Umbrian Driving School

"Go on, get it into fifth gear!"

"What do you mean fifth? That's too much, I've never had it in fifth."

"Oh get on with it. Both hands on the wheel, watch the road, give it some gas."

I suppose I would have to accept, if pressed that these are not the typical cautious instructions issued by driving school instructors. But there again in Terni Eleonora's driving school gets fifty Euros an hour and the way I see it, for the time I've spent gritting my teeth in the passenger seat she owes me upward of four hundred Euros.

 

"I'm scared, I hate tunnels!"

"For goodness sake, trucks and tunnels are going to be a fact of your driving life. Put your foot down, watch the road not the 18 wheeler (autotreno in Italian) and push on past."

"I'm scared!" she wailed but I was merciless.

"Get on with it! (Datti da fare)" and she did passing easily and with verve.

"This is fun"

"How fast are you going?"

"130 (80mph)"

"Aren't learners limited to 90?"

Which is in fact the case and requires learners (principianti) to attach special magnetic plates to the car, even if it is a deliciously sporty Alfa Romeo Mito (Myth) with six speeds and enough oomph to make driving twisting Umbrian mountain roads interesting.

At dinner Giovanni told his 19 year old daughter something that made me squirm in embarrassment. Michele, he said waving his fork at me, should teach you to drive. I spent the day going to the beach watching him ride a 170 horsepower motorcycle new to him on unfamiliar roads and he never missed a line through a turn. Giovanni is a gear head and he loves cars as well as motorcycles. Giovanni will concede I am not as fast as him but I do like getting my corners right. I apply the age old rule of right position right gear right speed to take the turn smoothly. I watch for the apex as the corner opens up and I apply counter steering and that's it really. Giovanni thought this qualified me to help his precious daughter pass her test on Wednesday.

First things first, clutch control. Getting out of the uphill garage I demonstrated holding the car in gear riding the clutch with minimal acceleration. She loved to stall. More throttle I barked (Più gas!) and that became the order of the day. We lurched around town trying to find a bank to change my dollars for Euros with Eleonora crunching and stalling like Monsieur Hulot on holiday. Più gas! Men are such pigs she said. They are either rude to me saying I can't drive or they patronize me for being a good little girlie driver. They just want to sleep with you I said, imparting the first really important lesson of the day. Don't believe any of them. She took my advice to heart and refused to listen to me when I told her to give the car more gas. Hoist by my own petard.

Then yesterday I rode down to Terni from my sister's house in the country and we tried the open road for three hours. We drove to a place I have never been, to my eternal shame. The home of C. S. Lewis's tale of the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Narni used to be known as Narnia when it was the birthplace of the first century Emperor Marcus Nerva, whose bust sits at the entrance to the city center. Nerva - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. However the literary merits of the books, which I enjoyed and doubtless the film which I didn't, have imprinted themselves more clearly on the contemporary mind.

Eleonora coped manfully with the steep defensive hill that this city lives on as do most medieval Umbrian cities and we parked the car more or less fitting within the parking stripes and strolled into town.

"Enough with the camera!"

Hardly.

"You're having pizza with cappuccino," my young provincial friend noted. "That's unusual..." I'm American now, I said. I get to do what I like and I like savory snacks with sweet cappuccino. I had in fact noted it was three minutes to eleven when I ordered the coffee drink that is typically only taken in the morning in Italy, and eleven is the traditional cut off time. She had a more proper juice, pear flavored with her slice of ham and cheese stuffed focaccia.

We sat and talked about her boyfriend "who is slightly Fascist," Eleonora noted. "He doesn't think women should drive." She dismissed his sexism with an airy wave of the hand. "I plan to be my own woman with my own job" and to that end she is studying for her Italian equivalent MBA.

Narni is quite pretty within the unusually narrow main piazza which is lined in the classical style with tall palazzi. Not palaces exactly but impressive homes nevertheless.

 

 

 

And talking of being her own woman, a cop carrying a side arm.

Back to the business in hand...

I had her drive me to Amelia (Ah-meh-lee-ya) on one of my favorite motorcycle roads around where I grew up. It was never so internationally twinned when I used to ride through here.

The twists and turns kept her eyes on the road and prevented her watching the gears as she shifted. I also threatened to beat her up if she ever again took a corner with the clutch disengaged as we screeched round a curve like James Bond in a car chase. "All right" she grumbled (Va bene), as I forced her to go through fourth fifth and sixth gears and back down again as we came out onto short stretches of straights.

 

And so it went. We drove to Lugnano in Teverina (Lugnano on the Tiber River) and managed not to kill any pedestrians on the absurdly narrow sidewalks in front of people's homes.

 

She completely failed to take out the badly parked 50cc Ape (ah-pay which means honey bee) three wheeler, typically badly parked here also.

You only need a moped license to drive one of these things and they are a blessing for old timers who need year round local transportation at low cost and high utility. They'd be perfect in Key West, easy to use, easy to park, weatherproof and cheap.

 

Mind you Eleonora could do with some brushing up on her own parking before the test next week.

Before dealing with that we took in the view of the Tiber Valley.

I backed the car out for her as she was afraid of scraping the innocent Seat (Spanish built Fiat) now parked too close. She drove home not at all sedately but very well. I fear I have ruined her for proper driving classes. She swore like a fishmonger's wife at an Ape that pulled out in front of her, and was so busy swearing we nearly wiped out against a wall. She recovered masterfully as I cheered her on.

Castles, palaces, coffees, crashes and driving lessons...oh my!

Key West on Dwellable

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Vacation Day 6

One should have something to say this day twelve years on. They tell you that three thousand Americans died that awful day, but they weren't all Americans; they came from 90 different countries. Stefano Giorgetti was one of the 2996 and he wasn't Italian. He was from the Republic of San Marino, the oldest democratic republic anywhere in the world. One dead man isn't much in the grand scheme of things until you remember there are only thirty thousand people who share that nationality, not much more than the population of Key West.

 

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Life And Death On An Umbrian Farm

I woke up Tuesday morning to the sound of a breeze blowing through the cherry trees outside my bedroom window, the air was fresh, the sky a little less gray and the fields stretching south from my I sister's hill top farm were dappled in the weak September sunlight pushing through between the clouds.

Below my bedroom windows my nephews are digging a swimming pool for their plans to have paying guests visit the farm, an ambitious plan that their father my brother in law views with a mixture of pride and apprehension.

This is, I thought to myself, quite the privilege, living the life even if temporarily of leisure amid the hustle and bustle of farm life. I get to see it up close, and as much as I was glad to get away thirty years ago, I was okay with being back here now. My sister Liz is ten years older than I and she is the elder of her twin sister by ten minutes so in some sense she is the matriarch of the family now our parents are dead. She has been a housewife married to the same man for close to forty years. They rebuilt this farmhouse where her husband grew up int their family home, Cerqueti Farm:

And there she is, the smiling face in the bottom left hand window surveying her world as she has for the past many decades, raising two boys and watching her husband till the fields and kill the pigs and raise the cows for market.

Her husband was not considered suitable by our rather snobbish mother and they were secret sweethearts from the age of 15 a full half century ago and despite their public reticence they are as much in love now as ever.

They labeled him a gold digger in the village because he was marrying the heiress of a landed fortune, five hundred acres of extremely hard work and a ton of inherited debt and no prospects. Today, after a lifetime of back breaking work he has handed over plans for the farm to his two strapping boys but he still raises livestock, the thing he has always loved to do as his boys expand and make their own plans for a "modern" farm. Vincenzo's idea of farming is to get up early, feed the animals, take care of the fields feed the animals watch the news and curse the politicians and then go to bed. I am not much of one to get up early on vacation but I did his evening rounds Monday night with him.

He found some wild boar piglets lost in the forest one day a few years ago and he brought them home, hand fed them and built them a pen. They were probably victims of hunters who love to kill these pigs for their rather gamey meat.

He let them out when they were adults but they just kept coming back to their home and one day this one came home pregnant. They know where they are well off he laughs, pouring their ground corn flour into their trough. Wild boar are as intelligent and tough as iguana in the Florida Keys. They are as destructive and lack all natural predators. Hunters are scared of them as thy will turn on an armed human and gore him to death if cornered.

Then it's down to the cow byre to feed the cows his sons don't want to deal with. They dislike the requirement to feed and water the animals every single daily day but he thrives on it. Vincenzo doesn't take vacations, he doesn't drink or play cards, he doesn't smoke, so his only vice is his livestock.

Most of his herd, reduced to three dozen from double that when he was younger he keeps on hundreds of acres of mountainside fenced in and free to come down and get hay and water or to stay on the hillside where he has a trough for them and they can forage as they please. He's says even in winter they frequently prefer to be up on the hill than in the shed that he has built for them at the bottom of the hill. The young ones and the pregnant cows he keeps in the shed.

This one, pictured above gave birth Tuesday night and Vincenzo and I went out in a rainstorm to help the newborn calf get its first meal. The new mother, afterbirth hanging down her hindquarters was kicking the calf away so Vincenzo tied up her foreleg and distracted her with hay while leading the calf to milk. I stood outside the pen holding the rope taut that kept her foreleg in the air and prevented her raising her hind leg to kick away her starving calf. It was all very elemental and satisfying when the calf finally pulled away and burped and the mother, released, started licking him.

The fact is he will go to the butcher in less than two years and will bring in six Euros a kilo, which puts your middle class urge to go "Aww!" in an unfortunate perspective. But that is life on the farm. My sister also called in the vet who spent twenty minutes and twenty five Euros removing a blade of grass from her pet dog's ear... So animal love has its place on the farm. As do tractors, viewed fondly enough that Vincenzo calls this his car.

It's the oldest and smallest in the fleet of five that they have but it's his and he uses it to look after his cows, moving feed around including bales of hay for the outdoor cows, by the light of the feeble glow of the headlamps.

It has been his entire life and my mother thought my sister could do better than marry the third child of a sharecropper who used to cultivate one of her farms. I guess she was wrong.

I rode shotgun on the tractor, an extremely uncomfortable place on the incredibly torn up road we had to take to his other stable of animals and there he went through the same routine twenty minutes later. Sweep the dirt, put out ground flour and hay and make sure the water drips are working.

He put out some pasta for the guard cat,

And admired his pigs which he himself will slaughter in January for his rather excellent home cured prosciutto and dried sausages, of which I am eating as much as I can while I am here. He told me the story of the European Union inspector who came by the farm to take blood samples of his animals to see if they were being fed artificial hormones. "I wanted to give him some artificial hormones up the back side," my brother in law said with a grimace. Damned government regulations.

He used to slaughter pigs in winter for money but new European regulations put a stop to that. Vincenzo, like everyone else I have talked to is fed up with the over reach of government in Italy. There are regulations for everything and it makes me laugh as I think back to the US Tea Party people who think we have too much government interference in the US.

It has been days of eating and talking, telling stories and thinking about the past which I find quite exhausting but rewarding. And it gives me much to think about and be thankful for. It's good to get off the rock and remember how most of the rest of the world lives.

Raising food, killing it and eating it. It doesn't get more elemental than that, agro-tourism and swimming pools notwithstanding.

 

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Vacation Day 5

A few of my favorite things. A ride on the Bonneville, a drink with a woman I love and a pint of Smithwicks works too, at Finnegan's Wake. Instead I'm in Italy.

 

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