MADRID

Our Easter in Madrid is over and we have many memories of a great time. We had four days there, and we really made the most of them. We got to know the bus and metro system and I got to practice Spanish again, but with a decidedly Italian accent. We took the double-decker tour bus all around the town, and saw some gorgeous churches, plazas, castles, statues, arches, parks, and roadways. But above all, the buildings will stand out in my mind, along with the Spanish painters from the Prado, Thyssen, and Reina Sofia museums. There is a huge variety in the style and materials used in the public buildings. And I had heard that the weather there might be “iffy,” this time of year, but for our stay it was quite moderate with some clouds, just a little rain and a little heat, nothing uncomfortable. But the crowds of tourists were outrageous! They were the only thing that made the trip at all negative, as we had to queue in line for almost everything.
Since we could not choose which museums to go to from the brochure, we chose the three most famous and the only regret we have is that we had to miss some “downtime” in Retiro Park because we could not get it all in. With such a busy sightseeing schedule, we did not check the restaurants out as we might have, but relied on paella and calamari sandwiches in Plaza Mayor on many occasions, and some were good, some not-so-good. But there was a Ben and Jerry’s also there, so that filled in the empty spaces. That and our “room food” purchases at the famous Corte Ingles department store, with pate, cheeses, wines, breads, and sausages making most of our late dinners. We got Chinese take out our last night there because we don’t have that opportunity here, and we could have skipped that, in both our opinions. Chinese-Spanish is just not as good as Chinese-American, or even the Chinese-Italian we have had in Rome and Siracusa. We found our best meal just by luck, in a real Peruvian food restaurant next to a recommended restaurant that was closed.
As I try to choose among the pictures, I see I took multiple ones of the same buildings from different perspectives on different tour buses. And I am sorry that I did not take even one picture of the Rastro, a real flea market that we went to on Easter Sunday morning after battling the crowds at the Prado. The Ministry of Agriculture building, the old Post Office that looks like a palace, and Atocha station were naturals that I could not resist shooting over and over. But the painted building in the Plaza Mayor, with classic nudes several stories high was probably my favourite. In fact, the Plaza Mayor was the best hang out and so that is where we chose to go Good Friday night to see some of the dozens of processions scheduled to go through there. But the rain delayed things and made it impossible to see the processions of followers with candles that came after the horses and the hooded figures that presided over the festivities. It is not the KKK, but the trade guilds in various colored hoods, and we are used to them in Italy.
Anyway, we were about to give up and go home when, from an upstairs lavoratory window, I heard the drums, and looking out, saw a procession coming. I quickly ran out and got some shots and a short video of the moving scene.

BACK FROM MADRID!

Stay tuned for new pictures and a better computer system (we hope!!)

STONE

BUSTED COMPUTER-PICTURES TO FOLLOW!

3/19/05
We have spent this week travelling around Sicily looking at sites for our guests to visit in April and June to visit. This is also the week that I have been reading Bruneleschi’s Dome, the saga of the vaulting of the great cathedral dome on the church of Santa Maria di Fiore in Florence (we saw it two years ago). Most of the book was about how tons and tons of stone were translated into a giant heavenly statement by mere men in the 1400’s. The ingenuity used in solving the problems of moving the stone and vaulting such a huge space make for excellent reading. My fond memory of the grandeur of that pink and green and white marble kept me interested too.
So I was thinking of stone before I noticed what I had been taking pictures of all week. As I looked at these pictures from our travels, I realized how important stone is to the general order of things here. When we walk at Sunset Point, it is to see the rock formations that the plants cling to and that the water slides over. We saw divers this week slipping under the huge stones and boulders in the water. They might have been exploring the recently discovered giant millstones that were mined in this area and shipped by water. We enjoy the natural stone head sculpture and the house that fits so well into the hillside and the stone wall that is so integral a part of the landscape that we cannot decide if it is natural or manmade.
We went to Gibellina again to see the earthquake ruins and rock sculpture covering the town. What an eerie feeling it gives to walk the concrete streets! It almost makes you look at the earthquake ruins of fallen stone buildings as normal scenery here.
We visited Erice again and found it just as medieval as ever. The stone streets and houses always make it feel chillier up there, so we were glad to be there on a warm day. Of course we found more pottery to buy at our favorite pottery shop. I did not get to the stone castles but how many pictures of the same thing do I need? Maybe some day when I shoot my favourite castle di Pepoli, I will actually see Rapunzel letting down her hair!
Finally, we visited the city of Calatafimi on the way home and tried to get into the new art museum which was closed unexplainably without signs of any kind-but that’s Sicily for you. I did get some a nice picture of the two stone slab sculptures in the back, and a neat sunset shot of the temple at Segesta from a different angle.
So everyday we live with stone all around us. It is the most available and cheapest building material around. Our stone house is not comfortable on cold winter nights. But the rest of the year it keeps us cool and comfortable-and cuts down on the hazards of fire. And it can be beautiful, like the piece of Turkish marble Steve admired at our friend Emilio’s marble works. Two days later he had fashioned a marble ashtray for Steve and brought it over. Sicilians are as warm as stone is cold.

TAKING A WALK

We have a new circular route for our Sunday walks. It takes a while, but the scenery is great as I think you'll agree! The last two photos are of yesterday's sunrise (taken by early-bird Steve) and a rainbow during the storm.
We ate broccoli and lettuce from the garden and I planted hot peppers, snapdragons, lobelia, and portulaca in pots. Spring is here.

SGRENA CALIPARI

No, that is not the name of a town near here. It is merely the last names of the two people caught in the latest drama of US-Italian politics. Giuliana Sgrena is the journalist that was just released after a month of captivity in Iraq and Nicholas Calipari is the diplomat who negotiated her release who was killed defending her from American bullets.
I say politics because, as usual, there are different stories of what happened depending on your political persuasion. Certainly you are not hearing what we are hearing here as we are called on to defend what our government did as representatives of a foreign minority. We are uncomfortably finding ourselves in that position. We can see first hand how important all of this is here because TV was interrupted constantly last night with special reports and news analyses. More importantly, the last part of the last night of San Remo, the annual love fest of Italian music (kind of like the Academy Awards show or the World Series) was interrupted to show the plane carrying Calipari’s body home from Iraq.
What you heard is that the speeding car approaching the check point would not respond to verbal warnings and lights flashing, clearly signalling them to stop. What we hear (this is from eye witnesses in the car) is that there was no check point, there were no warnings, there were not even lights on the two armoured tanks that lay in wait for the car. Suddenly a blinding light hit the car and volleys of shots hit the passenger section of the car (the Americans say they shot at the motor). The shooting did not stop when the driver started yelling, “We are Italians!” The Americans say they had not been not told that Giuliana Sgrena had been freed, the Italians say they were.
Here is where the politics begin. Sgrena is a communist journalist, and the communists are part of the leftist minority in Italian politics. The leftist say the Italians could not risk telling the Americans sooner because the Americans did not want Sgrena released alive. There is some mystery why here-there are suggestions her captors warned her about the American threats, that she had found out too much about the Americans in her work as a journalist. Whatever the truth, this incident is playing right into the leftist’s hands.
Now, the leftists are not popular with Italian President Berlusconi, Bush’s pro-war buddy, but Sgrena’s politic leaning is not a reason for any Italian to want to get rid of her, even though the left is solidly against the war in Iraq (in fact, most of Italy is against the war). Further, an Italian government agent has been killed by the Americans with an explanation that a mistake has been that differs from the eye witness version of things, and a weak apology has been made by the American ambassador in Rome (who unforgivably did what most Americans would do and mispronounced Calipari’s name wrong-it’s ca-LI-pa-ri, not ca-li-PAR-i). And Italians today are demonstrating specifically against the US’s actions and, again, against Italian participation in Iraq. Maybe this tragic event will help bring this war to an end soon-I hope so!

SCENES FROM SCIACCA THIS WEEK

It has been a very strange weather week, and March weather in Italy has been officially declared meteorologically unusual. There is never snow and cold that lasts this long, yet we wake up to see snow in the hills several times. The siroccos blow their way through a few times and we are glad for their warmth, but hate to clean up the sand from Africa that they blow all over our terrace. Our biggest problem here in Sciacca is the hard and consistent rain that causes collapses of roads and buildings. Drainage in Sicilian soil is awful and so the water never makes it down to where it could be conserved underground in reserve for the parched hot summers. So it runs under structures and down roads and undermines everything. Mud runs into the Mediterranean constantly, especially from the Porto Palo area near Menfi. You can see the streak of brown depending on the wind direction. And the waves on the sea have been high and ferocious.
I read in the local paper that the rain has interrupted the orange harvest and threatened economic ruin to the farmers in Ribera. Riberan oranges are some of the best tasting in the world, and we buy them in crates from roadside stands as we drive toward Agrigento. But yesterday morning we saw them in a surprising spot. They littered the beach and looked at first to be bobbers from a fish net. They were “bobbers” all right, bobbing oranges along with a lot of dried wild rice canes. The wind must have been just right to send us our share of Riberan oranges on the waves.