Brian H. Appleton
11-03-2007, 10:22 AM
Some Italian traditions / past times I have participated in
Everywhere I went this summer, everything I saw brought back a flood of memories…
Things long forgotten:
In Tirrenia there was Bagno Venere and there she was in all her glory, the beautiful nude Venere statue still exactly as she had been 52 years earlier...she was my first nude woman and I fell in love with her. See photo. That was one block from my house and the beach where I learned to swim. Our old Villa Pina on Via Oleandri and Via delle Viole was knocked down and replaced by condos however the trees and the front yard were the same and the fountain where I used to keep wild game fish I caught in the canals was still there with its dolphin and cupid statue but it had been turned into a flower bed…
In Pisa I saw the old tower of the fortress overlooking the Arno from which they shoot off the fireworks at the finale of the Festival of Lights, in fact we missed it by one day…I remembered all the little candles floating down the river, the building edges and window frames outlined with lights, the tug o war over the cart on the bridge…I remember the vendors selling us strings of hazel nuts and how we would whack them against the stone walls knocking off the shells and leaving the nut meats still on the string for easy picking…
In Siena, I could write a book about my memories…knowing that in 80 homes of families all around me my paintings and statues adorned them from 36 years earlier when I had been an artist there…it was awesome…I even began to remember conversations I had had with my clients over glasses of wine in the Enoteca Italiana inside the Fortezza Mediceo, plying them with wine until they loosened their purse strings…
I remembered a painting I had made of Buddha which had gone to a collaborative show in San Quirico. My fellow painter friend I had entrusted it with, had left it there because a potential client was looking at it at the end of the show…I never saw the painting again…perhaps it is still there…
Then there was the Palio delle Contrade Sorpresse which the youth of Siena organized one summer at a stables outside town and they commissioned me to paint the Palio for it…I stayed up all night working on it on the cold marble floor because it was too big for my table…I had Orso, Leone, Spadaforte, Contrada Nobile della Vipera, Quercia all mounted on horseback racing around the Campo…it was really magnificent and we drove it all around town after sunrise, me holding it on the back of a pick up truck for everyone’s admiration…the Contrada that won it had a fantino named Franco Manzone who owned our local discotec “If 2000” and his popolo was this one rich guy that owned a bunch of movie theatres…he took my Palio to his villa never to be seen again and it is probably still there…
There were afternoons spent hunting for wild mushrooms, Ordinali, on the farm of my friends, the Costa’s, who had been married in their own family chapel on their estate. His wife Lia taught elementary school in a little school on the top of the Fortezza Mediceo...can you imagine going to grammer school in a real castle?
In Marina Di Pisa, there were the same huts on stilts with the boom and fishing net apparatus on the end all along the Arno which they would lower and periodically raise full of white fish…still there and I would fish for rock fish with my cane using Lombriche, clam worms I dug out of a mud bank along a canal myself when I was eight.
In Vinci, I took my son to Leonardo's castle and looked for his coin press but the young lady who was taking the tickets said it had been removed even before she was born. They had a modern machine to stamp medallions of his head for 5 Euros but it was not the same as when we would take the old copper 20 Lira coin and stick it in and out it would come stamped with die that Leonardo himself had cut with his own portrait like a direct link to him over the centuries.
In Collodi Gardens, I saw my son trying to catch frogs in the same fountain just like when I was a child and there was the grotto where you could turn on the sprinklers once the children were inside so that they couldn't exit without getting wet...in those days the teacher or the tour guide would turn the secret faucet on or off but today they have a little sign asking you to please remember to turn it off when you leave...
In Rome in Piazza Di Spagna, I showed my son the chestnut vendors and told him how in winter we would buy a bunch wrapped in newspaper and shove it in our pockets to keep us warm and how the shepards would come down from the hills and play Christmas carols on home made bag pipes which used rubber inner tubes rather than skins for the air bladder. I can still remember them playing: ”Tu Scendi delle Stelle..O Re del Cielo” Everyone thinks that the Scotts invented bagpipes but actually the ancient Greeks had them first and then the Romans...the Dorian Greeks were Celtic so perhaps they brought the bagpipes to the British Isles in B.C. Rome there wasn't a building or a park or a monument that didn't remind me of an event or a friend that I had spent time with there...as we walked down Piazza Campo Dei Fiori, I remembered, an sculture studio that the American sculptor Paul Manship had had there...I remembered walking there with my high school music teacher who had studied opera and he started singing arias as we walked and people on the second floors opened their Persiani and started showering stems of single red roses on him and applauding...
In Florence, I took my mother and my son, first to Piazzale Michelangelo for the view and I remembered drinking tall glasses of grapefruit juice there when I was high school age in the heat of summer. I remember eating white Canelli beans in olive oil with a giant slice of crusty country bread at Macchiavelli's tavern and I showed my son Luke, the bust of Benvenuto Cellini on the Ponte Vecchio becaue I had read him his autobiography when Luke was in grade school. I realized when I was on the Ponte Vecchio that I had been on it too many times to count in my youth, my father had bought my mother a blue diamond ring there once which had fallen out of her suit case and been lost down a storm sewer grate when her bag had accidently opened up. I remembered the antique shop at the foot of the bridge where my mother would always buy me another Chinese little blue porcelain horse for my collection of them...
I could go on and on…13 years in Italy in my youth has more memories than 30 years in Suburbia Americana…
Auguri a tutti,
Brian H. Appleton
Everywhere I went this summer, everything I saw brought back a flood of memories…
Things long forgotten:
In Tirrenia there was Bagno Venere and there she was in all her glory, the beautiful nude Venere statue still exactly as she had been 52 years earlier...she was my first nude woman and I fell in love with her. See photo. That was one block from my house and the beach where I learned to swim. Our old Villa Pina on Via Oleandri and Via delle Viole was knocked down and replaced by condos however the trees and the front yard were the same and the fountain where I used to keep wild game fish I caught in the canals was still there with its dolphin and cupid statue but it had been turned into a flower bed…
In Pisa I saw the old tower of the fortress overlooking the Arno from which they shoot off the fireworks at the finale of the Festival of Lights, in fact we missed it by one day…I remembered all the little candles floating down the river, the building edges and window frames outlined with lights, the tug o war over the cart on the bridge…I remember the vendors selling us strings of hazel nuts and how we would whack them against the stone walls knocking off the shells and leaving the nut meats still on the string for easy picking…
In Siena, I could write a book about my memories…knowing that in 80 homes of families all around me my paintings and statues adorned them from 36 years earlier when I had been an artist there…it was awesome…I even began to remember conversations I had had with my clients over glasses of wine in the Enoteca Italiana inside the Fortezza Mediceo, plying them with wine until they loosened their purse strings…
I remembered a painting I had made of Buddha which had gone to a collaborative show in San Quirico. My fellow painter friend I had entrusted it with, had left it there because a potential client was looking at it at the end of the show…I never saw the painting again…perhaps it is still there…
Then there was the Palio delle Contrade Sorpresse which the youth of Siena organized one summer at a stables outside town and they commissioned me to paint the Palio for it…I stayed up all night working on it on the cold marble floor because it was too big for my table…I had Orso, Leone, Spadaforte, Contrada Nobile della Vipera, Quercia all mounted on horseback racing around the Campo…it was really magnificent and we drove it all around town after sunrise, me holding it on the back of a pick up truck for everyone’s admiration…the Contrada that won it had a fantino named Franco Manzone who owned our local discotec “If 2000” and his popolo was this one rich guy that owned a bunch of movie theatres…he took my Palio to his villa never to be seen again and it is probably still there…
There were afternoons spent hunting for wild mushrooms, Ordinali, on the farm of my friends, the Costa’s, who had been married in their own family chapel on their estate. His wife Lia taught elementary school in a little school on the top of the Fortezza Mediceo...can you imagine going to grammer school in a real castle?
In Marina Di Pisa, there were the same huts on stilts with the boom and fishing net apparatus on the end all along the Arno which they would lower and periodically raise full of white fish…still there and I would fish for rock fish with my cane using Lombriche, clam worms I dug out of a mud bank along a canal myself when I was eight.
In Vinci, I took my son to Leonardo's castle and looked for his coin press but the young lady who was taking the tickets said it had been removed even before she was born. They had a modern machine to stamp medallions of his head for 5 Euros but it was not the same as when we would take the old copper 20 Lira coin and stick it in and out it would come stamped with die that Leonardo himself had cut with his own portrait like a direct link to him over the centuries.
In Collodi Gardens, I saw my son trying to catch frogs in the same fountain just like when I was a child and there was the grotto where you could turn on the sprinklers once the children were inside so that they couldn't exit without getting wet...in those days the teacher or the tour guide would turn the secret faucet on or off but today they have a little sign asking you to please remember to turn it off when you leave...
In Rome in Piazza Di Spagna, I showed my son the chestnut vendors and told him how in winter we would buy a bunch wrapped in newspaper and shove it in our pockets to keep us warm and how the shepards would come down from the hills and play Christmas carols on home made bag pipes which used rubber inner tubes rather than skins for the air bladder. I can still remember them playing: ”Tu Scendi delle Stelle..O Re del Cielo” Everyone thinks that the Scotts invented bagpipes but actually the ancient Greeks had them first and then the Romans...the Dorian Greeks were Celtic so perhaps they brought the bagpipes to the British Isles in B.C. Rome there wasn't a building or a park or a monument that didn't remind me of an event or a friend that I had spent time with there...as we walked down Piazza Campo Dei Fiori, I remembered, an sculture studio that the American sculptor Paul Manship had had there...I remembered walking there with my high school music teacher who had studied opera and he started singing arias as we walked and people on the second floors opened their Persiani and started showering stems of single red roses on him and applauding...
In Florence, I took my mother and my son, first to Piazzale Michelangelo for the view and I remembered drinking tall glasses of grapefruit juice there when I was high school age in the heat of summer. I remember eating white Canelli beans in olive oil with a giant slice of crusty country bread at Macchiavelli's tavern and I showed my son Luke, the bust of Benvenuto Cellini on the Ponte Vecchio becaue I had read him his autobiography when Luke was in grade school. I realized when I was on the Ponte Vecchio that I had been on it too many times to count in my youth, my father had bought my mother a blue diamond ring there once which had fallen out of her suit case and been lost down a storm sewer grate when her bag had accidently opened up. I remembered the antique shop at the foot of the bridge where my mother would always buy me another Chinese little blue porcelain horse for my collection of them...
I could go on and on…13 years in Italy in my youth has more memories than 30 years in Suburbia Americana…
Auguri a tutti,
Brian H. Appleton