Unprotected Sex in a Tuscan garden.

There’s no experience quite like that of leaning out of the unshuttered upper storey window of a country villa on a sensuously warm Tuscan summer night and looking out over a valley upon whose hillsides specks of light mark ancient villages. On the honeyed air comes the seductive perfume of nocturnal flora, the barking of distant dogs and the rustle of the leaves of chestnut trees

Below the window, upon terraces where moon-silvered olives share grassy slopes with vines and raspberry canes fireflies weave like drunkards with torches trying to find their way home. You can’t help comparing this to paradise; it’s all too unbelievably perfect. Those fireflies, they’re so beautiful that we would like always to think well of them, but to their magical world there’s a grisly, dark and sinister side.

Take two species: photuris and photinus. Be careful, those names are deceptively similar.

The female of the species photuris is a siren who eats male fireflies. She has the decency not to tuck into her own menfolk, but with diabolical cunning she copies and then imitates the light signals of that other species, photinus.

Having done so, like a Cornish wrecker she lures into her air space any hot and lusty young photinus bent on a bit of nocturnal nooky, but it’s neither sex nor a good meal she’s after, she wants a chemical called lucibufagins which photinus has but photuris hasn’t. Indeed, she needs it badly because once she has ingested it from the doomed dupe it will guard her from attacks by predators - spiders, bats and the like. They don’t like the taste of lucibufagins so they avoid any firefly that’s got it.

So when, in the northern hemisphere summer, you savour the night air of the Tuscan terraces and are wooed by the enchanting illuminations of those meandering insects remember to reflect upon the casual, routine murder that's taking place before your misty eyes; and weigh the astonishing notion that when the crunch comes, photuris actually benefits from unprotected sex.

Now there’s a twist!

[ENDS]


© DON DONOVAN. donovan@ihug.co.nz 
www. don-donovan.blogspot.co.nz or donovan0001.blogspot.co.nz

Leaves From My Sketchbooks. 42. San Giovanni, Lucca

Sometimes you can work too fast! The girls had gone shopping but I'd no sooner opened my watercolour box than they were back again ready to catch the train home to Barga-Gallicano.

Dab, dab, dab and then I was walking along the strada waving the sketch book around to dry the paint. Rough, but it captures a moment and fixes a memory.

© DON DONOVAN.     donovan@ihug.co.nz 
www. don-donovan.blogspot.co.nz
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Leaves From My Sketchbooks. 40. San Michele, Castiglione di Garfagnana, Tuscany

Moss, when it is on top of a wall and has been in sunshine for an hour or two, makes a luxurious cushion and so I was able to work in comfort on the rendering of this ancient church in a rampart-defended hill town above the upper Serchio valley.

You can see a long way from here and I wondered how often fearful citizens might have prepared boiling pitch to pour on invaders in past years. It's peaceful now but has been raided by everyone from Longobards to Nazis; that silent tower has seen them all.

 © DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz    www.don-donovan.blogspot.co.nz

Leaves From My Sketchbooks. 39. Bar, Tiglio Alto, Tuscany

It looked like an ordinary casa but as I parked the Peugeot opposite I noticed 'Bar' over the door of the cantina. I can't imagine that they'd do a roaring trade - no bingo nights or quizzes - but I daresay that there are a few random callers, either lost or curious to see this remote Apennine hamlet, to sustain a store of local reds and whites just in case.

I didn't go in. I just sat, limning,  in the passenger's seat for a short time and then went on my way up the serpentine roads through the chestnut forests.

 © DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz    www.don-donovan.blogspot.co.nz
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Leaves From My Sketchbooks. 38. The Romanesque Church at Loppia, Tuscany

These drawings were made at different times and from different angles. The glebe and precinct were deserted except for a rather dishevelled looking mongrel apparently guarding the heavy, bolted door of what seemed to be more a dwelling than a church.

It's very old, 11th century, I believe, and makes a wonderful subject which explains why I went back again.

There's an ancient mule track bridge nearby where I and my companion played Poohsticks.

 © DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz    www.don-donovan.blogspot.co.nz
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Leaves From My Sketchbooks. 37. Seccatoio Castagne, Barga

I went for a walk up the chestnut-wooded hill behind the casa Chiesetta and found this barn-like structure in a clearing. While I was doing the drawing, sitting on a fallen tree trunk, I heard a shout and an angry looking man appeared running across the track waving his arms and shouting at me. Nervous, I waited until he came up to me then I showed him the sketchpad. He relaxed and smiled.

'Come si chiama quello in Italiano?' I asked him, 'Seccatoio castagne,' he replied, patted me on the shoulder and strode away.

I don't know what he was concerned about but I was clearly not the threat he'd inferred.

I wrote down 'Seccadoio castagne' on the pad. Later I discovered the correct spelling. It was a chestnut drying house.

 © DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz    www.don-donovan.blogspot.co.nz
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Leaves From My Sketchbooks. 35. Church Tower, Coreglia Antelminelli, Tuscany

The clock says 11.00 am; the date says 8 September but for the life of me I can't remember what year. What I do remember is sitting on the glacially cold marble step of a shop doorway and using saliva to wet my brushes and the small pans of my portable watercolour box; I'd forgotten to bring any water with me.

My tongue must have been green, brown and blue that morning; colourmen should flavour their pans, or at least give then some nutritional properties!

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz    www.don-donovan.blogspot.co.nz
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Leaves From My Sketchbooks. 34. Roadside Chapel, Loppia, Barga, Tuscany

My friend, David, and I both did paintings of this chapel which sticks out into the road as testament to Italy's constant problem of compromising modern transport with age-old buildings. 

'You haven't finished already.' protested David as I hopped off the wall. I had deliberately sat on some sharp stones knowing that the faster I finished the better the sketch would be! My God those stones were brutal.

 © DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz    www.don-donovan.blogspot.co.nz
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Leaves From My Sketchbooks. 32. Barga and the Duomo, Tuscany

I did these illustrations some years apart. The top one, the earlier, I drew while sitting on the alley surface with my back against a car bumper.

I was older when I did the lower one. That time I brought a stool to sit on, my bottom being less inclined to sustain punishment. Interestingly, the trees at the end of the alley had grown quite quickly.

The church on the hill dominates Barga; it is the duomo San Cristofero; on one of the corbels of its tower there is carved an image of Mussolini, who gave Barga city status. If you mention the carving to local people they frown in puzzlement and stare into the distance...

© DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz    www.don-donovan.blogspot.co.nz

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Leaves From My Sketchbooks. 29. Barga Silhouette

Monet painted the same scenes over and over because the light changed from one moment to the next, continually giving him new subjects.

Barga is like that. When you look down on to the little town that lies between the Apennines and the Apuane Alps it constantly changes as mists drift up the valley of the Serchio River.

This was painted from a low wall a short distance from where we stayed; as I quickly laid the wash a viper came sinuating along the wall and then stopped, looking at me. I finished, half panicked, then the snake and I took off in different directions as if a gun had been fired!

Art is dangerous.

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz    www.don-donovan.blogspot.co.nz
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Leaves From My Sketchbooks. 27. Door, Chiesetta No.2, Barga, Tuscany

Without moving from the lunch table on the terrace where we had enjoyed a light insalata and a chilled, local pinot grigio, I perched my sketchbook on my knee and drew the back door of  of the casa. Got carried away...

The house was built halfway through the 18th century but I don't know whether the door is that old and nobody knows who or what 'N.G' was. 

They don't make doors like this in New Zealand; I would have liked to have brought it home with me in my cabin luggage!

© DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz    www.don-donovan.blogspot.co.nz
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Leaves From My Sketchbooks. 26. Another View Of Chiesetta, Barga, Tuscany

Having done a watercolour of the house from beside the piscina, I quickly did this pen sketch because, hearing some falcons mewing in the sky above me, I was inspired to write a lyrical, illustrated article.

This drawing done, I started to write on the same paper, and this shows part of the essay, which covered several pages and was subsequently published by the Wellington Evening Post back in New Zealand.

Our bedroom was on the upper floor, the one with the shutters closed.

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz    www.don-donovan.blogspot.co.nz
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Leaves From My Sketchbooks. 25. Chiesetta No. 2, Barga, Tuscany, Watercolour

I sat by the swimming pool and did this daub of the upper house called Chiesetta No.2. It's so wonderfully Italian that it could exist nowhere else in the world.

A historic casa it stood on the Gothic Line in World War Two, one of Hitler's lines of last retreat as the Germans slowly lost the war. Our relatives found bullet holes and ammunition as they were restoring the house. Now, surrounded by chestnut covered slopes it is so peaceful that one could hardly imagine such a cruel history.

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz    www.don-donovan.blogspot.co.nz
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Leaves From My Sketchbooks. 24. Chiesetta Numero Due, Barga, Tuscany. Black and White

In Italian, Chiesetta means 'little church'. This house, No. 2, which belongs to our relatives, stands near a tiny two-person wayside prayer kiosk on an ancient mule road on the slopes of the Apennines.

I sketched it a number of times (more in later posts) but this rendering, done from below the slopes where olives, vines and raspberries grow, shows the whole, two-part casa. The main house is to the left. The smaller house was once used for animals but has been converted into living accommodation.

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz    www.don-donovan.blogspot.co.nz
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My Books: Antipasto

 

I have recently published this book which is a collection of random samplings from various writings, watercolours and photographs made over a few years of visits to Italy - particularly Tuscany. Among many other things, it touches upon Florence, Lucca, Barga and the hill villages of the Garfagnana, that area between the Apuane Alps and the Apennines that is drained by the Serchio River.

It also includes visits to Umbria: Carsulae, Terni and San Gemini.

The book is available from Blurb.com. Go to: www.blurb.com, enter 'Don Donovan' in the search box and my book will appear.

donovan@ihug.co.nz

Tuscany: Peasant Women, Café Men

Where do the solitary old women come from who, dressed in black, walk the back roads of Tuscany? It seems that whenever one drives in the country, at some point on the journey, at some time in the day, there will be one around the next bend, sometimes miles from any visible habitation.

Old fashioned women. Peasant women. 

Are they widows? Or are their men those who sit at the tables outside Barga’s Bar Onesti or similar village bars and cafés, reading tabloid newspapers, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and covertly appraising the luscious young raggazzi who toss their heads knowingly as they pass on the street?

Café men and walking matrons: I imagine them at home, couples living lives of grunted communication, each to their duties, love and lust spent, children grown and gone. They part company after breakfast, she to walk, he to male bonding at the café, both to return at day’s end to more grunts and a matrimoniale whose springs stopped groaning for joy years ago.

Some men retire early in Italy. I remember a young-looking chap whom we met, with his attractive wife, at the restaurant ‘La Mocchia’ who told us that he was retired from his job as a salesman at the age of fifty. He explained that once you’ve done thirty-five years of work you may retire no matter how old you are and collect a state pension. If that’s correct it’s a way of solving youth unemployment but what does it do to the psyche of the pensioner? Most people who retire don’t know what to do with their earned leisure; they and their minds wither.

But then again, early retirement may explain the intensively worked terraced smallholdings on the hills around the Garfagnana. I doubt that, ordinarily, they’d be payable propositions but if they serve to keep the retiree occupied, to supplement income, and to put home-grown food and wine on the table they make good sense. I think the master of Chiesetta No. 1, may have fallen into that category: he worked his slopes assiduously, especially those overlooking the pool of No. 2 around which the Inglesi women laid in the sun…

One sees some still-together pairs travelling side-by-side, sitting bolt upright in the confined cabs of Piaggios, those narrow three-wheelers low-geared enough to negotiate any track, any gradient. They’re used for everything, to carry goats, sheep, groceries, kids, tools, machinery - I’ve been held up behind one whose tray was so full of hay that it looked in imminent danger of overturning on the slightest bend but, like a mobile Leaning Tower of Pisa, made it all the way!

From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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The Devil’s Bridge: Ponte della Maddelena

At Borgo a Mozzano the fourteenth century Ponte del Diavolo - devil’s bridge - is also called The Ponte della Maddelena. It is the most beautiful thing along the Serchio River. When the surface of the water is unruffled the central arch and its reflection form a perfect ‘O’, the bridge arcing like a toreador’s hat, grey-white stone with clumps of flowers growing from the mortar. 

The legend is that it was such a difficult thing to build that they had to call in the devil to help. He agreed but claimed the first soul to cross it. The builder, San Giuliano, cunningly sent his dog across. I think a descendant runs the suede shop in the Via Fillungo…

From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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Il barbecue

To me, having lived in New Zealand for considerably more than half of my life, barbecues are commonplace. But to some English they rank for adventure with the Boy Scout fire; one preferably started with supreme difficulty and on a piece of equipment reminiscent of those makeshift stoves made of petrol cans one sees in photographs of British tommies ‘brewing up’ in the Western Desert in 1942. I have no doubt that England possesses as many elaborate self-starting gas barbecues in cast metal and redwood-stained hardwood as there are in the whole of Australasia but… they’re not British.
 
The barbecue at the casa Chiesetta Numero Due, Barga, Tuscany is a rectangular metal pan, similar in size and shape to a child’s toy pram. It totters on tubular plastic legs and has a wire grille that hovers over the pan with no discernible means of support or adjustment. Roger, flushed and pyromanic, sprinkles methylated spirits over shop-bought charcoal then drops a lighted match. Whoof! The coals settle to a cryptic blackness, their only sign of combustion being an occasional pinging noise.


Sausages, lamb chops and steak from the local Conad supermarket lie on the lukewarm grille for a considerable time before being turned to dry on the other side; but not before the grille has collapsed, plunging a number of titbits on to the coals. Sooty offerings are scraped and as charred sacrificial noisettes are shared around, augmented by a simple dressed salad, and eaten with as much relish as the contents of a soup bowl on the Hungarian border in 1956. This is the life!

As we wash our feast down with a local verdicchio the charcoals assume the fierceness of hot, flowing volcanic lava. The meal is over, the barbecue is ready.


From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’

© DON DONOVAN

donovan@ihug.co.nz

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The Bicycles of Lucca

Having forsaken the fountains of Rome, the palazzi of Florence and that teetering Pisan tower I spent a happy hour in Lucca, sitting in a kerb-side café, sipping espresso and nibbling una brioche while I watched the cyclists go by. At last I was face to face with real Italy at street level. Two things about this charming Etruscan city in northern Tuscany make it a bicycle town: its narrow streets and the complete absence of hills. It’s as flat as a slab of Carrara marble.

It didn’t take me long to realize that here there is no better form of everyday transport than the bike. Unless you’re sight-seeing, walking is too slow; motorists and bus drivers suffer stop-go misery in Lucca’s pinched and writhing one-way system, and the elsewhere ubiquitous three-wheeled two-strokes with their blue smoke and noise are plainly unwelcome in these airless alleys.

As I watched, it struck me that no matter whether old or young, large or small, Lucca’s citizens are bred to the bicycle: it fits them like part of their anatomy. They negotiate the cobbled thoroughfares and flag-stoned piazzas effortlessly and with complete disregard of the one-way signs. There’s an air of tranquility and confidence about them and a readiness to call a buon giorno to friends and strangers alike. They fear not neither do they give way to larger vehicles and their only concessions are to pedestrians, lesser beings for whom they tinkle their bells more as entertainment than as warnings.

Observing the passing ‘cycle-cade’ I could see that in Lucca the bike is no guide to socio-economic standing. There are no two-wheeled status symbols, no Ferraris or V6 Alfas. These machines are modest, neutral, purely practical. Well-dressed matrons flashing diamonds lost no dignity as they pushed their pedals, they looked as elegant in the saddle as on foot. Bankers, priests, businessmen suffered no loss of prestige in trouser clips. In handle-bar baskets, small dogs travelled contentedly in company with Florentine leather handbags. Two lovers met, wheel to wheel, and managed, while still astride their bikes, to touch hungrily and with an unashamed passion. A pair of toddlers passed trustfully poised on custom-made saddles on the cross-bar of grand-dad’s bike avoiding a gaggle of small boys who tilted at danger, taking that extra risk by standing upright on the parcel tray as they and their friends, sometimes three to a machine, bounced and rattled over the mediaeval granite stones.

I reflected that the transport needs of the historical centre of Lucca (that portion of the city which lies within the 4.2 kilometres of its third fortified wall, dating from 1645) would have been satisfied without the invention of the internal combustion engine and goods would have been carried just as effectively by horse drawn carts as they are today. The great leap forward would have been the bicycle and that’s where technology might comfortably have ended.


Lucca, in common with the rest of the world, traded horse manure for exhaust fumes but the bicicletta is above reproach and perhaps it is the confidence that they derive from their innate understanding of the appropriateness of the bicycle that made observing the endless stream of Lucchese cyclists such a source of enjoyment for this tourist.

From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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San Gimignano: Town of Towers

To San Gimignano. Early. I’ve long wanted to go there. We missed a chance in 1995 when our New Zealand contingent (minus us two who stayed at Chiesetta for peace as much as any other reason) went to visit the Rocca del Macie winery in Castellini in Chianti and paid a side trip to the town of towers. When they returned they spoke more of some museum of torture than anything else but I long ago shed any curiosity about man’s inhumanity to man and I shan’t even give it a passing glance.

It takes us just two-and-a-half hours to get there from Barga via the autostrade but although we arrive early enough, at 8.10, the town approaches are already crowded with tourist coaches. The inadequate carparks outside the walls are full. We watch as streams of zombified visitors file through the town gate. Unwilling to join them we decide to turn away and do a tour of the purlieus in the hope that we’ll get a better feel for how the towers make the town. Mauve heat deadens the colours of the distant views as I take photographs across the outlying valleys and over the rows of vines that surround the walls and radiate like dull green corduroy down from the eminence, giving tremendous perspective. Vineyards are everywhere and at the hearts of each are red-tiled factory buildings and houses guarded by cypresses that make the scene so archetypally Tuscan.

There’s a feel of quiet wealth here, an inheritance of history, of landowners no longer subjects of the feudal power that once dominated from the city walls. Away from the roads that lead directly to San Gimignano it’s peaceful and deserted; few people are evident, just the odd Piaggio comes farting along the dusty back roads its driver giving us a disinterested nod at passing.

Having made a circuit we stop for lunch on the main approach to the town at an expensive hotel that lies away from the road. On the almost empty terrace beside a glassy azure pool we sit under a Cypress-green market umbrella, sip iced Campari sodas and nibble on bruschetta while watching the cars and coaches as they contest share of the highway below with tractor drawn trailers loaded with newly harvested grapes. Their drivers ignore impatient visitors. Especially deliberately and, it seems, insolently, they now and then slow down and ease towards the centre of the road instinctively knowing which of the cars and coaches carry a ‘D’ origin on their number plates!

At last we attack the city. It’s a little quieter after lunch and we find a parking space near the Porta San Giovanni, entering by that gate and making our way up the cobbled Via San Giovanni. We peel off to a side road from where we can get some pictures of the towers, emphasizing their height. At the zenith of power, in the 12th and 13th centuries, there were seventy; only thirteen now survive. I’ve read that they were built by antagonistic families during the conflicts of Guelphs and Ghibellines as defensive keeps - some connected by walkways - each one trying to outdo the other with a higher structure; sort of keeping ahead of the Joneses. But I don’t believe it because it would be too easy to add to the structure and in any case, even for show-off Italians, would have been a petty enterprise.

A more sensible suggestion (although it lacks the absolute stamp of history) is that their towers emerged from the time when San Gimignano was famous for its textiles, particularly those dyed by secret processes using the saffron yellow distillations of locally grown crocuses. The most prized fabrics were those whose colours had been fixed while avoiding sunlight and dust, and were the longest strips possible. To achieve this the strips were suspended in the still air inside the windowless towers. The holes that can be seen in the walls were made for trusses to support staircases outside the towers thus leaving maximum internal space for the textiles. Knowing the Italians’ proclivity for turning a lira or euro I’m certain that’s why the towers were built; my contention is supported today by the sheer commercialism of the town which is so attuned to taking tourists’ money that it’s hard to imagine what the character of the real San Gimignano is. I guess a winter here would have its own rewards. In fact, a winter anywhere in Italy would be an eye opener for, as with the hosts of a dinner party, behaviour would be quite different after the guests had departed. Prices would come down for a start!

From ‘Antipasto’ random samplings from various writings made over a few years of visits to a ‘New Zealander’s Italy’ This book is available from Blurb.com.

© DON DONOVAN
donovan@ihug.co.nz
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