Paolo

Mia in Santa Barbara

Just realised Mia moved to Santa Barbara! The sun is precisely why I loved it.

When Great Trees Fall - Maya Angelou

When Great Trees Fall

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

- Maya Angelou

You Should Get Married in Italy

Thanks for the advice, Rory, maybe one day I will!

Yearning

Italy, with its scenery and its people's life, occupied my soul, and towards this land I felt a yearning. 

from The True Story of My Life: A Sketch by Hans Christian Andersen

The Price

'You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart will always be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for the richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.'

- Miriam Adeney

All Was Sunshine

'All was sunshine - all was spring! The vine hung in long trails from tree to tree; never since have I seen Italy so beautiful. I sailed on Lago Maggiore; ascended the cathedral of Milan; passed several days in Genoa, and made from thence a journey, rich in the beauties of nature, along the shore to Carrara. I had seen statues in Paris, but my eyes were closed to them; in Florence, before the Venus de Medici, it was for the first time as if scales fell from my eyes; a new world of art disclosed itself before me; that was the first fruit of my journey. Here it was that I first learned to understand the beauty of form - the spirit which reveals itself in form. The life of the people - nature - all was new to me; and yet as strangely familiar as if I were come to a home where I had lived in my childhood. With a peculiar rapidity did I seize upon everything, and entered into its life...'

from The True Story of My Life: A Sketch by Hans Christian Andersen

Echoes

'Rome is the city of echoes, the city of illusions, and the city of yearning.'
- Giotto di Bondone

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

‎'Whatever career you may choose for yourself - doctor, lawyer, teacher - let me propose an avocation to be pursued along with it. Become a dedicated fighter for civil rights. Make it a central part of your life. It will make you a better doctor, a better lawyer, a better teacher. It will enrich your spirit as nothing else possibly can. It will give you the rare sense of nobility that can only spring from love and selflessly helping your fellow man. Make a career of humanity. Commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights. You will make a greater person of yourself, a greater nation of your country, and a finer world to live in.'

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day xx

Tuscan Lunches

'I had never cared about lunch, until I was introduced to Sunday ones in Tuscan vineyards. Celebrations of food and wine amongst friends and family, they transcend the notion of mere meals and transform into a theatre for the senses.

It has much to do with the setting, the compelling beauty of ancient surroundings, of land which has yielded produce for millennia, of eroded stone walls and roads which wind through hills, and row upon row of vines. There is little more glorious then sitting through hours of golden summer afternoons at a long wooden table with twelve or sixteen or twenty others, or in winter warming limbs and souls with fires and food and wine.

Gianfranco has friends at Montespertoli and we go there often, mostly for winter lunches. We crunch up the circular gravel driveway and arrive at the back door, which leads into a vast stone kitchen filled with people. The ancient stove roars with flames, heating an assortment of saucepans that steam forth wonderful aromas. Someone is carving a prosciutto, claret-red slices sliding off the edge of the knife. There are women to stir the saucepans, wash the salad, slice the bread. I make myself useful by carrying cutlery to the dining room where men pose around the leaping fire, clutching glasses of Campari and smoking. Handpainted jugs of water and flowers clutter the table. I set for eighteen people, folding paper napkins into tiny triangles beside each plate. Two-litre bottles of homegrown chianti, translucent red, line up like soldiers. Outside the tall windows mist wraps around bare trees and church spires.

Platters are placed on the table: slices of wild-boar salami, tiny spicy venison sausages, rounds of toast topped with coarse chicken-liver pate sweetened with marsala, shiny black olives tossed in garlic and parsley. Wine is tipped into glasses and wedges of crusty, spongy bread passed around. Lunch has begun.

Pasta comes next, a deep ceramic bowl of steaming spaghetti in a simple tomato sauce fragrant with fresh basil, or a rich cream redolent of wild mushrooms. On top of the fire have been placed two metal grills which clip together to enclose the main course: thick slabs of prime beef, a handful of quails, fat homemade sausages. Passed around the table they are black-striped and crisp from the flames, perfumed with fresh rosemary, garlic and good oil.

Afterward there is a chunk of parmesan, aged and crumbly, and a tangy pecorino from Sardinia to eat with a large bowl of various fruits. This is the winding-down stage of the lunch, when women begin to push back chairs and carry out plates and men light up cigarettes and pour whisky. Coffee brews aromatic from the kitchen, conversation subdues and becomes sleepy, comfortable and confidential, Pastries accompany the coffee: a wealth of shortbreads, crunchy almond biscuits, macaroons and iced eclairs bulging cream. Vin Santo, sweet and dark, is pouted into small glasses; outside the evening has begun to descend and Sunday lunch settles.'

from Amore and Amaretti - Victoria Cosford

Mark Twain

'Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.'

- Mark Twain

Kaleidoscope

'Los Angeles is far from possessing the beauty of New York or the depth of Chicago, and I understand why some French people spoke to me about it with such distaste: without friends, I'd be lost. But it can be enjoyable as a kaleidoscope - with a shake of the wrist, the pieces of coloured glass give you the illusion of a new rosette. I surrender to this hall of mirrors... The French consul has invited me to dinner with N and M. In the entrance hall there is an exhibition of Hawaiian jewellery, shell necklaces, leis, and softly coloured seeds. I have never seen such an enchanting restaurant: it's as beautiful as the Palais des Mirages in the Musee Grevin. Greenhouses with luxuriant plants, aquariums, aviaries where birds coloured like butterflies swoop, all bathed in a murky, submarine light. The tables are glass pedestals in which the gleaming ceiling is reflected; the prismatic pillars are faceted mirrors in which space is infinitely multiplied. We dine under a straw hut at the end of a lake, in a forest, in the middle of an enormous diamond. The waitresses' costumes are a modest version of Hawaiian dress. In cylindrical glasses, which hold nearly a pint, we are served zombies (cocktails made from seven kinds of run poured on top of each other: the amber liquid is layered from dark brown to light yellow). The meal transports us, unexpectedly, to China. The dishes don't have that overly visual aspect that often discourages the palate in America; instead, the look very appealing. And if French cooking is 'thoughtful', as Colette says, this cuisine seems the fruit of a thousand years of meditation.

At midnight we are alone on top of a hill. We sit on the ground and smoke in silence. Los Angeles is beneath us, a huge, silent fairy-land. The lights glitter as far as the eye can see. Between the red, green, and white clusters, big glowworms slither noiselessly. Now I am not taken in by the mirage: I know that these are merely streetlamps along the avenues, neon signs, and headlights. But mirage or no mirage, the lights keep glittering; they, too, are a truth. And perhaps they are even more moving when they express nothing but the naked presence of men. Men live here, and so the earth revolves in the quiet of the night with this shining wound in its side.'

from America Day by Day - Simone de Beauvoir

The Pacific Ocean Never Runs Dry

'But oh, San Francisco! It is and has everything... The wonderful sunlight there, the hills, the great bridges, the Pacific at your shoes. Beautiful Chinatown. Every race in the world. The sardine fleets sailing out. The little cable-cars whizzing down the city hills. The lobsters, clams, & crabs. Oh, Cat, what food for you. Every kind of seafood there is. And all the people are open and friendly... Everyone is connected with the Universities hard-up. But that doesn't matter. Seafood is cheap. Chinese food is cheaper & lovely. Californian wine is good. The iced bock beer is good. What more? And the city is built on hills; it dances in the sun for nine months of the year: & the Pacific Ocean never runs dry.'

- Dylan Thomas from a letter to his wife Caitlin

Wonder

'I can't think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything.'

- Bill Bryson

Experience

'Stripped of your ordinary surroundings, your friends, your daily routines, your refrigerator full of food, your closet full of clothes - with all this taken away, you are forced into direct experience. Such direct experience inevitably makes you aware of who it is that is having the experience. That's not always comfortable, but it is always invigorating.'

- Michael Crichton

Rosa e blu

'Pink and blue. Blue rosette for un maschio, pink rosette for una della bambina. You pin them on the door , the main door of the palazzina that gives onto the street so that passers-by will see, so that friends will be informed without having to ask.'

from An Italian Education - Tim Parks

Travel

'The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.'

- Gilbert K. Chesterton

Cambi

'Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi.'

'If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.'

from Il Gattopardo - Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

On Leaving Sicily

'Under the lid of the half-cloudy night sky, far away at the rim of the Ionian sea, the first light, like metal fusing. So swallow the cup of tea and the bit of toast. Hastily wash up, so that we can find the house decent when we come back. Shut the door-windows of the upper terrace, and go down. Lock the door: the upper half of the house made fast.

The sky and sea are parting like an oyster shell, with a low red gape. Looking across from the verandah at it, one shivers. Not that it is cold. The morning is not at all cold. But the ominousness of it: that long red slit between a dark sky and a dark Ionian sea, terrible old bivalve which has held life between its lips so long. And here, at this house, we are ledged so awfully above the dawn, naked to it.

Fasten the door-windows of the lower verandah. One won't fasten at all. The summer heat warped it one way, the masses of autumn rain warped it another. Put a chair against it. Lock the last door, and hide the key. Sling the knapsack on one's back, take the kitchenino [canteen] in one's hand, and look around. The dawn-red widening, between the purpling sea and the troubled sky. A light in the capucin convent across there. Cocks crowing, and the long, howling, hiccuping, melancholy bray of an ass. 'All females are dead, all females - och! och! och! - hoooo! Ahaa! - there's one left.' So he ends on a moaning grunt of consolation. - This is what the Arabs tell us an ass is howling when he brays.

Very dark under the great carob tree as we go down the steps. Dark still the garden. Scent of mimosa, and then of jasmine. The lovely mimosa tree invisible. Dark the stony path. The goat whinnies out of her shed. The broken Roman tomb which lolls right over the garden track does not fall on me as I slip under its massive tilt. Ah dark garden, dark garden, with your olives and your wine, your medlars and mulberries and many almond trees, your steep terraces ledged high up above the sea, I am leaving you, slinking out. Out between the rosemary hedges, out of the tall gate on to the cruel steep stony road. So under the dark, big eucalyptus trees, over the stream, and up towards the village. There, I have got so far.'

from D.H. Lawrence and Italy - D.H. Lawrence on leaving Sicily

Awaken

'The need to travel is a mysterious force. A desire to go runs through me equally with an intense desire to stay at home. An equal and opposite thermodynamic principle. When I travel, I think of home and what it means. At home I'm dreaming of catching trains at night in the gray light of old Europe, or pushing open shutters to see Florence awaken. The balance just slightly tips in the direction of the airport.'

from A Year in the World - Frances Mayes