#Paola Mazzetti

[marcogiovenale]

macro / giuseppe garrera: omaggio a lorenza mazzetti, in occasione della giornata della memoria

macro / giuseppe garrera: omaggio a lorenza mazzetti, in occasione della giornata della memoria

continua qui (immagini e vicende, fino alla fondazione del “Free Cinema Movement” e al ritorno in Italia): https://www.museomacro.it/it/extra/parole-it/giornata-della-memoria-un-omaggio-a-lorenza-mazzetti-il-cielo-cade/ _

[carmenvicinanza]

Nulla è importante a parte che tutto è importante

"Nulla è importante a parte che tutto è importante".

Lorenza Mazzetti, appena scomparsa ha lasciato un segno profondo in ogni mondo frequentato. Cinema, pittura, poesia, letteratura, con una curiosità e la passione vitale di chi, come diceva lei stessa, ha «saldato i debiti con la vita ancor prima di viverla». Il 3 agosto 1944, con la gemella Paola, fu testimone dell’eccidio dei familiari a Rignano sull’Arno. Lo zio Robert Einstein, cugino di Albert, le aveva adottate piccolissime, perché rimaste orfane. Un commando di tedeschi irruppe nella  loro villa trucidando la zia e le cugine. Lo zio, nascosto nel bosco, non resse e si suicidò l’anno dopo. Fu un’esecuzione rimasta senza responsabili, una rappresaglia contro la famiglia dello scienziato odiato dai nazisti. Di recente aveva trovato in rete e riconosciuto il volto del capitano delle SS, era andata in Germania a denunciarlo. Ha sperato fino all'ultimo che la verità processuale confermasse quella che lei e la gemella sapevano essere la verità.

#unadonnalgiorno

[mastcomm]

Lorenza Mazzetti, Wartime Survivor and Seminal Filmmaker, Dies at 92

Lorenza Mazzetti, who as a child in Italy survived the wartime killings of her caretaker family by German soldiers and went on to help create an influential British film movement and write a prizewinning novel based on her experiences, died on Jan. 4 in Rome. She was 92.

The death was confirmed by her twin sister, Paola Mazzetti.

Ms. Mazzetti’s work spanned film, television, painting and book-writing; she even ran a popular puppet theater in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori neighborhood in the 1980s. Her searing experience in World War II shaped her most acclaimed book, “Il Cielo Cade” (1961), a best seller that won Italy’s prestigious Viareggio Prize. It was published in English the next year as “The Sky Falls.”

As children, she and her sister were placed in the care of her aunt Cesarina Mazzetti and her husband, Roberto Einstein, a cousin of the physicist Albert Einstein. The cousins had grown up together in Germany. When Albert fled Germany in 1933, settling in the United States, Roberto remained in Italy, where he had gone to study and had started a family.

As the German army was retreating from Italy, soldiers searching for Roberto and seeking retaliation for Albert’s move to America came across the Einstein family villa near Florence. Roberto had already fled to the hills, but his wife and daughters, accused of being spies, were shot to death on Aug. 3, 1944.

Lorenza and Paola were spared because their last name wasn’t Einstein and they weren’t Jewish. Roberto committed suicide a year later.

After the war, Ms. Mazzetti traveled to England to seek her fortune. Deciding she wanted to become an artist, she showed up the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 1951, a day before the fall semester was to begin.

She often recounted the story of how she had thrown a fit when an administrator told her that she had arrived too late to enroll in classes that year. “‘Next year, I will be dead!’ I started screaming. ‘I want to talk to the director,’” Ms. Mazzetti said in an interview in 2009 (later published in Luma, a film and media arts quarterly).

The school’s director, the artist William Coldstream, walked in. After he looked at Ms. Mazzetti’s work, he told her to come to class the next morning. Her instructors included Lucien Freud, the painter and grandson of Sigmund Freud. She spent two years at Slade, going to classes twice a week.

Film, however, had captured her imagination. Without telling her professors, she used Slade equipment to create an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s novella “The Metamorphosis.”

When Mr. Coldstream found out what she had done, he threatened to expel her — but first he showed the film to his friend Denis Forman, the director of the British Film Institute.

Mr. Forman liked it so much, he gave Ms. Mazzetti money from the institute’s Experimental Film Fund so that she could continue making movies.

“She was a very respectable, responsible person, certainly not a thief,” the actor Malcolm McDowell said in “Because I’m a Genius!,” a 2016 documentary about Ms. Mazzetti. “If you’re a young filmmaker, you get films started any way you can.”

One night Ms. Mazzetti and three friends — the filmmakers Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz and Lindsay Anderson — got together at a cafe where she was working as a barista. There, on a table, they wrote a manifesto, pledging to produce creative, innovative cinema. “No film can be too personal,” they wrote. “The image speaks.” They added: “An attitude means a style. A style means an attitude.”

The Free Cinema movement was born, bringing the four filmmakers attention and eventually shaping the British New Wave of cinema of the late 1950s and ’60s. Mr. Richardson went on to direct the Academy Award-winning movie “Tom Jones” (1963); Mr. Anderson’s film “If…” (starring Mr. McDowell) won a Palme d’Or at the Cannes International Film Festival in 1969; and Mr. Reisz’s “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning” (1960) propelled Albert Finney to a major career.

Ms. Mazzetti’s contribution to the movement was “Together” (1956), a short black-and-white film she directed about two deaf-mute dockworkers in London. One of them was played by her friend Eduardo Paolozzi, who went on to become a major 20th-century sculptor. “Together” was chosen to represent England at Cannes in 1956.

Lorenza Mazzetti was born on July 26, 1927, just outside Florence, to Corrado and Olga (Liberati) Mazzetti. Her father was a minister. Her mother died of complications after childbirth. By the time the twins were 7, their father had given them to his sister and brother-in-law to bring up.

After receiving the Cannes award, Ms. Mazzetti returned to Italy to be with her sister in Rome. She helped write and direct films for the screenwriter and film theorist Cesare Zavattini and then worked as a television reporter, but she became frustrated at being given news stories that she didn’t see as serious, she said in the 2009 interview.

With encouragement from Mr. Zavattini, Ms. Mazzetti tried writing, turning her wartime experiences into thinly veiled fiction in “The Sky Falls,” which was translated into German, Spanish, Portuguese and French. A film version was released in 2000 starring Isabella Rossellini as Ms. Mazzetti’s aunt.

“Writing that book saved my life,” Ms. Mazzetti said. “I wasn’t eating. I was crying. I was so angry. Writing helped me deal with what was going on in my head.”

She wrote several other novels and memoirs, including “London Diaries” (2014), which recounted her time in England in the 1950s.

In the 1960s Ms. Mazzetti married Bruno Grieco, a journalist and the son of an Italian Communist Party founder. They divorced, and she married Luigi Galletti, a doctor who had fought against the Fascists in Italy. He died in 1999.

In addition to her sister, who is an artist, author and art therapist, Ms. Mazzetti is survived by a niece, the photographer Eva Krampen Kosloski.

For the past 15 years or so, Ms. Mazzetti focused on painting landscapes and portraits of the Einsteins and other family members as she remembered them from her childhood. A show of the portraits, titled “Album di Famiglia — Diary of a Girl During Fascism,” was exhibited in Israel, France and Germany.

“I want people to remember the war and my uncle and his family and what happened to them,” she said. “If my art helps people remember, that is enough for me.”

from WordPress https://mastcomm.com/lorenza-mazzetti-wartime-survivor-and-seminal-filmmaker-dies-at-92/

[italiaatavola]

Alambicco d'Oro 70 medaglie alla 36ª edizione

Sono state 70 le medaglie assegnate a grappe, acquaviti e Brandy italiano al Premio Alambicco d’Oro promosso da Anag, Assaggiatori grappa e acquaviti e giunto alla sua 36ª edizione. Tra i 70 riconoscimenti, i 60 assaggiatori Anag hanno assegnato 2 Best Gold, 37 Gold e 31 Silver. A questi si uniscono i due premi speciali che da alcuni anni arricchiscono il concorso spiritoso: quello riservato alla distilleria con il miglior punteggio complessivo sommando le medaglie ricevute da prodotti propri e da quelli distillati per conto terzi e “Il vestito della grappa”, riservato alla bottiglia giudicata più bella per etichetta e forma da una giuria composta da giornalisti, architetti e operatori esterni al mondo della distillazione.

Le due medaglie Best Gold sono andate a una grappa giovane e a una grappa invecchiata. Nelle altre categorie, il Premio Alambicco d'Oro ha visto trionfare le grappe invecchiate, con 17 medaglie Gold e 8 Silver, seguite dal Brandy italiano, con 5 medaglie Gold e 4 Silver; le grappe giovani, con 5 Gold e 10 Silver; le grappe giovani aromatiche, con 3 medaglie Gold e 4 Silver. Chiudono l'elenco le grappe invecchiate aromatiche, con 6 medaglie Gold e 4 Silver; le grappe aromatizzate, con una medaglia Silver e le acquaviti d'uva aromatiche, con una medaglia Gold. Sul fronte dei premi speciali, quello riservato alla distilleria con il miglior punteggio complessivo è andato alla Distilleria Sibona, che ha ricevuto 3 medaglie Gold, di cui una distillata per conto terzi, e 3 medaglie Silver. Il premio speciale “Il vestito della grappa” riservato alla bottiglia giudicata più bella per etichetta e forma è andato, invece, a Targa Ilva Zita con la grappa di Moscato invecchiata Fior d'arancio, categoria grappa aromatica invecchiata.Guardando al medagliere spiritoso diviso per regioni, il Trentino conquista 12 medaglie Gold e 3 Silver, seguito dal Piemonte, con una medaglia Best Gold, 8 medaglie Gold e 9 Silver, e dal Veneto, con 3 medaglie Gold e 4 Silver. L'altra medaglia Best Gold è andata in Friuli Venezia Giulia, che ha visto anche l'assegnazione di 2 medaglie Gold e una Silver. Medaglie spiritose sono andate anche in Alto Adige, Basilicata, Lazio, Lombardia, Toscana, Umbria e Valle d'Aosta confermando la grappa come eccellenza 100% italiana da nord a sud.

«Il Premio Alambicco d’Oro - afferma Paola Soldi, presidente federale di Anag - si consolida con il passare degli anni come un evento di rilevanza nazionale per la produzione di grappe, acquaviti e Brandy italiano. Il numero dei campioni in gara aumenta costantemente, di pari passo con la qualità dei prodotti inviati, impegnando i nostri esperti assaggiatori in un'attenta valutazione che tiene conto dei diversi parametri previsti dalla scheda di degustazione Anag e di una profonda analisi sensoriale coinvolgendo vista, olfatto, retrolfatto e gusto. L'obiettivo della nostra associazione - aggiunge Soldi - è quello di premiare le eccellenze e per fare questo abbiamo stabilito un punteggio minimo per assegnare le medaglie. L'alto numero di medaglie di questa edizione equivale, pertanto, all'alta qualità dei prodotti in gara, dove spiccano le grappe invecchiate, con un trend in crescita negli anni sia fra i campioni inviati che fra quelli premiati. In aumento anche il Brandy italiano, che si conferma un distillato di alta qualità. Ringrazio tutti i produttori che hanno partecipato al nostro Premio Alambicco d'Oro e tutti gli assaggiatori Anag che anche quest'anno hanno lavorato con professionalità e competenza per selezionare i campioni in gara applicando i parametri della nostra associazione per promuovere una crescente cultura del buon bere consapevole attenta alla qualità piuttosto che alla quantità per ogni consumatore».

Nome Azienda Regione BRANDY ITALIANO MEDAGLIA GOLD BRANDY GRAN RISERVA SUPERIORE 20 ANNI DI LORENZO Umbria XO ACQUAVITE DI VINO INVECCHIATA 20 ANNI MAZZETTI D’ALTAVILLA Piemonte SPECIAL BRANDY INVECCHIATO 27 ANNI MAZZETTI D’ALTAVILLA Piemonte BRANDY INVECCHIATO 24 MESI PERONI MADDALENA Lombardia BRANDY SUPERBO VALLE DEL MARTA Lazio MEDAGLIA SILVER BRANDY 20 ANNI RISERVA BECCARIS Piemonte BRANDY STRAVECCHIO DEL MONFERRATO MAGNOBERTA Piemonte BRANDY NANNONI 5 ANNI ANNIV NANNONI Toscana GRANPASSO VLLA LA RIPA/DISTILLATORE NANNONI Toscana GRAPPA GIOVANE MEDAGLIA BEST GOLD SPECIAL EDITION PICOLIT DOMENIS1898 Friuli Ven.Giu MEDAGLIA GOLD AMARONE PRIVATA CLASSICA GRAPPA BOTTEGA veneto GRAPPA FRIULANA BUTUSSI – SPIRITO VALENTINO BUTUSSI SOC. AGRICOLA/DISTILLATORE DOMENIS1898 Friuli Ven.Giu GRAPPA DEL SOLE BIOLOGICA PISONI Trentino GRAPPA SEGNANA EXTREMA SEGNANA Trentino GRAPPA LEVI DI FUMIN SAINT ROCH Valle d’Aosta MEDAGLIA SILVER GRAPPA IN SELEZIONE DI CILIEGIOLO AZIENDA AGRICOLA  ZANCHI/DISTILLATORE  NANNONI Toscana GRAPPA PELAVERGA SELEZIONE DISCONTINUA BECCARIS Piemonte GRAPPA PROSECCO ALEXANDER BOTTEGA Veneto GRAPPA DI CHIANTI CLASSICO DETA D.E.T.A. Toscana UNUS  GRAPPA DI SAGRANTINO DI LORENZO Umbria GRAPPA DI SFORZATO INVITTI Lombardia SAGRI’ GRAPPA DI SAGRANTINO BIO MORETTI OMERO AZ. AGRICOLA/DISTILLATORE ROVERO Umbria GRAPPA CHARDONNAY UNICOVITIGNO PERONI MADDALENA Lombardia GRAPPA LAGREIN VITAE UNTERTHURNER Alto Adige GRAPPA DI PROSECCO VANZIN SELEZIONE / DISTILLATORE DI.VI.VA Veneto GRAPPA  INVECCHIATA MEDAGLIA BEST GOLD 7.0 GRAPPA DI RUCHE’ MAZZETTI D’ALTAVILLA Piemonte MEDAGLIA GOLD GRAPPA BAROLO 2004 BECCARIS Piemonte GRAPPA GRAN RISERVA BORGO VECCHIO Trentino RISERVA PRIVATA GRAPPA BARRICCATA BOTTEGA Veneto GRAPPA TARDIVA DA UVE PASSITE BOTTEGA Veneto LA GRAPPA AFFINATA DI LA FIRMA CANTINE DEL NOTAIO/DISTILLATORE BERTAGNOLLI Basilicata CLEMENTE VII GRAPPA RIS. DA VINACCE CHIANTI CLASSICO CASTELLI DEL GREVE PESA/ DISTILLATORE D.E.T.A. Toscana SECOLO RISERVA BARRIQUE MILLESIMATA DOMENIS1898 Friuli LE GIARE DI AMARONE MARZADRO Trentino GRAPPA CRU CENTENARIO MORELLI Toscana MEMORA RISERVA BARRIQUE PEZZI Trentino GRAPPA CLESSIDRA PISONI Trentino LERA GRAPPA DI BAROLO SANCARLO Piemonte GRAPPA SEGNANA ALTO RILIEVO INV. IN BOTTI DA SHERRY SEGNANA Trentino GRAPPA SEGNANA SOLERA COLLEZIONE SEGNANA Trentino GRAPPA RISERVA LA SPEZIATA SIBONA Piemonte GRAPPA DI ORMEASCO  RISERVA TENUTA MAFFONE/DISTILLATORE SIBONA Liguria GRAPPA GEWURTZTRAMINER RISERVA VILLA DE VARDA Trentino GRAPPA MULLER TURGAU RISERVA VILLA DE VARDA Trentino MEDAGLIA SILVER     FUORICLASSE LEON RISERVA 3 ANNI CASTAGNER Veneto LA GRAPPA AFFINATA CANTINE DEL NOTAIO / DISTILLATORE BERTAGNOLLI Basilicata GRAPPA CRU 98  INVECCHIATA ACACIA MORELLI Toscana MEMORA 19 50 RISERVA DEL FONDATORE PEZZI Trentino GRAPPA RISERVA BOTTI DA PORTO SIBONA Piemonte GRAPPA RISERVA BOTTI DA SHERRY SIBONA Piemonte GRAPPA DI NEBBIOLO DA BAROLO INVECCHIATA VIEUX MOULIN Piemonte GRAPPA INV 30ANNI MONTE SABOTINO SEL GRAN RISERVA ZANIN Veneto GRAPPA  GIOVANE AROMATICA MEDAGLIA GOLD GRAPPA GOLDMUSKATELLER GRAF KELLEREI ALGUND Alto Adige GRAPPA DI MOSCATO TOSCANO NANNONI NANNONI Toscana GRAPPA GEWURTZTRAMINER PISONI Trentino GRAPPA  GIOVANE AROMATICA MEDAGLIA SILVER GRAPPA SORSI DI MOSCATO E BRACHETTO FRANCOLI Piemonte GIARE DI GEWURZTRAMINER MARZADRO Trentino GRAPPA DI MOSCATO ANTICHI MANSI TENUTA VILLANOVA Friuli GRAPPA GEWURZTRAMINER GRAF KELLEREI ALGUND Alto Adige GRAPPA INVECCHIATA  AROMATICA MEDAGLIA GOLD GRAPPA MOSCATO 36 MESI BECCARIS Piemonte GRAPPA MOSCATO BARRICATA PISONI Trentino GRAPPA DI MOSCATO CATERINA VIEUX MOULIN Piemonte FIOR D’ARANCIO TARGA ILVA Veneto AMOSCA’ TARGA ILVA Veneto MEDAGLIA SILVER GRAPPA MORBIDA MAGNOBERTA Piemonte GRAPPA MALVASIA BARRICCATA 12 MESI PERONI MADDALENA Lombardia GRAPPA RISERVA BOTTI DA MADEIRA SIBONA Piemonte MMXVI GEWURTZTRAMINER INVECCHIATO VILLA LAVIOSA Trentino GRAPPA  AROMATIZZATA MEDAGLIA SILVER GRAPPA E CIRMOLO VILLA LAVIOSA Trentino ACQUAVITE D’UVA AROMATICA MEDAGLIA GOLD UVEDILANGA DISTILLATO D’UVA SIBONA Piemonte

Per informazioni: www.anag.it

[tuscannyandbeyond]

Cooking school

This is post # 12

On Tuesday, the day after our Cinque Terra adventure, all eight of us decided to hang around the house. We enjoyed the pool, the kids climbed in the olive trees, and whenever anyone needed a snack they would go to the fig trees, harvest, and enjoy. We talked about where our next family adventure might be: Portugal? Spain? Norway? Iceland? France? Ideas accepted. We also had arranged with Paola and her assistant Laura, remember both of whom speak no English, to conduct a cooking class. Geared toward the kids, they would make pasta from start to finish. It was so fun being together in the big old kitchen and watch them make a volcano, or well, and slowly incorporate 10 eggs into their flour mixture. Special care had to be made to not burst the sides of the well, or, well, you would have a disaster, as Hudsyn and Kendall both discovered! Once the dough was made, Dubi brought out a bottle of Prosecco to celebrate! It was noon! Not sure if this is an Italian tradition or not, but I guess they really like it when their pasta is nearing completion and celebrate accordingly. After letting the pasta dough rest for four hours, it was time to cut it. We were making tagliatelle and spinach ravioli, and would have them both for dinner tonight. The tagliatelle was about 6 feet long. And that darn ravioli took forever to make, and Briggs and Rex soon lost interest. But Hudsyn, Kendall, Isse, and I hung in there. We will forever respect any ravioli we eat in the future! Paola was my hero for our stay at the Villa. I didn't have to grocery shop, cook, or clean up. Absolutely all the meals were delicious, even the tripe, and if you needed a little more this or a wanted to try something new, Paola could make it happen. I am going to post her recipes, scribbled as they are, in hopes that someone can decipher them and translate them for my future use! I would also like to tell you a little more about Dubi. He is the house manager and general caretaker of the Villa. Tall and strong, he is from Croatia, and was in the Croatian army during the Bosnian war from 1992 to 1995. Sometime during that time he was taken prisoner of war and held captive. (We had been told this by Mr. Mazzetti upon arrival.) I am unsure how being a prisoner may have affected him, but he was way, way, subservient. When he saw you, he said "I'm sorry, buonjourno", instead of just "buonjourno". Once we ran out of Aperol, late in the day, no big deal we had plenty of other wines etc., but he volunteered to go 20 minutes to a store to replenish. (We insisted NO!) The kids were fascinated with the chickens and rabbits, his pets, and he accommodated them. He showed them the water cistern for the garden. He explained how the big stone discs were once the tool pulled by horses to crush olives in the huge stone "bowl", now a fountain, like a mortar and pestle. He took the kids and me across the street to their old olive oil building. He got the kids to help harvest food in the garden for dinner. He took the melon rinds back out to the garden so the wild animals could feed (remember they had had no rain). Dubi became the kids' best friend and the kids became his newest fan club members.And what I came to know about Dubi was how kind-hearted he was to all creatures. Those years of imprisonment did not make him bitter and crass, as it could have, but he appeared to cherish his life now and everything in it. It was a great reminder how adversity can strengthen character.

[tuscannyandbeyond]

Revelations

This is post #3

It’s Sunday, our first morning in Montelopio. Paolo has our breakfast ready at the predetermined time. Even though we have an on-site chapel, we head to Fabbrica for Mass, held in a very sweet, old church dating to the 12th century. Like all of these towns around here, the church is perched at the top of the hill and the town emanates from there. 

We hustled back home because Haylee and Currey were arriving today. Now that it’s daytime and we’ve had some sleep, we start to take in the details of our habitat. Each ceiling in each room is different. There is an old planter that once was the water source/well for the home. Frescoes adorn many of the walls. The leaded windows hold crooked, wavy glass. There is huge furniture in the formal rooms, not so much in the bedrooms. The library - the one visible to us-  is full of old books and manuscripts. Kendall, keenly aware of the history, the chapel burials, and the layers of previous inhabitants, thinks the house may be haunted, so each time she goes through the grand salon, she says hi to the ghosts. Just to make friends, just in case....

But our discoveries are just beginning...

Once Haylee and Currey arrive, we show them around like Mr. Mazzetti showed us around. What plays out after that is like a scene from a movie: the one where you are in a big old house and you open a door to a secret passageway that reveals the houses’ secrets. Haylee goes under the grand stairwell and around a corner down a long corridor with gravel flooring. We follow her, it’s dark and we all have to turn our phone lights on. What we find is a large cavernous room, 20-30 feet wide and 60-100 feet long, now we are on stone flooring, with huge olive oil terra cotta containers lined up in front of massive 5 foot tall oak wine casks sitting on old stone pedestals. What is going on here? Is this place still producing this much olive oil and/or wine and we don’t know about it? Further on is a stairwell descending below, open with no railing, and if we’d fallen through we’d be dead- down to another lower level. Now our flashlights are lighting up the space with all the pictures we’re taking. This level was a gorgeous barrel vaulted room with old wine bottles stored in the walls and broken on the floor. Rounding a corner, we see newer stainless steel vats. I expected some tall, deep throated man to step out of the darkness and take us captives, never to be heard from again. (Ok, that’s a little dramatic. I don’t think any of us felt endangered, but I did feel like a snoop). Really, we were in the catacombs of the estate. This gorgeous barrel vaulted ceiling was in perfect condition and for centuries held the weight of the house and the bottling facility. The old wine bottles were covered in dust and dirt. It was totally cool, we were speechless and at the same time uttering “wow, wow, look at this, this is incredible”. I now know how the Hardy Boys felt at one of their adventurous discoveries!

Ok, back to daylight. We then climbed the stairs to the tower, where our suite is located on the top floor, sorta. There was a permanent ladder up another level but we hadn't gone up here. Well, Haylee, Ms. Adventure, did, and now we followed. It was to another tower level, no big deal, but it too had another shaky ladder to the roof. For those counting, that’s 2 flights of stairs and 2 ladders, one permanent and one non-permanent. Of course she ventured on, and I was so glad she did because once on the roof of the tower we could see what seemed like all of Tuscany. It was beautiful. I could imagine this was the defensive perch of the villa, used as the lookout. 

Our villa would continue to introduce herself to us, with each new day and new arrival. It was so fun of Haylee and Currey to instigate todays’ revelations.

Our excursion that day was to Volterra. Paola had told us there was a medieval festival going on. Volterra sits atop a pretty steep hill and is at least 1,000 years old. Their cathedral/church is different because it’s white and black granite and marble, very striking. But there’s nothing like a medieval town to put on a medieval festival, and this was fantastic! Everyone was dressed up and we saw knights, maidens, royalty, urchins, feisty wenches, merchants, salt purveyors, jousters, jugglers, guys with the curly pointed shoes, monks... oh my, it was fabulous! We couldn’t stop taking pictures. And singing songs from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. With the purveyors of local trades represented in market booths, you really got the feel of Volterra in the 1300s. Of course, Volterra is a beautiful village with those skinny medieval stone streets that we all love. All I can think of is how to they retrofit the water, sewer, electrical, plumbing, etc. of these old stone structures. 

Dinner on Sunday nights is not provided, so we ate at L’Antico Molina, a sweet little restaurant about 4 km from our villa. After numerous (who’s counting) bottles of wine, this feisty wench and our whole motley crew is going to bed. 

[tuscannyandbeyond]

The Villa and arrival in Tuscany

(This is post #2).

We were very excited to finally arrive at our Villa in Montelopio, our home for the next 2 weeks, after a bleary-eyed drive from Rome.  We had seen its fabulous pictures on the Internet, but you know sometimes there's a question as to whether rental property pictures represent reality.  Hopefully my words and pictures will convey to you how this villa experience has surpassed expectations, how different and interesing it is, and how this property has continually revealed itself to us. 

The owner, Mr. Mazzetti, met us at the gate and showed us around. This property has been in his family for at least 400 years, possibly longer. There is an original house and an addition, I’m a little unclear on the vintage, but the addition has a date of 1611, so let’s say the older portion is 1400-1500, sound good? The owner said the older portion needed renovating and thus wasn’t open to us as renters, but he did show a bit of it to us, and I will tell you that in my mind it needs nothing, it was in great shape. Any house in the New World would have more cracks than this solid structure. More on this later. 

The entry courtyard, with it’s uneven stone pavers, reeks of history. In fact the original road ran along these pavers. We loved the outdoor table set up there - it would become our aperitivo location for the whole time. There is a stunning stone staircase leading up to the grand salon, with it’s 20 foot ceiling, where the Mazzetti family had parties and dances. Check out the cool bandstand. And the huge fireplace. He showed us the dining room, where our cook Paola would be serving our dinners. 

Everything was pretty dark, until he opened the complicated window shutter system. You see, the house isn’t air conditioned and if you’re under the Tuscan sun things can get quite hot. So, most windows and doors have outdoor shutters with slats, the actual glass window or glass door, and indoor shutters, all of which would be adjusted throughout the day as the sun dictated. The old kitchen was so cool, with it’s ancient wood fired ovens and cooktops, although he says it smokes up the house so they’ve added a more modern stove too. 

The “master” bedroom/sitting room is in the tower, and they are the only rooms that is air conditioned, so that’s our perch. We didn’t go up to the top of the tower - yet. There were 5 other bedrooms and 4 baths spread around, beautifully appointed with pieces you’d recognize from a Downton Abbey episode: the wash basins, dressing tables, lack of closets. This was gonna be fun! 

Back outside, he then showed us the last little building which blew me away: this estate had it’s own chapel! Not only did they have their ancestors buried and memorialized there - there were numerous “Mazzetti” marble markers- but travelers on their way to Rome would stop there for their spiritual needs. The chapel door opened onto the street as well as the courtyard. 

We also walked down the garden path. Mr. Mazzetti has olive trees galore, and most of the fruits and veggies we would be eating would come from the garden. The pool is beyond the garden. 

When we returned from picking Kendall up at the train station, Paola had prosecco and appetizers for us at the courtyard table. Paola is the cook and runs the staff. They would do all the grocery shopping and prepare the meals, breakfast and dinner. (I had emailed the rental agency a grocery list, but really just told them to go with local products and local dishes/recipes, along with plenty of wine.) Then, she called us to the dining room where she served what they call a light Tuscan meal: spaghetti with pomodoro sauce and wonderful parmesan cheese. We thought that was our main course but then she brought out a huge platter of fruits, charcuterie, and cheeses. All Tuscan products and so delicious. And more fruit and chocolate for dessert. We now know to eat less of the primi or pasta and save room for secondi, the main course.

You know how they say, don’t worry, everybody speaks English? Wrong. Paola doesn’t speak English so we are having to gesture what words we don’t know. The main word, after the gorgeous meal she provided us, was grazie. Despite our exhaustion, we could communicate the most important sentiment! Grazie. And you know what else: we don’t have to do the dishes! I am really liking this so far....all I need is a good night’s sleep!