A Calmer Trip Home

Wednesday, September 25

"Noël and I did some reorganizing of the items in our bags and settled in for our last night in Italy, with the window open and hearing the surf."--that's how I ended yesterday's account. About 2:30 AM, everyone but me, it seems, was disturbed by the sound of a loud argument under our windows. That's what I hear, anyway; it didn't wake me up. I learned about it at breakfast.

Today's departures lacked the drama of our travel here. We rose and shared our last breakfast in Ostia, and then hailed a cab to the airport at Fiumicino. The customs arrangements are new to me, but John, Elaine, and Noël were familiar with them. On our way here we carried all our luggage, but we decided to check one bag for the trip back, since we had a bit more to carry now.

Once on the plane, however, we were able to relax. Of course our flight crew offered complimentary wine with our fairly substantial lunch. Only later, after we switched our watches back to EDT, did we note that this had also been our breakfast time on this 30-hour day. From now on, we'll check Rome time when we need a second reference for alcohol.

At Philadelphia, I experienced the joy of customs for the first time. On arrival, US citizens went to one area and visitors went to another. Lines were about 12 people deep, in part because half of the customs lines were closed. (Sequestration, perhaps?) We handed in our customs form and reclaimed our checked bag, then re-entered the system by passing TSA security and re-checking the checked bag.

Fortunately, we were in plenty of time, so we didn't have to be alarmed at the shuttle's crawl from Terminal A to Terminal F for our final plane to Cleveland. It was in Terminal F that I ran into the second-worst bathroom I had seen in fifteen days. As Noël and I waited for boarding to start, we heard pre-flight announcements from a few gates away in a voice that would have been perfect for a middle-school cafeteria monitor. When our gate opened and our attendant tried to do the same, we realized that none of the departure gates had microphones and loudspeakers.

We were glad to get to our seats for the flight back to Cleveland's airport. When we heard that the flying time for this trip was 55 minutes, we thought that we might actually arrive early; but then we waited on the ground for about 20 minutes before actually taking off.

No matter: we arrived on time in Cleveland--a little sad for having left our family members and our new Italian friends, but glad to be back home and a bit more appreciative of our lives here, where most things are familiar and communication is effortless. I still had five Euro in my pocket for the next trip.

This Is Where We Came In

Tuesday, September 24

We were almost on the road when I realized that I didn't have my wallet. Was it stolen while I was distracted on a crowded bus? Did I leave it at Villa Enrichetta when we left there on Saturday? Perhaps I'll never know. But after verifying that it isn't actually hiding somewhere in my bags (which has happened to me before--our group calls it "pulling a Bill"), we said goodbye to Judy and Lew (who leave later today) and to Lauren and Bill (who leave tomorrow) and headed off on the road.

Fortunately, I kept no money in my wallet, so the only items to be concerned about are the credit cards, which I was able to take care of over the phone while John drove us from Genoa to Fiumicino. That's the location of the airport: we don't fly out until tomorrow, but we needed to return the car to EuropCar there by 2:30. We made it with time to spare. From the airport to Aran Blu Hotel in Ostia was a matter of a short taxi ride, and then we were back where we first arrived from the airport twelve days ago.

We had snacked on the way, but by this time we had skipped a meal, which is against the rules in Italy. We headed up the beach to Sotto Vente, where we shared our first meal in Italy, but André wasn't there. Once again they had closed their kitchen early, but we enjoyed some wine and a salad and headed off in search of something more substantial. We walked further north along the beach, but found  the same situation at the restaurants there. Back at the hotel, we were advised to head to the town center, some two miles to the south. Since it was a lovely afternoon, we decided to walk there, and were rewarded by finding at Ora di Napoli, a pizzeria suggested by the hotel staff. A couple of hours later, and we were walking our pizza off on our way back to the hotel.

Noël and I did some reorganizing of the items in our bags and settled in for our last night in Italy, with the window open and hearing the surf.

Meeting Friends in Genoa

Monday, September 23

In her previous visits in Italy and the research she has done online, Judy has made several contacts, and we wanted to meet them. One was Mirella Lazzarino and the other is Jackie Janotta Rothenberg. We met both of them for a late-morning coffee in the neighborhood called the Castelletto.

Mirella is an elegant Italian lady who has lived in England and in Italy. She was recently widowed and is now living on her own. We were all captivated by her and enjoyed this chance to meet her. She walked to meet us, had coffee with us, and took a bus back to her own place nearby.

Jackie is an American writer spending a year in Genoa with her family to deeply experience another culture and to give their girls an opportunity to experience Italian schools and learn the language from interaction with other students. I highly recommend her own blog, Giorni a Genova. Italian kids go to school from 8:00 am to 1:00 pm, but that only includes a snack break, not a lunch break; Italians figure that a 1:00 dismissal time is a perfect for lunch. We met with Jackie until just before her time to pick up the kids at school.

We went back down to the area around Piazza Ferrari, found another café for lunch, and visited the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, whose courtyard we had visited yesterday. This time we went inside. As you would expect of a cathedral, this is an impressive church. It's only a few hundred meters from the Palazzo Ducali, and in the day of the Doges, this would have been the Doge's parish church. The Cathedral offers a reminder that Italy and the USA were at war some years ago: an unexploded bomb is exhibited on the congregation's right side, toward the back of the nave.

The inscription reads (close enough), "This bomb, launched by the British fleet, while breaking through the walls of this famous cathedral, fell here unexploded on February 9, 1941. In everlasting gratitude, Genoa, City of Mary, wishes the memory of so much grace to be engraved in stone."


This is our last night in Genoa--tomorrow most of us will move on. Lauren and Bill will stay one more day. For our dinner this evening, we headed to a little shop on Via Albaro, just a couple of blocks from the Marcelline. It's where we had dinner last night, but tonight we used carryout, which they call "Take Away" in Italy. The difference is that in Italy, they generally aren't set up for people to take food away. If you do, you take a napkin and little else. But our shop found plastic plates and forks, and bags to hold the focaccia, fruit, cold cuts, and cheese that we ordered. We had a picnic on the second-floor courtyard of the Marcelline.

After that, Judy, Lew, and I taught Noël how to play pinochle. She did well! Then she and I Skyped a video call to Heather and the children. By that time it was nearly midnight, and time for us to rest up for tomorrow's drive back to Rome.

Genova La Superba

Sunday, September 22

Comparing cities is a dangerous pastime for the occasional traveler, but making comparisons is unavoidable. Genoa doesn't have the ancient component that Rome has: Liguria, the region that Genoa dominates, was a Roman outpost back in the ancient times. And although it has the familiar concentration of churches that we've come to associate with old Italian cities, it's not the religious center that Rome is. In fact, it's not really a center for art for art's sake: most of the art we saw was architectural, or decoration of architecture, or recognition of important figures in the city's history. Genoa is a port city that made its wealth by trading; so the art follows function here.

Liguria is a banana-shaped region of Italy that follows the curve of Italy's northwestern coast. It includes Cinque Terre and Portofino on the Italian Riviera. But Genoa was once an independent republic, back before the unification of Italy, and so it has its own history as an independent nation.

When people say that Christopher Columbus was Genovese, it's unclear what they mean. He is claimed by everyone here, it seems. The city of Genoa is happy to claim him, but so does Piacenza to the north, and Bettola has a statue of him in the town square we visited the other day. All of these places were at one time or another part of the state of Genoa, although they're not part of the modern region called Genoa; so saying he was Genovese is pretty broad.

Someone told me once that Genoa was so hilly that it made San Francisco look like Chicago, and there's some truth to that. High above the city is an old fort, and although it's possible to climb it on foot, it would take some time. The streets that climb the hills in town are laid out as switchbacks, much like roads in the mountains; so to move a few hundred surface feet, you might have to walk a half mile. Genoa Transit has solved that problem by laying out several funicular railways, which sometimes run on the surface and sometimes pass through shafts cut through the hills. They are like subway cars supported horizontally on an angled wheel carriage that follows the incline of the track. We took one of those to get near an old fort, and then Judy, Kelley, and Noël stayed in that area while Lew, John, Lauren, Bill, and I walked to the castle on foot.

From there we went to the Palazzo Ducali, or Ducal Palace, which was the seat of government during the Genoan Republic. The word "Duke" is frequently used to describe the rulers of Genoa, but the actual title was "Doge," which basically meant "leader." The Doge was the head of a Republic, not the kind of aristocrat that the work "duke" implies. Dukes get to be dukes by having a fealty relationship with a king. The doges of Genoa weren't subordinate to anyone except their own people. They had a nice palazzo, though, and in front of it, on Piazza Ducali, we found a market where we were able to find some interesting items for sale. Right around a corner is the Cathedral of San Lorenzo (St. Lawrence is the Patron Saint of Genoa), and the Piazza San Lorenzo had another market where we contributed even more to the local economy.

We had the opportunity also to visit our own alley: the Vico Lavezzi, which Google Maps can find but doesn't label online. One can always hope for a Via or a Piazza, but we get a Vico, which I guess ain't bad. Corsica used to be owned by Genoa, and there is a group of rocks there called the Lavezzi Islands. We've never found out whether there is any relationship between the Lavezzis of Genoa and the Lavezzis of Bettola, but we like to think there is. After all, they have an alley, and an island.

We saw a few beggars on the streets of Genoa, and some independent merchants who set up shop on the pavement; but it was generally a more relaxed atmosphere than we found at Rome, where the merchants frequently became pests. And I would say that Genoa was generally cleaner than Rome.

Before turning in for the night, Noël and I caught up by Facetime with Heather's kids at Drake's soccer game at home, and we decided to try again tomorrow.

That's What I Said, Room One!

Saturday, September 21

From Bettola to Genoa is a fairly short drive, about two hours. We needed to make good time because  Kyle and Lisa needed to catch a train in Genoa to get back to Rome in time for their flight home. So we got on the road fairly early to head to Genoa, which in Italian is called "Genova." Our residence here is La Marcelline, a multipurpose institute offering a music school, a sports institute, a pensione, and a soggiorno. A pensione is a place where retired people can stay, and a soggiorno is a place where people like us can stay while we're in town.

The place is on rather extensive grounds, with its own gate to get on the property. La Marcelline is run by sisters, but there the similarity to Casa Santo Spirito ends. The soggiorno is more obviously set up like a hotel, with bilingual notices of various house policies, and guests get little preprinted squares of paper identifying the numbers to be used to gain 24-hour entry to the main gate and the building door. Perhaps more important, it has free Internet that actually works.

Here as in Rome, the main desk sister is once again named Gisella. Our new Gisella is a cheerful nun, perhaps a bit older than me, who speaks fairly little English. I was able to find out that Sorella (Sister) Gisella comes from a town near Lake Como, a few hours north of Genoa.

A fairly comical scene ensued as we tried to communicate just what we need in rooms and for how many nights. Most of us will leave on Tuesdayt; but Kelley will leave on Monday, and Lauren and Bill will stay until Wednesday. Our plan is for Noël and Kelley to stay in one room for the next two nights while I stay in a single (the same arrangement we used in Bettola); then on Monday, after Kelley checks out, I'll vacate my room and move in with Noël.

It would have been hard enough simply to communicate not only which rooms we needed for which nights, but we thought (incorrectly, as it turned out) that they wanted to know would  be staying in each. My use of the Italian phrase book had its limits! We were dealing with Italian numbers and dates, and to make things more complicated one of our rooms is actually Room One (Camera Uno), so we had a hard time distinguishing between "one room" and "Room One." Judy speaks Spanish, and her "Spitalian" has come in very handy. But if you try to imagine the Abbott and Costello "Who's on First" routine, only with hotel rooms instead of baseball positions as its topic, carried on in three languages, with three or four participants, then you have a fair idea of the scene. Fortunately, one of the pensioners, Seniora Mirella, an Irish widow who has lived in Italy for several years, came to the rescue by providing translations between us and Sister Gisella.

La Marcelline is a block or two from the Ligurian Sea. After Kyle and Lisa had been delivered to the train station, several of the others went for a walk to the sea; but Lew and I had another mission.

The sisters didn't think we'd be able to find a laundry nearby; but Lew had found one online, so off we were. When we arrived at the lavanderia automatico, several young men were there watching a movie on a computer, but none of the machines was in operation. None of the young men spoke English, and my phrase book doesn't have a word for "detergent"; it soon became clear that they had no idea what was what at the laundromat: they weren't using the WiFi while waiting for their clothes; the laundromat was a WiFi hotspot, and that was their reason for being there. We chose our detergent as best we could from the half-dozen choices offered in the vending machine; fortunately, what appeared to be the cool-water detergent turned out to be a good bet. We had to do some trial-and-error to figure out how the pricing worked on the machines, but in the end we were rewarded with truly clean clothes for the first time in a week or more.

Once we got back to La Marcelline, it was time for us to head out for dinner at a restaurant that the others had scouted on their walk by the waterfront. I had heard that one should walk carefully on the streets of Genoa. The Italians take their dogs everywhere, and some are less good than others at cleaning up. We had our advance walkers sound off "Code Brown" or simply marrone, the Italian word for brown, as a warning to those following. We were able to avoid the marroni both on our way to the restaurant (in twilight) and on our way back (in the dark). And by the time we were done with dinner and the obligatory gelato stop, it was time for us to head to our rooms.

Not for all of us, however. Noël and some of the others have been playing a game called Pictureka on Noël's iPad, and that will go on for a while yet. For me, though, it's time to make use of the free Internet here.

Curds, Whey, and the Family Town

Friday, September 20

Bettola is about an hour's drive away from the region that produces what many consider the king of cheeses: Parmigiano-Reggiano. As the name suggests, Parmigiano-Reggiano is produced in two towns, Parma and Reggio Emila, and the area around them. We headed to Parma this morning to tour Consorzio Produttori Latte, one of the many caseificias that convert milk into Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese.

The process is pretty interesting to watch. Milk is cooked in a cone-shaped cauldron about three feet high. When the curds separate from the whey, they sink to the bottom. One of the cheesemakers uses a tool shaped like a canoe paddle to pull the curds away from the sides of the caldron. Meanwhile, his partner slips two corners of a cheesecloth underneath the ball of curds, and then the two of them pull the ball up from the bottom of the caldron and hang it from a metal rod spanning the top of the caldron.

This is a pretty big chunk of cheese: the final cheese will weigh about 70 pounds, so I'm guessing that with all the liquid in there the curds must weigh pretty close to 100 pounds.

The curds are placed in a form (hence the Italian word for cheese, formaggio), which presses a plastic ring into the side of the cheese to imprint the date, batch, serial number, etc. From there the cheeses go to a brine bath for a month. The brine bath leaches out the lactose in the cheese; I was surprised to learn that Parmigiano-Reggiano is lactose-free. Not surprisingly, the brine bath also adds salt to the cheese and toughens the rind: I had always assumed that Parmigiano-Reggiano had a wax or cloth skin, but the rind we see is simply a part of the cheese, and although it's edible, it's tough enough to protect the cheese.

"Parmigiano" is simply the Italian adjective for Parma; we, of course, say "Parmesan." Evidently the cheese has been famous for a long time: I remember the British diarist Samuel Pepys detailing his efforts to save his "Parmazan" cheese from the Great London Fire of 1666 by burying it in his yard before evacuating. Christiana Capelli, our guide, made sure that we understood that not all "Parmesan" cheese is Parmigiano-Reggiano, and of course that message is one of the reasons why they make these tours available. We enjoyed the samples they offered before we left, and visited their store to purchase some gifts and mementos. After our immersion a few days earlier in the life of ancient Rome and the treasures of the Vatican, it made a fascinating look at an everyday product of our own times.

With a stop for coffee on the way back, we spent the rest of the day in Bettola. We arrived pretty close to siesta time, which gave us an opportunity to look over the lovely town square. A statue of Cristoforo Colombo occupies one end of the town square, and a fountain occupies the middle. One side has a café, the municipio (town hall), and a tabacchi (the ubiquitous "tobacco" shop, carrying everything from prepaid cellular minutes to candy to post cards to actual tobacco). On the opposite side and dominating the square is the parish church.

The church is referred to as the Sanctuario di Santa Maria della Quercia: the Sanctuary of St. Mary of the Oak. The name refers to a 1496 apparition of the Blessed Virgin to shepherds at an oak tree near Bettola. If I understand the Italian correctly, the present church dates to 1954, but the list of pastors on the wall goes back to 1828, including the pastor who would have baptized my great-great-grandfather. The campanile (bell tower--seems like all the churches here have one) bears large letters reading Ai caduti della Valnure--"To the fallen of Valnure." Valnure, the Nure Valley, is the name of the geographical area that includes Bettola. We sometimes forget that 70 years ago, we were at war; we would occasionally see reminders like this.

Evidently, this a church still has a congregation; signs of current worship are everywhere, although I didn't see an organ or any other instrument. The sanctuary has a golden niche to hold a statue of the Blessed Virgin, when she isn't out in the church closer to the parishioners, as she was for our visit. You can see her on the right side in the photo below.

We went for lunch at Ristorante Agnello, a few doors down from the church, joined by Francesco and his mother, Maria Luisa. We think that they are related through the Costas, one of the many branches of our family formed through the dozens of marriages over the years. As we sat in the outdoor café area, Bianca Lavezzi, a Bettola expatriate who spends most of her year in England and part of the year at her apartment across the square from where we were sitting. We chatted with Bianca for just a few moments--she was on her way to a meeting with her attorney, who has an office near the restaurant.

We had visited Francesco's Vecchia Stazione the night before, and we stopped there briefly to meet his father. At their recommendation, we headed off to Grazzano Visconti, a reconstructed medieval fortress about halfway between Bettola and Piacenza. According to Wikipedia, it dates to 1395 and was somewhat restored in the early 20th century. Today it is perhaps most notable for its shops, but it was fun to walk around the grounds and see some of the exhibits.

We stopped at the Vecchia Stazione one more time for some snacks and drinks, and then it was time to head back to Villa Enrichetta for the usual late dinner. We had Francesco call ahead and explain to GiamPier that we would need a lighter dinner than usual. That proved to be a good move: we made do with only a single pasta dish and the usual salume (plate of cold cuts) this evening, and we left the table a bit less overloaded than on some of the previous evenings.

Tomorrow we plan to settle our accounts, take a few more pictures on the town square, and then head to Genoa.

On to Bettola

Thursday, September 19

We had breakfast at La Novellina with Anna and Bart, friends of Judy's. Anna was Judy's Italian contact who set up our accommodations in Cicagna. Our party was too big for La Novellina, so John and Elaine's daughters and their men stayed these two nights at another place nearby. Once we had regrouped, we began the ride north to Bettola.

This, by the way, is the single scariest ride of my life. For part of our way, our road ran right through a nature preserve on the side of a mountain, which meant one-lane dirt switchback roads without guard rails. Our drivers handled this amazingly well, and within a couple of hours we had crossed over the mountains and arrived at Bettola, the town where the Lavezzis moved from Soglio in the mid-1800s and from which they emigrated around 1870.

Our accommodations here were at the Villa Enrichetta, which in the USA would be called a dude ranch. Noël says the accommodations reminded her of band camp; and although my own camping recollections are more primitive, it is certainly rustic enough. 

Bettola today has about 3,000 inhabitants, and to my eyes appears to be essentially a bedroom community for the town of Piacenza, about a half hour to the north. It has a very pretty town square and another beautiful church, and a remarkable bar called Vecchia Stazione (the Old Station), tended by a 33-year-old bundle of energy named Francesco Costa. Francesco is an old acquaintance of Judy's, and has done some research work for her. Although he says his English is poor, he speaks it pretty well--certainly far better than any of us speak Italian. Francesco had us all in for drinks and snacks, and then we settled in at the Villa for dinner before what would be an early morning tomorrow.

Tomorrow, we meet the Big Cheese--about 100 pounds of Parmigiana Reggiano. We're going on a cheese tour.

Exploring Soglio and Romaggi

Wednesday, September 18

One of our purposes in staying here is to use Cicagna as a base of operations for visits to some of the towns near Cicagna. The couple that links the families on this trip consisted of a Soglio boy, Costantino Lavezzi, and a Romaggi girl, Rosa Raggio. (I use the term "town" with some flexibility. Some of the units I describe as "towns" probably aren't, but some other civic unit.

Before visiting the family churches, though, we had some free time. Noël, Judy, Lew, Kelley, and I  took the chance to visit the area around Cinque Terre, a group of villages on the coast. After driving perhaps 40 minutes from Cicagna to the coast, we found ourselves strolling around the seaside in a town called Santa Margherita Legure, where we had lunch at a restaurant branded as Zinco of London. The London connection didn't make it any less authentic, however.

We've been learning that there are several types of dishes served as "misti," which seems to mean "mixed": for example, misti formaggi, which is a cheese plate. Here we tried a fritto misti, which is a plate of mixed fried seafood. We enjoyed it a lot, although we had to get used to eating whole small octopus, looking at a whole shrimp, and wondering just why one would bother to deep-fry a shrimp anyway, when the breading goes on a shell that no one will eat.

After lunch, we rejoined the others at the Church of St. Michael in Soglio. This would have been the church where Costantino was baptized. The population has fallen in this area, and now there are very few families left to carry on, so one views these churches by appointment, and Judy had made an appointment for us to see this St. Michaels's. St. Michael's in Soglio appears not to be used as an active church any more, but it maintains its own kind of rugged beauty. I noted that it has an organ, but evidently the organ hasn't been played within living memory. The lady who let us in told us that it hasn't even been opened in many years.

This is a mountainous area, and the churches, as well as the residences, are built on what might be characterized conservatively as hillsides. From St. Michael's to the churchyard is a scary walk of just a few hundred yards, and we finished up with a walk around the cemetery, visiting the tombs and graves of many Lavezzos. We found Lavezzo graves, but we don't have enough information to know just how they are related to us.

Any Lavezzos from the last 150 years would have been descended from siblings of my great-great-great grandfather GB Lavezzo or even more distant relatives, and presumably those ancestors didn't marry girls with the same surnames as did GB; but I don't believe we know any now living in Soglio. Family lore has it that the Lavezzos emigrated to San Francisco for the Gold Rush, and I do write to Stephen Lavezzo, who is a teacher there.

After our visit to Soglio, we went to a nearby town called Calvari for lunch with Pier Felice Torre, a local genealogist who has been been working with many Italian-American families to piece together their ancestry. Mr. Torre is charming, elegant, and working gamely to recover from a stroke suffered earlier this year. The place we met is called Bar Torre, and he lives across the street.

From Calvari, we went up behind the hills to Romaggi, birthplace of Rosa Raggio, my great-great-grandmother. The church there--another St. Michael's--is the one where she was baptized and where she and  Costantino were married. I was invited to look at the campanile, or bell tower, and I walked into its second story, which has to be one of the most uncomfortable and frightening spaces I have ever been in. It has a tiny spiral staircase, rough-cut into stone steps smaller than my feet. Fortunately, the bell-ringer generally didn't have to climb to the top except to make repairs: the bell ropes ran to the first floor through a one-foot hole in the floor.

I also got a look at the organ, which has about one octave of foot pedals, a single manual of perhaps 48 keys, and about six stops. The pipes were encased in a cabinet, and I didn't see them. A crank for operating the bellows extends from the side of the case. I don't know when it was played last, but it's been a while. At least it can be opened, unlike the one in Soglio.

Romaggi only has about 34 residents, so it's surprising that this St. Michael's is still an active worship space. It's also surprising that next door is an excellent trattoria called Pellegrino (which I think means Pilgrim). Italians eat dinner late, so it was pretty close to 10:00 by the time our drivers got to show off their mountain driving skills again.

Soon we were back to La Novellina in Cicagna, ready for the next stage of our adventure tomorrow.

On to the North

Tuesday, September 17

We've come to the end of our time in Rome! Cicagna, the town where we're staying tonight, is up in the hills of the north. The driving at that end would be challenging, and more difficult if we arrived in the dark. In addition, we intended to drive through Florence on our way. All of those considerations called for a fast getaway this morning, so bright and early we were up and packed for breakfast. A quick goodbye to the sisters (and paying the bills), and we were off in cabs for the EuropAuto office.

We had some delay at EuropAuto. We were to pick up three cars, and only two were ready at 9:30; one hadn't been delivered yet. It soon arrived, but by the time we were on the road it was nearly 10:30.

We reached Florence about 1:30, and our three drivers dropped off the rest of us in the city center. For the next two hours, we were able to enjoy one of the world's most beautiful cities. A number of great statues, including Ammannati's Fountain of Neptune and a copy of Michelangelo's David, take up much of the Piazza. From there it was a short walk to the Duomo, or cathedral. The cathedral is shocking: you turn a corner and suddenly a gorgeous 200-foot church is standing a few feet in front of you. Very beautiful, very surprising.

We met up with our drivers near the Ponte Vecchio, and we began the rest of the ride to Cicagna. This is when we start to talk about the crazy cities of the north.

Evidently, a couple of centuries ago the nearby town of Soglio was awash with the Lavezzo clan. Our great-great-great-grandfather, GB (probably Giovanni Baptista) Lavezzo, and his wife Caterina Lavezzo, were both from Soglio. That's right, they both had the last surname. Personally, I think that the idea of calling their children the "Lavezzi" (which would be a plural for "Lavezzo") probably started as a linguistic joke; it's certainly the sort of thing I would have done.

GB and Caterina settled in Bettola, today a harrowing ninety-minute drive from Soglio over the mountains bordering the Buonafontana Valley. One of their sons, our great-great-grandfather Costantino, came back to Romaggi, in the Cicagna area, to marry our great-great-grandmother, Rosa Raggio. After Costantino's death, Rosa and their children, including my great-grandfather Giovanni, emigrated to Chicago in the late 1860s and early 1870s--just before the Great Chicago Fire.

For today, however, the main business was settling us into our accommodations for the night, in a bed-and-breakfast in Cicagna called La Novellina. Once unpacked, it was time to look for dinner. We headed into the town of Piano Dei Ratti to try the Pizzeria da Robertone. Robertone was a bit mystified by the unheralded arrival of eleven Americans, but he and his staff entertained us with great hospitality. We didn't even attempt to order. Once he made it clear that he would personally see to our dinner, he began serving pairs of plates, one for each end of the table. We lost count, but I think there were a dozen pairs of plates, most of them some sorts of pizza or similar flatbread. They started with sautéed polenta and ended with Nutella calzones. That's a little more than one pizza per person, along with several bottles of wine and water. We felt pretty happy to pay the bill, which amounted to €160.

The place was pretty raucous, with a fiftieth birthday party and a family dinner also going on, and each of us joining in the other celebrations. Before we left, Robertone invited us to join him for a "digestive," which turned out to be, basically, shots. Except for our drivers, we obliged.

We headed back to La Novellina ready to fall into our beds before the adventures planned for tomorrow.

The Vatican

Monday, September 16

Today was our earliest morning so far. We needed to meet Jon, our tour guide, at 7:15 near the Vatican Museum, which is perhaps a five-minute walk from Casa Santo Spirito. We've enjoyed 8:00 breakfasts with the sisters each morning, but no time for that today!

Our tour includes the Sistine Chapel, the Vatican Museum, and the Basilica of St. Peter. We were in the Sistine Chapel first. Everyone's seen pictures of the Chapel, of course, but there is something special about seeing it in person. Entry is metered, so we shared the space with perhaps another forty people; and you're expected to be quiet. The lights are off for these tours, but your eyes gradually adjust to the natural light admitted from a few windows. I found myself contemplating the "statue" of Jonah at one end of the ceiling, and was startled to discover that what I first thought was a statue is a painting. That's how realistic the three-dimensional painting is.

The Sistine Chapel was to be just the first example of many today in which the art can't be properly appreciated from pictures. Jon had a great knack for explaining the differences between periods and styles of art, and startled all of us by pointing out a painting whose perspective shifts as you cross from the right to the left, creating an optical illusion. We saw so many perfectly-painted imitations of 3D that by the end of the morning we weren't sure which windows, coffered ceilings, and cornices were real and which were painted. 

From the Sistine Chapel we moved on to the Vatican Museum and the Belvedere Palace, and from there we returned to St. Peter's. We had been to St. Peter's for Mass yesterday, but now the place was ready for tourists, so we could get closer to some of the works of art; and also, we now had Jon with us to explain some of the things we were seeing. There is much more to see and do at the Vatican--the tour of the vaults below, the ascent to the top of St. Peter's dome, some time to sit and take it all in--but by this time we were on overload and ready to rest for a bit at Casa Santo Spirito.

After a short break, we regrouped for a trip into the heart of Rome again. Within the next few hours, we visited the Spanish Steps, the Trevi Fountain, and the Pantheon. The Spanish Steps were not particularly inspiring, although for this English teacher it was fun to duck into the doorway of the Keats and Shelley Museum next door. The Trevi Fountain is very impressive; I was expecting something in the middle of a piazza, but it is actually an edifice on its own. From there a few of us went to the Pantheon, which is one of the most influential buildings in the history of western architecture. Like many internal space, this one is hard to communicate with pictures, so I was glad to have the opportunity to visit it and take it all in.

This was our last night in Rome. We travel to Cicagna tomorrow by way of Florence, so we needed some packing time. After dinner it was time to get on with that for tomorrow's drive. 

The Roman Forum and Colosseum

Sunday, September 15

The convent where we are staying is in the Borgo Santo Spirito. A "borgo" appears to be a very small village, and this one seems to consist of two parts: a hospital and the convent of the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother, where we are staying. If I understand the relationship correctly, we are on Vatican property outside the actual walls of Vatican City. When we walk out the door, we are a few yards from St. Peter's Square.

Several of us walked over to St. Peter's for morning Mass. There must be dozens of side altars, and on the hour dozens of priests fan out to say Mass at them. Congregations vary in size from zero to a few dozen, and the languages vary as well. Several of us joined an elderly priest for the "Daily Mass for World Peace" in Italian; John's daughter Lauren found an English-language Mass. Afterwards, we strolled around St. Peter's, which at this time had many sections roped off. Most of the ropes would come off for tomorrow's tours; today gave us a preview of what we would see tomorrow.

Today's tour covered the Roman Forum on Palatine Hill and the Colosseum. For me, the Forum was too much too fast, but that's probably unavoidable: I hadn't done any preparation for the tour, and so from the beginning it was hard to connect the parts together. And parts there were: our tour guide Maria took us up and down more steps than we could count. I first encountered the story of Julius Caesar's assassination as a kid, probably from Classics Illustrated comic books; and now, many years later, it was pretty neat standing in the very spot where all those events took place.

From there we went to the Colosseum. I was surprised to hear that modern scholars think that the Colosseum was used more for sports and spectacles than for the torture and killing of Christians. We took the underground tour, which offers the opportunity to walk in some of the spaces underneath the Colosseum floor. There are no "locker rooms" here for gladiators: instead, they came in from offsite training rooms through an underground passage, and were probably issued their weapons just before their contest. The whole area under the floor is honeycombed with passageways, and the current thinking is that the passageways held elevators that could deliver gladiators, animals, etc., to specific parts of the floor. As a former drama teacher, I could appreciate the technology.

This was a rainy day, and we were constantly surrounded by men trying to sell us ponchos and umbrellas. We resisted the temptation at first--most of us had hats or umbrellas--but eventually it became clear that we were going to need a bit more protection. The pictures will show several of us in (insert irony here) lovely fashion-forward plastic ponchos.

After dinner and a gelato, we found ourselves in what is sometimes called the Heart of Rome, which is about two miles from Vatican City. Some in our group walked back, but after walking all over the Capitoline hill and from the bottom to the top of the Colosseum, I was among those ready to take a bus back to the Vatican. There was the usual chat in room 201 at the convent, and then we were all ready to head to bed, because tomorrow's tour starts at the Vatican Museum at 8:15.

Buonanotte from Roma!

Our First Tour

Saturday, September 14

We have had some difficulty establishing consistent data connections on this trip, and so I will be posting observations as I can rather than trying to spread them out one per day as I normally might do.

I suppose I should explain a bit about who we are and how we got here. The organizer and instigator of this trip is my sister Judy, who has made several visits to Europe. One of those trips included three teenaged grandchildren, which establishes her as an accomplished and resourceful traveler. It was she who, about a year ago, began to promote the idea of a family trip.

Our group includes two branches of the Lavezzi family tree. Our third cousin John, his wife Elaine, and members of their family group make up six of us; the other five are Judy, her daughter Kelley, her husband Lew, my daughter Noël, and me.

We are linked by Costantino Lavezzi and Rosa Raggio, the great-great-grandparents of John, Judy, and me. He came from Soglio, she from Romaggi, and eventually they settled in Bettola. All three towns are north of Genoa: Romaggi is the smallest, Bettola the most remote. We will start in Rome, go north to the ancestral cities, and spend a few days in Genoa itself.

While in Rome, We have tours scheduled; and not just tours, but serious walking tours. (How else does one earn one's gelato?)

We are staying in a convent, and the sisters have Mass a few days a week. Several of us joined them for this morning's Mass. They have a little chapel with an electronic keyboard. They weren't using the keyboard, but Sister Rosa plays a pretty good guitar.

Today's tour took us to three sites that emphasize Rome as both an ancient capital and the heart of what was then an undivided Christianity. None of these spots allowed photographs, so this will be the least-photographed part of the trip. And that's unfortunate, because photos would be striking. I'll try to make up for that with some weblinks.

Judy made the arrangements for all our tours, all with Walks of Italy; they offer fluent English-language guides and priority entry before the lines that accumulate at most places. Our guide for today was Mike, who was born in the States to an American father and an Italian mother and has spent most of his life in Rome.

The first part of the tour was a visit to the Priscilla Catacombs, which derive their name from the family that donated the grounds to the Church in the second century. Now the entrance is part of a convent, and we had a chance to meet Mother Superior, a sprightly 92-year-old who doubles as the gift shop clerk.

It's estimated that these catacombs include burial places for about 40,000 early Christians. Many of them are on  the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th levels down, which are still being excavated and explored; only the first (top) level is on the tour. Still, there are plenty of catacombs there to be seen.

Evidently, archaeologists discern three stages in the uses of the catacombs as burial grounds. In the first, everyone  was  equal (mostly poor) and burial spaces were pretty much the same, and plain. In the second, Christians with more money were able to arrange preferential spaces and perhaps a bit better markings. In the third, the more well-off Christians were able to arrange fairly substantial spaces and  commission works of art for their spaces.

It was this third stage that produced some of the earliest Christian art. Among the interesting items are what is thought to be the earliest existing image of the Virgin Mary and a picture of what appears to be a female priest or minister. Obviously, this second one is of some interest today, as Catholicism considers the role of women in the modern church.

The website at catacombepriscilla.com/inglese has a nice slide show that shows what we saw. It doesn't communicate how confined the space is, and the photos look brighter than the site looked to our eyes.

Although the catacombs were pretty somber, our next visit went beyond that to the macabre. We went to the monastery of the Capuchins, one of the Franciscan orders. The Capuchins believed that the Franciscans of the period were beginning to get soft, and they practiced a sort of no-holds-barred bodily denial. They buried their dead below ground until all that remained were bones, collected them, and then reused the space. (A practice not unique to them--remember Hamlet with Yorick's skull in the graveyard?) In the mid-19th century, Rome officials decided that this was a health hazard and ordered the monks to clean up their act. The monks collected the bones of their deceased brothers and arranged them into artistic exhibits with religious themes. Odd, but interesting!

About 150 years ago, a young American reporter named Samuel Clemens visited Rome with some American compatriots; he published his observations as The Innocents Abroad under his pen name of Mark Twain. Of the Capuchin Crypts he wrote, "Here was a place for sensitive nerves! . . . There would be stirring times here for a while if the last trump should blow. Some of the brethren might get hold of the wrong leg, in the confusion, and the wrong skull, and find themselves limping, and looking through eyes that were wider apart or closer together that they were used to."

It wasn't so funny for us. It's one thing to look at the crypts in photos. (There are many websites: search "Capuchin crypt Rome, or look at this website to get the general idea.) But for me, at least, being in the actual presence of so many bones was quite different from seeing the pictures.

One of the main displays in the Capuchin museum is a painting by Caravaggio of "St. Francis in Meditation," in which he holds--of course--a skull. To these friars, all this is instructive rather than morbid, and I don't mean to belittle it: thinking about our mortality can be good for us, and the crypts certainly promote it. Just in case you've missed the point, they even have a sign among the bones reminding you, "Quello che siete fummo, quello che siamo sarete": "What you are we were, and what we are you will become."

We were ready now for the  Basilica of St. Clement. Clement was the third Pope after Peter; many Catholics know his name from one of the Eucharistic Prayers used for Mass. The present basilica was built in the 12th century. Hundreds of years later, the rector of the basilica, hearing water running underneath, did some exploration and found that this more modern basilica had been built over another, from the fourth century. Once they got that space excavated, archaeologists dug down deeper and learned that the fourth-century basilica had been built over a second-century temple to the god Mithras, who was the subject of his own cult within the pagan religion of Rome.

Mithras was a Persian god who was the center of a cult within the Roman religion which was apparently pretty friendly to early Christians. (Like Christianity, Mithraism seems to have been centered around sacrifice and a ceremonial meal.) All religions use symbols, and Mithras had his own trademark image called the "tauroctony": it shows Mithras cutting a bull's throat as a serpent attacks the bull and a scorpion stings the bull's privates. (You know the expression: some days you're Mithras, and some days you're the bull.) We were to encounter tauroctonies several times over the next few days.

To me, this combination of different eras in one place was fascinating and instructive. In the absence of any photos from me, you'll have to make do with the excellent official website, which includes a brief summary video.

By the time we had tramped around these sites, we were ready to eat. So we headed to a restaurant near St. Clement's for dinner. We had a very nice dinner, and the (all male) staff there especially liked the ladies in our group and were very friendly. We returned to the convent just before its 11:00 closing time. We made the necessary arrangements to use their WiFi connection and headed to our rooms.

We quickly found that the common room on the second floor was an ideal place for us to gather and talk over the events of one day and plan for the next. This also started a pattern that was to continue for the next several days: the late dinner, the evening gathering, and the early rising.

Which bring us to the next day, which I will post when I can.

We Arrive in Rome

log for Friday, September 13

Well, the good news is that I got a good night's sleep. The bad news is that I got more than expected, so that I got downstairs late for the breakfast that we were to have with John and Elaine: I had slept right through my 6:00 wake-up alarm! 

We had a very nice breakfast nonetheless, and in the way of Lavezzi meals it went on for a while. None of us had a printed address for the convent we were to go to tonight, and that made internet access especially important. One of the oddities of the hotel is that unlike most free hotel WiFi, theirs requires separate credentials for each device. Last night I had internet on my phone but no power for the iPad. Now, finally, I had the iPad recharged and was able to get internet credentials and get to my records and get the address.

First, though, lunch! We headed down the beach again to the same café we had visited last night. We made our way through the menu with help from our new friend Andrei, the proprietor of Sotto Vente, where we had eaten yesterday. John had octopus, which I had never had, and I enjoyed a taste of that. After lunch it was time to bid farewell to our beachfront hotel in Ostia and take the 35-minute taxi ride to Casa Santo Spirito, where we will stay until Tuesday.

We were greeted by a vivacious young Neapolitan sister named Gisella, whose English is quite good. I'll write more about Casa Santo Spirito some other time, but in the meantime you can find out more about them at casasantospirito.it. Basically, this is a convent of the Sisters of St. Francis of the Sorrowful Mother, which they operate for tourists, pilgrimages, and youth groups. Despite the name of their order, there is nothing sorrowful about these ladies.

The Casa is just off St. Peter's Square, but for our first night in Rome we headed away from the Square to get find an Ottica (optician) to repair Elaine's glasses, which had lost a nose pad. Eventually we found one: the optician fixed her glasses and refused payment.

We had wondered where Judy and Lew were, but back at the Casa we found that they had arrived while we were away. John and Elaine's daughther Lisa and her husband Kyle are staying nearby, and we met up with them for dinner. So now there are eight of our eventual group of eleven in town, and the eight of us got together for a lovely dinner (and more wine) at a ristorante a few blocks away from the convent.

Tomorrow (Saturday) we head to the Catacombs of Priscilla, the Capuchin Crypts, and the Basilica of San Clemente.

We'll post pictures when we can; for now, internet is a challenge.

Ciao from Roma!  

From Wine to Gelato

Thursday, September 12

We arrived at our hotel, the Aran Blu, about 3:00 this afternoon.That was about four hours later than expected, due to our flight's being delayed and our being rebooked through Frankfurt. So now my new passport's first stamp is from Germany and not Italy. The various sins of US Airlines will have to be documented some other place and time, but on the positive side we did get a spend a few hours in Germany, and both our Philadelphia-to-Frankfurt US Airways flight and our Frankfurt-to-Rome flights served complimentary wine. Our internal clocks are so confused now that we couldn't tell you just when in the day we were drinking it. It had to be past noon in either Ohio or Italy!

Our hotel for this night is in Lido di Ostia on the Mediterranean coast. Here's a view from our balcony.

We walked north up the coast for dinner and enjoyed supper and our first gelatos with John and Elaine Lavezzi, who arrived earlier today.

Tomorrow we'll head to Rome. We'll also try to straighten out some technical issues which have made the process of writing this blog a bit more complicated than we would like. And maybe then I'll be able to post a photo from today's travels. [As should be obvious from the picture above, that did turn out to be true.] Until then, ciao!

Bill and Noël's Excellent Adventure

Wednesday, September 11, 2013

In just a few hours, Noël and I will be boarding our flight to Rome. After a four-month hiatus, it's time for me to write something again.

My sister, Noël's Aunt Judy, was the inspiration for this trip, and it's turned into quite the family outing. All eleven of us are somehow connected to the Lavezzi name. At times the webconferences we've used to coordinate the trip have covered four time zones. We're traveling in six groups, on six different schedules. To keep it simple, here's a brief summary of the itinerary Noël and I will follow.

• We leave for Rome today and arrive about 11:00 AM local time tomorrow. (That's 5:00 AM back home.)
• On Tuesday, September 17, we start our journey north by driving our three-car convoy through Florence to Cicagna.
• On Thursday, September 19, we head to Bettola, the home of Costantino Lavezzi (born 1813) and Rosa Raggio (born 1816), who were my great-great-grandfather and great-great grandmother and the common link among those of us making this trip.
• On Friday, September 20, we have scheduled a side trip to Parma to meet the "big cheese": Parmigiano Reggiano.
• On Saturday, September 21, we head for Genoa.
• On Tuesday, September 24, we leave Genoa for Rome.
• On Wednesday, September 25, we return from Rome to Cleveland.

Cicagna and Bettola will not be familiar locations to most American readers, but I am assured that they are relatively large compared to some of the places we will visit up north!

This is my first trip away from North America; experienced travelers tell me to expect to do plenty of improvisation. So I'm planning to post observations here. There's a good chance that I won't have an internet connection every day, so I can't predict how regular these will be; but you're welcome to follow along if you like.

And along the way, I'll be mindful of the observation of explorer Roald Amundsen (1872-1928): "Adventure is just bad planning." I'm hoping he was just being ironic.