Travels With My Sister ~ Milan to Cortona

Planning the trip is part of the pleasure. For those of us who enjoy the choices and challenges of travelling independently, the internet is a godsend as long as you work to specific criteria, remember to convert foreign currency prices to Oz dollars, and watch the bottom line for assorted ‘city taxes’ and ‘booking charges’ before you present the plastic card. Another thing I’ve learned to check is the distance from airport to city; Milan’s main airport is a forty-five minute drive from the city, which translates to A$100 by taxi! However there is a very plush bus service for A$13 –if you are not too weary after the flight to find it.

My criteria are mainly location and price. Central location means higher price, generally speaking, but there are gems to be found in back streets – for our overnight stay in Milan on arrival in Italy, I found a small 2-star hotel just 2 blocks from La Scala and the Cathedral: small bedroom and a shower recess that was a challenge to tuck our bottoms in to close the door, but spotlessly clean, and with a delightful breakfast room with stained glass windows and very comprehensive breakfast included in the price.

 

The next day, onward by train to Cortona, via Florence; we had checked our timetable and bought tickets online, but nearly came undone in Florence where we had to change trains with fairly tight timing because Cortona doesn’t have many trains on Sundays – and found that tickets ain’t tickets, only vouchers that have to be processed at confusing machines on the very crowded station. So Sis did the processing while I wrestled our luggage towards the waiting train and sweated until she came running down the platform with a couple of minutes to spare! The trains are VERY punctual.

 

Our first sight of Cortona from the train was thrilling. High on a hill, the mellow old buildings appeared to be painted on the patchwork green and brownish landscape, a quintessential Tuscan portrait. We were driven to our apartment by the owner’s English-speaking friend (a real bonus) and I was torn between loving the scenery and worrying about the quality of the apartment I’d booked online – it’s one thing to live with my own decisions, but another to feel responsible for Sis – what if I’d booked a real lemon?

The owner and a crowd of curious neighbours were there to give us a warm and confused Italian welcome, and as soon as we made it inside my worries were dissolved in the huge grins of delight on our faces – it was magic! Old, 2-storey stone, with 2 bathrooms, bedrooms beautifully prepared with ironed, embroidered linen, fully equipped kitchen and lounge furnished with antiques, shuttered windows framing the view of Tuscan farmland. First impressions? We were speechless.



Sampling Cortona’s local produce



Ensuite bathroom, Italian style



 

We couldn’t wait to get out and explore the town, which is small and easy to navigate; well, as long as you can push your legs and lungs up and down the steep streets and winding laneways! Shopping for fresh food was a delight, and we were like a couple of kids playing house, so delighted to have our own little pad to cook snacks in and just live to our own timetable instead of being in a hotel.



The view from my bedroom!



 

So we settled in for 2 weeks, and spent our days walking, eating, drinking, shopping, exploring. We found the sanctuary where St. Francis went for retreats, a massive stone building where there are still monks spending retreat time gardening and maintaining the place – one of them chatted to us and found me an English version of the history of the Sanctuary.

We hired a car for a few days to explore the countryside; I was promptly and undemocratically appointed driver so had to take the challenge of left-hand driving amongst some of the craziest drivers on the planet. All went well until we drove on to the ferry to go to Elba: the attendant beckoned me to one side and directed me to drive up the 45 deg. ramp to the upper deck for tiny cars, and I swear the ramp was no wider than my dining table- I was paralysed for a moment, just can’t do this, help! But the cars behind me had no mercy and nor did the attendant, who ran up the ramp backwards in front of me, urging me on – did he not realise he was in imminent danger of being crushed as I was terrified of losing revs and stalling on the bloody ramp! Terrifying.

We survived, and loved exploring Elba with its history as the place where “The Emperor Napoleon took early retirement”(Lonely Planet quote). His house and garden were open to tour, and well maintained, decorated with horses’ head sculptures (he missed his battle ponies) and pictures of bees (apparently the royal symbol of his court – who knew?). Some wonderful trompe de l’oeil wall painting of drapes that looked so real you wanted to touch them. Apparently the man basically ran the island and lined his pockets with local industry, and then escaped in plain sight while the English administrator was away for a week!

 

Evening in the piazza

Most days, we just enjoyed being temporary locals in our village; we felt disgracefully superior towards the bus tour groups who were dropped off for a few hours and martialled together by flag-carriers while we sipped and munched in our favourite cafes! In the evenings we watched the locals gather and chat, the women strolling with children while the old men gathered in their corner of the piazza where they seemed to have exclusive use of the seats to argue loudly, gesticulate, and drink beer.



Cortona - the house used as a set for‘Under the Tuscan Sun’




There were a couple of typically Italian adventures, such as the day we took the bus to a nearby town for an annual market, then waited over an hour for the bus home – only to be told (eventually) that on this market day, buses don’t run from this stop! No notices, just cancel the buses! Local knowledge takes a little longer to pick up, and you can get frustrated, or just laugh at yourself and walk to the other side of town to catch the bus – that’s independent travel.

Helen

Philida ~ Andre Brink

One of the Man Booker Prize long list, this is the story of a slave in South Africa in the 19th century, set in the period leading up to the end of slavery. Interestingly, the author is a descendant of the family who ‘owned’ Philida, and his familiarity with the country and its history are apparent in the details of the government actions and the turbulence among the Boer settlers as slavery is about to be banned.

The book begins in first-person format, and opens with the compelling line: “Here come shit.”

Philida, who has walked many miles from the property of her owners, must confront an unhelpful public servant ‘with deep furrows in his forehead, like a badly ploughed wheat field, and a nose like a sweet potato grown past itself’ with her complaint of rape by Francois, the son of her master.

She had decided to lay the complaint, having borne four children to Francois, because he has reneged on his continual promise to buy her freedom – he is to marry a white woman, and Philida and her children are to be sold to a distant landowner to avoid any ‘offence’ to the wife.

Here come shit, indeed – the reaction of the Brink family to the sheer audacity of a slave’s action in lodging such a report, and Philida’s own feelings about the white man she is clearly quite fond of, make compelling and often cringe-inducing reading.

The story follows the gritty fight for her children’s future amid the insecurity of everyone’s struggle to find a new life, and Philida’s physical and emotional journey away from her familiar life is well worth following.

 

Helen

The Hiding Place ~ Trezza Azzopardi

I Just loved this extraordinary novel

 

A finalist for Britain's prestigious Booker Prize, The Hiding Place – Welsh novelist Trezza Azzopardi's brilliantly lyrical tale of an immigrant family in the harbor town of Cardiff, Wales - is turning the heads of readers and publishers around the world, moving some critics to compare it to Frank McCourt's bleak, stirring memoir Angela's Ashes. But The Hiding Place need not "hide" behind any ready-made comparisons; Azzopardi's astonishing, tension-filled debut stands assuredly on its own as a work of tremendous power and originality.

 The Hiding Place is narrated by Dolores, the youngest of six daughters born to a Maltese immigrant father and a Welsh mother. With one hand permanently disfigured by a fire when she was only one month old - the hand is beautifully described by the author as "a closed white tulip standing in the rain; a cutoff creamy marble in the shape of a Saint; a church candle with its tears flowing down the bulb of wrist" - Dolores has always been treated as an outcast. Her father, Frankie Gauci, is an incorrigible gambler who bets "more than he can afford to lose." On the day Dolores is born, he loses his half-share of a café, as well as the apartment above it where his family lives. Everything in Frankie's life is potential currency, including his family; he even sells his second-oldest daughter Marina to gangster Joe Medora in exchange for a house and money to pay off his debts. Dolores's mother, Mary, is driven to the edge of insanity as she watches the world around her collapse, helpless to save even her children from her husband's vices.

 

At times, The Hiding Place paints a phantasmagoric portrait of cruelty, but Trezza Azzopardi's gracefully exacting prose saves her tale from becoming a shock-fest of the sort you would expect on daytime television talk shows. Azzopardi forges profundity through delicately interwoven double-sided images: rabbits that are the children's playthings, until they are brutally slaughtered by their father; trunks, rooms, and cages that can either protect or ensnare; and most abundantly and most significantly, fire, which can warm as well as ravage. Even Dolores's older sister Fran is sent away to a home for being a pyromaniac, craving risk like her father, "gambling on how hot, how high, on how long she can bear it."

While some readers may wonder how Dolores is able to relate events that happened when she was so young, it is easy to associate these stories with the phantom pains she feels in her missing fingers, her ability to "miss something [she] never knew." The story comes to us in a dreamlike tapestry, weaving together different times and perspectives.  Consequently, the narrative is fragmented, leaving the reader with half-tellings, missing details, stories that unfold only in the retelling, and a sense that the only fact we can be certain of is the profound meaning she imparts through them. The Hiding Place is as much a portrait of a family's destruction as it is an exploration of how memory bends and buckles under the weight of ruin, and how "blame can be twisted like a flame in draught; it will burn and burn."

 

Robyn S.

War Brides ~ Helen Bryan

I just loved this story it involved so many real events, and people have told the stories from their heart, this author has done a remarkable job in retelling their stories in a very interesting way.

With war threatening to spread from Europe to England, the sleepy village of Crowmarsh Priors settles into a new sort of normal: Evacuees from London are billeted in local homes. Nightly air raids become grimly mundane. The tightening vice of rationing curtails every comfort. Men leave to fight and die, and five women forge an unlikely bond of friendship that will change their lives forever.

 

Alice Osbourne, the stolid daughter of the late vicar, is reeling from the news that Richard Fairfax broke their engagement to marry Evangeline Fontaine, an American girl from the Deep South. Evangeline's arrival causes a stir in the village, but not the chaos that would ensue if they knew her motives for being there. Scrappy Elsie Pigeon is among the poor of London who see the evacuations as a chance to escape a life of destitution. Another new arrival is Tanni Zayman, a young Jewish girl who fled the horrors of Europe and now waits with her newborn son, certain that the rest of her family is safe and bound to show up any day. And then there's Frances Falconleigh, a madcap, fearless debutante whose father is determined to keep her in the countryside and out of the papers. As the war and its relentless hardships intensify around them, the same struggles that threaten to rip apart their lives also bring the five closer together. They draw strength from one another to defeat formidable enemies - hunger, falling bombs, the looming threat of a Nazi invasion, and a traitor in their midst; and find remarkable strength within themselves to help their friends. Theirs is a war-forged loyalty that will outlast the fiercest battle and endure years and distance.

 

When four of the women return to Crowmarsh Priors for a VE Day celebration fifty years later, television cameras focus on the heartwarming story of these old women as war brides of a bygone age, but miss the more newsworthy angle. The women's mission is not to commemorate or remember -they'e returned to settle a score and avenge one of their own.

 

Robyn S.

Handling The Undead ~ John Ajvide Lindqvist

The first half of this novel was so promising that I could not not put it down, it was creepy and disturbing.  I felt excited that I had finally found an unnerving book.  But then it dwindled to something boring, and finally ended up feeling like a bit of feel good fluff.

 

The premise was initially interesting - a strange weather event in Sweden results in the re-animation of the recently deceased.  The powers that be try to handle the situation as best they can by rounding up the dead (which they later term as the 're-living') and taking them to local hospitals, and digging up the more recently buried.

 

The novel follows three families - Flora & Elvy, David & Magnus and Gustav & Anna.  They have each lost someone they love, Flora her grandfather (Elvy's husband), David his wife (Magnus' mother) and Gustav his grandson (Anna's son).  Basically the novel then explores the feelings each experiences coming to terms with the 're-living'.

 

By far the best storyline was that of Gustav (Mahler), Anna and Elias. Gustav is grossly overweight and constantly locks horns with his grieving daughter Anna.  Anna's young son Elias tragically died in a balcony fall, but when the strange event occurs Mahler races to the cemetery and digs Elias up (a bit 'Pet Semetary' you might think, I thought so too but it was not the case as it turned out). The weather has been very hot and dry so Elias has not begun to decompose, he is however mummified and full of decomposing gas.  The description of this mummified child being taken care of with lotions for his skin, and saline which he will swallow from a baby's bottle whilst not moving nor being able see through his dead eyes, is truly nightmare material.  It is tremendously creepy.

 

I 'got' that Lindqvist wanted to explore the emotional side of a 'zombie' event but it got too airy fairy towards the end especially the Flora & Elvy storyline.  The supposed proof of a soul and life on the other side didn't really work for me.  (After reading The God Delusion can you blame me?) I really think that it would have worked best as an out and out horror.  I didn't need flesh eating zombies, the 're-living' that he presents are creepy enough, but I would have liked to have seen more exploration of the other types of re-living such as those that had been recently drowned.  Anna encounters one and it is quite frightening at first but then that falls flat too.

 

However, with this said, I think I will read more of Lindqvist's work as he is very readable and the ideas are definitely there. 

Maxine