Via Giacomo Matteotti

 A couple blocks east of our current apartment lies Via Giacomo Matteotti, which means that I usually end up heading up and down it several times in the course of a week. I do like the fact that Terrasini (again, like so many other Italian towns), devotes so much time to celebrating famous and influential Italians through the naming of street signs and piazzas. It's deepening my interest in Italian history, and giving me a direction for more research. Giacomo Matteotti was born in Fratta Polesine in northern Italy in 1885, and later assassinated in Rome in 1924. Matteotti was a sociologist, but is probably more famously known for his adherence to Socialism, as well as his journalism and anti-fascism. His book The Fascists Exposed: A Year of Fascist Domination revealed to many what was actually happening in Mussolini's Italy, but also undoubtedly led to his murder. 

In 1924 Matteotti was kidnapped and assassinated by a group of Fascists, after he had denounced the expanding dictatorship of Benito Mussolini (who had only come to power a couple of years earlier). 

Matteotti began his The Fascists Exposed thus:

"The Fascist Government justifies its armed conquest of political power, its use of violence and the risk it incurred of igniting civil war, by the plea of the urgent necessity of restoring the authority of the law and the State, and or rescuing the country from economic and financial conditions approaching utter ruin."

If that seems like it might apply to the US today, well, it sadly does much more than we'd care to admit.

Beach Days

 As I've previously proposed, Terrasini is sort of a glossy beach town (which we're starting to see now, as shops and restaurants are closing for the season). Janet and I are the farthest thing from beach folks, but when in Rome - and it was especially tempting to sneak down to the beach for a couple hours when the weather was so ungodly hot. Also, because of the time difference, there was a perverse joy in spending three hours at the beach, and then heading home to begin the (Eastern Standard Time) workday. We tried several of the different sections of the beach, but usually ended up at the first lido, where you could rent an umbrella and a couple chairs. There were a couple free sections, but then we would have had to buy or carry chairs and an umbrella (the latter being essential in the hellish Sicilian heat), so I was happy to rent a space. Sadly, that spot has been purchased and will be part of a new resort, although I wonder when that will become a reality. Now that we're twenty minutes up the hill, as compared to two minutes away (as we were in our first place), I suspect we'll mean to go to the beach next year, but probably won't. I can see me heading over to the Calla Rosa Beach for early morning laps.

One day we were at the beach and I snapped this picture of my cane and one of my Mothman shirts hanging from the umbrella. There was this ungodly beautiful young couple sunning next to us, which would have been easy to hate, except that they were both so aesthetically beautiful you forgave them many sins because of their beauty. Anyway, we were packing up to leave and I put on my shirt, and the guy yelled, "Dude, I love that shirt!" All was forgiven.

Andrea Camilleri Bench

 In the coming months I'm going to devote some time to the different streets - and related notable Italians - that populate the city of Terrasini. I should also pay tribute to the artistic benches that the city built to celebrate famous Sicilian artists. There are five of them, which I discovered rather organically on my morning walks. Now that I've tracked down all five, I'll include posts for every one of them. For the sake of geographical order, I'll start in the east and head west. With that in mind. we need to start with Andrea Camilleri. He was born in 1925 in Porto Empedocle in southwest Sicily, and died in 2019 in Rome. He's best known, I suppose, for his Inspector Montalbano novels and short stories, which inspired one of the longest-lasting and most popular television shows in Italian history. Along the way he taught at the National Academy of Dramatic Art, and one of his students was Luca Zingaretti (who starred in the Inspector Montalbano series). He was also a very dedicated and long-time member of the Italian Communist Party (one of the things that I love about Italy is that being a Communist is simply a political and economic decision, and not an allegiance to the dark lord, which seems to be how it is viewed in witless America). We've watched about half of the films, and Janet has read several of the novels - and I'm starting my Camilleri journey soon, as I have the first couple queued up in my Kindle.

Camilleri wrote into his 90s, and in the end grew even more dependent on his assistant as he lost his eyesight. 

Like all the benches, his looks like an open book - and features a lovely view of the sea. It's tucked away between a couple buildings so it's easy to stroll by it, but it's also up the hill from La Sireretta, so it's pretty easy to find. As you head toward the Lungomare, just keep sneaking peeks down alleyways towards the sea and you'll track it down.

Easy Rider

 It's an old chestnut (but there's a reason why old chestnuts become old chestnuts) that sometimes the most disconcerting things about your new home is the occasional scene that seems like it belongs in your old home. On one of my recent walks I was camped out on a bench on the Lungomare when suddenly a couple motorcycles drove by, and then a couple more, and then four more, and suddenly there was a small gang in front of the Barinello Cafe. As it turns out, they were all members of a local motorcycle club in the next town over, who were taking advantage of a lovely fall day for a drive.

There was no sign of Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, or Jack Nicholson.

Via Andrea Doria

 One of the nice things that Terrasini does is reserve almost every street name for a famous/influential Italian. In addition, there are also five benches, made to look like open books, that are reserved for famous/influential Sicilian artists, but more on that later. I suppose lots of cities in Europe do the same thing with their street names, but it's such a marked difference than the US. Maybe we haven't been around as long, but it may well be that we have a more superficial relationship with history. So, instead, we have an endless series of Mulberry Streets (including where I grew up in Rising Sun, Indiana) or Pine Streets or Cherry Streets, etc. (actually, we'd be lot healthier if we ate as much fruit as our streets names suggest). Anyway, I'm taking note of the street names here in Terrasini on my morning walks, and plan research them bit by bit - and in the process learn more about our new home. One of the streets that I tend to pass along quite a bit is Via Andrea Doria. Now, I always associated the name with the Italian ship that sank in 1956 off the coast of Nantucket when it was rammed by the Stockholm. Of the seventeen-hundred passengers on the Andrea Doria, forty-six died (including five more on the Stockholm). What I didn't know, was that the ship was named after the famous Genoese admiral, Andrea Doria (1466-1560), who was one of the most famous sailors of his age.

Truthfully, I knew precious little about the shipwreck and nothing about the sailor.

Il Gatto Capo

 One of the many things that makes Pizzeria TUSA such a great place to eat is the cat who clearly runs the show. On an early visit I noticed a cat sitting on a chair just inside the restaurant, and it seemed so out of place that I initially thought it was a bunched-up sweater thrown casually onto the chair. As it turns out, it was a cat - or rather, the Cat. I thought that maybe he was just passing through, but then he was there on every following visit. On a recent visit, once Janet got up to leave the cat jumped up and took his rightful place.

I don't know whether he goes home with the owner every night or just hangs around the restaurant and uses his talents as a championship mouser to earn his keep.

And I did track down his name: Charlie. He looks a little worse for wear, like he lived a tough life on the streets for a while, but he's clearly found his retirement gig.

La Befana Came Early

 We had another success the other day, and this one was not middling: Janet's two boxes, full of some of her most beloved books, arrived. Unlike her husband, who relied upon the US postal service to start the process, Janet used a company called Send My Bags, whose job it is to deliver your treasures door to door. Whereas my boxes book two and then three weeks to arrive, hers made it in barely a week. True to their word, they did pick up the boxes at the door of the cabin in Calais and delivered them here to our apartment building in  Terrasini. It was not without incident, of course, because this is Italy. They picked up the boxes in Vermont on a Monday, a day earlier than they were supposed to (happily, my son was on top of things), and then on Saturday Janet received an email from the Italian customs folks telling her that we missing some shipping number. I encouraged her to pitch it back to the company, and they got involved, and we were told that it would take a week to play itself out. This is fine, of course, because international shipping, like travel, is never a seamless process. Fast forward to Monday morning, when I was out and about on my early walk and trip to the gym. I had not brought my Italian phone, because I wasn't expecting to get any arrivals, and the concomitant call, for a week. I open the door and see two Chewy boxes next to the elevator, and my first thought was, "Man, Janet is going to be so pissed that Chewy does actually deliver to Italy," and then I looked closer and realized that they were Janet's boxes, which had somehow arrived thirty-six hours after we were told that they'd be held up for a week. How that happened, and how they got into the building, is a mystery, much like every part of life in Sicily. The only non-win was me being left to push the boxes up four flights, two steps at a time, powered by my weakened legs. Still, just looking at Janet's face when she returned a day later made the pain completely worthwile.

It was much like opening a bunch of La Befana presents, and it made her very happy to be surrounded by actual, physical books again. She also purchased some books in Turin on her recent trip, so the place is beginning to feel a lot more like home. Now, we have to track down some bookcases.

Her beloved Crone tarot deck arrived as well, and I think you can see how happy this made her.