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A memorable meal, part 2

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The previous day two of us enjoyed an informal celebration for carnivores in Panzano with Dario Cecchini, the famous butcher of Panzano. Today we would travel as a group of four to a winery 25 miles to the south for a luncheon at Castello di Ama that featured their own wines.   When we planned the trip, we thought that it was odd that Google Maps said that the trip would take an hour. Hmmmm. As we drove south the two-lane roads twisted and turned and we gained altitude over the valleys to the east and west. We were a little concerned as the typical Tuscan forests gave way to scrub oak. The soil became more and more rocky and there were so few people, so few buildings. As the roads grew more narrow and more twisted, we wondered, “Are we really headed toward to wine making estate where we have reservations for lunch?”   Castello di Ama ( Photo source ) Finally, at the highest point of our drive the valley opened up around us and we saw vineyards in all four dir
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A memorable meal, part 1

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Dario Cecchini might be the most famous butcher in the world. His butcher shop is in the small town of Panzano in the Chianti region of Tuscany. While the town is small with 1,161 people, his butcher shop is known by people who have read Bill Buford’s book, Heat , in which he describes his time in Panzano and in this New Yorker article . Mario Batali also studied with Cecchini. Part of the antipasti Besides his shop Cecchini operates a number of small restaurants in the town and all are intensely popular. While we were nearby we had to visit the shop and try a meal. The meal began at noon with antipasti served across the narrow street at the butcher's shop consisting of wine, olives, sliced salamis, toasts with lardo, and toasts with oil and salt. The antipasto was so informal that Cecchini had handed us glasses of wine before we were clear who he was. By 1pm the crowd was overflowing into the street. From the choices of many varied menus , we chose the Solo Cicci
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Day trip to Siena for the Ambrogio Lorenzetti show

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Bus ride to Siena on a rainy day Monday was yet another rainy, cool day. Despite the weather we bought bus tickets and rode with a friend to Siena about 47 miles to the south. A museum in that town,  Santa Maria della Scala , was offering a show of the work of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, a Sienese artist of the early 1300s.   We were impessed with Lorenzetti’s work. What we learned about Lorenzetti’s painting of the Annunciation surprised us. Museum for Lorenzetti show Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s best known works, the  Allegory of Good Government , the Effects of Good Government in the City and in the Country (in the city, look  here ; in the country, look here ), and  Bad Government and the Effects of Bad Government  are frescoes in the Palazzo Publico, the city’s historic civic building.   The Poor Clares The subject matter of the Good and Bad Government frescoes is remarkable. In a time when artistic effort was aimed toward retelling
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The magnolia in the piazza

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The weather has been dreadful at home and dreadful here in Florence. At home we read that the snow continues to pile up. Here in Florence the days are gray and rain falls most days. Just before we arrived, rain fell, the temperatures plunged, everything was covered in a sheet of ice, and then an inch or two of snow fell. Very un-Italian. But this may be more than just a coincidental stretch of bad weather in two places that are 4000 miles apart. According to a news article we read today there has been a (relative) heat wave at the North Pole. The Arctic sea ice is melting. Soon there may be a real Northwest Passage available, a sea lane from Europe beyond northern Canada to Asia. Magnolia in 2016 This is a result of change in the world climate, a phenomenon that travels under names such as global warming or the more neutral term climate change . Some people say this way of thinking about we have observed is a hoax; some people, people who make judgements based on fac
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Blog posts from previous years

We’d want to keep in touch with family and friends while we are spending a time in Italy. This blog will record some of the interesting things that we’ve done and some of the things we’ve discovered. It’ll be especially interesting for us to be able to share the photos that we’ve taken. By the way, we’ve kept blogs in previous years. If you’d like to see posts from our blogs in previous years, select a link from the list below. Postcards from Italy 2011 Some sample posts from 2011 The Days of Wine and Vino Sfuso Protests on March 8, La Festa delle Donne A Haircut With Gigi Department of Wry Public Art Postcards from Italy 2012 Some sample posts from 2012 Our friend, the weaver Watching the games La Porta San Martino in Pensilis, continued Missanello Postcards from Italy 2014 Some sample posts from 2014 Lunch at the alimentari in Lucignano d’Asso Fruits and vegetable stands at Mercato Sant’Ambrogio includes a quiz How d
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A quiet soccer crowd

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This year our apartment is on Via San Giuseppe with the great Franciscan cathedral, Santa Croce directly across the street from our doorway. Today was a quiet, sad day within the church, in the piazza, and in all of Florence. During the morning people were streaming into the piazza wearing the purple and red colors of the local soccer team. It seemed like the day of a game in a place, Santa Croce piazza, where the games are never played. All this happened because the captain of Florence’s soccer team, David Astori, died last Saturday, March 3, during the night while the team was getting ready for a match against Udine the next day, a match that would be played away from Florence. He was thirty-one years old and had two young children. People were shocked that a prominent athlete would die so suddenly from natural causes. Italy is a soccer obsessed country but this event eclipsed the desire of Italians to see their Sunday soccer games. The league called off all the Italian
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The lost Leonardo da Vinci painting has been found

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The Uffizi Museum is Florence’s premier painting museum. In the museum there are a number of famous paintings by Botticelli, Michelangelo, Giotto, and others. Among the other famous paintings is the Adoration of the Magi by Leonardo da Vinci. Da Vinci was commissioned for the painting by a monastery in Florence in 1481 and he worked on the painting until 1482. In that year da Vinci left Florence for Milan where he stayed for 17 years. The painting, unfinished, stayed behind in Florence. The unfinished painted entered the collection of the Uffizi in 1670. When we first saw the painting as students many years ago, it was a bizarre melange of religious figures, animals, partial architectural structures, and vague in dark detail. We thought that if the painting was famous, it had to be because da Vinci was famous. It was a strange puzzle. da Vinci's Adoration of the Magi, before restoration When we returned in the early 2000s da Vinci’s Adoration was the same. Da
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