Daily Entries for the week of
Sunday, August 9
through
Saturday, August 15 2020
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It’s Saturday, August 15, 2020
Welcome to the 856th consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com
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1.0 Lead Picture
Sen Kamala Harris pays a visit to King Elementary School in Des Moines on 7 October 2019
Phil Roeder from Des Moines, IA, USA -
Kamala Goes to Kindergarten
U.S. Senator and presidential candidate Kamala Harris paid a visit to King Elementary School in Des Moines.
While there she spent time with a kindergarten class as
they were learning the sounds and shapes of letters, and
met with teachers and staff.
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2.0 Commentary
What will we do in Tuscany?
We will spend more time at dinner than at any other activity of the trip,
except traveling round-trip across the Atlantic.
We are foodies.
We all know that walking into any restaurant in Florence and the Tuscany countryside
will produce a far more satisfying Italian dinner than
doing the same thing back in the states.
Everyone who’s traveled there comes back with the same ‘nice little Italian restaurant’ and ‘the best meal of our lives’ and ‘it only cost us’ stories.
Those experiences don’t hack it for us.
We will research the singularly most acclaimed restaurants in Florence and
in the towns will be visiting.
We will book tables at these restaurants
as soon as our schedule is fixed, hopefully,
a month before we go.
We anticipate dinners to be the single largest expense of the trip and happily
budget for it,
perhaps as much as $175.00 per person per meal.
Based on long, successful experiences,
we will choose from among the Guide Michelin starred restaurants.
We will want to sample the greatest range of foods we can muster.
We will sometimes order the chef’s menu but more frequently,
we will order a la carte,
coordinating our orders,
taking advantage of being part of a cooperative group
to share an even wider range of the kitchen’s production than the chef’s menu..
So much fun.
Especially on the countryside-half of the trip, the drive through Tuscany,
we expect to choose accommodations conveniently close to the restaurant.
In fact, if the restaurant has attached accommodations,
we will usually choose to stay there.
Booking a room usually assures a table and
is a compliment to the artist behind the enterprise.
Within larger cities, respected restaurants and accommodations are less frequently connected.
So during the Florence-half of the trip,
we prefer longish walks from the hotel to the restaurant and back.
Walking, we get to see the city late at night and
the walk will help us work off some of our dinner.
And we don’t have much fear of getting lost.
During the countryside-half of the trip
I do have a lingering fear of getting lost on a dark country road.
Even armed with a GPS.
Vampires know how to circumvent.
Anyway, the sun goes down, country folk are thinking bed.
Not many people out after 10.00pm.
So I prefer to eat next door to where I’ll be sleeping.
We will most often book a 7.00pm table, kind of early for the cosmopolitans.
But we’re unpretentious Americans.
With a couple of Italian surnames in the mix.
They’ll forgive us.
So with dinner at 7pm we’ll be in our rooms at 6pm, taking a quick nap or shower, and dressing.
Art and buildings behind us, we are getting very hungry and
We will muse about our impending meal.
Then the walk.
The three-hour dinner.
The walk back.
Close to five hours a day.
Ten or so days.
Ten of so food memories that will remain with us for the rest of our lives.
Unfortunately, Tuscany doesn’t have a food-writer equivalent to Paris’ Patricia Wells.
Patricia was a fun read in preparation for visits to the French-starred restaurants.
So that’s as aspect of the planning we will have to do without.
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4.0 Chuckles and Thoughts
You don't always want to be miserable on my birthday, do you?
~Eeyore
Winnie the Pooh
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5.0 Mail
We love getting mail.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
This from Sally C, responding to our sucking down little neck clams as they are opened.
Dear Dom,
No, clams do not wriggle much. I prefer mine fried or steamed. Not much into the raw ones, clams or oysters. As the French say, "Chacun a son gout" - "To each his own taste."
My mother and I are quite fond of one particular clam who lives in the flats near Blue Hill, Maine.
His name is Newberry, and he is a quite a character.
You can read more about him, in twelve tales, in "Newberry: The Life and Times of a Maine Clam" by Vincent Dethier.
It's touted as a children's book, but the stories are absolutely charming.
When I go out clamming now, I always keep an eye out for a tiny purple scarf, for that is what Newberry ears to keep from getting a sore throat.
I wouldn't want to dig up, steam, and eat Newberry by mistake!
Sally
Sally M. Chetwynd
brasscastlearts@gmail.com
http://brasscastlearts.blogspot.com
Blog Meister responds: Love your relationship with your mom, Sally.
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6.0 Dinner/Food/Recipes
Thursday night, Kat, my 21-year-old daughter, and I spent a lovely eating a delicious 2-lb rib-eye,
slow-roasted then seared/broiled.
Asparagus and home-fries fleshed out the menu.
She’ll be home for another couple of weeks and
we expect to share most of our meals together, alone, or with others.
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7. “Conflicted” podcast
Conflicted, by Dom Capossela, is a spiritual/fantasy story about a sixteen-year-old mystic-warrior conflicted internally by her self-imposed alienation from God, her spiritual wellspring, and, externally, by the forces of darkness seeking her death or ruination.
https://soundcloud.com/user-449713331/sets/conflicted-dom-capossela
The podcasts are also available on Sound Cloud, iTunes, Stitcher, Pinterest, Pocket Cast, and Facebook.
Search: dom capossela or conflicted or both
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11.0 Thumbnail
Kamala Devi Harris was born on October 20, 1964, in Oakland, California.
Her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, was a breast cancer scientist who
had emigrated from Tamil Nadu, India, in 1960 to
pursue a doctorate in endocrinology at UC Berkeley.
Her father, Donald J. Harris, is a Stanford University emeritus professor of economics, who
emigrated from British Jamaica in 1961 for graduate study in economics at UC Berkeley.
Her mother's family is of Brahmin lineage.
Harris was raised in Berkeley, California, with her younger sister, Maya Harris.
As a child, Harris lived briefly on Milvia Street in central Berkeley, and then
her family moved to the upper floor of a duplex on Bancroft Way in West Berkeley,
an area often called "the flatlands", which had a
significant Black population.
Harris's childhood home on Bancroft Way in Berkeley
Harris was bused to Thousand Oaks School
When she began kindergarten,
she was bused as part of school desegregation efforts to Thousand Oaks School,
a public primary school in a more prosperous neighborhood in northern Berkeley.
The school bus drove her to a school which, two years prior, had been 95 percent white.
By 1969, 40 percent of the students were Black.
She grew up going to both a Black Baptist church and a Hindu temple, while
she and her sister visited their mother's family in Madras (now Chennai), India, on occasion.
She understands a small amount of Tamil, according to her memoir.
Her parents divorced when she was seven;
she has said that when she and her sister visited their father in Palo Alto on weekends,
neighbors' kids were not allowed to play with them because they were black.
When she was 12, Harris and her sister moved with their mother to Montreal, Canada, where
their mother had accepted a research position at Jewish General Hospital and
teaching at McGill University.
Harris attended Westmount High School in Westmount, Quebec, graduating in 1981.
After high school, Harris attended Howard University,
a historically black university in Washington, D.C.
While at Howard,
she interned as a mail room clerk for California senator Alan Cranston,
chaired the economics society,
led the debate team and
joined Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
Harris graduated from Howard in 1986 with
a double-major Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and economics.
Harris then returned to California to attend law school at the University of California,
Hastings College of the Law through its
Legal Education Opportunity Program for students from adverse backgrounds.
While at UC Hastings,
she served as president of its chapter of the Black Law Students Association.
She graduated with a Juris Doctor in 1989,[27] and was admitted to the California Bar in June 1990.
The 2020 presidential campaign of Kamala Harris,
the junior United States Senator from California,
officially began on January 21, 2019, with an announcement on Good Morning America.
Harris had widely been considered a "high profile" candidate for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries since 2016.
Citing a lack of funds, Harris officially withdrew her candidacy on December 3, 2019.
On March 7, 2020, Harris endorsed former vice president Joe Biden.
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It’s Friday, August 14, 2020
Welcome to the 855th consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com
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1.0 Lead Picture
The State Historical Museum on Red Square, Moscow
Photo: Marcin Konsek / Wikimedia Commons
This is a photo of a cultural heritage object in Russia,
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2.0 Commentary
Planning a day in Tuscany: looking at art
Much of the art we come to Tuscany to admire is outdoors:
no tickets; no lines; no need to build a schedule around opening and closing hours.
But what about art held indoors?
For which planning is necessary?
While art is important on this trip,
there is so much else to do that
we must limit the time we spend in museums.
In my experience,
what works best is a major visit for which an entire morning is allocated,
morning because we are fresh and eager, plus
an afternoon visit, of shorter duration.
A major visit will encompass from an hour and a half to two hours plus.
After that, fatigue gets me.
An afternoon visit is an hour to an hour and a half.
What can we see in 2/3 hours?
Not much.
A lot.
Is the glass half empty?
This is where planning shines.
We will be visiting the Uffizi one time, one morning.
By definition, we will be merely scratching the surface of its treasures.
So we want that scratch to count.
We cannot spend time commiserating over the hundreds of wonderful works we will miss.
We will celebrate the few that we see.
Our plan will select a dozen or so pieces which we will intensively study,
as we might for an exam.
We will gather our notes.
At the Uffizi, we will walk slowly past extraordinary works and smile,
stopping here and there for a minute or two, until
we come to a selected work.
At that, we will stop,
call up our notes, and
one of us, in turn, will read the notes, and,
art in front of us,
understand everything being read.
Each of us will offer a comment or two or three.
We will smile at each other and move on.
And if we did that six, eight, or a dozen times,
we will walk out of the Uffizi feeling blessed.
At peace.
Awesome, literally.
Measuring the time, these elongated stops will take about ninety minutes,
leaving a scant hour to see what we see.
We will not be going back.
Why not?
We’re in Florence.
Will we not visit the Galleria dell'Accademia wherein lies Michelangelo‘s David?
Or the Bargello, with Michelangelo’s Bacchus and Donatello’s David?
We are in the middle of a paradise of art and
cannot absorb even a small part of what’s being offered.
But an hour or two in each of the several museums we must visit
will at least net us a glimpse of Florence’s most notables.
Always being reminded that museum time has competition.
Sightseeing, cafés, gelateria, dinner, nature preserves…
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4.0 Chuckles and Thoughts
This writing business.
Pencils and what-not.
Over-rated, if you ask me.
Silly stuff.
Nothing in it.
~Eeyore
Winnie the Pooh
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5.0 Mail
We love getting mail.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
We got an irate letter from a blogger who mused on moving to another country.
Only to discover that. From third world to advanced economies,
no one will permit a US citizen to enter.
Corona.
Blog Meister responds: Makes us all sad. All we can do is to follow our leaders,
at least those of them who are rational.
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6.0 Dinner/Food/Recipes
My daughter Kat arrived Wednesday for a two-week visit.
Lauren joined us.
We spent an hour at the apartment opening cold little neck clams,
adding lemon and tobacco, and
swallowing them, juice and condiments and still-wriggling clams.
Not wriggling.
Then walked out to Seaport to Lola’s,
and, overlooking the harbor and airport,
spent ninety minutes over a single drink each,
eating tuan tartare, and chopped salad, and roasted cod.
Service was terrific and the food was good.
A very nice reunion.
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A museum is an institution that cares for (conserves)
a collection of artifacts and other objects of artistic, cultural, historical, or scientific importance.
Many public museums make these items available for public viewing through
exhibits that may be permanent or temporary.
The largest museums are located in major cities throughout the world,
while thousands of local museums exist in smaller cities, towns, and rural areas.
Museums have varying aims,
ranging from serving researchers and specialists to serving the general public.
The goal of serving researchers is increasingly shifting to serving the general public.
There are many types of museums, including
art museums, natural history museums, science museums, war museums, and children's museums. Amongst the world's largest and most visited museums are
the Louvre in Paris,
the National Museum of China in Beijing,
the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.,
the British Museum and National Gallery in London,
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and
Vatican Museums in Vatican City.
According to the International Council of Museums,
there are more than 55,000 museums in 202 countries.
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It’s Thursday, August 13, 2020
Welcome to the 854th consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com
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1.0 Lead Picture
A statue dedicated to the traveler in Oviedo, Spain
Astur - Own work
El regreso de Williams B. Arrensberg. Oviedo, Asturias, Spain
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2.0 Commentary
Planning a trip takes a lot.
A lot of time to plan.
A lot of knowledge.
Knowing a lot about yourself.
And about whomever you’re traveling with.
Best to think holistically, considering the structure of your typical day abroad.
Is sleeping in your goal?
Or is it to get up and into an outdoor café as soon as they open?
To get at the head of the line into a coveted museum?
How much walking do you want to do?
What are the specific sights you must see?
How long can you spend in a quality museum before fatigue sets in?
What will be the rhythm of your meals?
Will you follow a rational plan or throw caution to the wind and return home eight pounds heavier?
There is a lot to consider when planning.
I think the planners get almost as much fun in learning and planning as
they do on the actual trip.
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3.0 Tuscany, extracting an essence
I think I’ve finished the design to the Timeline of Art History as it applies to the Tuscany trip.
I’ll be ready to share that soon.
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4.0 Chuckles and Thoughts
I'm not concerned with people seeing me in a certain way.
Some people see me as a kid,
some people see me as an adult.
But I'm seriously not going to complain how anybody sees me,
as long as they see me.
~Taylor Swift
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5.0 Mail
We love getting mail.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
This from Sally C:
Dear Dom,
Dear Eeyore! Morose, perhaps, but philosophical, too, as are most of the residents of the 100-Acre Wood in their simple ways. A favorite Eeyore quote of mine is when he is contemplating sharing his thistle patch with Tigger, who is looking for what tiggers like to eat.
"A little patch I was keeping for my birthday. But after all, what are birthdays? Here today and gone tomorrow. Help yourself, Tigger."
He was likely pleased when Tigger discovered that tiggers do not eat thistles, although he wasn't one to gloat over the fact.
The original Pooh stories and characters have always been favorites in my family. (The Disney renditions do not appeal to us at all. We're traditionalists, I guess.) Back in the 1950s, my mother acquired a package of sewing patterns to make stuffed replicas of all of these friends at Pooh Corner. Each of us children had our favorite character, and when grandchildren came along, my mother either handed these down or made new ones if they were worn out. She likely has made four or five sets, some of which have been handed on to great-grandchildren now.
One time when my oldest nephew (now age 50) was about a year old, my mother gave him a new Tigger she had made - a new generation of Pooh figures for a new generation of Morongs. He was quite enamored of it. The gift and Joshua's delight was too much for our dog Otis, a powerful shepherd-basset mix, who must have felt slighted at the lesser attention he was getting. Not one to do harm to a living person, whether or not the person was a member of his pack, Otis waited until Tigger was left on the floor. He grabbed the tiger by the head and proceeded to cut its throat, pulling out a mess of stuffing. I'm sure that taught Tigger a lesson not to horn in on his territory again. My mother made the repairs, stuffing the fluff back into the gash and stitching it up neatly by hand. Fortunately for Tigger, he went home with Joshua at the end of the visit. (Pooh, Piglet, Kanga and Roo had all been made and given to Joshua previously, but perhaps Tigger was the last straw!
Sally M. Chetwynd
Blog Meister responds: You have so many nice stories, Sally. Thanks for sharing.
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6.0 Dinner/Food/Recipes
Takeout!
Tuesday night.
From Billy Tse’s in Boston.
Ribs, wings, chow mein, spring rolls.
All delicious.
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Travel is the movement of people between distant geographical locations.
Travel can be done by foot, bicycle, automobile, train, boat, bus, airplane, ship or other means,
with or without luggage, and
can be one way or round trip.
Travel can also include relatively short stays between successive movements, as in the case of tourism.
Travel dates back to antiquity where wealthy Greeks and Romans would travel for leisure to their summer homes and villas in cities such as Pompeii and Baiae.
While early travel tended to be slower, more dangerous, and more dominated by trade and migration,
cultural and technological advances over many years have tended to mean that travel has become easier and more accessible.
Mankind has come a long way in transportation since Christopher Columbus sailed to the new world from Spain in 1492, an expedition which took over 10 weeks to arrive at the final destination;
to the 21st century where aircraft allow travel from Spain to the United States overnight.
Travel in the Middle Ages offered hardships and challenges, however, it was important to the economy and to society.
The wholesale sector depended (for example) on merchants dealing with/through caravans or sea-voyagers, end-user retailing often demanded the services of many itinerant peddlers wandering from village to hamlet,
gyrovagues (Wandering Monks) and wandering friars brought theology and pastoral support to neglected areas,
travelling minstrels practiced the never-ending tour, and
armies ranged far and wide in various crusades and in sundry other wars.
Pilgrimages were common in both the European and Islamic world and involved streams of travellers both locally (Canterbury Tales-style) and internationally
In the late 16th century it became fashionable for young European aristocrats and wealthy upper-class men to travel to significant European cities as part of their education in the arts and literature.
This was known as the Grand Tour, it included cities such as London, Paris, Venice, Florence and Rome.
However, The French revolution brought with it the end of the Grand Tour.
Travel by water often provided more comfort and speed than land-travel,
at least until the advent of a network of railways in the 19th century.
Travel for the purpose of tourism is reported to have started around this time when
people began to travel for fun as travel was no longer a hard and challenging task.
This was capitalized on by people like Thomas Cook selling tourism packages
where trains and hotels were booked together.
Airships and airplanes took over much of the role of long-distance surface travel in the 20th century, notably
after the second World War where there was a surplus of both aircraft and pilots.
Indeed, air travel has become so ubiquitous in the 21st century that one woman, Alexis Alford, visited all 196 countries before the age of 21.
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It’s Wednesday, August 12, 2020
Welcome to the 853rd consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com
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1.0 Lead Picture
Sheet 6 out of 12. Detail showing Mansa Musa sitting on a throne and holding a gold coin
attributed to Abraham Cresques
This image comes from Gallica Digital Library and
is available under the digital ID btv1b55002481n
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2.0 Commentary
Pathetic.
Our news coverage.
In their desperation for news,
reporters and producers and cameramen swallow
whatever crap our government offers up.
Monday night: how wonderful the T is:
we clean the cars very night.
We mean, really clean.
Sanitized.
Nightly.
And when ridership jumps in September ,
we will still keep cleaning.
Isn’t it wonderful?
Bring in Eeyore: pathetic.
The number one problem with the T is crowd control.
Have you heard a word about crowd control?
I haven’t.
Not a peep.
Not an expletive-deleted peep.
So a distraction: clean vehicles.
We give awards for doing their job?
Gentlepeople of the MBTA:
You are participating in the looming genocide
of a class of people called ‘your ridership’.
Pathetic.
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3.0 Tuscany, extracting an essence
Working on a timetable to help the travel-crew
understand the historical background of the pictures we will be seeing.
Loving how it’s developing.
As soon as its taken shape, I’ll share it.
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4.0 Chuckles and Thoughts
Eeyore, the old grey Donkey,
stood by the side of the stream, and
looked at himself in the water.
"Pathetic," he said.
"That's what it is.
Pathetic."
~Winnie the Pooh
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6.0 Dinner/Food/Recipes
Monday night I ate the bones of a two-pound pork rib roast.
I made a sauce with the puree of two locally raised Hungarian peppers
with some jarred vinegar peppers.
It worked.
Terrific.
The bone-pickings were scrumptious as well.
The huge chunk of leftover pork will go into the Gravy I intend to serve to guests on Friday.
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7. “Conflicted” podcast
Conflicted, by Dom Capossela, is a spiritual/fantasy story about a sixteen-year-old mystic-warrior conflicted internally by her self-imposed alienation from God, her spiritual wellspring, and, externally, by the forces of darkness seeking her death or ruination.
https://soundcloud.com/user-449713331/sets/conflicted-dom-capossela
The podcasts are also available on Sound Cloud, iTunes, Stitcher, Pinterest, Pocket Cast, and Facebook.
Search: dom capossela or conflicted or both
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The Mandinka, or Malink are a West African ethnic group primarily
found in southern Mali, eastern Guinea and northern Ivory Coast.
Numbering about 11 million, they are the largest subgroup of the Mandé peoples and
one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa.
They speak the Mandinka language, which is
one of the Western Manding languages in the Mande language family and a
lingua franca in much of West Africa.
Over 99% of Mandinka adhere to Islam.
They are predominantly subsistence farmers and live in rural villages.
Their largest urban center is Bamako, the capital of Mali, which is also
inhabited by the closely related Bambara.
The Mandinka are the descendants of the Mali Empire, which
rose to power in the 13th century under the rule of king Sundiata Keita,
who founded an empire that would go on to span a large part of West Africa.
They migrated west from the Niger River in search of better agricultural lands and
more opportunities for conquest.
Nowadays, the Mandinka inhabit the Sahelian region extending from
The Gambia and the Casamance region in Senegal to Ivory Coast.
Although widespread, the Mandinka constitute the largest ethnic group only in the countries of Mali, Guinea and The Gambia.
Most Mandinka live in family-related compounds in traditional rural villages.
Their traditional society has featured socially stratified castes.
Mandinka communities have been fairly autonomous and self-ruled, being
led by a chief and group of elders.
Mandinka has been an oral society, where
mythologies, history and knowledge are verbally transmitted from one generation to the next.
Their music and literary traditions are preserved by a caste of griots,
known locally as jelis, as well as
guilds and brotherhoods like the donso (hunters).
Between the 16th and 19th centuries,
many Muslim and non-Muslim Mandinka people,
along with numerous other African ethnic groups, were
captured, enslaved and shipped to the Americas.
They intermixed with slaves and workers of other ethnicities, creating a Creole culture.
The Mandinka people significantly influenced the African heritage of descended peoples now found in
Brazil, the Southern United States and, to a lesser extent, the Caribbean.
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It’s Tuesday, August 11, 2020
Welcome to the 852nd consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com
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1.0 Lead Picture
Uffizi Museum
Florence, Italy
Michelle Maria
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2.0 Commentary
It’s not often that an off-the-shelf product works for a user without some tinkering.
But it’s rare when one can’t glean some needed or helpful ideas from just a trifling amount of research.
The power of the Internet brings to a creator so much material to borrow and adapt
that it takes one’s breath away.
To better understand the periods of art which
specifically apply to my wished-for trip to Tuscany,
I decided to create a timeline of the various periods and movements
to side-by-side compare them.
The ease of calling up the work of others
willing to share the product of their countless hours of research and
their intellectual input is changing the way I’ve come to view humanity.
While it is true that many, many people are driven by
the pursuit of money, power, and glory,
so many others want all knowledge free for the taking and
give of themselves accordingly.
Bless Wikipedia, PBS, and all other organizations and individuals that give.
We all hope you understand the depth of our appreciation of you.
Thank you.
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3.0 Tuscany, extracting an essence
I’m having a lot of fun learning about the art we will be viewing.
Right now I’m creating a timeline that will help me understand when
Byzantine started to fade away to be replaced with Renaissance and
Renaissance with Mannerism.
And what were the characteristics of each.
Why didn’t I study harder in college?
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4.0 Chuckles and Thoughts
Growing up is scary because
it happens without you knowing it.
~Taylor Swift
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5.0 Mail
We love getting mail.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
Several emails have arrived with ‘must sees’ for a trip to Tuscany.
They reveal the personal nature of any trips abroad.
Blog Meister responds: I thank everyone for their thoughts, all of which are helpful.
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6.0 Dinner/Food/Recipes
Last night I had a rib eye and a braised artichoke for dinner.
The artichoke was excellent and the steak very good.
Some markets are unable to get the beef product necessary to dry-age the steaks and so
a dry-aged option will not be available for a while.
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7. “Conflicted” podcast
Conflicted, by Dom Capossela, is a spiritual/fantasy story about a sixteen-year-old mystic-warrior conflicted internally by her self-imposed alienation from God, her spiritual wellspring, and, externally, by the forces of darkness seeking her death or ruination.
https://soundcloud.com/user-449713331/sets/conflicted-dom-capossela
The podcasts are also available on Sound Cloud, iTunes, Stitcher, Pinterest, Pocket Cast, and Facebook.
Search: dom capossela or conflicted or both
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The Uffizi Gallery is a prominent art museum located
adjacent to the Piazza della Signoria in
the Historic Centre of Florence in the region of Tuscany, Italy.
One of the most important Italian museums and the most visited,
it is also one of the largest and best known in the world and
holds a collection of priceless works,
particularly from the period of the Italian Renaissance.
After the ruling house of Medici died out,
their art collections were gifted to the city of Florence under
the famous Patto di famiglia negotiated by
Anna Maria Luisa, the last Medici heiress
The Uffizi is one of the first modern museums.
The gallery had been open to visitors by request
since the sixteenth century, and
in 1765 it was officially opened to the public,
formally becoming a museum in 1865.
Today, the Uffizi is one of the most popular tourist attractions of Florence and
one of the most visited art museums in the world, with
4,391,861 visitors in 2019.
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It’s Monday, August 10, 2020
Welcome to the 851st consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com
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1.0 Lead Picture
"The School of Athens"
Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino
Raphael - Stitched together from vatican.va
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2.0 Commentary
Books.
Magic.
Real magic, having the power to influence one’s immediate future by
converting ordinary time into a carpet ride over the highest skyscraper.
Waiting in a medical office?
Boring?
Oh! No.
A rare opportunity to take that magic carpet.
How to cope with a restless child?
Pick any of the thousands of wonderful books written
specifically for him.
Watch the change that first picture, that first line, has on that child
as she cuddles closer, sucks her thumb, and listens, totally absorbed
by the ducklings search for a suitable place to play and grow.
I rented a college text for $17.00.
As soon as the used paperback arrived I knew I had to own it.
It cost $150.00 to buy.
I bought it.
Daily, this tome brings me more pleasure than any TV series; any movie can ever do.
Compare Cimabue’s Crucifixion in Arezzo with the one he did in Florence?
Define the Veronese school of art?
No prob.
Day after day adventure waits.
Or perhaps you will select a book that
tells more about George Washington and
the trouble he had with his teeth.
Or perhaps you want to read the dystopian trilogy
that your child is reading so
you have something intellectual with which to bond.
Or are lucky enough to be me, and
take an online course comparing
Toni Morrison’s Sulla and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend,
the course headed by your granddaughter.
Books.
Magic.
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3.0 Tuscany, extracting an essence
Spent a frustration sit down at my computer
trying to find a central location that defines the Veronese School of Art.
Nor does it show up in any of the indices in my textbook,
Italian Renaissance Art.
Certainly I got lots of info, but not a clear, unified presentation of its
characteristics.
Not the end of the world.
Some research requires a bit of sweat.
Time lost.
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4.0 Chuckles and Thoughts
My grief lies all within,
And these external manners of lament
Are merely shadows to the unseen grief
That swells with silence in the tortured soul.
~William Shakespeare
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5.0 Mail
We love getting mail.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
This from Sally C, responding to the phenomenon that ice cream tastes better when eaten directly from the cardboard carton into which it was stuffed.
Oh, my, Dom! You are spot on about eating ice cream! I tend to do the same with potato chips, right out of the bag, and Cheez-Its, right out of the box. (Since I don’t drink wine, I wouldn’t know the first thing about the olfactory sensations of cork-pulling “puffs,” so I’ll leave that for wine connoisseurs to dicker about.)
Sally
Blog Meister responds: It would appear everyone has their own binge soft spot. It’s so easy to relax the rules of diet.
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6.0 Dinner/Food/Recipes
Saturday night I tried out a new attitude towards baking pasta.
I used a large, thick boxed pasta, boiled it until it had softened but still uncooked.
Then, using red wine and chicken stock, I thinned out some Gravy I had made earlier in the week.
I stirred in a crushed meatball and seasoned ricotta cheese and
mixed this bath with the still firm pasta,
and poured it all into a casserole.
With the oven set for broil, I set the casserole on the lowest oven rack and
cooked the pasta for 15 minutes.
As it finished cooking,
the pasta absorbed the excess liquid and
the top of the casserole got deliciously crunchy from the exposure to the flame.
An adventure.
Delicious and promising.
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7. “Conflicted” podcast
Conflicted, by Dom Capossela, is a spiritual/fantasy story about a sixteen-year-old mystic-warrior conflicted internally by her self-imposed alienation from God, her spiritual wellspring, and, externally, by the forces of darkness seeking her death or ruination.
https://soundcloud.com/user-449713331/sets/conflicted-dom-capossela
The podcasts are also available on Sound Cloud, iTunes, Stitcher, Pinterest, Pocket Cast, and Facebook.
Search: dom capossela or conflicted or both
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11.0 Thumbnail
The Renaissance was a period in European history
marking the transition from the Middle Ages to Modernity and
covering the 15th and 16th centuries.
It occurred after the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages and
was associated with great social change.
In addition to the standard periodization,
proponents of a long Renaissance put
its beginning in the 14th century and its end in the 17th century.
The traditional view focuses more on the early modern aspects of the Renaissance and
argues that it was a break from the past, but
many historians today focus more on its medieval aspects and
argue that it was an extension of the Middle Ages.
The intellectual basis of the Renaissance was
its version of humanism,
derived from the concept of Roman Humanitas and
the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, such as that of
Protagoras, who said that
"Man is the measure of all things."
This new thinking became manifest in art, architecture, politics, science and literature.
Early examples were the development of perspective in oil painting and
the recycled knowledge of how to make concrete.
Although the invention of metal movable type sped the dissemination of
ideas from the later 15th century,
the changes of the Renaissance were not uniformly experienced across Europe:
the first traces appear in Italy as early as the late 13th century, in particular with
the writings of Dante and
the paintings of Giotto.
As a cultural movement, the Renaissance encompassed innovative flowering of
Latin and vernacular literatures,
beginning with the 14th-century resurgence of learning based on classical sources,
which contemporaries credited to Petrarch;
the development of linear perspective and other techniques of rendering a more natural reality in painting; and
gradual but widespread educational reform.
In politics, the Renaissance contributed to
the development of the customs and conventions of diplomacy,
and in science to an increased reliance on observation and inductive reasoning.
Although the Renaissance saw revolutions in many intellectual pursuits,
as well as social and political upheaval,
it is perhaps best known for its artistic developments and
the contributions of such polymaths as
Leonardo da Vinci and
Michelangelo,
who inspired the term "Renaissance man".
The Renaissance began in the 14th century in Florence, Italy.
Various theories have been proposed to account for its origins and characteristics,
focusing on a variety of factors including
the social and civic peculiarities of Florence at the time:
its political structure,
the patronage of its dominant family, the Medici, and
the migration of Greek scholars and their texts to Italy
following the Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks which
inherited from the Timurid Renaissance.
Other major centers were northern Italian city-states such as
Venice, Genoa, Milan, Bologna, and Rome during the Renaissance Papacy or
Belgian cities such as Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, Leuven or Antwerp.
The Renaissance has a long and complex historiography, and,
in line with general skepticism of discrete periodizations,
there has been much debate among historians reacting to the 19th-century glorification of
the "Renaissance" and
individual culture heroes as "Renaissance men",
questioning the usefulness of Renaissance as a term and
as a historical delineation.
The art historian Erwin Panofsky observed of this resistance to the concept of "Renaissance":
It is perhaps no accident that the factuality of the Italian Renaissance has been
most vigorously questioned by those
who are not obliged to take a professional interest in the
aesthetic aspects of civilization –
historians of economic and social developments, political and religious situations, and, most particularly, natural science – but only
exceptionally by students of literature and hardly ever by historians of Art.
Some observers have called into question whether
the Renaissance was a cultural "advance" from the Middle Ages, instead
seeing it as a period of pessimism and nostalgia for classical antiquity,
while social and economic historians, especially of the longue durée,
have instead focused on the continuity between the two eras,
which are linked, as Panofsky observed, "by a thousand ties".
The term rinascita ('rebirth') first appeared in Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists (c. 1550),
anglicized as the Renaissance in the 1830s.[
The word has also been extended to other historical and cultural movements, such as
the Carolingian Renaissance (8th and 9th centuries),
Ottonian Renaissance (10th and 11th century), and the
Renaissance of the 12th century.
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It’s Sunday, August 9, 2020
Welcome to the 850th consecutive post to the blog,
existentialautotrip.com
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1.0 Lead Picture
Vivoli gelateria in Florence, Italy
ice cream anyone?
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2.0 Commentary
Why does ice cream taste so much better when we eat it directly from the carton?
Really.
Once that scoop hits china, poof! Some of its flavor, some of its gestalt dissipates.
A Frenchman I was tasting wines with many years ago
told me of the ‘puff’:
that burst of air that follows in the wake of a pulled cork.
While I believed he described the event correctly,
I stepped away from believing it told much about the wine,
although, I admit,
for a period of time I did try to smell that puff as it vaporized into nothing.
While I’m not a believer in the value of a puff,
I heartily endorse eating ice cream from the carton that God put it in.
I really think that having the carton in hand represents a lack of borders, portions, limits.
Carton in hand is the ticket to eating it all.
Although we start by saying “I’m only going to eat half.”
When we get to that half we want one more tablespoon, and
that next tablespoon breaches our self-imposed limits and
we agree to eat only half the remainder,
dissolving limits until we’ve eaten all of it;
its entirety.
All gone.
Guilty.
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3.0 Tuscany, extracting its essence
On revisiting the itinerary, I discovered we needed another half day for the countryside sightseeing.
And when sorting out an itinerary for Florence,
discovered we’d need another day there to see the must-see pieces I had selected for the visit.
Our ten day trip has edged into eleven, and
maybe twelve.
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4.0 Chuckles/Thoughts
A good leg will fall;
a straight back will stoop;
a black beard will turn white;
a curl'd pate will grow bald;
a fair face will wither;
a full eye will wax hollow:
but a good heart, Kate, is
the sun and the moon; or, rather,
the sun, and not the moon, —
for it shines bright, and never changes, but
keeps his course truly.
~William Shakespeare
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5.0 Mail
We love getting mail.
Send comments to domcapossela@hotmail.com
We got two private emails
dealing with unwanted surprise exposures.
Invited to visit a friend
to discover only after arrival
that others also had been invited.
Do you stay or do you go?
Blogmeister responds: Responses to that situation are so wildly different that
no rules work for everyone.
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6.0 Dinner/Food/Recipes
Friday night we had dinner at Clay Hill Farm in Ogunquit.
It was as good as we expected.
We shared everything: flatbread, shrimp cocktail, Caesar salad,
lazy person’s lobster, two portions of prime rib,
ending with a humongus hot fudge sundae at the end.
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7. “Conflicted” podcast
Conflicted, by Dom Capossela, is a spiritual/fantasy/political story about a sixteen-year-old mystic-warrior conflicted internally by her self-imposed alienation from God, her spiritual wellspring, and, externally, by the forces of darkness seeking her death or ruination.
Today we post Chapter 22 in which Dee presents to the world her personal take on Christian mysticism.
The podcasts are also available on Sound Cloud, iTunes, Twitter, and Facebook.
Search: dom capossela or conflicted or both
Here’s the link:
https://soundcloud.com/user-449713331/sets/conflicted-dom-capossela
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11.0 Thumbnails
Artisanal Gelato Vivoli is located in the historic center of Florence,
a few steps from Santa Croce,
near the main historical monuments of the city.
Since 1930 the same family has created and produced
home made ice creams with
high quality ingredients and
a lot of passion handed down to the 4th generation.
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