ladies in a café

Will took this picture of these ladies in a café, in many ways they are very typical of ladies of that age group who meet for coffee and conversation. What is interesting is how they are dressed, look at their hairdo, They are just meeting, there is a certain elegance, I would say a feminine charm about them. They have something young women today have lost in our changing society. They seem to have a certain peace about them. Probably grandmothers, their children are grown up. They went through life and now have time to meet but I suspect they have been meeting like this for some time, it is a tradition here to meet friends in this manner, no kids, no husband, no outside demands.

They are meeting in the Café delle Specchi (mirrors) on the Piazza dell'Unita d'Italia in Trieste, but this scene could be any town in Italy. Men also meet like this, young men, older men and students. What I also like about this scene is the coffee and drinks are served in real china and glassware, no plastic, no carton, no paper, with a real table cloth. It makes a difference in the quality of life, you can easily spend several hours here without feeling that the decor or setting around you is trying to sell you a lifestyle or more products. It is not expensive to meet like this, just a little more civilized.

living in an Imperial Palace in Rome, yes possible.

There is one area of Rome which goes back to the beginning of Christianity and to the time when the religion became official around 343 AD. under the reign of Emperor Constantine, who would become the founder of Constantinople, today's Istanbul.

It is the area between the Lateran and the Piazza of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme. When Emperor Constantine for political reasons after his defeat of his rival Maxentius at the battle of the Milvio Bridge in Rome established that only one religion would rule and that would be Christianity, he decided to built a church and a palace for the new head of the Christian religion on land belonging to the Laterani Family. Thus the Basilica of St-John Lateran and its Episcopal Palace are to this day the seat of the Bishop of Rome also known as the Pope. It is only much later around 1500 under Pope Paul V and for other political reasons that St-Peter's Basilica will become the second home of the Pope in Rome.

Constantine got his entire family into the Christian Project so to speak, his wife Fausta and his daughter Constance and his mother Elena who was an ambitious women. Rome was a city at the time of many religions from all over the world, given the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Capital of the Empire. Constantine who was Pontifex of the Imperial Cult, simply appointed himself Pope of the Christians and he named a bishop to head the religious affairs in Rome. This is something the Catholic Church always contested because it goes against their official story.

His mother Elena, (also known as Saint-Elena) decided that for the new religion could take root, you would need relics, the ancient religions in Rome had lots of relics to different gods from ancient times for veneration so this new Christian religion also needed relics for people to worship, it did not have any up to this date.

As mother of the Emperor she was a prominent and authoritarian figure, she took several Imperial ships with her and a large retinue to Jerusalem and cruised to Palestine, an systematically went on a shopping expedition. Now the City of Jerusalem she visited in 326 AD had little to do with the Jerusalem of the time of Jesus in 30 to 33 AD. In a Jewish revolt against the Romans 70 AD, the city and the Temple of Salomon had been totally destroyed by Titus the son of Emperor Vespasian and the city was rebuilt along Roman ideas of City planning. The Golgotha was now inside the city walls and all streets had been widened when not completely changed all together. But this did not stop her, she was a woman on a mission, first thing she did on arrival was to create, out of the blue, what Catholics know as the Stations of the Cross by walking in Jerusalem and marking various spots as a station. She also bought the staircase of the Roman Governor's Palace from the time of Pontius Pilate. It is said that this staircase was taken by Jesus when going to his trial.
The staircase (Santa Scala) is today inside the Lateran Palace in Rome, you can only climb it on your knees. She also found large pieces of the true wooden cross of Christ some 293 years after his crucifixion. The story goes that a little jewish man knew where the cross was but would not tell Elena unless she paid a certain price, she got mad at him and ordered he be put into a pit until he revealed where was the true cross. She found the crown of thorns and the inscription attached to the Cross INRI. She found the real nails and so on and the stone column to which Jesus was tied to when he was flogged. She brought all of it back to Rome and installed it all in a museum in her Palace just down the road from St-John Lateran on Piazza Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, where it remains to this day on display.

At the time her Palace was already old it had been built under Septimus Severus and known as the Sessorium with it's own amphitheater Castrensis. It is the only other amphitheater in Rome and it is less known than the famous amphitheater of the Flavian (Colosseum). Today the church occupies what was the atrium of the former palace and a monastery shares the palace area with the hotel, the amphitheater is a huge garden with an incredible array of fruits and flowers all maintained by the monks.

The Domus Sessoriana today is the hotel within the Palace and you can stay there if you wish. It is quite beautiful and well appointed and it gives its clients an exclusive entry to the amphitheater garden. The garden is otherwise closed to the public.
Few people even notice it when they walk by as it is part of the Aurelian city walls of Rome.
Rooms with breakfast are at 100 euros a day which is a bargain for Rome, very central, near all the major sites and in front of the subway station (San Giovanni). See www.booking.com for details.

The photos show the palace hotel and a view from one of the rooms looking at the Basilica of St-John Lateran in the distance.

food and desserts, Italy vs Canada, part 2

To continue on this theme. I notice on the menus of many restaurants in North America or Canada that usually french fries is obligatory and if any greens are offered it will be a salad, usually with wilted lettuce and tasteless tomatoes or if there is another vegetable it will come with a dressing of some kind, like green beans with slivers of almonds or peas with gravy. At home people will be tempted to dress up their vegetables with melted cheese sauce or a creamy sauce. Any meat also comes with lots of sauces even if grilled its bar-b-q sauce with mesquite. Bread is served by the basketful with melted garlic butter or melted butter and garlicky cheese. Portions tend to be over sized, giving you the too much approach to food. Simplicity is not the name of the game. Holidays like Canadian Thanksgiving in early October or Xmas dinners tend to exaggerate the food element so that people get sick with indigestion or feel bloated, how often you hear people say that they ate too much and gained so much weight at the holiday season. Not to mention the desserts and this fascination with chocolate and fudge and excess, a few years ago books came out on how to make those super rich dessert as if this was the only way to enjoy food. We have never had a famine in Canada and even poor people can eat sufficiently, so where does the culture of heavy meals come from. Is it from an association with wealth? In his book on Italian food through the ages titled Delizia! John Dickie explains that poor Italians who immigrated to North America changed their eating habits. Inventing a new Italian cuisine for their new home in the New World in which meat appeared in almost every dish, as an example Spaghetti and meat balls, totally unknown in Italy. Or beef lasagna with heavy cheese sauce also unknown, obviously for these people meat equalled wealth. In French Canada, the hunt was from the early days of the colony in 1608 the best way to survive, so meat in various forms and in great quantity was prepared for the table. Also people use to work hard in the fields all day so a hearty meal was necessary. Though nowadays the hardest physical labour might be to go down to your local coffee shop and lift that mug.

Though in North America the old habits die hard, a big breakfast is still seen as the best meal of the day and a big evening meal is also often the mainstay of our society. Lunch is skipped or people will eat a sandwich or a salad thinking they are dieting, the salad will be covered in heavy creamy dressing and topped with bacon bits and then afterwards a heavy dessert as a reward for being so abstemious. Coffee breaks is another no no, while in Italy an espresso and a cornetto will be your coffee break if not your breakfast, in Canada a huge muffin or a piece of cake with a large American coffee is the rigueur Though many people will tell you that they cannot drink a small espresso because they can't sleep at night, medical studies and studies by dietitians have shown that American drip coffee we drink everywhere has a far higher concentration of caffeine than your average espresso. Again it is all psychological and based on culture or learn behaviour.

Meaning that obesity is stalking a lot of Canadians because of the way they eat while Italians women and men tend to be slim.
Elegance in Italy for men and women is in low body weight and a slim figure.

food and desserts, Italy vs Canada

After living in Italy almost 2 years now, I have started to notice some patterns in food habits amongst Italians that are completely different from Canadians. Per example, a restaurant or café serving lunch or any other meal for that matter will always offers several vegetables or contorni with the main course which is called a Secundi or Second course.
Lunch is always a primi Pasta and secundi a meat.
If you are having a serious meal and want to make it your main meal of the day, for any Italian it will be lunch not dinner
nor breakfast. It is the custom in Italy to close schools, shops and work places at 13:00 for lunch and re-open at 16:00, this break offers the opportunity for all to have a leisurely lunch.

The very North American idea that a big breakfast is very important is totally unknown here. Breakfast here is usually a small coffee two gulps like an expresso and a cornetto which is a croissant filled with chocolate or cream, you can have a cappucino or caffe latte which is the size of a cup 4 gulps there are no mugs or super sized mugs like you see all too often in North America at Starbucks and of course we are blessed with no Starbucks or Tim Horton's.

Lunch offers a wide range of salads fixed for you as you simply ask the waiter to prepare one for you, no such thing as self-service. Dressing, the only one available is olive oil and balsamic vinegar. Lots of people like a salad with tuna in it, it seems to be the only meat you can actually have in a salad. Sometimes once a week you will find a pre-prepared chicken salad with shredded chicken and salad nothing else, no creamy dressings or stuff with mayonnaise. If you prefer you can also choose from the hot dishes, again at least 4 green vegetables, spinach is always on the menu, chicory, green beans, and roasted potatoes with rosemary. Certain days of the week will be all fish, Friday and Wednesday. Menus also offer at least 4 different types of pastas, and in winter a soup with beans and vegetables or leafy greens. If it is a meat day then paper slices of rare roast beef, roast chicken usually a leg or veal or pork scaloppine, never breaded always in a gravy.

Everyone drinks water frizzante ( with gas) for digestion sake. No soft drinks like coke or coffee or milk. Mineral water is the only acceptable drink, wine maybe a glass, but no more.

Sunday lunch is the big meal with friends and family, with an antipasto of salami and prosciutto and a soft cheese a few roasted vegetables usually eggplant, zucchini, porcini mushrooms and olives. Then a pasta dish like a lasagna or a spaghetti with seafood or clams, then a meat dish and being Sunday a good bottle of wine. If this looks like a lot of food, it should be remembered that portions are small never large or over sized. On Sunday lunch will be from 13:30 to 15:30

Now lunch on any day is always served at 13:00 or 13:30 never before that time, restaurants are not open. Same with dinner never before 20:30 at night, only again tourists will have dinner at 6pm or 7pm and will get the lunch left over in restaurants located in touristic spot of town and the prices will be high and the food mediocre.

The evening dishes on the menu are never ready before 20:00 hrs. Many people are not aware of this fact but it is true. Even children are use from an early age to have meals at 13:30 after school recess and in the evening at home with their parents around the table at 20:00 or a little later, even as late as 21:00 on weekends. The whole concept of selling food on the run or fast food for families who don't have time to sit for a meal is unknown here. Meals are social events and one cannot hurry such a thing, it would be rude and a sign of not being civilized.

Dinner at night can also be a delightful meal but it will not be a big meal like lunch. Often people may have only one dish or two and skip the pasta dish all together. At the end of the meal there may be dessert but if so then it will be fresh fruits, strawberry with a zest of lemon juice or ananas fresh from the fruit itself and an expresso. Restaurants do not offer the wide range of heavy creamy desserts we see in Canada. There may be tiramisu or a crostini which is usually a biscuit like dough with a jam of fruit on top. But again it seems tourists will go for that but not the locals.

Restaurants do not offer kids meals, or menus with items just for kids like a hamburger or chicken fingers or french fries, again it flies against the principal that children should be taught young how to behave at table and like the same foods as adults so they can be more sociable. Everyone gets into the act of teaching them about eating vegetables of all kinds and sample other foods and eat in moderation. Drink plenty of mineral water with meals, you will not see an Italian mother offer her kids a coke or milk with a meal, more likely a little wine mixed with lots of water.

This way children are not fat and do not seem to have the skin problems so frequent in our society. They also appear more calm.
As an example during our trip to Trieste on the Adriatic, we were having lunch in a Café and noticed 2 mothers with 5 kids come for lunch, the children were between 5 and 12 years old. Moms ordered food for them and to my surprise, I saw them eat green vegetables and veal scalopini and roast chicken with rosemary, to drink mineral water. They were all well behaved and stayed at the table for the whole meal. I was just fascinated to see the 2 mothers able to have a conversation and enjoy their meals with the kids and no fuss. I simply could not imagine the same thing in North America.

Trieste on a sunny day

The City has been largely spruced up and many notable buildings including all the great buildings along the sea shore and the Citadel and Catherdral above the city have been extensively renovated, lots of good restaurants, there is a feeling of prosperity despite the financial crisis.

We walked for about 5 hours throughout this beautiful city and have been impressed with its architecture and how nice people are.

We stumbled upon 2 monuments to the Hapsburg, Austria controlled this region for a long time often as a rival of the Republic of Venice who also controlled the area in the middle ages. But the monuments I speak of is of a much later period around 1850 when Franz Josef was Emperor of Austria with his wife Elizabeth known as Sissi. She has her monument in front of the Railway Station and the other is to Maximillian of Hapsburg on Piazza Venezia facing the sea. He was the brother of Franz Josef and he was the Governor of Lombardy and the Veneto which included the province of Istria where Trieste is located. He is remembered kindly by the people of the region because he was a liberal and progressive thinker compared to his brother the Emperor in Vienna who was your old arch conservative type. He also favored economic development and built the Palace of Miramar which brought a lot of people to Trieste and made the name of the region. Trieste became an important sea port and naval base for Austria. Captain Von Trapp (yes him again) served in the Austrian navy and was stationed here.
Tragedy struck Maximillian and his wife when a Mexican delegation under French political influence came to see him and asked him to become Emperor of Mexico. He was told that a referendum had been arranged and that the people of Mexico had chosen him by a huge majority. France promised military help and the Pope gave is blessing. Maximillian could out do his brother by becoming Emperor in his own right in what was thought to be a rich country. When he arrived in Mexico in 1865, he quickly saw that no referendum had taken place, the country was in a state of civil war and anarchy. The French troops he had been promised never materialized, in other words in was on his own with a price on his head. His wife returned to Europe, first to Paris to see Napoleon III to ask for help and troops to support her husband by this time Napoleon III had his own problems with Bismarck and the growing new state of Germany. Napoleon was to loose his throne just a few years later in 1870 at the battle of Sedan and go to England as a guest of Queen Victoria for the rest of his life. Carlotta then ran to Rome asking the Pope to please do something as her husband’s position in Mexico was unbearable. The Pope had a rebellion on his hands with Garibaldi and the Italians fighting for their own freedom from Papal rule. In 1867, Maximillian was arrested in Queretaro near Mexico city and shot by a road side. Carlotta went mad and spent the rest of her life locked up in the Palace of Bouchout near Brussels on her father Leopold I of Belgium orders. As for Franz Josef well he was happy to loose a liberal meddling brother, though his troubles in Italy were not over having to fight Italian rebellion against Austrian rule in the North.

a day in Trieste

Well after a good night sleep, we got off today by walking in central Trieste in and around the Piazza del Unita d'Italia, we also went to the train station to change our tickets to first class and the direct train Trieste Rome. This way we do not have to change trains in Venice and since it is a long ride be more comfortable than second class which tends to be very crowded at this time of the year. Had to leave my luggage in the car corridor twice because the compartments are full, 6 people to a compartment is more than cozy and not pleasant.
We also had lunch at a lovely cafe called Hydro City, the salad of anis and smoke salmon was very good and my shrimps on a bed of cous cous delicious. We then went shopping for shoes at Bata found exactly what we were looking for at very good prices.
The store manager overcharged me by 50 euros and then he came running after us and found us to apologize and reimburse me for the amount. We visited the Greek Orthodox Cathedral and looked at the mosaics of the Serbian Orthodox Cathedral.
Found out that James Joyce lived in Trieste in 1909 and fell in love with the city.
Tonite we made reservations at Suban an Italian restaurant who specialize in grilled meats and has been around since 1865. It comes highly recommended.

Trieste and the Adriatic

Trieste on the Dalmatian Coast of Italy.

We rode down from Udine to Trieste on the small regional train of 4 cars which provides service to the many small towns along this stretch of the Italian territory, all that is left of the once great Roman Empire in the Balkan. Most of it was lost after 1946 when Italy was punished by the victorious Allies for its Fascist past and for its alliance with Hitler during the war. The ride takes about 90 minutes and there are many stops along the way.

We stopped in CORMONS which is a famous wine producing city, I really like Cormons wines mostly whites, dry and light. They have a distinct bottle with a blue tinge to it.

Then we stopped in Gorizia, the train station is actually in Slovenia and the town square to your left in Italy. Strange but there you go.

Trieste is a big port city and has an ancient history, closer to us it was a Venetian city ruled by the Republic of Venice. Many kings and Emperors came here in the summer and lots of Palaces dot the coastline like Miramar.

We are staying at a beautiful hotel called Le Corderie, as the name implies it is about the making of rope, several antique drawings on the walls show this process. It is an all inclusive modern hotel, beautiful décor and very quiet. Free bar and free internet, very friendly staff. As the moto of the hotel says, Eleganza, Cultura, Sensazioni. See web site
www.lecorderiehotel.it

Our room is a very modern style Zen like with a fruit basket but a different presentation Apricots in a large glass.

I also ask the Front Desk to recommend restaurants for us to try. Now Trieste is a Port city and you would think that fish or sea food would be famous here, not so, why?
Well apparently the water in front of the city is very deep, it is a natural deep water port and fish stick to more shallow waters usually. But they did recommend a fish restaurant we will try tonite and another with Trieste style cuisine specialties a mix from Croatia, Slovenia and Italy.

It is much warmer here around 25 C. and partly sunny.