Olives, Bologna and Gospel

I went to southern Sardinia, to Carloforte on the island of San Pietro, to help with the olive harvest at Eva and Leonardo's lovely place. One long hard day's work yielded 350kg of olives, which were taken to the mainland to be pressed the next day, yielding 45litres of rather yummy new oil. This was the first time for me, and I was clearly born to be a contadina, for I loved every minute of this hard working day, when you really felt you deserved Eva's  lovely, plentiful lunch, and when you relished the swim in the still warm Mediterranean at the end of the long day..

Then on to Bologna, and my lovely friends Patty and Les, who will be living in my London flat quite a lot in the future... Bologna gets better and better every visit- I love the colours and the shapes and the grand scale of the city- so different from Siena.

The shapes an curves of Siena are more monochrome, but still enchanting to me, and I spend quite some time now on the streets with my sketchbook.

And other activities are becoming important- the below is the Gospel choir I have joined! We are giving a concert at the end of November, and also a couple at  Christmas, I believe..

and most weekends include some trekking- here yesterday in the Crete Senese with the walking group, where I get plenty of Italian practise in...
                                      

Famous sons of Siena's Contradas

 Or at least two of them: Let's start with Ettore Bastianini, the famous Barytone and the pride of the Pantera contrada. At the end of his illustrous carreer he became the Capitano of Pantera, and at his untimely death from throat cancer in 1967 his American wife took over that position. To celebrate the 100 year's anniversary of his birth, the Pantera laid on a free staged performance of Tosca at the lovely 18th century Teatro dei Rinnovati, situated inside the Palazzo Pubblico. The role of Scarpia was one of Bastianini's most frequently performed. 

                                                       

This was all very generous and nice of course, and Hettie and I went along happily. No one told us where we were supposed to sit, so we went in and installed ourselves on  a couple of good seats a few rows from the front, where we remained, unchallenged, until a few minutes before the beginning of the performance, when a couple of officials arrived, in the company of some important Contradioli, and we were unceremoniously told to get out and take the seats that were allocated non-Contradioli. Now, this did not go down well- of course I would not have minded in the slightest if we had been told where to sit in the first place! As it now happed, I got angry - in Italian- once more in this theatre... (see December 11, 2021)

I'll have to watch it, I don't want to get a bad reputation after all... so, we were bundled away up in the gods, and this is what we looked like:

                                         

                        below a bad shot of Scarpia's demise: 'Davanti a Lui tremava Tutta Roma!' (some Pantera flags in the background...)

                                                  

            And now onto my own territory- that is to say the ONDA Contrada, where, in the crypt of the San Giuseppe Church, is housed the Museum of the ONDA with the original plaster sculptures, from which were made, in bronze or marble, the oeuvre  of their  most famous son, the nineteenth century sculptor Giovanni Dupre.  

                                              

                                                         

I went this morning at 10 to a lecture in this museum,  and it was really quite interesting- Dupre was regarded as something of an innovator in his day, however conventional his work may seem to us. His dead Abel, plaster cast below, was considered shocking in it realism at the time- the marble is  placed in  the Hermitage, St. Petersburg.           

                                                 

  Dupre said that he wanted to find beauty in reality, not try and enhance the real into something ideal, which was the contemporary approach to art. 

I had only seen one of his works, the lovely little sleeping girl on a  funerary monument   housed in the Palazzo Pubblico. Here is another funerary sculpture, regarded as his masterpiece: the Pieta, at the Misericordia cemetary in Siena where we went after the lecture, a short stroll through the Porta Tufi. I was chatting amiably with Simonetta, one of the pillars of the ONDA, who thinks I have to become an Ondaiola...                                                           

                                            

Feeling suitably  inspired by the morning's artistic pursuits I decided to continue in the same spirit and went to the new exhibition at Santa Maria Della Scala: Arte Senese, from the collection of the Monte di Paschi di Siena. And here I found another little gem, an Amor,  from Giovanni Dupre, who excelled at children:                                                               

              And then onto the Campo, where there always seems to be something going on- this afternoon it was the competition between the children of all the Contradas: the new generation of drummers and Alfieris, the flag throwers with their intricate  manoevres (those that used to exercise under my window at Via Roma...) And here are the young Ondaioli, doing their best... we will se tomorrow who were the lucky winners!

Well, actually, it just came up on Facebook, and here they are : SELVA! Bravi!!!

 

Views and Stripes

And as far as the first of these items go, this is now 'my' view from the garden at Hettie's place. One can see far across the Crete Senese from her great flat in the Tartuca contrada, where she is kindly letting me stay in her guest room until I will move into my new abode- inchallah, in the early New Year? I will be 'dog sitting' her lovely labrador Bonnie in November, and in fact 'cat sitting' too, for she has two cats. So my days in Via Roma have come to an end- a whole year in that flat which became so familiar, and in which  I was able to welcome many friends in the past year. 

Hetties place is just around the corner from my new flat, so I can pop in just about every day and check progress.

And from one great view to another spectacular one: this is the view from the Piazza dei Martire in Volterra, one of the many towns which I had  not yet visited in Tuscany. And what a town! It is quite breath taking- the spectacular scenery during the bus journey between Colle Val d'Elsa and Volterra literally brought tears of joy and amazement to my eyes- and this wonderful Roman town itself- even older than Siena, and - dare I say it- even more beautiful perhaps..

Here too, one sees a lot of those black and white stripes that make Siena Cathedral so spectacular:

It was market day in Volterra, where I stayed for lunch before heading off to Cecina on the bus, in pursuit of more black and white stripes: 

Those strange flat stones, found  on the beach at Cecina, which I hope to use somehow in one of the bathrooms at Casato di Sopra...

If you zoom in above you will see...I filled up a little rucksack while some people  were still sun bathing.

P.S. Forgot! Who is Hettie? Well, she's a Texan friend of a friend, introduced to me recently- she, just like I,  have decided to make Siena her home- at least for the foreseeable few years. She is part of a growing set of friends, both expats and Italians. I am not used to seeing mostly women though, but this seems to be the way here...