Dreaming In Italian

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a post. I guess that’s because there hasn’t been too much to do here during the long lockdown and frankly I’ve become a little lazy. However that has changed a lot in the past month. First of all I’ve been vaccinated with two shots of Pfizer and the second one just under two weeks ago so I’m as immune as I’ll ever be. Even after the first shot I had a huge feeling of relief and now I’m almost giddy. I go out of the house almost every day for some errand or another. I do most of the grocery shopping since I really like doing it and I do it in the morning when the supermarkets and specialty stores (baked goods, butcher shop) are open. The first shot had almost no ill effect but the second laid me low but only for a day. Laura had her first shot of AstraZeneca about 2 weeks ago and had a reaction to it that lasted a couple of days. Her second shot is in July since they’ve found that a longer interval between shots works best for that vaccine. Still she is reasonably protected against serious illness during the interval between shots.

I’ve been cooking a lot since I’ve always liked to cook and when you stay at home most of the time there’s a lot of free time. Lately I’ve been cooking American stuff, especially chocolate chunk cookies and chili. Chocolate chunk because while they have chocolate chips here there’s pretty small and also because I like more dense chocolate. I use 90% which I find really too bitter to eat alone but in the cookies which have a lot of sugar it works out well. I’ve settled on a recipe that’s a hybrid between Italian and American ones. For chili I wind up using an Italian one with minor variations. As you might imagine “chili powder” doesn’t exist here but the Italian recipe has an equivalent with available spices which works well. I’ve never seen hot chili peppers like jalapeno either. In any case I also make cornbread with my cast iron skillet to go along with it.

As the lockown is finally easing here I can restart my volunteer work at the library – (Scioglilingua) . My first day for that is next Tuesday. We’ll be outside and wearing masks but if my conversation partner is vaccinated we’ll probably go unmasked for our 45 minutes together. I’m really looking forward to seeing some of my regulars. I’m also going to start inviting people out for lunch, possibly at our house. Of course we’ll need to tidy things up a bit.

Ah yes, sometime this summer, hopefully in June or July I will be having a much more serious encounter with the national health service (SSN – Servizio Sanitario Nazionale). I will be having a hip replacement. I’ve had to use a cane if I walk more than a short distance and should be able to be back to “normal”. The date is not yet fixed but my orthopedist says that surely by July at the latest I can get it done.

I’ve done some other things that I’ve been putting off for months; a haircut and a dental appointment. I’m keeping my hair long and want it a bit longer but it’s definitely in better shape now. Sometimes I put in a ponytail and other time just let it go wild.

Plans for the relatively near future include a day trip to the beach. I’m not a huge beach fan but Laura is so I’ll take a book to read and maybe even rent a beach chair.

I’ve been envious of all of the people that I know in the U.S. that have been fully vaccinated for a couple of months or more and the situation in the U.S. is getting a lot better but it’s really hard for me to understand why so many people are refusing the vaccine. If you compare the risk of the vaccine (which is so low there are a lot of zeros after the decimal point of a percentage number) to that of getting infected with Covid; well to me it’s inconceivable that people refuse a shot.

And now two little saying from Baci. Both seem appropriate for nearing the end of the pandemic.

Every sunset brings the promise of a new dawn.
Ogni tramonte porta la promessa di una nuova alba.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the rest of the world calls a butterfly.
Quello che il bruco chiama fine del mondo, il resto del mondo chiama farfalla.

Lao Tze

That seems like an odd question – at least in the U.S. it would be strange unless related to politics, i.e. red state or blue state. Here it refers to the state of Covid in the various regions (equivalent of states) and sometimes the zones can include not the entire region but the province (like a county in most of the U.S.) or even a city. There are 20 regions in Italy and I live in Emilia-Romagna in the city and province of Bologna.

So the colors are white, yellow, orange and red. As they progress from white to red they indicate the level of Covid risk and consequently the restrictions on daily life that are in place. The risk is the measure of the infection rate a number called the Rt index. If it is over 1 it indicates that each infected person is on average infecting more than one other person. Obviously if that number is high then you have a rapid spread of infections, hospitalizations and deaths. The only way to combat that spread of infections (until we’re all vaccinated) is to limit the exposure from one person to another. For example if you are in a red zone (and Bologna right now is red) there is no restaurant dining indoors in any form. You can get take-out food up until 10 in the evening. The same goes for bars (the name for coffee shops here). You basically cannot go anywhere far from your home and visits with friends and family are severely limited both in number and frequency. Schools are closed as well as any non-essential business are closed. Obviously there are some exceptions but they are few. On the other end of the spectrum, white, just about everything is open. Only Sardinia is a white region. Of course masks are still obligatory just about everywhere. Unlike what seems to be the case in the U.S. there are penalties for not following the rules. “Freedom” does not mean that you can act irresponsibly and be a menace to your fellow citizens. You can get a pretty hefty ticket here for violating the rules.

So we are all bored but we eat well here at the house of Joe and Laura (I’m making some great chocolate chip cookies). Cooking is a good answer to boredom and thank goodness for the internet and especially streaming video. I only go out for food shopping. Even though the number of people allowed in a supermarket and other stores is limited I always go as soon as the stores open to avoid crowds. I take the garbage and recycling out on early Sunday morning when there is rarely anyone else moving about.

There is always a risk any time that you are near someone else. My good friend Gianluca has been careful but found last week that he was infected. Fortunately his symptoms are relatively mild but he cannot leave his apartment for (I think) 3 weeks. He has doctors that check in with him every 2 or 3 days and fortunately he has family members who don’t live very far away that have brought him food and other essentials.

The vaccine rollout is relatively slow here. I don’t know why we are so far behind the U.S. in getting people vaccinated but it seems to be a supply issue. Right now they are vaccinating essential workers, those at high risk and those over 80 and I’m hoping for my first vaccine shot in early April but don’t really know when that will be. I’m SO envious when I hear from friends in the U.S. that have already been vaccinated.

So I can just dream about a relatively normal life and have enough confidence in the state of things that I have already bought a plane ticket to make a fairly brief trip back to California in September.

And a pair of Baci quotes:

True happiness comes from the zest of creating new things.
La vera felicita’ deriva dall’entusiasmo di creare cose nuove.

Antoinde de Sainet-Exupery

Magic is believing in yourself.
La magia e’ credere in se stesso. (it was “noi stessi”)

Wofgang Goethe

Stay safe – it’s not a long wait now.

We haven’t used Laura’s car for over two months and even then it was only to go to a supermarket outside the center. So that means that for over two months we’ve never been further than maybe 200 meters from our front door. Over the last month or so in fact it was against the law to travel outside your city except for some compelling reason (work, health, etc). I was getting a little worried that the car battery might be going dead. As of February 1st the rules were relaxed and it is now allowed to take a trip outside your own city and even to another region (except for two regions which still have a high rate of infections). So we decide to take a little trip.

I had once done a translation of a tourist brochure for the comune of Bologna about nearby points of interest so I knew that there was a relatively well preserved Etruscan village not too far away. After a Google search I found that it was at Marzabotto. Well, preserved is relative since the Etruscans left there about 2400 years ago and so the layout of the town with streets and foundations of houses are there but not much else. There is however a museum with a lot of Etruscan artifacts that were found at the site and surely a lot of other information. In any case Marzabotto is only about 30 Km from Bologna so it seemed like a good outing. Unfortunately all of the Etruscan stuff was closed due to the pandemic.

If interested you can find out more about the Etruscan site and museum here . We’ll be back.

I also found that Marzabotto is noted for something more somber. In and around Marzabotto between September 29 and October 5 1944 the Nazis massacred at least 770 people, the entire populations of some little towns; men, women, children, seniors, priests, everybody. The idea was to terrorize the population to convince them to not support the partigiani (the Italian partisan guerrilla fighters). I suspect that such cruelty served to increase the recruitment of partigiani and supporters. In any case there is a memorial museum in Barzabotto and as you might guess, it too was closed.

At least it prompted us to watch a film on Amazon Prime the next day “L’uomo che verrà” (The Man Who Will Come) on the subject of the massacre. It is only available here with Italian spoken language and Italian subtitles. The subtitles are necessary not only for me, but also for most Italians since much of the dialog is an a local dialect. If interested in learning more about the massacre you can follow this link

Then we had our first restaurant meal for 4 months. I had researched restaurants in the area and found that there were some good ones in Sasso Marconi which is larger than Marzabotto and and only 8 km away. The meal was good, the restaurant was very welcoming and the price was incredibly low for the quality of the food. We decided to splurge and has an antipasto (sformato – “flan”), a primo (tortelloni- a fresh stuffed pasta but the size of big ravioli), a secondo (scaloppine) and a contorno (verdure fritte – fried vegetables), plus a half liter of the house red and water and coffee at the end of the meal. The total for everything was 50 euros. It was all good (although the fried veggies weren’t great).

So since we’ll need to go back sometime to see the museums we’ll definitely eat at Osteria dei Sani again.

As we were almost home I was almost overwhelmed by the feeling of being able to have at least a taste of a normal life. It was like taking a deep breath of the early morning air. Don’t we all wish so much for a return to normal – whatever that is – or will be.

Sometimes life gets a little boring when I need to stay home almost all of the time. Fortunately I always have little projects. One you can see when you look at this page. I added a feature and did some rearranging. The addition is the ability to translate the entire post for those who don’t read English well (I’m looking at you Laura). As long as I was at it I threw in French, Spanish and German just for kicks. I know one person who reads my blog who’s fluent in German and don’t know about the other languages. The free version of this plug-in uses Google translate and I know that the translations, at least into Italian are, let’s say, imprecise. Still Laura can read the blog now rather than just look at the pictures. If I get any comments in the other languages in the next couple of months I’ll keep them otherwise I will narrow the number of languages to English and Italian. And I will hope that Google keeps improving the translation into Italian. Click on a flag at the top left corner. Hovering over a flag shows the language if you don’t recognize the flag. I also moved some stuff that was on the right side of the page to the left side since all of that stuff disappears when viewed on an iPad. This includes the place where one can subscribe by mail (hint, hint).

One way to relieve boredom for me is to cook. I like to do it and I like to eat the results. This week when I was at the great vegetable market near us named Verdura (vegetable in Italian) I admired a squash that I had never seen before and thought that I could do something with it.

I thought a hearty soup since it is winter after all. It’s a big and heavy sucker. I could use it as a weapon if need be. I also found that it is really tough in the sense that cutting it was a real challenge. I have a good quality 10 inch chef knife that I keep well sharpened and it was a challenge even with that. I tried using a vegetable peeler to peel it and found that was really not going to be a good option so I cut it into slices and roasted it for about 30 minutes in the oven so that I could easily cut off the peel and make it into chunks. Since soups are very forgiving you can add a lot of different stuff (of course there are limits) so I had half a head of left-over cauliflower and a couple of potatoes that were getting pretty old and for something green I had some tuscan kale as it’s called in the U.S. or sometimes called dinosaur kale. Here it’s cavolo nero. I always have broth available and the trinity of aromatic vegetable – celery, onion and carrots so I was all set. Fortunately it is really tasty. I say fortunately because I made a LOT of it.

Next I made some chocolate chip cookies, a very American thing that it turns out seems to have taken root in Italy if not the world. I found a bunch of Italian recipes for these in addition to all of those from american sites. They look a little funny but they are pretty much what I wanted – a little crunchy rather than soft in the center. I can hardly wait to make another batch since I learned a lot from this one.

And of course there is a little silliness. Since I am an early riser after I have breakfast I set everything order so that when Laura finally comes into the kitchen everything is ready for her breakfast. So I have a little fun with it from time to time.

I mentioned in the last post that Laura had order a ton of stuff from the Coop supermarket. That includes our preferred beer.

And of course a Baci quote:

Life is too important to be taken seriously.
La vita e troppo importante per essere presa sul serio.

Oscar Wilde

That’s all folks. I’ll continue to lie low and wait for the vaccine.