Our November Sagra: Noci (November 4, 2016)

I'm backtracking here to post about a trip we took in early November. I have been wanting to go to a Sagra ever since Brad and I visited Umbria with friends, Gail, Mark, Molly and Glenn in 2014. A Sagra is an Italian food festival that typically highlights a local crop or dish or drink. Some are of ancient origins, some more recent. We just missed an onion festival in Umbria with our friends in 2014, and I was determined to catch one once my knee felt strong enough for the walking and standing. By late October, I was starting to feel more confident, so we picked a Sagra in the little town of Noci in the Puglia region, in the “heel” of Italy. 

Two of our Seattle Italian teachers are from Puglia: Simona, our Dante Alighieri teacher (from Bari) and Valeria, our summer conversation class teacher (from Taranto). It seemed fitting to go to Noci, which is right between those bigger towns. (We also visited the neighboring towns of Alberobello and Locorotundo, as shown in following map.)

The Sagra, a relatively new one, is called Bacco delle Gnostre and celebrates Vino Novello, new red wine from local grapes, and roast chestnuts. "Bacco" obviously covers the wine, but "Gnostre" actually means the long courtyards they have in Noci, like ancient cul de sacs, open on one side to the street. We took the train from Rome’s Termini station on Friday, November 4. Il cielo a Roma rarely disappoints: I took this photo from the city bus on the way to the train station.

I've become a regular coffee drinker now and can get by with just one sugar (instead of the usual 3 or 4 I needed before to mask the taste)! Quite a feat for a little immigrant girl who only had milky Irish tea growing up and was never able to get used to American coffee. The coffee here is better naturalmente!

When we stopped in Bari to transfer to a regional train, I found myself thinking of last summer’s train crash, which killed 25 people.Turns out that was a different rail company on a stretch of track north of Bari. We had no problems. I took lots of photos from the train of farmland, which stretched in every direction, with artichoke, grapevine, greens, and more, plus notably ancient olive trees like these. 

Arriving in Noci, we discovered that the sagra didn't actually start until Saturday night (Italian festival websites are notoriously ambiguous). So we wandered around Noci that afternoon and then had a wonderful meal at a little restaurant called Montegrappa, run by a young husband and wife, both from Noci. Angela, front of house, spoke virtually no English, but she and I managed to have a conversation about her life with Gino and their two small children, about where he had trained (locally), and about food of course. Here she is cutting prosciutto. 




Brad had “strascinata di grano arso.” “Strascinato” means stretched pasta—think of an orrechiette pulled and flattened into a long half-moon shape. “Grano arso” is literally “burned” wheat (think of the English word "arson), leftover when crops were burned in olden days and the fallen kernels collected by poor farmers. The pasta had a green color and a smoky flavor. I had orecchiette “con funghi cardoncelli di bosco” (a local woodland mushroom). Delicious. Normally, we don’t have room for “secondi” and we marvel at all the slender Romans we see eating antipasto, then pasta, then a main course of meat, followed by dolci and caffè. But Angela talked us into grilled meat, which ended up being just a big slice of beef (quite rare, "al sangue") and nothing else. Is was, she assured us, the best: “costata di scottona” with “la scottona” being “il manzo donna” (female beef), “giovane” (young), “che non ha mai partorito” (that has never calfed). It was both tender and chewy and very flavorful! A wonderful evening. 

It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas: Buon Immacolata!

Christmas decorations have been going up in Rome steadily for the last several weeks.

However, the semi-official start of the Christmas season happened only last Thursday, December 8, the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Not to be confused with the conception of Jesus, this feast celebrates the doctrine that Mary was conceived free of “original sin.”

As a side note, in Late Night Catechism, the long-running comedy-show-cum-catechism-class, Sister always asks, “What is the Immaculate Conception?” I have a little plastic Mary statue at home, my prize for getting the right answer. Sister also made me class monitor during the intermission but that is another story … twelve years of Catholic school counts for something!

To commemorate the Pope’s official recognition of the doctrine, a memorial was erected in Piazza di Spagna, just to the right from the bottom of the Spanish Steps. A statute of Mary sits high above the square atop an ancient Roman column sitting on an elaborate base with four large statues of biblical figures, including Moses (left) and King David (right, striking that chord that pleased the Lord). 

On December 8, using ladder trucks, Roman firefighters place wreaths at the foot of the statue and around Mary’s outstretched arm. 

Many other groups, mainly other labor unions, also place huge wreaths at the base of the memorial. 

Later in the day, the Pope comes to venerate. It’s big! Brad and I made our way over there mid-afternoon and waded into the crowd at first. But it got thicker and thicker as the Pope’s arrival got closer. 

We relented after a while, dropping back to where the crowd was thinner. Piazza di Spagna and the street leading into it (Via Condotti) are very high-end: Check out the workers with their smartphones, waiting on the Prada balcony (first balcony to the left above, and below) to catch the Pope's arrival.

And here is a night shot of Via Condotti lit up in the background with a wild, fireworks Christmas tree in the foreground. The tree sits on the main landing of the Spanish Steps, reminiscent of the fireworks that marked their September re-opening after refurbishment, all financed by the Bulgari jewelry company.

We finally gave up waiting on the Pope and went into a little English tea room, Babbingtons, which has been there at the foot of the Steps since 1893. A little later, we could hear the crowd outside cheering as we enjoyed our tea and wine and sweets…

                                                

We Miss You, Kevyn .. Tanti Auguri a Brad

We miss you Kevyn!

Today is Brad’s 64th birthday: we are humming the Beatles tune under our breath. 

We didn't do much, though, because I’ve just come off a week-long bout of stomach flu and I’m, well, drained … but, after dinner, we went to a wonderful little organ recital by Livia Mazzanti at a local church, Chiesa Santa Lucia del Gonfalone. 

Also, to over dramatize at bit, we’ve been in a multi-week period of second-guessing and disorientation. We miss our condo and our stuff. We miss our friends. Learning Italian is super slow, so we can’t talk with people or even ask for simple things when we go to a store. And tea time is now 16:00, I only weigh 70, and I don’t know much many quarter cups are in a bottle of milk.

I keep getting lost when I go out alone (a few weeks ago, it took me three hours to get home).

Physical therapy for my knee (and the preexisting hip instability that probably caused the injury) has also been slow and frustrating. It seems that I just need to move, walk, step, and stand a different way, that’s all … On the plus side, I can now traipse long distances with only the usual tourist leg-and-foot aches, thanks largely to my cheerful and patient trainer, Claudia, who is learning English very quickly!

No, Claudia, those are toes, not fingers on my feet ... 

The EU rules applicable to Brad are more complicated than we understood. We know, for example, that he has a right to stay in Rome with me (since I’m a EU citizen, being Irish-born). But we learned too late that, after his 90-day American tourist visa expired on December 10, he can’t travel by air to most European countries (the “Schengen” ones) without a final “carta di soggiorno” from Italy. He doesn’t even have his carta interview until late January, but we planned a trip to Vienna in late December with the kids. So now he’ll either have to take the overnight train (no, wait, the holiday trains are already booked!) or we’ll eat the expenses and just stay in Rome. (First world problems, I get that.)

It's also been a struggle to establish a routine or find what seems like the right balance between time-at-home and time-out-touring. And here I wanted to see every corner of Rome and blog about all of it and set up our finances perfectly and take up piano again and speak passable Italian and have a regular spiritual practice and row on the Tiber and …

The election still feels like such a shock (for most, but not all, Italians we meet too). We voted by email; took photos with our iPhones of filled-in ballots printed from the King County elections website and emailed them back. Washington state is liberal that way. I swapped my Clinton vote through TrumpTraders with a Stein-supporting hipster in Pennsylvania, meaning I voted for Jill and—I hope—Evan K voted for Hillary (although it is an honor system and his one vote didn't do anything). I also gave Jill money for the recount efforts ... have some second thoughts about that but I needed to do something. I’m going to scream if I read one more news piece comparing Trump to Berlusconi and now Renzi is out too … Right after the election, we joined a candlelight vigil outside the American embassy protesting Trump’s positions …

Not to mention that our condo tenants broke the lease (thankfully, the property management company we hired found a new tenant quickly), we had issues with mail delivery (the change of address we filed with USPS before we left Seattle didn’t take but thankfully Ger, my wonderful sister, offered to step in to have our mail forwarded to her for re-mailing to us), and it took forever to get faster internet service in the house (just happened about a week ago).

Worst of all, two weeks ago, our dear sister-in-law, Kevyn Love, died after a horrible reaction to an antibiotic she was taking after knee-replacement surgery. She had battled many health issues in recent years and always stayed strong, with the kindest and most generous spirit. She and Curtis (Brad’s brother) were very much in Iove. It is such a shocking blow for him and the whole family.

Have you had a time when nothing seemed to go right, and how did you handle it? I'm getting back onto a blogging schedule and have lots to tell you about, including the Brigidine nuns we happened upon one evening doing vespers, the Love exhibition at the Bramante museum, watching the super moon rise from the Gianicolo under the statue of Giuseppe Garibaldi, seeing Martin Scorcese at Mass, visiting the Jewish Ghetto, traveling to Puglia for a “sagra” in Noci and seeing the “trulli” in Alberobello, seeing Shahzia Sikander’s show at MAXXI, and so much more!