Sicilian Car Stories (Italy) by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Sicilian Car Stories (Italy) by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget


We were lucky to have a car in Sicily.  The rental agency in Catania had a problem with our reservation and would not give us a car.

This left us stranded at the airport and forty miles away from our hotel.   The lesson here is that you should always have cab fare no matter what your age.  It took us about two days to straighten out the car situation, but we finally obtained a rental car.

Once we had the car, we immediately set out along the coast towards Messina.  The road was bumpy, because it was paved with volcanic rock from Mount Etna, which towered over us with permanent clouds over its central crater.

We learned Sicilian car etiquette and navigating nuances along the way:

-1 honk = get moving faster…right now

-2 honks = a car will appear turning right or left out of nowhere…right now

-Headlights being turned on in oncoming traffic = I’m turning across you lane right now

-Tiny cars = two cars in a lane built for one car, especially leading into traffic circles

-GPS includes directions for dead ends and former donkey paths in medina mazes in towns located on top of rock outcroppings

-GPS does not include road closures due to fallen boulders

-Parking is reserved for residents in downtown areas – tourist parking is downhill and far away unless you are a tourist bus

Even after we had learned these principles of Sicilian car etiquette, we still had mishaps.  We drove to Taormina to see the Teatro Greco and the GPS sent us through the narrow streets of the pedestrian-only downtown and up to the gate of the Teatro Greco.  We got a tour of Taormina that taxis and tour buses cannot replicate.  We found “the big road” as soon as the police began following us.

The second mishap occurred in Syracuse at the Papyrus Museum on Ortygia Island.  (Papyrus grows outside of Syracuse in addition to locations in Africa.)  We found a parking spot and did not see the very small, obscurely located sign that said the parking spots were reserved for residents.  The sign was written in Italian.

We discovered all of this after visiting the Papyrus Museum when we returned to the empty spot where our car had been.  I also discovered that I could read and speak Italian in emergency situations.  We managed to get a call into the police to find out where the car was, get a taxi, and pay a fine to liberate our car.

Our third car mishap introduced us to the maze-like urban planning of the Arabs, who had once ruled Sicily.  Maze-like medinas were built for house-to-house defense and fighting.  This third car adventure led us to the interior town of Enna, which is located on top of a rock outcropping.  GPS directions here send you up and down steep streets and hairpin turns.

Once we had made it up to the town, we found a parking spot by Enna’s Castello Lombardia and were happy to exit town via a wide road that was built for tour buses.  Halfway down the road, we discovered that the road was closed due to fallen boulders and work on the retaining walls.  The GPS did not reroute us when we turned around, but gave us directions for the same road.

We returned back up the road we had taken and were finally rerouted.  We could not return the way we came into town, because the streets were narrow, one-way lanes.

The GPS led us into a funnel-shaped, former donkey path that was a dead end.  I knew the people who had garages there drove Smart cars and Vespas.  We had trouble turning around and the side mirrors struck house walls when we tried to squeeze back out.

While I was directing angle plays to get the car turned around, two Sicilian men arrived and heads began to pop out of doorways and windows.  The men took over the geometric directions and pushed the side mirrors to sides of the car.  My husband proceeded to drive out of the passage with one centimeter of space on either side of the car.

We profusely thanked our rescuers and set out for the town square with the directions the men gave us in Italian.  (I was learning quickly.)  We watched where all the traffic was going and made our way down the hairpin turns of the rock outcropping.  I was ready for a reposo (nap).

Vertiginous views from Taormina follow.

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Laurent Paget Photography 

Laurent Paget Photography

Ruth Paget Selfie

Visiting Prague, Czech Republic with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Prague, Czech Republic with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

“We won’t be in the Euro Zone in Prague,” I remarked to my husband as we set out from our Bavarian inn toward the Czech Republic.  I had forgotten how easy it is to exchange money in countries seeking tourism.

On all the back roads we took into Prague, I marveled at GPS technology and the orderly countryside that would make a Midwestern American farmer happy.  Some buildings remain to be repaired, but I felt that the towns and villages adorned with flowers were making things nice for their inhabitants as well as potential tourists.  Czech restaurants with Czech-only signs appeared along the way with families out for a weekend lunch.  Gas stations with gas advertised at 325 Czech Korunas per liter dotted the road

We found parking one block down from the Charles Bridge.  The large avenues with trees reminded me of Boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris.  The streets were clean, but I felt the buildings would be even more stunning with cleaning.  The towering Baroque architecture in town was built to keep you in line with the Catholic faith and not to be tempted by deviations from it.

What is true of the architecture is also true of the statues on the Charles Bridge over the Vltava River.  The Bridge is named after King Charles (1316 – 1378) with work beginning on it in 1357.  Various guidebooks say that passing the religious statues on the Charles Bridge is akin to making a pilgrimage.  The statues are darkened with wear by the elements and pollution.  If they were cleaned, Pont Alexandre III in Paris would have some competition as the most dramatic bridge in the world.

The base of the statue of Saint John of Nepomuk (1345 – 1393) has a shiny spot on the brass where people touch it.  Legend according to tour guides is that you will one day return to Prague if you do this like throwing a coin in the Trevi Fountain in Rome.  Another online legend says you might have a wish granted for rubbing that statue.  A Czech woman we spoke with said you would not get sick for a year if you rubbed that spot.

After a walk amidst artists, buskers, and tourists, we found a nice restaurant outside the towers on Mostecka Street called Pod Vezi. The restaurant serves lunch specials and dinner throughout the day.  I had bresaola and pork loin while my husband had potato soup and spaghetti.  We both had apple cheesecake for dessert.  The food was excellent and so was the service; we had three waiters taking care of us.

We dodged tour buses, trams, and motorcycles and climbed winding roads on the mountains outside of downtown with a shift-gear car as we left town.  The countryside is amazingly close to the sophistication of downtown Prague.  The music on the radio was good even if we could not understand it.  The music accompanied us back to Bavaria, where we would enjoy a Pils beer from the Czech Republic and watch World Cup Soccer on a Fourth of July Weekend.

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Laurent Paget Photography

Laurent Paget Photography

Laurent Paget Photography

Sun Dial House - Laurent Paget Photography

Laurent Paget Photography

Laurent Paget Photography

Ruth Paget Selfie

Visiting Amiens Cathedral in Picardy, France with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Amiens Cathedral in Picardy, France with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 


On the way back from Arras (France), which we had visited during Memorial Day weekend, my husband and I stopped in Amiens to visit the Cathedral.

Notre Dame d’Amiens is twice as large as Notre Dame de Paris.  The Cathedral was built between 1220 and 1269.  Its architectural symmetry is pleasing to the eye.

You have to walk up to the Cathedral on steps with platforms at fifteen or so steps.  Each platform requires you to turn at a ninety-degree angle to a new set of steps before you reach the Cathedral plaza.

The platforms would be good places for jugglers, clowns, people who do handstands and walk on their hands, and Amiens’ own marionettes featuring Lafleur, who does not like to work.

The Cathedral’s interior nave features a six-sided labyrinth at its center. I have seen labyrinths at the cathedrals at Chartres (floor) and at Poitiers (wall), but the one at Amiens could be displayed while still making room for chairs at services.

Putting chairs around the labyrinth incorporates the labyrinth into the life of the people as a way to do a symbolic pilgrimage after mass.  Picardy is remote.  Expenses would have kept most parishioners from doing a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostella, Rome, or Jerusalem.  The day that we visited a family was walking the labyrinth, keeping the tradition alive.

There are symmetrical geometric designs that run the length of the nave.  Geometry as is illustrated in the Carnet de Villard de Honnecourt XIII Siecle edited by Alain Erlande-Bendenburg et al formed the design foundation of the Gothic architecture and sculpture as it did in the Renaissance.  The difference between the Gothic and the Renaissance lies in the fact that the Renaissance artists knew about musculature and the skeleton and could render life-life images using perspective.  This knowledge especially affected the treatment of clothing in the two periods.

As we left the Cathedral, rain set in.  Everything became dark and dank.  It was easy to understand how a beautiful Cathedral could become the focal point of a agricultural-turned-industrial community.  Notre Dame d’Amiens will always be a draw for locals and tourists alike.

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Laurent Paget Photography

Laurent Paget Photography

Laurent Paget Photography

Laurent Paget Photography

Ruth Paget Selfie

Visiting the Chateau du Haut-Koenigsbourg in Alsace (France) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the Chateau du Haut-Koenigsbourg in Alsace (France) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg in Alsace, France is a fort and not a palace, which requires much steep climbing to visit: be forewarned.

German rulers beginning with Frederick von Hohenstaufen in the 12^th  century have used this mountaintop location to survey the wheat and wine road (running north to south) and the salt and silver road (running west to east) on the plain outside the modern town of Kintzheim.

The masonry of the holding walls along the way up to the Château reflects German construction methods rather than English and French ones.  The stones on the holding wall did not have mortar between them to hold them up like the massive stonework masonry that you find in Incan construction.  Moss and plants have grown between the cracks to form a sort of mortar.

Germanic masonry here differs from English masonry in the way that stones are laid down upon one another.  The base row of stones is covered by stones that are placed at regular intervals that fall in what appears to be at 1/5 intervals of the stone below.

The effect of this mathematical scheme on the entire wall is to see diagonal, parallel lines in the wall of German masonry.  This type of construction is very solid and could hold one side of a tunnel wall in a mountainside.

The effect of English and French masonry when you can see it under stucco is to have a series of parallel lines perpendicular to the base row of stones or bricks.  The base row is covered by stones or bricks that fall upon the base at ½ intervals.  The pressure point on the bricks is on the center and may be easier to break down for this reason.

German masonry is found on all three levels of the Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg fort.  The view from this solid perch has been in peacetime as well as in war.  Jean Renoir filmed La Grande Illusion here and used the interior as well as the exterior for shots.

The day my husband and I visited, there were two busloads of Italian schoolchildren from the Veneto region of northern Italy doing a tour.  German rulers have been very influential in the politics of Italy, which probably explained the children’s educational tour before a visit to Kintzheim’s monkey zoo and the preserve for storks, the symbolic bird of Alsace.

I somewhat envied the children’s field trip.


By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Laurent Paget Photography

Laurent Paget Photography

Laurent Paget Photography

Visiting Nuremberg, Germany's National Museum with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Nuremberg, Germany's National Museum with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

You could spend a week or two just visiting each gallery once in Nuremberg’s German National Gallery.  With just a morning to devote to it, my husband and I decided to visit the Renaissance galleries.

What struck me the most was the presentation of tools such as sextants, protractors, pantographs, compasses, and globes before you could enter the painting collection. I thought this was a subtle way of explaining that technological advances set the foundation for the Renaissance style, particularly in the development of perspective painting.

Perspective painting is based on what is called the vanishing point, a point from which angles emanate to determine size in a painting.  Images are larger the further away they are from the vanishing point and smaller as they approach it.  The difference in size gives the illusion of depth or perspective in painting.  This approach differs from that of the Middle Ages where the most important person in paintings or sculpture is usually much larger than surrounding people and landscape elements like trees.

Mathematical precison was the element sought after in the Museum’s Behaim terrestrial globe (c. 1493), the oldest surviving globe in the world.  Hispaniola, where Columbus and crew landed, is very large with no North American and South America depicted.  

You could predict sea voyage lengths with an accurate globe.  Knowing this helped control lucrative trade routes that made nations rich and able to control other countries.  Globes were almost proprietary knowledge for this reason: information sharing was not an asset during this period in history.

The German Renaissance paintings in the galleries displayed a sobriety that you do not find in Italian Renaissance art.  Flemish painting was more of an influence on German Renaissance art with brown backgrounds and interiors and emphasis on detailed lacework.  Nudes by Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1472 – 1553) and portraits by Albrecht Dürer (1471 -1528) reflect the influence of Flanders.

This short visit whetted my desire for return visits to the German National Museum to see suits of armor, tea sets, doll houses, and German furniture, which are all in the collection.

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Laurent Paget Photography

                                                               

                                                          Laurent Paget Photography

Laurent Paget Photography

Ruth Paget Selfie

Visiting the Zwinger Palace in Dresden, Germany with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the Zwinger Palace in Dresden, Germany with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

The porcelain collection at the Staatliche Kunst Ammlungen Dresden encourages visitors to reflect upon the fragile beauty of civilization. Works from Asia and Meissen, outside Dresden, make up the collection.

Japanese and Chinese porcelain glimmers in the sunshine from the palace museum’s windows. The true treasures of this collection are the characteristic blue and white Ming Dynasty (1368 – 1644) vases from China.

The Asian porcelain is displayed in Western fashion: symmetrical arrangements that cover walls with smaller pieces displayed on gold-colored shelves.  In Asia, one or two of these shimmering beauties would be displayed to fully appreciate them.  The German display method made me think of the Russian czar-like wealth of the Saxon rulers with serfs working the land and one hundred ruling families living in voluptuous luxury.

The Meissen porcelain collection equally reminded me of wealth and privilege, but more in the style of an Iranian shah with its monumental peacock porcelains along with other animals commanded for a zoo collection by Augustus the Strong (1670 – 1733).  An entire wall in this collection is covered with porcelain birds in various turning poses depicting self grooming.  My favorite piece in this collection was a large splay of porcelain flowers in a porcelain vase.

Meissen vases and dishes have luminous colors that make you want to caress them as if they were satin.  The Meissen yellows and light blues are the characteristic colors of the manufacture.  Meissen vases in these colors would look wonderful in a curvy Rococo drawing room with François Boucher (1703 – 1770) paintings of ladies being pushed on swings in lush gardens.

When I left the porcelain collection at Dresden, I felt as if I had understood Saxony’s history and how it might affect the cultural and political outlook of its citizens.

By Ruth Paget - Author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Laurent Paget Photography

Laurent Paget Photography

Laurent Paget Photography

Laurent Paget Photography

Laurent Paget Photography

Laurent Paget Photography

Ruth Paget Selfie

Visiting Sauternes, the Bordeaux (France) village of honey-like wine with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Sauternes, the Bordeaux Region (France) village of honey-like wine with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 


The petite village of Sauternes belies the legendary acclaim of its dessert wine.

This white wine made from semillon, sauvignon, and muscadelle grapes is harvested late, allowing a beneficent mold to grow on the grapes and concentrate the sugars. When aged, Sauternes becomes amber colored and pours viscously from the bottle.  It tastes of honey and gives a French meal a grand finale, letting the wines that preceded it build up to it.

The French consider Sauternes to be the best wine produced in the Bordeaux region.  Château d’Yquem is the most renowned producer, but d’Yquem receives much competition for the market from Château Rieussec and Château Guiraud among others. In the village on the day we visited, the Maison de Sauternes was closed. This meant no tasting, purchasing, or receiving the crucial map of the châteaux.

We struck out on our own on the châteaux route and were struck by the differences between Sauternes and the Médoc regions of Bordeaux. Towns abound in the Médoc with many outlets for purchasing wine.  The châteaux road in the Médoc sports gussied-up architectural gems with room for parking and taking photos.  In Sauternes, the châteaux road features walled in vineyards in places and châteaux hidden by forests.

I thought the people making this honey-like wine resembled honeybees themselves.  They hid in their secluded châteaux and cellars and made wine just like bees hide their hives and make honey.  The châteaux that were visible reminded me of well-tended manor houses that would surround a castle like the one portrayed in the book Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry (circa 1412 – 1416). 

This book illustrates the life of everyone for its era from peasant to prince and how nature and its rhythms regulated life.  On a sultry day like the day we visited, everyone was absent from the vineyards. They were no doubt checking the advance of an impending hail storm.

My husband asked me if I would like a photo a château as a souvenir.  (There was no place to buy postcards in the village.)  I smiled and asked for photos of the well-manicured vineyards.  The leaves covered the grapes in the canopy and appeared to obtain the greatest surface area for photosynthesis.  The heightened level of photosynthesis allows sugar to develop in the grape, making it a prime target for late harvest, noble rot.

We did not buy any Sauternes wine, because no place to do so was open. This just drove home the fact for me that Sauternes is a wine for holidays and special events; an item to be savored and cherished.

By Ruth Paget - Author of Marrying France and Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Laurent Paget Photography

Laurent Paget Photography

Laurent Paget Photography

Laurent Paget Photography

Laurent Paget Photography

Ruth Paget Selfie