Not a good year for figs

So far this season, I've eaten well over a hundred figs, picked from numerous trees in a few different locations, and I have to say that I'm not impressed. Among them all, perhaps two or three were excellent, about half were passable, and the rest were insipid. Bear in mind that I am very picky about fresh figs because we are fortunate enough to have more than we could ever eat (we have at least twenty trees and they produce figs all summer long,) and that means that I can choose only the very best, as it would make no sense to do otherwise.

I wondered whether the unusually rainy spring had anything to do with all the disappointing figs, and I asked the aunt, who has a great knowledge of all things agricultural, if that were so. She confirmed my suspicion, though gave me a rather unscientific explanation that made me doubt for a minute that she really knew what she was talking about. But I must defer to her experience, and absent any other obvious explanation, I think it can be said that too much rain is no good for figs. I'm hopeful that the second crop later in the summer will be better, and while I wait to find out, I'll be making quite a few jars of spiced fig preserves.

As sad as a summer without decent figs is, I can accept it, mostly because our pears seem to have benefited from all the rain and are very, very good. Pata had lots of fun helping us pick them (about 15 kg) over the weekend:

"Mio. Tutto!" ("All mine!") Picking pears at Campo di Pere

Something makes me think that we're not going to have much trouble eating all those pears.

Sessa Saturday: Vineyard

Continuing with the agricultural theme of the last post:

Walled vineyard just outside the historic center

I walk by this urban vineyard whenever I go to the supermarket. I'm a little envious of the owners because I think it must be absolutely lovely inside those stone walls. (If it belongs to who I think it does, I may yet have a chance to see it from the inside: it's attached to the house of Pata's pediatrician, who has many times expressed interest in practicing English with me.)

Same excrement, different day

I haven't written about this sooner because it makes me so angry that I prefer not to think about it, but sometimes it's hard to avoid, especially in the summer.

N and I have some agricultural land right outside the town walls. It's part of a lot that N inherited together with his mother and his siblings when his father died. His father had inherited it from his parents; it had been part of a much larger estate that was divided among numerous heirs. N's father's lot didn't have a suitable house on it, so he rented it and its small casa colonica (farmhouse) to a tenant. The tenant had a son, who growing up on the land, came to think of it as his own, and indeed, he began to act as though he were the owner, and it took an acrimonious and drawn-out court case (which N's father nearly lost due to both perjury and bribery by the other side) to finally evict him. Sadly, N's father didn't live long enough to see that happen.

While the tenant's son lived there, he allowed several things to happen that irreparably damaged the land. The worst of these things was allowing the builders of three nearby condominiums to avoid connecting the buildings to the town's sewer line by simply letting the untreated waste flow out onto N's father's land. As soon as N's family discovered this, they reported it to the authorities. There was a trial, the town fined the owners of the condominiums, and the police were charged with ensuring that the situation be remedied. N's family gained hundreds of enemies, as the inhabitants of the condos were required to pay a share of the fine (they spent a decade shitting on someone else's land, but they felt that they had been wronged), the town made some easy money, and then nothing happened. I think it helpful to add here that among the residents of the condominiums in question was the mayor of the town.

And so we have some agricultural land that cannot be farmed because there is a stream of untreated waste that flows through it, more or less uninterruptedly. It cuts off a portion of land that has perhaps twenty olive trees on it, making them hard to reach because of the wide swath of saturated terrain that must be traversed to do so. It flows by several fig and orange trees, providing a constant source of fertilizer for poison fruit that cannot be eaten. We have a walnut tree that produces every year but all it's good for is a bit of shade. (If you like to sit downwind of a stinking canal of excrement, that is.)

When N's father died, his family looked into developing part of the lot. I think that they wanted to find a way to keep it in their family yet forget the bad memories associated with it (including the sad truth that N's father had spent decades trying to take possession of HIS OWN LAND and died before he succeeded.) But it's zoned for agricultural use, and it doesn't matter at all that it's useless agriculturally. I think it helpful to add here that the town several years ago availed itself of some adjoining agricultural land, which happened to belong to the aunt, to build a pay parking lot. Apparently, what can be built on agricultural land depends on who is doing the building.

I remember how insistent I was to N about doing something, anything, about it when I first heard the story, and I couldn't understand his or his family's inaction, their seeming shrug in the face of injustice. It took years for me to grasp, finally, that they had already done all that they could and that they were tired of fighting and wary of letting that piece of land consume their lives that way it had done to N's father.

We are torn between wanting to sell the land and wanting to take up the fight once again to resolve the problem. If we sell it, then all of N's father's efforts will have been in vain, (and we suspect that if we sell it to someone more well-connected than we are, it is likely that permission would be given for it to be developed.) If we decide to fight, we risk wasting years on something that, frankly, looks like a lost cause. And even if we were to win, how many years would we have to wait before we could be sure that the land was no longer polluted by all the nasty stuff that people flush down toilets (and here I'm not talking about human waste?)

View of the damaged casa colonica (on the day of his eviction, the tenant tried to destroy as much of the house
as he could, at one point even climbing onto the roof and throwing the roof tiles down to the ground.)
The modern buildings in the background of the photo are not the condominiums discussed in the post.

Halter tops and more

Yes, another recent sewing projects post:

Halter top and matching shorts

Another halter top

Yet another halter top
(I'd be happier with this one if I hadn't done such a crap job of topstitching the bias tape at the bottom edge)

Peasant blouse

Sessa Saturday: Stemma

Stemma, Via Ugolino

Quite a few of Sessa's finer palazzi have stemma (coats-of-arms) over their entrance portals. I find this one to be the most interesting because of its atypical design and the relative crudeness of its execution. The others I've noticed around town tend to include elements in multiples, i.e. three balls, five balls, three birds in a row, five diagonal stripes, and so on.

While researching the palazzo the stemma decorates, I learned that the street in which it is located is traditionally considered to be the site of the resuscitation of a young boy by Francis of Assisi, depicted in this fresco in the lower church of that saint's basilica at Assisi:

Giotto (attr.), Resuscitation of the boy at Sessa, early fourteenth century,
transept of the lower church, San Francesco, Assisi

***

Finally, happy Fourth of July to all Americans, whether living in the U.S. or abroad.

More recent sewing projects

I've been busy sewing again. Here are some of the clothes I've made for Pata in the last couple of weeks:

Tie-strap dress

Another tie-strap dress

Short trousers

Halter top. This was just for practice, hence the the bland fabric

All very easy to make (a requirement for me as I have to sew standing up to keep Pata from getting her hands on the sewing machine.) For the halter top, I used the excellent tutorial here. I'll be making a few more of them over the next week, and I'll post photos when they're finished.

Sessa Saturday: Dragon Portal 2

Another portal with sculpted dragon decoration, this time near the seminary.

Corinthian capital and dragon, detail of a portal, Via Ugolino

Here, a grinning dragon appears rampant in the spandrel of an arched portal, flanked by an elegant Corinthian capital. The foliate treatment of the dragon's form, visible in the vine-like quality of his long, floppy crest and the two leaf-like shapes at the tip of his tail, harmonizes with the leafy decoration of the capital beside him. Note also the repetition of the spiraling forms of the capital's volutes and the coils of the dragon's lower body. The portal, and the palazzo it adorns, date to the Renaissance. (For the other dragon portal I've written about, see this post.)

An Improvement

Sometimes you open your door to find a hideous pink basket on the landing. Other times, it's a half-dried sausage. And every now and then you find something much better. Much, much better:

Basket of figs

Props to the aunt.

Stambergo Strillante

The Shrieking Shack (from Harry Potter) is called "La Stamberga Strillante" in Italian, and the first time I heard it, stamberga seemed to my anglophone mind a rather imposing word for what a shack is. I'd been repeating it in my head, the way I do with words whose sounds please me, until the episode recounted in this post tainted it by association.

A little over a week ago, we started getting phone calls from a man who mistakenly believed that our number was the number of one of his friends. I've noticed that callers of this type of wrong number (one that hasn't simply been misdialed) tend to be less willing to accept that they've made a mistake. I think their logic must go something like this: they've accurately dialed a number that someone has given them, someone has answered, so there's nothing wrong with the number, isn't it reasonable then to expect that they be permitted to speak with the person they're trying to reach?

In this case, the caller, a certain Dottor Stambergo, was convinced that I was the person he wanted to reach. Our first conversation:

KC: Pronto?
Stambergo: Pronto? Ehi, Ciao!
KC: Buon giorno. Con chi parlo? (Who am I speaking to?)
Stambergo: Ehi! Who are you speaking to!?
KC: I don't know you.
Stambergo: You don't know me!?
KC: I think you have the wrong number.
Stambergo: Excuse me, Signora. Click.

Later that day, I noticed that there had been several calls from the same number within a two hour period. Not recognizing the number, and thinking it could have been one of N's clients, I called to find out who it was. A woman with a Ukrainian accent responded.

Woman: Pronto?
KC: Good evening, I found this number, which I don't recognize, on my phone. I'd like to know who wanted to contact us. There were several calls and I think it might be important.
Woman: I don't know, Signora. It must have been Dottor Stambergo.
KC: Dottor Stambergo?
Woman: Yes.
KC: Do you know why he called?
Woman: No, Signora.
KC: Oh. Well, thank you. Good evening.
Woman: Good evening.

Over the next few days, we had more calls from Dott. Stambergo. Every time, I politely explained that while our number was in fact the one he had dialed, I was not his friend, and I suggested that either she had given him the wrong number, or he had misremembered it. During one of these calls, we had an exchange that I consider the most absurd of them all:

Stambergo: Well, who is this?
KC: I've told you before, Signora C., this is the C. residence.
Stambergo: Oh, come on! Always with this Signora C., Famiglia C.!

I suppose that the consistency of my responses counted for nothing.

For a few days I didn't answer when he called, but he persisted anyway. Yesterday morning, when he called yet again, I picked up the receiver and hung it up, hoping to prompt his memory. It didn't work, and a few minutes later, he called again. I wondered how to prove to him that I wasn't his friend coyly pretending to be someone else, and I thought that speaking English might be a trick she wouldn't be able to repeat. I answered politely, tried to explain to him again that he had the wrong number, that he could call it until the end of time and that he would never find his friend here, and that he needed to stop. He protested. So I told him the same thing in English, then repeated it once again in Italian, at the end asking if he'd finally understood.

"No I don't understand you!" he yelled, and turning away from the receiver, he addressed someone else, saying, "you talk to her, I don't understand her, she's a foreigner."

In all our previous conversations, I'd spoken Italian well enough that he mistook me for his (Italian) friend, and despite my repeated protestations to the contrary, he persisted in that conviction. Now that he knew that I was a foreigner, my formerly acceptable Italian had become unintelligible. This is one of my biggest pet peeves, (as absurd it seems, it has happened to me more than once) and I wish I had a name for it, something like immigrant-induced comprehension dissonance. I find it disturbing because it demonstrates the extent to which our reality is conditioned by our prejudices.

(It calls to mind a couple of related pet peeves, the first being accent-induced comprehension dissonance, which sometimes occurs whenever I betray my origins with a badly accented word. It causes the listener to become mute. The second is the more annoying accent-prompted language assistance that I receive from helpful people who feel that they must finish my sentences for me. They never actually guess what I'm about to say, and protest my every attempt to correct them with a polite, "no, no, I understand, I understand.")

But back to the phone call:

Woman: Pronto? Signora? I don't understand about this "foreigner?"
KC: I'm a foreigner too. This man has been calling my house, and I don't know who he is. I've explained to him that he has the wrong number but he continues to call. I have a baby and it's not easy for me to run to the phone whenever it rings, especially if it's a wrong number.
Woman: Oh, I understand, excuse me.
KC: No, it's not your fault. HE is fixated on this number and won't stop calling. It's not you.
Woman: Okay, Signora, excuse me.

(That would be the immigration-induced exaggerated politeness of foreigners who are often reminded that they are outsiders; I recognize it because I have it too.)

KC: Okay, Signora, good day.
Woman: Grazie, ciao.

I haven't heard from Stambergo since. I think that our last conversation finally convinced him that rather than being the friend he is looking for, I am just (an)other.

Sessa Saturday: Madonna

Niche with fresco of the Madonna, centro storico

This is my favorite of the many public devotional images of the Madonna scattered throughout Sessa Aurunca. It's more visible than most of the others because it hasn't been closed behind a protective glass or metal grate, but its unprotected state has left it exposed to the sun and rain, which have faded it and reduced it to little more than a trace. Its fragmentary state reminds me of a bit of oratory, important to my dissertation, in which the author explains that we commemorate the lives of those who came before us so that our memory of them “which has begun like a beautiful painting to fade with the passing of time, might be renewed as if with new colors."* In my dissertation, those words were significant as an example of the rhetorical device of comparison; here instead they are a reminder of the fragility of the images we create.

*"pictura egregia sed vetustate evanescens: novis quasi coloribus anima laudatione renovaret," in Tommaso Inghirami, T. Phaedri Inghiramii Voterrani Panaegyricus in memoriam diui Thomae Aquinatis seuatui apostolico ad Minervae dictus, Rome: Euch. Silber, c. 1495, fol 2r.

Medieval Bestiary: Eagle

Eagle clutching personification of sin or paganism, ca. 1224-59, pulpit,
cathedral of Sessa Aurunca

The eagle is a bird with eyes so strong that it can gaze directly into the sun. While flying high above the clouds, the eagle can discern a fish swimming in the sea, and swooping down upon its prey, seizes it in its talons and pulls it to the shore. When an eagle grows old, with dimmed eyes and heavy wings, it finds a spring of purest water, and soars above it, flying toward the sun, which it fixes in its gaze. In this way it rises until the light of the sun burns its eyes and feathers. Then it plunges itself three times into the water and bathes until it is healed and newly young.

***

The motif of an eagle clutching a human figure entwined in a serpent's tale is a frequent one in Campanian pulpits, and likely represents the triumph of the Gospels over sin. The eagle is traditionally associated with St. John the Evangelist, while the figure trapped in the serpent's coils is a borrowing from classical art, which, within its new Christian context, becomes a symbol of paganism, and hence, sin. This is a particularly opportune blend of Christian and classical iconographies, due to the preexisting symbolism of the serpent in Christian art, and due to the appearance of the motif on a pulpit, the place from which the gospels are preached.

Honest Scrap

Laura at Ciao Amalfi! has bestowed the Honest Scrap Award upon the Shock of the Old! The conditions of accepting the award are posting a list of ten honest things about myself, and passing the award on to "a fellow blogger whose blog’s content or design is, in the giver’s opinion, brilliant.”

So here's my list of honest things:

I've known very few people more introverted than I am.

I prefer architecture to painting but didn't specialize in it because I worried that the addition of a third dimension introduced a new level of meaning I wasn't ready to confront.

I tend to overthink things, (obviously.)

I once gave up chocolate on the advice of a doctor; I lasted eleven months without it. I dreamed of it every night and carried a piece with me everywhere, so that in the event of a fatal accident, I could eat some before dying.

I love gardens and used to know the names of a wide variety of plants and trees, but I've since forgotten most of them.

Sometimes I wake up in the night and can't fall back asleep because I need to hold Pata but I don't want to wake her.

I would probably eat gelato every day if there were a good gelateria in town.

I miss quiet snowy mornings.

Sometimes I go looking for a book that I didn't bring to Italy with me, forgetting that I sold it or donated it. Then, when I can't find it, and I remember that it's gone, I feel its absence in my heart, like part of my soul has died.

I pretend not to understand much of what the aunt says just to annoy her.

And now, a few brilliant blogs:

Postcards from Istanbul
Flavors of Abruzzo
Care and Feeding of Wild Things
Under the Neapolitan Son (I'm not sure if Rompipalle is back to blogging permanently, but her current series on Naples is brilliant on its own.)

Congratulations to the winners and thanks to Laura for sharing the award!