CONNECTIVITY Like so many others, we found ourselves in a state of shock at the news coming from our homeland a short time ago that yet another in a series of senseless mass shootings had occurred. Our emotional reactions have ranged between disbelief, grief and anger. We are proud to be Americans and that conviction further heightens our despair for what appears to be a cancer lurking within contemporary American culture. The proliferation of and an apparent fascination with guns in America is very troubling. But focusing just on the guns themselves may miss the much larger issue; is there a compelling personal deficit that is driving so many to feel the need to have ready access to weapons? Feeling a need to have lethal force accessible for personal defense, or worse aggression, strongly suggests the presence of fear, alienation and a symptom of societal dysfunction. American culture is highly complex and as such, sociologic patterns are more of a matrix not readily reduced to cut-and-dry factors. There is much to admire in American energy and an impression of a ‘can do’ approach to life. At core may be an American abundance of a sense of ‘Individualism’ and self-confidence. When things were going well, Americans were naturally at their best. Self-assertion, competition, drive and self-confidence can produce results when opportunity and possibilities are available. Americans are so accustomed to taking positive potential for granted that when the playing field is altered, we may be left in a state of confusion and disorientation. America now seems on the rebound from multiple, yet probably related, assaults on ‘who’ we are. Life in the United States is outwardly projected as one of relaxed pleasure. It may still be for an increasingly smaller segment of our society. In reality, quite the opposite is how many other individual Americans currently seem to perceive their lives. There have been multiple examples of the failures of institutions, including financial, political and even religious, to live up to and honor the trust that has been invested by citizens. The economic collapse brought on by those who felt little restraint to curb their own greed has brought serious distress into the lives of those whose trust was betrayed....

 One of my earliest memories from previous travels in Italy involves the sound of church bells. There is timelessness in those sounds. That perception is enhanced when what reaches the ear is colored by reverberating off old stone surfaces. In communities of any size, there are a number of bell towers each with their unique metallic occupants, each with their own unique metallic voice. In short order, we learned to recognize the Ascolani bells that are speaking to us. Although mostly welcome, under some circumstances, bells have potential to be less appreciated. Retirement is synonymous with getting older with all those assorted issues. However, in compensation, retirement also finally grants a pardon from being under the perpetual sentence of an alarm clock. When exercising the well-earned prerogative of rolling back over for a little more sleep, another form of sonic intrusion is not necessarily welcome. The sound of bells, particularly serious bells, may be like relations with some people. There are those acquaintances that are best appreciated at a certain degree of distance. So it was by happenstance that our apartment in the historic center of Ascoli is situated where we can recognize the distinct metallic voices coming to us from a sufficient distance to be appreciated but not so close as to alter our enthusiasm for them. Here the churches are older than in the U.S. and harken back to a time when the bell of the church was a pivot around which the community functioned. Bells signaled the milestones in the passing day. In simpler times, the bell, like the church itself, brought order to life. The early morning call to first Mass told you when to be up. At midday, the bell on the church announced it was time for Pranza and the extended rest break from the early afternoon heat in the fields. The evening bell announced it was time to stop for the day. In Ascoli, an accommodation appears to have been reached catering to those of us with insufficient religious fervor. Although a first Mass of the day may be celebrated much earlier, we are not usually aware of bells much before eight in the morning. In addition to the church bells, the...

Buona Pasqua! Happy Easter! (See photos under Portfolio) Today is Monday, Pasquetta (little Easter), or Lunedi dell’ Angelo, and a holiday in Italy.  Easter is just behind Christmas as the Italian holiday that is the most food-oriented.  There are many Pasqua foods and I will try and introduce you to a few. That also means that today’s Italian lesson is delayed for three days, giving me a chance to catch up on some blogging. You might be wondering how the Italian is coming along after four months of lessons?  I will begin by saying we are still enjoying our lessons because we are so fond of our friend/teacher. He feels two hours a week with each of us is not much time but if we increase our lesson time I fear we’d be able to do nothing else. I can only speak for myself here.  I have not put this much time into any one thing since our kitchen remodel but my study habits are undisciplined and “the little grey cells” are old and not very cooperative.  There is so much data going into my head that my brain aches, but there is little coming out yet. I am hoping that at some point physics prevails and my brain will run out of space and the Italian will have no choice but to escape through my mouth.  (Nose, ears? Please no lower!)   I can now translate about 30% of what I try to read and understand about 20% of what people say if they speak to me like I’m a small child. (Larry is far ahead of me, no surprise.) Why I am hesitant to speak Italian, except after two or more glasses of Italian wine, I do not know. Intellectually I understand that practice is the key, and our friends are more than kind and helpful. It seems one day I feel I know many words but when I want to speak I panic and cannot remember them. Our teacher, Serafino, said to relax and keep reminding ourselves, “they are not French, they are not French.” Oh well, we have nothing if not time and some very patient friends, who speak much better English now than when...

Newspaper Article – Il Resto del Carlino – Martedi 25 Marzo 2014  It seems our star continues to rise in this city of Ascoli – go figure!   Above you will find a copy of a recent newspaper article about us.  This does not make us celebrities here in Ascoli, but it was fun to talk with the kids.  Note that this is written by high-school students, many who think the best place in the world to live would be America, especially where The O.C. is filmed.  I am sorry to say we may have inadvertently left them with the impression that restaurants have separate rooms for adults, children and the elderly.  We were trying to explain what we now realize is a very complex observation – that in the U.S. adults often leave the children and elderly home and go out to very nice restaurants where one would not normally take children because they are too noisy and active.  Here in Italy we have yet to find a restaurant where the long tables did not include everyone, from the youngest to the oldest family and friends, all talking and gesturing at once.  (And frequently the family dog under the table, except in the very best restaurants.)  So, no surprise they didn’t quite understand us.  Qualifier: this is my first translation (took three hours) which is literally the student’s interpretation in Italian of what we said to them in English, translated back into English by someone just learning Italian.  Hoping for total accuracy seems futile. WHEN ASCOLI IS BETTER THAN AMERICA  An interview with a couple that moved “Under the Hundred Towers”  We kids in the newsroom had the pleasure of meeting Larry and Arlene Howe, a couple of Americans who, after retirement, have chosen to live in Ascoli.  Interviewing them we got to know their motive for coming to our city.  Our guests responded willingly and very slowly to allow us to comprehend their English. *Why have they decided to live in Ascoli Piceno?  We lived in southern California, precisely San Diego, and as the city is very busy we desired to live in a place more peaceful where everything was accessible by foot.  We chose Italy in...

PRIMAVERA

By Larry & Arlene on Mar 26, 2014 in Blog | 1 comment

 Primavera, spring, has officially arrived in the northern hemisphere.  Here in Ascoli Piceno, there were some earlier signs that spring was not far off.  The sun seemed a bit warmer, the days started to get a little longer, closer examination of the trees we pass on our walks showed signs of forming buds and song bird choruses were more in evidence.  And then, just about on the Equinox calendar schedule, we had a brief warming trend that actually had us out one afternoon without jackets.  But that didn’t last long.  It is back to the changeable weather that is so common to the transitional aspect of what makes early spring.  And as if we were having difficulty recognizing that winter was not that far behind, on clear days we can see the higher elevations in the Apennine Mountains west of Ascoli are still covered in snow. We arrived in Italy in the earliest part of summer last year.  So we are now moving beyond the third into the fourth seasonal experience in our newly adopted home.  Being southern Californians through multi-year immersion, we are accustomed to less extreme and more rapid temperature changes as in during, Morning, Afternoon and Night.  But Arlene and I have our roots in a less temperate zone on the east coast. There were defined seasons that were part of how we were reared in those years.  I‘m finding it interesting that the visceral signals involved in the passing seasons here in Italy have a surprising comfort to them.  I’ve never been a great fan of being cold and damp but I seemed to have found what little of that was experienced was really quite tolerable. It seems I’m getting back in touch with the natural, cyclical order of things that might have been submerged beneath the climatically comfortable consistency of southern California. I continue to be amazed by the sensory reawakening that being retired seems to afford.  Intellectually I realized my working life involved a pace that was too fast to adequately sense some of what was passing by.  Occasionally, I gained awareness that I was missing something. During one of my phases, I became enamored with riding a motorcycle. What comes to mind...

Holiday Fun: There is a lot of information about food here, but I chose not to put this on the Food Blog because I cannot separate the celebrations and people from the foods – they are one.  The holiday celebrations began as soon as we returned from Rome and kept on through the New Year and Epiphany.  Accompanying photos should be up in a couple days.   Laura & Sergio: As I have said before, my favorite thing is to be invited to someone’s home.  Laura & Sergio (who use to own our apartment) hosted a small dinner party the day after we returned from our Rome trip.  The invitation was for 8:00 PM, which is the normal start time for a dinner party in Italy.  Their current apartment is only a couple blocks away from ours.  Their building has a lovely gated garden in the front and their apartment is two stories and, as with many of the older buildings, this apartment has been totally remodeled.  It is warmly decorated in a fun eclectic style to match Laura’s personality.  As in most homes the centerpiece of the living area is the dining table.  Over their table hangs a lovely Murano glass chandelier in the traditional style but in a mix of fun colors.  Sitting at the table under that chandelier, you had to be happy!  In addition to us, attendees were angels Cinzia M. and Grace, her partner Maurizio (the singer) and Rita, who works with Laura. They had selected some lovely wines to serve with the meal and we all brought a bottle, so there was no shortage of good wine.  Laura had really put a lot into this dinner and we were the lucky beneficiaries.  We started with a delicious guacamole (which I hadn’t had since we left the US) that Grace had made and a plate of traditional black olives with orange slices.  Most notable was an organic brown bread with nuts that Laura had made that was as yummy as it was beautiful.  For Primi we had two pasta sauces over bucatini.  Bucatini is larger spaghetti pasta but with a hollow center to hold sauces well.  It is, as Sergio pointed out, very hard...

Buon Natale, Joyex Noel and Felice Anno! La Bafana has come and gone and the Italian holiday season is now officially over.  Monday, 6 January, was an Italian holiday (Epiphany) with banks and post offices closed.  Their holiday break over, the children returned to school yesterday.  The holiday decorations in homes are being boxed up and stored away until next Natale.  In Piazza Aringo, Babbo Natale is nowhere to be found,  the Christmas market stands are closed and waiting to be dismantled, the donkeys are taking a well-deserved rest after carrying an untold number of delighted children through the piazzas.  The ice rink has started to melt, the speakers that had ensured a festive mood with holiday music (oddly mostly in English) are now silent, and the holiday decorations in the piazzas and adjacent streets are being removed.  The shops have changed their holiday displays and one of my favorite Italian words – SALDI – is now plastered on every window.  Tis the season to shop and blog! We spent a very good week in Rome in early December enjoying the sights and their famous Christmas market, decorations and some good food.  From there we took a quick one-day trip to Florence to see their holiday decorations and their international Christmas market.  When we left for Rome on 6 December, Ascoli was just putting up their decorations, there were almost no stores with holiday displays in the windows and few places you could even purchase holiday decorations.  As I mentioned in another post, the holiday season begins in Italy on 8 December (Feast of the Immaculate Conception) and in Ascoli that tradition holds.  When we returned late on the 13th, Ascoli had become an even more magical place than usual.  I know I’m partial but, in all honesty, Ascoli at Christmas is way more beautiful in every way than Rome or Florence.  In fairness to Rome and Florence, in this case size does matter, they are too large and spread out to achieve the intimate fairytale quality of Ascoli no matter how hard they try.  One night after walking around our town with the lights, music, market, ice rink, donkey rides and train – I told Larry that I...

It is a tradition of the New Year observance to look back over the past year and attempt to put it into perspective.  The year 2013 has been very significant for us. It is the year in which we became Ex-Patriots in Italy. We hope this Blog has gotten across how very pleased we are to have made this move but I’m not sure we yet fully grasp how we came to make such a good decision. In attempting to better understand how this came about, an idea I’m currently playing with has to do with how a change in life circumstances can lead to the generation of new options.  Gail Sheehy and others have talked about life having ‘passages’ – significant stages in the course of living.  Retirement has been a very important event for us, just as it has for so many others.  Gradually coming to terms with the adjustments retirement imposed on us was probably a factor in starting the reassessment process that ultimately brought about this decision. A professional career becomes a pivot around which so many of life’s structures operate and is also a source of affirmation. Once the old structures and sources for affirmation don’t have the same immediacy they used to provide, there is the option to develop a new focus for your life.  Developing a different direction is not so much a discarding of the past, as it is moving beyond it into something new and satisfying. In moving forward, it would be a tragedy to diminish any sense of pride in what has been accomplished in the past.  Past accomplishments reside in memory and should be a source of satisfaction.  An appreciation of the accomplishments of the past is, at best, a source for having confidence to move forward and take on new challenges. The future can hold any number of opportunities for growth in new directions. An interesting insight is suggested in biology.  The concept of ‘Atrophy’ suggests that a biological function that is not kept active deteriorates. Growing and developing ourselves seems to be built into the dynamic of sustaining who and what we are. In retirement we are probably also dealing with an aging process that contains...

There is the old cliché about travel being broadening.  If the originator of that observation had Italy in mind it is true personal girth could be at serious risk of enlargement.  The catchall phrase ‘Italian Cuisine’ does not come close to suggesting the rich variations in the mosaic of unique, regional dishes.  Italians have lived close to the earth for centuries and have developed a wonderful harmony in making the best out of what the immediate, natural environment has to offer. In our case, if it weren’t for all the walking we are doing, we would have ballooned as a result of the indulging our taste buds are getting.  Because Italian cuisine is identified as ‘close to the land’ in no way means it is monotonous, bland or lacking in creative invention. There are the endless varieties of pastas combined with an even larger variety of sauces plus the cornucopia of locally raised fruits, vegetables, meats, fowl plus the harvest from the very nearby Adriatic Sea.  And that is before we talk about the pastries, the gelatos and the obvious love Italians have for sweets of every kind. We have been drawn to the immediacy of the Italian table.  The ingredients tend to be very fresh and the preparation has the gift of bringing out the best of what freshness has to offer. On the other hand, regimentation in the promotion of ‘consistency’ to support the ‘bottom line’ can degenerate into a corporate imposed, standardized formula that is intended to not vary in a franchised chain. It is easy and delightful be get spoiled in Italy where what is placed before you is, at its best, a unique production that was carefully prepared. The food is not surprisingly like a good Italian wine – it has complexity and one senses individual flavors but yet the internal harmony is a joy.  This added aesthetic dimension elevates what could be an otherwise perfunctory experience for simply meeting basic bodily needs to a whole new level.  This is one of the joys of Italy.  At its core, it is saying to us simplicity is not a minimization out of a forced economy or a subtraction in the quality of the experience.  It...

Basic human nature suggests our personalities are multi-faceted. It seems it doesn’t take much in the way of a perceived unfriendly situation to cause us to revert to a more primitive, self-protecting response. On the surface, it appears to be very contradictory that in one context a person can be the model of consideration and then in another, the same person can be down right inconsiderate. We have seen this seeming paradox in others and, when we are being honest with ourselves, we have probably seen it in our own behavior. We are in Italy now looking to develop a yardstick to use in situations involving interaction with others.  I think we have come to recognize at this early stage, lacking a good database to work from, there is a clear danger in jumping to conclusions too early on how another culture works. First, there is the obvious language problem.  A mature language has layers of nuance and subtlety that are opaque when you are trying to squeak by in accomplishing some of the more basic, life tasks. Then right along with inadequate language capability is the absence of a seat-of-the-pants orientation to what is still a fundamentally different culture.  One of the pre-eminent, early leaders in modern psychotherapy was Carl Jung who came up with the concept of the ‘Collective Unconscious.’  That is to suggest we carry in our makeup an imprint of our distant, cultural past.  However much some of us associate our genetic strain to have been made up of an ancestry rooted in Europe, America of the past 300 years has been a very different place.  It is probably not too extreme to suggest that there may be some elements of an ‘American Personality’ that are different from an ‘Italian Personality.’ We do correctly see Italians as a warm and generous people.  But then the problem arises as to how we should interpret some other behavior we observe demonstrating what to an American would be considered a clear lack of consideration.  In Italy, there is an expression, ‘furbo,’ in other words, a ‘sly one.’  One who acts in blatant disregard to the equities of others such as sneaking ahead in line.  The behavior is often...