Visiting Mantua (Italy) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Learning about Isabella d'Este in the City of Mantua (Italy) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget 

I first read about Isabella d’Este and her acclaimed art collection in my art history classes at the University of Chicago.  Isabella held court in Mantua, a Gonzaga family town.  She had married into the Gonzaga family as a member of the Este family of Ferrara.  The art collection, correspondence, and fashion were just some of the ways in which she became a cultural arbiter.

Isabella used her education to preserve Mantua’s independence amongst the vying powers of Venice, Milan, and France.  The rulers of these powers were impressed by Isabella’s culture.  This admiration helped keep Mantua from being invaded and occupied when other Italian cities were suffering such a fate like Urbino.

Thanks to her correspondence, we can find information about her in biographies such as Isabella d’Este Marchioness of Mantua: 1476 – 1539: A Study of the Renaissance by Julia Cartwright Ady.  This biography is particularly good at discussing Isabella’s education and that of her children. 

Isabella’s education is important for learning how to create diplomats, who can equally lead troops if necessary.  (Isabella led Mantua’s troops when her husband was absent from Mantua, and she had to defend the city.)

Ady begins her biography by writing that Isabella could recite Virgil’s Ecologues and Cicero’s Episltles from memory.  She could also retell the story of the Aeneid as well.  All this points to her grounding in Roman culture and studies in the Latin language.

Isabella learned to dance, embroider, play the lute, and sing.  She learned math, grammar, logic, philosophy, and how to ride a horse.  She went on many travel expeditions.

The only thing she did not learn how to do was how to draw and paint, which might explain why she spent a fortune collecting art. 

She knew French and sang French songs.  She also read French romances and those of Brittany.  King Arthur and the Round Table was part of her library collection.  She liked maps and globes, both celestial and terrestrial.  She had maps of Venice, Cairo, and Constantinople in her library collection.  Books and music filled her days unless she was entertaining guests.  She liked to play the card game Scartino.

When my husband Laurent and I visited Italy recently, I suggested that we visit Mantua, Mantova in Italian, to pay homage to Isabella d’Este.  Her art collection is no longer there; it has been dispersed to Hampton Court in England, the Louvre in Paris, and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna among other places.

However, there are many places to visit in this tiny-yet-might peninsula city.  We used the Skira Guide book Mantua: Cities of Art to guide our walks around the Palazzo Ducale and the Centres of Power tours.  Art lovers might like the Palazzo d’Arco and Palazzo Te tours in addition to these two tours.

I still felt that Isabella’s d’Este’s sprit was in Mantua as I viewed the lovely buildings.  Everyone is committed to beauty it seems.

My favorite place in Mantua was a doorway directly across from the Palazzo Ducale and adjacent to the Duomo (Cathedral):  The entrance to the Palazzo Vescovile, formerly the Palazzo Biannchi (1776 – 1786). 

The entrance was built after Isabella d’Este, but it is a testament to the town’s love of beauty.  Two telamon figures stand on either side of the doorway and invite photos with their excellent 3-D relief.  I felt that I saw Isabella d’Este’s legacy there and left Mantua happy.

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

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Visiting Louis XIV's Niece's Chateau in Lorraine (France) with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting Louis XIV's Niece's Chateau in Lorraine (France) at Luneville with Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

France’s château at Lunéville has royal connections not only through the Polish king Stanislaus Leszcynski (1677 – 1766), but also through his predecessor at Lunéville Elisabeth-Charlotte d’Orléans (1676 – 1744), who was the niece of Louis XIV.

The château was designed by Germain Boffrand (1667 – 1754), but it is the people who lived at Lunéville that made his designs come to life.  A provincial château could not compete with Versailles.  However, Elisabeth-Charlotte grew up with the royal family and passed on the culture that she acquired in Versailles to her children in Lunéville.

Much is known about Charlotte-Elisabeth from her correspondence, which helped form the research base for the book Eclat et Scintillement: Lumière sur le décor de la chamber de la duchesse à Lunéville (not translated in English).  This book, which is ostensibly about the interior decoration of the duchess Elisabeth-Charlotte’s bedroom, contains much information about raising aristocratic children in Germany.

The Germanic connection is easy to understand as Elisabeth-Charlotte’s mother came from the Palatinate region in modern-day Germany.  Her mother also named Elisabeth-Charlotte was the second wife of Louis XIV’s brother, Philippe d’Orléans.

Elisabeth’s German mother is recorded as saying in the Eclat et Scintillement that she always spoke to her children with reason.  She showed them what is good and bad.  Her mother did not accept any naughtiness.  The young Elisabeth-Charlotte was told not to follow bad examples.  She could not have a bad attitude.  Her mother praised virtue and taught her daughter to be horrified by vice.

When Elisabeth-Charlotte raised her own children, she taught these same things to them.  She also shared with them those things she had come to love at Versailles such as theatre, music, poetry, literature, nature, and animals.  Elisabeth-Charlotte also loved cooking and was very involved in her children’s studies.

Elisabeth-Charlotte was a mother, educator, and regent of Lorraine for nine years.  As part of a political treaty, she had to leave Lunéville so the deposed Polish king Stanislas could live at Lunéville.  Duke Stanislas of Lorraine was the father-in-law of Louix XV.  When Elisabeth-Charlotte moved to Commercy with all of her belongings, the era of Duke Stanislas began.

Under Duke Stanislas, Lunéville became known as a cultural center while the duke maneuvered to regain his Polish throne.  Stanislas sought to ally himself with the Turkish Ottoman Empire to regain his throne and had several portraits of himself painted in Turkish Dress.  The book Turqueries et Autres Chinoiseries: L’Exotisme en Lorraine au XVIIIème Siècle documents the many portraits.  This may have irritated Lorraine’s aristocratic families who had Turkish inspired artwork commissioned to commemorate Duke Charles V (1643 – 1690), who fought the Turks at Vienna.

Today, the gardens are a family to place to visit in addition to the château.   The day my husband and I visited drops of spring rain greeted us in the garden.  However, we could see the hedge embroidery that outlined the flower beds with a few blooms peeking out. 

A visit to Lunéville coupled with a visit to Nancy is a nice weekend outing.

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

Click here for:  Ruth Paget's Amazon Books

Laurent Paget Photography

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Sampling Vietnamese Cuisine with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Sampling Vietnamese Cuisine with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

My family’s many Vietnamese restaurant outings in Monterey, California were the product of my meals at Chicago’s Mekong House in the 1980s and Vietnamese meals in Paris’ Vietnamese restaurants in the 1990s.  (Vietnamese restaurants outnumber Chinese restaurants in Paris, since Vietnam was once a French colony as part of Indochina.)

When we moved to Monterey, I noticed the Orient Restaurant while shopping and took my daughter Florence to it for lunch on what was the first of several Friday afternoons when she got out of school at noon.

“What kind of food do they have there?” Florence asked.

“They have Mongolian beef,” I responded knowing that I had mentioned the one exotic food item that Florence liked from Chinese dining adventures as well as Korean ones where we ate bulgogi, which resembles Mongolian beef.  She preferred Mongolian beef to burgers and fries.

“The Vietnamese actually beat back the Mongols from their country twice,” I continued.

“Who are the Mongols again?” she asked.

“Horse riders who ruled from China to Persia,” I responded with my quick historical summary of the Mongol hordes.

“Why do they have Mongolian beef at a Vietnamese restaurant, if they beat the Mongols?” Florence asked.

“They serve both Chinese and Vietnamese food, because that’s what their customers want,” I said.

When we arrived at the restaurant, an altar with a four-foot high laughing Buddha and a three-foot high vase full of sunflowers greeted us at the entrance.  The pale green restaurant walls and black, marble-top tables showed that they were prosperous.

I ordered lemongrass chicken, and Florence ordered Mongolian beef.  When Florence tasted the Mongolian beef, I asked her what she thought of it.

“Spicy,” she said as she moved a red chili pepper off to the side of her plate.  The green onion looked the same as what goes into Chinese Mongolian beef, but the Orient’s version was saucier and had mushrooms and bamboo shoots in it.  It came with rice.

“Is it a little sweet like bulgogi?” I asked.

“No, but I like it.  I don’t mind spicy food,” she said.  She had inherited my liking for hot and spicy food.

“Try the lemongrass chicken,” I said, putting a nugget on her plate.  She put it in her mouth and grimaced.  I like slightly sour foods, but Florence does not.  Lemongrass chicken arrives at the table sizzling with the aroma of chilies, garlic, and citrus in the air.  I like the out-of-the-ordinary ingredients.

“They have a Buddha on their altar,” Florence remarked as she finished her meal.

The altar held many things: incense sticks in a bowl full of sand, cups that looked like egg holders which were full to the brim with a clear liquid probably a rice wine, a stemmed platter of mangos stacked in a pyramid, rose-colored silk tulips, two electric candles, a bowl of rice, and a statue of long-haired, bearded Taoist Immortal.

On the way out after our meal, Florence bent down to look at the altar that was on the floor while I picked up the take-out menu.

“Is the guy with a beard Buddha, too?” she asked.

“He’s a Taoist Immortal; someone who lives forever,” I said, fending off trying to explain Taoism, which believers themselves claim is unknowable.

“Did you know that people who believe in the Tao find doing everyday things beautiful?” I said and smiled.

“What do you mean,” Florence asked.

“Doing stuff like buying groceries, doing the laundry, cleaning the house, and going to school are all beautiful for someone who believes in the Tao,” I said.

Florence looked at me and said, “Doing laundry isn’t beautiful.”

“It is if you like clean clothes,” I responded.

Florence shook her head and said, “You’re weird, mom.”

“Weird and happy,” I retorted.  “Can’t you think of one ordinary thing that you could call beautiful?” I asked.

“I guess eating lunch,” Florence answered.

“Exactly like eating lunch,” I said as I pinched her cheek.  I liked having time to take my daughter out to lunch.

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

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Attending a Filipino Festival with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget in Salinas (California)

Attending a Filipino Festival with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget in Salinas (California)


“Not another festival!” my pre-teen daughter Florence cried.  I thought she was suffering from festival fatigue syndrome.

I was undaunted in my efforts to make Florence into a world citizen however.  “Oh, come on.  You’ll like Filipino food,” I said.

“No, I won’t,” she said and ran to see my husband Laurent to get out of the excursion.

Before Laurent could say anything, I volunteered to drive to the Steinbeck Center in Salinas where the Filipino Festival was taking place and pay for lunch.

“We get to leave after 20 minutes if it’s boring, right?” Florence said on the way there.

“If it’s boring,” I said.  I knew she would become interested in what was happening as the day wore on.

When we arrived at the Filipino Festival, I noticed that almost all of the attendees were Filipino unlike the Greek, Turkish, and Sicilian Santa Rosalia Festivals held on the Monterey Harbor.  Those three festivals had many tourists attend them. 

Many of the beautiful, dark-haired women wore long, flowered formal dresses with the stiff sleeves that puff up at the shoulder.  They looked like graceful butterflies flitting about the festival with children and grandchildren.

The long lines at the food booth moved slowly.  The food smelled so good at the Filipino Festival, however, that people patiently waited their turn.  Florence was impatient with the wait.

“Why don’t you go for a walk with your dad,” I suggested.

I was trying to decide what to order.  The names meant nothing to me except adobo.  I had eaten adobe, a kind of stew, before.  I tried to attach names to the delicious looking dishes that people were ordering, but everyone was speaking Tagalog, which hampered my efforts.

When I got close enough to see what was happening behind the scenes, I saw a man tossing noodles and vegetables in a three-foot wok.  I was going to order that – pointing would help me there.

Finally, it was my turn.  The mystery noodle dish turned out to be pancit.  I ordered that, a serving of chicken adobo, and two egg rolls called lumpia Shanghai with two waters and a soda for Florence.  I was happy with the Filipino sampler menu I had put together.

The thin rice noodles in pancit reflect the Chinese influence on Filipino food.  (The Filipinos themselves have intermingled Malay, Chinese, and Spanish roots.)

“Did you know that the Philippines are named after a Spanish king?” I asked Florence.

“No,” Florence responded, more interested in the Filipino dancing than a history lesson.

“The king was Phillip the Second,” I said.

Florence was becoming more interested in the festival as she ate the adobo, which was made with chicken, vinegar, spices, and pork.

Later when I read Reynaldo Alejandro’s The Philippine Cookbook , I saw that he refers to Mexican adobo as the origin of the dish.  Alejandro writes that Spain administered the Philippines as a colony out of Mexico.  Or, was it Filipino cuisine that influenced Mexican cuisine?  Some things in life remain a mystery.

The origin of the long, torpedo-shaped egg rolls I was eating obviously made me think of China with their stuffing of ground pork and onions.  They were crunchy despite mass manufacture for the festival and tasted good dunked in the red, spicy – sweet dipping sauce.

The child dancers left the stage to be replaced by the director of the first all-Filipino cast film called The Debut.

“If we can’t do well in Salinas with an Asian cast, we’ll never make it in Middle America,” the director said.  “So, bring your ‘lolos’ and ‘lolas’ to the film with you!” he told everyone.

“I just learned the words for ‘grandpa’ and ‘grandma’ in Tagalog,” Laurent said.

“Aren’t we going to the cute store?” Florence asked.  As soon as the director finished his sales pitch, we went down to the “Reflections of Asia” market that was a roofed stall covered with palm leaves.

Florence looked at necklaces.  The coral ones seemed to be de rigueur fashion gear for all Filipino young men.  “Always ready to go surfing,” I thought.  I told Florence she could have one if she let me look around in peace.

I gravitated to the book section.  I looked through cookbooks and a beautiful book about Spanish influences on Filipino religious architecture and art.  (The Philippines is Asia’s largest Christian country with more than 80% of the population being Roman Catholic.)  These items were beyond my budget, but I found a small children’s book about José Rizal.  Rizal is the Philippines’ national hero.

“Who’s that?” Florence asked with her coral necklace with a scallop shell on it in hand.

How do you explain a martyred liberation leader to a young Californian?

“He’s José Rizal.  He’s like the Martin Luther King and Cesar Chavez of the Philippines,” I said.

“Neat,” Florence responded, having regained her curiosity about other cultures.  I doubted she would remember Rizal’s name, but I would slip the book into her bookshelves to be “discovered” one day.

Florence had outgrown Barbie dolls, but they had several on sale that wore the Filipino dresses with the puffy sleeves that I liked.  I asked the saleswoman what the dresses were called.

“We call them Santa Claras,” she said.  I later read that they are also called “ternos.”

I bought some postcards of the Philippines, too.  The first postcard I bought showed terraced rice fields in the mountains.  I remembered reading a book about them called Rice by an author named Grist at the University of Chicago.  I recalled that maintaining these terraced fields, especially the retaining walls subject to heavy rains, and overseeing irrigation tend to create communal societies.

Another postcard showed the verdant green foliage around the waterfalls on Basilan Island.

Both postcards would go into our family journal along with a write-up of the day’s outing to make Florence a world citizen, who knows about the Philippines.

By Ruth Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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Learning about the German Minnesingers and Participating at Mayfair with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Learning about the German Minnesingers and Participating at Mayfair with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

“The German lyricists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were men of knightly rank who sang the praise of women, the joy and pain of love, the happiness of springtime, the beauty of flowers, the sweet music of birds” wrote Calvin Thomas in The History of the German Language (Google Books page 77, Book page number 92)

The poetry, mostly written by the knights, that Thomas refers to paid homage to unobtainable yet nubile ladies or Minne; minne is the origin of the word minnesingers, or love singers. 

Southern France with its troubadours is the source that Thomas cites as the source for minnesingers, but Northern France’s trouvères may have been a conduit of the troubadour tradition or a source of stories itself for some German-language songs and tales.

The minnesingers, or nightingales as they liked to be called according to Thomas, used May Day, the herald of spring, for their assignations, passing of notes, and attention getting. Once again my daughter’s Waldorf School kept alive the tradition of the Minnesingers in a most lovely way; a May Day picnic.

We did Californian things like barbecue wild boar sausage made in Carmel Valley on one grill and organic peppers, carrots, and celery for dipping in tamari sauce on another grill. A cake walk was held in the park’s gazebo, and we set up all our age-appropriate games all around the park.

All the little girls received flower garlands to wear in their hair like white and yellow crowns. A very tall May Pole stood in the center of the park with white ribbons swirling in the wind. The children caught the ribbons and walked around the May Pole without tangling the ribbons. (They had been practicing.) Their walk was accompanied by recorder music and song. 

Sheet music with lyrics helped out those of us who had not been taught by a minnesinger.

Thomas writes that each minnesinger had “[h]is stanza with its tune…. a Ton , and professional honor required that a man’s Ton be respected as his property.” (Google books, page 85 and Book page number 100). This practice appears to be an early form of copyright.

Tunes were becoming property, but good stories were shared out in the medieval era. The most famous of the shared stories are the Arthurian Romances. The stories entered Germany as Parzival written by Wolfram von Eschenbach. 

While they seem to deal with love, they represent a love that is different from that portrayed by the Minnesingers. Parzival seeks the Holy Grail, Christ’s cup which represents holy love. Parzival begins naively and ends as a wise man through his own efforts including mistakes.

Learning to succeed through your own efforts is a powerful lesson to express to sixth graders, but I was impressed with how Waldorf Schools dealt with this lesson as a system. Several schools worked together to hold a Medieval Games at the end of the school year. 

Children at my daughter’s school began running one mile every day before class to get into good physical shape. They practiced the games they would compete in such as tug-of-war, archery, shot put, and javelin throwing. 

In their sewing class, they made crests representing families to sew onto their tunics. I told my daughter on the way to school, “Win, lose, or draw, you will be in great shape at the end of the year!”

On the day of the Medieval Games at the Marin County Waldorf School outside San Francisco, all the kids tried to lose a little at tug-of-war to get muddy. I helped hose down kids after their bouts in the “boue,” or mud. I quizzed them about their family crests and the courtly songs they would compose that day.

As I read Thomas’ book The History of the German Language now, I hope the children from that day will all have inhered some poetry along with the mud to them. Thomas writes that Esenbach’s Parzival is the work of a poet; Esenbach “saw visions and thought in symbols…” 

Communicating symbols through metaphor and/or simile in poetry or prose is a skill that makes complex ideas concrete.

The ability of the German language to make intellectual concepts into objects you can see, feel, handle, and experience through metaphor and simile truly makes it not only a tool for communicating technical ideas, but a language that merits its place in schools and universities for the beauty of the ideas it conveys and its form.  I wish it had been taught in my daughter Florence's Waldorf School.

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

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Learning about the Runes and the Edda with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Learning about the Runes and the Edda with Juilliard Graduate Florence Paget and Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

As I read through the first half of A History of German Literature by Calvin Thomas on Google Books, I felt like I was reliving many of the experiences I had shared with my daughter when she was a grade school student at a Waldorf School. 

This is not a farfetched claim when you consider that the founder of the Waldorf Schools, Rudolf Steiner, was Austrian and founded his first school in Stuttgart, Germany in 1919. Steiner’s philosophy focuses on the performing and visual arts as a means for teaching, which makes the mystical and medieval texts of the German language come alive.

Thomas relates in the very beginning of his book that the German runes are a form of paganism. He says that no extant literature exists which uses the runic alphabet. When my daughter and I made clay pebble tablets and inscribed runic symbols on them, which resemble Sumerian hatch marks, I told her, “People who could read runes were thought to be magic by everyone else. That’s why reading is still magic now.”

I believe that runes hid codes and showed my daughter how to set up codes similar to vignière ciphers to communicate with me. These codes may have been beyond her years, but they provided us with afternoon entertainment during long winter nights. 

The entertainment for the Germanic peoples most probably came from what were eventually written down in the thirteen century Icelandic Edda that formed the corpus of the Norse myths. Thomas deals with these myths only briefly as he was focusing on indigenous literature, but these myths appear to be important to German speakers as well.

Thomas writes that it was only in the twelfth century that “gleeman’s or minstrel’s tales were written down.” The two most famous tales were The Niblung Lay and The Lay of Gudrun. What is interesting here is what Thomas shares about how storytellers memorize their tales for presentation. Storytellers use “stereotypical phrases and prolixities which stamp the gleeman’s style.” (Google page 33, Book page 48). 

This creates flat characters, but allows the storyteller to focus on action and plot, perhaps accompanied with body movement.

Thomas further notes that “the gleeman’s art is discernable in this repetition, also in a marked fondness for fantastic adventures, hair-breadth escapes, cunning tricks and disguises, and in general for the wildly fabulous.” (Google page 48, Book page 63)

As I watched school performances where young children recited poetry each in turn, I understood why their teachers had them do this from reading Thomas’s A History of the German Language; Literature is based on the foundation of oral literature’s strong plot structure, especially when accompanied by music.

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

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