Quake sisterhood

I was reading the online papers this morning. First baby to be christened after the earthquake today in one of the camps around L'Aquila. One to come to light any moment. All good news, because children and new life can give a perspective of future even in the darkest moments.

Insurance companies are sending inspectors and detectives to collect cement samples and information on the collapsed building. Their motto: be prepared.

One of the dams in the lake of Campotosto has been build in the 70ies just above a fault line. Nothing wrong with the dam at the moment, by they are working at simulation models at the moment, just to know what could happen, should weird things occur.

The mayor of l'Aquila is all the time on all net with perfectly crisp shirts and freshly ironed clothes. His fellow citizens, taking a shower once a week from the tnt camp, cannot quite follow what he is actually talking about on future plans for their city, but say they would appreciate if he would pop by and talk to them too, every now and then. At least to ask him the adress of his laundrette.

And last, but not least, I read of an earthquake in East Afghanistan, 5.1 Richter. And I callen my friend Mariam to ask if she had any news of her family there. She didn't know, just like we didn't know a couple of Mondays ago, when friends start calling to ask how things were going.

"We are sisters in quake" I told her. Because Afghanistan might be a little farther away from my backyard than Abruzzo, but a quake is a quake, and the misery it causes is the same under the stars. She hung quickly up to turn on TV.

PS: another of the L'Aquila Pictures of Antonio Di Maggio. Hier the facade of the church of San Bernardino (now damaged by the earthquake. My grandma used to go and play in the big stairs oing down, when she was finishing her elementary school in L'Aquila with her sisters. In Ofena they had only the firts three clsses, so first Amelia and Filomena were send to live in with their uncle Antonio Silveri. The young girls were already able to run a household and cook, so the idea was that they could help their uncle in that sort of chores, and he would chaperon them in the big city, as he was also working in education (he ended up his career as a school inspector and a writer).

Later the other Silvestroni girls followed. My gradmother Peppina regretted her entire life that she did not make most of her education chances, but when TBC broke up in her boarding school, her mom took her home and she never completed schooling.

Pictures from Ofena

I will start, now and the coming days, to publish a few pictures of Ofena and Abruzzo in general, made by Antonio Di Maggio a couple of years ago for a guide of the region with recipes and local stories I am working at.

Antonio is one of the best photographers I know and he is particularly gifted with portraits. This time it's mostly landscapes, but you will notice his eyes for the details and his gift of catching unique moments, before they go forever.



Here you see Vicolo del Forno, behind Angelo Delfino and Maria Teresa's house. I remember I used to play in this building as a child, because back then, though roofles and abandoned, it was still standing. A few years later it collapsed, totally.

Here a picture made in L'Aquila by Marianna Sansone, who now is in Pescara and does all she can to help the escaped friends from L'Aquila who lost everything.

I recognize this urge of doing things, now. I feel exactly the same. Doing, just to avoid any too negative, alas realistic, thinking.

But it's not about that.

What I invite you o consider is how new houses may be damaged. Modern building entails a skeleton of concrete, and in most houses of this type the skeleton held all very well. But especially in the lower floor, you may have this sort of holes.

And if the instability affects staircases, you have exactly the situation Raffaele Cantera explained me yesterday on the phone. They live at the fourth floor (third would we say in Italy) and their apartment is apparenty intact, but because the first staircase between first and second floor collapsed, they cannot go easily home. They managed to go a couple of times to collect the bare necessities, but have been sleeping outside the last couple of nights.

They just moved to Ofena, but I just heard from Stefania De Luca that there they are also staying as much as possible outside, because you never know if anything is going to fall on your head, should a shock occur.

So I imagine that all the places in between, like Barisciano, are very much in the same shape.

Tomorrow the funerals in L'Aquila. All the dead have been brought at the caserma della guardia di Finanza. May their souls rest in peace.

God bless corporate communication! TNT is taking initatives to help the victims of the earthquake, and since I commend any initiative in this sense, I am publishing this:

Here is a picture of zia Vittoria my cousin Dan Emanuele send me. It is so very much her, with the typical Silvestroni features (yes, that's where my nose comes from). And typical her in her terrace, bursting of pots, plants and flowers (remember the picture of her house in the previous post? In the broken down part you see her big agaves's).

Today I decided to get into some healthy action. All this reading, writing, organizing the fund raising, talking to people, being filmed by the TV, enough. Some Easter cleaning seems the best reaction. I still have a house to clean after all, and for the first time in my life I realize how blessed am I for this.

Then I crawled again behind this screen. Luckily friend Monique is coming by, so now I have a extra good reason to clean at least the table. Yesterday, when the TV guys came, there was no decent place ti film, except before the bookshelf, but they filmed also a wooden plank with some chese and salami I left there for the childre.

They had to take care of themselves after school, yesterday, which they certainly did. All the chocolatey and yogurthey things in the house are gone.

This tells a lot on the healthy survival instinct of small kids, when mom is busy. I just don't dare to tell them what actually happened, it's not really necessary at this age and Elianto would get real worried and scared, if I know him (and Luca is already in one on his phases, so no need to get him behave even weirder than he is).

But it is hard. I read the papers on the net when they sleep and hide when I feel like crying. All I wanted until yesterday was to crawl in a dark corner with a blanked on my head and cry myself in sleep. I only managed to sleep one and a half hour before dinner, while my kids where freely watching all of Tom and Jerry's cartoons on youtube.

Which explains why, when yesterday I asked them to decorate with the alphabet stamps the placemats for the school Easter breakfast, Luca wanted to stamp Tom and Jerry. He is training to get totally indipendent from bigger people when digiting it on the keyboard. Oh, I guess that's how modern kids learn to write, these days.

A provisional list of the victims of the earthquake si to be found here: http://ilcentro.gelocal.it/dettaglio/articolo/1615339

Except from my auntie Vittoria Silvestrone, no other known names. But I read it very fast.

The earthquake in Abruzzo has kept all of us busy the last three days. But I knew from my friends in L'Aquila that already for a couple of months they felt weekly some small shocks. Point is, nobody ever talked about this. In Italy people are discovering only now how bad the situation is.

You get an idea from the picture above, it is the helft of the house of my aunt Vittoria. She slept in the broken down part, they recovered her body yesterday.

Miss Kappa is one of my blogger friends who was rescued from under the ruins of her house by her husband and neighbours. At the moment they are living in the emergency tents camp in l'Aquila. She and her family lost everything, except the will to tell the world that the authorities are lying now on the actual nummbers (they claim 200 dead, she thinks is more 1000), and they refuse to take responsability for not warning the population on time.

I can imagine now that the situation is horribly confused and that the prioritites are finding people still alive under the ruins (just now the saved a young woman after 42 hours under her house) and curing and sheltering the survivors. Communication is therefore not ideal, which is a bit ironic if you think how the global media have been covering the event those days.

I am not even sure if they already have plans to bury the dead, and if there are going to be proper funerals, if the families have to organize this, of is there a masterplan for this sort of acts of god.

We only know we lost my auntie Vittoria in Onna, the last of the matriarchs of the Silvestroni family from Ofena. In the coming days I will try to post daily all info I can collect, especially for you guys overseas. For me it is quite unreal to watch these pictures of ruins and recognize places where I used to live, to study and to work. May this is the difference: I can name most of these pictures (luckily, not the people I've seen in them).

The church of Santa Maria a Paganica above is one of the many ruined monuments. I used to sit often on the staircase right. I hope, and I will work on this, that in the future, once the most urgent problems are solved, that I can help restore as much as possible as it was.

How arroganrt, really, of Mr. Berlusconi, to claim as a first thing that we need nobody's help to recover from this drama. We must gratefully accept all possible help. Because this is the place I want my children to call theirs. Their home in Italy.

Credits pictures: I took them from the website of de Spiegel, if I am breaking any copyright law, please contact me and I will take them away

You always wanted to learn how to cook yourself a real italian meal

Dont'cry, it is much easier than you think. No matter how many different recipes go under the label "true Italian cuisine", there is a basic philosophy all Italians follow when cooking.

It is calling something Italian that causes the main problem. You should know that in Italy only there are at least 22 recognised regional cooking styles. Besides, every village, every family, every single cook in a family have their own peculiar style and recipes. So, where do we start?

Let's start by the ingredients:

choose, lovingly, only the best, freshest, seasonal ingredients.

Preferably those produced locally. Trust your senses; look at them, smell them, touch them and possibly taste them. If you are convinced, buy them and let's get started.

(You shouldn't forget to get the package open).

Oh, yes, most important: all famous Italian cooks claim the learnt everything by watching their mom cooking. You can do the same in this course, Elianto and Luca don't mind you joining in the kitchen.

You might be used at measuring in cups, or grams or liters, by volume or by weight. I really prefer the eye, except for baking or other fine-tuned recipies.

As the Italian saying goes: if you want to bake an omelette, you need first to break the eggs. So don't be afraid of just trying things, following your common sense as well as your other senses, and trusting your judgments.

After all, who else can tell you what you like, if not yourself?

After you put together all the ingredients, you can get started. It might surprise you, or you don't know anything better, but buying the best ingredients take lots of time. The actual cooking goes much faster, if you get good stuff.

When I am in Ofena, I usually go on Thursdays at the market in Popoli, where they also have a farmer market.

My other favourite market in the area is the daily one at Piazza Duomo, in l'Aquila.

"Hey will you pass that one too? Yep, that one there".

No recipe is engraved in marble for posterity to follow it. You are free to add or change ingredients, add your own touch and create your own version of a recipe.

What I do during the course is to give you some basic guidelines.

After you trust your basics, I encourage you to experiment, to check things on your own, to discuss alternatives together.

If you are not convinced, or just want to check, you should always taste it. I once had a student that wanted at all costs to subsitute the oranges in an orange and fennel salad, because she had a friend who made a grapefruit salad.

I thought it wasn't a good idea and told her so, but she was very assertive, so I let her go her own way, and helped other students instead. The salad turn out to be horrible, I kept my mouth shut, and the rest of the course went wonderfully, wth lots of experimenting and good food.

This is to say, I might be the mamma in the course, I am not going to make you eat whatever you made against my judgement. Because this way we all might find out wonderful combinations.

The nicest thing about cooking together as a group is that there is always someone to help. And I am there all the time to get you there. The process to me is as important as the results.

Because that's the spirit: we cook together, we eat together, we share food with others. That's really one of the basics in Italy.

That one person does all the work and another does all the eating is not really the idea. So, don't say I did not tell you that.

Otherwise it can result in a big mess.

And when we are done, we all help cleaning up.

I hope you got a better idea of how I like a cooking course to go: we have lots of fun together, we are free to experiment, we try all sort of different recupes, techniques and ingredients, but most of all: we enjoy food.

Food preparation and eating. It is the most basic form of art, everybody can enjoy it.

Tomorrow I am living. I am going to introduce my children to Italian Carnival, to have them experience an Italian school (hoping it will be good for their language skills) and, of course, report on everything.

So, stay connected.

Italian vinaigrette might be the title of this picture. Finally Silvia send me the pictures of the Olive-oil tasting we held for a bunch of Dutch heiresses last June. The ladies were delighted, the sun shone in an almost Italian way and we had lots of fun.

Here the most simple and delicious of dressings: your best olive-oil from Southern Italy, which is the oil from Ofena as far as I am concerned (see also my previous post on olive oil from Abruzzo) and lemon juice. A bit of lemon zest if you are really doing your best. Sea-salt.

We like keeping things simple, as long as the ingredients you choose are the top of the market.

Yes, my cooking courses in Abruzzo start again coming summer. The last one was in 2006, and now the house in Ofena is renovated and the kids are old enough to entertain themselves (i.e.: they don't need constant supervision anymore) I can start again.

Next to it, since I am officially a sommelier at AIS (Italia sommeliers society) I can integrate this competences in the cooking courses I give.

But I am especially glad to start again, because cooking, showing others how easy it is and eating are, actually, my favourit things in life (+ a couple of others I am not mentioning here).

And cooking with a group is much more fun than on your own.

But the best thing about my cooking courses in Abruzzo is that I can share with others an experience belonging to my childhood: cooking with and for a big bunch of people in the house in Ofena. It is a lifestyle I can experience only there.

The house used to be a trattoria, run by my great-grandmother Annina Silvestrone. It has always been full of people, family (she had 9 daughters), friends, patrons. I still have somewhere her bookkeeping notes, with the prices she paid and got paid for all sort of goods and services.

Here the details of this course:

Period: Weekend Fri-Sun (leaving Mon morning) 31 July- 2 August. Extra group on 7-9 August

Location: Old family home of the Silvestrone (used to be a monastery) within the old city-walls of Ofena. the village lies within National Park of the Gran Sasso, between L'Aquila and the highway Rome-Pescara A25.

Accommodation: Two large rooms with balcony facing South (the view is fantastic), antique furniture and a good, modern bed 180x220cm. If you want to share it with children I can easily add 2-3 extra beds or a bunkbed, and it is still spacious. Other two rooms are small and cosy, for singles or a very much in love couple (bed is smaller, 140X220). A simple, modern bathroom with shower is to be shared with the other rooms. The bathroom is cleaned 1-2 a day.

In the village are available other accomodations, and outside the village there is a camping with a swimming pool (open also to other guests) and a decent restaurant with good home-made local cuisine.

Kitchen: where the old kitchen of the trattoria used to be I made my own cooking school. It is mostly furnished with the stainless steel professional interior of my parents' hotel kitchen, together with all the nostalgic stuff that has always been there, the old flour cases and utensils.

Cooking workshop: Friday afternoon and Saturday morning we are going to cook and learn together. You will learn a number of basic recipes, which you can cook home with all sort of variations. Typical local recipes as well the most popular Italian dishes. we will decide together on the definitive program, as I cook the traditional way with the best ingredients at hand and they vary with the seasons. I use preferably organically or traditionally produced vegetables and meat. Abruzzo is the European region with the highest biodiversity, so we have a very large choice.

Think of dishes such as self-made pasta, risotto, veggies in all manners, salads, cakes, tiramisu etc. seizoensgroenten en salades, tiramisù, taart etc. After the lesson we will eat together with the others. This way we can stay inside during the hottest hours of the day, and explore the village and the surrounding nature in the fresher hours.

Wine-tasting sessions: thanks to my background as a recognised sommelier at AIS I will hold two lessons on wine making and wine-tasting, so that you can learn a few things on the most famous Italian wines, how to combine them with dishes, how the Italian approach sometimes differs from the French and how a professional wine-tasting session works.

Extra: if you like participating when we make with the neighbours sweets and cookies, tomato-bottles or other products to store for the winter, you are very welcome to join.

You can also visit the local wineries and buy wine there, or the local bottega, the grocery store, go outside and pick wild herbs, nuts and fruit, which we will use for cooking.

The nicest market in the neighbourhood is on Thurdsays in Popoli, so if you are already there let me know and we can go together.

Costs: € 550 for two include: 3x nights B&B, 2x cooking lessons, 2x wine-tasting with small dishes as aperitivo 2x lunch and dinner cooked during the lessons, all ingredients and drinks during lessons, meals and wine-tastings.

The cooking course alone, if you have another accomodation, is € 180 per person for a group of 3, and € 150 in a larger group.

I can send you a detailed flyer in English or Dutch per mail. You can contact me at: barbara(at)madrelingua.com

Cooking with your own group? I am available foor fod & wine lessons for private parties in:

Amsterdam, from 3 to 80 persons, all over the year

Ofena, max. 10 cooking, 20 eating, 50 wining from Easter to October

Abruzzo, larger groups: 30 cooking, 100/150 dining and wine-tasting in several locations about 45 minutes from Pescara-airport, all over the year.

Looking for a restaurant? Try this one: L’Angolo d’Abruzzo, in Carsoli, 0863.997429.

Chef Valerio Centofanti is concurring in San Sebastian (Spain) as lo Mejor de la gastronomia, an international award for recipes using oil as a main ingredient, not as a dressing.

And send us your feedback, if you happen to eat there.

I love maritozzi. And this summer, because I went to Pescara, I managed to go back in the temple of maritozzi con la panna, sweet bread-rolls with raisins, filled with whipped cream. And I am talking here of Cremeria Bresciana.
If you have half-an-hour to spare, walk from central station to the sea, and just before piazza Salotto, take the last alley right, turn right again so that you end up on the parallel street of Corso Umberto, and there you are. They also have a covered terrace in the back, nice fot not-too-cold rainy days. Or just hot days, although the airco is on in summer.

Since you are there anyway, I would then walk further on Corso Umberto, until you hit the beach, because just there you'll see one of the nicest modern fountains I know in italy. Now, as you might have noticed, Italy is full of white marmer and travertin fountains, isn't it? But this is a modern one, called La Nave - the Ship, made by the scupltor Cascella and really worth the extra walk.

Then you can go to the beach, or walk back to the station. And if you choose for the latter, the moment you are about to cross the road after Piazza Salotto, turn right instead until you hit Caffé Venezia. This is my last discovery of the summer as the ideal place for an aperitivo. Just order your favourite Martini, Mimosa, Bellini, or, if you belong to the non-alcohol drinking sort, one of their delicious aperitivi analcolici made of fruit juices. And ask for the savoury accompaniments to it.

You can just skip your lunch, after it. Which is just as well, because I do not have yet a great address to lunch around the corner, but I will do my best to find one next time I am in Pescara.

Now, if I really need to get personal at this point, I will tell you what else I do there. I go have a look at the marvellous tiles and bathroom shop next to Caffé Venezia, under the porches. Because estetically responsible views are one of the points that distinguis the human sort from the beastly. Then I would go into a shopping splurge in the shops on the way back to the station (you should always firts eat good thing and then go buy new clothes, so you won't get discouraged from eating something nice because you just got this great pair od trousers, which are almost perfect, if you just manage to lose a couple kilos. No, lady, great clothes never distracted me from great food.) What helps is that I was there just in the midst of the summer sales.

And then, I would reward myself for not spending all my money in clothes with a loooooong stop at the Feltrinelli bookstore. Just to discover I had enough points on my fidelity-card to get one book free, and I had to decide fast, because it never happened me before, and they were about to close for the afternoon and I got in the end this very intersting, scary, informative Opus Dei work.

Dance on the beach! One of the misteres of life is: why Italians like so much group-dances? Just these formal, boring, social-control freaks, can get all loose and shake their bellies in swimmers en plein air on the beach, without a thought on what people may think of them.

In the picture you see the regular program of dances on the beach at our favourite hotel. Kids love it, grandma's too (you have no idea, all these old ladies of the Seniors' holidays organized by the social services of their village, elderly housewifes from the countryland, the whole bunch of them shaking their thing like teen-agers at a disco.

But woe, if the animation organizes a dancing evening of oldies goldies tangos, mazurkas etc. They stick at their chairs and don't dare to move a step. god forbid, what would the neigbour think of them?

I guess the great thing of group dances is that all you are required to do is to follow the directions of the dance-leaders. You are not accountable for your ability, or non-ability, to actually dance. It is a group thing, you do a little bit tongue-in-cheek, sort of "don't take me seriously, I am usually not like this" thing.

All the responsability is away, all the fun stays. You know what I mean: just the usual group feeling, for good and for bad.

Credits picture: Roberta

You love Italian design? Here something new from Abruzzo. Creakit is a brand new company founded by two architects and their first product are these lovely baby-shoes everybody (even I) can make by itself with the kit they sell. Roberta is a passionate DIY creature, and at a certain point her husband suggested she put her professional experience into creating a DIY-kit for the shoes she made for their baby-girl Sveva.

Here my favourites models (you can tell I have two boys):

You might have guessed by now that this sort of green is my favourite colour (I am considering doing my new kitchen in a slightly darker hue of this).


Everything comes in a box that you can later use to pack your gift in, decorated with the provided ribbon. what absolutely astonished me was how complete this kit is. The English/Italian tutorial is clear and the step-by-step instructions make it easy to follow, even if you are not such a great DIY-er. What absolutely knocked me off my socks was the needle-holder (an idea of Roberto, you need men for this sort of technicalities) a tiny plastic strip. No disappearing needles in the cushions of the couch (I don't know why, I am not a couch-person, but this kit evokes a cosy afternoon on the couch with a cup of tea under reach, until the shoes are made).

The whole story in Italian and English can be found on http://creakit.blogspot.com/, and if you fall in love with them, you can buy them online at Etsy:
http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=5926475

The funny thing is that in Italy the kit is sold in design shops. So you can find it also in the new venue of my favourite Alessi-dealer: Katia at Archimedia, in Giulianova, at the Via Thaon di Revel in the center.

Because that's how it goes, design-freaks always manage to find each other.

Water has many faces. So you will find everywhere the so called mascheroni di fontana, fountains in the shape of a face.

Sometimes you don't even need to bother to build such a mask. You just need to look carefully.

Credits picture: Antonio Di Maggio

Iconicelle (which means as much as small, lovely icons) are en expression of simple popular faith. You see them all over the place in old Italian towns, and sometimes I wonder if there are also modern versions of it.

They are holy images and symbols placed in all places visited by many people: usually at crossroads, under arches. The idea used to be that people, on their way to work, could say a small silent prayer or cross themselves to invoke protection for their businesses and journeys.

Here a few of them, all pictures were made by Antonio Di Maggio.

This Madonna, not very visible from behind the protecting grate, is in Ofena:


These fresco's were partially deleted when the house was renovated. Pity. They can be found in Ofena, in via dell'Ospedale.


In via dell'Ospedale, a bit higher, they also placed this votive lamp. No wonder, as being there a hospital people needed some moral support when walking that street.

Not only Ofena has lots of iconicelle. Here a couple from Fontecchio. As the name of this village already suggests, In Fontecchio they had a beatiful Fountain, and this Madonna is placed just above the washing basin. The stone ornament on the right side is a details of the decorative fountain.


Another iconicella in Fontecchio is this one:


Most of this images are quite worn out because of age, traffic fumes, weather, light. This is inherent to their function of road altars.

Other were saved and protected in museums, which is all very well for the art works, but pity for the passers-by.


Still other were placed in cripts, as this one:


But many more can be found in the "institutional" places: churches, abbeys, monasteries, cemeteries. God knows if we lack any of these in Abruzzo.

Still in need of spiritual inspiration? Come and see by yourelf.

One misty, moisty morning,
when cloudy was the weather...

that was May last year, when I went to Abruzzo with photographer Antonio Di Maggio and his wife and my good friend Daniela Tasca. The weather was back then as awful as you will see in the next posts and pictures, but there is this stubborn, shy grace in the mountain landscape rounf Ofena in the mist: just as a toddler who refuses to give a kiss to the visiting aunty, and grumps, all closed in itself.

Which reminds me also of that sort of stubborn shyness many elderly locals have towards all that's foreign coming into their village.

Anyway, I am getting ready to go in just more than a couple of weeks. My 6-year old son will precede, he is going for the first time abroad without us (just his grandma), and as any good, neurotic Italian mom i am having nightmars of him being abducted. Definitely, this short separation will do all of us good: he will be the big boy, my mom will enjoy him exclusively for a couple of days, his little brother will be only child for a while, I will have to get used at the idea that there is no harm to me and my family in this big, wide world.

Enjoy this view of the road to the mountain and Forca di Penne, taken from the small green bedroom.

Abruzzo, land of olives, saffron, wines, candied almonds, what more? You won't believe it, but try and add beer to it.

I just discovered that next to the production of industrial beers as the Peroni brand, Abruzzo is home of an interesting brewery in Spoltore, just above Pescara: Almond bier. http://www.birraalmond.com/

The reason of their name is that they started up in the premises of a former almond producer. A hommage to the past of their region. So in the same space where once local women used to select almonds, now their children and grandchildren produce an eccellent beer, appreciated by the most famous Italian sommeliers. Their Grand Cru is especially recommended for the festive celebrations in December.

The reason I mention them, is that I find the recipe section of their website very interesting. Several traditional abruzzese recipes revisited with beer as an ingredient. So next time you want to entertain in Abruzzo style, surprise your guests with beer. They will love it.