Rafael Nadal is still very much the main man on clay – and looks a shoo-in for another French Open title if his form in Rome is anything to go by. Judging by the way he dismantled and dominated Roger Federer to win the Italian Open final 6-1, 6-3, it will take injury to deny […]
Pasta at Midnight
I could say that these cold winter nights are the reason I love to have a warm, delicious bowl of pasta at midnight. But then I’d be lying. I love having pasta at midnight at any time of the year, although there’s something particularly satisfying about a bowl of your favorite pasta when there’s a chill in the air, and it’s been too long since dinner. Or maybe it’s 11:30, and, God forbid, you haven’t even eaten yet! Late night dinners in the Carlesimo family always meant one thing: It was time to Put on the Ollies! Better known to the rest of the world as Linguini with Garlic and Oil, or Linguini con Aglio e Oglio, they were a favorite of my father’s, and he called them
Traveling to Italy so often — at least several times a year — I’ve discovered that my favorite season to visit Italy is winter, especially right around Christmas. This is the time when tourist crowds are more tame, the weather is usually still mild and Italians are doing what they do best: bringing together family, food and faith according to age-old traditions. While modern life have caught up with many other areas of Italian life, Christmas in Italy still seems to be held sacred. Home to the Vatican, and many noteworthy churches, Italy’s capital of Rome, in particular, offers a wealth of free Christmas festivities:
Piazza Navona’s Christmas Market
(Photo by Sean O’Neill, flickr.com)
Italy’s Christmas markets don’t quite have the notoriety of their northern European cousins, but they still bring Old World charm to the holiday season. Between the prelude to Christmas and the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6), Romans head to Piazza Navona to peruse the stalls selling food, candy, crafts and toys. Yes, there is an Italian Santa Claus (Babbo Natale) and he can be seen both in person and in the toys made from his image. Even more popular is La Befana, the good witch who hands out candy to children on the Epiphany. During the holiday season, Piazza Navona truly comes to life especially in the early evening for la passeggiata — the Italian tradition of an evening walk around the neighborhood.
The Nativity Museum (Museo Tipologico Internazionale del Presepio)
(Photo by Frances Kidd)
A few years ago, when my American expat friend Frances Kidd introduced me to this small museum in her adopted hometown, I felt like I had been let in on a delicious Christmas secret (like what Santa was planning to bring me). Many native Romans don’t even know that inside inside the Church of Ss. Quirico e Giulitta is a museum devoted exclusively to all the elements of the presepio (nativity scene). As Frances reminded me, “Italians are crazy about nativity scenes — almost every Italian home is sure to have at least one if not more on display during the Christmas holiday.”
Over 3,000 nativity figures and mangers — from every corner Italy and the world – are on display at Rome’s Nativity Museum. According to Frances, you will find pieces made from all kinds of materials – clay, stone, coal, cloth — even eggs and marzipan. The museum, founded in 1953 by the run by the Italian Association of Friends of the Nativity, has extended hours during the holidays but is also open most of the rest of the year.
Midnight Mass at the Vatican
(Photo by sunshine city, flickr.com)
Likely the most famous Midnight Mass in the world, Christmas Eve services at St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City are once-in-a-lifetime event for those who are lucky enough to get tickets to sit inside the church. Like many Christmas Eve services, “”Midnight Mass” at the Vatican actually now starts two hours earlier (10 p.m.) than the traditional time. Although challenging, it is possible to score these tickets to the Midnight Mass at the Vatican but you have to start trying early — like in May — and work any connections (now is the time to reach out to your cousin the bishop) you may have. Yet, you don’t need tickets to soak up the magical feeling in St. Peter’s Square on Christmas Eve. When my parents and I spent an impromptu Christmas in Rome a few years back, we stood in St. Peter’s Square — next to the life-size nativity scene — and watched the mass on large video screens. The warm energy and joy our fellow pilgrims in the square that night added to the magical experience.
Christmas Eve at Ara Coeli
(Photo by Allie Caulfield, flickr.com)
Midnight Mass at the Vatican isn’t the only game in town for Christmas Eve in Rome. The Eternal City is home to over 600 churches — all of which have their own special celebrations. Atop Capitoline Hill, the 7th-century Church of Santa Maria in Ara Coeli is a stunning sight on Christmas Eve with candles on each of the 124 steps leading to its entrance. This church is considered the official church of the Roman people and bears a fascinating history. Inside, a statue of baby Jesus (Santo Bambino) — supposedly carved out of wood taken from an olive tree in the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus prayed before his crucifixion – is waiting to be unveiled for just one day of the year. Ara Coeli is the official church of It of the Italian Senate and the Roman people (Senatus Populusque Romanus).
For more on Christmas in Rome, get a free copy of Dream of Italy’s 35-page Christmas in Italy guide.
Follow Kathy McCabe on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/dreamofitaly
Source:www.huffingtonpost.com
The war in Afghanistan is about perpetual war, not Afghanistan.
It’s about preventing democracy in the United States, not bringing it to Southwest Asia.
And it is the tombstone of the Obama Presidency.
To justify the fight, they’ve rounded up the usual suspects: Terror. Oil. Minerals. Poppies. Democracy.
But George Orwell’s 1984 — now updated with important new books — illuminates the bigger picture: “continuous warfare” is the key to social control.
It keeps the public frightened and dependent.
And it keeps “the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed.”
Better to destroy them in a ritual slaughter like Afghanistan, and wherever is next.
For a truly prosperous society, educated and secure, cannot be ruled by the few. Poverty, ignorance and fear are the three pillars of authoritarian control. Without war, they all disappear.
Thus Afghanistan. Before it: the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, central America. After: whoever else is handy.
Recent books by Howard Zinn and David Swanson have updated Orwell’s analysis.
Zinn’s The Bomb, testifies to the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the utter senselessness of these “announced nuclear tests.” Once an Allied bombardier, Zinn revisited a French town he helped destroy. He found the act, of which he was once proud, had no military meaning whatsoever.
Though he passed away earlier this year, Howard’s People’s History of the United States continues to shape our understanding of this nation’s true core. In narrating the hidden, bloody past of our compromised democracy, he warns at end that even for the US, “There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”
Swanson’s new War is a Lie adds to the litany. A tireless campaigner for peace and justice, Swanson was instrumental in tearing away the ridiculous Bush lie that the war in Iraq was about Weapons of Mass Destruction. War is a Lie adds carefully documented, passionately argued reasons why the era of endless slaughter in Southwest Asia is a tool of social control for the military-industrial elite.
Over the years, Norman Solomon’s books and film War Made Easy have also provided a firm, steady opposition to this fatal addiction.
Nowhere has our military madness become more transparent than in the Obama Administration. The “shellacking” the Democrats took this fall stems directly from Obama’s painfully visible failure to bring hope or change to a nation at war since 1941.
For a few infuriating weeks, Obama danced around the decision to escalate in Afghanistan. Rarely has a single human being had a greater chance to change history.
Obama could have stood up to the generals. He could have de-escalated. He could have begun the process of drawing down the military budget, the only way to save our economy.
More than 50% of taxpayer money goes to weaponry. We have troops in more than 100 countries. We spend more on our military than all the rest of the world combined. Throughout history — Athens, Rome, Persia — empires have spent themselves to military oblivion. We have now been in Afghanistan longer than the USSR.
With a simple speech, Obama could have begun the Great Reversal. It was a crystal clear moment. The public support was there. It was what he was elected to do.
But like Lyndon Johnson’s catastrophic March 1965 decision to escalate the war in Vietnam, Obama went exactly the wrong way. He became the first man in history to accept the Nobel Peace Prize with a pro-war speech. With Bush’s Secretary of War by his side, he ceded to the military our nation’s most critical decision. He doomed our domestic economy and global ecology by burying us still deeper in the lethal quagmire of perpetual war.
All else is sad detail. When Obama caved on Afghanistan, so did his presidency.
As Orwell, Zinn, Swanson and Solomon make clear, perpetual war is the carefully engineered route to poverty, ignorance and dictatorship.
Afghanistan is merely the latest installment in this seamless, unseemly tragedy. Its ever-changing justifications are meaningless smokescreens, forever poised to cloud the inevitable transition to the next conflict. The names, places and rhetoric may change, but the impact will not.
Until we find a way to break through to a genuine state of peace (and we must, and soon), we have no future.
Source:www.huffingtonpost.com
As part of my ongoing visual referendum on expat life in Berlin, I chronicled a recent trip to Rome where I met up with my mother and stepfather before they left on an international folk-dance themed cruise. Here are some of the wacky cross-cultural hijinks that ensued.
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The best view of the red carpet, I realized, was from above. Browsing the bleachers a full hour before even the press arrived for The Rome Film Festival’s world premiere restoration of La Dolce Vita, I decided, finally, on a front row seat next to a shrunken woman of about seventy. Surrounded by blankets and snacks and cigarettes, she looked like she had been waiting all day. “No Scorsese?” she asked as I sat down beside her. (Scorsese was scheduled to introduce the film.) I told her it was still early. He’d be here. Disgusted, she threw up her hands. “No Scorsese, no cinema!” I’m not quite sure I agree, but it’s hard to disagree.
Fifty years after La Dolce Vita’s original release, the film has been restored from its original widescreen negative for the clean up of a lifetime. The premiere, which was itself a thing out of Fellini — from Nino Rota on the loudspeakers to the paparazzi on the floor — saw an avalanche of beautiful stars that all looked liked twins, save for one. Early in the parade, before things got too frenzied, a black car stopped as close to the carpet as it possibly could, a policeman flew to the door, opened it (slowly), reached in, and out came a cane, a foot, and then the rest of Anita Ekberg. The place went nuts.
As the new stars began to appear, with their smiles and waves and tastefully torn clothing, the mighty Ekberg limped wryly toward the press line, accentuating every labored step with a grande sigh. She had a lot of carpet to walk, and watching her fight it, prodding it with her cane and laughing all the while was a thrill even the most immaculately restored La Dolce Vita would not likely upstage. Moreover, Ekberg was the only woman on the red carpet with a purse slung over her shoulder, as if she had just came from lunch. How could you not love that?
I moved inside the theater to watch the rest of the arrivals on the big screen, in close up. There I rediscovered Ekberg’s entire face. Tickled, I found her jack-o-lantern smile, enormous eyes, and high-pointed eyebrows told of a darker, wittier person than I remembered from the movies. But I have a good defense: after the Trevi Fountain scene, all you can do is remember the Trevi Fountain scene.
The camera then drifted away from Anita (what would have Fellini have done with a Steadicam?) to Scorsese, and the entire theater erupted in applause and cheers, and then immediately hushed to hear what he had to say. At that moment someone behind me whispered, “You don’t have to be tall to be big.” In other words: No Scorsese, no cinema.
Once the little giant entered the building, things started to move quickly. There were a few introductions and some clips before Anita Ekberg was brought out on stage (with purse) to remember the filming, which she did with sardonic glee. I’m not sure, but she may have cackled. In fact, Ekberg got so gleeful she didn’t even see the cortege of stagehands that had gathered to signal her time was up. So she went on, gleefully, and as her enthusiasm grew, they moved closer, until finally the cluster was on stage, practically standing beside her. Even then she didn’t see them. So deep was her Fellini trance, they had to literally, almost physically, interrupt her sentence to bring her back to the present. It was glorious.
Then Scorsese. Watching La Dolce Vita, he said, is like the dream sequence — Guido freefalling — that opens 8 . “You feel like you’re flying,” he said. “At times it’s frightening or even terrifying. But at the same time it’s liberating.” In other words, no Fellini, no cinema.
This Blogger’s Books from
A Splurch in the Kisser: The Movies of Blake Edwards (Wesleyan Film)
by Sam Wasson
Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman
by Sam Wasson
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Source:www.huffingtonpost.com
Tourist information staff on Segways in Rome. Sue Frause photos.
How ironic that the owner of Segway died after his two-wheeler went off a cliff and into a river in northern England.
I recently spotted a couple of middle-aged tourists tooling around Rome on Segways. Actually, my hubby and I thought they looked pretty silly, and it didn’t seem to be in sync with The Eternal City.
But ever since Segways were introduced in 2002, they’ve been popping up in various cities around the world. In the US, City Segway Tours (“Proud to be the first guided tour using Segways in the world”) has operations in Atlanta, Berlin, Budapest, Chicago, Munich, Paris, San Francisco, Vienna and Washington, DC.
And Italy Segway Tours (“The first and the original in Italy since 2005″) offers trips in Florence, Pisa, Milan and Rome.
Sorry, Segway, but I’m not smitten with your human transporters. I can’t think of anything more harrowing than trying to navigate Rome’s narrow, cobblestone streets while aboard the so-called Ultimate Green Machine. All the while trying to take photos, check out the map or stop for a morning cappuccino along the way.
I’ll stick with my own two feet.
My feet worked just fine at Rome’s Colisseum.
Follow Sue Frause on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/suefrause
Source:www.huffingtonpost.com
Jon and Stephen, we have an important announcement to share with you.
We, not we the people, not we those people, no, we a bunch of un-we-the-peoplers had previously filed an application for a rally on the Washington Mall on October 30.
That’s right. Evidently you were so busy planning your rallies that you didn’t notice we had already applied for a permit on the same date. What rally, you might ask? Who are we?
Not the Green Tea Party. Not the Coffee Party, either. Not the T Party (although it is tempting, with T standing for everything from Truthiness to Treason and Trillions to Triorganophosphate). We’re none of the above. In all truthiness, we’re not even much of a we.
Heck, we couldn’t even figure out what to call our rally. The Un-We-The-Peoplers Rally for Off Shore Drilling in the Last Known Deepwater Reserves of Civil Discourse? There aren’t many folks who can be funny and serious at the same time, the way you can, and we certainly couldn’t manage it. So, we left our name off the rally permit application and told the Park Service we’d get back to them with a name by October 1. Imagine our positively incredulous serendipitous delight when we learned that you had come along and applied for the same date!
(What are the odds of that? Probably lower than the odds that Lipton and Starbucks are about to announce a joint venture on a new nutraceutical smoothie called Lipbucks. Leave it on your lips for a few seconds before you slurp it down and it gives you the kind of pucker people pay for.)
Which leads us to our announcement: we called the Park Service today and officially relinquished the date. It’s all yours.
The funny thing is, in the process of making the decision to withdraw from the Mall, a bunch of us were talking and it came to us. Our name, that is.
The EAT Party.
Kind of like the TEA Party turned around, only better. (Turn TEA around and you get AET, the ticker abbreviation for Aetna Insurance. Who knows where Aetna stands on the whole question of the health benefits of green tea, much less those of Lipbucks.)
The EAT Party.
The Enough Already with Taxophobia Party.
The Equally Audacious Truthiness Party.
The Everyone At the Table Party.
Everyone At the Table. That seems like a solid recipe for a good party and a healthy culture.
What would it be like if we spent a little less time hurling slogans at one another and a little more time finding ways to break bread together? A little less time at Drive Thru windows and a little more time in the kitchen? We’re not only driving thru for our food, we’re driving thru for our politics. Lip-smacking, quick, stuff-your-face politics that fill us up quickly but leave a trail of health problems behind.
Our politics have become as salty and greasy as our food. Distrust and scapegoating are more rampant than salmonella in an egg factory. And there’s no recall for infected discourse.
So, now that we’ve stumbled on a name and the beginnings of a platform, we need an alternate location for the first rally of the EAT Party. We’ve got one.
While you’re on the Mall, we’ll be in Piazza di Spagna in Rome, across from where the first McDonald’s in Italy opened in 1986, sparking the Slow Food Movement. Instead of fighting fire with fire, we are going to fight TEA with pasta. And a little Barbera d’Alba.
We’re not giving up on American politics. We’re just going to get a little distance from them this time around, in a country whose politics are every bit as fractious but whose food is, well, a lot more Italian.
In a moment of seriousness, we may ask while we are there: Is the erosion of civility that is happening in America unique to us? Or maybe we should ask, are we exporting the erosion of civility around the world as surely as we exported fast food?
So many of our cultural values are eroding: civility, optimism, trust, our willingness to invest for the long term, our spirit of common purpose in building for the future. Even our ability to gather around the dinner table. It’s all eroding faster than farmland in Iowa.
If we had any sense of black humor left, we’d note that the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico into which millions of gallons of oil just spewed had already been emptied of oxygen and filled with chemical run-off from the breadbasket of the world. That’s one Molto Grande Americano Double-Down Non-Latte, hold the dispersant.
But even our sense of humor is eroding. That’s where you come in.
I don’t know if the word humor is related etymologically to the word humus, but maybe you could look into it. It sure seems like humor is as vital to a healthy culture as humus is to the health of the soil.
We’ll be toasting you from Rome!
For more information on the first rally of the EAT Party, contact Woody Tasch at woody@slowmoney.org. Woody is the Founder and Chairman of Slow Money, an NGO dedicated to catalyzing the flow of capital to local food systems. He is author of Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms and Fertility Mattered.
Follow Woody Tasch on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/@slowmoney
Source:www.huffingtonpost.com
Christine O’Donnell’s election in Delaware’s Republican Senate primary on September 14th was a big surprise and a big win for the Tea Party movement. This is the same person who argued that masturbation was a form of adultery. Even Karl Rove said about O’Donnell, “there’s just a lot of nutty things she’s been saying.” When a crazy person accuses you of being crazy, that’s bad. That’s like an alcoholic who prefers beer disparaging another alcoholic because he drinks whiskey. That doesn’t change the fact that they both wake up on the bathroom floor with a black eye and missing shoes. Yeah, I speak from experience.
Christine O’Donnell and the rest of the Tea Party movement love to say that America is number one! Yet it is precisely the candidacy of people like O’Donnell, Sarah Palin, and Alaskan Senatorial candidate Joe Miller and the generally extremist language of the Tea Party as a whole that are devaluing America around the world. How can you see a poster of Obama with a Hitler mustache and not think we’re a nation full of crazy people? Tea Party members are so ridiculous they could see a baby with a smudge of dirt right below his nose and accuse that baby of supporting Hitler and hating America. They might even call that baby a communist, not knowing that communism and fascism are entirely different things.
The argument that America is number one always makes me laugh because people say it with no sense of history. People act like we’re supposed to be number one forever. Did you graduate 8th grade social studies class? History books are littered with the rise and fall of empires far greater than our own. Remember Rome, Ancient Greece, Ancient Egypt? I don’t think Romulus Augustus, the last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire, was walking around wearing a shirt resembling the Roman flag chanting “we’re number one, we’re number one.”
We don’t have to go back to ancient times to find former number ones. Portugal, the same country that is now an afterthought for rich white kids planning their European summer vacation, once had the largest empire in the world. During the 16th Century, Portugal controlled all trade in the Indian Ocean and established colonies throughout the world. However, due to its smaller population and inability to defend all of its trading posts, Portugal was overtaken by Spain as the most powerful country in the world. Spain enjoyed a nice run on top but they got greedy and tried to attack England, and the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 shifted power from Spain to England. Then a bunch of rowdy colonists put an end to British world supremacy. My point is that you don’t see any of these countries getting all butt hurt over their place at the dinner table now.
In fact, as number ones go, we’ve had a pretty short run on top. We’ve really only been the most powerful country in the world since World War II. A Tea Party member would never admit it, but the main reason we became the most powerful country in the world is that World War II was not fought on our soil. We received all the benefits of economic stimulation and none of the disadvantages of having our homes bombed. It’s amazing how you can jump to number one when you don’t have to jump over big piles of rubble.
Members of the Tea Party movement love words like freedom, honor, pride, and they say things like, “We’re the only nation like us in the world.” I agree with this point. I would go so far as to say every country in the world is the only country like it in the world. Maybe that is why it is an independent country. In fact, every country is number one at something in the world. Estonia is number one in the world for adult literacy, Italy is number one for caesarean sections, and Australia is number one for car thefts. Maybe we should be more specific when we say America is number one. Or maybe we should celebrate our number one status by eating cake, and then we can overtake American Samoa as the number one country for obesity in the world.
America is definitely not going to be number one if the Tea Party movement continues to gain steam. Even most Republicans seem less than excited by O’Donnell’s win. The National Republican Senatorial Committee simply said, “We congratulate Christine O’Donnell for her nomination this evening after a hard-fought primary campaign in Delaware” and offered no predictions for November while Karl Rove went on Fox News and delivered his “nutty” remarks.
However, maybe Christine O’Donnell can overtake Sarah Palin as America’s number one political cougar.
Follow Grant Lyon on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/grantlyon1
Source:www.huffingtonpost.com
Sampling the local street food when traveling can be a tasty (and memorable) experience. What’s not to love? It’s almost always yummy, portable and cheap. When times are tough, something picked up from a street vendor can fill in for an entire meal. At other times, it can just keep you happy between meals.
As I’ve traveled around Europe during the past 10 years writing about budget travel, I’ve bit into, licked and burned my tongue on a delicious range of snacks purchased from outdoor vendors. So, which city offers the tastiest treats on the streets? Read on…
Have a favorite street food? Send photos our way!
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St. Petersburg: Fried Pirozhki (30 rublesabout $1)
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I thought I was ordering a freshly fried sugar donut when I pointed to my first pirozhki last year in St. Petersburg. Imagine my surprise, then, to find a savory meat treat tucked within that pastry pocket! Mine was filled with minced meat, but they can also be filled with chicken, potatoes, mushrooms or sweeter fare, such as cherries.
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Delicious!
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