Archive for the ‘scenes from village life’ Category
village games
I moved here three and a half years ago, but I still haven’t discovered even half of the gorgeous, unique, and interesting nooks and crannies of the village.
How can I be so sure?
Well, every time I find something simply amazing, P nods politely and tells me exactly where it is I’m talking about.
He rather enjoys bragging about how well he knows his medieval village. And know it he does–understandable as he has lived here all of his 28 years. Plus he’s a guy, so you know that most of those years were spent exploring the most obscure and likely dangerous spots.
So I’m taking him to task, calling his bluff, and pulling out every other cliché in the book (hah!) as we institute a little game I like to call “Dove cazzo è?” The clean version would be “Where the heck is it?” and it works like this:
(1) I roam the village taking random shots of things.
(2) He has to tell me where I’ve found them–all of them.
(3) Loser cooks dinner and cleans up afterwards.
Here are this round’s pictures:
This is not one of the famed door knockers as you might think. It’s actually a fancy place to hook up your donkey outside the house. This was the easiest of the photos, as it’s not too far from P’s house.
But then I turned up the heat:
A random orange in a random tree. Somewhere. Right? How could one pinpoint it?
Close-up of a door. In a tiny alley. A good distance from where we live.
So? How’d we do?
Tonight I’m making that artichoke dish from last week’s What’s Cooking Wednesday if anyone would like to join us. I’ll even let you dry the dishes. (But not put away the silverware.)
And then we’ll go out and find much more challenging pictures.
Just wanted to give him a false sense of security for the first go-around.
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[tags] calabria, donkey rings, oranges, life in calabria, wooden doors, wood[/tags]
Calabrian Door Knockers
Buona domenica!*
Today turned into a working Sunday for me, but not before I took a long walk with Luna and snapped pictures like these:
Someday these will be part of a larger collection of Calabrian Door Knockers. I do realize that I’ll need a different name as that one just sounds kinda dirty.
FYI, the second one above is on P’s house. He tells me there’s another head somewhere in the village although he can’t remember where, so now we have a mission. OK, that sounds kinda dirty too, so let’s move on.
Another series in the works is of the original arches of the village. Here are two of those:
Now back to work for me.
*This means “Happy Sunday,” and believe it or not, they actually say this on a regular basis here. Weekly in fact. There’s even an all-day variety show of the same name.
Yes, you read that correctly: variety show. Yes, it’s 2007.
Getting Fowl: Meet Our Hens, Turkeys, and Rooster
A few days ago I promised that I would show off our hens (and other fowl). This beautiful sunny morning, P, who doesn’t take much joy from anything technological, asked for the camera. He’s really proud of our fowl, and rightfully so.
Before we get to the pictures, though, let me explain something. We don’t live on a farm, but we also don’t keep farm animals in or near our house. We live in a typical walled medieval village on a mountaintop, which means many of the houses touch. A skilled driver can squeeze a small car down the main corso, but all the other streets are narrow, winding alleys. Not a whole lotta room for vegetation within the village itself except for balcony plants and trees and flower boxes. Don’t worry, someday I’ll do photos of those too.
As you ascend the mountain, if you look closely, you’ll see stone chicken coops and pig pens tucked into the greenery. Although the demarcations are known only to those to whom the properties belong, the entire mountainside is split into plots, usually passed down through the family. Here village residents have their gardens, growing everything from tomatoes and eggplants to lemons and oranges and keeping various small farm animals. The larger plots of land more outside the village are where you’ll find crops like olive trees and grapevines and many more farm animals.
Here’s a piece of our little plot, although this isn’t where the fowl are because it doesn’t get enough sun. In case you didn’t know, hens need sun/warmth or else they won’t lay eggs.
We have lemon, orange, and almond trees, as well as cucumbers, peperoncini, eggplants, parsley, basil, rosemary, celery, and probably other things I’m forgetting. Sadly, no tomatoes–again, the whole sun problem.
The pollaio is on P’s brother’s plot; he lives in Perugia, so he’s not using this chunk of sun-drenched land. The garden and the pollaio are a two-minute walk apart, and they’re each a five-minute severely downhill walk from the house–going down is fine, but coming back up? Let’s just say I don’t need an elliptical trainer.
Ready to meet some fowl after the longest photo introduction ever?
Below is the outdoor meeting place. I like this shot because you can also see how the land is parceled up. None of the other structures on this picture belong to us or P’s family, and as far as I know they aren’t being currently used either.
The big white thing among all seemingly tiny friends is the turkey we were supposed to eat for Thanksgiving. We used to have three total, but two weeks before Turkey Day, a feral cat celebrated early by taking one of ours. Happy to oblige, Thanksgiving Party Pooper, but you left us with only two turkeys–a girl and a boy, who need each other for company.
We ate chicken instead. No worries, since that’s what my grandmother always made anyway because she didn’t like turkey, but still. Maybe next year.
Now how pretty is this little dude? He’s what they call here a “gallo americano,” an American rooster, but we know him better as a bantam. P waited for ten minutes to see if he could catch him singing, but no dice.
Here he is with one of his hen friends.
And here’s my arsty photo of Signor Bantam, as I call him:
Can you tell he’s kind of our favorite?
On a sad note, some of the roosters will meet their demises very soon. Probably tomorrow morning in fact. But I won’t point out which ones because I don’t know, and I like it that way. Rest assured, though, that the turkeys and Signor Bantam are in the clear.
I most certainly won’t be present for the killings to document it either, so you’ll just have to rely on some Discovery program or something for that. And in the same vein, I won’t be cleaning the birds.
Why? Because I’m no plucker. Hah!
love thursday: photographs
Finally got a chance to play with the camera and with Photoshop yesterday. I installed the program in Italian, which has made getting acquainted all that much more, um, challenging, but it’ll happen.
I’m thinking I could just reinstall in English, but I swear I chose “inglese” the first time around. Not sure what’s going on there. I’m really only at the cropping stage, but collages are coming soon. I hope. Collages are fun.
For today’s Love Thursday, I’m expressing love for my new camera, in particular that it enables me to share parts of my life with family and friends around the world. Plus I love toys!
These two are as taken:
Now for some fun, here’s the original:
And two with the help of Photoshop from the above photo:
Original:
Shopped, now with less spazzatura:
“To pee or not to pee?” Sorry. Couldn’t resist.Happy Love Thursday everyone!
P.S. Don’t forget that it’s De-Lurking Week for charity!
Leave a comment and $1 goes to the American Lung Association.
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[tags]love thursday, dogs, photoshop[/tags]
A Virtual Tour of Badolato, Calabria
Why yes I do happen to have some photos of my village. Thanks for asking!
From a photo-taking point in the piazza:
The main street, or as we say, Il Corso:
La piazza:
A cute building on the piazza that I think would be perfect for an Internet café:
Above the piazza:
More interesting photos to appear here periodically.
Michelle Kaminsky is an American attorney-turned-freelance writer who lived in her family's ancestral village in Calabria, Italy for 15 years. This blog is now archived.
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