This is the fifth post of a guest series. We ask friends and colleagues to share with us what the expression to “feel at home” means to them. We believe that to truly enjoy a place, you need to really experience it, to make yourself at home. This means different things for different people, but it is an essential part of our lives, both as travelers and travel professionals. The idea came from a post I published in March and that you can read here.

Itchy feet and the call of home

Ever since I first travelled, a need for home has fought against an insatiable burning desire for something new, my thoughts swinging like a pendulum from one to the other. When I’ve been on the road too long, the lure of home is incredibly strong, whilst at home – boredom and lack of inspiration drive an insatiable urge to head away. Along the way I feel I’ve learnt about how to balance the desire for home and travel – but are the two needs simply irreconcilable?

Travelling at length for the first time, after 4 or 5 consecutive weeks on the road, I began to crave home, to crave the familiar, English pubs, friends, nesting. At its worst it could get to the state where mustering enthusiasm for even the greatest sites, places and cultures became a chore. I strongly remember sitting in a lovely hostel in Queenstown, unable to generate excitement at the prospect of sky diving the next day. After this experience, all future travels would combine time on the road with time settled in one place.

One of my life ambitions is to retire early and live abroad and my wife and I often talk about how it can be done. Ideally we wouldn’t be stuck to one place for all time. We could spend a year or two here, a year or two there, feel at home in many places. Is this possible though? Does the impulse to travel, to experience the new, an addiction to change dash all hopes of ever calling a place home?

My first experience abroad was as a student studying on exchange in Australia – Despite being miles away from girlfriend and family for the first time, I felt instantly at home. I belonged to a community. I lived in a tight-nit college, played loads of sport, made good friends and explored Australia in our free time with fellow exchange students, unwilling to waste a single second of the experience. Undoubtedly being part of a community meant I felt more at home, but having a fixed time limit felt like I still had permanent bonds to my real home, and also meant I was motivated to make the most of my time.

Many years later my wife and I took a career break and travelled around the world for the best part of a year. We deliberately planned in 3 months staying put in Sydney. On paper it was perfect, we had a small flat in Manly, we surfed every day and I taught sailing in the harbour. The opportunity was there to live like a Sydney local. But ultimately we didn’t enjoy it that much, we didn’t feel at home – and I think it was because we didn’t become part of a community, we were isolated within what is essentially a very international city. I’ve always thought in hind-site we would have been better working on an outback farm. The experience would have been newer, and we would have become part, however fleetingly, of a small community of sorts. Ironically we had felt more at home when months earlier in Sri Lanka we were welcomed into the home and life of a Sri Lankan family for all of a day or two.

Surprisingly, ever since we had children we have found feeling at home when away so much easier. The crazy, mad rush of colour, stuff, mess and noise that is our travelling family of three girls under 5 means that wherever we go it is pretty easy to feel at home. Of course, we have found coping mechanisms, the girls have their teddy-bears and we always have some little travel speakers and an ipod stocked with our favorites, but ultimately the secret is that we have less time to feel home-sick and to our delight other people, be they travellers or locals, stop more and want to talk to us – children are a great introducer!

Our last trip abroad was a house swap to Savannah, Georgia USA. We swapped with a family with two small girls of similar age to ours for 6 weeks. It was perhaps the perfect expression of feeling at home away from home. For 6 weeks we benefited from a real house stocked full of the normal accompaniments to home life – toys, books, films, a garden, an office to work from when necessary even a large family van to get us around. We had the benefit of our swappers tips on where to eat and more importantly which beaches to visit, and most incredibly we pretty much dropped right into our hosting families’ circle of friends. We were invited to dinner parties, bbqs and play dates. We managed to satisfy all our homing instincts whilst exploring what is a fantastically different place – arguably the most strikingly different anglo culture I have encountered. We even established favourite haunts – revelling in the crass Americana of the wonderful creek-side Crab Shack where we dined on seafood before the kids insisted we go check out the alligator pool again…

So when we are lucky enough to be able to abandon work and live at leisure where will we stand, what have we learnt so far?

• We should stay in places for at least a year or two. Unless we have hit lucky, then 2-3 months hasn’t been long enough to feel a part of a community. On the other hand, having some kind of fixed time limit does mean we feel less itchy footed and make more of our time.
• We should make sure the places we visit are compellingly different to home – after all the excitement of the new keeps us going.
• We should plan on working or joining-in in some way, maybe teach English abroad, who knows.
• We should intersperse spells abroad with time at home. We need to feed the homing instinct so it doesn’t become a monster and over-rule our better judgement.

Will this be enough? I suspect that in reality unless we go suburban and attempt to live happily in one place for eternity (which trust me, will never, ever happen) we won’t ever feel completely at home in any community – we will always be temporary visitors. I guess this is the price we have to pay for loving travel, loving change and having exceedingly itchy feet!

This week’s guest writer

This post was written by Ben Colclough, founder of Adventure holidays specialist Tourdust.com. Tourdust is an online travel agent specialising in cultural & adventure travel for independent travellers. All the experiences on the site are operated by specialist local suppliers. Ben writes the Tourdust adventure travel blog and can be followed on Twitter @Tourdust.

A house is made of walls and beams; a home is built with love and dreams.

So, you know when you’re at a cocktail party with your significant other of the past twenty years, and he’s over at one side of the room holding forth with a group of friends and you’re at the other side of the room hunkered down by the hors d’oeuvres drowning your social awkwardness in a glass of merlot and hoping no one notices as you toss numerous apricot and brie tartletts down the hatch, and this very put together woman comes sidling up to you and with just one look you have her typed and her type is not your type because your type is the type that began the evening with a five year old who managed to smash a full glass jar of honey all over the kitchen floor, the noise of which startled you so badly while you were rushing to get ready to leave that you poked your eye with the mascara brush and then you spent 20 minutes kneeling in your dress and stockings on the floor cleaning up the mess and somehow managed to get a tiny hole in the heel of your only pair of hose which in the car on the way to the party you dabbed with clear nail polish in the hopes that the damn thing won’t spread into a run all the way up the back of your leg during the evening?

She’s not that type.

Then she purrs at you, “Your significant other is so charming.  And he has gorgeous blue eyes.” And your first reaction is to freeze mid-chew, tilt your head slightly to the left, and cut your eyes at her with a look that says, “Girl.  Back away from the man slowly, and no one will get hurt.” (At least, that is my first reaction, because I grew up in a neighborhood where menfolk were loudly and publicly contested on street corners and front porches by screeching women with toddlers on their hips.)  And your second reaction is to glance over at your significant other, who is absorbed in animatedly telling his favorite joke which you have heard at least 500 times over the past 20 years but the way he tells it still manages to crack you up, and think “Damn.  He is charming.  And he does have gorgeous blue eyes.”

And right then he catches your eye and smiles you over, and when you get there he rests his hand on the nape of your neck in silent recognition of how he loves when you wear your hair pulled up and says, “Here she is…what was the name of that restaurant in Barcellona?  She’s always the one who remembers these things.”  And your shoulders relax and by some miracle, out of the depths of your harried mind, you call up the name of the restaurant and a funny anecdote about your dinner there because suddenly you aren’t the you who hides out by the buffet and forgets people’s names and has a run in her stocking creeping up the back of her leg but you’re the you who wears sexy black dresses and her hair in a chignon and can tell funny stories about her world travels at cocktail parties.

You know all that?  Well, that is what feeling at home is to me.  Not a physical place, per se, but an existential one which, like one of those newly discovered dimensions in astrophysics, can be both round and square, both flat and curved, both comfortable and demanding.

I feel most at home in that mental place where I am so at ease and my psyche is so absorbed with kicking off its shoes, tossing its car keys on the table, and sticking its head in the fridge to see if there is any leftover pizza still around to snack on that I get complacent and forget how lucky I am to be living this life in this place.  This amazing life. This amazing place.

I’m fortunate to have the kind of business I do, where I am jarred out of my buffet insouciance by a constant stream of guests who are in that process of newly discovering Umbria, Italy, travel.  They show me what I am so familiar with through fresh eyes and force me to glance across the room, pull my head out of the fridge, and see for myself the wonders hiding in plain sight all around me.  They remind me of the first time I had to navigate a new language and culture and how gratifying it can be, and of the first time I had fresh truffles grated over linguine and what an epiphany that was, and of the first time I saw Assisi awash in the pink light of sunset and the thought that real people lived here seemed impossible to me.  Now I do all of those things almost daily, and the comfort of that routine feels like home.

Feeling at home is also, paradoxically, the demanding opposite of that familiar complacent comfort–that challenging mental place which expects the best of you because it sees the best in you and knows the best in you and won’t settle for you settling for less than that.  In Italy I am the me who runs a business, not the me who has a hard time with balancing the checkbook.  I am the me who is a competent parent, not the me who rages and frets about my own family baggage.  I am the me who recognizes the value of serenity and connection, not the me who salivates over the latest shoes and celebrity gossip (though that me rears its ugly head disconcertingly often).

Part of this is undeniably linked to the timing of my move to Italy…I got here when I was a 23 year old girl and am now a 40 year old woman.  Ok, 39.  Which means, of course, I have all the hang-ups and insecurities of that 23 year old but with the side benefit now of wrinkles and cellulite to fuel them.  It also means that it has been these years in Italy which have coincided with that universal human process of seeking home in an external place or with an external person but finally, comfortable in my own skin, finding it within myself.

I love my house… I have poured my heart and soul into it.  I love my family… my sons are the only truly important and beautiful thing I have ever done.  I love Umbria… every day I discover something new and marvelous here.  But home is, ultimately, something bigger than all that. Something so vast that the only place it can fit is inside me:  the comfort–and the challenge–that come from loving myself.

This week’s guest writer

Rebecca is the queen of Umbria, where she rules from her beautiful agriturismo Brigolante Guest Apartments in the open countryside just outside Assisi. She is a friend and one of my favourite bloggers out there: with her witty, funny style, she tells about her life and adventures in Umbria where she moved from Chicago after meeting Stefano, her Prince Charming. Her blog is called Rebecca’s Ruminations. You can also follow her on Twitter as @brigolante and on Facebook. We would like to thank her for accepting to write this beautiful guest post, a real love letter to her family, to her home, and ultimately to herself. And, let me tell you, rightly so.

Yesterday, after a long day of work, we went to a new bar that has just opened right on the river bank in Pisa: Argini e Margini. To get to the bar you need to go down to a small sandy beach by the river Arno. The walk provides a very unusual perspective on the buildings of the Lungarno and the atmosphere is really cool. It is a “different Pisa”, in a way.

Argini e Margini consists of two small stalls with tables – a bar and a small booth where they fry seafood (squid and shrimp) -  and a floating seafood restaurant.

You can sit wherever you find a spot: we sat next to two perfect strangers, so it might be a good way to make new friends!

They serve aperitivo: you buy a drink and you can help yourself at the fingerfood buffet. Truth be told, there is not much to eat compared to other places in the city, mostly dipping sauces and bread, but the fried-food stall sells really good fried seafood!

The bar serves wine, beer and cocktails. Actually, I found out that my allergy pills and mojitos don’t go well together… and so I “had to” eat two servings of fried fish and vegetables to avoid getting too drunk! What a sacrifice!!!

The place is not expensive, and the crowd is very laid-back. Yesterday there was an exhibition (Firehouse Rock Poster Expo) and music. At the weekend they have live jazz concerts too. I think I have found my favourite spot in Pisa to hang out in the warm summer evenings!

And I would like to stress once again that Pisa at night is really beautiful, and fun. There are so many new locales, pubs, events and exhibitions! Spending only a few hours in the city and then leaving to go to Florence or elsewhere is “a sin“!

This is the second post of a guest series. We ask friends and colleagues to share with us what the expression to “feel at home” means to them. We believe that to truly enjoy a place, you need to really experience it, to make yourself at home. This means different things for different people, but it is an essential part of our lives, both as travelers and travel professionals. The idea came from a post I published in March and that you can read here.

At home away from home in Hungary

Last year my wife and I decided that we wanted more than just a holiday.  We wanted to really experience a place at a deeper level than we normally do as sightseeing tourists.  So we packed the car and headed across the continent in a three-month trip to Hungary.

The journey across Central Europe from the UK was itself a great experience, but what we were really looking forward to was making ourselves at home in Hungary’s capital city of Budapest.

When we reached Budapest after 1000 miles of driving, we certainly did not feel at home as we tried to navigate the busy city streets with its dense traffic, tram tracks, one-way systems and complex junctions.  Nor did we feel much better when after several stressful hours we found our accommodation on what looked like a slightly dubious back street.  However, a couple of months later when it was time to start packing up and head back home again, we found ourselves feeling unsure about where home really was, since Budapest had become out home away from home.

So how did a place that felt so foreign and stressful when we first arrived come to feel like home?

1. Local Knowledge

There is only so much that you can learn from guidebooks and the best guides are normally the people with local knowledge.  However, we weren’t looking for a tour guide of the landmarks and historical sites at all.  We wanted to be the people with the local knowledge – to get a feel for how the local people really live.

The best way to do this was to simply do what we would do if we moved to a new town in the UK.  We stayed in a residential area away from the main tourist areas and explored the city extensively on foot and by bicycle, aware of the fact that the lives of real people don’t always take place in the big city squares, but the small lanes where you find your local grocery stores, markets, cafes and parks.

2. Home Cooking

Surely few things make you feel more at home than good home cooking.  We were never going to feel at home for this length of time staying in a hotel and eating out in restaurants every day (nor could we afford to do so).  We wanted to get up in the morning at breakfast in our own kitchen, and then be able to come home at night and cook our own meals, which is why we rented a furnished apartment with a fully equipped kitchen.  This not only gave a sense of normality by being able to have meals at home whenever we wanted to, but it also meant shopping for groceries, and if I dare say it, cleaning up after ourselves, which in a strange way gave us a sense of ownership and made us feel that the apartment was our own.

3. Favourite Hangouts

Wherever we live, we always find special places that we enjoy going and spending time, whether it’s a place to go shopping, a cafe, a place to go for walks or whatever.  Get to know a place well enough and you’ll find some favourite places where you regularly like to spend time.  In our case we love to go for walks by the river, have picnics at Normafa on top of the Buda Hills and enjoy the tasty but extremely unhealthy food across the road from our apartment at Fanyuvo cafe, with its rustic log cabin interior.

4. Take Something with You

Whatever it might be, everyone has a few possessions that they always associate with home.  You can’t take everything with you, but sometimes it’s nice to take a few special things.  In our case, the most significant thing we brought with us was in fact our car, which as well as being a familiar item from home, actually made us feel as that if we had driven there, then we couldn’t be very far from home.  We also brought along our cuddly orang-utan Koyah, so we always had a friendly face to keep us company wherever we went.

5. People

I’ve always believed that home is not where the heart is, what with whom the heart is.  Basically, feeling at home is in many ways more about people than about place.  The most important thing of course was that my wife and I were together, but we also had friends and family visit while we were there.  It’s funny how little you can see people who live just a short drive away, but when you travel to another country you suddenly have people queuing up to come and visit you.

On top of that, the attitude of the local people is very important.  We found Hungarians to be extremely welcoming, and there was not one occasion when we were made to feel uncomfortable or excluded.  The language barrier in Hungary does make it difficult to get to know people, but just seeing familiar faces around the local area and in shops and cafes where we regularly went was very important, especially those people who even though you can’t speak their language, recognize you and give you a smile whenever they see you.

If we’d stayed longer then learning the language would certainly have been the final ingredient to feeling truly at home away from home in Hungary, but that will have to leave that the next time.

This week’s guest writer

Tom Greenwood is manager of the Hotel Price Comparison Website Hotels Fairy, which independently finds travel is the cheapest prices on over 200,000 hotels worldwide. He’s on Twitter as @hotelsfairy.

This is the first post of a guest series. We ask friends and colleagues to share with us what the expression to “feel at home” means to them. We believe that to truly enjoy a place, you need to really experience it, to make yourself at home. This means different things for different people, but it is an essential part of our lives, both as travelers and travel professionals.  The idea came from a post I published in March and that you can read here.

Home

Ever since I can remember, I have sought after a feeling of home. To be honest, I haven’t made it easy on myself, having moved 13 times through three countries in 28 years.  Almost all of the moves were job related, and each required its own set of adjustments.  New curtains were a given – I am certain that there is a law of nature stating that no two residences will ever have the same sized windows.  Furniture got put in storage and pulled out.  Washers and driers were always an issue – some places came with them and some didn’t- leading to buying and selling expensive appliances continuously and annoyingly.  Things broke.  Things got lost.

If it sounds negative, it wasn’t. It was mostly positive. I have seen this world more deeply than I ever could have done by traveling alone.  Living in different places and on different continents forced me to stay open, pliable, accepting of opinions different from my own.  Making new acquaintances from divergent backgrounds added richness to my life in ways that I could not begin to recount here.  I grew – professionally, personally, emotionally.  I learned things that I never could have learned had I stayed in my hometown.

But the one thing this lifestyle never gave me was a sense of home. As hard as we tried, and try we did, there was never one place that we stayed long enough to develop roots, to be part of the community, to plant a garden and watch it mature fully, to attend family events marking special occasions.  These are the things we left on the side of the road in pursuing a lifestyle of change and growth. And as I grew older, as the moves started to add up, it was these thoughts that started to wear on my mind and soul, more and more.

The last move we made, the most significant by far, was by our own choice – not through decisions made in a boardroom.  Giving up the corporate life and buying an abandoned farm in Piemonte, Italy, to turn into a bed and breakfast was a statement of sorts. It would require harnessing every skill we ever learned, every ounce of commitment we ever could muster up, and a good deal of guts to scratch out a living and make this project work.  After all, we were non-technically inclined city folk and the cluster of buildings we had just bought were four hundred years old and had been abandoned for almost half a century.

Where would we start? How would the B&B end up looking and functioning?  We had no experience in hospitality.  In fact, before we started anything at all, we would have to figure out the answer to the biggest question:  what did we want the project to be?

The original house

That was easy for me to answer.  I wanted to offer a few people a sense of home when they visited Italy. The difference, however, between answering the question and actually accomplishing the goal turned out to be a much larger challenge than I could have imagined.  Because you cannot give what you do not have yourself.  And I knew from experience that simply moving to a place does not make it home.  Not by a long shot.

I would never be able to act as if I had lived here all my life and knew everything about Italian life while I was still in the throes of adjusting.  So I took a different tactic.  We turned this project into a work in progress. We threw out the window the idea of finishing it completely at the outset and instead took on small piece by small piece.  Two rooms for the guests; a tiny apartment for us.  We built a website.  We visited a few vineyards, got to know a few local restaurants.  We shared with our first guests what we knew.  I got out my paints, I had high-tension electrical wiring installed for my kiln, and I started making plates and art and cups and mosaics.  Micha learned the art of the chainsaw from our neighbor Franco, who spent hours with us, chopping down old, dry trees and clearing the property.  We planted potatoes.  We planted so many that we learned we don’t like planting potatoes at all, if you consider the potato bugs and all the work watering.  But we didn’t mind a few tomatoes, and some sunflowers.  We learned. As the years progressed we took on renovation as we saw fit:  a pool, a washing machine room, a new gourmet kitchen. We fretted over the impending collapse of a roof.  We argued with the Commune over permit issues.  We laughed with guests and worried about there being enough hot water.  We found new wineries. We build a new room, a wine cellar.  New restaurants made it on our list.  We changed the colors of the rooms and I tried new things at breakfast.  We exhausted ourselves with garden work and murdered hundreds of hornets.  We got invited for Christmas by the neighbors, we had friends get ill and die and we went to funerals.  In short, we became part of the landscape in our small valley. We started to understand the heart and soul, the inside and out, the yin and the yang of Piemontese life.  The natural rhythm of the seasons, the harshness and the beauty of old stone houses, the consequences of choosing a life heavy on chores and low on nonsense.

Diana's beautiful home now

All the time, we have had guests who have come and gone, and many have come back again. They have watched it grow, our work in progress.  They have marveled at the changes and have felt part of it all.

And it is through THEIR eyes, that I have realized that this place has become home to my nomad soul – a home fought for and loved into reality.

We have done this project at a time when there is no certainty in the economy and even less in the future. But it’s the only time we have, and we have grabbed it with both hands.  In all of the tribulations and hurdles of making this life work, there is not a day when we do not look around, taken with the simple beauty by which we are surrounded.

Piemonte is stunning. It is abundant with goodness.  It makes you love it actively, with your hands in the soil and your face toward the sun.  The people are kind, and if you listen to them with humility, you can learn things that you never thought you could have learned.  Important, simple things.  Things that matter.  Truths.  How to build a fence, for example, or how to help a friend with his harvest.  Which wood burns the slowest and hottest.  The best stuffing for agnolotti.

The view from the house

It is in all of those small truths that we have come to realize the essence of the last seven years of our lives.  We have been given the chance, the privilege to be able to say that today, here, we have found home, a beautiful, simple, meaningful home.  And with that, we are able to accomplish the goal for which we had originally set out:  to give our guests from far away a sense of home, right here in Italy.

And that, I must say, makes me very happy.

This week’s guest writer

Diana Strinati Baur is the owner of the beautiful Baur B&B in Aqui Terme, in Piedmont. She is also a gifted and fine artist and a very interesting blogger. You can read about her life in Northern Italy on her blog, Creative Structures – One Woman’s Journey. She is also on Twitter as @dianabaur. Most importantly, Diana is a friend, first met online and then in real life, although not as often as we would have liked. To her goes our gratitude for this beautiful post!

April 25th is a holiday in Italy. We celebrate the liberation of the country from Fascism and Nazism. The day is also dedicated to Italy’s fallen soldiers.

My husband is Canadian and he has more than once asked me what we are celebrating on this Festa di Liberazione day. In the end, he used to say, wasn’t Italy the country creating all the fuss along with Germany, so liberation from what? From yourselves?

Yes.

Not all Italians supported Mussolini and his racial laws. There were also the Partigiani, the partisans, who fought both Fascists and the Nazis during World War II. Some of them are still alive today, and they were certainly still in good shape when I was a kid. The day some of the people from the village who had fought in the Italian Resistance movement came to my elementary school to tell us about those years is still one of the most impressive memories I have from schooldays. It was living history.

My grandfather had been a soldier and then a partisan. He remembered both experiences with horror, because, he used to say, “blood is blood“, no matter who you are fighting against or why. And besides, he always brought up the drama of having to fight other young men who looked just as scared and unwilling to do that stuff as he was. Young people sent to die for something they didn’t believe in for the most part.

He taught me to respect those who took great risks and sacrificed their lives to fight for the rights of all Italians so that we could all be part of a free and democratic nation. He was a very honest person though, and never once denied that sometimes things would get ugly even when he was with the partisans. The war is the war, and it’s never a completely “noble” thing to be part of, he used to say. No matter how right the ideals you are defending are.

It is true then that April 25 is a day that honors the memory of the many partisans and foreign soldiers who fought to free Italy from the dictatorship, but it is also a day on which we should remember the many soldiers who, in these situations, are victims of their governments. Young people sent to fight for a cause they neither believe in nor support.

It is also a day that deserves to be celebrated because it is a reminder of the importance of democracy, and civil rights. But most importantly it should serve the purpose of making people think about the importance of tolerance, respect and standing up for what’s right.

Something that these days is not so obvious in Italy, unfortunately.

Interesting websites about Italian Resistance (Resistenza):

• The Italian Resistance Movement
• Liberation Day in Italy, April 25: La Festa della Liberazione

April 1st already… April Fool’s Day in many countries, in Italy we call it Pesce d’Aprile, literally “April fish”! Not sure why. As usual, I am fascinated by the origins of present day “holidays”. Not surprisingly, the tradition of organizing practical jokes on the first day of April has ancient roots.

Some people believe that it goes back to the times when New Year’s Day was celebrated on March 25th (see my blog entry about Capodanno Pisano, here in Pisa they still celebrate it). The celebrations lasted for a whole week and April 1st was the last day. When the celebrations were moved to January 1st, a curious habit of exchanging empty gift boxes became popular in France, probably as a way to make fun of those who continued to celebrate the new year on April 1st.

Other people hypothesize that the origins of April Fool’s Day go back to the Antiquity instead, and would be rooted in the story of Proserpina. She was abducted by Pluto and her mother Ceres looked for her everywhere, but was tricked by some nymphs and didn’t find her for a long, long time.  The legend itself is beautiful and poetic, and it’s meant to explain the alternation of the seasons. You can read about it here.

This year, it happens that April 1st is also Holy Thursday (Giovedì Santo in Italian), the second important day of Holy Week after Palm Sunday. Christians commemorate the Last Supper of Jesus Christ with the Apostles. The solemn Mass that takes place in the afternoon on Holy Thursday opens the Easter Triduum, the three days that commemorate the Passion, Death and Resurrection of Jesus.

Having grown up in a Catholic family in which my mum and grandmother were real “churchgoers”, while my dad and grandfather were rather “onlookers”, I have developed this “taste” for the ritual aspects of our religion while looking at them with sort of an anthropological eye…  I go to church and all, but I cannot help listening to the readings and looking at the rite and trying to find the reasons behind the story that is told and the actions that are re-enacted. I find the whole thing totally fascinating. I am always trying to figure out what principle regulating human society is being “promoted”, if you see what I mean.

I love Easter time. I have so many fond childhood and teenage memories connected with the Easter celebrations. It would all start on the Saturday before Palm Sunday when we, the kids attending “catechismo” (the equivalent of Sunday school, which for us can be any day of the week, and which you attend from when you start school until you are 14 and are confirmed), would be sent out to the farms in the area to collect olive branches for the blessing of the following day.

In such a small village, every kid would participate: we were all altar boys… and girls! It was so much fun!

Then there was the tremendously boring Mass on Palm Sunday, with the reading of the entire Passion of Christ… The only good thing was that, sometimes, we would actually get to read a piece each, and that would keep us awake throughout the service. After the mass, the olive branches would be blessed just outside the church and then Don Piero, the priest we had then, would send us to bring the branches to the people who had not come to church. Well, kids still go door to door today, but it would be inconceivable for the priest today to be able to visit people at home and tell them off for not showing up to church! Can you imagine?! But in a small community of 350 people, back in the 80’s and 90’s that was still perfectly acceptable.

We would go back to our normal life for a couple of days, and then on Wednesday, the Easter holidays would begin: no school for a week!

On Wednesday afternoon, we were sent to summon the 12 men who had been chosen to “play” the 12 Apostles during the Easter Triduum. It was not a fun thing to do, believe me. As usual in Italy, most people say they are catholic, but few are actually practicing Catholics. So when we delivered the news, some would say ok, while others would swear like sailors! Still others would simply find somebody to substitute them (that would be my dad’s case…).

The 12 apostles had to come and pick up their tunic and get ready for the mass of the Holy Thursday, which also includes  the ritual washing of feet. On the same day, the women would get together and prepare what is supposed to reproduce the Holy Sepulchre in the smaller chapel in the village. Their job consisted essentially in laying lots of flowers by the altar and making it look pretty. There was an interesting tradition which has now practically disappeared: that of decorating the church with “veccia“. Veccia is vetch in English, I think, but the peculiarity is that, at the beginning of the Lent, seeds were planted  in pots then stored away in cellars and other dark rooms. The sprouts grow thin and white (hence the Tuscan saying for sick people “sei bianco come la veccia“, you are as pale as vetch). I think that in my area the seeds planted were actually wheat seeds, rather than vetch. Anyway, my great-grandmother grew lots of pots of these thin, white grass and I had to help her carry them from her cellar to the church.

Right before the Holy Thursday mass, the sacristan (who was really the “director” of this complicated event!) would make the turns for the Easter prayer vigil and would hand them out to the apostles. The Holy Sepulchre is never left unattended, and at least a few people and 2 or more apostles and the priest are always present in the chapel to pray.

Good Friday was my favourite day of the Holy Week. Yes… I know it sounds bad, as it is the day commemorating the crucifixion of Jesus Christ and his death at Calvary. However, it was (and still is) also the day of a procession through the streets of the village for the Stations of the Cross. The Stations of the Cross were prepared in 12 different spots in the village. The local people poured much effort into this task, as the altar for each Station represented the pride and joy of the residents of a part of the village. Nowadays, it’s probably not as important as it used to be, but I remember my great-grandmother, my grandmother and other women living in their building digging out of old and dusty trunks very old ex-voto and decorations, probably handed down from generation to generation. And I remember them hand-embroidering white linens and curtains right before the procession, to decorate their altar.

The Friday afternoon was hectic. The church of Civitella has an old statue of a dead Jesus and a statue of the Virgin Mary. The statue of Jesus was taken out from the glass case under one of the altars of the church where it is normally located and placed on a stand in the middle of the aisle, where caskets are normally placed. The statue of the Virgin was brought from the smaller chapel to the main church and placed on a pageant used to carry it in procession.

The thing I loved the most – and I still wonder where all that stuff is gone – was when we were sent to this room in the sacristy (in which we were normally not allowed) to get the necessary items for the procession. I guess people had accumulated stuff over the centuries really. In a large, worm-eaten, old wardrobe there were soldier costumes, old tunics, ensigns and flags, and the old “Confraternita di Misericordia” flag. The confraternita, literally the brotherhood, is the association that still takes care of the church, the cemetery, the village ambulance etc. I guess in the past, the people in the village had reenacted the whole thing, with period costumes and all.

We would bring these ensigns and the flags to the chapel where they were distributed before the procession, along with candles with colourful paper screens to block the wind.

At 9pm everybody would gather in the main church and the procession of the Stations of the Cross would begin. People would leave the church in a very orderly way. The priest first, followed by the apostles, the statue of Jesus, the men, then 4 young girls carrying the statue of the Virgin Mary and all the women. Such an old tradition. Again, I was fascinated by it. Throughout the village, people would have lit their windows with candles or with lamps. The bars and restaurants would close their windows and turn their TVs and music off. The procession would stop in front of each of the altars with a picture of the episode described in the reading and then we would move on to the next station. People who could not walk up and down the hill would stand by the side of the road, the men with their hats in their hands, the women with their heads covered in black veils and their rosary in their hands. And then, the procession would end in the church and after the blessing, we would all walk up to the statue of the dead Jesus at the front of the church and kiss it.

The procession still happens, but the number of people participating has decreased significantly. I can still smell the candles, and the burning paper around them! So typical!

The Saturday was unusually silent. From the Holy Thursday to the midnight Easter Mass, bells were tied, so there would be no ticking away of the hours, no call to the mass. I would spend the day with my grandmother colouring fresh eggs by boiling them with red onion, or in tea, or just painting them. We would boil enough eggs for the people who were invited to the Easter lunch. The decorated eggs would then be placed in a nice basket, taken to the church and left on one of the side altars.

At 11:00 pm we would go to the church. First the priest would bless the eggs, then the mass would start. After 40 days of no flower decorations anywhere in the church, the main altar was finally covered in beautiful (usually red) flowers.

Above the tabernacle, a red cloth would cover a statue of a resurrected Jesus, which would be uncovered at midnight, when Easter day officially starts. That moment would also be marked by a festive peal of bells, which essentially meant we could go home and open the chocolate eggs to get the surprises!!!

In my village, we still celebrate Easter like that, just in a much more low-keyed way. The numbers of people who go to church is smaller and most people do not really care that much anymore. There are fewer catholic children, and so I guess that the responsibility for most of the chores falls upon the old priest and the “apostles”.

Easter is always a good time of the year to visit smaller places: local communities do their best to make their homes festive and this type of tradition can certainly teach much about the history of a place and about the local (often changing) culture.

Happy New Year!!! No, I’m not crazy… I know it’s March 25, but, here in Pisa, today we celebrate the Capodanno Pisano! 2011 has officially begun!!!

From the 12th century until 1749, Pisa had its own calendar, different from the Gregorian calendar. March 25th, the day of the Annunciation – the Catholic celebration of the announcement by the angel Gabriel to Mary that she would become the mother of Jesus – was New Year’s Day.

The new year officially begins when a sunbeam strikes a marble egg placed in the Cathedral, above the beautiful pulpit sculpted by Giovanni Pisano. The sunbeam enters the beautiful church from a small round window located in the chapel of San Ranieri: a very ingenious solar clock!

Each year, Pisa celebrates his history with a parade in period costume, with flag wavers, beautiful damsels, and crossbowmen! Plus soldiers, drums, trumpets and obviously the Anziani del Popolo, the wise men that ruled the Pisan Republic.

The whole celebration was really cool!  The parade started from the church of  S. Giorgio ai Tedeschi and entered Piazza dei Miracoli around 11:30. The flag wavers threw flags to the rhythm of the drums, the soldiers marched with their swords, the girls carried flowers.

Only a few people know about this event outside Pisa and, since it is not high season yet, most of the other people  in the square were actually locals: they took pictures of their friends in period costume and cheered them in a very festive way.

We followed the crowd inside the Cathedral (free entrance for the occasion!) and we got a really good spot by Galileo’s chandelier: perfect to see the sunbeam hit the marble egg. Of course to find the best spot, we followed the wives and girlfriends of the figuranti (the people in costume): nobody knows better than a real Pisano where to go stand to catch the first glimpse of the Capodanno Pisano!!!

There was a mass, and then, in the general excitement, while we were all with our heads up waiting for the bright spot of light to move over the marble egg, at midday sharp, the bishop officially announced the arrival of the new year gave the blessing while struggling to talk loudly enough to be heard as his words were drowned in applause.

After the mass the parade left the cathedral, and reached the Bishop’s Palace, where the flag waver paid their respects to the Anziani del Popolo. If you want to see the photos below in a larger size, you can click on the symbol to watch the slideshow full screen.

I’ll admit it. By that point I had fallen in love with one of the crossbowmen… and I had to ask my husband to take a picture of us… wouldn’t you have?! I am sure he was originally, authentically medieval!! He must be 800 years old!! He was just perfect for the role, so I had to go and ask for a photo!!!

A great morning!

And today, Pisa keeps celebrating its 2011 with exhibitions, conferences and live music!

Here is the video of the first part of the celebrations (90 seconds):

Here is the video of the final part of the celebrations (86 seconds):

Lately I’ve been thinking about the relationship between luxury hotels or resorts and the local communities. I read about the famous British chef Gordon Ramsay coming to manage the restaurant of the brand new luxury resort in Tuscany called “Castel Monastero”, just outside Siena.  My first reaction was, are Tuscan chefs so bad that we need to “import” a British one?!

I suppose it’s a marketing strategy. At least that gives me an idea of the type of crowd they want to attract (the Russian version of the website gives also a clue about the audience they’re after!). I went to look at the hotel site and I saw that the cheapest room is almost 400 euros per night, which obviously makes it a luxury place for (maybe) many but (definitely) not for all…

I realized there is something that I really don’t like about this kind of tourism ventures.

Let me be clear: I have absolutely nothing against Castel Monastero, Mr. Ramsay or the many other excellent foreign chefs working in Tuscany. I know for a fact that they are good, and probably lovely people. I wish them all the best for their venture: why not? They have beautiful places in wonderful locations. We might even end up staying there when we win the lottery!

It’s just that I would like for these “colonies” to contribute to the local economy in a substantial way. I believe in tourism as a way to improve the life of the local communities besides that of the tourism-related business people, and I cringe at the idea of a place that has nothing or next to nothing to contribute to the local economy and environment (both the flora and the fauna, the people and the places, the plants and the animals…), which might not even be the case of Castel Monastero, I have no idea. I’m just talking in abstract terms here.

I’m a dreamer.

I found an interesting article: Can luxury travel be responsible travel?

The concept of “responsible travel” in the article is mainly about responsibility towards the environment, whereas my main concern is responsibility towards the local people. I suppose I’m more interested in ethical travel than in responsible travel… but shouldn’t it be the same thing?

Ms. Howse, Sustainability Director of CC Africa, says that

The luxury traveler potentially (and certainly in our case) delivers significantly greater positive impact to the cause of environmental protection and the support of communities as a result of how much money they spend than the budget (although very well-meaning) traveler.

And she continues:

Also the income introduced by the high end operations is often the only way the wildlife land can be sustainably defended from other forms of land use. The small amounts of money that can be charged for the “village stay” option is usually insufficient to protect any meaningful tracts of land from other forms of land use.

Now, this might be a positive example of a Luxury travel company, but is this always the case?

I am not sure what my opinion is about this. My gut feeling tells me that there should not be companies that don’t even try to recruit people to put in responsibility positions in the area where they open their  structures. There should not be places that don’t seek out equipment and services in the area where they are located, instead importing all they need. There should not be places that do not bring any improvements to the communities in which they plant themselves.

But can you regulate this? I believe that you somewhat should, but that it is realistically not feasible. Luxury places should be ethical, and invest in their environment at large: finance projects, support improvements, spend part of their big money in the area where they are, so that it stays as charming as they found it and possibly even more so.

Is this wrong or too much to ask? The truth is that I don’t know.

Anyway, here is a list of interesting reading about these matters. A lot of food for thought. However most of these articles are about exotic destinations, but the matter is the same even in a popular and richer destination like Tuscany. And yet nobody talks about it.

• What is community based tourism?
• Responsible travel and responsible tourism
• Supporting local businesses: How your holidays help
• Should all inclusive holidays be banned?

I’d love to hear other people’s opinions on this, as, I admit, I’m very confused.