Wandering Italy Blog: Italy Travel

Finding the Hidden Italy in Sassoferrato · Sep 12, 04:02 AM by James Martin

These are bad economic times in Italy. But there’s always good in bad—even beyond the fact that the dollar is rising against the Euro (finally!). Tourism is important in Italy, and regions you’ve probably never considered (and probably know nothing about) are primed and pumped to show you that Italy has interesting cities besides Rome, Florence and Venice—and interesting regions besides Tuscany.

Take le Marche, for example. What the heck, let’s even drill down to a town with which you are perhaps not at all familiar: Sassoferrato, a town whose symbol is a bunch of rocks wrapped with a band of iron, as the name implies. A town of fewer than 8000 people. Now you know why you’ve never heard of it.

What’s in Sassoferrato? An important Roman archaeological site called Sentinum, on the Via Flaminia road system, historically important because the Romans defeated the combined forces of the Samnites and Gauls here in 295 BC, allowing the Romans to unify central Italy right up to the Adriatic coast.

In Sassoferrato there are 12 churches and a castle, along with the usual palaces. There are ethnographic, archaeological, and mineral museums. There is an ancient book cover in the museum with a micro-mosaic picture made out of the tiniest tesserae you’ve ever seen, many of them in gold.

In Sassoferrato. Population 8000.

The folks are friendly here. You’ll see things you wouldn’t see in other places even if they existed there. Why? Because this is a small town, a village, where people don’t have to pretend that everything they are going to show you is precious beyond belief.

Ok, so we’ve all looked through the thick grate in which a church’s relics were to be found. In the murky darkness we may have seen a fragment of holy phalanx (finger or toe bone). What if your guide marched you behind the big reliquary and, with particular relish, flung open the rear access door to where you could really see the scatter of saintly bones?

They probably don’t do that in Rome.

Or maybe your guide ushers you out of the church and through another unmarked door. You’re now in a place the church uses for its records. There are handwritten diaries from the 18th century. Your guide grabs one and flips it open.

“Guarda!” he implores, “look! There’s not a single error, not a cross-out.” He flips through the pages like they were from a fifty cent comic book.

And he’s right. Written in a steady hand, the account of the writer is without apparent mistake.

And you touch the book. On a corner. Lightly. And you remember all the books you’ve seen in other museums open to the cover page under a glass that’s wired so that if you press too hard, people with guns and rabid dogs will descend upon you in an instant.

Not in le Marche. Not in Sassoferrato. Here history lives. Here history has texture you can feel.

But there’s more. You notice a tiny window leading to a small room. Your guide explains it’s a jail.

But it’s not just any jail. It’s not for townspeople who’ve violated some statute or another—it’s for errant priests.

Your guide takes you around the corner, where there’s a heavy door that opens upon a tiny room. In one corner there’s a box with a cover. It’s the toilet. It still works. It doesn’t, of course, flush—but the depth of the “plumbing” below is over 3 meters. I wonder if anyone has tried it?

The walls of this little cell are covered in writing. You can’t read it, of course, but your guide can. It turns out that one priest had been turned in for doing something unpriestlike, and blamed…the “bitch” that snitched. He was innocent, of course. It was written in 1792. Evidently this particular priest couldn’t contain himself, because he got turned in a second time, and his dated response, written on a different part of the wall, again proclaimed his innocence.

I love these little slices of life from way back. Religion hasn’t always been the staid practice we’ve been lead to believe. Or maybe it never was.

Then your guide takes you to the Church of San Francisco, Chiesa di San Francesco. In it he points out yet another unique visual element. One of the rich families of Sassoferrato once commissioned a huge painting. Its subject is circumcision. Its graphic subject, that is.

Turns out, according to the guide, that this is the only representation of its type in a church in Italy. The Vatican evidently has one, but somewhere in history they’ve erased the evidence by painting pants in the inappropriate place.

Yes, there was lots of circumcision art, but evidently none of it is currently on display in a church.

So, you want to see this? Without the glare that seemed to get in my pictures of it?

Well, you’ll have to come to little Sassoferrato in le Marche.

What will your friends say? Probably “Sasso…what?”

If you’re worried about that, then I’m sorry you got all this far in reading. Get thee to Florence. See the things other people insist you see.

As for me, I won’t deny it: I meant to lead you astray. It’s the meandering path to the best stuff in Hidden Italy and it’s my job.

(I visited Sassoferrato with the help of the Pro Loco, who have a Facebook page with contact information. Get your guide through them and have fun in Hidden Italy.)

Finding the Hidden Italy in Sassoferrato originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Sep 12, 2011, © James Martin,

Filed in: Italy Travel | Leading You Astray

Italy Travel Toolbox

Roman Roads · Sep 9, 04:59 AM by James Martin

Roman Roads are rather amazing bits of ancient construction. They surface in various places in Italy; tourists may encounter them anywhere from Rome, where a trek to the ancient Appian Way makes a fine walk out into the Italian countryside (especially on Sundays when traffic is forbidden) to roads in the south and east that linked distant port cities to Rome.

The Via Flaminia links Rome with Adriatic ports, and was known in the Medieval as the Rimini Road. In the Marche region, a part of the Flaminia system passes through the ancient Roman site of Sentinum near Sassoferrato, where these pictures were taken. The modern road which parallels it—the SS3 is nicknamed the Flaminia.

Reading the Roman Road

In the first picture (click to see it larger) we look down a stretch of Roman road that links the Flaminia to Roman Sentinum and runs past the thermal baths in the center of town. The road looks bumpy, but in antiquity it most certainly would be smoother; the cement between the visible blocks here has worn away with time—2000 or so years of it. So imagine yourself to be an observer in Roman times, looking down a relatively smooth road.

At the end of that road there is an intersection, a tee. Thru traffic passes to the left in this view. How do we know that? Let’s look at the next picture.

See the tracks? We’ve turned around, facing the opposite way that we faced when taking the first picture, so the tracks would tend to send a carriage off to the right in this view. The straight part of the road lacked tracks, but the curves have them. Why was that?

Early Roman carts and carriages didn’t have articulating front wheels. Send them through a sharp turn and the carriage and its wheels would be all over the place (and since just about all Roman roads followed compass directions, most of them had 90 degree turns) so tracks were carved to take the wagon on a gentle curve that hit the apex perfectly, just like the line a skilled Formula One driver might take in the same situation.

Did all wheels have the same axle length so that they fit these twin tracks? Not necessarily; since speeds were slow it was enough to find a single track to sink a wheel into to make the curve.

And why does the road to the right in this picture lack tracks? Archaeologists surmise that this was a driveway to a private residence, so there wasn’t enough traffic to warrant the work of making tracks.

In a twitter exchange with archaeologist Bill Thayer, it appears there is some disagreement over the tracks and their function: “The ruts are another matter. I’ve never got to the bottom of them, and there is much disagreement. I’ve seen and photographed ruts that can’t be what you suggest (1 or 3 on the same stretch; some interrupted, or curved on straight road).” So there is some mystery in the working of these roads!

In any case, Sassoferrato has an interesting museum where you can learn more about the ancient Roman city of Sentinum. Not much of the city is left, but there are some excavations of the city center and baths, and another on the other side of the modern via Flaminia that uncovers the larger baths which were built when the smaller city center baths became inadequate for the growing population. There is a stretch of the wider ancient Flaminia on the site, but it is covered to protect it, since there isn’t money to preserve it.

Roman Roads originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Sep 09, 2011, © James Martin,

Filed in: Italy Travel | Leading You Astray

Lunigiana Homecoming · Jul 2, 02:03 AM by James Martin

It’s good to be “home.” There are some things we need to get used to. Again.

Bread stores, for example. Folks walk up, point to a particular pile of bread and ask where it comes from.

“Agnino”

“Va bene”

And that’s it. Bread like they bake in the tiny little town of Agnino has been purchased, and for about a quarter of the money that a decent loaf will cost in California. Pane di Vinca is more popular. Most likely you’ve never heard of Vinca, but the tiny mountain village is as famous for its bread as Bigliolo is famous (all over Italy!) for beans.

Yesterday we lunched under the awning at Ristorante Rolando in Barbarasco. Well, strike that, we half-lunched under that awning. You see, just as the ravioli with porcini and spaghetti con le vongole were arriving, rain began pelting the tattered canvas stretched over our heads. It was actually quite pleasant, sitting on the terrace, alone (the economy really is that bad, evidently), hearing the rain drum the canvas and feeling the sudden and quite welcome breeze…

Then, as the waiter disappeared into the restaurant to check on our second plates, there came a sizzle suspended in the air, a crackling sizzle that came from nowhere or everywhere—then a very short and very pregnant period of silence, then an ear-splitting and quite authoritative clap of thunder I will never forget.

The waiter arrived with a start, as they say in old lit. We decided to head into the dining room. Lights flickered. A candle was brought. Soon thereafter the lights went out for good.

You need to come and witness a thunderstorm like they have frequently in Tuscany. You don’t get those in California. We’re too mellow for that.

You also won’t get to hear the waiter blame the threatening skies on a politician that often. Yes, the gods were unhappy—and it was Berlusconi’s fault, according to the waiter.

I suppose this means he will just have to sacrifice another of his virgins…

Lunigiana Homecoming originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Jul 02, 2011, © James Martin,

Filed in: The Lunigiana | Italy Travel

Popular These Days

Le Quattro Volte - A Movie Review of Sorts · Jun 16, 09:03 AM by James Martin

We recently saw the Italian movie Le Quattro Volte, or The Four Times. A fabulous film for those of us who don’t need to see bullet-riddled dead people oozing bodily fluids every 15 or so minutes to keep us interested.

The movie has been reviewed elsewhere, but let me take a stab at describing its celluloid skeleton. In a mountain village in Calabria we observe an old goatherd with a bad cough as he begins his Pythagorean journey through the four phases of life: mineral, vegetable, animal, and man. We’re doing it backwards, so the goatherd is reborn as a goat, who begets a tree which is used, ultimately, to create charcoal, which is cheating because carbone is not a mineral. But who’s gonna quibble? (Pythagoras lived a while in Crotone in Calabria, so he no doubt observed the same rituals we’re being exposed to while coming to his conclusions.)

Every step of this amazing journey is celebrated by a local festival. The movie, like time, is circular; it begins with the production of charcoal and ends with it. It is the perfect movie about life in an Italian mountain village. Simple on the outside, chock full of meaning on the inside.

If you watch the movie you will note a few interesting concepts. It’s in Italian but there’s no dialog. Yes, people mumble and yell at dogs but it’s all background noise, so essentially we’re talking about a movie without words—and certainly without dialog.

Also interesting is the point of view. The camera doesn’t become part of the scene. It doesn’t roam sentimentally over the contours of its subjects. It doesn’t wow the observer with zooms and pans. It is fixed. It lets the scene dictate the action. It’s like the good old days of Italian neo-realism without the yelling.

While watching the movie you’re likely to feel like a true wanderer. You’ve reached a mountain village of which you are unfamiliar. You’ve taken up a vantage point on top of a hill, where you sit and have a view of the church, the goat pen, the edge of the village, the house of the goatherd. Everything happens in front of you in the wide angle view. You do not need to open up your dog-eared copy of Rick Steves to make a stab at understanding the scene before you because Mr. Steves would never send you to waste your valuable vacation time in such a remote and unattractive village. There is no history because the history is there in front of you. Raw. It’s always been there. You just need to observe it.

Another interesting thing to note: the goatherd seeks relief from his cough through the sacred dust the woman who cleans the church collects and packages and exchanges for goat milk. If you notice, his cough improves noticeably until one day he loses his magic packet. You can imagine what happens next. Anthropologists will tell you that folk cures like these work more often than you might think. Belief is a strong element of keeping a body healthy, and a strong element in the fabric of an isolated community like the one you’re observing.

See the movie if you can. It’s great to see a picture aimed at the curious wanderer.

(Goats? Then we must consult Bleeding Espresso’s take on the movie)

Le Quattro Volte - A Movie Review of Sorts originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Jun 16, 2011, © James Martin,

Filed in: Italy News | Italy Travel

Crap! It's Herculaneum! · Jun 13, 01:13 PM by James Martin

There are folks who think archaeology must be one of the best jobs in the whole, wide, world. Many of them have added hot air to this ubiquitous thought-bubble after having watched a vintage Indiana Jones movie. They are magic, these movies.

But unlike real bubbles, or even Internet bubbles, this thought bubble doesn’t seem to ever have dissipated—or exploded.

Let’s face it, archaeology can be a crappy job. I once spent weeks with a crew excavating a city block of Oakland’s turn-of-the-century’s privies. Old ones*, fortunately do not stink—and since people threw their old and worn out stuff in them when they finally got real plumbing, there were some incredible finds lying in wait in those perfectly rectangular holes. Like old pottery.

“Whoopie!” I hear you muttering. (You are edging toward the exit door of your gigantic, archaeological thought bubble, aren’t you?)

Romantically backward modern archaeologists are today less concerned with shooting pistols while watching slaves excavate glittering jewelry from inside the ruins of grand palaces than they are with everyday stuff. Low life stuff. For example, they often get excited when a Coprolite appears like a fat, dull, burnt umber corkscrew in their sieving screens.

Yes, especially to paleontologists, fossilized turds are gold.

But the apple of an archaeologist’s trained eye doesn’t have to be fossilized. Listen to what one of these fellows thinks of a recently excavated Herculaneum sewer:

Specialists involved in the Herculaneum Conservation Project have excavated the ancient sewers of the city and uncovered the largest deposit of organic material ever found in the Roman world.

Yes, they came away with 750 large sacks of human excrement.

Certainly, this find has caused some sleepless nights. The excitement must be unbearable for those picked for the task of sorting it all out. (It is not likely to be a coincidence that the words “excitement” and “excrement” sound so darn similar!) In any case, like the privies of Oakland, there were some interesting things in those ancient sewers that have been found and cataloged already:

Apart from 170 crates of artifacts including pottery, a lamp and 60 coins, the excavation team has recovered bone pins, necklace beads and a gold ring with a decorative gemstone from the sewers. But it is the organic deposits that may provide the most innovative research – giving researchers an unprecedented insight into the diet and health of the Roman inhabitants.

But honestly, excrement is gold if you want to find out what the population ate and how well it all went down. Especially in Italy, a country whose whole population is thought to have some innate and selfish gene that makes them cook well and demand way-better-than-edible food.

I’m excited just thinking of the results. Like travel, it’s getting there that’s the pain in the ass.

So I wish the researchers well.

Herculaneum is a great place to visit. If I were going again, I’d be tempted to take a Context Tour, in which real scholars and researchers take you around and can answer all your questions. They have a customizable one: Full-Day Archaeology Around Mt. Vesuvius.

Scholar and Chicago White Sox fan Bill Thayer reminds us via twitter that “Sometimes the ancient burial grounds do stink…” while referencing THE SANITARY CONDITIONS OF ANCIENT ROME quoted below (but read the whole thing, it’s interesting—like the rest of the site):

The Esquiline cemetery was divided into two sections: one for the artisans who could afford to be buried apart in Columbaria, containing a certain number of cinerary urns; one for the slaves, beggars, prisoners, and others, who were thrown in revolting confusion into common pits or fosses. This latter section covered an area one thousand feet long, and thirty deep, and contained many hundred puticuli or vaults, twelve feet square, thirty deep, of which I have brought to light and examined about seventy-five. In many cases the contents of each vault were reduced to a p65uniform mass of black, viscid, pestilent, unctuous matter; in a few cases the bones could in a measure be singled out and identified. The reader will hardly believe me when I say that men and beasts, bodies and carcasses, and any kind of unmentionable refuse of the town were heaped up in those dens. Fancy what must have been the condition of this hellish district in times of pestilence, what the mouths of the crypts must have been kept wide open the whole day!

Crap! It's Herculaneum! originally appeared on WanderingItaly.com Jun 13, 2011, © James Martin,

Filed in: Italy Travel | General

The Electric Rodi Garganico · Jun 8, 01:47 PM by James Martin

rodi garganico picture

One of the things I most enjoy about wandering around Italy is getting out in the evening and joining the collective walk called the La Passeggiata. The hot sun has almost set the shadows are long and mysterious, and things you don’t notice in the light of mid day snap into focus.

Like the electricity they charge you an arm and a leg for. Notice the care they have taken to make sure it’s all in place. Neatly.

Walk, have a gelato (in this case at the Gelateria Ognissanti (dal 1985), and enjoy the Seaside town of Rodi Garganico. Don’t worry about the electricity, it will be there in the morning. Unless it’s not.

Filed in: Puglia | Italy Travel

Sardinia and the History of Malaria · Apr 24, 10:39 AM by James Martin

If you’re walking through a city or village in Sardinia, you’ll likely see stencils that seem to indicate the existence of DDT. Once you spot one, you’ll see them everywhere. Even on old doors to rural storerooms that haven’t been painted since the second world war.

These stencils do indeed refer to DDT, and an anti-malaria program that was quite ambitious. Some say too ambitious.

Rockefeller Foundation’s Sardinian Project (1946-51) utilized 32,000 DDT workers to spray 10,000 tons of DDT mixture over an area the size of New Hampshire, finally liberating the island of malaria. The environmental implications were enormous. ~ The Rockefeller Foundation in Sardinia: Pesticide Politics in the Struggle Against Malaria

In the case of this location along Cagliari’s Via Roma as shown in the picture, the area was sprayed with DDT in 1948.

Although the project’s aim was to eliminate the mosquitoes that carry malaria, that objective was never reached. Malaria was eliminated from the island nevertheless.

Malaria was thought to come to Sardinia with the Carthaginian conquest of Sardinia in 502 BC. The wetlands of the southern plains were ideal for mosquito habitat, and the problem persisted through the Roman period. Romans rewarded their fighting elite with plots of land in these malarial plains as a parting gift, and eventually many of the swamps were drained and Malaria kept at bay as old generals made do with what they had. Sardinia, specifically the campidano plain, became Rome’s breadbasket.

After the Roman era, malaria became endemic during the medieval period, and persisted until recent times, when the Fascist government instituted a land reclamation project which used modern technology on a large scale for drainage and sanitation. This program and the availability of quinine to treat the disease caused Malaria numbers to decline significantly, the number of reported cases dropping to 88 in 1940.

But the war not only ended these programs, but some wartime tactics exacerbated the problem; German troops flooded a large area to hinder the movement of the Allied Armed Forces, for example, causing Malaria cases to soar—in 1946, 74,600 malaria cases and 169 deaths were reported.

And so this enormous project in which houses and the ancient stone towers called nuraghi where sprayed in addition to extensive and concentrated spraying in remote wetland areas (where donkeys were needed when jeeps couldn’t get to them).

The success of the program didn’t deter detractors.

Sheepherders, fish farmers, and beekeepers blamed their dead sheep, dead fish, and dead bees on DDT spraying. Other villagers maintained that malaria fevers derived from pestilential waters, not mosquitoes, and so were reluctant to let sprayers into their homes, especially when house flies that once died (the most immediate benefit of spraying) acquired pesticide resistance. Local health experts and politicians also complained that the project focused too much on mosquitoes and not enough on the disease, sometimes faulting “American” methods over tried-and-tested “Italian” methods. After the project’s first director quit, secretly claiming that mosquito extermination over such an extensive area was an impossible task, the next director orchestrated a final all-out campaign before declaring malaria success while admitting mosquito defeat, and then beating a hasty retreat out of Sardinia.

Perhaps simple spraying of the houses and draining of the swamps would have been sufficient. As the results indicate, it wasn’t at all necessary to kill all the mosquitoes to eliminate Malaria.

What’s interesting is there is an online digital archive that has many pictures of the activities at the time.

Cagliari. Preparazione delle palle larvicide di DDT, 1948
Trasporto di bidoni di DDT su un asino, 1950
Disinfestazione all’interno di una casa, 1950

This post is drawn from the paper linked above and another authored by one more sympathetic to the program, Eugenia Tognotti: Program to Eradicate Malaria in Sardinia, 1946–1950

Filed in: Italy Travel | General

Pisa and the Leaning Tower - A Different View · Apr 22, 06:05 AM by James Martin

pisa italy

Nice, no? If you wanted, you could see millions of pictures of the leaning tower and its religious supporting structures on the internet. Half of them would feature the classic view with people holding up the tower. (Cute. Why didn’t I think of that?) But this was the view from the spacious balcony of my hotel room—with a tiny bit of telephoto action behind it. The picture was taken in the early morning after a day of rain, so there’s plenty of haze to mystify the surroundings.

If you look at a map, you’ll see that the Piazza dei Miracoli, the rectangular green from which this ill-designed eye-candy springs, is in the far northwest corner of Pisa, about as far away from the train station as you could put it. There’s not much else beyond it you’d want to see, mostly it’s just fields that don’t contain miracles. So putting a hotel out there a short ways away is pure genius. Putting a place you vacation at on Via Caduti Del Lavoro is another stroke of pure genius. It reminds you that you can die while doing work. So quit working and get to that hotel and get out the camera and start shooting (but don’t lean over the railing on your balcony too much.

If you zoom in, you’ll get a shot like that on the right.

The hotel is a spa/business hotel, my favorite kind. I no longer need the tourist crutches of worm-eaten beamed ceilings and toilet seats that don’t stand up on their own to remind me I’m in Italy. I want free internet, a desk upon which to work, and a shower with a hand shower that spews hot water in abundance. The hotel, called Abitalia Tower Plaza went one better, it had dual showers, glassed in so you could watch your sweet honey lather up (or whomever you’re sharing your room with).

And the restaurant had good food, too. Local food, well-prepared, with excellent wines. You don’t often get that kinda thing in business hotels.

There are even expensive signs in brushed stainless steel to guide you to the gigantic blue tub of water outside that Italians call the Piscina. Problem was, the signs read “poll.” Planning, and double-checking, is everything.

But overall, a very nice hotel, not so far from Pisa Airport. And guess what? They let us leave our car in their parking lot while we spent a week in Sardinia. Free.

You can’t beat that.

Find out more or book it: Abitalia Tower Plaza

Or if you decide to just make a run for the Piazza dei Miracoli from the train station because you’ve planned one of those 14 country in ten day vacations, see our video: Getting from Pisa Train Station to the Leaning Tower in a Hurry

Maybe they should have a street dedicated to the vacation fallen, the Via Caduto de Vacanza.

Filed in: Italy Travel | Italy Travel Tips