The period of Easter naturally is one if the most important festive days in a catholic country like Italy. Masses and processions are part of the menu in all villages, however small.

The Easter Dove or Colomba

The Easter dove or colomba The traditional dolce of Easter is the colomba or dove. It is a type of sweet cake, not unlike the panettone of Christmas, albeit in the form of a dove. Legend has it that it was invented or became known when the Longobards (we are talking deep Middle Ages here) took in the city of Pavia after a siege of months. To convince the Longobard king Albuin not to kill them, the inhabitants decided to prepare a delicious, irresistable sweet bread for him in the form of a dove, the symbol of peace. And it worked! Another variant has it that the colomba was the result of the visit of the Irish monk San Colombano to Pavia, who, refusing the rich meat dishes offered him by the Longobard queen Teodolinda, turned them into the sweet cake bread that from then on was named after him. There are still other legends about the origin of the colomba so who knows which one is true?

Whatever the true story is, in the 1930’s the Milanese entrepreneur Motta decided to produce the colomba on a large scale as a dessert for Easter. Nowadays you will find a large choice of different types of colomba in every supermarket. You can make one yourself, following the traditional receipe (see mytravelintuscany.com) but in Italy you can often get one for 1 euro if you spend a certain minimum amount of money in the supermarket, so why bother?

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The San Siro stadium in Milan, the home ground of both Internazionale and AC Milan soccer clubs, is officially named after the two-time World Cup winner (1934 and 1938), Giuseppe Meazza

A particular experience

We went to see a game, AC Milan – Crotone, yesterday and although the level of playing was not that high it was quite an experience. AC Milan is struggling this season, again, even after having bought an entire new team, spending hundreds of millions and Crotone is in the bottom region of the Seria A in only its second season in the top league. We had (very tight) seats in the second tier and from up there the field seemed much smaller than on television. Paradoxically, the field also looked rather empty even with both teams, 22 players, on it! The passing now also appeared much more risky than we expected from the tv reports and the play seemed to develop rather slowly. And, another weird experience, there is no replay of course (although they might in principle, show these on the large screen in the stadium) so you are constantly left with a bewildered „what happened?” Two Milan goals were cancelled by the referee and we could not understand why. We missed it and there was no replay to check.

Tickets

Conclusion: if you have never been in a (large) soccer stadium it is definitely worth the experience. Our tickets for excellent positions cost 35€. Come early and enjoy the atmosphere of diehard Milan fans arriving, take a snack and a beer at one of the many foodstalls outside and see the stadium slowly fill up and being decorated by the tifosi from all over the country! Under the southern terrace outside the stadium, you will find the San Siro Museum. Guided tours (in English) of the stadium are possible in combination with a visit to the museum. Tickets for AC Milan games are available at the Best Ticket website. Tickets for Inter can be bought at their website or at the few selling point in the city like the Ricordi media stores in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II and Il Sipario Mondadori Multicenter at Piazza Duomo.

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The 26th of december is a rather special nameday as it is the day immediately after christmas. In many countries it is an official holiday as well, also in Italy. St Stefano was in fact the first martyr of the Church, altough his death in 36 AD was not really a official execution but a result of public anger, a lynch … The saint was stoned to death after having commited blasphemy to Moses and God. Have a look at the liturgical calendar to see when your onomastico is. That is, if you have one, because not all names are covered.

Liturgical calendar: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Roman_Calendar

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In our region, the Oltrepò Pavese, exists a tradition from medieval times, called la cena delle sette cene, lâ sénâ di sèt sén in dialect, 

The symbolic meaning of 7

The number 7 of dishes has all kinds of symbolic meanings, as always with these type of traditions. God took seven days to create the world, there are seven deadly sins, the day has seven hours of daylight in winter. There is also a connection with the classical Saturnalia feast that lasted 7 days from the 17th of december.

The seven courses are:
1. Insâlàtâ âd bidràv, püvrón e inciùd – Salad of beet, anchovis and peppers
2. Turtâ d’sücâ – Pumpkin tart
3. Sigùl cul pen – Filled onions
4. Fas dâ Bâmbén cun l’âjà – Baby Jesus’ diapers with garlic (pasta)
5. Mârlüs cun l’üvâtâ – Cod with an egg
6. Furmâgiâtâ cun mustàrdâ – Cheese with mustard
7. Per giâsö cöt cun i câstégn – Cooked pears with chestnuts

Each of the ingredients has a symbolic meaning as well, the yellow-orange pumpkin represents the sun, onions and garlic are supposed to scare away evil spirits, the broad tagliatelle of the 4th course are called the diapers of the baby Jesus. The cod is in fact stockfish, brought from the Mediterranean dried and conserved in salt along the Salt Roads.

An Italian meal is always accompanied by bread and this holds true for the cena delle sette cene as well. The head of the family would put a large piece of bread, the miccone, on the table to hand out pieces of it at the end of the dinner as a protection against sicknesses.

A few years ago we were invited by Italian friends to share this meal with them. A very special occasion indeed!

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Italian christmas is more or less like the holy feast in other Christian countries.

The bishop from Bari

The festa di San Nicolò, as it is called, re-enacts the arrival of the bishop of Mira (Turkey) in Bari in … It is the celebration of the saint’s miracle … During the feast the bishop chases away the evil spirits like the one called Krampus, a part human part goatlike monster. In addition San Nicolò checks which children have behaved the previous year and which haven’t. The good ones receive sweets, caramelle; the bad ones pieces of coal, carbone. There is a clear relation with another, very Italian feast here, the arrival of the Befana witch early January. In the course of the ages traditions have interchanged and become entangled a little.

The origin of this early December tradition of San Nicolò lies in Germany. The feast is very traditional in The Netherlands, more so than the American Santa Claus who arrives at Christmas. In Holland the saint is not accompanied by a devil-like figure like the krampus but by dark-skinned servants, each of them called Black Pete. The servant’s looks have changed over the years, at some point becoming some sort of black slave caricature, with earrings, curly hair and thick red lips. The arrival of black immigrants from former colonies like Surinam and the Antilles together with the recognition of the dark past has now led to a very ‘lively’ (and agressive) discussion.  Is a feast in which a black slave like figure plays a role still acceptible in modern times? An ever increasing minority thinks it is not. Time to import the German and North Italian Krampus?

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Yesterday we went to a performance of La Cenerentola in the Fraschini theater of Pavia.

La Scala in miniature

It seems that every, even the smallest town has its own Scala-type of theater. Pavia has the Fraschini, but the smaller village of Stradella has its Teatro Sociale which accommodates only a few hundred within its miniature Scala theater. Another theater of the same type we visited in the peasant town of Busseto where Verdi was born. Another Scala lookalike. One immediately feels at home in these cosy venues, the warm red velvet, the cream coloured balconies, the golden ornaments glittering in the dimmed honey-yellow light of the crystal chandeliers. When the central lights are spent, the boxes seem to be the loggias of apartments in palazzi that surround you. You feel you are in the square of a city on a summer evening. Italy! La dolce vita.

Of course one immediately thinks of the Scala in Milan as the archetypical Italian opera theater, but maybe this is wrong. Wouldn’t the Fenice theater of Venice the real original model of all theaters, the Scala included? But even La Fenice wasn’t the first of this box-type theater, the San Carlo in Naples being the oldest still existing one. The box-architecture has a long tradition and Italians kept building these long after other countries like France opted for a more open style. Fortunately, as now you can (and should) go and see the local theater in every town you visit. The smaller the town the better. Buy a ticket for a performance, anything, as these are normally cheap, just to get the inside. The theater seasons are a bit strange when compared to those of other countries as in Italy one starts with all the operas first, presenting all the plays afterwards, from February or so. No more opera after January! (major theaters like the Scala excluded).

You should also visit a theater to watch the Italian public, how they behave and what they wear. La bella figura in ottima forma. A winter visit is special as in that season almost all Italian ladies wear fur, real fur, even inside the theater! Yesterday was the first cold day of the year and yes there they were! While we we dropped as much clothing as was still decent, temperature being somewhere near 23 degrees Celsius, the furs remained! Unbelievable. Italians and their health obsession.

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The Giro 2017 – Amore Infinito

The day before our departure this year we heard that the Giro d’Italia was about to depart. Oh, well, we thought, just another year that we won’t be able to watch one of the stages. In all the years we live in Italy we had managed to watch the Giro pass by only once, in 2011 when the cyclists visited Stradella, 15 minutes from our home. And now 2017 is not going to be a Giro year again. Let’s just have a look at the percorso, I thought, maybe they pass closeby our house again while we are in Sardinia. But no! This year the Giro happened to start in Sardinia of all places! This turned out to be the great race’s 100th anniversary and the organizers had decided that to celebrate this the tour was to visit all regions this episode.

Luck was on our side even more: on the same morning we were to arrive at Olbia the 2nd stage of the Giro was to depart at … Olbia. Can you believe it? We would arrive at 8 a.m., the cyclists were to depart at 10. And to make matters even crazier, the stage was to pass close by our holiday home, 100 km south of Olbia. We could easily arrive, drive to our holiday location, unload and then go an watch the Giro pass at the village of Dorgali. Fantastic! So that is what we actually did. As is was only the second stage, it wasn’t clear yet who would be this years great contenders for winning the race. We must have seen our conational Tom Dumoulin passing by, who was to become the first Dutch winner of the Giro a few weeks later! If only we had known this at the time.

An orgastic experience

The entire event was worth the small detour anyway. We were lucky, again, to find a free table in a bar spot on at the centre of the village and could watch the cyclists arriving on a large screen and then passing live on the street. The Giro is a big circus actually with all the promotional cars passing long before the cyclists arrive. Watching the inhabitants prepare themselves for the arrival of their heroes, getting more and more anxious as the giro draws closer … It actually resembles a collective orgasm: they are coming, they are near, they’re already at …, just one curve now, I can almost see them, yes, yes, yes, yessssss there they aaaarrreee! …. And gone, over, past. Everybody leaves and within 30 minutes the streets are deserted. Only the waste, some paper and lost little pink flags remind one of the spectacle that took place just a while ago. Ah well, next year.

Il Giro 2018

Yes, next year, 2018! Will our hero Dumoulin participate to defend his title? And can we manage to watch a stage live again. The itinerary has been made public. The 18th stage on the 24th of May is not far from our home, so we might just make it. Forza il Giro! Forza Dumoulin!

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