mercoledì 27 luglio 2011

Ladies Who Lunch a Milano

I left the lake on Wednesday morning and caught the train from Varenna back to Milan. When I lived in Milan, time spent outside of the city was golden, but having left, I was anxious for a dip back into my old life.

My first stop was the Mondadori bookshop on Piazza Duomo, where I picked up a couple of books by Niccolo' Amaniti and Lidia Ravera and mused at the fact that, although Mondadori is currently embroiled in a major corruption scandal and has just been ordered to pay a 560 million euro fine for its misdeeds, everything felt clean, normal and calm, almost to the point of being un-Italian. I left with my books in an eco-friendly paper bag with a message encouraging me to use energy-saving lightbulbs and save the planet.

After that I walked back across the piazza, giving bracelet-sellers and pooping pigeons alike my best Parisian glare, and met my friend, who took me to the Californian bakery on Via Larga for lunch. Lesson learned: if you would like to sit in a shaded outdoor garden eating a bagel topped with fresh, healthy ingredients, this is the place for you. If you would like to eat large quantities of delicious baked goods, rest assured, this place is genuinely American in its attitude to dessert. If you would prefer your delicious cake to be accompanied by equally delicious coffee, think again. While my friend may have been a little mean in her condemnation of our espressos as "sock juice", they were definitely more USA than Italian in style too and, in my book, this is not such a good thing.

My last hour in Milan was spent in a rapid raid of the three fabulous floors of my favourite Italian clothes shop, Nadine, whose flagship store is located at San Babila. While the quality is sometimes not quite high enough to justify the price, the clothes have a definite Italian style that is hard to find in France (There is colour! There are chic little details that you don't have to be a Parisian fashionista to notice!) and I picked up a sweet little bag, reduced from 45 euros to 20 to take home with me. Happiness is ...

martedì 26 luglio 2011

Bellagio and Lenno


For my final day at Lake Como, wanting to save my hiking strength and enthusiasm for my upcoming trip to the Pyrenees, I decided to doss around the lake doing very little. (And to be honest, apart from mountain and watersports, sitting in the sun eating gelato and admiring the beautiful surroundings is pretty much all there is to do at Lake Como. This is not a criticism.)

I took the boat from Menaggio to Bellagio, one of the prettiest towns on the lake, which sits at the end of the Triangolo Lariano between Lake Como and Lake Lecco. Being stubbornly un-lemming like in my natural behaviour, I avoided the lakefront next to the ferry terminal and headed straight up the hill and down the other side, where I discovered the other, much quieter shore and port.


Very few of Como's towns offer great possibilities for swimming, but it can be done either from the small beach south of the Villa Melzi or from the steps near the garden out at the very point of the triangle. A creepy man with his T-shirt pulled up to reveal half of his chest appeared to be following me at this point, however, so I ran away as fast as my flip-flops would carry me and hopped on a boat to Lenno for my swim instead.

From Lenno, I decided to take the bus back to Menaggio, which turned out to be a good decision, as around 6 o'clock thunder started roaring and the heavens opened, so the hour long boat trip would not have been particularly entertaining. Instead I had the fun of standing at the bus stop without an umbrella next to a slightly nutty Italian lady who seemed to feel that the lateness of the bus (by 15 minutes) combined with the rain was evidence that the wrath of God was being targeted in her direction* and stood beseeching the sky to tell her what she had done to deserve this until the bus finally swung around the corner.

* I suspect that if you jump to this sort of conclusion every time something fails to happen on time in Italy, you are well on your way to suffering from some kind of a divine persecution complex.

domenica 24 luglio 2011

Alta Via dei Monti Lariani


On Monday, I learned my lesson from Sunday and took the C13 bus 750m up the mountains to the village of Breglia to start my second hike. I was planning to go up to the Rifugio Menaggio, our over-ambitious goal from the day before, and continue on to Monte Grona and beyond, but when I got to the fork in the path leading to the refuge, I decided that "beyond" would be more exciting and set off along the ridge, following the Alta Via dei Monti Lariani.

The one flaw in my plan was that I had meant to fill up my water bottle at the refuge and, by bypassing the highest tap on the mountain, I left myself with limited supplies, which, given that the temperature down in the valley was about 30 degrees, was not very clever. I knew there were some water fountains on the way down, so I decided that I would carry on for as long as my water lasted and turn back as soon as I had drunk the last mouthful. Luckily, this turned out to be the summit of Monte Bregagno, which was about as far as I wanted to go anyway, especially as I had a bus to catch.


As well as having stunning views, the ridge was actually pleasantly cool and I enjoyed myself hugely, stopping for lunch and to admire the views of Monte Grona and Lake Lugano at Sant'Amate before carrying on the the highest point at Monte Bregagno.

It was only as I strode back down the mountain in search of water and the bus, with the temperature seeming to increase by several degrees with every step I took, that I realised how hot the weather actually was. I finished the day with a well-earned gelato from the shop on the main piazza in Menaggio (great ice-cream but very grumpy service!) and a dive into the lake to cook down.

giovedì 14 luglio 2011

Barna and the Valle della Senagra

Varenna from the Ferry

After a Saturday evening of catching up with friends in Milan over some good old spritz Aperol aperitivo and mispronounced cocktails, my friend and I dragged ourselves out of bed early on Sunday morning to head up to Lake Como for some hiking. I was staying at the hostel La Primula in Menaggio, so we caught the train to Varenna (using a free weekend ticket that they've been handing out at the stations recently!), then the boat across the lake. and I was able to drop my suitcase off before we set out on our hike. The Menaggio tourist office publishes a booklet of walks in the area, but many of them require you to take a bus to the starting point and buses on a Sunday are few and far between, so using a hiking map which I had (luckily!) bought in Milan a while back, we combined a couple of their itineraries to make a route of our own, starting at the town centre and aiming for the Rifugio, which was a somewhat optimistic 1400m above the town.

We didn't make it all the way up, mostly because my friend had to get back to Milan that night to go to work on Monday, and in the end it turned out to be a good thing because an enormous thunderstorm began roaring soon after we had turned back and the storm clouds chased us right back down the valley. We did have a good day out though, and saw some interesting sights:


Scary Rock Face in the Valle della Sanagra

I wasn't planning to!

Dinky little Fiat

Barna

Monte Grona

Barometer. The text reads, "If the cord is dry, it's nice weather; if the cord is wet, it's raining; if the cord is stiff, it's cold; if you can't see the cord, it's foggy; if the cord is moving, it's windy and if there is no cord, it's been stolen!

Storm Clouds over Lake Como

Linguistic Slip-Up Nearly Causes Culinary Confusion

Back in Milan for a few days over the weekend in an attempt to get my Italy fix for the summer, a friend and I went out for drinks at Il Coccio, a bar with a big outside terrace and a highly dangerous staircase if you need to go to the toilet after a couple of drinks on the corner of the Naviglio Grande and the Naviglio Pavese. The waiter came to take our orders and I told him the name of the cocktail I wanted.

"But we don't serve pizza here," he said.

Because, ladies and gentlemen, the cocktail is a margarita, the pizza is a margherita, and in Italian you can actually hear the difference.

martedì 12 luglio 2011

My New Favourite Expression:

'ha alzato troppo il gomito"

Literally, "he's raised his elbow too often".

Figuratively, I'm sure you can guess!

mercoledì 22 giugno 2011

Discovering Niccolo' Ammaniti

A while ago, when I was looking for Italian books to read and films to watch, a friend recommended Niccolo' Ammaniti's Ti prendo e ti porto via. The next time I was in Italy, I bought it, I read it and I loved it. When I finished it, desperate to experience again that feeling of reading such a great book that you can't wait for a boring train journey so that you can find out what happens next, I bought Io non ho paura.

I love reading in Italian. I would much rather read in Italian than French, even although in theory my French is far better than my Italian. However, because I learned Italian largely by speaking rather than studying literature, it's important to me to find books that are at the right level, and Ammaniti's definitely fit into that category.

At the same time, I remain an English literature graduate at heart and if the quality of the writing is too trashy, it bothers me, even if it is in a foreign language. Ammaniti does use language well (as far as I can tell) but really it's the characters and the plots that I appreciate in his stories. In Ti prendo e ti porto via, he describes personalities which are greatly flawed but, with the insights that he gives into human nature, manages to maintain the reader's sympathy for the characters.

Another thing I appreciated about the books was the insight into Italian culture that they gave to me. In the UK, we tend to associate poverty and its terrible consequences with living in the inner cities, but Ammaniti shows how the Italy that many people consider to be a rural idyll is home to great deprivation and all its associated problems.

For anyone who wants a thought provoking but manageable read in Italian, I would definitely recommend the two books , and, having finished the second one, I'm off to look for his other works on Amazon!

mercoledì 2 febbraio 2011

More Dark Heart of Italy

When I was in Italy last summer, I was inspired to write about so many things. In the space of two weeks, I was constantly struck by endless examples of what an Italian writer (I think it may have been Beppe Severgnini but I might be completely and embarrassingly wrong) called the difference between “your Italy and my Italia”. This is the difference between the Italy that tourists see (the magnificent scenery, the richness of the history, the art, the food, the fashion, the musicality of the language and the generousity and sociability of the people) and the complicated, illogical, confusing country of endless paradoxes that Italians actually live in. I felt guilty, enjoying the hospitality of my Italian friends and the locals in the village who shared so much with “le ragazze inglesi” and the desire to probe into the depths of the “confusione”, to criticise and to write.

In the end, only a couple of these posts got written, and less eloquently than I would have wanted them to be. Last night, however, a programme about Berlusconi’s Italy on Arte, the Franco-German TV channel, inspired me to say some more.

The programme began by describing the rise of Berlusconi and I recognised many of the events that I had already read about in Tobias Jones’ wonderful Dark Heart of Italy: how Berlusconi’s early political career began with the corruption scandal surrounding the Milano 2 residential complex that he built as a property developer and how he initially dodged legal procedings by exploiting the statute of limitations. The programme talked about how terrorism was exploited to create a fear of communism (“communism” and “fascism” are current political terms in Italy), making voters believe that the only “safe” government was one which subscribed to neither of these philosophies and instead promoted the development of the country and the gaining of wealth. It revealed how Berlusconi’s masonic connections enabled him to borrow enormous sums of money and build his media empire until it became a monopoly and how Mediaset then ignored rulings by the European Court in favour of a rival television channel.

All of this I knew already, and I would highly recommend Jones’ book if you would like to know more. The thought that the programme left me with however, was not outrage at the corruption itself but a sense of the terrible tragedy that all of this has been for Italy itself. Berlusconi came to power on a promise to promote prosperity for “the good people” instead of the political extremists, but it is clear even travelling around Italy today that there is an incredible rift between the wealthy and the ordinary people (never mind the poor). Public facilities such as swimming pools and libraries are rare in Italian cities. Much of the country’s beauty spots have been “privatised”, so that you have to pay to go to the beach and you can’t swim in the lake unless you own a villa on its shore. Italy’s cities, towns and villages traditionally belong to their peoples: socialising takes place during the passeggiata through the streets and sitting in the town square, but as someone who likes to wander around at liberty, I can testify to the general absence of public parks, spaces and places to go. While the rich have their fast cars, their yachts and their multiple holiday homes, there are places where graduates and professionals earn 500 euros a month and have to live with their parents even when they are in their late 30s. A young lawyer in Milan can earn as little as 1000 euros a month – when I lived there my rent alone, in a smallish flat on a dodgy street was 850 euros.

Many of these educated people know to protest but the combination of what was described as the “lobotomisation” of the Italian people through dumbed-down media, the labyrinthine nature of the country’s politics and a head-in-the-sand attitude to what is actually going on among many of the country’s ordinary citizens make it very difficult to bring about change. This indeed is the dark heart of Italy.