Author: Abellio

I like writing, but I’ve spent most of my life writing about things that don’t particularly interest me. Finally, as I neared the age of 60, I decided to change that. I wanted to write about things that interested me. What really interests me is beauty. So I’ve focused this blog on beautiful things. I could be writing about a formally beautiful object in a museum. But it could also be something sitting quietly on a shelf. Or it could be just a fleeting view that's caught my eye, or a momentary splash of colour-on-colour at the turn of the road. Or it could be a piece of music I've just heard. Or a piece of poetry. Or food. And I’m sure I’ve missed things. But I’ll also write about interesting things that I hear or read about. Isn't there a beauty about things pleasing to the mind? I started just writing, but my wife quickly persuaded me to include photos. I tried it and I liked it. So my posts are now a mix of words and pictures, most of which I find on the internet. What else about me? When I first started this blog, my wife and I lived in Beijing where I was head of the regional office of the UN Agency I worked for. So at the beginning I wrote a lot about things Chinese. Then we moved to Bangkok, where again I headed up my Agency's regional office. So for a period I wrote about Thailand and South-East Asia more generally. But we had lived in Austria for many years before moving to China, and anyway we both come from Europe my wife is Italian while I'm half English, half French - so I often write about things European. Now I'm retired and we've moved back to Europe, so I suppose I will be writing a lot more about the Old Continent, interspersed with posts we have gone to visit. What else? We have two grown children, who had already left the nest when we moved to China, but they still figure from time to time in my posts. I’ll let my readers figure out more about me from reading what I've written. As these readers will discover, I really like trees. So I chose a tree - an apple tree, painted by the Austrian painter Gustav Klimt - as my gravatar. And I chose Abellio as my name because he is the Celtic God of the apple tree. I hope you enjoy my posts. http://ipaintingsforsale.com/UploadPic/Gustav Klimt/big/Apple Tree I.jpg

THREE DAYS IN VERONA

Milan, 12 February 2026

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I went on a quick three-day trip to Verona. We’d made a lightning visit there a few years ago, when we had a couple of hours to wait at the station for our train connection. I have no memory of that visit other than standing in front of a balcony purported to be the one where Juliet stood while talking to Romeo (“O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” etc.) and wondering what on earth the fuss was about – as far as we could tell, 90% of the tourists flocking to Verona had come to see this.

This time, we were determined to keep completely away from anything related to the two “star-cross’d lovers”, and we succeeded admirably. I have to say, we were greatly aided in this by relying on an old and well-thumbed guidebook of the Touring Club Italiano, which my parents-in-law had bought way back when.

It had been published in 1958, long, long before the current instagram- and TikTok-fuelled hysteria about Romeo and Juliet, and so had not a word to say about them. For the first two days, we faithfully followed the two itineraries suggested in the guide, while we spent the third day visiting a couple of art museums.

So, “let us go and make our visit”, as T.S. Eliot intoned.

Since our Flixbus from Milan arrived at around lunchtime, we actually started proceedings by going to lunch – always good to start a visit on a full stomach! My wife had identified a trattoria that looked interesting, the Osteria A Le Petarine, at the far end of the old city. To work up an appetite, we walked up there. That took us through Porta Borsari, an ancient city gate that started life as the main gate in the city’s ancient Roman walls.

We continued up corso Porta Borsari, the old decumanus maximus of Roman Verona, and now a pleasant pedestrianised street.

After a few dog legs through the narrow streets of the old town, we finally arrived at the trattoria.

My wife was not persuaded by her choice, but I had an excellent Pastisada de caval, a dish of horse meat stew laid on a bed of polenta.

After lunch, we headed over to our hotel, dropped off our bags, and sallied forth on our first itinerary. This took us first to piazza delle Erbe, which has been the centre of Verona’s civic life since Roman times, when this was the forum.

It’s unfortunate that the square has been invaded by stalls selling tourist tat. It’s difficult to get a clear view of the square now.

The itinerary instructed us to next take a small street leading off the square, which took us to the Arche Scaligere, the tombs of the Della Scala family, which was Verona’s most famous family, ruling the city in the Middle Ages.

The itinerary then led us to Santa Anastasia, the first of four churches we were to visit. We would have visited a few more churches, but they were closed the day we tried to visit them (I think my wife was quite relieved by that; it is possible to have too much of a good thing).

Santa Anastasia’s facade, the first part of the church we saw, was nothing to write home about, and in fact I later read that it was never completed (a problem in Italy which I’ve complained about in an earlier post).

The inside was a different story: tall, airy, and with a ceiling painted with a vegetation motif. It quite put a bounce in my step to see all that exuberance on the ceiling.

Of the internal details, there were a couple of frescoes and paintings by Worthy Artists, but the one that caught my eye was these two holy water fonts. I’ve never seen any fonts quite like these.

The itinerary next took us to the Duomo. It was early evening by now, so our visit was hampered by a lack of light. Whether it was that or simply that there wasn’t much to see in the Duomo, I have only vague memories of it. Nevertheless, I’ll throw in a few photos from the internet.
The exterior:

A view of the inside:

The one detail that caught my attention, this semicircular choir screen that encloses the presbytery:

After which, we decided to call it a day (or rather night since by now it was pitch black) for our sightseeing.

But we weren’t ready for bed yet! My wife had got us tickets to a show where a dance troupe danced to Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps.

The music was lovely, the dancing rather less so. Nevertheless, it was a very pleasant end to the day.

The next day saw us pick up the second itinerary a few streets away from our hotel. The first stop was the church of San Fermo Maggiore.

It’s actually two churches in one. The lower church is the oldest. Its low ceiling gave the space an intimate feeling.

The most interesting detail was the frescoes which decorated many of the pillars. My wife and I agreed that this 11th Century fresco, of the Baptism of Christ, was the most remarkable.

But I also liked this fresco from the same period, of the Virgin Mary breastfeeding the baby Jesus.

We also agreed that this modern sculpture, of the Annunciation, was wonderful.

The normal iconography is something along these lines: an angel – obvious because of its wings – on one side, announcing the message, and the Virgin Mary, modestly attired and sitting or standing, reading a book, on the other (I’ve chosen the Annunciation by Pinturicchio as my example).

But here you have what looks like two young women, adolescent girls almost, one, the angel, whispering the message to the other, the Virgin Mary. In case any readers are interested, it is by the South Tyrolian sculptor Hermann Josef Runggaldier.

We then climbed the stairs to the upper church. After the intimacy of the lower church, the space felt majestic.

The most remarkable aspect of this church was its wooden ceiling.

It was built in the first half of the 1300s and by some miracle it has survived until now (I think with melancholy of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, whose centuries-old forest of oak logs in its ceiling caught fire back in 2019 and nearly burned the whole cathedral down).

This funerary monument for Niccolò Brenzoni, from the early 1400s, was also arresting.

The itinerary now took us to the River Adige, which encloses the old town in a large hairpin bend.

It had us cross the river and walk along its bank. We got to admire the church of Santa Anastasia and its campanile from the back, much nicer than from the front.

We passed the old Roman bridge, much remodeled over the centuries (and partially destroyed by the Germans, who blew it up when they retreated out of Verona in 1945).

We passed the old Roman theatre which had been carved into the side of the hills running alongside the river. It has been turned into a modern outdoor theater.

But this is what it looked like to us as we walked past it, some mouldering walls with houses built on top of it.

The skyline was now dominated by the church San Giorgio in Braida, which sits next to the river.

Alas! A visit was not possible because the church was closed. No matter! We admired the view of the Duomo across the river.

And since we were beginning to feel a bit peckish, my wife used this pause to find another trattoria in the vicinity where we could have lunch. She discovered the Osteria A La Carega, located down a small road which we took just after we had recrossed the Adige.

We shared a pasta e fagioli as a first, after which I had a trippa alla Parmigiana while my wife chose a cotechino con puré. Delicious!

Nourished and refreshed, we picked up the itinerary again. It now took us to piazza Bra, a large square along one side of which stands what is probably Verona’s most well-known monument, the ancient Roman amphitheatre.

We couldn’t actually see much of the amphitheatre since workers were busily getting it ready for the closing ceremony of the Olympic Winter Games. The square itself is very pleasant, with a row of cafes along one side (mostly tourist traps, unfortunately)

And with a little garden in the middle (we see the wall of the amphitheatre on the left).

The itinerary now took us back to the river. We skirted the Castelvecchio (we would be visiting its art museum tomorrow) and admired the view of the ponte Scaligero over the River Adige, behind the castle.

As we discovered the next day at the art museum, it was a view that had been painted by Bernardo Bellotto in about 1745.

Little seems to have changed in the intervening centuries.

The itinerary drew us along the river and then through a maze of little streets to the church of San Zeno. As we entered into the piazza, this was the view that greeted us.

In particular, the main door was fantastic (although you only see it from inside the church). It is made up of 48 bronze tiles, produced in the 11th and 12th Centuries.

Each tile represents a story about Jesus or, more rarely, Saint Zeno. Here are close-ups of a couple of the tiles, just to whet readers’ appetite. From left to right, they represent the washing of the disciples’ feet by Jesus, and the Last Supper.

The interior was light and airy.

There was a hodgepodge of frescoes on the walls, all very pleasant.

But the fresco that really caught my eye was a giant St. Christopher.

It was nice to see this gentle giant again after my sightings of him in one of our hikes in Austria last summer. No doubt he was there to greet pilgrims from Central Europe who had come over the Brenner Pass and walked down the valley of the Adige River, on their way to Rome or Jerusalem.

Our visit to San Zeno brought us to the end of the second itinerary. We celebrated with a nice cup of tea in a bar across from the church, and then slowly made our way back to our hotel.

On our final day in Verona, we visited two museums, both dedicated to Veronese artists. We started with the museum in Castelvecchio, which was once the castle of the Della Vecchia family.

The collection goes from the Middle Ages to the 18th Century. My wife and I both agreed that the statuary from the Middle Ages was the most interesting. Here is a sample:

A most expressive St. Catherine

I’ve never seen a Medieval statue look at you in that way!

Christ on the cross

I’ve never seen such a suffering Christ!

A Sant’Anna Metterza, a formalised composition where the Virgin Mary, holding baby Jesus, sits on the lap of her mother, St. Anne.

I’ve always found this such an improbable situation: what grown woman would ever sit on the lap of her mother!? But it was a popular subject. Famously, Leonardo da Vinci painted a version.

The equestrian statue of Cangrande Della Scala, the greatest of the Della Scala family.

From the broad smile on his face, Cangrande must have been a very merry fellow.

After the visit, it was time for lunch. We chose a restaurant near Castelvecchio, but unfortunately it turned out to be a tourist trap, so I won’t bother to report on what we ate. We then walked back up to the Piazza delle Erbe; the second museum we visited, the Galleria d’Arte Moderna Achille Forti, was installed in the old Palazzo della Ragione, which gives on the square.

It covered the 19th and the first part of the 20th Centuries. To be frank, there wasn’t much in the collection that struck me. This statue, of a young woman wearing a hat typical of the 1920s, was one of the few pieces that caught my attention.

Otherwise, a couple of paintings which showed views of the city from the top of the hills above the old Roman theatre made me regret that our old guidebook hadn’t included an itinerary taking us up into those hills. Here is a view of the city from the top of those hills.

With that, our visit to Verona was over. We walked down another of the city’s very pleasant pedestrianised streets, via Mazzini, which runs from piazza delle Erbe to piazza Bra.

And then on down Corso Porta Nuova, a broad avenue running through the newer part of the city.

And so back to the bus stop to take our Flixbus back to Milan.

SEAPLANES OVER LAKE COMO

Sori, 31 January 2026

One of the gentler walks my wife and I take from Como is one which takes us along the lakeside all the way to Cernobbio. We choose it when one (or both) of us are feeling tired or have a pain somewhere in our ageing bodies or when it’s really too cold to venture higher up on the hills around the lake.

We start at the train station of Como Lago (which is a charming rinky-dink little station with an entrance in Liberty style, much nicer than the rather grim main station at Como).

We walk along Como’s newly developed lake front (which will look very nice when the newly-planted trees have grown).

We pass the town’s war memorial (which I must confess I find rather brutalist).

We pass the soccer stadium which is home to the town’s home team, Como 1907 (which looks quite nice in this aerial view, although all we see are the forbidding outer walls).

We pass the site of the Aero Club Como, which offers scenic flights around the lake in seaplanes.

We then walk along a walkway that hugs the lakeside and takes us past a series of neoclassical villas giving onto the lake.

The walkway ends at a busy main road. We walk along the road, with lovely views across the lake to our right.

The road brings us to the old village of Tavernola (now a drab suburb of Como), where we branch off along a long straight road that passes the Liberty-style villa Bernasconi, once the property of a rich manufacturer of silk and now a museum.

After which we finally arrive in Cernobbio.

At this time of the year, when it’s too cold to eat a picnic outside, we’ll often treat ourselves to lunch at the Osteria del Beuc.

The last time I was there, I had a magnificent osso buco with risotto.

One of the pleasures of the section of the walk along the busy main road (apart from getting to nod hello to a mouldering statue of St. John Nepomuk down by the water’s edge) is watching the seaplanes from Aero Club Como taking off and landing.

I’m very fond of these seaplanes. There’s something quite beautiful about these little planes skimming across the water, their engines at full throttle, finally rising off the water surface and soaring up, up, up

and then banking to fly along the lake, the drone of their engines bouncing off the hills (I love the noise of prop engines, so much nicer than the ear-splitting whine of jet engines).

During the years between World Wars I and II, the use of seaplanes flourished: the “airfields” were free, compared to the high cost of building airfields on land. Various commercial lines were established, giving rise to some wonderful poster art.

Things changed dramatically after the Second World War. Many of the military airfields which had been built during the war were no longer needed and could be turned over to civilian use. Suddenly, land-based airfields were available cheap, and so the main competitive advantage of seaplanes disappeared. On top of that, land-based planes were much less affected by weather (even small waves could halt seaplane flights) and they flew faster (the aerodynamics of seaplanes are poorer). The result was a swift decline in the use of seaplanes, which are now squeezed into a few niche uses, like aerial firefighting, access to undeveloped or roadless areas which have numerous lakes, air transport around archipelagos …

… as well, of course, as the offering of scenic flights over dramatic lakes.

In the late 1940s, 1947 I’m guessing, My parents took what was probably one of the last long-distance seaplane flights offered by BOAC, which ran between Sydney and Southampton. They boarded at Karachi and stopped off at Bahrain, Cairo, Augusta in Sicily, and Marseilles, before arriving in Southampton.

The scene of their arrival in Southampton would have looked something like this.

Once, in a moment of madness, as we watched a seaplane gracefully lift off Lake Como, I excitedly suggested to my wife that we take one of the scenic flights offered by the Aereo Club. A check of the prices soon put paid to that idea. Ah well, another experience of my parents which I will never share.

IL QUARTO STATO

Milan, 14 January 2026

There is an expression in Italian which goes like this: “Whoever does X on the first of the year will do X for the whole of the year”, where X can be anything you would like to do (or should do) throughout the year. Well, it wasn’t the first the year, but it was pretty close when my wife and I visited an art exhibition, hopefully a herald of many more visits to art exhibitions during 2026 .

The exhibition in question, at Milan’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna, was not one of those blockbuster affairs covering an incredibly famous artist and attracting droves of visitors. It centred on the Italian artist Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo, who was born in 1868 and died in 1907. Here is a self-portrait of the man, a painting which greeted us when we stepped into the first room of the exhibition.

I will perfectly understand if any of my readers confess to never having heard of this artist. I had never heard of him before I came to Italy, and I was to live in Italy quite a number of years before I came across him. If he is known at all, it is because of one, magnificent, painting. It was in the exhibition, but at the very end. So let me first show my readers a selection of his works that my wife and I passed as we wandered along through the exhibition. The paintings were hung in more or less chronological order, so we could appreciate how his style developed over the years.

An old man, a certain Signore Giuseppe Giani, staring out at us solemnly.

Executed in 1891, the painting’s formal title is “Il Mediatore”, which I think would be translated as broker or agent. Not sure what Signor Giani would have brokered: land deals, perhaps? Very classical in its execution, I would say.

“Panni al Sole”, Washing in the Sun, painted a few years later, in 1894-5, when Pellizza was intensively exploring Divisionism, Italy’s response to Pointillism.

Those predominantly yellow hues in the painting remind me of an exhibition of Dutch pointillists which my wife and I saw a few years ago in Vienna. Unfortunately, although Pellizza used divisionism in all of his paintings from this moment on, he didn’t follow the more modern painters of the age. His subjects always tended to the sucrose. The exhibition notes called this style Symbolism. Maybe they were full of symbolism, but I couldn’t get away from the chocolate-box feeling of his paintings. Here we have “Speranze Deluse”, Dashed Hopes, painted in 1894, so at the same time as “Panni al Sole”.

And here we have a series of three paintings , all titled “l’Amore nella Vita”, Love in Life, painted between 1901 and 1903.

The summer of young love, the autumn of middle-aged love, the winter of old love. As I say, rather sucrose – although as a person who is now an oldie I gazed at the old love and saw something I suppose we oldies all fear, the loss of the partner of a lifetime and the loneliness of the last years.

After all the sugar, it was relief to find this painting in the next room, a sober rendition of snow, from 1905-06.

Turning around, this painting from 1904 had me pause. It is of the rising sun, at that moment when it appears over the horizon in a flash of brilliance. I feel Pellizza captured that moment very well (and by the way, his divisionist style is very noticeable in the sun’s rays).

And so we moved on to the exhibition’s last painting, completed in 1901, the majestic “Quarto Stato”, The Fourth Estate.

A small photo like this doesn’t do justice to the original, which is 3m high by 5.5m wide. Nevertheless, it will have to do. The painting showcases workers marching, calmly and confidently, for their rights and into a bright future. The title takes up the idea that the proletariat which the Industrial Revolution created had become a fourth estate, adding to the three estates of aristocracy, clergy, and bourgeoisie which existed in pre-revolutionary France.

Initially, the painting was ignored. The Italian bourgeois, the ones who went to exhibitions and bought paintings, were turned off by a painting with such obvious socialist connotations. It stayed in the family’s possession. Then, in the early 1920s, at a time when Milan’s municipal government was strongly left-leaning, the government raised money to buy it. It was hung in Milan’s castle, the Castello Sforzesco, for all the world to see. Then, during the Fascist period, when Socialism was a dirty word, it was quietly rolled up and consigned to the castle’s basement, only to be fished out after the war and hung again, this time in Milan’s main municipal office. After which, it became very popular in left-leaning circles. Bernardo Bertolucci, for instance, in his film Novecento, which is a study of the agricultural working class in northern Italy over the first fifty years or so of the 20th Century, used a close-up of the painting as a backdrop for the film’s opening credits

while the painting itself acted as a background to the film’s poster.

Others on the left used the painting as a template to create their own images. Here is one, a group of people celebrating May 1st. They hold a red flag and have obviously copied the Quarto Stato in their composition.

There have also been less serious uses of Quarto Stato. Dylan Dog, for instance, an iconic horror-mystery comics series very popular in Italy, used Quarto Stato’s composition many times over on its covers. Here is one from 1991.

It’s even been used in publicity. Here is an ad for Lavazza coffee from 2000.

I’m not sure what Pellizza would have thought of these trivialisations of his painting. He was a sincere Socialist. But I suppose all publicity is good publicity.

Just to finish Pellizza’s story. His wife – she is the model for the woman with the baby in the foreground of the painting – died in childbirth in 1907, together with the child. Soon after, Pellizza’s father died. In anguish, Pellizza committed suicide; he was just shy of his 39th birthday. Who knows what paintings he might have gone on to produce?

I’ve seen that Volpedo, the little town where he was born and where he spent much of his time, is quite easy to get to from Milan. One day, when the weather is warmer, I will try to persuade my wife to go there. It’s been crowned as one of Italy’s Most Beautiful Villages. I’m sure we can also find a nice hike to do in the surrounding hills.

In the meantime, we need to keep a weather eye out for other interesting art exhibitions to get us through the cold months.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Milan, 31 December 2025

I should have got this message out on Christmas day, but my wife and I were up in the mountains of Alto Adige, celebrating Christmas with our grandson, his parents, and our son. But now they have all left, our son to Morocco with his friends, our daughter, partner and our little grandson back home to Los Angeles. So I take this occasion on the last day of the year to wish all my readers far and wide a happy new year!

I took this photo in the village of Rovenna, high up above Lake Como, on a hike my wife and I did a few weeks ago – it captures the modern spirit of the season well, I think.

See you all in 2026!

TOM STOPPARD

Milan, 1 December 2025

As I appeared bleary-eyed for breakfast a day ago, my wife – who normally gets out of bed before me – announced, “Tom Stoppard is dead”. How old, I asked? 88 she replied. A good age. In my advancing years, I read obituaries more and more frequently (such interesting lives people have lived!), and I have noted that many of those who are graced with an obituary in the newspaper I read shuffle off this mortal coil in their 80s. So, as I say, a good age.

For any of my readers who are not familiar with him, Tom Stoppard was a playwright, primarily for the stage, but also for radio, for TV, and for film (as a screenwriter in this case). Perhaps they will have seen the film Shakespeare in Love, whose screenplay Tom Stoppard co-wrote (and for which he shared a screenwriting Oscar).

Famous playwrights have been popping off, and I’ve never written about them. So if I write a post about Tom Stoppard’s death, it’s because he holds a special place in my heart. Many, many years ago, when I was 17 to be precise, I played a lead role in the play that made Stoppard’s name, “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”. I have preciously kept the edition of the play we used as a script. It is now battered and worn from following us around on our countless moves over the intervening decades.

The play is a riff on Shakespeare’s “Hamlet”. Stoppard has taken two very secondary characters from that play, who are friends of Hamlet’s from way back, and has turned them into the protagonists, but of what exactly is never really clear, to them or to the audience. They have been summoned to the court of Denmark by the king, but they don’t know why. Essentially, the whole play is happening in the wings of the play “Hamlet”, with R & G passing the time discussing various topics and waiting for someone to explain to them what is going on; this aspect of the play has strong echoes of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot”.

From time to time, apparently to give them the explanations they crave for, scenes from “Hamlet” roll onto the stage and our two hapless friends find themselves taking part in those scenes.

They are such minor characters that the king and queen, as we see in this photo are constantly getting them mixed up. Then the “Hamlet” scenes roll off the stage and R & G find themselves alone again and even more befuddled than before. Eventually, after a hilariously farcical scene on a ship with pirates, and without really understanding why, they die. The dialogue is absolutely scintillating, a hallmark of Stoppard’s. In fact, a common criticism of his plays is that there is too much head and too little heart. Perhaps, but his dialogue is among the best I have ever heard or read.

I played Rosencrantz, although I have to say that over the decades my memory faded and, like the king and queen of Denmark, I got confused about who I had played; I had to re-read the script again to be sure. I have no photos of myself, alas, in this performance. I’m sure photos were taken, but they will have remained in one of the albums which littered, and no doubt still litter, the school theatre’s green room. Instead, I’ll throw in some photos of some of the well-known actors who have played R & G, to show what good company I’m in. Here we have Daniel Radcliffe and Joshua McGuire playing the two roles.

I’m chuffed to see that Racliffe played Rosencrantz.

Here we have Gary Oldman and Tim Roth.

I’m equally chuffed to see that Oldman (whom my wife and I have been watching religiously in “Slow Horses”) played Rosencrantz.

And here we have Adrian Scarborough and Simon Russell Beale.

Scarborough plays Rosencrantz, I’m pleased to see – my wife and I watched him recently playing a police inspector solving hideous murders.

Looking back, I realise that playing Rosencrantz was the apex of my acting career. I performed it in my last year at school, and my subsequent acting career at university was a relatively swift decline into secondary Rosencrantz-and-Guildenstern-like roles. The fact is, there were much better actors than me at university. I had briefly entertained the idea of becoming a professional actor, but I quickly realised that unless I wanted to spend much of my life out of work I had better find something else to do.

Funnily enough, I have never seen another of Stoppard’s plays in the intervening decades, although I have read a good number – that scintillating dialogue. I have to say, I turned off play-going after I stopped acting; I was spending too much time thinking about how I would have directed the plays I was watching. But maybe I could at least watch on YouTube the one film Stoppard himself directed – which happens to be of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead”. That would surely be a fitting way for me to remember this great playwright.

SPINY PUMPKIN

Florence, 21 November 2025

A week or so ago, my wife and I were doing a gentle hike on Lake Como. We’ve both been a bit under the weather, so a hike with none of the brutal climbs required of many of the hikes around Lake Como were just what we needed. We had also done a few other, rougher hikes along the lake in the previous days and had discovered to our dismay that heavy rains back in late September had made a number of them impassable. So as I say, a nice gentle hike along a well-kept path was just what we needed. For any of my readers who might want to know which hike we did, it was the “Via Verde”, which runs between the villages of Moltrasio and Laglio (and is not to be confused with the rival “Green Way”, which runs further north along the same shoreline of the lake). Here is a photo of the typical view one enjoys along this path at this time of the year.

Towards the end, we were walking into the village of Carate Urio when we came across a table set up along the path and on which were placed two crates holding a dozen or so of these strange-looking vegetables – or were they fruits?

My wife trained her iPhone camera on one of these vegetables (or fruits?) and promptly identified it. In Italian, it is called “zucca spinosa”, or spiny pumpkin. They were certainly spiny, but the relationship to pumpkins wasn’t immediately obvious. And being a pumpkin, it’s sort of both a fruit and vegetable: botanically a fruit but culinarily a vegetable given the way it is eaten (as we shall see in a minute). For the purposes of this post, I will henceforth refer to it as a vegetable.

Different parts of the world have different names for this vegetable. It’s called chayote in the US. Here we have a lady from Louisiana showing off two of them (although, reflecting that State’s French heritage, they are often called mirlitons there, as they are in nearby Haiti).

The Americans have actually just borrowed the Spanish name for the vegetable; we’ll come back to the Spanish name in a minute.

It’s called chocho or chuchu or some variant thereof in places as varied as Mauritius, India, Sri Lanka, Brazil, and Jamaica. This is thought to be the Pidgin English version of chayote. Here we have a farmer in Assam with his crop of chocho.

The vegetable is called choko in Cantonese (am I wrong in thinking that this ultimately derives from chocho?), which later became the name used in Australia and New Zealand thanks to the Cantonese who emigrated there in the 19th Century. Here we have an Australian proudly showing off the chokos growing in his garden (note that his variety is without spines).

Meanwhile, in the islands of the eastern Caribbean, the vegetable is called christophine or christophene. Here we have early risers in a market in the island of Martinique searching for their choice christophenes.

There are more names used for this spiny pumpkin, but the ones I’ve cited give us an indication of where it originally came from. It is one of those foodstuffs which make up the great Columbian exchange: that massive movement of foodstuffs, people and diseases which occurred after Christopher Columbus stumbled across the Americas. I’ve mentioned this exchange several times already in these posts, when writing about the prickly pear, the Jerusalem artichoke, vanilla, and turkeys. And now I can add to the list the spiny pumpkin, or christophene (which reflects the connection to Christopher Columbus), or chayote, which is a Spanish transliteration of the Nahuatl name chayohtli. In fact, modern studies indicate that the chayote was first cultivated in Mesoamerica, between southern Mexico (in the states of Oaxaca, Puebla, and Veracruz) and Honduras, with the most genetic diversity being present in both Mexico and Guatemala. Here, we have a field of chayote in Mexico.

Just to finish my elongated riff on names, another name for the vegetable which is used in Guatemala and El Salvador is güisquil or huisquil, which is derived from another Nahuatl name for it, huitzli. Here we have a Guatemalan singing the praises of the güisquil.

But to come back to my wife and me, standing in front of that table on the Via Verde. The vegetables’ anonymous grower was offering them for free to passers-by. I was hesitant, but my wife was bolder. She reminded me that we were having some old friends over for dinner the next day, why not try the spiny pumpkins out on them? But we don’t know how to prepare them, I objected. My wife waved off that objection, immediately doing a search on the internet. Hey presto, she found what sounded like a pretty easy recipe, explained in a video by a lady from Calabria in southern Italy, who mentioned in passing that the spiny pumpkin was particularly popular in her region – readers should note this link of the spiny pumpkin to Calabria, as we shall come back to it in a minute. My doubts brushed aside, we picked up five of these little spiny pumpkins and loaded them up in our rucksacks.

The next day, preparations started early. As recommended by the Calabrian lady, I peeled the pumpkins with a potato peeler – the spines were a little annoying but no more than that. Then I opened them up to take out the stone, after which I cut the halves into thin slices. Then I could start on the other two ingredients, tomatoes and onions. I divided up six large tomatoes, and sliced up one small onion (the recipe called for more but I’m not a fan of onions). At which point, I handed over to my wife, who threw all the ingredients into a big bowl, added the herbs, salt, and oil, and mixed everything up thoroughly. At the right moment, she ladled the mix out into a pan and put it into the oven for 40 minutes at 180 degrees Centigrade. I throw in a photo of what the result looked like – this is actually from the Calabrian lady’s video; we forgot to take a photo since we were so busy with preparations of the dinner.

Because what we had prepared was a side dish. The main course, the pièce de resistance, was cotechino with lentils and mashed potatoes. Like that, if the side dish turned out to be a disaster, we still had the main dish to fall back on. Luckily, it all turned out well. When I carried in the side dish, I explained the whole back-story. None of our guests – three Italians and one American – had ever heard of zucche spinose (in the case of the Italians) or chayote (in the case of the American). We all tried the dish with a little trepidation, but luckily it tasted really good. To me, the spiny pumpkins tasted like a cross between zucchini and cucumber. They went well with the tomatoes.

We didn’t finish the dish, so my wife froze the remains. When we get back from Florence where we are at the moment (to see an exhibition on Fra’ Angelico), we’ll try it out on our son too.

I fear we’ll never make the dish again, unless our anonymous grower on Lake Como is kind enough to make next year’s crop available to passers-by, because you cannot grow spiny pumpkins in the north of Italy (except, as we have seen, in Lake Como’s microclimate). As a result, northern Italians have no culinary experience with it – which is why our three Italian guests, all from Milan, had never heard of it. Of course, we could travel down to Calabria. Because, I discovered, Calabria is a “hot spot” for the growth and consumption in Italy of the spiny pumpkin. This is a consequence of one of the many individual rivulets that made up the giant global flow of plants out of the Americas after the continent’s accidental discovery by Columbus. When, in 1502, the Spaniards took over the Kingdom of Naples, of which Calabria was part, they carried the spiny pumpkin from their new dominions in Mesoamerica to their new dominions in southern Italy. And the plant took particular root in Calabria.

But we can’t go to Calabria just to eat spiny pumpkin! I’ll have to come up with an exciting trip full of new things that we’ve never done before if I’m ever going to persuade my wife. I have one or two things in mind. There’s the Riace Bronzes in Reggio Calabria, which we’ve never seen. There’s some old Christian mosaics in a monastery up in the Calabrian mountains, mentioned by John Julius Norwich in one of his books, which we’ve never seen. I’ve got the whole winter to come up with some more things to see and do …

TRISKELES

Milan, 6 November 2025

My wife and I were down in Sicily recently. Our daughter and her partner came over with the grandson and they decided to spend a week down in the very far south of the island, near one of Sicily’s three promontories, Capo Passero (if I mention this detail, it’s because it plays a role later). The house they rented gave directly onto the beach and our grandson spent many happy hours digging holes, making sandcastles, and braving the – relatively small – waves that broke onto the beach.

In between these sessions on the beach, we managed to get in brief visits to Noto and Syracuse, both UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Here’s a photo of the cathedral in Noto.

And here is one of the square in front of the cathedral in Syracuse.

It was while I was wandering the streets of Syracuse that I noticed this flag – every public building had one.

I discovered that it is the official flag of the region of Sicily (which is why I normally saw it flying along with the Italian national flag and the EU flag).

I’m a bit of a flag man – many years ago, quite soon after I started this blog, I wrote a post about what I considered to be the most elegant national flags. So of course I focused in on this flag. What really intrigued me about it was that symbol in the middle: a face from which emanate three legs bent at the knee.

I quickly established that this symbol is called a triskeles, Greek for three-legged. It was a popular symbol on coins. The earliest numismatic representation of it (from around 465 BCE) is on coins from the Greek statelet of Pamphylia, in what is now southern Turkey.

The triskeles was used in varying formats on Greek coins for several centuries thereafter, but it was most closely associated with the coins of Agathocles, Tyrant of Syracuse from 317 BCE, and self-proclaimed king of Sicily from 304 BCE, until his death in 289 BCE. On this coin, it is the main decoration on the reverse side of the coin, because Agathocles adopted it as a personal symbol of his reign.

Agathocles brought an important modification to the design, placing a Gorgon’s head as the central hub from which the legs emanate. He also added wings to the feet.

On this Syracusan coin, instead, it is used as the mint mark.

It seems that Agathocles chose the triskeles as his symbol because it mirrored the (roughly) triangular shape of Sicily.

The Greek name for the island was Trinacria, which means three headlands. The three headlands in question were those at the “corners” of the island: Capo Peloro, to the north of Messina, Capo Passero, all the way down south of Syracuse (and close to where we spent our little Sicilian holiday), and Capo Lilibeo, close to Marsala. The choice by Agathocles of the triskeles as his personal symbol was no doubt meant to underline his ambition – realised in the last years of his life – to be ruler of the whole of Sicily.

None of Agathocles’s heirs who were still alive when he died managed to succeed him as king of Sicily. In fact, he was formally reviled after his death, with all statues of him throughout Sicily being destroyed. Nevertheless, his triskeles continued to be used as a symbol for the island. After the Romans had turned the island into a province of its Empire, they added three ears of wheat to the Sicilian triskeles, apparently to underline the province’s role as a granary for Rome (and took the wings off the feet).

With the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the use of the triskeles seems to have disappeared in Sicily. But it came roaring back in 1282, when, in what has become known as the War of Sicilian Vespers, the Sicilians rebelled against their French Angevin overlords and invited the King of Aragon to take their place. The Sicilians created a flag to carry into battle.

It was made up of the red and yellow colours of Aragon (but also the colours of the communes of Palermo and Corleone, where the revolt started) with a triskeles at its centre (where the Roman ears of wheat had disappeared and the wings brought back, but this time attached to the head).

After twenty years, peace was concluded and the House of Aragon ruled Sicily for the next 400 years or so.

In 1848, some 600 years after that first burst of rebelliousness, and when the whole of Europe was being shaken by revolutionary outbursts, the Sicilians had another bout of rebellion and ousted their Bourbon overlords. The movement of course needed a flag, so the triskeles was rolled out again, but this time it was affixed to the red, white and green tricolour, itself created in 1789 by Italian revolutionaries copying their counterparts in France.

Alas, the revolt, and the flag, lasted only a year, until the Bourbons took back control of the island. But then, a mere ten years or so later, in 1860, when Garibaldi and his thousand volunteers disembarked in Sicily on his way to conquering the island and the boot of Italy, the Sicilian rebels dusted off this flag to fight behind. That rebellion was successful this time. Or maybe it wasn’t, because Sicily shucked off its Bourbon overlords but only to become part of the new Italian State, where national unity was strongly promoted and regional diversity quashed. So of course the triskeles disappeared from the tricolour flag.

Then, at the tail end of the Second World War and after 80 years as part of the new Italian State, separatism reared its head in Sicily. In the chaos created by the Allies’ invasion of Sicily and the collapse of the national government, the Movement for the Independence of Sicily was formed. Of course, it created its own flag which naturally enough sported a triskeles, a bright red one in this case. I’ve no idea why the separatists chose this colour for its triskeles, or the colour of the flag’s background – perhaps simply the red and yellow now traditionally seen as Sicily’s colours?

It was a strange movement, which pulled in people from the left and the right of the political spectrum but also had links with the mafia and the island’s traditional bandits. Indeed, the darker, criminal elements of the movement spawned an armed force, the Volunteer Army for the Independence of Sicily. It, too, created its own, triskeles-bearing, flag.

This “army” attacked Carabinieri barracks and made general mayhem but was eventually crushed. In the meantime, the national government bought off the separatists by promising Sicily a special autonomous status (as it did to other regions on the rim of the country: Sardinia, Val d’Aosta, and Trentino-Alto Adige).

In the decades after the War, Italy’s regions, which had been politically moribund since the country’s unification, slowly clawed back their political importance. Finally, in 1970, the country’s first regional elections took place, while in 2001 a constitutional amendment gave the regions greater say in policy-making.

With the regions’ increasing political importance came the desire to create their own flags, banners, armorial bearings, and so on. Sicily was no different. Its regional parliament approved a first flag in 1995.

Its design explicitly harked back to the flag created by the rebels in 1282 (although the colours of the background were switched around), but instead of the triskeles the region’s coat of arms was placed in the flag’s centre. This did include the triskeles but quartered it with the arms of the Normans, the Swabians, and the Aragonese, who had all been overlords of Sicily at some point.

Finally, in 2000 good sense prevailed and the regional parliament approved today’s flag with only the triskeles in the centre.

So there we are. An ancient symbol created back in the mists of time has managed to survive down through the centuries as a symbol of Sicily’s desire to shake off its overlords and now has been given a new lease of life as a symbol of – hopefully – a vibrant region in a more federalist national state.

ST. CHRISTOPHER

Milan, 30 October 2025

The genesis of this post was a hike my wife and I did back in May, around the Danube not too far from Linz. As I relate in the post I wrote about that hike, one stop we made was at the small church in the village of Pupping. And there I found, among other things, this wooden statue of Saint Christopher.

The statue caught my attention because of Saint Christopher’s expression; as I wrote in the post, the Saint looks less than pleased with the Child Jesus sitting on his shoulder. In fact, I would go so far as to say that he looks downright grumpy. A nice take, I thought, on the traditional story about St. Christopher, and normally the only story that most people have ever heard about the Saint. So I made a mental note to come back one day to this Saint’s story. On a drizzly afternoon in Milan, that day has come.

So what is the story that most people have heard about St. Christopher? I think a quick recap might be useful. I should start by noting a little-known fact, that at the beginning of the story our Saint was actually called Reprobus. He was a big, brawny man – a giant in many tellings of his life – and he was in this period of his life spending his time carrying people across a deep ford at a river somewhere in Asia Minor. In case any readers might think this surely was not a job people did in the old days – they would use a boat or a raft, right? – I throw in here a print of people doing precisely this in Japan in the 1860s.

In any event, one night Reprobus heard a young voice calling out. It turned out to be a child asking to be carried to the other side. So even though it was late Reprobus put the child on his shoulder, seized his trusty staff, and started crossing. To his consternation, as he waded across, the child got heavier and heavier. So heavy did the child get that this huge, strong man found himself struggling mightily to make it across. When he finally made it to the other side, he said to the child: “You put me in the greatest danger. I don’t think the whole world could have been as heavy on my shoulders as you were.” To which the child replied: “Don’t be surprised, Christopher [which in Greek means Carrier of Christ], you had on your shoulders not only the whole world but Him who made it. I am Christ your king, whom you are serving by this work.” Thus did Reprobus become Christopher. And no wonder Reprobus-about-to-become Christopher is looking so grumpy in that statue in the church in Pupping!

It is a charming story which got painted many times by numerous artists in Western Europe. I throw in here an assortment:
By the Master of the Pearl of Brabant

By the Flemish painter Joachim Patinir

By Rubens

In fact, it’s just about the only story of Christopher’s life that ever got painted in Western Europe, crowding out all the other stories associated with him.

I must confess, the precise theological messages of the story elude me, even though I have perused several posts trying to help me out. In fact, I read elsewhere that the story was actually made up by various churchmen to “normalise” what was a widespread practice by the “little people” of painting enormous portraits of St. Christopher with Christ, first inside their churches and then later on their outer walls. When I read that, I had a jolt of recognition. A couple of weeks before that hike around the Danube, my wife and I had hiked for a couple of days in the south of Austria in the hills around Villach. In some of the small villages we walked through I had noticed these giant St. Christophers painted on the outside of three of the village churches which we passed. I was so struck by them that I took several photos.
This is a general view of the church where I saw the first one

Here is a close-up of the fresco

This was in the next village we passed through

This was at the church where we sat down to have our sandwiches for lunch.

At the time, I had found these frescoes charming. I was now reading that they actually had a precise meaning. They were showing St. Christopher in his role as the “guardian from a bad death”, and especially a sudden and unexpected death. We have to plunge into the Christian mindset of the Middle Ages to understand why this was so vital. Any person who died “unshriven”, that is to say without having confessed and been absolved of their sins, was condemned to spend eternity in Hell without any possibility of salvation. And the torments of Hell were always well represented in church frescoes in case people forgot. Here is one such example, painted by Giotto in the Scrovegni chapel in Padova.

Under the circumstances, it made perfect sense for everyone to do whatever they could to avoid an unshriven death. Somehow, the belief sprang up that if you saw the image of St. Christopher you wouldn’t die that day. Thus the huge size of the St. Christophers as well as their location on the outside walls of village churches; like that, all villagers, even those living far from the church, avoided the risk of not seeing the image during the day. As one can imagine, the popularity of these images soared during the Black Death, when the risk of dying unshriven increased enormously. Continuing bouts of the plague over the centuries maintained their popularity.

I rather like this role of St. Christopher as a Gentle Giant keeping an eye on your lifespan. However, by the 15th Century, when huge St. Christophers had proliferated everywhere, theological and ecclesiastical authorities had become less enthusiastic, considering this trust of the “little people” in St. Christopher to be mere superstition. They were far more comfortable with the Saint’s role as the protector of travelers and all things travel-related (it was of course his role of carrying travelers across the river that led to travelers invoking his protection). And the coming of the automobile, where the dangers it posed to life and limb became immediately obvious, saw a huge increase in the Saint’s popularity. Even now, miniature statues of the Saint are frequently displayed in cars; sign of the times, you can buy one on Amazon. Yours for a mere $8.99!

Meanwhile, in Orthodox Christianity, things took a different path for Christopher. The whole story of him carrying the Boy Christ across a river was ignored (at least until relatively recently). Instead, the focus was on his good, Christian life after his baptism and his martyrdom. So the icons of him have a young man, normally dressed as a soldier. Here is an example from Saint Paraskevi Church in Adam.

So far, so bog-standard. But then, there is a startling alternative in his iconography, one where he is depicted as having a dog’s head (at least, I find this startling; showing saints with dog-heads seems rather disrespectful to me).

I find these icons so strange that I am moved to throw in the photo of another one, where St. Christopher is cheek by jowl with a perfectly normal St. Stephen.

This strand of iconography came about from a rather too literal reading of the legends about Christopher’s origins. It was said that he had been captured by Roman troops in combat against tribes dwelling to the west of Egypt in Cyrenaica. Already back in the 5th Century BCE the Greek historian Herodotus had written that in these parts, on the edges of the civilised world, lived dog-headed men as well as headless men whose eyes were in their chests. This belief in Europe that the edges of Europeans’ known world were populated by strange hybrid human species continued well into the early modern times, as this woodcut from the 1544 book Cosmographia shows.

As a consequence, some icon painters believed that Christopher (or Reprobus as we have seen he was then known) was dog-headed, and they painted him as such.

Not surprisingly, there was pushback on this depiction of Christopher from the Higher-Ups. In a 10th Century hagiography about the Saint, its author, Saint Nikodemos the Hagiorite, wrote: “Dog-headed means here that the Saint was ugly and disfigured in his face, and not that he completely had the form of a dog, as many uneducated painters depict him. His face was human, like all other humans, but it was ugly and monstrous and wild.” For its part, in the 18th century the Russian Orthodox Church forbade the depiction of the Saint with a dog head because of the association of such a representation with stories of werewolves or monstrous races.

Poor Christopher! Giant, dog-headed, and now cancelled. Because, back in 1969 the Catholic Church struck him from the General Roman Calendar, deeming that there wasn’t enough evidence to show that he had ever existed. I still remember the general consternation this caused at the time. What about all those miniature statues in cars (and medallions around necks)? How could they protect you if Christopher had never existed? I guess the fact that people continue to buy them shows that the “little people” will still believe in these images’ magical ability to protect, whatever the Higher-Ups say or do.

SPINDLE TREE

Milan, 15 October 2025

It was our last hike in Austria this year. We hiked across the hills between Sankt Veit an der Gölsen (another Sankt Veit) and Wiesenfeld, in the pre-Alps behind St. Pölten. During the final walk into Wiesendorf, I spotted this flowering bush on the roadside.

I’d seen the plant before, but this time I decided to identify it. I did my usual trick of using my iPhone’s plant identifier programme, but it was a complete failure. It first suggested “hawthorne”, which even I knew was wrong, and then, on two other try’s, it simply suggested “plant”, which was really not very helpful. So I turned to the internet. And there I got my answer: I was looking at a Euonymus europaeus, the European or common spindle tree (or bush to some people – it seems to fall between being a small tree and a big bush).

The plant has a rather lovely fruit, which is why I’d spotted the plant in the first place. I throw in a close-up of the fruit.

It is a lovely pink, and then, as the photo shows, when it ripens it splits open to reveal a bright orange seed (actually, what you see is an orange aril, a “fleshy” material in which the seed is buried; the edible aril attracts birds and other animals, which helps in seed dispersal).

To my eye, this combination of pink and orange is a bit jarring, but hey! that’s the colour combination the plant “chose” (is there some scientific reason behind the colours you find on plants? A question for another day).

The fruit’s pink colour, and the fact that it is four-lobed, has led to one of the plant’s French names: bonnet d’évêque, bishop’s cap. I don’t know if bishops wear them anymore, but the hat they wore in the past was four-sided and pink.

All very nice, but as I said in my previous post, while our ancestors might have admired the colours of nature, they were highly utilitarian in their approach to plants: how can I use them? Well, the fruits of the spindle tree are toxic – indeed, every part of the plant is toxic – so there was no nutrition to be had from this particular plant. But our ancestors did manage to eke various uses out of it. Two stand out for me.

As the plant’s English name indicates, the plant’s wood was used to make spindles. Women (for the most part) used spindles to spin wool or flax fibres into yarn or thread. In this picture, the spindle is in the woman’s right hand (and the distaff in her left).

And here we have a group of women all spinning together. I guess this was seen very much as a communal activity, the way women used to knit together.

Spindles are a very ancient technology. The oldest evidence of their use goes back 12,000 years. But at least in the developed countries, they were eliminated by the Industrial Revolution, when automation destroyed the cottage industry of spinning. Their use lingered on here and there; this photo, for instance, from 1901, shows a peasant woman in Greece still spinning by hand.

And I still remember watching a housewife in Eritrea, where I was born, sitting at the door of her house spinning with a distaff and spindle. This would have been in the late 1950s.

One of the plant’s French names – fusain – indicates the second of the plant’s intriguing uses. Fusain is a charcoal made from the wood of the spindle tree, which is used in drawing. It’s much appreciated by artists for its exceptional strength and density. This is a good excuse for me to throw in a few charcoal drawings by famous artists, although I will start with an artist I personally have never heard of, François Bovin, simply because the subject of his drawing connects us back to what I was just writing about, spinning.

Turning to other artists, these are preparatory drawings of Tahitian faces, by Paul Gauguin.

This is a drawing by a favourite artist of mine, Käthe Kollwitz, of a home worker.

And this is a drawing by another of my favourite artists, Egon Schiele, of a reclining model in chemise and stockings.

And finally, a cubist charcoal drawing by Pablo Picasso of a standing female nude.

A week after this hike, we were gone. We’ll be back next year, maybe early enough to see a spindle tree in flower.

GROUNDCHERRIES, OR CHINESE LANTERNS

Vienna, 28 September 2025

A week ago, my wife and I were passing by a florist during our afternoon walk down into the city centre when my eye was caught by one of the products the shop was selling.

It wasn’t just the pretty display that caught my attention. It just so happened that I had taken a photo of the very same plant growing along the side of the path during one of our earlier walks during the summer, in Vienna’s Tiergarten (a very nice area of woods and meadows on the edge of the city which used to be an imperial hunting ground).

Already when I had taken this photo, I had said to myself that I should look into this plant. The clever feature on my phone’s camera told me that I was looking at a groundcherry, so at least I knew what the plant was. But, as Samuel Johnson is reported to have said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions – I hadn’t gotten around to doing anything. But that second sighting in front of the florist got me going again. And now, finally, after a few days of rain, I have cobbled together my story.

I suppose I should start with the plant’s most conspicuous feature, its bright orange to red papery calyx.

It is this beautiful calyx that caught my eye and catches the eye those who decide to plant it in their gardens.

It’s also what makes people put the plant in arrangements of dried flowers.

These sometimes can veer towards the Japanese ikebana style.

Not surprisingly, it is also this calyx which gives the plant one of its more common names in English, Chinese lantern, in German, Lampionblume or lantern flower, and in French, lanterne or lantern.

If left on the plant, much of the calyx will decompose, leaving behind only the veins of the calyx in the form of a delicately beautiful, skeletal net and revealing an orange-red berry within.

The berry’s resemblance to a small cherry has given rise to the plant’s other common name in English, the groundcherry. Having a berry trapped, as it were, inside the calyx has also given rise to other common names, like the French amour en cage, love in a cage, but the one I like best is one of its Persian names: the puppet behind the curtain.

As I have noted several times in these posts, while our ancestors no doubt saw the beauty in the world around them, they were nothing if not profoundly utilitarian: how can this thing (plant, fruit, rock, wood, animal, whatever it is) be useful to me? So of course they explored whether or not the berry of the Chinese lantern was edible; there is evidence that our Neolithic ancestors were eating the berries. The internet is not very clear on how tasty these berries are. As far as I can make out, though, they are not very tasty, having low levels of sugar and being somewhat sour. But with the addition of a lot of sugar they can be made into scrumptious jams and marmalades. Apparently, the Italians also pickle the berries, although I’ve never, ever seen this in Italy.

Our Medieval ancestors, and very probably even earlier ancestors, were just as interested, if not more interested, in the plant’s use as a medicine, particularly the berry. And this interest explains the plant’s rather strange scientific name, Alkekengi officinarum. It’s the plant’s generic name, Alkekengi, that’s so odd. It’s not Latin, what is it? The answer to that lies in Persia. In Persian traditional medicine, the Unani system of medicine, the dried berry was used as a diuretic, antiseptic, liver corrective, and sedative. The Persian name for the plant is kākunaj (which, by the way, I think means “balloon” or “bladder”, another common description of the plant). I throw in here a photo of a 15th Century miniature of a Persian garden.

When the Arabs overran the Persian empire, they picked up the Persians’ traditional medicine and carried it westward. This included the kākunaj berry, whose name they arabised to al-kākanj. In turn, Arabic traditional medicine was carried into Europe, where the name of the berry, and the plant, was europeanised to “alkekengi”. Another small example of the way ideas were transmitted along trade routes, something which I have written about many, many times in these posts.

The plant’s medicinal role has now died away, although there are still a lot of articles written on its pharmacological properties. So we are left with its beautiful calyx, that orange-red lantern, to enjoy. Which leads me to one lovely traditional use of the plant, in Japan. During the summer Obon Festival, the Japanese remember their deceased ancestors, believing that their spirits return to visit them. They use lanterns to guide the spirits from their graves on the first day of the festival, and back to their graves on the last day of the festival. Normally, they use paper lanterns, but in many places they also drape strings of groundcherry calyxes – called ghost lanterns in Japanese – on the shrines in temple grounds that house memorial tablets for the deceased. This photo shows a market selling strings of grouncherry calyxes.

Maybe we should institute this practice at Halloween, when the spirits of the dead traditionally come back into the world of the living.