history – Page 3 – Lo Vedo Life

Old stone walls

Where there is rocky soil, there will be stone walls. I don’t know why, but I love these things that are built of stones. I have enough photographs for at least two stories, and this first one is to introduce you to some of the walls and other structures near where I live. Nearly every day, I pass one or another of these sites as I walk around the hills.

Before there were machines, anyone who wanted to farm the soil had to first do the hard work of removing the larger rocks. By hand.

You can picture it: there is a plot of land that someone would like to plant with food crops. The land is rocky, which makes farm work difficult, so the first chore is to remove all those rocks. The whole family spends as much time as it takes—days, weeks, months, a lifetime—to move the rocks away from the field. As time passes, there are growing piles of stones at the edges of the field.

The smell of fresh-baked bread

Cauduro Fresh Loaves — Can you smell it? Warm, freshly-baked bread cools on racks right after being taken from the ancient bread oven.

Nine hours of bread: part one
We began the day with a drive that climbed high into the hills north of town, taking increasingly tiny roads and finally arriving at the hamlet of Cauduro for their bread feast. I have a weakness for tiny roads and secrets to be discovered, and this day’s outing was a dandy example.

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Il Palio, Part 2

I closed the last post by saying that the world of the Siena contradaioli (the members of the various contrade) is almost entirely focused on the two days a year on which there’s a horse race, which today is referred to as the Palio, or in Italian, “Il Palio.” Now it’s time to learn more about the Palio itself.

Horses — **It’s all about the horses!** From left, a piece of street art in Siena; a horse on an Etruscan tombstone; a copper weathervane.

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Il Palio, Part 1

Siena, Italy, is a city with two personalities: a successful modern culture layered onto a rich, storied medieval foundation that functions today much as it did 800 years ago. I love it, and recently returned from a visit there to experience the crazy bareback horse race known as the Palio. There’s so much to talk about that I’m planning to divide my story into two blog posts; this one will tell the background story, and the next will cover the Palio itself.

A long history, in brief
Historians tell us that Etruscans founded Siena a few hundred years B.C., and then the Romans arrived in the first century B.C. But that’s a little dry and the legend contains more intrigue: it holds that Siena was founded by Senio and Ascanio, sons of Remus and nephews of Romulus, the founder of Rome. Romulus murdered his brother, whose sons then fled Rome. The twins took a statue of the she-wolf suckling the infants Romulus and Remus, made the symbol their own, and founded Siena; today, these statues are seen all over town.

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Explorations

Happy summer solstice! We’ve progressed from a long, wet spring to a somewhat less wet, warmer season. The summer solstice is days away, and I’ve been out exploring a few corners of the region.

A trip to the beach
First stop: Gruissan, on the Mediterranean coast south of Narbonne. This area is all about life next to the sea. There’s an ancient fishing village, with small picturesque cabanes de pêcheurs (fishermen’s huts), some now used for holiday rentals, plus tantalizing fresh fish stands. Just around the bend are the salt flats where salt is still produced in the old way, by hand. There are long, beautiful beaches with cabins on stilts (1,300 of them!). All along the water’s edge you can find places to pick up fresh oysters and other seafood. And if all that isn’t enough, there’s a round medieval tower named for the pirate Barbarossa.

We strolled around the site of the old fishermen’s huts at Étang de l’Ayrolle:

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From the South of France

I had another “does this guy know me?” moment the other day, when my daily email missive from Brian Andreas had this to say:

That thing you want to do with your whole heart? Yeah, go do it. That thing you kinda want to do if it ever works out? Let it go. Free your mind for something great.

I’m relaxing on my last night with my friends Sophie and François; they’ve hosted me in Nice and Antibes so graciously for nearly a week. Tomorrow I set off on a new piece of this adventure: I have leased a car for four months, and I’ll be picking it up tomorrow at the Nice airport. I’ll drive to Bonnieux to spend one night in the town where Dale and I and a lot of people we have loved celebrated Dale’s 50th birthday ten years ago.

The next day, I’ll pick up Katie from the airport in Marseille, and we’ll drive to Nîmes for a few days’ exploration in the region. And then on Saturday, I’ll move into the house I’ve rented in Bize-Minervois!

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