Trading post cards for boarding passes

For Thanksgiving this year, I ate no turkey and watched no American football. There were no pumpkin pies cooling in my kitchen, no traditional Quaker hymns sung across generations. I did receive a gift beyond worth when my parents and brother came to visit for a week. We spent our time together in Tuscany, mostly in Florence with a day-trip to Siena. We rambled and ambled, wined and dined, raptured at art and city and captured moments on film. To avoid gluttony of reading and writing, I will try to describe the vacation in installments. Hey, it worked for Dickens and Matthiessen, right?

The Uffizi. A grand palace with an overwhelming collection of art. Countless Adoration of the Magi; innumerable Madonnas, including Madonna of the Pomegranate, the Long-necked Madonna, and a dark 15th century portrait that reminds me now of Munch, found by museum representatives at a flea market in Milan in 2002. I learned about the martyrdoms of various saints: Sebastian killed by arrows, Florian thrown from a bridge with a millstone chained to his neck. Many of the Masters are there: Caravaggio, Botticelli, Raphael, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Giotto, Titian, Dürer... Having now traveled a bit in Italy, I recognize its plants, architecture, and landforms in Renaissance art: who knew that Bethlehem looked just like the Tuscan countryside? At night, the city sparkles along the river and the dome of the cathedral still boggles the mind despite the shadows.

The Accademia. We lucked out and, with the combination of a slower tourist season and an afternoon rainstorm, walked right in without waiting in line. The pen-and-marker graffiti along the wall lining the sidewalk attest to the expectant purgatory of visitors past. The small museum has one room of amazing paintings and another exhibition area of musical instruments from the Medieval and Renaissance periods. However, the gallery’s main attraction is Michelangelo’s David, and rightly so. A few unfinished sculptures precede the David and show some of Michelangelo’s process and genius. The 17-foot tall David is... Giorgio Vasari, Michelangelo's contemporary and biographer, said: "Whoever has seen this work need not trouble to see any other work executed in sculpture, either in our own or other times, by no matter what craftsman." The stone seems more alive than some people I’ve known. I had to remind myself of optical illusions when I saw his chest swell with breath. With tired feet and a curious mind, I was happy to sit and stare for a long time. To think that Michelangelo completed the sculpture by the time he was thirty...

Islands in the Stream, Part III

The last installment of Mordecai's essay...

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Pius II’s efforts towards the creation of a utopia in the hills of Tuscany are often glossed over by historians of theology, the Crusades, and the political foundations of modern Europe. It has particular resonance for historians of sport, however, and there is a growing body of research on Pius the Sportsman. Some grants have been awarded in support of further studies of Pius II’s practice of falconry, for example, but, given the prevalence of that activity during the early Renaissance period, more adventurous historians have set their sights elsewhere.

While the evidence is scant, some historians are beginning to assert that Pius II was an ardent practitioner of a much-practiced yet oft-maligned sport: Wiffle Ball. Yes, Wiffle Ball – a variation on baseball that is played using a lightweight, perforated plastic ball, almost invariably white in color, and an invariably yellow plastic bat. Groundbreaking historians in this field, including Hampton, Grieves, et al., now claim that Pius II’s fascination for and dedication to the sport of Wiffle Ball were so great that he designed the central piazza of Pienza to be a Pantheon for its dedicants.

Centuries later, a group of us made good on Pius’ promise to Wiffle athletes. On our recent trip to Tuscany, we played Wiffle Ball in Pienza’s historic central piazza. Crazy, yes, but true. We found many pieces of Pius II’s grand Wiffle Ball stadium still in place and were frequently surprised by the overarching beauty of his plan. The locker room/dugout along the wall of one abutting palace, replete with hooks for jackets. The batting practice cage alongside the ancient well. Infield/outfield practice from the lip of the central door. A perfectly placed circle bricked into the very pattern of the piazza from which the pitcher could serve up Wiffle junk.

The lights shone bright on our field. Tickets were scalped to disbelieving neophyte fans for free – we were putting on a show and inviting all of Tuscany, even the papal ghosts, to join us. Except for when the municipal police rolled by: some of us scattered like high schoolers caught loitering in a midnight parking lot; one of us waddled off with the Wiffle Ball bat running the length of his leg. Our official photographer documented the scene. We laughed at the spettacolo and improbability of it all: Wiffle Ball in the House that Piccolomini Built for Wiffle Ball. A fitting sequel to the Lake Como Cup of 2006.

[For a fuller treatment of Pius II’s fascination with American sports invented, allegedly, after his death, I encourage you to read Jackson Checo’s thorough and impeccably researched examination of the subject, Piccolomini: The First Suburban Teenager?]

Islands in the Stream, Part II

Mordecai's essay continued...

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The Leibnitz party thought they had found their parcel of the Promised Land, but the island proved barren despite their efforts. Within a fortnight it became clear that it was not even, in fact, a true island, as the spring Proxigean tides soon inundated the small space, leaving but a speck of damp sand “the size of a rolltop desk (Adão, ed., 1957).” By that point, the party was over, and Leibnitz was the only remaining guest.

One of the last to depart, Maggie Oswald, claimed, in her interview with the New Bedford Daily Register, that Leibnitz was attempting to construct “a platform of some sort, from any which flotsam and jetsam and the like that happened by. I saw a lobster pot he had, and a shipping palette, an empty rum barrel from a pirate ship I think, a big bone maybe from a moose, a split plank flower box... I don’t know. It didn’t look real stable (Adão, ed., 1957).” Colorful as this description may be, Ms. Oswald’s report was certainly influenced by the severity of the ordeal she had just endured and unfortunately could not be verified.

Any attempts to corroborate her story of Leibnitz’s unusual tower were thwarted when, within a few days, an unseasonal hurricane swept up the North Atlantic coast. While meteorological records from the period indicate a low-force storm (Davis & Davis, 1922), by the time the weather had cleared, Leibnitz, the accordion, the two sheep, any platform, and the first ten feet below sea level of the island had disappeared. At the University of Maine at Orono-hosted symposium “Is Any Man an Island?: A Discussion on the Hermeneutics of Ill-Fated Utopian Expeditions of the 19th Century,” Dutch researcher Jan-Mendelt Van Wristler commented, “It is doubtful Leibnitz survived.” Indeed. Another arrow shot at the moon that fell well short.

Whether or not Leibnitz knew of Pope Pius II (1405-1464) is a subject of some debate among utopian historians. However, they both held la città ideale of More and Plato in high esteem: Leibnitz played out his tragedy along the Massachusetts coast; Pius II used the Tuscan countryside as his palette. What is generally agreed upon is that Pius II was “born Enea Silvio Piccolomini in1405. [He] was Pope from August 19, 1458 until his death in 1464. Pius II was born at Corsignano in the Sienese territory of a noble but decayed family. His longest and most enduring work is the story of his life, Commentaries, which is the only autobiography ever written by a reigning Pope.”

Strongly influenced by the humanists of his day, Pius II set out to resculpt his hometown, and this aspect of his papacy is of special interest to historians of urban design. Corsignano, later renamed Pienza in honor of its most famous son, became the first formidable exercise in city planning in post-plague Europe. The town still retains most of the fruits of his labor and was designated a World Heritage site by UNESCO in 1996.

Islands in the Stream, Part I

On my recent trip to Tuscany, I traveled with my roommate Mark and a collection of characters associated with his baseball team. We also spent some time with an acquaintance of mine from New York, Mordecai Johnson, who is a visiting adjunct professor at the University of Bologna. He asked if he could contribute some historical perspective to my blog, and I readily agreed. Because of the length of Mordecai’s essay, I have separated it into three installments.

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The desire for utopia has engendered many attempts at the ideal community. Plato’s Republic and Sir Thomas More’s Utopia are justly the most famous literary antecedents. In Massachusetts of the 17th century, the Puritans believed they were establishing a “city upon a hill” that might serve as a beacon to the world. Many sought a counter-example to the increasingly teeming cities of the Industrial Revolution during the 19th century. Within this last category, the story of Arnold Leibnitz provides an especially telling example. While peculiar, the story is by no means unique; the Leibnitz party and a trove of other foolhardy experiments share a common result: failure.

Leibnitz was in many ways the archetypal aspiring utopian leader: charismatic, prematurely grey, neglectful of quotidian minutiae. With a small group of like-minded souls, Leibnitz set off from Boston in mid-March of 1857 on what was then an arduous overland journey to Provincetown, Cape Cod. Inspired by Leibnitz’s creative firebrandery, they hoped to form a utopian community apart from “the roiling mess of present society (Rosenfeld, 1975).” By early April, however, having established nothing more than poor relations with the local inhabitants, the group was run out of town. Though first-person accounts vary wildly in their depiction of the Leibnitz party’s exodus, there is a general consensus that the group was lax in paying bar tabs and maintaining personal hygiene.

Finding themselves with “but a skiff and a sack of potatoes to their collective name” (Lister, 1964), the group gathered on a dune to regroup. Eventually, after much deliberation and not a little ill will, the latter primarily directed towards the accordionist in the group, Leibnitz decided to lead the party out to a small, uninhabited island he saw just off-shore. Gesturing vociferously, he proclaimed, “There, amidst the unspoilt bosom of Nature, we shall settle and make famous our experiment (Kalantagian, 1981).”

Clamoring into the skiff, one and all with potatoes and accordion and two sheep – the reasoning being that most in the party enjoyed their tea with milk and that come fall they could “make what harvest we could from the wool of our flock” (O’Leary, 1980) - the group splashed out towards the island. They made landfall on Accordion Island, so named for completely unrelated circumstances, after over four hours of drifting caused by the group’s having neglected to bring any means of propulsion or steering and to “Poseidon’s cruel sense of humour [sic]” (Ferthen, 1917). Splashing ashore, Leibnitz fell immediately to his knees in prayer to God, Shiva, and the animist spirits of the island, it being an ecumenical endeavor...

The quickest way to a man's heart

Cypress trees ring the early evening sky. The air hangs with the smell of sulfur. Steam floats off down valley in the growing dark. I’m floating, boca arriba, in the thermal baths of Bagno Vignoni. In Tuscany. On cloud nine. How did I get here?

While Italians don’t really celebrate Halloween, All Saints’ Day is a national holiday. Because it fell on a Thursday this year, most Italians took one of their favorite (among many) liberties and stretched the day-off into a four-day weekend. Fare il ponte – to make the bridge. Mark and I traveled south to Pienza in Tuscany with friends from the baseball team and a few others, some of whom who have been visiting the area regularly for ten years. Mark and I agree it is one of the best ways to travel in Italy: go with Italians who know where to go, where and what and how to eat and drink, who to talk to, what to see, etc. Thanks especially to our de facto tour guides Bodo, Moris, and Panno.


Cloud nine is a big place full of many wonders. I cannot hope to cover our trip adequately, especially not in one post. My best advice: go and see for yourself. Tuscany is magical and it calls to you.

First, let me start with our meals, since that was one of the central motivations for the trip. As with small vehicles, contour plowing, and wiffle ball stadiums, Tuscans do food very well. Perhaps too well. If I lived there the way we lived this weekend, I wouldn’t live very long. I would probably drown in the thermal baths, satiated on homemade pasta and locally-produced wines.

Eating with honorary locals Bodo and Moris, we were often that group at the various restaurants we visited: 7 guys, talking exuberantly, sitting for hours at a table that had been reserved weeks ago and marked with a little card, ordering the entire menu, turning heads of less-informed and un-local-tour-guide-blessed tourists, joking with the waiters, calling out to the owners on a first-name basis, laughing at each other and the rubes who thought they could merely walk up and get a table (most of the restaurants we ate at had between 5 and 10 tables; all were bursting with patrons), eating enough to sink small ships, and drinking enough wine to float ‘em back up.

Here is a sampling of what we ate. Most of it was “four stars heartily shake the hand of the chef” good. Some of it was “call the cemetery and reserve a spot because I can now die and go to heaven” good. These are of course subjective descriptors and will require further research to refine. I have tried to list them as best as possible in the order in which they would be eaten during a meal. Yes, sometimes we ate the vast majority of things on this list at one sitting. I wish I had photos of all of these dishes to share, but I was too busy eating to remember my camera.

- crostini: small pieces of bread toasted with toppings: olive spread, liver pâté, pecorino (sheep’s cheese, also known in Tuscany as cacio) with chopped nuts, pecorino al tartufo (cheese flavored with truffle , a good example of how man was not born to live on bread alone)

- bruschette: another toasted bread dish, familiar to most, addictive to many; the difference from crostini seems to be that the bread is toasted first and then topped with tomatoes and olive oil, pecorino al tartufo, ricotta and green onions

- salumi misti: mixed cuts of cured meats – salami, prosciutto, culatello (another type of prosciutto), capicola, bresaola, lardo (yes, lardo) - Tuscany, or anywhere in Italy for that matter, is not the best place to keep kosher AND sane

- salad with salsa di acciughe (anchovy sauce)

- zuppa (soup) with pane (bread), fagioli (beans), olio (olive oil), pepe (black pepper), and erba cipollina (chives, or, literally, green little onions)

- cipolle al pane: onions with bread chunks, baked in the oven in terra cotta dishes (a common technique used to perfection in Tuscany)

- pecorino fresco con pancetta: fresh sheep’s cheese (there are three general categorizations of pecorino, which I hope to cover in a future post) baked in the oven with bacon – perhaps both the tastiest and least healthy food I ate all weekend – wow.

- salsiccia alla griglia: grilled sausage

- pici: a homemade pasta special to Tuscany, rolled between the hands, long like spaghetti but thicker; with cinghiale (wild boar) ragu, with briciole (bread crumbs), with aglio and pomodori (garlic and tomatoes). I would probably eat this pasta with mulch or gravel or newspaper pulp. It is wicked good.

- tagliatelle: another homemade pasta, often served with a meat sauce

- maialino di latte: roast suckling pig, served with some of the subcutaneous layer of fat – tasty but not my favorite

- semifreddi: ice-cream-esque dessert that comes in slices like bread

- cantucci e vin santo: small almond biscotti, that may or may not be baked feathers from angel wings, and dessert wine traditional to Tuscany – I think Heaven may be a piazza where you sit all day drinking caffe, eating pecorino, reading La Repubblica, writing postcards, drinking vin santo with cantucci, watching stylish women walk by in stivali (boots).

Stay tuned for more reviews from la Bella Toscana.