good, 18--)

Sansepolcro - 28 April

Very quiet here. It's Monday, so many shops and restaurants are closed. It's also raining, but never mind, there's still things to see.

Went today to the Cathedral, San Giovanni Evangelista, one of the few churches I've seen yet that is still in its Romanesque form. The church has several noteworthy artworks. The most important item here is a rare crucifix called the Volto Santo (Sacred Face) which dates from the 9th century. Unusually, it portrays Jesus as fully clothed. It was used for many centuries as a processional cross at Easter celebrations, but after authorities became aware of how rare an item it is (wooden things are very destructible) it was restored and given a special side chapel.

Unusually, the windows of the church are made of thin slices of alabaster, not glass.

Two very fine della Robbia terracotte of St. Benedict and St. Biagio.

A 14th century Madonna and Child in stone 

The apse and altar. There's something about Romanesque simplicity that I really like.

The adjoining cloister has been walled in, and now forms part of the civic offices, but there are some frescoes of the life of St. Benedict. One of Benedict's miracles was finding a missing pruning-hook that had been dropped into a pond. It seems a very prosaic miracle, but rather touching for all that; no doubt the pruning-hook was quite expensive and the only one the monks had.

 There is a little chapel here in the cloister built over the original shrine that gave Sansepolcro (Sacred Sepulchre) its name. The shrine houses a fragment of Christ's tomb, brought back from the Holy Land by two pilgrims, Arcano and Egidio. A community grew up around the shrine, including several monasteries attracted by the flow of pilgrims to the site. Permission was given for a Saturday market by the local big-wig, and this, combined with the rich pastures and forests surrounding the area, set Sansepolcro up as a viable little town. It also occupied a prime position on the route from Florence to Rome, the old Via Roma.
  Sansepolcro became famous for its woad production, the blue dye a cheaper alternative to costly indigo. The town is also the home of dried pasta. In 1828, Giulia Boninsegni and Giovanni Buitoni, husband and wife pasta-makers, had the idea of drying pasta to be reconstituted later, and a whole new industry was born.
  A fascinating town and well worth a stay of a few days.

Bits and pieces

It's been a very cold couple of days here, I've hardly stirred from the house except to get groceries and flea treatment for Thomas. We're going to try a new one, hopefully that will not make him crazy with the smell as did Frontline and Advantage. So tomorrow is the big day and I'm bracing myself for the heart-rending behaviour that will no doubt follow. Poor Thom, it's tough having fleas, even tougher getting rid of them.
     I did go out and pick some violets, that's them in the little glass vase in the picture. I also picked some hellebores which promptly drooped. The trick to stopping this is (as I found from the Internet) to re-cut them under water. Apparently an air-bubble forms when you cut them off the plant, so the water in the vase can't get up to the flower. They are nice and perky now.
    The decluttering is going on apace. The spare room is full of stuff that must now be delivered to the Sallies or taken to recycling. Finally getting rid of stuff of Mum's that I've felt too guilty to dispose of, even some really old stuff like the ex-husband's presents to me (two books, the very rare times he bothered to give me a birthday present at all, apart from a punching-bag (?) and a perfume that he ended up wearing himself!!!!), and a book of mine that he had re-bound and ruined. I don't know why I kept them, probably because I was afraid of being "over-sensitive" about material objects, (he always accused me of being over-sensitive, classic bullying behaviour) but these things still cause me pain when I look at them, so out they go.
   Painful stuff going on at work at the moment, too. Someone has written an anonymous letter to the Big Boss complaining about the Little Bosses, so now there's a witch-hunt on to discover the miscreant. I wish the writer hadn't done this, because now we're all under suspicion. (No, it wasn't me, even though I am a potty-mouthed underachiever; just between you and me, I don't care enough to give myself the trouble of writing an anonymous letter and creating all the fallout therefrom among my colleagues, all of whom I like and don't wish to distress. And I still need the job, because I need the money). Sigh.
  Next post, I'll take you back to Sansepolcro, then on to Arezzo to a wonderful couple on an organic B&B (my favourite stay). Then I'll finish my trip with a visit to the Franciscan sanctuary of La Verna, a very beautiful and special place. (I've just had an on-line argument with someone about St. Francis, my opponent castigated Francis for being a "self-indulgent madman", and the contemplative life as a complete waste of time. One of those bloody extroverts, no doubt, a "don't just sit there, do something, even if it is quite useless, at least you can say you're busy" types.) I never thought I'd be sticking up for a Catholic saint, but there I am, and no one is more surprised than me!

Sansepolcro - 27 April

Here in my room at a BnB called Relais Palazzo Magi, an old palace redecorated. Huge bed as you can see. It's Sunday afternoon in Sansepolcro, it's very quiet. Most of the locals are inside finishing Sunday lunch and preparing for the afternoon snooze (or already snoozing). I've had a magnificent meal of roast duck (the best meal I've ever had) at a great restaurant here, Osteria Toscana Borgo Antico, http://www.osteriaborgoantico.it/ so I'll be doing as the Sansepolcrini do in a few minutes.

Went to see the Piero della Francesca Resurrection at the Museo Civico this morning. It really is magnificent, and I've wanted to see it for a long time, but never been in the vicinity of Sansepolcro before. I love the expression on his face, no namby-pamby Jesus this. It's also the only known depiction of the resurrected Christ who wears a pink robe (all the others are white), to symbolise the new dawn of Christianity. Piero's altarpiece of the Madonna della Misericordia is here too. Sadly the original surround is long gone, but all the paintings have been found and brought back together. This was a common fate with altarpieces; as they depicted different saints or scenes they were broken up and sold during the internecine wars so common in Renaissance times or dispersed to other churches quite easily. 

Here's Piero's house

There's a fascinating museum here called the Aboca Museum, a museum of  apothecary and the medicinal use of herbs. Smells wonderful. So much equipment for distilling, drying and harvesting, it was a big industry here in Tuscany, which grows herbs so well.

Needing glass for retorts, metal for boiling, baskets and tins for storing, the apothecary's art supported a whole lot of other industries too. Now we have huge ugly factories to do the work.

The majolica  storage jars are particularly beautiful

Weird alembic for distilling

Next door, and leaning against the wall of the Museum is the church of San Rufino

Statue of Piero in the little park across the street from his house.

This is a sculpture outside the lace-making museum. Sansepolcro is famed for its handmade lace. (Sadly the museum was closed both days I was here)

The gate to Florence. There is another gate at the other end of the historical city which leads to Rome.

My room is accessed through the billiard room. 

Sansepolcro is a pleasant town, not touristy, a town you could live in.  This part of Tuscany is beautiful, hilly and wooded, with cultivated river plains, very green now in the springtime. I came through on the bus from Arezzo yesterday, past Anghiari, another magnificent little town. Saw two wild boar just outside Anghiari, there are many in the forests here. Never seen them before, so that was a plus. More Sansepolcro tomorrow.