The visitors

Daytrip to Scarperia

Scarperia is a small town about 20 miles north of Florence in the Appenine Mountains. The main road does not go there so traveling to Scarperia involves a little effort. But it’s worth the effort because Scarperia has been a center for making knives, scissors, swords, daggers, and all other kinds of things with sharp edges for many years. In the past there were many producers of such items in Scarperia; today there are only four but the knives and related products made in Scarperia are well regarded in Italy.

The trip from Florence to Scarperia has two legs. The first leg is by train and takes about 30 minutes.The train travels from Florence to a little town called San Piero a Sieve. The second leg of the trip begins at the San Piero rail station. From there you take a regional bus for about 5 minutes to Scarperia. Fortunately, there is a pleasant coffee bar in San Piero to kill time waiting for the bus early in the day and waiting again later in the day for the train.

Town walls

The Florence-to-San-Piero-and-return train is interesting. The end of the line is in Borgo San Lorenzo, only a few miles beyond San Piero a Sieve. The train includes only two cars, a passenger car and a car that combines the engine and another passenger car. Very comfortable, very punctual, and very cheap (only about $4 a person each way.) Most people leave the train in the towns near Florence.The bus and driver were waiting for us when we arrived at San Piero.

Appenines in the distance

Scarperia is an old town. The sign for the town is on the ancient city walls. Today, of course, the town is larger. The photo to the north of the town shows apartment buildings outside the old city walls and the Appenine Mountains in the distance.

The main street, Via Roma, includes a number of shops that sell the town’s knives and related products. The window of one store shows the usual knives, jack knives and a nice selection of swords. We assume that the swords today are for ceremonial purposes but, honestly, we don’t know of any ceremonies that would require a sword. Swords were never required in the jobs where we spent our working lives.

A store window

The town museum, of course, features the local industry. This device shown in the photo was used by two workers to sharpen blades. The actual sharpening must have been dangerous to one’s eyesight since there was no evidence that workers used eye protection.

We passed by the stores on the main street with the impressive displays and stopped in Giglio Coltelleria or the Lily Knife Shop. The Giglio is the symbol of Florence and many businesses have adopted the giglio as their emblem. The shop is on the main floor of what appears to have been a factory at one time. Today the factories have moved to the outskirts of the town and this one former factory near the center of town seems to be an outlet rather than a shiny, impressive retail store. We made our purchases easily and quickly.

Sharpening tool

A cat guarded the Giglio Coltelleria in the piazza in front of the store.

We had lunch in a restaurant near the knife shops and waited for the bus back to San Piero a Sieve on a beautiful spring day. The bus arrived and a few minutes later dropped us at the rail station where we waited very briefly and enjoyed the the view of the countryside from the station platform.

Giglio store in Scarperia

Returning to Florence

Our friend, the weaver

Sign for the Foundazione Lisio

Nancy and Dan visited us in Florence for a few days and led us to an interesting experience on a topic we knew very little about. Nancy is a weaver with looms in her home near our home in Syracuse. Her machines are made of wood and are impressively sturdy and large. While she was in Florence, Nancy’s interest was to visit the Foundation Lisio on the outskirts of the city where the ancient art of hand weaving has been kept alive using traditional Jacquard looms.

A Jacquard loom

The organization is properly called the Foundazione Arte della Seta or the Foundation for the Art of Silk Making. The organization is headquartered in the hills south of the Florence where, on the morning of our visit, the flowering trees were in blossom and the sun was warm. In their building they manufacture brocades and velvets made from silk, all woven by hand on commission. The Foundation also holds classes in the facility for weavers from around the world and maintains the Jacquard looms as fascinating objects of the history of technology. The tour included the four of us and was led by Eva Basile, the Lisio School Director.

Strings above control
shuttle cock threads

Florence has a long association with textiles. Textiles made from wool were a thriving industry in Florence and Tuscany in the early years of the second millennium. Eventually Florence became a leader in banking, originally in support the trade in fabrics. With the great success of banking, Florence became a power in central Italy and eventually home to the Renaissance, the stupendous flowering of thought and art between 1200 and 1600 that was made possible, in part, by the wealth of the city.

Silk came to Florence from the Orient early in the Renaissance. Silk worms and the techniques for harvesting silk and turning the threads into rich fabrics became as important an industry as woolen fabrics.

The Jacquard looms used at Foundation Lisio were invented in France in the early 1800s. These looms were very complex mechanically and multiplied the productivity of a worker many, many times and, consequently, enlarged the market for fabrics made from silk.

How plush velvet is made

A Jacquard loom has two sources of threads for the ground, the basic fabric. A shuttle cock flies through these threads and then the positions of the two sets of ground threads are switched, holding the shuttle cock thread in place. At the heart of a Jacquard loom is a mechanism above that controls which threads in the ground fabric are lifted so that the shuttle cock thread can come to the surface and be seen.

Punch cards control the design

Yes, yes, this sounds pretty complicated but it’s probably more complicated than one might imagine. At the Foundation silk fabrics are woven at densities of 250 threads per inch. That is incredibly dense considering the image on a high resolution computer display is 72 dots per inch. An ordinary television is 30 dots per inch.

In a Jacquard loom hundreds and hundreds of individual strings hang down, held in place by tiny weights. The strings lift up (or fail to lift up) the threads in the ground fabric. When an individual string lifts up, color from the shuttle cock thread peeks out from the silk background color.

Shuttle cocks with metallic threads

The very high “resolution” of the silk produced is not the only connection with modern computers. The individual strings that lift (or fail to lift) the individual threads are controlled by punch cards. Holes in the punch cards allow a string to be pulled up, the lack of a hole prevents the string from being lifted up. There isn’t much difference between Jacquard punch cards and the old IBM punch cards that some of us may have used (if one is over a certain age.) Fabric designers “programmed” their Jacquard looms to produce particular designs with a particular set of cards. A new set of cards would produce another design. The Jacquard was a special purpose computer elegantly designed for one purpose, that is, to weave beautiful fabrics.

A sample of velvet made on
a Jacquard loom

The tour leader showed us a tool in two halves, made of cast iron and quite heavy, that was used to make the punched cards. The metal had holes in every position where a hole might be punched in a card and a card fit nearly inside between the two halves. The user took a cylinder of metal and punched holes in a card with a little hammer to make the cards and to program the loom. This process of “programming” must have taken forever. Dan wondered aloud how these “programs” would be “debugged”. You’d have to be pretty far into weaving to see mistakes erupt and we understand that such mistakes could not be fixed easily.

Spools of satin thread

Eva Basile said that she had learned this primitive method for punching cards when she was 15 years old and that it was reasonable for a 15 year old to be tied to such painstaking process and such a primitive tools. It helped to focus the mind. There were machines in the workshop for punching holes in the cards much more quickly.

The Jacquard loom has relatives such as the player piano and the music box, other single purpose computers. The invention of the modern electronic computer dates to World War II when scientists in Britain built single purpose computers to break the famous German Enigma codes.

The looms are noisy. The video clip gives a sense for what one loom sounds like. A factory full of these machines all making fabrics would very noisy.

The tour was fascinating especially for someone who is also interested in computers and the history of computers. Because the loom is controlled by a "program" stored on punch cards, a Jacquard loom is in the center of the computer exhibits at the Ontario Science Center near Toronto as an example of an early programmable device, that is, an early computer.

For the report of a group of weavers who spent some weeks studying at the Foundation Lisio, see New World Technology Meets Old World Weaving,

Taste Florence

Early Sunday morning on NPR in Syracuse is pretty calm, sedate stuff. Normally.

On an early Sunday morning in mid-January  I was emptying the dishwasher and making a pot of coffee with the radio on in the background, bleary eyed, trying hard not to stumble and break the dishes that I was putting away. Then I heard something about Florence.

The program was Inside Europe broadcast by Deutsche Welle Radio. Normally on Sunday morning it is the caffeine that wakes me up. This morning it was Deutsche Welle Radio. The announcer mentioned something about a person who is taking people to try real food in Florence. 

Food. Florence. Suddenly I was alert

Here's a link to the audio from Deutsche Welle Radio. The clip is about 7 minutes long.

Real taste of Florence | Inside Europe | Deutsche Welle

The link to the audio is under AUDIOS AND VIDEOS ON THE TOPIC. It's worth listening to.

The reporter takes you to the Sant'Ambrogio Market, the market we go to most days while we're in Florence. The reporter stops at the stand of a person named Urbano Innocenti, a guy we visit every time we go to the mercato (that is, the local market.) You'll hear Urbano saying "The best in the world ..." in the background and he's correct. Everything he sells is excellent. He also flirts will all the women.

Then it's onto a  butcher in the same market who describes the ideal Florentine porterhouse steak.

Finally, they walk from Mercato Sant'Ambrogio a few blocks to Vestri. The report describes Vestri's gelato as the best in Florence. The person being interviewed is right on this. There are lots of good gelato places in Florence but Vestri is excellent. The reporter, however, fails to mention that this is more of a chocolate shop than a gelato shop and there are chocolate goodies everywhere. The piles of chocolate turn into mountain ranges of chocolate at Easter time.

Toni Mazzaglia (right) and
her colleague, Pam Mercer

The interview involved places we go to most days and Annette and I wondered if we’d cross paths with this person who haunts some of the same places that we haunt. Fortunately, we did meet her and, not surprisingly, it was in front of Urbano Innocenti’s small shop in Mercato Sant’Ambrogio. 

The woman who was interviewed in the Deutsche Welle Radio story was Antoinette Mazzaglia. She goes by Toni. She has a business leading visitors to Florence on tours to try the best of the tastes that Florence has to offer. She has a web site, of course:

Taste Florence | Where eating is an art

She also has a blog where she shares her opinions about eating and everything associated with eating. Here's the address:

Eataliana

In her blog she has an amusing discussion regarding bruschetta, a word that is always mispronounced by Americans (because that "sch" cue in the middle of the word is a booby trap; In Italian it's pronounced "sk" as in skate in English, not as "sh" in shame.) She has a few choice words on the subject in her blog:

“Most of all, I am upset with anyone who owns an Italian restaurant and pronounces bruschetta wrong. There is just no excuse. If you are charging people for an Italian dish (with a 500% profit margin!) you should throw in the f%#@king proper pronunciation! No excuses.”

Toni is a transplanted Italo-American but you can tell she's Italian at heart, not because of her last name, but because her blog is all about the fundamental Italian subjects of family and food.

Two visitors from Maryland

The birthday party

Two visitors arrived last Monday at about mid-day, Jacqie and David. We were sad to see David’s sister, Laura, leave a few days before with her family but we were happy to see Jacqie and David arrive to celebrate his birthday even though it had been a few days since the actually event.

The birthday cake was a surprise to David. The cake was a layer cake with a fruity jam between the layers and a “frosting” of sweetened almond paste, a flavor very much like the candy we call marzipan. The cake was good, the frosting divine, and the birthday celebrant was a little surprised by the hoopla.

The four of us walked around the city of Florence. Each of them had visited the city once before. It was a treat for us and for them, we hope, that they were able to spend most of a week in Florence this time.

Jacqie and David in
Piazza della Signoria

We spent a good bit of time in Florence’s largest civic piazza, Piazza della Signoria, where the statue of Michelangelo’s David stands just out of sight to the left in the photo. The Uffizi painting gallery is just off the piazza and we toured the gallery another day. On a sunny day the piazza is filled with tourists walking between the famous sites of the city.

Tough choice; selecting a pastry
at Nannini's in Siena

We spent a day on a trip to Siena, a smaller city about 50 miles to the south. Florence is compact but Siena is even more so. The streets are narrow and the sidewalks (when there are sidewalks) are barely wide enough for people to pass one another. Fortunately, there is very little traffic allowed in the city and the streets are shared by pedestrians, buses, and taxis.

The city has one large, famous open place, a piazza called Il Campo or The Field. Of course, it’s not a field but a huge half-circle paved with brick and stone. The piazza slopes down from its curved edge to the center in front of the Palazzo Comunale, the City Hall. 

On the edge of Siena's
famous piazza

A museum is located in the this city hall with famous fresco paintings from the 1300s, among them the Good Government and Bad Government frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. In the Good Government  fresco Justice is seated to the left above the figure representing Concord. The Siena government is represented by a tall figure to the right dressed in black and white, the city colors. Justice, Concord, the people, and the Leader all hold a rope which signifies common agreement. In Bad Government Justice is in chains near the bottom of the fresco. The leader in Bad Government is a monster named The Tyrant.

We also visited Nannini’s, a famous coffee bar and pastry shop. The choices are bewildering. A lot of careful consideration must go into the choice of a mid-morning treat.

Frittelle out from the fryer

There are treats everywhere in Siena. We visited the city during the celebration of the Feast of San Giuseppi (or Saint Joseph’s Day.) A temporary shack was set up on an edge of Il Campo where frittelle are deep-fried and offered for sale. The recipe is on the wall of the shack; the little donut holes are made of flour, rice flour, and orange. They are cooked quickly and are surprisingly light.

Looking forward or looking backward

Travel to any vacation destination is stimulating. New places, new people, new situations. The further afield you travel, the more stimulating.

When we spend time here in Florence, we see many things that make us stop and ponder. The food is so good and the people are so trim. How can that be? Of course, there is much more walking and biking here but the food is hard to ignore. And yet few Florentines carry excess weight. An overweight person in the center of the city is most likely a tourist, not a local.

A publicly accessible
cigarette machine

Some other things are bewildering. Italian homes are spotless. The saying that “You could eat off the floor” would be probably uncomfortable physically but correct in the hygienic sense in Italy. But public spaces are messy and litter is tossed about casually. The city makes heroic efforts to clean up each day but the one day of the week when they let up, Sunday, the mess multiplies until Monday morning when the cleanup begins anew.

The other day I passed a cigarette vending machine that was outside, on the face of a building, available to the public 24 hours a day. At first I though that it was incongruous; Italy has banned smoking indoors and the warnings on cigarette packs say “Fumare uccide” (roughly “Smoke and you will die”) in boldface type that takes up half the face of the pack. Odd, then, that a cigarette vending machine would be so open and so available.

With a closer look this is not the case. The machine has four places for the user the interact with the machine. First, you check the display to see what you have chosen and how much it costs. Second, you insert your diver’s license or some other official document that indicates your age. (Cigarette purchases are limited by age.) Third, you feed the machine a bill, a banknote, since cigarettes and about the some prices as the lowest denomination of paper money, five Euro. Fourth and finally, you get change.

That second step is interesting. We have nothing like that at home. And it’s so simple. Yes, a young person could use a parent’s driver’s license but that would be skating on pretty thin ice with your parents and a machine sophisticated enough to scan bar code could keep records of whose official document was used to purchase a pack a cigarettes. Imagine a cigarette machine emailing a parent to notify them that their driver’s license had been used to buy a pack! Creepy but a parent might want to know something like that.

Detailed image

This is not to recommend cigarette smoking or cigarette machines; this is only to recommend fresh thinking.

At home the presidential race, particularly on one side, seems totally focused on old controversies. Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 should have made birth control uncontroversial but here we are discussing the issue as if it were current. 

By the way Italy has the lowest birth rate in Europe. Last I looked, Italy was a Catholic country. What could be causing that? Whatever the cause, there is no controversy here.

Roe v.Wade may still be controversial legally but it was decided in 1973. This is not new stuff except for rearward facing politicians.

It seems a shame that our public life at home includes so much discussion about issues that were settled in the past. This leaves less space for thought about how to fashion our future.

A note that is somewhat related

I’m reading a biography called Thomas Jefferson; American Sphinx by Joseph Ellis. He notes that Jefferson pressed for the decimalization of our currency. Of course, he was successful and instead of the mysterious pounds, shillings, pence, quids, and whatever else the English use, we have a much simpler system.

A smart vending machine that checks for proof of age is an interesting idea. It’s never occurred to me and you wonder what other applications there might be for such an idea. But it’s striking because it’s different.

Too bad that Jefferson didn’t press on into decimalizing measurement. If we had adopted the metric system, we might not have to teach fractions to kids in elementary and middle school. That fact that we don’t teach fractions to students in high school doesn’t necessarily mean that they know how to use fractions! And adults?

Can you imagine the Republicans with the issue of the United States adopting the metric system? Rush Limbaugh? The sky would definitely be falling.

The Whirlwind

Tom, Noah, and Laura

We had some wonderful visitors this week. Laura, Tom, and Noah arrived last Tuesday and stayed through Sunday morning. Laura and Tom have been here before but this is Noah’s first trip to Florence. He is three years old and we’re pleased that his parents thought that the three of them could make the trip to visit us in Florence.

What kind of experience would a three-year old have in Florence? What kind of impact does the great Renaissance city have on such a young child? Those were questions that we wondered about in advance. We should have thought about the impact of a three-year old on us.

We forgot that he is a whirlwind.

The morning of first full day we took Noah to Piazza Republicca, a large piazza in the center of the city with fashionable stores, fancy cafés, and a carousel smack in the middle of the automobile-free space. His carousel ride was fun and he smiled as he went round and round, up and down on his fine stallion. Then the ride was over.

And the real fun began.

Noah hopped off the carousel, took a few steps across the piazza, and began to stalk a pigeon. Of course, the pigeon interrupted his hunt for shards of bread and pastry and flew a few feet away. Noah squealed with delight. This continued for the next half hour as Noah ran around the piazza, disturbing the scavenging of the pigeons.

Some of the adults in the piazza noticed Noah and his contest with the pigeons. A man whose job was to bring people into his restaurant smiled. A man who sold tourist trinkets from a cart stopped and had quite a conversation with Noah about what presents his parents and grandparents might want to buy for him. Fortunately, Noah was more interested in the pigeons.

We could keep up with him only because there were four of us and just one of him.

On the carousel

Noah and his parents had a stimulating time visiting the Bargello Museum, Florence’s great sculpture museum. The museum is an old fortress with imposing, crenelated walls. Inside there is a large central courtyard with a large, deep well (safely screened a few feet from the top.) The ground floor and the floor above contain a number of sculptures by Michelangelo, Donatello, and the other Florentine masters but Noah was more interested in the collection of old cannons and sculpted lions in the courtyard. (The lion is one of the symbols of the city.) Egged on by his Nonno (grandfather), Noah would put his finger in a lion’s mouth and pull it out suddenly, complaining of bite by the animal. There were many such encounters with stone lions.

Pigeon pursuit 1

Noah ignored the Michelangelo scultpures and circled the well in the courtyard again and again.

Pigeon pursuit 2

There are not many green spaces in Florence. The famous book about Florence, The Stones of Florence by Mary McCarthy, describes a city where the streets, narrow sidewalks, piazzas, and and buildings are constructed of gray or brown stone. There are two exceptions, Piazza Santo Spirito and Piazza d’Azeglio. The first is across the Arno in front of the church of the same name. The second is a large park in a residential area in the western part of the city. The park is surrounded by fine homes and an expensive hotel but the playground swarms with young children in the afternoons when the weather is pleasant. The park also has a carousel and pigeons. This may be Noah’s fondest memory of Florence, the carousel and the pigeons he pursued in this park.

Besides carousels and pigeons, Noah also enjoyed the street musicians who are often very good musicians. The guitarist chose a spot between buildings where his music bounced off the stones beautifully. Noah took a coin to put into his guitar case. Noah also was interested by a man wearing white makeup and a costume that made him appear to be a statue. Noah approached him, the man gently put his hand on Noah’s hand, and slowly turned his head toward us so we could take pictures. Artfully done.

Talking with a salesperson

A thought about our three-year old’s experience

It seemed like a whirlwind but that is how we adults see it. The three-year old child was engaging everything that was around him and bouncing from stimulus to stimulus. Interestingly he quickly developed a sense for where things were. The first day he got a cookie our favorite bakery, he was very happy. The second day we passed near the same bakery but from a different direction, he recognized the store front and wanted to visit again. (Of course, we did.) He also knew how to travel the blocks from our apartment to the park with the other kids and the carousel. He seemed to be mapping the city in his mind quickly and accurately.

The statue

We remember reading a book review some years ago titled What Babies Know and What We Don’t. The reviewer noted that adults have a style of learning that might be called spotlight consciousness where we focus on one thing (for instance, writing a blog entry) and ignore or try to ignore other things. Young children, on the other hand, have a style of learning that might be called lantern consciousness where they

“are vividly aware of everything without being focused on any one thing in particular. There is a kind of exaltation and a peculiar kind of happiness that goes with these experiences too.”

The guitarist

It seemed like a whirlwind but it was a child taking in a varied collection of new experiences with “exaltation” and “happiness” and bringing his parents and grandparents along for the ride. 

We made a mistake. We should have napped when he napped.

Coming down from an exciting day