#italy salt

[dittaturamonegasca]

i'm a simple girl: lec ice cream by charles leclerc is not available in the supermarkets where i live (south italy) so ofc the first thing i do when vising my gf (in the north of italy) is an ice cream hunt.

it's a matter of PRIORITIES

[shutterandsentence]

"Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone."

--Colossians 4:6

Photo: Marsala, Sicily, Italy

[awesomefringey]

https://twitter.com/Babyratcoucou/status/1688906961293615104?t=VpUr4tk7p5BFRHr4kOxa5A&s=19

Louis was in Rome and there are pictures going around of him in Italy? TikTok isn’t very factual so I don’t know what to think? 👀

[ahandfulofregrets]

ppl on tiktok crying, screaming, throwing up about the latest european election results as if jewish ppl haven’t been talking about rising antisemitism for the past few months plus literally every other minority yelling at the top of their lungs about the hot mess that is the european social landscape for YEARS now.. mhhkay :)

[nwjuu]

[ask-sum-2ps]

I swear i'm not dead!

i just have had a lot to deal with at home qwq like my wisdom tooth coming in and other new adult stuff that i have to deal with but i'm still working on the blog and my 2ps so please take this Marcello drawing in the mean time and yeah that's his new look. most of the 2ps will get a small upgrade

[isbn28]

[alessia-photography]

Notes on a Summer (2023) in Portovenere

Every year we return to this house on Via Olivo in Portovenere. We sit on the terrace, look out over the bay & the boats. Time stops. "Time that is moved by little fidget wheels / Is not my time" wrote the Australian poet Kenneth Slessor. Listen to the water, be water my friend.

It's good to be back.

We have been coming here for two weeks in August for over a decade now. Porto Venere, a one-way-in-and-one-way-out-village on the Ligurian coast, in the Gulf of La Spezia, also known as the Gulf of Poets.

This place 44°3'19"N, 9°50'15"W has become like a super fast charger for my family. It's more than that reliable cocktail of sun & sea, fresh mussels & lemon, multi-coloured houses, pebble beaches, deep-fried anchovies and pesto. It's the time to stop. To sleep. To swim in the sea. To discuss the future. My father paints, my mother reads. We cook, we laugh, we eat out on our terrace on Via Olivo; sometimes we eat out in town. We heal.

This notebook has been coming here since 2016, filled with local illustrations, our gentle exploration of this part of the world, our routines & rituals, what we eat, what we read, what we do, how we feel. It only has a few blank pages left, so this year is its last year here.

The ancient Portus Veneris is believed to date back to at least the middle of the 1st century BC. It has been said that the name refers to a temple to the goddess Venus which was sited on the promontory where the church of San Pietro now stands.

In Roman times the city was essentially a fishing community.

Via Cappellini, a narrow multi-coloured thoroughfare sometimes packed with the Cinque Terre tourists, sometimes not.

An antique vintage book market in the main square, the scent of basil, water in my ears, sleeping in the sun all afternoon then a bit of CNN news while my father cooks guanciale, adding chunks of bread which cook in the porky oil, fried jewels in the salad we eat on the terrace under an almost full Harvest moon. Waxing (very) gibbous.

The Monday morning market in Portovenere - buying peaches & green beans, a pair of flip flops & a roast chicken from rude Riccardo.

The pebble beach in front of the American bar.

The rocks, and their mermaids.

Biting into a deep-fried anchovy in Via Cappelini. It's hot and steamy, my lips are salty, the air smells faintly of shit & lemons, sweet & sharp. We are in Portovenere and I'm so happy. This basil mojito is heaven.

There is lots to do in Portovenere. Look it up in an Eyewitness Guide. I have done everything there is "to do" in Portovenere and I really don't go to Portovenere to do stuff. I go for my August Super Fast Charge which gets me to Boxing day when I fly to Venice for a fortnight with my family for our other Super Fast Charge of the year.

Essential Summer Super Fast Charge ingredients: sun, sea, salt, basil, anchovies, lemons, books, a camera & notebook, family love.

[quotesfrommyreading]

It is often said that Venice grew rich on the “spice trade.” This is true – yet that spice was not exotic cloves or cardamom, but simple salt. Aside from fish, the lagoon does not offer much in the way of foodstuffs. Throughout its long history, Venice has always had to import its food, which requires money. The earliest Venetians built saltworks that allowed lagoon water to flow during high tide into wide basins, where it was trapped and left to evaporate in the sun. They then used heavy cylinders to roll over the salt, breaking it up into pieces that could be loaded aboard boats for export. It fetched a tidy sum – crucial for the tiny, but growing, economy of early Venice, and indeed for many centuries to come. It is often said that Venetians left salt production behind when international trade and commerce became their path to riches. That is simply untrue. Medieval and Renaissance commercial documents bear strong witness to the combined importance of the salt trade. Indeed, the Venetian government established its own Salt Office, which would grow to become one of the most powerful organs of the state.

  —  Venice: A New History (Thomas F. Madden)

[fieriframes]

[We're gonna make a marinade with freshly crushed garlic, lemon juice, a little bit of chopped parsley, pepper, salt, olive oil, and soften chapped hands.]

[faunabel]

i've had an interesting time w/ cooking carbonara so far

first time, the recipe i used called for an ENTIRE. CUP. OF. CHEESE. and i thought it was my fault for using parmesan instead of pecorino (it's all i had) but no. the same thing would've happened if i used pecorino. it turned into a DOUGH. i scooped half the cheese out once i realized what was happening but it was too late. i fixed it with olive oil and a lot of pasta water. it tasted delicious although i kept it on the heat too long so the eggs totally scrambled and it was really dry, but still, delicious

the SECOND time, i did everything right except i didn't measure the cheese (i used pecorino this time). the texture was perfect and creamy like it should be but the taste wasn't there. kinda bland. i was so scared of making a dough again that i didn't use enough cheese.

I WILL PERFECT THIS RECIPE SOON ENOUGH >:(

[nomairuins]

the world if sims 4 had more lots per world

[kidnappedalien]

i wanna try a lil survey thing in the tags

what was the fondest snack from your childhood? and where did you grow up?

[happyfeetfuryroad]

This is one of those Jimmy Neutron sodium chloride moments where I'm like. Really frustrated because some people who are in scientific fields choose to be pedantic for pedantry's sake and forget how human language works in the process.

Definitions are human-made and exist based entirely on their purpose in whatever context you're considering. The distinction between "blue as a result of the presence of pigment" and "blue as the result of texture" is relevant in some contexts, and irrelevant in others. It's like using months instead of years to describe a baby's age: useful and appropriate when you're talking to your pediatrician, mildly inconvenient to slightly annoying when you're talking to someone who was just trying to make casual conversation and asked how old your baby is.

Is it useful, in some contexts, to keep in mind that a blue object doesn't always contain any blue pigment? Sure, absolutely! But is it always appropriate to say "actually, such and such isn't actually blue"? Not necessarily! The way we colloquially assign colors to objects doesn't depend on the inherent physical or chemical properties of that object, but on what wavelengths end up hitting our retinas and send signals to our visual cortices. In that regard, our eyes don't give a flying fuck how that color was generated - the end result is what is meaningful in a general context. Otherwise, we could start being equally pedantic about iridescence because "actually, this substance doesn't contain a pigment for every single color of the rainbow, it's just an illusion due to its microscopical structure". Which doesn't really enhance our understanding of the world so much as it unfairly associates common parlance with ignorance.

And it really is unfair, when you think about it. Language is malleable, and definitions are context-dependent. Why is a scientist's first instinct to go "well akschwally," instead of holding onto that same curiosity that drove them to their field and asking themselves "why is it that some distinctions are acceptable in my field of study, but elicit a negative emotional response in some people outside of it?"? It's easy to dismiss the problem as "oh this society has a literacy problem" or "oh they're just being reactionary" or "oh how sad, they don't value knowledge the same way I do". But sometimes, maybe, it is you who still has some things to learn about how humans work. Give people the grace they deserve. Human curiosity isn't the exclusive intellectual property of the scientific community.

[lookthetart]

Being an atheist is literally the best gift you can do to yourself. Why would you relinquish your freedom to do as you want to be exploited and controlled. Like literally what are religious people even doing!!!!!!!!

[fuckktotum]