Month: March 2018

WHITE SANDS NATIONAL MONUMENT

Los Angeles, 30 March 2018

Like most children who have spent holidays on a beach somewhere, both my wife and I have memories of playing in sand dunes, I in Norfolk

she along Italy’s Adriatic coast.

Then, after we met and started traveling the world we visited a number of large-scale sand dune systems, far away from any sea. The first we saw, at the start of our lives together, were the sand dunes of Death Valley.

On a business trip a few years ago, I visited the sand dunes of Inner Mongolia which are remorselessly engulfing farmland; I commented on these in an earlier post.

And then there were the sand dunes of Namibia, which we visited one Christmas some ten years ago with our children.

The most awesome of these dunes were a dull red, with the biggest towering over us.

But the blindingly white dunes of the White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, which we visited last week with our daughter and her boyfriend, are in a class of their own. The eerie beauty of these dunes has led better photographers than I to surpass themselves, and I have shamelessly pinched some of the best of their photos to insert here.



We walked in a big circle, from dune crest to dune crest, marveling at the vistas before us of undulating whiteness, all the way, so it seemed, to the surrounding mountain ranges.

I’ve been careful not to refer to these dunes as sand dunes, because they are not sand as we normally understand that term, that is to say silicate. These are dunes of gypsum (calcium sulphate to the chemically inclined of my readers).

In the morning, we had visited Lake Lucero, which lies to the southwest of the dunes. It is an evanescent lake; it appears during the rainy season in late summer and is gone by the time the windy season in the spring rolls around. When we visited it, there was no sign of any water.

Here we could see how the gypsum “sand” had been created. It all started 24,000 years ago, when a new ice age started and the climate in this corner of New Mexico began to be much wetter than it is today. For nigh on 14,000 years frequent rains lashed the nearby San Andres and Sacramento mountain ranges. The rainwater nibbled away at strata of gypsum which had been exposed by the mountains’ uplifting, and streams carried the dissolved gypsum into a lake at the foot of the mountains. This lake has been named Lake Otero. The lake had no exit, so it grew in size until the water evaporating balanced the stream water entering. But the gypsum (and other salts) carried into the lake remained and slowly concentrated. Then, some 10,000 years ago, the ice age came to an end, and the climate here became dryer. Less rainwater fell on the mountains, streams got smaller or disappeared, and Lake Otero began to shrink. As it shrunk, the dissolved gypsum became ever more concentrated until finally the lake water was saturated. The gypsum started precipitating out of the lake water, forming huge crystals of selenite in the process, which then settled onto the lake’s bed. This picture shows a very pure crystal of selenite, which is colourless.


But during our ramble along the shores of Lake Lucero we saw selenite crystals in their more natural state, jutting out of the ground. They were various shades of brown; other substances that were present in the lake water have colored the crystals.

 

And still Lake Otero kept shrinking, until nothing but Lake Lucero – sometimes there, often not – was left.

With the climate change of 10,000 years ago came strong winds. For the last 10,000 years they have been scouring the alkaline flats left bare when Lake Otero disappeared. They first carried away the thin crust of clay and fine particles, which exposed the selenite. Freezing and thawing cycles went to work on the crystals, breaking them along their weakest plane. The process continues to this day. We saw these crystals of selenite down at Lake Lucero being slowly split open.


The shores of Lake Lucero are littered with fragments of selenite crystals, broken up by wind, frost and heat.

On and on went the work of breaking down the crystals until they had become flakes light enough to be carried along by the prevailing southwesterly winds. As the flakes bowled along over the alkaline flats, tumbling over and over, they cracked and crumbled further until only small sand-like grains were left.

The winds have pushed the grains up into the dunes that we see today. And all that tumbling has so scratched and scarred and pitted the surface of the grains that they reflect back sunlight in all its wavelengths so that we see them as intensely white.

Unbeknownst to us, my wife and I have been living with selenite around us in the apartment in Milan, although in this case in the form of desert roses.

My mother-in-law picked them up in Algeria, where she visited some of the oases south of the Atlas Mountains and walked the dunes of the Saharan desert, like these at the Biskra oasis.

Another dune system for my wife and I to visit – once Isis no longer roams the Sahara desert, kidnapping and beheading hapless tourists.

____________________

Norfolk dunes: http://www.bringingtheoutsidein.co.uk/landscape_photography/holkham.html
Dunes Adriatic coast: https://www.rentbyowner.com/property/hotel-le-dune/BC-268102
Sand dunes Death Valley: https://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g143021-d2255762-i116167540-Mesquite_Flat_Sand_Dunes-Death_Valley_National_Park_California.html
Sand dunes Inner Mongolia: my picture
Sand dunes Namibia-1: https://it.pinterest.com/pin/6685099420949300/?lp=true
Sand dunes Namibia-2: https://travelservice.tips/attractions/africa/sossusvlei-dunes.html
White sands-1: https://www.nationalparks.org/connect/blog/wave-dunes-white-sands
White sands-2: http://www.magazinusa.com/us/states/show.aspx?state=nm&doc=10&dsc=White_Sands_National_Monument
White sands-3: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20160517-the-beautiful-white-sand-dunes-that-should-not-exist
White sands-4: https://www.newmexico.org/listing/white-sands-national-monument/218/
Lake Lucero: my wife’s picture
Selenite-pure: http://www.crystallinephoenix.com
Selenite crystals in the ground: my pictures
Selenite crystals on Lake Lucero shore: my picture
Gypsum grains: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Sands_National_Monument#/media/File%3AWhiteSandsGypsum.jpg
White sands-5: my picture
Desert rose: https://www.feelcrystals.com.au/product-category/crystal-meanings/desert-rose-crystal/
Tadrart, Algeria: https://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g293717-d504734-i300952025-Algerian_Sahara-Algeria.html
Biskra oasis, Algeria: https://plus.google.com/105463517722617181754

THE ODYSSEY: DAYDREAMS OF MY YOUTH

Milan, 10 March 2018

A couple of days ago, my wife declared that I needed to buy some books since my supply of unread books was running low. No sooner said than done: we popped down into the basement of the large bookshop in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Piazza Duomo and I spent a happy half hour perusing their shelves of English books. As I walked off with five or six new volumes to read, I spied a book whose title was “Odyssey”.

And suddenly I was 10-11 years old again, sitting in the school library, breathlessly reading a simplified version of the Odyssey which was written in installments in some boys’ weekly magazine. Week by week, I followed the crafty Odysseus as he and his men sailed away from the still smouldering ruins of Troy in his “racing warships across the wine-dark sea”, bound for Ithaca and his wife Penelope and son Telemachus. I absorbed his adventures, some of which I illustrate here with Greek pottery or Roman mosaics or sculpture (and in one case with a much more recent print because I couldn’t find an example from the Classical period); I accompany the illustrations with passages from the text of the Odyssey translated by Robert Fagles:

In the land of the Lotus Eaters

Any crewmen who ate the lotus, the honey-sweet fruit,
their only wish was to linger there with the Lotus-eaters,
grazing on lotus, all memory of the journey home
dissolved forever. But I brought them back—I forced them,
hauled them under the rowing benches, lashed them fast
and shouted out commands to my other, steady comrades:
‘Quick, no time to lose, embark in the racing ships!’—
so none could eat the lotus, forget the voyage home.

In the cave of the cyclops Polyphemus, who is now in a drunken sleep after tossing down several large bowls of wine given to him by Odysseus

Now, at last, I thrust our stake in a bed of embers
to get it red-hot and rallied all my comrades:
‘Courage—no panic, no one hang back now!’
And green as it was, just as the olive stake
was about to catch fire—the glow terrific, yes—
I dragged it from the flames, my men clustering round
as some god breathed enormous courage through us all.
Hoisting high that olive stake with its stabbing point,
straight into the monster’s eye they rammed it hard—
and bored it round and round in the giant’s eye
till blood came boiling up around that smoking shaft
and the hot blast singed his brow and eyelids round the core
and the broiling eyeball burst—its crackling roots blazed
and hissed. He loosed a hideous roar, the rock walls echoed round
and we scuttled back in terror. The monster wrenched the spike
from his eye and out it came with a red geyser of blood —
he flung it aside with frantic hands, and mad with pain.

On Circe’s enchanted island

She opened her gleaming doors at once and stepped forth,
inviting them all in, and in they went, all innocence.
She ushered them in to sit on high-backed chairs,
then she mixed them a potion—cheese, barley
and pale honey mulled in Pramnian wine—
but into the brew she stirred her wicked drugs
to wipe from their memories any thought of home.
Once they’d drained the bowls she filled, suddenly
she struck with her wand, drove them into her pigsties,
all of them bristling into swine—with grunts,
snouts—even their bodies, yes, and only
the men’s minds stayed steadfast as before.
So off they went to their pens, sobbing, squealing
as Circe flung them acorns, cornel nuts and mast,
common fodder for hogs that root and roll in mud.

Sailing by the sirens

I stopped the ears of my comrades one by one.
They bound me hand and foot in the tight ship—
erect at the mast-block, lashed by ropes to the mast—
We were just offshore as far as a man’s shout can carry,
scudding close, when the Sirens sensed at once a ship
was racing past and burst into their high, thrilling song:
‘Come closer, famous Odysseus—Achaea’s pride and glory—
moor your ship on our coast so you can hear our song!’
So they sent their ravishing voices out across the air
and the heart inside me throbbed to listen longer.
I signaled the crew with frowns to set me free—
they flung themselves at the oars and rowed on harder.
But once we’d left the Sirens fading in our wake,
once we could hear their song no more, their urgent call—
my steadfast crew was quick to remove the wax I’d used
to seal their ears and loosed the bonds that lashed me.

Sailing between Scylla and Charybdis

Now wailing in fear, we rowed on up those straits,
Scylla to starboard, dreaded Charybdis off to port,
her horrible whirlpool gulping the sea-surge down, down
the whole abyss lay bare and the rocks around her roared,
terrible, deafening— bedrock showed down deep, boiling
black with sand— and ashen terror gripped the men.
But now, fearing death, all eyes fixed on Charybdis—
now Scylla snatched six men from our hollow ship,
the toughest, strongest hands I had, and glancing
backward over the decks, searching for my crew
I could see their hands and feet already hoisted,
flailing, high, higher, over my head, look—
wailing down at me, comrades riven in agony,
shrieking out my name for one last time!

Odysseus killing the suitors

With that he trained a stabbing arrow on Antinous …
just lifting a gorgeous golden loving-cup in his hands,
just tilting the two-handled goblet back to his lips,
about to drain the wine—and slaughter the last thing
on the suitor’s mind: who could dream that one foe
in that crowd of feasters, however great his power,
would bring down death on himself, and black doom?
But Odysseus aimed and shot Antinous square in the throat
and the point went stabbing clean through the soft neck and out—
and off to the side he pitched, the cup dropped from his grasp
as the shaft sank home, and the man’s life-blood came spurting
out his nostrils— thick red jets— a sudden thrust of his foot—
he kicked away the table— food showered across the floor,
the bread and meats soaked in a swirl of bloody filth.

Ah, what stories, what stories!

Then, a few years later, when I was 13-14 years old, I caught the bug of trying to figure out the route which Odysseus had taken in the ten years he wandered the seas trying to reach home: just where were the land of the Lotus Easters, the cave of Polyphemus the Cyclops, the rocks on which the Sirens sat and sang, Scylla and Charybdis? Sitting in the quiet school library

I would surreptitiously shove my homework aside – Latin, Greek, French, History, whatever it was – and go get myself the Times Atlas. This was a very large atlas with a lovely dark blue cover. It had maps of every corner of the world, but I zeroed in on the maps of the Mediterranean: the Aegean Sea

the North African coast up to Tunisia

Italy, especially the area around Sicily

and a glance or two across the western Mediterranean to Spain.

I pored over a translation of the Odyssey, which I found in some corner of the library, trying to tease out clues as to travel time and direction. Then, having got some information somewhere about how fast a sailing ship could go, I would examine the maps with furrowed brow, trying to turn this information into travel distance and direction. I read up on competing theories of Odysseus’s itinerary, which had maps looking like this.

I spent hours on this. But eventually reality stepped in. Either my grades were slipping or I realized that it was impossible to work out Odysseus’s itinerary with any level of certainty; I was slipping into the world of cranks. But it wasn’t all for naught: I was left with a love of maps and of the Mediterranean. And from time to time, when I have a chance encounter such as that in the bookshop, good memories flood back of this brief passion of mine.

____________
Escaping the Lotus Eaters: https://art.famsf.org/theodore-van-thulden/ulysses-and-his-companions-land-lotus-eaters-no-5-labors-ulysses-19633015206
Odysseus blinding the Cyclops: https://it.pinterest.com/pin/498914464951224721/?lp=true
Odysseus blinding the Cyclops: https://trecancelle.wordpress.com/2013/04/22/153-sperlongas-archaeological-museum-and-tiberius-grotto/
Circe turning Odysseus’s men into swine: http://www.theoi.com/Gallery/T35.7.html
Odysseus and the Sirens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey
Odysseus and the Sirens-mosaics: http://marmor-mosaike.de/FK035.html
Odysseus and Scylla: https://releaseyourkraken.com/blog-3-kraken-mythology/
Odysseus and Scylla (reconstruction): https://ontravelwriting.com/places-and-people/sperlonga-sculptures-group-ulysses-national-archaeology-museum/
Odysseus kills suitors: http://slideplayer.fr/slide/3720241/
Times Atlas Greece: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Original-Antique-Victorian-Greece-Scutari/dp/B0088WNU8Q
Times Atlas Italy: http://www.stanfords.co.uk/The-Times-Desktop-Atlas-of-the-World_9780008104986
Times Atlas Libya and Egypt: https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~225480~5506188:Egypt-and-Libya,-Plate-85,-V–IV
Map with journey: https://it.pinterest.com/pin/74379831324150781/?lp=true

PIAZZA DUOMO, MILAN

Milan, 7 March 2018

My wife and I frequently have to go up to Piazza Duomo, Cathedral Square, in Milan, where we visit a little store in the underground station to do our printing. We can’t be bothered to buy a home printer, and anyway we need excuses to leave the house – one of the early lessons of retirement.

Our usual route takes us through the back streets, coming out at the piazza’s north-east corner. This is the sight that greets us:

I’m very fond of this view, because it encapsulates something like a thousand years of Milan’s architectural history. There are some even older bits of architecture scattered around the centre of the city, but at this point in time they really are just bits – some mosaic-covered arches here and there, from Milan’s early Christian period, tucked away at the back of what were once 3rd-4th century basilicas; short stretches of the city’s Roman streets, preserved in odd corners of underground stations; that sort of thing. Milan’s visible architecture really only starts in the early 1000’s AD.

Which is more or less where I want to start unpicking my photo. I invite my readers to zoom in on the campanile poking up at the back of the photo.

This is the campanile of the church of San Gottardo, built around 1336 by order of Azzone Visconti, then Lord of Milan. Azzone dedicated the church to Saint Gotthard because this saint was invoked by those who suffered from gout and stones, and poor Azzone suffered from both. The campanile shows the typical details of the Gothic-Lombard style: red brick combined with white marble, the latter often used in a series of small columns at the top of the tower, but also used to pick out details. Here is the campanile from behind, where this lovely combination of red brick and white stone is seen clearly.

The campanile is particular in another way, in being octagonal. It is not unknown for campanili to take this shape, but the campanile of San Gottardo, in its slimness and height, is a particularly elegant example of the form. In its current format, the campanile has no clock, which is a pity because at Azzone’s orders it originally carried Milan’s (and probably Italy’s) first public clock. This caused so much excitement at the time that for centuries afterwards the area around the church was known as Quarter of the Hours.

Next in time is the massive white Duomo, the city’s cathedral, to the left in my photo.

Actually, the building took centuries to complete, so it’s a little difficult to know what century to assign it to. Going by overall style, we can say that it belongs to the late 14th, early 15th Century. And in fact the decision to build the Duomo was taken in 1386 – so some 50 years after San Gottardo was built – by the-then archbishop Antonio da Saluzzo. It was to take the place of a baptistery and two existing cathedrals – the “winter” cathedral of Santa Maria Maggiore and the “summer” cathedral of Santa Tecla (a combination I have never heard of before). Antonio da Saluzzo was thinking big; he wanted a very large church worthy of the great city of Milan. But he was still thinking traditional; he had in mind a brick and marble church along the lines of San Gottardo. But that idea was nixed by Gian Galeazzo Visconti, who had just taken over the lordship of Milan (through a treacherous attack on his uncle Barnabò, who died shortly thereafter in prison; poisoned, it was whispered, by his nephew). Milan, ever since the Roman Empire, when it became the capital city for a while, looked north across the Alps towards the Empire’s border on the Rhine as well as south. Gian Galeazzo wanted to use the new cathedral to firmly anchor Milan to northern Europe through the use of its architectural styles, which at this point meant late gothic in the Rhenish-Bohemian style. Not only did that mean a different architectural style to the ones then in vogue in Italy, it meant a stone-faced building. So the Duomo that we see today is at its core Lombard, made essentially out of brick, but northern European in look because it is faced with stone. And what a lovely stone it is! A white marble with pinkish hues from the quarries of Candoglia close to Lake Maggiore.

To get the style he wanted, Gian Galeazzo imported French architects, who already then behaved in that typically French manner, poo-pooing on the building techniques of their Lombard masons and generally pissing them off. Neverthless, things moved along, and by the time Gian Galeazzo died in 1402 (but not before becoming the first duke of Milan by paying Wenceslaus IV of Bohemia, King of the Romans, 1,000 florins for the privilege), half the church was complete. At that point, the whole building programme ran out of steam. Things crawled along for another century and a half, until Cardinal Carlo Borromeo took over the archbishopric. There was a spurt of activity for several decades until his death, at which point worked slowed to a crawl again. There were endless arguments about what style the facade should have, and numerous designs were proposed, accepted, then abandoned (something which seems to have been a general problem in Italy, as an earlier post of mine attests). This photo shows what the Duomo looked like in about 1745.

As readers can see, not only was the facade of the Duomo a mess, the cathedral itself didn’t yet have that forest of spires which give the building its distinctive look today. It took Napoleon to get the city to make the final push to get over the finish line. In 1805, he wanted to be crowned King of Italy in the cathedral and he wanted it to look worthy of this solemn ceremony. He made the rash promise that the French State would pay for the final works. This never actually happened, but the promise that someone else would pay galvanized the community and by 1819, when this painting was made, the Duomo looked pretty much how it is today.

Work still continued, and strictly speaking even today it is not finished; there are places where statues are still missing. But when the final door in the facade was installed in 1965, a mere 600 years after work was started, the Duomo was officially declared to be finished. Oof!

Next in time, we have the building standing in front of the campanile of San Gottardo.

Unfortunately, because of the city government’s bizarre idea of planting palm trees in the piazza, one can now hardly see the building in question from where I took my photo, so let me insert here another photo which I lifted from the internet.

This is the so-called Palazzo Reale, the Royal Palace, although it almost never had royalty staying there. Since the earliest times, this was the area where the government buildings of the Comune and then the Duchy stood. As rulers of Milan and the surrounding territories succeeded each other – the Viscontis, the Sforzas, the French, the Spaniards, the Austrians, the French again under Napoleon, back to the Austrians once Napoleon was safely locked away on St. Helena – they or the Governors they sent added, demolished, changed, extended, and remodeled the government buildings and the lodgings they inherited to fit their needs and their egos. You would think that the result would be a hodgepodge, but actually a remodeling carried out in the 1760s gave the building its defining characteristics both inside and out. The facade that we see in my photo, the first example of the neoclassical style in Milan, is the fruit of that remodeling. Its architect, Giuseppe Piermarini, had a really hard time with the work. His purported client was Archduke Ferdinand of Austria-Este, a younger son of Empress Maria Theresa of Austria (and brother to Marie-Antoinette, who lost her head in the French Revolution). Maria Theresa had packed him off to Milan to marry Beatrice d’Este and to be Vienna’s governor of Lombardy. Ferdinand had dreams of Piermarini building him a residence worthy of his status (at least as he saw it) and a building that would rival the other stately piles going up around Europe (he particularly wanted to compete with his elder brother’s Schönbrunn summer palace in Vienna). But Piermarini’s real client, because she was paying the bills, was Maria Theresa. She was famously cheeseparing and anyway didn’t see her younger son’s position in quite as grand a light as he did. She just wanted him to suitably represent the Austrian Empire in Lombardy and to leave all the decision-making to Vienna. Somehow Piermarini managed to satisfy everyone without getting the sack or having a nervous breakdown and came up with the austerely elegant building that we see today.

The building experienced numerous further vicissitudes. Its moment of greatest glory was under Napoleon, when Milan was the capital of the Kingdom of northern Italy. After the Austrians came back in 1815, Milan went back to being capital of just Lombardy. With Italian unification, the building was handed over to the House of Savoy, but they rarely used it and eventually sold it to the municipality. It got badly damaged during a bombing raid in World War II. It now houses various museums and exhibition spaces.

Then we go to the building on the far right of my photo.

This was part of a rebuilding campaign decided on in 1860 in the wake of Italian unification. In their enthusiasm, the city fathers proclaimed their intention of radically redesigning the piazza in front of the Duomo, making it bigger and grander, and of creating a new major avenue to celebrate King Victor Emmanuel II, first king of the newly-united Italy. I suspect this urban remodeling plan was also seen as a way of cleaning up some embarrassingly leprous zones of the city centre. For instance, putting up the building in my photo, the southern Palazzo dei Portici, allowed the municipality to clear away a whole neigbourhood located there which went by the name of Rebecchino and which was full of petty criminals and other louche types who preyed on the pilgrims and other assorted tourists who visited the Duomo. The remodeling of the piazza in front of the Duomo took from 1865 to 1873. Its most famous element, which you can’t see in my photo, is the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, which runs from Piazza del Duomo to the piazza in front of the Scala theatre.

But more significantly, I think, the whole piazza in front of the Duomo now has a harmony and elegance which it definitely lacked.

For once, a rebuilding programme decided by a municipal government has left us with something better than what it replaced, especially after a much later municipal government decided to ban advertising billboards on the building opposite the Duomo, Palazzo Carmini.

Which brings us to the final building in my photo, the one squeezed in between the Palazzo Reale and the Palazzo dei Portici.

Again, I think readers need another photo from closer by and without those silly palm trees in the way to appreciate the building.

It is a building in the Fascist style, the competition for its design being held in 1937 and construction of the winning design starting in 1938. I don’t know if there is a formal definition of the Fascist style, but these buildings tend to have a “Roman” look to them: the use of white stone facing and of semi-circular arches. They also tend to have little external decoration other than massive, heroic-looking statues and bas reliefs. I don’t know if De Chirico was a Fascist, but many of his paintings have such building in them.

This particular building goes by the name of Arengario, which is an old Italian word first used in the Middle Ages to describe municipal buildings. The root of the word, “aringare”, is the same as the English word “harangue”, and in fact Arengari were buildings from which the municipal authorities addressed (or perhaps harangued) the local citizenry. In later centuries, the term Arengario fell out of use, presumably because municipal authorities couldn’t be bothered any more with the direct democracy of addressing the people. But since the Fascists, Mussolini in the lead, liked to harangue the luckless populace, they brought the word back into use. As a result, a number of Facist-built Arengari, Milan being one of them, are to be found throughout Italy. I presume the idea was that the Fascist cadre would adress Milan’s citizenry drawn up in the piazza below.

The winning design actually had as its overall objective to balance the triumphal arch at the beginning of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele directly across the piazza, which is why there are two more-or-less identical buildings flanking the road which passes through them, rather than just the one you would need if all you were interested in was haranguing the crowds. The idea was that the road between the buildings would lead to another piazza (today Piazza Diaz) where the country’s modern (Fascist) companies would build their headquarters.

In the event, World War II intervened, construction was halted, what had been built was damaged during the bombing raid that damaged the Palazzo Reale next door, and the municipal authorities found themselves after the war with a damaged, unfinished Fascist building on their hands. The balcony from which the Fascist haranguing was meant to have taken place was quietly demolished and the rest of the buildings were completed by 1956. After various uses, the building next to the Palazzo Reale now houses Milan’s museum of 20th Century art. I highly recommend this museum to any of my readers who happen to be passing though Milan.

Well, that finishes my little tour of Piazza Duomo. Without wanting to sound too much like the local tourism office (which used to be housed in the Arengario), I highly recommend my readers who come to Italy to stop off in Milan before they hasten on to Florence, Rome, and Venice. A stop in Milan can be highly rewarding – in my case, it got me my wife.

________________

Overview and zoom-in photos: mine
San Gottardo: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiesa_di_San_Gottardo_in_Corte
Duomo 1745 circa: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duomo_di_Milano#Contesto_urbanistico
Duomo 1819: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piazza_del_Duomo_(Milano)
Palazzo Reale: http://ciaomilano.it/e/sights/preale.asp
Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galleria_Vittorio_Emanuele_II
Piazza del Duomo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRUXl0wyvLY
Palazzo Carmini, 1970s: https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palazzo_Carminati
Arengario: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/339177415661775996/?lp=true
De Chirico painting: https://www.arteallimite.com/backup_2017/en/2016/07/la-pintura-metafisica-de-giorgio-de-chirico/

SPARKLING RED ITALIAN WINES

Milan, 1 March 2018

Many, many years ago, when I first came to Italy, my wife to-be introduced me to a wine from the Oltrepo’ Pavese, that tongue of land in the south of Lombardy wedged between its sister regions of Piedmont, Liguria, and Emilia-Romagna. It was a Bonarda, a red wine. A sparkling red wine, to be precise.

This was a revelation to me. I had never known that red wines could be sparkling. Certainly, in France, land of my mother, I had never come across such a wine. It seemed to me almost a heresy to have red bubbly. But I was made to understand that Italy had a long tradition of sparkling red wines, so I tried it.

I can’t say I was bowled over. But I think that was simply an extension of my distaste for sparkling white wine. My New Year’s Eves have never been made jollier by having to quaff bubbly, and I try to avoid the stuff whenever I can. Over the years, I’ve experimented with various sparkling Italian reds, and it’s always been the same. The one exception is the sparkling sweet red wines, good as dessert wines. Lambrusco is probably the most well-known of these, its vineyards clustered around the town of Modena in Reggio-Emilia.

But there is also Brachetto d’Acqui from around Acqui Terme in Piedmont, a town known also for its thermal baths.

And then there is Sangue di Giuda, the Blood of Judas, made on the hills around Broni, a fairly nondescript place in the Oltrepo’ Pavese.

It was trying a bottle of Sangue di Giuda recently that set me off onto writing this post. As I sat there rolling this sweet wine around my mouth, I couldn’t understand how it could possibly have been given this name. I mean, the man who sold Christ to his enemies for thirty silver talents, who betrayed him with a kiss, the man whom early European artists depicted like so:

this man’s blood must have been dark, bitter, acidic, thoroughly undrinkable! In contrast, Sangue di Giuda tastes sweet and happy, and like all the sweet sparkling red wines, has a lovely dark red colour and a wonderfully dark pink foam.

The locals have come up with a thoroughly preposterous story to explain the name. According to them, Christ in his immense goodness resurrected Judas after he’d committed suicide by hanging himself, to give him a chance to redeem himself. Judas turned up – what a coincidence! – in Broni. The townspeople recognized him and wanted to kill him. Judas saved himself by curing the surrounding vineyards of some disease they had, and the Bronians, in their joy, named the wine after his blood. A completely silly story! I prefer an alternative explanation, which has it that the name was given to the wine by local monks, who believed that drinking the wine would lead you to betray yourself and do naughty things, especially of a sexual nature.

Or perhaps the name can be linked to a similar idea that floated around in Champagne, at a time when no-one had any idea of the chemistry behind wine-making. The seemingly random process by which bottles of wine sometimes turned out sparkling and, worse, could blow up, often in a chain reaction with one bottle setting off the others, was seen as the work of the devil. It’s no great step to go from devil to Judas.

Whatever the explanation, Sangue di Giuda is a delicious wine, and its grapes grow in a zone visible from the train line and motorway which lead from Milan to Genoa. Over the years, as we have sped by on our way to the sea, I have gazed at those vine-covered hills, thinking to myself that one day, one day, my wife and I would go for a nice little trip into those hills which so remind me of the vine-draped hills of the Beaujolais, home to my French ancestors, where I spent many a happy summer a-roaming. I have made a mental itinerary for this trip, and I insert here a map with its trace.

As readers can see, after starting in the Piedmontese pre-Alps, it would meander along the northern face of the Apennines. Taking sparkling red wines as our guide, we could start in Piedmont, at Alto Monferrato, whose surrounding vines make Barbera del Monferrato DOC frizzante.

After a glass of this Barbera (it would seem that Monferrato is the birthplace of the Barbera grape), we would move on to Acqui Terme.

I’m sure we could find a nice cafè on whose terrace we could dreamily sip on a glass of Brachetto d’Acqui.

After which, we would curve into the Oltrepo’ Pavese, home to Sangue di Giuda, but also to that Oltrepo’ Pavese Bonarda which I first tried so many years ago.

We would loop back around into the Colli Piacentini, the hills behind Piacenza.

We could find somewhere there a welcoming taverna and settle down to a nice glass of Colli Piacentini Gutturnio DOC frizzante.

After which, we would make our way along to the zone behind Modena.

There, we could ease ourselves into seats at a bar and order ourselves a glass or two of Lambrusco. Which one to try? Lambrusco di Sorbara? Or Lambrusco Salamino di Santa Croce, perhaps. Or, why not?, Lambrusco Grasparossa di Castelvetro.

Finally, we would wend our way, unsteadily no doubt by this point and hoping not to meet a police patrol with breathalyzer at the ready, to the Colli Bolognesi, the hills behind Bologna.

There, we could sink down onto a banquette in a restaurant and while we eat we could finish with a Barbera just as we started with one, trying a Barbera Colli Bolognesi frizzante.

Yes, I think this will do nicely. I will work on my wife to turn this little trip into reality. We can think of doing it in May perhaps, when the weather is good but not too hot.

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Glass of sparkling red wine: https://www.vinook.it/vino-rosso/curiosita-vino-rosso/il-vino-frizzante.asp
Modena: http://misure2017.ing.unimore.it/Modena.html
Acqui Terme: https://www.gogoterme.com/terme-di-acqui.html
Broni: http://ilpattodeibuongustai.it/broni-il-re-dei-paesi
Judas: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/biteintheapple/judas/
Sparkling red wine with foam: https://culturecheesemag.com/cheese-pairings/great-28-pairings-cheese-sparkling-red-wines
Medieval love-making: https://it.pinterest.com/jamieadairwrite/medieval-love-making/?lp=true
Northern Italy: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Northern_Italy_topographic_map-blank.png
Alto Monferrato: http://www.terredavino.it/en/il-territorio/lalto-monferrato-acqui-terme/
Acqui Terme vitigni: https://www.vinook.it/uva-e-vitigni/vitigni-rossi/brachetto-d-acqui.asp
Oltrepo’ Pavese: https://www.contevistarino.it/en/the-vineyards/
Colli Piacentini: http://www.rgvini.it/it/colli-piacentini
Lambrusco: https://www.vinook.it/vino-rosso/vino-rosso-emiliano-romagnolo/lambrusco-grasparossa-di-castelvetro.asp
Colli Bolognesi: http://www.spreafotografia.it/photo-7724-ma-come-bello-andare-in-giro-sui-colli-bolognesi.html