We are staying with a large party of people in a lovely old villa near Montevarchi & Bucine in Tuscany. We know that there is the cantine aperte on the 31st but we will all be gone by then.
Enjoyed the post FNO. Well observed & well written. Shame you'll be separated from your source material soon. Maybe though, you'll have a decent store of memories with which to keep the keyboard busy. You being on the Tuscan/Ligurian border are no more than an hour & a half drive from Bolgheri & Castagnetto Carducci. When you manage to visit again, take a drive to Castagnetto Carducci & find the little corner Enoteca/Bar in the centre where the lovely barman, if he's still there, gives you tasters of top flight Bolgheri wines for a small handfull of euros. An experience worth a few lines/pages. Pilch
Have not read an Italian themed book for a while so Thin Paths sounds like it'll be my next good read & I'm looking forward to it after a few too many Scandinavian crime thrillers. We also had a serious look in "the Strip of Bacon" for property after being told by a cousin that it was a highly favoured retirement destination for Torinese & Milanese. We had a few of other reasons for going there anyway: (1) it was on the way to Tuscany via the Apuan Alps, (2)we both had read a couple of light hearted books set in one of it's hillside villages, (3) it had a village very close to Imperia after which a very close member of my family was named because her mother, having been given a bottle of olive oil from the village, was blown away by the flavour, (4) we could visit a childhood friend that had a holiday home in a "by foot only access" area on the Cinque Torre with the most stunning views from the tiny strips of terraces down onto the sparkling azure sea. I remember the Sage bushes the size of box hedging growing wild everywhere & the most humungous great green eyeless revolting maggotty thing, the size of a Lincolnshire sausage, tumbling, with a purpose, down the stone steps on it's way God knows where to do God knows what. Liguria was a little dissapointing though. The seafront proms were populated mainly by pairs of wrinklies in matching shell-suits & the interior, after the acres of glass-houses & the odd pretty olive clad slopes, seemed to be just mile upon mile of Chestnut forests. The killer for us was the Torinese bikers that came hacking round a blind bend on the wrong side of a pretty narrow road & bent our pristine Audi. I'll still read the book though &, I dare say, wish I had been a little more patient with Liguria. Pilch
English differs from many other European languages, official Italian being a case in point, in that it is a mongrel born of pretty diverse parentage. It has been forced to be an ever-changing, dynamic & fluid language, which, to an arguable degree, makes it the very capable, & expressive language it is today. Because it is a mongrel, rules of grammar are constantly broken by officially sanctioned exceptions as to make nonsense of them. Consequently, English Grammar is not a subject generally taught beyond early teens. This can make learning the grammar of other languages, especially Greco-Romano languages, infinitely tedious for many Brits, even those that may also be intelligent & reasonably well educated. Language tutors, or those who had the benefit of the usually high level of education in the grammar of their own Latin based mother tongue, may sometimes forget the advantages they have. Stand someone in front of a high mountain & they may never attempt more than a few faltering steps to the summit. Show them a modest hill, give them comfortable boots & a lightweight pack & they’ll usually get to the top of the hill pretty quickly. Then maybe the next hill, then the next. They may eventually get really keen, invest in crampons & ice-axe & go for the big one. Grammar is one component of language alongside vocabulary & pronunciation. In an imperfect world it's down to individual choice as to how to achieve the desired results. My opinions re learning Italian, however, are biased by my being study-phobic & needing quick results; as poor as they may be. Pilch Pilch
I have enormous respect for those here that can actually debate grammatical subtleties on ANY level, never mind the level THEY are at. I’m not sure though that many newly arrived ex-pats would either have the determination, time or energy to ascend to these dizzy heights when probably all they are hoping for is a good working knowledge of the language: something that’ll function reasonably well for social & domestic purposes, not academic or business. Having an Italian mother, I had a head start but was never interested in studying Italian & was fairly useless with French at school. My mother’s English was incredibly good with only a fugitive trace of accent. I think what I did get from my mother & those long annual Italian holidays was good pronunciation & I think it has been that & that alone that had me communicating freely with Italians from all walks of life while fellow ex-pats, whose Italian was technically pretty damned good, constantly struggled. I often had Italians asking me to translate what had just been said to them, by studious & grammatically correct Brits. I was constantly apologising for my poor Italian & being told not to worry because, at least they understood the words I used; that my grammar might be primitive but they could work it out. Anyway, they’d say (& this was said to me by every Italian) that Italian was still a fairly new language to most of them, that most Italians still speak their own local dialect as their first language, that most Italians speak grammatically incorrect Italian but they all manage to get by. If like me you can’t or won’t do the studying, then getting the pronunciation right will get you by much better on it’s own than good grammar & crap pronunciation. Imitate the better spoken locals’ speech patterns & get stuck in. The world loves a tryer & Italians are no exception. I did, however, regret never having attained a really good level of conversational Italian because, when it comes down to it, being able to communicate the minute subtleties & nuances is always going to make the difference between just talking & full social immersion. It’s one of the many complex reasons I came back to the UK. I wonder though how good my Italian ever had to be to provide me with that level of satisfaction. Does anyone know, or have their own experiences/impressions to relate? Maybe it takes starting young. The hundreds of different dialects, which are far more like different languages than just varying pronunciation as it generally is in the UK, is bound to me a pretty big issue though; maybe even for Italians. Pilch
QUOTE "I'd make sure the shaven pig doesn't leave too many petrol cans lying around in case the twins, Pinky and Perky, get singed." What kind of bait would you call that? Pilch
QUOTE:- “find ONE SINGLE post where I start the antagonism” QUOTE:- “I'm going fishing now - is it true you can use a silly little Sprat to catch a great white Shark?” Pilch
"whilst rural Marche food is very meat based, there are lots of pasta, pizza and bean based dishes plus inventive salads" I have been a vegetarian for nigh on 40 years and I could'nt face an exclusively carbohydrate meal every time I went out to eat. Pasta, pizza and bean based dishes is not a balanced diet and no matter how inventive a salad is it is still generally a green salad which is mainly water and a few minerals. Meat is a complete and balanced food and meat eaters can, and invariably do, suffice quite adequately in the short term, eating no vegetables other than potatoes. As a vegetarian I eat a substantial amount, and very wide range of, vegetables and non meat derived foods. Italy was once famous for the wealth of excellent quality vegetables and fruit. You see them in the Italian supermarkets but very few people seem to buy them these days; prefering to fill their trolleys with manufactured trash and Cola. You see vegetables growing everywhere in Italy. Everyone in the country seems to have a beautiful well ordered veg patch but, if invited to dine with them, not a single vegetable will appear. The same is true for restaurants and, as for phoning ahead, it rarely made any difference. You get told there is no problem---lots of vegetarian things to eat, and when you turn up, whilst the others are eating meat you get given a big lump of cheese and a knife! Italians don't view chicken as meat, so it creeps into everything; especially chicken stock. And the same can be said of pancetta. Sprat
Off topic slightly...heard a rather disturbing comment on a T.V. program last night on BBC 4 about the Antarctic. Where Ranulph Fiennes was asked how people were chosen for his expeditions His quote was "We don't take dour people who don't forgive and forget, so we don't take Yorkshire people" Fair comment or what?
No-one can define the length of that piece of string although, one hundredweight (cwt) is 112 pounds (lb) & 2.2 lb= 1Kg. We used to go & collect our own logs in a van & trailer. Our neighbours were all farmers that had their own woodland & cut their own, so had no real advice as to the where, what & how. We eventually found out that the best deal was from our local Coal Supermercato when they ran out of storage space in their warehouse & started stacking the crates of logs outside the shop. We had no idea they also sold logs. If bought in summer, one of those ubiquitous 6ft tall crates would cost, delivered, €110 but as much as €150 in winter. A mix of Oak, which burns hot & slow, & Beech, which burns very hot because it burns fast, is a good & very useful normal mix. One of our stoves had a very short fire box yet most logs would still fit. There is no way anbody here could estimate your needs (altitude, number & size of rooms, comfort level required, number of days in coldest months etc) but I'd advise getting a couple delivered, ASAP, & see how it goes in September when you arrive. Most Italian houses are pretty free from draughts & are fairly well double glazed but.......... have no insulation or ventilation so, in winter are as cold as hell & damp from condensation. Many of our locals shut off all rooms that were not absolutely necessary & never let the thermocamino go out. Pilch
I love camping. You cannot beat it. Any kind of camping. Wild camping, camping in small sites, large sites with all types of facillities ( lots of sites have on site hairdryers), in blizzards with 3 foot of snow on top of tent when you wake in the morning, in the mountains with only a stream for washing and drinking & a wayside fire to cook on. Carrying everything you need in yer sack and feeling totally free to roam and set up "home" where ever you please. Falling asleep in your sleeping bag staring up at the stars. Experiencing total darkness & silence. It's a great feeling. We spent years camping in Europe & the U.K & am just about to set off for a couple of weeks camping today. We don't mind what the weather is like, ( although some sunshine is always welcome) because as we all know, it's not just about the weather. I have slept in 5 star hotels, caravans, campers, luxury villas and some of the best experiences I ever had has been under canvas. So, FromNowOn , have a great time and let us know which sites you visit and how much of a great time you had. Happy Camping!
Comments posted
Enjoyed the post FNO. Well observed & well written. Shame you'll be separated from your source material soon. Maybe though, you'll have a decent store of memories with which to keep the keyboard busy. You being on the Tuscan/Ligurian border are no more than an hour & a half drive from Bolgheri & Castagnetto Carducci. When you manage to visit again, take a drive to Castagnetto Carducci & find the little corner Enoteca/Bar in the centre where the lovely barman, if he's still there, gives you tasters of top flight Bolgheri wines for a small handfull of euros. An experience worth a few lines/pages. Pilch
Have not read an Italian themed book for a while so Thin Paths sounds like it'll be my next good read & I'm looking forward to it after a few too many Scandinavian crime thrillers. We also had a serious look in "the Strip of Bacon" for property after being told by a cousin that it was a highly favoured retirement destination for Torinese & Milanese. We had a few of other reasons for going there anyway: (1) it was on the way to Tuscany via the Apuan Alps, (2)we both had read a couple of light hearted books set in one of it's hillside villages, (3) it had a village very close to Imperia after which a very close member of my family was named because her mother, having been given a bottle of olive oil from the village, was blown away by the flavour, (4) we could visit a childhood friend that had a holiday home in a "by foot only access" area on the Cinque Torre with the most stunning views from the tiny strips of terraces down onto the sparkling azure sea. I remember the Sage bushes the size of box hedging growing wild everywhere & the most humungous great green eyeless revolting maggotty thing, the size of a Lincolnshire sausage, tumbling, with a purpose, down the stone steps on it's way God knows where to do God knows what. Liguria was a little dissapointing though. The seafront proms were populated mainly by pairs of wrinklies in matching shell-suits & the interior, after the acres of glass-houses & the odd pretty olive clad slopes, seemed to be just mile upon mile of Chestnut forests. The killer for us was the Torinese bikers that came hacking round a blind bend on the wrong side of a pretty narrow road & bent our pristine Audi. I'll still read the book though &, I dare say, wish I had been a little more patient with Liguria. Pilch
English differs from many other European languages, official Italian being a case in point, in that it is a mongrel born of pretty diverse parentage. It has been forced to be an ever-changing, dynamic & fluid language, which, to an arguable degree, makes it the very capable, & expressive language it is today. Because it is a mongrel, rules of grammar are constantly broken by officially sanctioned exceptions as to make nonsense of them. Consequently, English Grammar is not a subject generally taught beyond early teens. This can make learning the grammar of other languages, especially Greco-Romano languages, infinitely tedious for many Brits, even those that may also be intelligent & reasonably well educated. Language tutors, or those who had the benefit of the usually high level of education in the grammar of their own Latin based mother tongue, may sometimes forget the advantages they have. Stand someone in front of a high mountain & they may never attempt more than a few faltering steps to the summit. Show them a modest hill, give them comfortable boots & a lightweight pack & they’ll usually get to the top of the hill pretty quickly. Then maybe the next hill, then the next. They may eventually get really keen, invest in crampons & ice-axe & go for the big one. Grammar is one component of language alongside vocabulary & pronunciation. In an imperfect world it's down to individual choice as to how to achieve the desired results. My opinions re learning Italian, however, are biased by my being study-phobic & needing quick results; as poor as they may be. Pilch Pilch
I have enormous respect for those here that can actually debate grammatical subtleties on ANY level, never mind the level THEY are at. I’m not sure though that many newly arrived ex-pats would either have the determination, time or energy to ascend to these dizzy heights when probably all they are hoping for is a good working knowledge of the language: something that’ll function reasonably well for social & domestic purposes, not academic or business. Having an Italian mother, I had a head start but was never interested in studying Italian & was fairly useless with French at school. My mother’s English was incredibly good with only a fugitive trace of accent. I think what I did get from my mother & those long annual Italian holidays was good pronunciation & I think it has been that & that alone that had me communicating freely with Italians from all walks of life while fellow ex-pats, whose Italian was technically pretty damned good, constantly struggled. I often had Italians asking me to translate what had just been said to them, by studious & grammatically correct Brits. I was constantly apologising for my poor Italian & being told not to worry because, at least they understood the words I used; that my grammar might be primitive but they could work it out. Anyway, they’d say (& this was said to me by every Italian) that Italian was still a fairly new language to most of them, that most Italians still speak their own local dialect as their first language, that most Italians speak grammatically incorrect Italian but they all manage to get by. If like me you can’t or won’t do the studying, then getting the pronunciation right will get you by much better on it’s own than good grammar & crap pronunciation. Imitate the better spoken locals’ speech patterns & get stuck in. The world loves a tryer & Italians are no exception. I did, however, regret never having attained a really good level of conversational Italian because, when it comes down to it, being able to communicate the minute subtleties & nuances is always going to make the difference between just talking & full social immersion. It’s one of the many complex reasons I came back to the UK. I wonder though how good my Italian ever had to be to provide me with that level of satisfaction. Does anyone know, or have their own experiences/impressions to relate? Maybe it takes starting young. The hundreds of different dialects, which are far more like different languages than just varying pronunciation as it generally is in the UK, is bound to me a pretty big issue though; maybe even for Italians. Pilch
QUOTE "I'd make sure the shaven pig doesn't leave too many petrol cans lying around in case the twins, Pinky and Perky, get singed." What kind of bait would you call that? Pilch
QUOTE:- “find ONE SINGLE post where I start the antagonism” QUOTE:- “I'm going fishing now - is it true you can use a silly little Sprat to catch a great white Shark?” Pilch
"whilst rural Marche food is very meat based, there are lots of pasta, pizza and bean based dishes plus inventive salads" I have been a vegetarian for nigh on 40 years and I could'nt face an exclusively carbohydrate meal every time I went out to eat. Pasta, pizza and bean based dishes is not a balanced diet and no matter how inventive a salad is it is still generally a green salad which is mainly water and a few minerals. Meat is a complete and balanced food and meat eaters can, and invariably do, suffice quite adequately in the short term, eating no vegetables other than potatoes. As a vegetarian I eat a substantial amount, and very wide range of, vegetables and non meat derived foods. Italy was once famous for the wealth of excellent quality vegetables and fruit. You see them in the Italian supermarkets but very few people seem to buy them these days; prefering to fill their trolleys with manufactured trash and Cola. You see vegetables growing everywhere in Italy. Everyone in the country seems to have a beautiful well ordered veg patch but, if invited to dine with them, not a single vegetable will appear. The same is true for restaurants and, as for phoning ahead, it rarely made any difference. You get told there is no problem---lots of vegetarian things to eat, and when you turn up, whilst the others are eating meat you get given a big lump of cheese and a knife! Italians don't view chicken as meat, so it creeps into everything; especially chicken stock. And the same can be said of pancetta. Sprat
Off topic slightly...heard a rather disturbing comment on a T.V. program last night on BBC 4 about the Antarctic. Where Ranulph Fiennes was asked how people were chosen for his expeditions His quote was "We don't take dour people who don't forgive and forget, so we don't take Yorkshire people" Fair comment or what?
No-one can define the length of that piece of string although, one hundredweight (cwt) is 112 pounds (lb) & 2.2 lb= 1Kg. We used to go & collect our own logs in a van & trailer. Our neighbours were all farmers that had their own woodland & cut their own, so had no real advice as to the where, what & how. We eventually found out that the best deal was from our local Coal Supermercato when they ran out of storage space in their warehouse & started stacking the crates of logs outside the shop. We had no idea they also sold logs. If bought in summer, one of those ubiquitous 6ft tall crates would cost, delivered, €110 but as much as €150 in winter. A mix of Oak, which burns hot & slow, & Beech, which burns very hot because it burns fast, is a good & very useful normal mix. One of our stoves had a very short fire box yet most logs would still fit. There is no way anbody here could estimate your needs (altitude, number & size of rooms, comfort level required, number of days in coldest months etc) but I'd advise getting a couple delivered, ASAP, & see how it goes in September when you arrive. Most Italian houses are pretty free from draughts & are fairly well double glazed but.......... have no insulation or ventilation so, in winter are as cold as hell & damp from condensation. Many of our locals shut off all rooms that were not absolutely necessary & never let the thermocamino go out. Pilch
I love camping. You cannot beat it. Any kind of camping. Wild camping, camping in small sites, large sites with all types of facillities ( lots of sites have on site hairdryers), in blizzards with 3 foot of snow on top of tent when you wake in the morning, in the mountains with only a stream for washing and drinking & a wayside fire to cook on. Carrying everything you need in yer sack and feeling totally free to roam and set up "home" where ever you please. Falling asleep in your sleeping bag staring up at the stars. Experiencing total darkness & silence. It's a great feeling. We spent years camping in Europe & the U.K & am just about to set off for a couple of weeks camping today. We don't mind what the weather is like, ( although some sunshine is always welcome) because as we all know, it's not just about the weather. I have slept in 5 star hotels, caravans, campers, luxury villas and some of the best experiences I ever had has been under canvas. So, FromNowOn , have a great time and let us know which sites you visit and how much of a great time you had. Happy Camping!