Congratulations to Lorrie, our randomly chosen winner of a signed copy of “Up at the Villa: Travels with My Husband,” by Linda Dini Jenkins.
Thanks to all who commented
on Linda’s Inner Italian Q & A.
The Inner Italian Q & A: Linda Dini Jenkins
One in an occasional series of conversations with those who try to “live Italian” wherever they are.
"La Principessa" in Perugia
Linda Dini Jenkins is a freelance travel writer and photographer and the author of Up at the Villa: Travels with my Husband (more later on how to win a free copy!). She also blogs regularly about travel and travel writing at Travel the Write Way and teaches creative writing and journaling. She enjoys taking small groups of friends, to explore what Italy has to offer beyond the Florence-Venice-Rome triumvirate, and she can pack her suitcase in 15 minutes.
◊ ◊ ◊
Q: Living “Italian”. . . Is it a great way to live or the greatest way to live?
A: Well, I think it’s the greatest way to live. When you take into account the slower pace of life (outside the big cities!), the immersion in history and art, the fantastic cuisine, the love of design and music, the respect for taking time out to enjoy the simple things . . . whether it’s Italian or Mediterranean or European, it’s how I want to live.
Q: Why?
A: Are you kidding? Start with the food, the design sensibilities, the language, the arts, the vino, the pausa, the passeggiata . . . need I go on?
Q: When did you discover your Inner Italian? What is your Inner Italian named?
A: I always knew about my Inner Italian but, like other children of first-generation Italian-Americans who desperately wanted to assimilate, “being Italian” was something that just happened and was never really encouraged. In fact, I’d heard stories growing up of how hard it was for my father to be Italian in a New York suburb in the 1930s and ‘40s; even being Italian in my first job in New York in the 1970s was something of a liability. And I was always a little ashamed after that of being part Italian (my mother’s side of the family was English/Irish/German) until I met my husband and he took me to Italy in 2000. Since then, I have been a proud and vocal Italian-American. If my Inner Italian has a name and it needs to be something other than Linda, I suppose it’s Principessa . . .
Q: What does “living Italian” mean to you?
A: My grandparents came over from Italy in the late 1890s and they were anything but rich. So for me, living Italian has to do with cooking and eating together, always having crusty bread and wrinkled olives and green olive oil on the flowered oilcloth-covered table. It means not being afraid to be emotional—even if that involves fists and things flying when you’re angry. It means loving music and feeling the arts very deeply. It means trying to have a sense of style—of la bella figura—even if the clothes or table settings come from Target. And it means being a storyteller and a traveler and something of an adventurer.
Buon Compleanno Rossini
The house of Rossini's birth is now a museum dedicated to the composer.
If you’ve done a Google search today, you already know from the doodle that it is Gioachino Rossini’s birthday. The great Italian composer came into the world in the Leap Year of 1792. Luckily for me, Martin Kettle of The Guardian did the math on just what number anniversary this is. Depending upon whether you count every year or only the leaps, Rossini is either 220 or 53 (there are no leaps in 00 years).
Think you don’t know any Rossini works? You do. The theme from the classic TV program The Lone Ranger is The William Tell Overture. Director Stanley Kubrick also used the William Tell in the film A Clockwork Orange along with La Gazza Ladra (The Thieving Magpie).
As a fan, I’ve visited both Rossini’s birthplace and his tomb. The former is a two-room second floor apartment in the placid Adriatic coastal town of Pesaro. The latter is in the Basilica di Santa Croce, a veritable pantheon of cultural luminaries, in Firenze.
The triumphant arc of his life and career is summed up in those two locations. From his impoverished beginning, Rossini’s talent launched him into the musical stratosphere. He was a rock star of his era. Every August, Pesaro hosts The Rossini Festival continuing to shine a spotlight on their hometown genius. Check out the 2012 program.
Today, I’ll be listening to one of my favorite pieces—the overture from La Scala di Seta (The Silk Ladder). This wonderful recording is a performance of Arturo Toscanini conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1938.
Do you love Rossini’s work? What’s your favorite?
Money and Beauty
The Money-changer and his Wife (Florence, Museo Nazionale del Bargello)
What were the 1 Percent of quattrocento Florence doing with their gold florins?
Buying exquisite works of art by Botticelli, Beato Angelico, and the Della Robbias.
The current, and timely, exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence through January 2012 shows how the modern banking system developed in parallel with the most important artistic flowering in the history of the Western world.
Money and Beauty: Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities is co-curated by art historian Ludovica Sebregondi and Tim Parks, writer, translator and author of Medici Money – Banking, Metaphysics and Art in Fifteenth-century Florence.
I know of Parks through his entertaining books on the expat life Italian Neighbors and An Italian Education. I’m intrigued to learn he’s a scholar of Italian art history.
According to the program notes, “the exhibition is conceived as a ‘duet’, in which the two curators present different – and sometimes opposing – views of the exhibition’s content. [They] aim to provide the visitor with an opportunity to look at art from a cross-disciplinary perspective involving economists, politicians and diplomats. It examines the story of how the Florentine Renaissance grew from the supposedly open, but more often actually hidden, relationship between art, power and money.”
The Florentine bankers practiced usury on a scale the world had never before witnessed. But, unlike today’s 1 Percent, they at least left us with The Birth of Venus and countless other treasures.
Risotto alla Monzese
Delicately seasoned luganega sausage and robust red wine are the flavor keys to this rice dish.
Photos make fine souvenirs but you can’t have them for dinner.
From now on, when I want to recall my visit to Monza last June, I can reminisce over a plate of steaming risotto alla monzese (Monza Style Risotto) like the one I sampled there.
The recipe comes courtesy of Guidarte guide and architect Laura Radaelli who escorted our media group around the charming medieval city.
In the course of exchanging e-mails to fact check my “Off the Beaten Track in Monza” article for Dream of Italy newsletter, I learned that Laura is an enthusiastic home cook. She shared some lore about the town’s signature dish along with the preparation method. [Read more…]
Pranzo di Ferragosto
This is one lunch you won't want to miss.
August 15, the feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary into heaven, is a national holiday in Italy. Like many other Christian celebrations, it is built upon the crumbled foundation of ancient traditions.
In modern times, Ferragosto is the jumping off day for Italians to escape stifling apartments and head for holiday al mare or in montagna—the sea or the mountains.
August is the worst time for foreigners to explore Italian cities because mostly they’ll encounter overheated, testy tourists like themselves. The living spirit of the cities has been drained out like the color from a faded photograph. [Read more…]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13
- …
- 19
- Next Page »