Acetaia Piglet

Piglet recently made their first visit to an acetaia in Modena, and learned all about the process. Here you see them guarding the oldest barrel.

Here Piglet looks proudly at the final product. With thanks to Acetaia Gambigliani Zoccoli!

Earthquake Virgin No More

 

A couple of hours ago something a bit weird happened - I felt as if someone had pushed me in the back like they were trying to get past my chair. The cat ran away, but L noted that our lights that hang down from the roof were utterly still. Thus I was left to consider whether or not ghosts might actually be real, and annoyed at me for some reason.

An hour later, whilst L was out at a meeting, and I was blithely watching some Big Bang Theory, the sofa the cushions the lamp the floor the cat everything moved sideways for a few seconds; and then the messages started arriving. It was an earthquake. As was the first.

According to Corriere della Sera, "a series of earthquakes has been striking Emilia Romagna since Wednesday evening, with the epicentre between the provinces of Reggio and Modena. There has been a lot of fright and people have taken to the streets, but for the moment the Civil Protection has not reported any damage. According to the Ingv data, the first tremor was of magnitude 4.0, at a depth of 7 km, and was recorded a few minutes before 8 pm. A second tremor was felt an hour later. The INGV estimates the magnitude of the latter event at 4.3, which is more violent than the previous one."

Unlike my sisters, I have never lived in California (though I was visiting Los Angeles in 1994 but left on maybe the last plane out, utterly unaware of what would happen a couple of hours later). So this was a little scary. I have plenty of memories of feeling the Piccadilly Line thundering beneath Kent House, and the trembling of the living-room floor. But this was my first 'quake in person, and whatever I may have imagined, I was incorrect. Although our ancient palazzo has clearly gone through this for several hundred years (pu pu pu), I have not, and am still shaking a bit. The important things are: L is fine, I am fine, Sara the Cat is shaken and won't come out from under the bed for more than a few seconds but she is fine. And as far as we know so are all our friends here and hopefully everyone else. 

Bees in Conversation

Found this old bee pic and wondered what they might be saying to each other. This was my thought - but maybe you think otherwise ...?

Tearless Onions!

First there were Funyuns, a tasty Frito-Lay oniony snack of the 70's. Today we are being introduced to Sunions, an almost a homophone/homograph but not quite, oniony replacement for those everyday onions that turn the greatest stoics into a weepy mess of goo. I just read about them in the Times, and so can you (if you can get past the paywall). Or you can buy a pack of 3 for £1.50 at Waitrose and test them out yourselves.

Sadly, they do not yet seem to be available in Modena, so I shall have to resort to the old-fashioned ways. In my youth, during a 3-month stint in a kibbutz kitchen where it was my job to prepare the onions each morning for hundreds of people, once my eyes had swollen to the point where I could no longer be trusted with a knife, someone would call for Eitan, and he would unlock the meat freezer and stand me in there for a couple of minutes. Nowadays, with a 2-drawer freezer in our kitchen that is too low down to stick my head in, I resort to the surprisingly successful folk method of holding a wooden spoon between my teeth whilst slicing. Such fun (yuns).

Defender of Modena

The other day I was doing a bit of procrastinating, i.e., family genealogy research when I should've been doing something less interesting, and wrote a message to a SIG asking for advice. One of the responses I received was from a person who, before listing myriad articles they had written that were all unavailable to me, introduced themselves thus:

"Hello Mr F ...

Having consulted your blog, I presume that you mean that you are located in Modena, Italy, and not Modena, New York or Modena, Missouri, both in the United States of America. However, it would have been helpful if you would have indicated which; it is always best to think globally."

After thanking him politely for his response, I could not help but add a PS:

With a territory inhabited since the Iron Age, as a place defended by the father of Julius Caesar's assassin Brutus against a siege by Pompey, with a cathedral whose foundation stone was laid in 1099, and whose university was founded in 1175; not to mention being the home of balsamic vinegar, Luciano Pavarotti and Ferrari, do forgive me if I consider that Modena in Italy would come to mind first from a global perspective rather than the Modenas of NY, WI, IL, PA, UT, MO or the Eastern Cape of South Africa.

It was the exhortation to think globally that pushed me over the edge. I am a proud Modenese!

Piglet Returns to Modena

The pandemic has certainly curtailed his travels, but after Piglet returned from his day trip to Milano, he stopped to admire the chimney at the former tobacco factory in downtown Modena. Here's hoping that he'll be able to head out on another journey soon!

 

The Queen of Procrastination

These are stressful days. The heat in Modena seems more oppressive than ever before, and relentless. They say it may break tomorrow. We certainly need a break of some kind.

Meanwhile, the new year is just a couple of weeks away, and there is so much yet to prepare. I talk about the heat having boiled my brain, and escape into genealogy explorations. But I have paperwork to complete. Numbers and words await my collection and arrangement. People await my attention and support. My dear ones await my cheshbon nefesh. It's time to face the things I fear instead of hiding.

I'm sure I say this every year, and each time I intend to do better. Will this be the year that I fulfil that promise?

 

Finding My Way

The other day I went to get a blood test, and went to the wrong place. They were actually demolishing the building as I arrived, so they had definitely changed their address. The foreman told me I had to go to the Casa della Salute, and sent me across town. It was the first hot day, and I was late for my appointment and extremely flustered. As I dashed through the old city streets like a flustered rat in a maze, I came upon this sign, "Via della Cerca", "Road of the Search". So I went down that road. & you know what? It took me where I needed to go. 

NB new favourite facemask created by Lior from a t-shirt I got at the Memphis Zoo when I visited the lovely Peggy Kaplan z"l many years ago. Peace, Love & Pandas!

Too Close to Home

I feel sick. This Shabbat morning, as L looked out of our bathroom window and down at the car we've borrowed from her mother, she saw this graffiti carved in the dust on the bonnet. I've been watching too much CSI, because my first thought before cleaning it off was whether I might get a good fingerprint from the hand if I put some sellotape over it. 

Some of the symbols and meanings are clear, the cross, the swastika, and the imprecation (possibly the worst thing one may say in Italian) for sure. Not so sure about "adesso" or the hand. (and, as L said, even if I'd got a print from the hand, there's not necessarily proof that this same hand was responsible for the rest of the graffiti!)

On my way back upstairs, I stopped by Max the barber, a fixture in this neighbourhood for several years, with whom we are reasonably friendly. I showed him the photo, and asked if anything like this had happened before. He said no, and that if he ever saw anyone doing something like that they wouldn't arrive home in one piece! I reminded him that L & I are Jewish, so something like this is particularly disturbing, but he was adamant that it was a massive coincidence and that we were not being targeted.

L & I have discussed this from every angle. The few people who know we are Jewish, and know that is the car we use, seem utterly unlikely to behave in this way. In fact, we cannot imagine any way for someone to connect that car and our being Jewish. It may well be just a horrible coincidence. But it hurts, and I have to admit that I am feeling it even more when it has happened to us than the anger and sympathy I have felt when it happens to others. I hate to admit to such egotism, but it is so. 

This may also have something to do with the fact that just a few minutes earlier we were studying the weekly Torah portion, Balak. This is the one with the talking donkey (eat your heart out Shrek fans), and we got into a bit of a discussion about the power of words. I remembered that when I was little and somebody said something mean, you were supposed to throw back at them "sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me!" It was a good attempt to reduce the influence such words - fatso, four-eyes, Christ-killer - might have had on my psyche, at least I had a comeback, but I don't remember that it really helped much. 

In Judaism, words have great power - God used them to create the world ... throughout the Torah there are consequences for what people say as well as what they do ... lashon ha-ra was and is considered akin to murder (of the soul if not the body) - we are taught, and should understand that words - in written or pictorial form - can really hurt. Immediately after our Or 'Ammim discussion on this topic, real life bit us on the bottom. Funny how that worked out.

Nu, what now? Perhaps we will inform the local police, just for it to be on the record. As I write these words I am singing along with my favourite NFTY songs (starting with the first and second albums), trying to salve my soul. Will I develop an improved empathy that translates into a proactive response next time others are hurt? I hope so.

Bernie Sanders Does it Again

This is a photograph of Bernie Sanders at the Capitol building in Washington DC during the Inauguration of President Biden yesterday. His mittens in particular seem to have captured the interest of folk on social media. NPR suggested that he had won "the Inauguration Day Meme Game". 

And then, one of my colleagues posted a link called "Put Bernie Anywhere" that places this photo in a Google photo of that site.

Greatest Procrastination Device of the Week!

You've got to be careful with the wording of the location, but you can put him pretty much anywhere.

At the Sydney Opera House:

At the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin:

In Pisa:

Also, there's no guarantee that the vista chosen will actually show the object/building/view that you requested. For example, when I entered "Jolly Green Giant statue" (that I visited a gazillion years ago in Blue Earth, MN) I got this:

but there's no view of the big guy that we saw when we drove through Minnesota:

O, and be as specific as you can. When I put "Modena", a city of c. 190k people, with a historic centre full of beautiful architecture, and a nine-hundred-year-old cathedral:

I got this:

Senator Sanders is sitting by the bus stops at the main railway station of Modena. I'm proud that I know this, since I often claim to have become a Modenese, and such knowledge supports that claim!

Anyway, it's a bit of fun connected to the news today. Enjoy. As for me ... PROCRASTINATION, THOU HAST BESTED ME ONCE MORE. I'm off for a nap.

Lost in Modena

 

Usually at this time of year Modena is teeming with tourists. Not so during the time of Coronavirus. On my way home the other day, I noticed a couple who looked a bit lost. She was walking in a wandering style, and he had stopped and was looking at his phone and then around and then back at the phone. As I passed them I heard him say something in English, so I said, "may I help you? Are you lost?" "Yes," replied the woman, "but that is the plan." "Ok, " I said, "enjoy!"

The Greatest Photo I Never Took

QPR photographer has a prime view of Andy Sinton's goal celebration

1990 FA Cup 4th round. QPR had drawn the first match at Highbury vs the League Champions, and now faced a reply at Loftus Road. Under the floodlights, it poured with rain, which in pre-digital days made action photography quite difficult. To relive the joy of beating Arsenal, there's a link below to some YouTube footage. As for my photographs, you can see in the screenshot above that when Andy Sinton scored in the final minutes to make it 2-0 and seal the victory, I had the rare opportunity to take some unique close-up shots of his celebration which, despite my excitement as a fan, I did.

A few minutes later, the game was over and I was packing up my things. I went to roll the final film back into its canister, ready for developing when I got home, and had a terrible shock - THERE WAS NO FILM IN THE CAMERA. To this day I don't understand what happened. Never did it before. Never done it since. That night, I did it. I shot a roll of stunning pictures, with no film in the camera. I can still see the photos in my head. But they do not exist. Andy's face full frame, fists clenched in victory above his head. Or not. Unbelievable. Still feel gutted every time I think of it. How could it be, and how could I not have noticed? NO BLOODY FILM IN THE CAMERA. Sigh. So the pixelly screen grab above is all that remains of that moment.

Hard to believe also that this took place 30 years ago. Looking at the screenshot again, I am amused to note that it happened in front of an ad for Panini football stickers. I now live happily in the city where the stickers are made. That's my taste of lemonade!