Sunday, May 28, 2006

WINE DAY-CANTINE APERTE



This Sunday is local election day in Sicily as well as the day that selected cantinas open their doors to the public for tours and tastings. This is a national tourism program in its 14th year, with the slogan, “Take a closer look at what you are drinking.” Wine tourism here is growing and although it is not as famous as the Napa Valley, and although they don’t have a movie like “Sideways” to promote them, Sicilian wines are fast becoming more popular in the US. We have always been fans of local wines and just recently decided to switch to tasting bottles of varied local chardonnays, inzolios and catarrattos and blends, all of which are local white grapes.
On our way out of town, we noticed a new sign for an agriturismo about a mile away from our house. We decided to investigate Torre Tabia and found relatives of friends running the place who knew us. There was a lovely pool and 10 inexpensive rooms so we think it is a nice place to send people. We also ran into a herd of sheep, but they moved out of our way (just barely). This encounter prompted Steve to say that he had already had enough adventures even if we did not get to a winery!
We arrived at Donnafugata winery near Poggioreale on the road to Palermo and found that we could get a small English tour. Our tour guide was a young German girl from Hamburg that spoke her native German, very good English and Italian also. Ah, those talented Europeans! But I had to tell her that in the US, we called groups of grapes “bunches” instead of “clusters” because she did not know that. Anyway, she did tell us details about white wine production that I never knew. The grapes for white wines are the first to ripen and the temperature must be low to process it correctly (6 to 8 degrees C, or about 43-47 F), so the harvest is often done at night in late August. The juice of the grapes is taken at this cantina and sent on to Marsala for further processing.
And the flowers seen in vineyards are there not for beauty and not for encouraging bees, as I always thought, but as warnings for any possible infestations of the grape crop. They call the delicate roses seen here the “guardians of the vineyards,” since any damage to them is closely monitored to prevent damage to the grapes.
Our second stop, Calatrasi winery in San Cipirello, was much bigger and did the entire process there, from collecting grapes to bottling the wines. The tour groups was large and the vats for the wine were HUGE. The storage room held over 4,000 barrels, some full and labeled in code, some waiting for the wood to mature (they all come from one region in France). Later, we had some very nice “flavors of Sicily” snacks, actually, enough to make up lunch! A Dixie Land band played and we spent our first afternoon in Sicily sitting on real grass, eating our plates of delicious cheeses, sausages, and pizzas and breads and drinking our wine, which flowed freely. I am not usually a fan of Ricotta cheese, but this cheese was so fresh it was bleating.
Since we had skipped a real lunch and since it was hot hot hot, we stopped in Sciacca to get gelato for our pranzo. While at the gelato store, we watched a furniture move from the eighth floor of an apartment building using an ingenius window mover. Then it was enough of adventure for the day, and time to get home!

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

SIRACUSA






We left early Saturday morning to travel through the Sicilian countryside to Siracusa. The weather was unsettled, but incredibly, we saw a good view of Mount Etna just as we spotted the mountaintop city of Enna just after Caltanissetta. The fields were golding up with the warm sunny weather and balers were busy cutting early hay. We arrived at our hotel, the Grand Hotel Villa Politi and we were suitably bowled over by its location! It is on the edge of a series of gorges, ravines, or deep holes, whatever you want to call the weathered limestone that is under and around the site of this grand old hotel. Built by Maria Teresa Laudien, an Austrian who was joined to a native Siracusan painter, Salvatore Politi in 1862, it is on the site of the ‘Latomie Cappuccini,’ the hiding place for Romans who used it for early Christian prayer groups and later, the home of Cappucine monks. Besides being pretty classy, they have a wonderful pool and I spent many happy moments there.
We were joined by an American Department of Defense English teacher from Illinois, Mary Ellen, who teaches at the Sigonella Naval Base here in Sicily. We went on to the famous Siracusa Greek theater performances of the classics. This is our third year in attendance for these plays that take place right where the Greek would have watched them! Siracusa was a major Greek city, not Sicilian or Italian, but part of Grecia Major. The Orestes cycle finished last year, so the Euripides plays that were performed were The Trojans and Hecuba, both tragedies involving the end of the House of Atreides after their loss in the Trojan war. My paraphrase of both plays is that the Trojans, after losing the war, continued suffering through a lot of innocent women and kids get killed afterward.

Tuesday, May 09, 2006

WINE RIDE










After the gorgeous days Sunday and yesterday, today dawned a bit misty. We had been sticking pretty close to home because we had a storage shed built in back of the house. The new gardener, who even seems to know how to work, unlike the last one, started cutting and burning brush early. The smoke was thick and stinky! So we decided to take a ride to buy some wine and oranges.
Our first stop was Feudo Arancia, a gorgeous hillside cantina outside of Sambuca di Sicilia. It sits on top of a hillside overlooking miles and miles of grapes, with slopes of lavender and rosemary. The hallway outside of the business office was so nice that I had to stop and take a picture. The owners are Northern Italian and nothing but class.
Next we went on to Sambuca and stopped at Cellaro. I always like to see their winemaking machines can I see what they do so clearly, with names like “Rinsematic,” “Fillmatic,” and “Corkmatic.” Then it was on to Ribera for a case of their famous oranges to store in the coolness of the new storage shed. Wine and oranges, and Sunday, fresh bread from Paolo and Ignatzia’s wood burning oven…Ambrosia for the gods!
The season for red flowers is upon us. Poppies are everywhere and the geranium explosion just goes on and on. There are so many distinct colors in my one plot but my camera does not even distinguish them all.

Friday, May 05, 2006

THE SOPRANOS AND SICILIAN YOUNG PEOPLE



We finished the last episode of a mega marathon Sopranos viewing. It took us quite awhile, and made for some great entertainment on cold evenings, but we have seen all of the last 4 and ½ years in order. This particular episode involved the problems with A.J. and his parents, neither of whom can do a thing with him. His constant backtalk and disrespect, his lack of regard for consequences and easy lying and scholastic laziness, all look as familiar to me as they would look to most US parents. Of course people who have never experienced personally raising adolescents have seen this behavior in others in America nowadays. But also in the episode we just watched, A.J. is determined to show his parents how much they are out of his life and how much of a pain it is to even be in the same room with him. Carmela cannot get over the hurt of being excluded so totally from her beloved children’s lives.
But I got to thinking about this. I have thought before when seeing this type of thing-you just don’t see this behavior in Sicilian young people. You see plenty of bratty and disrespectful small children. But you never see outward rebellion or disrespectfulness such as obvious looks of disgust when a parent talks or enters a room. Older children accompany parents to relatives’ houses, help parents into the car, wash dishes without being told, and keep their rooms clean. They call their parents daily on their cells, they seem to share their secrets and they respect curfews. In fact, they seem to willingly spend time with their parents! Even adolescent kids spend long hours sitting at table with relatives until they are excused. It is the accepted thing for children to stay in their parents’ lives for all their lives.
No, there is no outward evidence of any of that constant “testing” of parents’ will, nor efforts to break the ties with their parents, that striving for independence that our modern American kids all seem to go through to one extent or another. It could be all for show, but then why such a taboo on showing the struggle that spills out into so much of everyday American life? And I wondered anew what it is about this society that produces this closeness between parents and siblings, especially mothers and their children.
First off is that most Sicilian kids are in no way independent. What you do see often is a post adolescent group that appears, well, lazy, compared to U.S, standards and not all that serious. This “laziness” is evidenced by the fact that many people in their 20’s take twice the amount of time to graduate from college than US kids do. Many have no job by the age of 25 or 30, sleep late everyday, dress up in the latest (expensive) styles to go out and stay out with friends (equally jobless) till all hours of the night. They are in relationships but will not marry until they are financially stable. Often this stability occurs when the parents can afford to set them up. Marriage in the 30’s is more common than marriage in the 20’s. It all seems (to a foreigner) like a fearfulness to take chances in life, a hesitation to make decisions that could be wrong.
Among college graduates, there is also a lack of hope for a job in a chosen career as well as a certain amount of fear of taking chances in life in general. There just are no jobs here in Sicily. Many twenty and thirty year olds settle for the idea of lifelong dependency and by US standards, they waste time in careers they are not suited for. For when they do work, many settle for jobs backed by their parents’ own businesses or through parental effort. They live in the comfort of the family home, financed by the bank of mom and dad in a room they have slept in since childhood. Those who want to work in a particular field are forced to leave their homes and move out of Sicily to find jobs, often to the north or to other more industrialized countries of Europe.
But a big percentage stay put and wait for a job to develop while living at home. No one cooks pasta as well as mom nor washes and irons their clothes just right! The trade-off for this dependence is good behavior, a restraint toward manifesting the impatience that youth feels for adults. Individual freedom and responsibility that our American kids all develop (eventually) is just not as important as this security. A popular T.V. satire show, Striscia La Notizia, consistently refers to this lack of independence and responsibility with the slogan “Sono Ragazzi!” (“They’re just kids!”). The big joke is that they are referring to 30 year-olds that in any other society would have been out on their own for many years.

Tuesday, May 02, 2006

MAYDAY IN SICILY




Angelo and Francesca from Palermo joined us for the May 1st holiday weekend. We woke yesterday to a beautiful day and pane cunzatto, the hot Sicilian bread with lots of oil, anchovies and small slices of tomato. Then we decided to go out to see whatever was out there. I suggested we take a ride up to Caltabellotta the town that overlooks Sciacca and much of the countryside below. So we piled into the Punto and we were off.
The ride up was fabulous! Steve had his doubts because it was a bit misty in the distance, but if you wait for a perfectly clear day, you would never go anywhere around here. So we drove and drove and saw the land slowly rise and the rock formations become more and more bizarre and entered the “Citta di Pace” (“city of peace”) with a great appreciation for convertibles and gorgeous days. It is called that because Caltabellotta was the site of the signing of the peace treaty ending the war of the Vespers in the 1300’s between the Aragonese and the Angevinians, so it has retained its importance. Its historical importance is also based on the fact that it is the highest city around, therefore the strongest and most powerful in terms of defense. But nowadays it is just a pain in the butt to get up there so high. Just goes to show you how things can change.
On arriving in the town, one of the first sights I saw was flower petals on doorsteps. I could not believe that I had the conversation about the very same thing with my 84 year old mother the day before! As kids we went to neighbors’ doors and threw flower petals there. We also saw full water bottles affixed to cellar windows. Francy explained that it is to keep cats away from peeing there, since they see light reflected off of the bottle of water and it scares them off. A man with an old fashioned ass walked down the street. We clowned for the camera and took pictures in front of rocks and churches. And we tried to eat dinner there, but all the restaurants we tried (well, there aren’t that many, so we tried only two of them) did not have any space left.
Back to Sciacca we went, to eat at an excellent fish restaurant at the port, La Vela. That is our favorite seafood restaurant, the place where our friend Calogero works. The last time I took a picture of him, it was with his arm around my niece. I posted it here and my twin brother wrote and said, “Hey, watch it, that’s my niece.” Calogero’s uncle from California then responded with, “That’s my nephew!” He was reading the Blog because I had just been corresponding with his wife Cathy about a Sciacca student exchange program with her school in California. Small world!
Even though we had cooked (and enjoyed) at home 3 courses of seafood the day before, we did a good job of the wonderful meal we had. There were at least 10 fish antipasti, 2 types of pasta with bread crumbs (mollica that we only made at Saint Joseph’s Day in the states), and wonderful grilled whole fresh fish and jumbo shrimp, plus fruit and lemon ice and almond gelato with chocolate sauce, espresso and Amaro to finish it up. We took our time (they were busy anyway) and we did not leave till about 3 or 4 hours later. And although the meal was more expensive on this holiday than normal, it was at least half of the price if any of that type of deal in the states exists, 25 euros a person including several bottles of wine and sparkling water, all inclusive. Oh, and pictures with the owner, waiter, and chef afterward!