Waiting- My New Career in Film

Cinema may not be big in Todi, in the sense of a movie-going public, but the three year old summer film festival in the nearby village of Izzalini first featured films shot in or around Todi (e.g.The Agony and the Ecstasy, Romanoff and Juliet), then, in the second edition, films starring Ida Di Benedetto, an Acqualoreto weekend resident, and this year, six or seven films of Ben Gazzara, who has a house eight km. down the road near Melezzole.  Indeed, we’re surrounded by people from the world of cinema.  Besides Ida Di Benedetto, actors such as Memè Perlini and Adriana Asti have houses here.  Bernardo Bertolucci was here for much of the summer again this year and Danilo Donati, the set and costume designer for films by Fellini, Pasolini and Bertolucci, was a long-time resident of Acqualoreto and now occupies a prominent place in our cemetery.  It would almost be enough to make those of us in the village who are not involved in cinema to feel like outsiders, except that those of us whose names end in consonants already know that we are outsiders.

Every five years one of our more successful ex-patriot friends throws a spectacular birthday party to celebrate another half decade of the good life.  At the most recent manifestation, while the hundred guests were seated for dinner, a young woman circulated asking for volunteers to participate in a film being shot in Rome.  My wife, in her normal skeptical tone, asked why would anyone want to do that, but my American pioneer spirit jumped at the opportunity.  Why not?  At last, a chance to become a member of the cinematic community.

Two days later I found myself getting up at 5 AM to meet a cheerful woman in Amelia named Federica, who would drive me to the set in Rome, along with another aspiring American extra named Scott.  Scott runs a bed and breakfast in one of Amelia’s historic palazzi.  Federica has the effective habit of starting every sentence with the name of the person she’s addressing, as in “Scott, have you done any acting before?” thus creating a sense of familiarity among people who’d never before met and insuring recall of their names.  Yes, Scott did have some acting experience.  As for Federica, I’ll never have a problem with her name since I equate Italian cinema with Federico Fellini, and she’s the movie woman.  Her job is to round up extras, have them sign all the releases, and pay them.

The film was to be a two-part TV movie on the Fontana sisters, who were big in the fashion world starting in the 40’s.  The day’s scenes were to be at a villa in Olgiata, Rome’s gated suburb to the northwest, with the villa standing in for one in Beverly Hills.  After reporting for duty we were sent directly to the wardrobe people, who, equipped with one or two racks of clothes, miraculously managed to dress up twelve extras from head to toe in slightly exaggerated 1950’s outfits.  When one of the wardrobe women first saw me, she muttered “American?  He looks more Russian.”  Once dressed, we were sent to makeup where I was shorn of all the hair above my ears with the little that remained pomaded straight back.  One fellow recruit from the party showed up, along with his partner, who proudly proclaimed himself to be a dealer in derivatives, i.e. a master of the universe, as well as a lecturer in economics at American universities in Rome.  He thought he might meet young women on the set, since this was August and his wife was away at the beach, per Roman custom.

Among the other extras were some mostly retired Italo-American women from the International Club of Rome and students from American universities.  The girls all seemed pretty and slightly overweight, a trait emphasized by their casual attire.  In a flash they emerged from the wardrobe tent transformed into Kim Novak replicas with cinched-in waists, billowing skirts and hair piled up under silly little hats.  Scott was immediately dressed up as a waiter and was so convincing in his demeanor that all day I kept wanting to ask him to bring me a gin and tonic.   The box lunches filled with a nice pasta and tomato sauce, roast veal, and assorted fruits and vegetables, arrived soon after we were all costumed and made up.  I managed through supreme effort and concentration to keep the sauce off my wool suit and tie, but the scheduling did seem a bit strange.

After lunch the extras were all ordered out to the street in front of the villa. This is a small street in a gated residential community but it seemed like we were on the Via Flaminia and nobody seemed able or inclined to halt or divert the traffic.  Filming was done in brief spurts between the passage of cars, construction trucks, motorcycles, anything you could imagine.  I found myself on the street escorting one of the costumed ladies, wondering what we were doing or where we were going when I heard a distant voice say “you, come over here”, after which another extra stepped into my place.  It was all over right there, but I just didn’t know it, and I waited around all afternoon in my wool suit wondering if I’d be called for another scene.  They switched to the driveway where a 1954 Oldsmobile convertible pulls up to the villa and Scott unloads the luggage from the trunk, even getting to say something, creating speculation on his part as to whether his name will appear in the credits.  The masters of the universe were long gone.  They’d said at the outset that they could only stay until 1:30 and the filming hadn’t gotten started until 3:00.  Eventually Federica started calling the extras to be paid, the girls traded their new glamour for their baggy shorts, and I finally realized that I hadn’t even made it to the cutting room floor.

A week later Federica called to see if I was ready for another day as an extra.  Of course!  I spend lots of days sitting or standing around and usually I’m not paid.  My overly protective wife worried “How do you know that this isn’t a disreputable film?” instantly conjuring up lascivious thoughts of my being an extra in a new Tinto Brass epic.  Alas, it was the same film, but this time the filming would be done at the Alitalia Training Facility at Fiumicino.  I’d been called two days ahead for all my clothing sizes and when I arrived, my costume had my name pinned to it.  Today’s extras were divided into “Italians”, mostly darker haired people dressed as peasants, who would be doing a dusty bus scene at an old villa in Ostia Antica later in the day, and “Americans”, who would be passengers on two or three flights simulated at Fiumicino.  There are Americans of every size, shape, color and ethnicity and by now I suspect that young Italians think of Michael Jordan as the prototypical American, but this was a 50’s film and they wanted the people to look like the ones in the movies of that period.  Ironically, there was a tall, stocky red-headed (Italian) fellow working on the set who looked more like that American stereotype than anyone I’ve ever seen, but nobody thought to simply have him stop working long enough to put him in the movie.  There was more confusion of nationalities in the hangar as we were getting started.  They called for the “Americans” but then said we need some “real Americans”, apparently because someone might have to be seen speaking.  Among the day’s extras there was one good looking woman, casually but elegantly dressed enough that I immediately assumed she must be Italian.  Another young woman looked like she could be her daughter or younger sister.  The first one emerged from wardrobe looking fifteen years older and very American, with her hair scrunched up under a funny little hat and clothes that completed the look.  I suppose it was fair since she turned out to be a teacher from North Carolina, but she seemed a little disappointed when I told her I didn’t think they’d done her any favor.  Her ”daughter” turned out to be a lovely young woman from Naples named Simona, who works in the fashion industry in Rome.

We were only in the hangar for a short time when the “real Americans” were called into the fragmented plane interior.  I was told to sit next to the star, Alessandra Mastronardi.  When the others were in place I was told to pretend to be asleep and I did as told.  I’m not the director, and he seemed to know what he’s doing, but I wonder how many flights Ms. Mastronardi is on where men sitting next to her fall asleep.  I was on another flight later but since I’d been in a close-up, I had to sit in the back row with my face behind a newspaper.  Scott returned for the day’s shooting too but having been a servant at the villa, he couldn’t get too close to the camera this time either.

As we were waiting around the hangar between scenes, rather than reading a book, I pulled out my ever-present sketchbook and started drawing some of the extras.  When Simona saw this, she jumped up and asked if she could draw me and vice versa.  She did the sketch at the top of this piece in a few minutes.  It’s in ink and rather decisively done.  I was impressed, as well as flattered.  By then it was five o’clock and unfortunately, as I started to sketch her, she had to leave for her ride back to Rome and I had to go to Ostia Antica with Federica for the remaining scenes.  While waiting for the crew to finish, I passed a little time sketching the villa.  The  bus scene was done expeditiously, but the filming was held up by the need to reshoot a scene with a little girl who had appeared in an earlier scene and whose parents were holding out for more money to bring her back but Federica got it resolved.  Around 10 PM the corks popped, signaling the end of the production and the time to go home.

The Fontana Sisters film is due to be shown on RAI this fall or winter.  The director is Riccardo Milani.  I’ll be curious to see it; even more curious to see if Federica calls again.

In A Sentimental Mood

In the course of attending Umbria Jazz for the past thirty-six years, I’ve developed the habit of sketching musicians as they perform, wherever that may be. This season, most of the sounds I’ve heard have emanated from the legions of grandchildren making pilgrimages to the family home, but on Friday, July 16th, I managed to slip out to Perugia for some music. Too late for the Roberta Gamberini concert, not inclined toward the over-elegant confines of the Hotel Brufani to hear Hilary Kole sing, and confused about the whereabouts of the Funk Off concert, I just had an ice cream and waited for the concert I’d come to Perugia for, that of Sonny Rollins.

What I saw is documented in the drawing here, and what most of us there really couldn’t see, appears in the photo. What I heard was something else again. Rollins started the concert with a long, raucous number that could have been the death rattle of some aging beast. Not an auspicious start, but as he played on, the power and the beauty of his music emerged. He is indeed a beast. He turns eighty on September 7th and while his walk gives away his age, his energy and creativity never abate. Backed by a four-man rhythm section of guitar, bass, drums and conga drum, Sonny Rollins played virtually non-stop, pausing only briefly for an occasional solo by guitarist Peter Bernstein. The concert featured standards from his repertoire of recent years, but some of the titles seemed particularly timely. He hit his stride with a thoroughly unsentimental version of Duke Ellington’s In A Sentimental Mood and went on to his calypso classic, Global Warming. Rollins was born in Harlem to parents from the Virgin Islands and his affinity for calypso songs runs deep.

Despite a harebrained US Senator erecting an igloo on the Washington Mall last winter to mock the concept of global warming, this has been the hottest first six months of the year since measurements were kept. The 32-35° temperatures (90-96 American degrees) in Perugia kept Corso Vannucci, normally carpeted with people at this time of the year, looking semi-deserted. Nevertheless, the huge Arena Santa Giuliana was ¾ full to hear the Saxophone Colossus, and while the hellish temperatures had abated somewhat with the sunset (the sun-baked concrete seats retained their heat), Sonny Rollins played without a break from 9:45 until midnight.

Sonny arrived on the jazz scene in the 40’s and 50’s, playing with Bird, Diz, Monk, Miles, Trane, Bags, Dexter, Stan and Bud. He’s survived all of them, as well as his wife of forty-six years, Lucille. She was also his manager, taking care of everything but the music until she died in 2004. He’s had to adjust, but he keeps on going, playing these Olympic–sized concerts. Five days before Perugia he played in Rotterdam and four days after the Perugia concert he was scheduled to play in Norway.

One of the last songs of the concert was “Why was I Born?” It’s a question that most of us ask at some point and one that Sonny Rollins has asked more than most. He’s found his answer. Sonny Rollins is here to play his music.

Hard Choices

Upon my return from a recent trip to the UK, I recorded my thoughts about British politics vs. those of the US (You can scroll down to “A New Perspective” in case you missed it.) For those of you unfamiliar with the current state of US politics, I refer you to recent events in South Carolina. We’ll just skip lightly over all the sexual shenanigans but something seems to be in the air in the Palmetto State. Could it be powdered Viagra? More to the point is the current reelection campaign of Sen. Jim DeMint and that of his new Democratic challenger, Alvin Greene. While Vic Rawl, a Charleston County councilman and retired judge, was expected to easily win the Democratic primary to challenge DeMint for his Senate seat, Alvin Greene came from nowhere to win his first foray into electoral politics, getting 59% of the vote (although Rawl had received as much as 84% of the absentee ballots in some districts), in a state election which featured electronic voting machines with no paper trail. “Nowhere” in this case was the very modest house in Manning, SC that the unemployed Greene shares with his father after an involuntary discharge from the Army, in which he had served for twelve years. Greene’s place in the race is not yet assured since he faces felony charges relating to showing pornography to a (presumably under-age) SC University student, and because there is some question about where he got the $10,400 for the filing fee, given his serious lack of income or other resources. Daniel Vovak, a Republican who had run against Michael Steele in the 2006 GOP primary for the US Senate, claims to be Greene’s campaign manager.

I confess that Greene’s success has engendered a certain amount of envy on my part. Like Greene, I am short of cash, and even the outside chance of gaining a US senator’s salary and perks has more appeal than most lottery tickets on the market these days. Therefore, I hereby declare my willingness to run for any congressional or senate seat that someone is willing to pay my filing fee for, along with reasonable relocation expenses. Like Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton and countless others before me, I’m ready to establish residency in any state which provides suitable political opportunity, though since the cost of home heating is so high here in Italy, I would prefer the sun belt. Nevertheless, if Alaska beckons (it seems they're in bad need of new blood) or any other desolate place, I’m open to the challenge.

Unlike Greene, I have no pending felony charges, and I do have a political platform, which won’t be affected by choice of locale, given my foreign residence for thirty-seven years and my regional loyalties to Umbria. My platform hasn’t changed much since my 2008 presidential platform, ignored almost equally by both major parties. Indeed, party affiliation is also no problem. Just as I could provide an unlikely alternative to shoe-in GOP senators such as DeMint, Cornyn or Shelby, I could as effectively provide token opposition to any dysfunctional Democratic incumbent senator such as Nelson or Landrieu.
Sadly, sunny South Carolina, with its charming, sexually charged atmosphere, is out of play, barring a Greene disqualification. Returning for a moment to that contest, there is the prospect of a tough choice that South Carolinians will have to make. Jim DeMint has a perfect voting record, according to the Conservatives Fund, which gives Mitch McConnell only a 79% approval rating. He has consistently voted for all wars, guns, war resolutions, proposals and funding, border fences and corporate interests, while regularly voting against education, separation of church and state, health care, environmental protections and civil rights. Alvin Greene has no voting record at all, and his comment on any issue raised to date has been “no comment”. Still, if he votes differently on any one issue from what Jim DeMint has done until now, or if he never shows up to vote at all, we will see a significant improvement over DeMint’s performance. Weigh your choices carefully Carolinians!

Destroying a Medieval Town

Medieval hill towns, typical of Umbria, but present in most of Italy, grew up as fortified castles on hilltops where both visibility and air quality were good and would-be invaders had an uphill battle. Their massive external walls enclosed and protected artisans and shopkeepers, as well as some of the people who worked the surrounding agricultural land. Little changed in this scenario for a millennium until the advent of the automobile. Still, throughout the twentieth century these old towns continued to provide compact urban centers of remarkable architectural richness, surrounded by unspoiled landscapes.

Indeed, Professor Richard Levine, who headed an overseas branch of the University of Kentucky School of Architecture, starting in 1983, described one such medieval town, our own nearby Todi, as the model sustainable city. The town fathers were thrilled by the good professor’s praise and went on to declare Todi to be the world’s most livable city. No doubt Prof. Levine only intended to identify the urban characteristics in evidence in Todi as qualities to be emulated elsewhere. In what would be an extreme case of the law of unintended consequences, foreigners flocked to Todi to buy up houses and apartments where they could spend two or three weeks a years reveling in this ideal environment. Every third shop in Todi was transformed into a real estate agency and very quickly existing houses were priced well beyond the means of young local people who needed homes. Despite a static local population, a great deal of building has taken place on the periphery of Todi since its fame spread.

The town government has done a reasonably good job (scroll down to “The Sienese Invasion” for a notable exception) of assuring that the new buildings are compact and the materials reasonably harmonious with the existing town. However, when people are compelled to move to new houses, they want those houses to have modern amenities, or more precisely, the basic modern amenity, easy access to a car, and the new housing has provided this access. Despite worldwide evidence that we’re facing energy shortages and that greater urban densities will be needed to sustain our environment and our standard of living, Todi is moving from a compact pedestrian-oriented town to one in which most local movement is by car. Todi’s main street is a narrow passage allowing one lane of downhill traffic and, in most places, one lane of parking. It doesn’t work very well for shoppers who come by car, and merchants complain that the city hasn’t done enough to provide parking. In reality, the city has done a great deal to improve access. In addition to frequent bus service to the center, a large pay parking lot has been built at the bottom of the hill with a funicular elevator leading to the center of town. Existing parking spaces in town have been divided into those reserved for residents and others where people can park and pay with time-stamped tickets from conveniently located machines. In a town so dense and hilly, there just isn’t a lot of space to put cars. The main piazza at the apex has a busy mix of commercial, governmental and cultural activity. Local institutions make a strong effort to promote fairs, concerts, theater, etc. in the town center. Nevertheless, shops along the main street have been closing for years, and once you get 150 meters down the hill from the piazza, the empty shops outnumber those still in business, at least until you approach the hospital near the bottom. More on that another time.

Much of Todi’s revenue these days derives from tourism. The beauty of its setting and its architecture are impressive attractions, but if its economic decline continues, its appeal to visitors will diminish, creating a sad downward spiral. Some of the recent changes were inevitable, others less so. The arrival of large supermarkets signaled the end of the small food shops in the center, just as has happened everywhere else in the world. Nevertheless, small shops depend on pedestrian traffic and it can’t all be tourists.

What’s to be done? Many people have tried to answer this but the decline continues. I don’t pretend to have all the answers, but I do believe more of a stick and carrot approach is required. The town has provided lots of carrots, such as subsidies to people opening shops in the town center, and the amazing variety of cultural promotions. I would propose taxing the owners of storefront properties on the main streets that remain vacant. The owners have to pay taxes on the rental income, an incentive to not rent, but not on the value of business potential. The community spends a fortune to keep the town viable, but by holding out for non-economically feasible rents, these owners are damaging the town by wasting a valuable community resource.

It’s also important that doctors, lawyers, notaries, dentists, accountants and design professionals keep their offices in the town center to insure an ample presence of pedestrians. Unlike supermarkets, these activities do not require a steady flow of bulk merchandise. Many doctors, etc. have already moved to the new residential districts where parking is hardly better, and where the flux of patients does nothing for the town. Whether by stick or by carrot, they should be encouraged to stay in (or move to) the center.

As local residents, what can we do? We can support the various government initiatives to promote the town. More practically, we can patronize businesses in the center, from barbers, lawyers, dentists and shoemakers, to bars and restaurants. Do your banking in town rather than at the strip mall. This violates the theology of the new religion of Convenience as God, but heresy has its own rewards. It may take more time to park one’s car and walk through Todi to a bank in the center than it does to stop at some roadside shack, but for those of us not under inflexible time constraints, the trip is well worth it.

A New Perspective

Half a century ago when I first visited Italy, I thought it was the most beautiful place in the world. After living here for well over three decades and becoming familiar with all the warts and blemishes of my adoptive country, my evaluation remains unchanged. Nevertheless, it’s good to get away now and then. The world is full of other delightful places.

I’ve recently returned from a two and a half week trip to England and Wales. It was a happy occasion, a daughter’s wedding and family reunion with all the grandchildren, two of whom I’d not seen before, and most of the new in-laws present. I had lived in London for a few months in 1977 and quite frankly, I hated it. Perhaps the country has changed dramatically, perhaps I’ve mellowed with age to the point of losing my critical edge, or maybe it was just the joyous circumstances of this visit, but I thoroughly enjoyed being there. People were friendly and helpful, the food was much better than thirty years ago, the countryside was green and lovely, and I even grew to enjoy the beer.

During this visit, national elections were held. What a revelation that was! I believe they’d only set the date a month before. I managed to see half of the TV debates between the three contenders for Prime Minister. While there were some differences on policy, all three came across as intelligent and articulate gentlemen who were mostly in agreement on the challenges that the nation faced. There was no debate about banishing evolution from the schools or the need for more concealed weapons on the streets. While the press speculated over whether Gordon Brown’s grumpiness would prove fatal to his political career, no one felt the need to question any of the candidates’ mental health or stability. As an American, I fully expected the other two to challenge the citizenship or the patriotism of Nick Clegg, whose mother was Dutch, his father half Russian, and whose wife is Spanish. Not only was no one’s patriotism challenged but neither Cameron not Clegg brought up Gordon Brown’s embarrassingly recorded comments about an older constituent he’d been introduced to.

In a lead-up to the election, a scandal regarding bogus “expenses” claimed by Members of Parliament was unveiled by The Telegraph. More than ten MPs involved lost their seats in the elections, among them Jacqui Smith, the former Home Secretary, who had claimed expenses for her family home while listing her sister’s home as her main residence, as well as submitting claims for pornographic films ordered up by her husband. Among other contested MP expenses were charges for manure for gardens, plasma TVs, massage chairs, second homes eight miles from the main home, a chimney sweep for a second home, etc. Most of the claims were trivial as well as outrageous, with amounts ranging from a few pounds on up into the thousands. MPs had avoided voting themselves pay raises in an attempt to look better to their constituents, so there was some irony in their comeuppance, brought on by their padding of expenses to round up their pay and benefits.

What a striking contrast between these tragicomic examples of petty graft and the industrial sized bribes our US Congressmen receive for selling out the interests of their constituents, under the seemingly legitimate guise of campaign contributions. High ranking Democrats such as ex-Majority Leader of the House Dick Gephardt and former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle have gone on to lucrative careers peddling influence on behalf of the health care, health insurance and investment banking industries. Republican Senators such as Mitch McConnell, Richard Shelby and Bob Corker haven’t even seen fit to exit the Senate before getting those big paychecks from insurance, investment, tobacco, oil and mining interests to insure that the American public doesn’t run the risk of getting decent health care or environmental protection.

The words of former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales come to mind, as when he described the provisions of the Geneva Conventions as “quaint”. The British MP expenses scandals do indeed seem quaint in this era of Supreme Court-approved corporate influence peddling. May these quaint British notions of propriety long endure and, with a little luck, may they spread to our American shores, together with their brilliant idea of one month-long election campaigns.

God save the Queen!

A Darker Shade of Green

Early spring is beautiful in Umbria. The forsythia and the Siliquastri (Judas trees) are in bloom, as are the biancospini (Hawthorn bushes), those nasty thorn bushes that grow everywhere and are a nuisance to trim or remove but which brighten the landscape in April. Right now the light green of the fields is particularly intense but most of the woods retain a purplish gray tint as the deciduous trees have not yet sprouted their new foliage. The one sad note is that with the woods still bare, the persistence of ivy and other climbing parasites is particularly evident. One might say that this is hardly a problem, that nature will run its course, and that trees come and go. However, the Umbrian landscape is completely shaped by man. Woods are harvested for firewood every decade of so; fields are plowed and divided by linear rock piles, which become covered by blackberry vines and biancospini. Trees grow along the roads to sizes that they would never reach in the systematically harvested woods. Some of these roadside trees, mostly oaks and elms, get to be rather old. They define and shade the roads. When the ivy fully envelopes them, they can be very attractive and they stay green, despite their falling leaves, throughout the winter. Still, it’s only a matter of time before the tree is strangled. It isn’t really hard to prevent this, just a simple matter of cutting off the vines at the base, but the local culture works against it. Our local naturalists, i.e. the hunters, become furious when they see anyone cutting the vines from the trees. A fully vine-enveloped tree is a wonderful nesting area for small birds, and although there are few birds left, our “greens” are thrilled at the thought of trees full of birds waiting peacefully to be blasted into oblivion during the winter hunting season.

There are people, employed by the various levels of local government to maintain the roads, who regularly cut the grass along the margins of the road, sometimes with weed whackers, sometimes with tractors fitted out with large cutting devices. I’ve never seen one of these people touch the ivy on the trees, even though the threat to the viability of the road and to public safety posed by large falling trees is considerably greater than any threat posed by tall grass. The workers may all be hunters but one might expect some responsible person to oversee this activity and get the job done.

Likewise, children are not taught in school that vines kill trees (just as they’re not taught to avoid throwing their candy and ice cream wrappers in the street), so they all apparently grow up to join the clan of hunters rather than becoming custodians of the landscape. Parasites can be beautiful. The Spanish Moss in the swamps of Georgia and South Carolina creates an eerie and fascinating landscape, and likewise, some of our big dying trees are splendid to behold. However, the brief spectacle of these green giants is little compensation for the loss of the fifty or one hundred years that these trees could remain landmarks.

Bi-polar Baschi

Wikipedia says bi-polar disorder is a condition in which people experience abnormally elevated and abnormally depressed states for a period of time in a way that interferes with functioning. Some of us have known people with this problem but here in Acqualoreto we’ve come up with a new variant, a bi-polar local government.

Our local government isn’t really local, since the village of Acqualoreto is only one of nine towns and villages in the Comune (Township) of Baschi. Despite having only 2650 residents, the Comune covers a huge area and our village is twenty-four kilometers from the seat of government in the town of Baschi. The population of Acqualoreto may reach 150 but it fluctuates wildly from winter to summer and many residents live in the countryside or along the roads leading in and out of the village. Less than thirty people currently reside within the remnants of the medieval castle that forms the core of the village. The street running around the circumference of the core is 200 meters long.

Last summer, during the manic phase of local activity, the cobblestone paving of the perimetral street was completed. It had been started a few years earlier in conjunction with the driving of dozens of huge piles to consolidate the hill, the laying of new sewers, and the burying of most overhead utility lines. At the same time, most of the five kilometer road down to the river was repaved and the fifteen year-old concrete retaining walls, which keep the town from sliding down the hill, were faced with local stone. That so much time, effort and money was expended on a shrinking medieval village is something I don’t expect my pragmatic brethren in the USA to understand, but I rejoice that there is a determination in Italy to preserve treasures that we’ve inherited from the past.

Psychologists suspect that Vincent Van Gogh suffered from bi-polar disorder. Most of us are grateful for his manic output and creativity but his life was plagued by self-doubt leading to madness and despair.

What passes for madness and despair in Baschi appears to reside in the Building Commission, which has shown signs of instability for decades, even as the other administrative functions of the Comune have grown steadily more responsive to the public’s needs over the past several administrations. Its task may not be easy since Italy has more laws than most other countries, laws that are frequently in conflict with each other. As long as I’ve been here, rules for building on agricultural land have been restrictive, with three hectares of land required to build a modest sized house. About a decade ago, the laws were made even more restrictive, although some concessions were made allowing larger additions to existing buildings. When the new regulations went into effect, new houses started popping up in the woods like mushrooms. Somehow, despite the restrictive regulations, some of these new houses even had auxiliary guest houses nearly as large as the main house, on plots that didn’t appear to be all that vast. Whether they’re stately or garish, whether or not they exceed their allotted size or violate parts of the Building Code, nobody complains here about the new houses, or any other project for that matter, on the sound principle that everyone’s property is in violation of some regulation or other, and no one wants to be responsible for the irreversible unleashing of inflexible compliance powers.

The big wave of building subsided but it was only a lull before the depressive state returned, bringing strange projects in its wake. An abandoned house in the old village center has been allowed to disintegrate, leaking water into at least three adjacent houses, making them unsalable at best, uninhabitable at worst. Other than briefly closing the perimetral street to protect passers-by from falling roof components, the Comune has done nothing. Nearby, one owner did a nice job of renovating what had been the ugliest house in the old core. It had been abandoned for decades and now looks much better, except that the stucco walls are painted a bright white, in clear violation of local building rules. Outside the village, on the most beautiful building site on this precious protected landscape, a huge three-story stone bunker emerged from traces of an ancient foundation, all under the guise of renovation of an existing building. A nearly invisible remnant of a doorway with the outline of a tiny window above it led the archeologically expert designer/geometra to convince the Building Commission that this had been a two story building. The unfinished basement walls and windows, which were required to be enclosed by areaways and covered with soil, remain clearly in view from the village, below the elaborate stone walls above. The visual effect could be described as chaos and decadence but perhaps that’s allowing too much subjectivity to creep in.

Our general store/bar went out of business about five years ago when the owner died. Now the ground floor of the building is being divided up into two mini-apartments, one of which has a main room with no window. It gets light from a glass entrance door facing directly onto the street, an interpretation of the Building Code which could be seen as extremely creative, although more objective analysis would suggest it to be the product of a severely depressed, dysfunctional mind.

More recently, one neighbor built a simple but handsome and well-constructed stone guesthouse near his larger old farmhouse. The houses sit on a remote hill facing the village from a distance of about two kilometers and they blend nicely into the landscape. At the far end of the new house a balcony was built outside the bedroom on the upper floor. In keeping with the rest of the house, the detailing and workmanship were excellent. Apparently the balcony was not shown on the plans submitted to the Comune for approval. The geometra who drew up the plans either said, or was told by the authorities, that an upper floor balcony had to have an exterior stair to the ground to look like farmhouses did in the days when the ground floors were occupied by animals.

A few months after the house was completed, the Comune had its ultimate Van Gogh moment. The authorities, in the form of a Forest Ranger of all things, intervened and directed that the balcony, like Van Gogh’s ear, be immediately cut off. Bi-polar disorder can often be controlled through medication, but how does one medicate a comune, and can you get rid of the symptoms of depression without also halting all that good manic activity?

A Modest Proposal

Recently I read in the Giornale D’Umbria that the University of Perugia is facing a shortfall of Five Million Euros for the year and plans to sell off some of its real estate to cover the deficit. Critics say it's like selling your house to eat or burning the furniture to stay warm. For a large university such as Perugia, €5 million doesn’t seem like an enormous amount. Surely, there has to be a better solution than selling off assets.

I’ve been watching an unhealthy amount of American football this year, both college and pro games. Professional sports in Italy are similar to those in the United States. While American football is a different game from football (calcio) in Italy, the successful teams in both countries mostly play in the biggest cities in front of rowdy, drunken louts with painted faces in moderately large stadiums, and the teams and the players all make obscene amounts of money. I won’t deal here with the differences between the two versions of football. The US version has been played in Italy for decades with little success and I don’t see that changing. There just aren’t enough 300 pound (136 kg.) Italians, and while the numbers are growing, most of the growth is among middle aged women in small villages. The American game is very specialized and requires discipline and planning, qualities quite different from the pure athleticism and acting skills favored in Italy.

Although the professional games have similarities, Italy has absolutely nothing reminiscent of American college football. While the pros play in front of sixty or seventy thousand dedicated fans in New York or Houston, college teams regularly sell out their 100,000 seat stadiums in places like Ann Arbor, Gainesville, State College, Tuscaloosa, and Columbus throughout the fall season. There’s big money in college football, at least for the coaches and the universities. Urban Meyer, citing the stress of the game as a threat to his health, recently announced his resignation as head coach of the University of Florida team. After ruminating for five days on the fact that he still had six years and $24,000,000 left on his contract, and perhaps after consultation with his wife, he retracted his resignation in favor of a leave of absence of unspecified duration.

The players don’t share the cash, but they do get full scholarships, which these days translate into real money in the US. Any effort to bring money-making college sports to Italy would be hampered by the fact that tuition is so low that scholarships wouldn’t have much pull. There are other perks for players in the US. The University of Tennessee is now under investigation by the NCAA for alleged recruiting irregularities involving attractive coeds attending the high school games of college prospects and attempting to lure them to their school. Tennessee is not the first or only university to use attractive young women as bait.

The most sought after job in Italy is that of the “veline”, i.e. the sensuous and perfectly formed young women who adorn every quiz and variety show on Italian television. There are thousands and thousands of well-qualified applicants. Only a few make it on television, but all that unused talent could form a solid basis for the legions of recruiters needed for a new intercollegiate Italian sports program. Successful footballers become some of the wealthiest people in the country and some even go on to politics, so exposing the future leaders and owners of Italy to a university for a few years might have benefits beyond the obvious financial rewards.

Despite Italian backwardness in college athletics, we’re ahead of the curve here in some respects. In my youth, college was a four-year deal and upon graduation your connection with the school was abruptly terminated, at least until the alumni association started to come to you for money. In graduate school we couldn’t even get student tickets to games, much less play on those teams. Times have changed, as American universities have moved to a more Italianate approach. This season, every third player is referred to as a “true freshman” or a “red shirt freshman”, and in a few strange cases, players have graduated the year before but returned to play their final year of eligibility. Athletic eligibility is still limited to four years but those years can be spread over as many years as the coaching staff wants. In Italy about 90% of students are red-shirted, and they don’t even play sports. I believe there’s a ten-year limit for a four-year degree. Just imagine the financial rewards for the educational system of signing up adolescent Peles and Maradonas to commit to playing four years for their university of choice.

The opportunity is there. Italian football is cheap. No helmets or shoulder pads to buy, just a ball, a pair of shorts and a field. The stadiums are not in place just yet, and they would require substantial financing, but Citibank has taken bigger risks on housing and commercial real estate. This is a sure thing! Many successful American stadiums have been named after the original Coliseum right here in Rome. It’s time to turn the tables and borrow from American sports entrepreneurial initiative. €5 million operating loss? Peanuts! Perugia should be paying its coaching staff that much, and raking in maxi-millions

Forza Perugia!

Scandal on the Airwaves

Last week I was watching Fox News, something I rarely do unless Julie Banderas is wearing a particularly sexy outfit, but that day they carried the Senate grilling of Ben Bernanke live, something CNN decided to forego.

After cutting away from the Senate hearings, Fox turned to the top stories of the day, the first of which was the Tiger Woods scandal. It wasn’t clear then, and after some days of further reportage, the nature of the scandal still hasn’t revealed itself to me. He apparently drove his SUV into a tree and/or a fire hydrant, which miraculously revealed that he was cheating on his wife, who may have added to the damage incurred in the crash. I admit that my interest in golf ranks right along with cricket, another sport I’ve neither played nor watched. He may be the best golfer in the world, a bad driver, and worse husband, but I’m not sure how this “scandal” made the cut. Nobody died, not even a dog.

We hardcore sports fans all know that Michael Vick served two years in Federal prison for raising vicious pit bulls, getting them to fight, and then killing the ones who weren’t vicious enough. He got time off for good behavior; apparently there being no dogs at the prison. Now that was a real sports scandal, although should he ever decide to apply for a job as an assistant to Dick Cheney, or with one of our leading defense contractors, it might look good on his résumé. I recall that in the off-season, another famous QB was alleged to have gotten a Las Vegas waiter fired for asking a young lady in his entourage for I.D., and then (allegedly) proceeded to rape a waitress in the same hotel. Charges were dismissed. Everyone loves a dog but we’re apparently more ambivalent about cocktail waitresses, who are supposed to know how to treat famous sports stars. I don’t believe that story qualified as a scandal worthy of Fox coverage.

The second big story of the day certainly did. The jury in Perugia, after a seemingly endless trial, pronounced Amanda Knox, as well as Raffaele Sollecito her Italian boyfriend at the time, guilty of the 2007 murder of Meredith Kercher. Whatever else can be said about the trial, which went on for about a year in scattered two day bursts of testimony, it shielded countless bars, hotels and restaurants in Perugia from the full brunt of the economic turndown, as journalists from all over the world repeatedly descended on Perugia to file updates on the case. It may have been the biggest boon to cable news since the O.J. Simpson trial.

The lead correspondent for Fox News was none other than Amanda Knox’s father, who dutifully reported that we all knew that Amanda was innocent, now it was just up to the jury to acquit. After the guilty verdict was pronounced The New York Times weighed in with a statement from Columbia University law professor George P. Fletcher saying “I think this is a scandal of the first order”, a statement which will insure him of frequent paid appearances on Fox News for the foreseeable future. He continued: “I don’t think this is an expression of anti-Americanism”.. but the verdict came about because the Italian judicial system has not “adapted correctly” to the American judicial system. Alas, Cheney-speak comes to the world of academia. Watch out Italy! The last country accused of not adapting to American standards was Iraq, and look at it now. Any day now we can expect some professor of commerce at Boise State or Yale to demand that the world drop the metric system and adopt the US (formerly British) Imperial Standards.

I confess that nearly two decades ago I wrote in unflattering terms about the Italian judicial system, where verdicts can be appealed by both the defense and the prosecution for two successive levels of review. There are other peculiarities but, as in all judicial systems, there is tension between the fairness of the process and the justice of the outcomes. Despite concern about the procedures and timing of the investigation in Italy, the Italian public appears to believe in Amanda Knox’s guilt in about the same proportion as Americans believed in O.J. Simpson’s guilt. Lucky for O.J. that some of the doubters were on the jury.

Among the American criticisms of the trial, there was mention of civil damages awarded by the jury in a criminal trial. Is this so outrageous? Despite his acquittal in a criminal trial, O.J. Simpson was effectively retried for the same crime in a civil trial, and found guilty of the crime he had been acquitted of, despite constitutional guaranties against the double jeopardy that incorrectly adapted Italian courts routinely impose. The defense in the Knox trial complained that no motive was established; yet they also complained that her character and behavior were improperly examined during the trial, something which might reasonably be deemed relevant to establishing motive.

We can quibble with the niceties of different judicial systems, and had this all happened ten years ago, I might not have taken exception to Professor Fletcher’s comments. However, he lives in a country where the Supreme Court effectively appointed George W. Bush president, a scandal of somewhat greater magnitude than anything associated with Amanda Knox. Among his own appointees, the President selected a young law graduate from a Pennsylvania Bible college, whose dedication to the Party trumped her oath of loyalty to the Constitution, to select and deselect all top US Prosecutors. His “Justice Department” authorized torture and the suspension of habeas corpus. With a murder rate five and a half times that of Italy, there are about 15,000 murders every year in the USA. The United States executes more than all but five countries in the world (places such as China, Iran and Iraq). DNA evidence has shown that in a significant percentage of these cases, an innocent person has been executed. I don’t know what Professor Fletcher could call this other than murder by the state.

Professor Fletcher’s time and effort might be better spent trying to improve the judicial system in the United States before he takes on the shortcomings of Italy. Then again, that probably wouldn’t help his chances of getting lucrative appearances on Fox News.

Teo Teo Teo

I listen to a lot of music. It started with records, then cassettes and more recently CDs. There was, and is also the radio, from Symphony Sid and Mort Fega after midnight in the sixties to WBGO on the Internet 24/7 these days. and the music just keeps on coming. Recently, my Irish neighbors lent me CDs of violin concertos played by Anne-Sophie Mutter and Irish folk music by Martin Hayes and Sharon Shannon; my supernaturally generous friend at Blue Note sent me a lot of music, ranging from the completely new to me Rosanne Cash to my longtime favorite Patricia Barber; one son-in-law, who is putting all his CDs on a monster hard drive, has presented me with a CD of the master takes of Charlie Parker with Strings as well as a 4 CD anthology of the blues. The wonderful Italian magazine Jazzit arrived the other day with a CD of JellyRoll Morton, something I wouldn’t have known to look for, but which is a sheer delight to listen to.

Amongst all the music I’ve gathered over a lifetime, one extraneous sound has lodged in my memory. At the end of Gingerbread Boy on his Miles Smiles album, Miles Davis can be heard to say to his long time producer Teo Macero “Teo, play that-- Teo, Teo, Teo”.

In 1995 when one of my daughters rescued a litter of abandoned kittens from the courtyard of her college apartment in Perugia, she found homes for all but two. We already had seven cats but my wife and I share a weakness for cats. We’ve all learned from childhood that “a dog is man’s best friend” but I’ve never thought of a best friend as someone you can train to fetch your slippers or beg for food. Apparently my masochistic streak is dominant. Whatever the explanation, we took the two cats and I was ready for the next task at hand, which was to give them names. Miles had died four years earlier but that refrain was fresh in my mind and I said, “This one is Teo”. His sister, a dark and silky gray miniature panther, I christened Tina. We never trained Teo to do anything, apart from brief efforts to make him play goalie with a ping pong ball, and my main interaction with him was to comb and brush the burrs out of his long fur in the morning. He wasn’t smart. He was castrated and long experience has led me to believe that 60% of male cats’ intelligence resides in their testicles. Still, he was good company. At night when it was time for the cats to come in, I’d go out and call “Teo Teo Teo”. I can’t play a trumpet. I don’t play any instrument at all, but that nightly ritual has always kept the presence of Miles vivid in my mind, just as I expect that Miles’ music will continue to be a reminder of Teo.

Last week we took Teo to the vet to end his long battle with a tumor that made breathing difficult and eating impossible. Tina is now the last of our cats. She too misses Teo.

Early Season Football Notes

Here in Italy there was a NFL blackout last year on SKY, our monopoly satellite TV provider. Following my resolution to drop the sports package (it requires a year’s advance notice) and who knows how many threatened lawsuits by other disgruntled football addicts, football is back on SKY TV. Not only back, but there’s a tidal wave of football, half a dozen college games from Thursday through Saturday followed by four live NFL games, all of them repeated at various hours throughout the week. After going cold turkey for a year, I feel as happy as Chet Baker in Marrakech. My eyes have been giving out after overdosing the first couple of weekends but I'm modulating my viewing, getting more sleep, and regaining some measure of equilibrium. I’m now fit and ready to join the horde of analysts on ESPN despite lacking 100 pounds of heft and a NFL resume, but they may not be ready for me.

The September schedule has produced an unprecedented amount of last minute game-changing heroics but my early analysis is focused on names and uniforms. In the early years of my football fandom when about 70% of the players were Polish-Americans from western Pennsylvania, many were named Joe, Johnny or Dick, with a sprinkling of really big guys named Alex. Rare names were truly rare. “Doak” still comes to mind. Of course the South produced a lot of Joe Dons and the Bobby Joes. As African-Americans increasingly entered the league, Roosevelt became a popular given name. In addition to one of them, my own beloved Rams had two Deacons, Deacon Dan Towler and Deacon Jones, whose number was finally retired just last week, more than three decades after his own retirement. With African-Americans now achieving even greater dominance than the Polish steelworkers once had, the names have become ever more interesting. While Jamal and Jabbar have taken the place of Joe and Johnny, we also hear of Jamarcus, Jacory, Keyshawn, Knowshon, Ladainian, Laveranues, Erick, Plaxico, Rashard and countless others. While I am a strong believer in original and well thought out names (other than the Madonna all graven images in my house are of a man named Thelonious), my inner conservative is consoled in seeing the Seattle Seahawks with a quarterback bearing the classical name Seneca.

The Seahawks typically wear what I considered the drabbest uniforms in the NFL. What they call teal looks like two shades of blue-gray in the Seattle rain. This is football, not the Civil War, and part of the joy of my childhood was seeing the parade of visiting teams in different vibrant colors. Other people may have made the same complaint. A week ago the Seahawks came out in shirts which appeared to be fluorescent lime green highway safety vests over the usual gray sleeves, possibly the ugliest sports uniforms ever seen, but you can judge for yourself. See above.

I’ve never set foot in Cleveland, Anaheim or St. Louis and spent only one night in LA, but I’ve been a life-long Rams fan, largely due to their uniforms. (It helped that the QB was married to Jane Russell.) They wore bright sun-yellow jerseys when all over America the choice was between red, white or blue. “Yellow” was synonymous with cowardly and “yellow journalism” was in disrepute before it became the norm. so the yellow was called gold. Those jerseys were replaced for a while in the 60’s because yellow didn’t show up well on b&w TV. Bright yellow, always called gold, is popular in California, with USC, UCLA and Cal all wearing it in combination with other colors. After the Rams moved from California to St. Louis and won a Superbowl in their somewhat garish yellow and blue and white outfits, they switched to a more sedate beige-like “true gold” and blue, more suitable to the Midwest. Since then they’ve nose-dived steadily to where they are now clearly the worst team in the league. I’m hoping to see a return to respectability, but at the least, a return to yellow gold.

The Rams also were the first team to decorate their helmets, when in 1948 a halfback named Fred Gehrke, who had majored in art, came up with the idea of painting rams’ horns on their helmets. Logos now give a strong sense of team identity to all but one or two teams in the league; a function perhaps more successfully carried out than their original one, which was to protect the wearer. A study released last week showed that retired NFL players between the ages of 30 and 40 have an incidence of dementia and Alzheimer’s 19 times that of the population at large. No similar study has yet been done on the rate of dementia in retirees who watch upwards of nine hours of football each week.

Herding Cats

Last week Todi held its annual Arte Festival. The Comune (county) of Todi has less than twenty thousand residents, half of whom live in the city, but in addition to its three major tourist-worthy churches and a large main piazza, which has served as the set for films such as “The Agony and the Ecstasy” and “Romanoff and Juliet”, the city has a magnificent 140 year old theater. The orchestra seats are surrounded by four tiers of boxes in the opera house style of the 1870’s. There is also a large 18th Century palazzo, the Palazzo del Vignola, which was restored following a tragic fire in 1982. The weeklong festival utilizes all these venues and while there are numerous concerts of various types of music, the emphasis is on theater, with the Teatro Comunale hosting a different play on each night of the festival.

On Friday I attended two concerts and several art exhibits with some neighbors I had recruited. A world-class noon concert at the theater, in which Ramberto Ciammarughi improvised for over an hour on movie music from Fats Waller to Leonard Bernstein and Disney to John Williams, Ennio Morricone and Nino Rota, kept the audience, which may have numbered as many as 45 people, totally enthralled. After lunch we headed for a large show of paintings by Roberto Banfi Rossi, in my humble opinion one of Italy’s finest living painters (I’ve written about him last February on this blog). The glossy 88 page program stated that the show was open in the morning and from 4 to 8 in the afternoon, and indeed the building was wide open at 4 PM when we went in. The subtleties of his glazes and incredible detail were not enhanced by the fact that nobody had turned on the lights. On the way out I asked a cheerful young woman downstairs in the huge Palazzo del Vignola about it and she said, “Oh, the show doesn’t start until 6 PM”. By 6 we were at a delightful concert of Neapolitan jazz by the Marco Zurzolo Quintet. Given that all 48 seats in the beautiful little Chiostro delle Lucrezie were filled, I suppose it could be regarded as a sell-out, as well as an undeniable artistic success. The Italians present may have numbered about 15, although I suspect none were local.

A couple of weeks earlier our tiny village of Acqualoreto had its own weeklong festa. I serve on the eleven-member committee which governs the Circolo di Acqualoreto and organizes the festa. My participation is essentially by default since, excluding children and women who no longer remember what month it is or where they’ve left their teeth, eleven more or less represents a quorum of the full time winter residents. What we really do well is food. The president of the Circolo procures and prepares most of the food himself, with precious help from some of the better cooks in the village. We had no trouble filling the tent for our opening night supper in the piazza with about 200 paying customers, well over our pre-established limit of 180. Younger people in town serve the food and all the diners seemed to love it. From there on our promotional skills seem to go downhill.

An old saying states that you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink. My long experience with cats has taught me that you can offer them new types or food, or their regular favorites, but you can’t make them eat. Forget about teaching them to do anything else. I’ve always been amazed by circus people who manage to train lions and tigers to jump through burning hoops. Tigers are, after all, just big cats.

Our local people are easier to deal with than horses or cats. You can always get them to eat or drink. The jumping through hoops becomes more difficult. In the case of our festa, it consisted of participating in a bocce tournament and an art contest. I foolishly tried to organize a bocce tournament. While bocce is a game frequently played by older Italian men, our 16 team tournament was made up of children, some of whom re-enlisted after losing in the early matches, and recent èmigrès from Bermuda and Ireland. The hordes of Italians, who return to sit in the piazza for the month of August, continued to sit in the piazza. We set up an exhibit of the artworks done, mostly by their grandchildren, during the art contest, but none of them ventured the 100 meters to the show during its three day run. Several did buy their kid’s or grandkid’s drawings, unseen, at the auction. But then again, attendance and participation in these events by the members of the organizing committee matched that of the piazza sitters.

I suppose that there will be a festa next year, since the people all say they are happy that there’s a festa. They just don’t want to get involved, except of course, to eat. My own involvement has brought me little satisfaction, but on the positive side, every year brings me a greater understanding of how Mussolini came to be so popular in Italy, before he wasn’t.

Mission Drift

In my youth I argued continuously with my father about just about everything. One disagreement I remember particularly well was between his assertion that the purpose of General Motors was to make money and my counter argument that its purpose was to make cars. If he were still around today, Buick would have at least one faithful customer and we would probably be having the same argument, but it turns out that GM has failed us both.

Despite lack of agreement over just what its mission was, there’s little doubt that mission drift was central to the bankruptcy of the company. Instead of just making cars efficiently, GM got into providing health care for its workers and financing for its customers, with disastrous long term results.

I once had some stock in ITT, which had been International Telephone and Telegraph before it started making Wonder Bread, renting cars and running hotels, until it diversified itself out of existence.

In the public sector, the US Department of Defense became so immersed in creating weapons systems for unlikely wars, and promoting unnecessary wars to use or sell the products it developed, that a whole new Department of Homeland Security had to be invented to assume the neglected original core functions of the DOD.

Money is a strong motivator, as essential to most types of activity as air is to fire, but unbeknownst to GOP politicians, there are other reasons for doing things, and when money starts to drive out the other motivations, we often see the entity lose focus and degenerate. Local events here have recently brought this to mind more than ever.

Umbria Jazz was founded in 1973. Its mission seemed to be to enrich the cultural life of Umbria by providing a showcase for this vital modern music. Carlo Pagnatta was genius at organizing the festival, and if the mission was as I’ve outlined, his success was phenomenal, despite a few bumps in the road in the early years. He managed to line up governmental and private sponsors along with the world’s best musicians. The festival took off, to the point of expanding to Orvieto for a winter version, and occasionally to places far beyond. I believe the organizers still do truly love jazz but the sponsors and city fathers may love the festival even more. Seeing how much money tourists bring to the city to hear jazz, apparently somebody decided that even vaster sums could be generated by bringing in pop groups to appeal to the wider public. There is still some wonderful jazz at Umbria Jazz but the main concerts are now in a stadium (shown above) instead of the smaller and magnificent Frontoni Gardens. This year’s headline performers included such jazz greats as the Simply Red and Burt Bacharach. No doubt the money pouring into Perugia is more abundant than ever but the festival is well past its glory days as a cultural event. Celebrity sells! Maybe next year we’ll see Berlusconi’s teenage friend Noemi Letizia brought in as mistress of ceremonies.

Here in the little village of Acqualoreto we’ve just held our summer festival. The festa pays for itself and it has paid for the opening of our small clubhouse and bar. We have events such as an art contest, a bocce tournament, theater, a card tournament, concerts and film, all designed to enliven the village and entertain the people, although since we’re in Italy the vast majority of activity revolves around eating. So far it has worked fairly well, but I do see a tendency to value the events in terms of how much money they bring in rather than how much they contribute to the community. Lotteries are a big hit with the committee. They contribute nothing to village life but they do bring in reams of money.

Yes, money is important. GM factories and jazz festivals go silent without it and when our little festa loses money, that will be the end of it. But as we’ve seen with Enron and Bernie Madoff, the health insurance companies and the banksters, when money becomes the only motivation, the world becomes a desert.

The Ninth Circle of Heaven

Monotheism can be a drag. It inhibits our natural human tendency to elevate revered figures to the status of gods. I’ve been building my own pantheon from the worlds of sports, politics, cinema and especially jazz all my life, evidence of which can be seen here. This One God concept is in direct contrast to our highest goals of democratic capitalism, i.e. maximum consumer choice.

One might think that monotheism would bring the peoples of the world together, but the Middle East alone has spawned three separate monotheistic traditions. While neither the Jewish version of an eye-for-an-eye God nor the Islamic version of a God urging perpetual jihad has done a whole lot for world brotherhood, one would think that Christ’s message of loving one’s neighbor as thyself could have helped us all get along, but the idea never gained much traction, no matter how numerous His professed followers have become.

In our polarized society it seems only fair that I should be able to worship Venus and Bacchus while my Republican friends openly profess their devotion to Mars. For some time now Neo-Cons have elevated Ayn Rand to the status of goddess, despite public protestations of devotion to the One God. Some prominent GOP figures of a strong Christian bent have recently been confusing their constituents and their congregations by appearing to have divided loyalties. Those good folk in SC and NV should remember that Jesus Himself said: “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s…”, suggesting His acknowledgement of dual loyalties.

The Catholic Church has accommodated our irrepressible urges toward polytheism through the creation of saints. This works up to a point, but its limitation is in its insistence that its saints measure up to the relatively conventional standards of piety exalted by monotheism.

Working within the limits of Catholic tradition, Dante Alighieri elaborated the various regions in Hell with spaces reserved for every species of sinner. Alas, Hell has fallen out of fashion lately; other than in the occasional invective that we hurl at our enemies, “May you rot in Hell”. However, references to Heaven still do occur with some frequency, as in ”she’s moved on to a better place”

Following Dante’s lead, (but not too far) I would suggest that that there are different circles of Paradise. Our Muslim brethren have led the way with their special designated zones for martyrs, but the fascination with people of self-destructive urges is not confined to Islam. We regularly assign our greatest esteem to people with such tendencies. My personal jazz pantheon may feature Miles, Monk and Trane but the real gods of the jazz world remain Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday and Chet Baker, whose sublime skills were matched by their unrelenting urges toward self-annihilation. Still, they remain minor gods, since their talent was never appreciated in the wider society.

There is a special circle of heaven reserved for the celebrity gods, those larger than life personages who capture the imagination and devotion of the teeming masses. Many aspire to it but few arrive. The requisites for popular canonization are ambiguous but surely, Blondie’s advice to “die young, stay pretty” is fundamental. A long productive life and happy dotage just won’t cut it. We’ve seen Liberace lose his spot in celebrity heaven by overstaying.

The good news is that the elite ninth circle of heaven is now complete. Michael has joined Elvis and Diana to form the perfect triad of popular gods. At future memorial ceremonies marking the decades, a larger number of the weeping matrons placing large bouquets at the various temples and shrines will be black, which seems only fair in this day and age, although in truth, at recent appearances Michael seemed almost as white as Diana. Never mind. Michael’s shrine at Neverland will rival that of Graceland. Despite the news that Diana’s shrine at Althorp House has been closed due to a diminishing number of visitors, we’re confident that when William eventually ascends to the throne, pilgrimages and worship services will return to levels of the glory days.

Paramus, Umbria

Being born and growing up within five miles of the intersection of Route 4 and Route 17 in Paramus, New Jersey has conditioned my whole life. Route 4 connected Bergen County to the George Washington Bridge and Route 17 was a major highway, which carried thousands of New Yorkers to the Catskills on weekends throughout the summer. While other towns had severe residential zoning and restrictions on commercial development, Paramus was a free for all. Both of these four-lane highways came to be lined with stores of all kinds and from the 50’s until the 70’s shopping centers grew like cancer along both, rendering them useless for travel other than from one shopping center to another. Alternate highways, such as Route 80 and the Garden State Parkway were built at great expense to take traffic from the increasingly clogged older roads. This process was going on throughout the United States but I believe Paramus was the leader, the first and worst in the development of the suburban sprawl model. With the growth of the Bergen Mall and the enormous Garden State Plaza, the nearby downtown shopping areas went into irreversible decline. Hackensack, the county seat, was seriously impoverished, but the larger and once bustling city of Paterson, established by Alexander Hamilton to be the major industrial city of the east coast, simply was transformed into a large depressed ghetto. It took years but the wealthy neighboring town of Ridgewood eventually lost all its fashionable shops, replaced by a tidal wave of new restaurants serving the increasingly rich population of nobody’s ever home families.

How did all this condition my life? Well, Paramus was one more element that made me want to get as far away as possible, for example to a city or village where every movement is not necessarily by car. I’ve lived in Italy since the early 1970’s so I thought I had escaped, but one should never underestimate the power of progress.

Perugia sits on a big hill with the Tiber Valley passing below it to the east. One of Umbria’s main north-south highways, E45, passes through this valley connecting Terni and Rome to the south with Cesena and other cities to the north. The A1 autostrada is half an hour to the west and , except for some coastal roads, most north-sout traffic in Italy is on A1 or E45

Sometime following WWII, a Jewish philanthropist owned a large parcel of land in Collestrada adjacent to the path of the highway. He wanted to set up a summer camp for poor children on the land. Most Italians in such circumstances would donate their resources to a charity run by the Church, but being Jewish, he decided to entrust the land to the Comune of Perugia to be used as the site for the desired facilities. Alas, the city or provincial fathers knew better. They decided that the land could be put to better use by putting a big shopping center on it. There was some resistance but when large commercial interests are at stake, resistance has a way of being overcome.

Some scandals did come out of the construction of the center, built around a IperCoop market, with one of the developers doing some jail time, but they seemed to concern payoffs in the construction process rather than the misappropriation of the land.

The commercial center is less ugly than most and the COOP ipermarket is one of the best places to shop in the Perugia area. The Italians apparently learned something, a little at least, from Paramus. E45 is a limited access highway so there is no direct entry to any of the big stores that now line the road. Nevertheless, on major shopping days, traffic running up and down Italy on E45 is totally blocked near the Collestrada exits and there is no alternate route. The point of blockage is just a kilometer or two before the turnoff for the rapidly expanding Perugia airport, so if you’re flying out of Perugia it’s wise to check if your departure date is on a big shopping day or not. For shoppers, the whole idea of monster shopping centers is a leisurely wandering and choosing from the glut of stuff, so the delays are a minor inconvenience. For the long distance travelers, both private and commercial, it’s one more unwelcome incitement to road rage. As for those poor children, well, they never carried much weight in the deliberations over what to do with the land donated to their welfare.

Grand Tour Jazz Fest 09 starts well

Last night the Grand Tour Jazz Fest 09 got started at the Parco delle Fonte in San Gemini with the Iiro Rantala New Trio. The weather was cold, damp and threatening so at the last minute the Vanni brothers wisely moved the concert indoors to the auditorium adjacent to the park. While the auditorium lacks the magic of the park, on this night the magic was in the music.

Wine critics who write of hints of mint or suggestions of walnut, raspberries, anything, that is, except grapes, have always amused me, but at the risk of sounding just as silly, I’ll try to suggest the flavor of this very original Finnish trio, made up of Iiro Rantala on piano, Marzi Nyman on electric guitar, and Felix Zenger on beatbox. The beatbox, which amplifies and distorts sounds made orally by the performer, substitutes for a bass, drums and percussion, and adds some original zoo-like sounds. Given my age, I prefer the traditional instruments, but this kid is a phenomenon, both entertaining to see and hear, and effective in contributing to the musical concept. Marzi Nyman seems to be a hairless Frank Zappa. He sang in a couple of numbers, his voice as wildly distorted as his electronically modified guitar playing. While Zappa is his model, I detected hints of Jimi Hendrix and George Benson in his playing. Iiro Rantala resembles Bennie Hill and projects a similar zany persona. Like the Danish performer Victor Borge before him, he subverts the sweet romantic classical playing that he’s so good at with an irrepressible tendency to veer off in comic detours. At times he leads the group into swelling passages that conjure soundtracks for really big movies, with Nyman adding symphonic effects, while at other times he does his take on boogie-woogie. Rantala described his composition A Chick from Korea as having three parts: a Finnish tango, a funk section (very electronic), followed by Norwegian art jazz, and the music perfectly followed that unlikely scenario. All told, an astonishing and entertaining concert, brilliantly performed. The audience loved it and I think the performers had just as much fun.

Next up is the Omer Avital Band of the East at the Chiostro Boccarino in Amelia. There’s also a wonderful exhibit of black and white photos in Terni throughout the festival by Roberto Paolillo, the son of the famous jazz producer Arrigo Paolillo. It contains images of visiting American jazz legends, from Louis Armstrong to Ornette Coleman in the 60’s and 70’s. On Thursday Kurt Rosenwinkel will be at the Abbazia di San Pietro in Valle.

The Sienese Invasion

Years ago, when visiting Umbria for the first time, my brother exclaimed: “My God, what wretched lives these people must have lived!”. This was in response to his first sight of the once gated portals and crenellated towers enclosing Todi, an experience that more commonly evokes comments such as “How lovely” from the bewitched tourists.

He was right of course. Life in medieval Umbria was no doubt short, hard and cruel. City-states frequently attacked neighboring towns and those walls and portals were not there for decorative purposes, no matter how decorated they were, nor how attractive they may appear to us today. What escaped him was the irony of the fact that while the portals of Todi are no longer closed, those of his own gated community are not only closed, but also defended by armed guards around the clock.

The most popular anecdote routinely told to Todi visitors is about the façade of the Church of San Fortunato. It has remained unfinished since the late 1400’s when people came from Orvieto to put out the eyes of the architect, so that he couldn’t create a rival for the façade of their own splendid cathedral.

In the future, our children may have a sequel. While I’m unaware of any further threat from Orvieto, we may be under some sort of stealth attack from Siena. Why Siena? I can only guess. Tuscany received the first big influx of foreign settler money and after everything there has become overpriced and overcrowded, some of the surplus foreign money started flowing to Umbria. Just as Orvieto had its own great cathedral, the Sienese have had plenty foreign investment but perhaps, like the old Orvietani, they don’t want to see a neighboring territory share the wealth and the glory.

The evidence? In the past several years, an architect from Siena, Andrea Milani, has secured three major commissions in the Todi area: the Parco Fluviale in Ponte Rio; a new office building on the site of the old olive oil consortium in Todi; and the renovation of the old convent of San Bartolomeo in Ceccanibbi. This isn’t necessarily unusual, or evidence of an attack, given that once architects get their foot in a regional door, they always try to branch out with multiple local commissions. While I’ve studied neither the first nor the last of these projects in any great detail, and I continue to hope for the best, the new office/retail building (ex-elaiopolio tuderte), just across the street from the medieval wall, has raised the specter of a regional invasion. While there have been no news of bombings of Umbrian wineries, this assault seems more in the spirit and methodology of the Greek invasion of Troy. Rather than a crude attack on the city, say by sending 50 progress-crazed geometre to plan 100 new industrial warehouses on the farmland below Todi, the attack has been brought by a smooth talking architect speaking in glowing terms (on his website) of the opportunity to bring contemporary architecture to a site of particular historic/environmental interest. The florid descriptions of the rich materials to be used and their dialog with the antique walls are too poetic for me to adequately translate. If you can read Italian, I suggest you read it for yourself here under progetti, nuove architetture, No.2.

The emerging building is not quite complete, although a supermarket has opened in the basement this week. The building’s huge glazed areas are framed in gleaming, untinted aluminum and the walls, which were a dazzling white, smooth concrete, have been darkened down somewhat in recent weeks. Perhaps it really is possible to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear although at this writing, the silk purse has yet to emerge, and there is no trace of the delicately perforated weathered copper sheathing specified to cover the left side of the building. The deeply striated stucco surface of the right side of the building still seems as smooth as a plain sheet of paper.

There is some irony in the fact that the building houses a supermarket. We used to shop in a tiny supermarket just across the street in what we referred to as the hole in the wall, literally a simple unmarked door in the ancient wall of the town (first door on the right in the picture). That shop was driven out of business by the opening of four new and larger supermarkets in the Todi area.

Questions remain. What’s behind it? Has the ufficio tecnico of Todi been infiltrated by hostile Sienese? Have an architect’s noble intentions once again been subverted by a budget-cutting owner? Was the project submitted for approval as per description on the web site, or as built? If as described, what is the city doing about it? I visited the technical office hoping for answers. The clerks there told me that the director of the office who had approved the project no longer held that position. I don’t know if he was a political appointee who had been replaced after the recent change of administration, or was simply a disgruntled retiring employee taking revenge on the city for imagined slights. Those in the office conceded that there had been a flood of protests and they couldn’t imagine how such a building could have been approved for such a site.

Finally, a plea to our Sienese brethren. Please halt the invasion. Keep sending us your wine and your panforte and your ricciarelli and caciotta di Siena, but if it’s not asking too much, please keep your architects at home, or at least out of Umbria. Grazie.

Postscripts: While it’s in my protestant nature to protest more than most, I should say that in my years here I’ve been impressed with the efforts of Todi to keep new development compact and in reasonable harmony with the existing ancient city. Adjacent to the new building there's a middle school with a long parking lot several meters below the main road along the wall. A sidewalk has recently been built along the road supported by new columns, creating not only the sidewalk but also a sheltered area below, stairs, and a covered pavilion where kids can wait for a school bus or their parents. The concrete, brick, steel and glass employed have a modern look and feel, but seem to fit in comfortably with the old walls across the road. At the end of this area, a one-story nondescript computer shop was recently torn down, to be replaced by a two-story building. The ground floor has display windows, as before, but the addition above has a stone wall with a series of small square windows, with a sloping tile roof above. Call it post-modern if you want, or perhaps pre-modern, but it’s functional and fits well with the look of the town. Such developments make the big new building all the more mystifying and discouraging.

For any of you interested in urban issues, a friend of ours, Frank Gruber has recently reported on a Congress for the New Urbanism for Huffington Post. It’s a fascinating and informative series of reports.