32. Cherry Thief

In the meantime, Pete the Welshman had married Dora the Artist sister of Elisabetta and they invited me to visit them in Switzerland.

At the time I was pretty furry--with a full beard and longish hair--sort of a hippy-looking chap--so I expected some sort of border problems crossing from Italy into Switzerland, but I told the customs officer I was visiting friends and mentioned their names and the village they had given me directions to--the officer waved me and my bike through and wished me a pleasant stay in Switzerland.


Pete was such a fun person to be around. Everything he did was done with maximum energy and enthusiasm--he was one of three young men I was lucky to meet in this lifetime: Nordic Norm in Lassen County California, Brian Callahan in Sonoma County, California and Pete at Il Poggio and now in Switzerland.


When I found the cottage of Dora and Pete, Pete immediately took off from whatever he was doing and took me for a spin by bicycle further into the mountains to see a religious community he thought I should visit.


Pete had a classic antique bicycle he had found and restored and was immensely proud of--especially its real leather covered narrow seat. I stripped my own funky German old-man-going-to-buy-bread bicycle of its bags and bottles and we took off.


It was a beautiful Swiss day and everything was fine.


Pete slalomed back and forth across the empty paved road with his usual joie de vivre which was so contagious--I started swooping with him.


There was a house at a sharp curve in the road and there was a cherry tree in its garden loaded with fruit hanging out over the road. I grabbed one cherry as I swooped under and around the tree.


"I thought pilgrims were not supposed to steal!" Pete cheerfully reprimanded me when we paused--and remember this is Switzerland. one of the very few places in this world where the inhabitants do not steal anything.

...

31.A Death

While I was at Il Poggio there was a death in my family.

Bro Joe, that good guy, found out where I was (which took some detective work) and telephoned that Dad (Andy Wold) had died at home of a brain aneurism in Ventura, California. This was the only phone call I got during the long pilgrimage.


Dad had been feeling weak and had some painful back trouble before I left but both he and my mother, Lorene, seemed healthy enough to last some time--at least until I had finished this pilgrimage and had returned to the USA.

Dad had always been very good to me. 

After Joe called I walked to the little church in San Vicenzo a Torre and sat for a while thinking about everything. 

There is really nothing like the death of a parent to set one thinking as you either know or will find out some day.


In a way I was sorry I was not there to help out and in another way I was glad I had missed all the emotion and sadness of my grieving family the my parent's friends.


I was a long way away from Ventura, there was nothing I could do and I would continue my slow pilgrimage to Holy Mountain in Greece in the spring.

...

30. Old Mill Stream

One of the things I liked best about Il Poggio was that it was a  place with a lot of  history.

What is old to an American just can't be as old as the old things here in Italy and I really liked that fact.

For example I was scouting out the neighborhood and followed a path behind the Il Poggio buildings and into the countryside. A couple of hundred yards along this woodsy path I came to a babbling brook issuing from a cavern in a hill.

I went into the darkish cavern and discovered that it was  made with mostly collapsed old brick arches with a floor of dressed stones--and buried in the sandy clay bed of the stream was a big millstone--which weighed, I guess, several hundred pounds.

What the heck--this hillside must be part of an old dam. And this millstone must at one time have been part of a regular mill--a flour mill maybe before this country was all turned  into vineyards.

When I asked Elisabetta about it she said that Il Poggio had at one time been a monastery and the monks had dammed the stream in the valley to produce water power for a mill!

This was all long ago. The mill had been ruined for years--maybe hundreds of years--and all that was left was the partially collapsed cavern and the half buried old millstones.

Lovers sometimes made the cavern a romantic  trysting place these days. She said if you looked you could see places where candles had burned on long summer nights down by the old mill stream.

....

29. Wall Falls

In the time I am writing about, Germany was divided into two sectors--east (the DDR soviet side) and west. As an American citizen  I was welcome to come and go in the western sector, but not the east. The east was closed to Americans.


Before I came to Il Poggio I had been visiting friends in west Germany--in the province of Hesse--and  I was riding with Siggy (Siegfried) one evening and asked him when he thought the wall separating the east and the west would come down. He said: "Not in my lifetime"--and that seemed to be the general opinion in west Germany.


I was on the road a few months pilgrimming before I got to Il Poggio and I had been at Il Poggio a short while when three East German young people in an old car arrived on their way to Rome.


Their car was jammed with stuff and they were a happy and carefree lot it seemed to me.


They told us this story: they were sitting in their apartment one evening when some friends stopped by and said that the guards at the wall separating east and west Germany were letting everyone pass through--no questions asked--no passports needed.


So these intrepid three--two girls and one young man--tossed everything they thought they might need into their old car and crossed to the forbidden west--and here they were.


I don't know how they found about Il Poggio but they stayed a couple of days and left for Rome.


I was so impressed I made a Wall sculpture with little figures climbing ladders and so forth and standing on a wall with the dates of the opening of east Germany and incised some kind of remark about freedom in English, German and Italian. I would have done it in French too but my French is too bad. 


After Elisabetta fired the sculpture, I placed it on a pedestal in the Il Poggio garden.


...

28.Portrait Ceramics

In the ceramics studio at LIl Poggio there were some small circular metal platforms which you could turn when you were working on a pot or vase and I discovered that they were perfect for building a ceramic portrait head on.

I know now that these devices are called banding wheels on sculpture stands. They spin and make it easy to look at the totality of anything in clay you are working on--like a full-sized portrait head, for example. 


That's what I started using them for and it was good fun.

I got people to sit for me while I made portrait heads of them in clay.


The biggest problem, of course, was that the heads had to be hollow so they wouldn't explode in the kiln but I licked this problem by making a kind of honeycomb structure beneath the final head.

Another problem was controlling the drying of the portrait--if it was not done carefully, the clay would crack. 


I learned to do this by judiciously keeping the head covered with a plastic bag except for short periods of time when I was in the studio to monitor the drying process.


These things took a longish time to make so I only finished about six in the several months I stayed at Il Poggio--some only bisque fired and some of them color glazed fired.


Tilo, Elisabetta's grown son, posed for me so I had the opportunity of making a life-sized portrait of him--a sensitive, handsome young man with lots of long wavy hair which I enjoyed making by layering thinner slabs of clay. This portrait was bisque-fired but not colored since it was effective as a work of art as plain reddish stoneware.

I found later, after I had left Il Poggio, that stoneware masks and portrait heads were made here in Tuscany long, long ago--so I was following, without knowing it, a very old tradition.

...

.

27. Jesus

I got right back into the ceramica and clay work too.

Since I was on a pilgrimage to some Christian Holy Places and had been using the old Greek Jesus Prayer mantra as  I rode my bike, (Kyrie Jesu Christe eleson mas) I thought I would make some little crucifixes out of clay.


This turned into a very interesting project for me and I made a lot of them--all about eight inches tall and four inches across at the widest spot. I rolled out the cross pieces and notched them and put them together like pieces of wood and then I made little Jesus figures--they were fun to do with Hebrew noses and kind of skinny but athletic builds.


I made tiny clay nails and used them to stick the figure on the soft clay cross and at first this seemed a good solution to an artistic problem--but then it seemed not so nice.


True this was just clay and I was just an artist--but it still didn't seem exactly right to me to be "crucifying " this little clay Jesus.


Something else.


At the time Pope John Paul the Second was the man in the Catholic Church and he carried a symbolic cross that was sort of droopy  and sad looking. Well, that's OK for HIM, but I didn't feel so weepy about the whole thing, so I started by straightening the cross bar of the cross--no droop--and then I even started turning it UP like a smile.  Well, why not?

But after making twenty or thirty of these things, I started to leave the cross out of the "crucifix" entirely and started to make the Jesus figure raise his arms into a dancing man. I turned the famous crown of thorns into a crown of flowers and his famous loin-cloth into a flowery dancing costume--more like a Krishna than a Jesus, maybe..

Oh, it was good fun and absolutely unique and suited my happy feelings exactly.


When these figures were glazed with color (some totally black or deep blue) and fired they were as good as I can do. 

I was pleased and Elisabetta said I could have a one-man show in her gallery whenever I wanted to. Hooray!

...

26.Roof Tiles

There was always plenty of interesting work for me to do at Il Poggio.


First Elisabetta had me paint numbers on the doors of her guest rooms with colorful animal cartoons as a part of the number. That was fun and luckily I had brought some tubes of acrylic paint and brushes with me in my little yellow wagon.


She said some of her guests had told her that there were scurrying noises coming from the ceiling in one of her upstairs rooms and she thought some squirrels had decided to move in so she asked me to help a couple of her regular workmen to solve the problem by removing the false ceiling from the room and opening it to its original height--which was about fourteen feet high.


She said that one of the previous owners had thought to modernize the room by putting in a regular eight foot ceiling, but she actually preferred the old original--open to the very pretty old pink fired clay tiles of the roof overhead.


There was some other work which also needed to be done to the tile roof, so we climbed up and removed and cleaned some of the original tiles.


The Italian workmen demonstrated for me the ancient method of making the tiles. They were formed from a thick sheet of clay being laid on the artisan's muscular thigh, then dried and fired.


These were the original tiles used by the workers hired by the Medici family in the original construction and some of the tiles had five or six inches of moss growing on them. We had to scrape off some of the moss to see if they were sound and so forth, but the workmen tried not to move too much of the moss because it takes so long to grow--it has their respect.

(We never found any trace of squirrels.)

...

25.Return

I was a little bit lost--which was not so unusual for me--when I approached San Vicenzo a Torre and Il Poggio by bicycle.


I had followed the road signs from Florence and that I was close to my destination was pretty clear to me--but it was getting dark--it had been raining and was about to rain again--it was getting colder--and darker--by the minute, and I was exhausted tired.


My bike was loaded to the max and I was even pulling a little yellow plastic two-wheeled trailer with tools and bedding and stuff and I was more than ready to pause and stay for a while with my old friends.


I pushed my gear less bike--walking beside it--up a long, dark hill--thinking that maybe Il Poggio was at the top--but it wasn't. 

I was so disappointed and frustrated I almost cried, but I rode back down the way I had come and found a little grocery and wine store still open at a crossroads. I asked the shop man if he knew of Elisabetta or Il Poggio and he said yes, she had just been in for something and Il Poggio was only a few kilometers down one of the crossroads--not the one I had was on! 


I thanked him and rode the last bit feeling very much better.


I soon recognized the tree-lined dirt lane leading from the highway to Il Poggio and pushed my bike the last hundred uphill yards.


Oh my! Elisabetta was so happy to see me.


She put a lot of warm food on the big wooden kitchen table for me with a handy bottle of wine and called some of the guests to join in a home-coming celebration for the pilgrim--me!


I talked for quite a while-- telling pilgrim yarns to the cozy gathering--until we were all sleepy--then Elisabetta showed me to one of the nice upstairs tourist bedrooms where she said I could stay--and continue our old work-for-food and-lodging program.


Wonderful.

...

24. Pilgrimage Time

I returned to Il Poggio a couple of years later. 

This time I did have a goal and a purpose--though rather ill-defined by normal goal and purpose standards, I guess. 

I was on my way by bicycle and slowly on a pilgrimage to Holy Mountain, Greece, where I wanted to visit the old monasteries and perhaps learn a bit about the use and manufacture of their sacred icons. 

Winter was coming on and I hoped to spend the cold months at Il Poggio and leave for Greece in the spring. I was coming from Santiago, Spain, where I had completed a pilgrimage for an old German woman from Bavaria, who had asked me to do it for her, and I wanted to complete a pilgrimage to Holy Mountain in Greece for a Greek Orthodox woman in California who had asked me to do it for her, so I was no longer a wandering traveler, but A PURPOSEFUL PILGRIM, though I must admit I  I knew very little about being a pilgrim of any sort--purposeful or not--since pilgrimage was not a part of the religious life of my family or friends. So I was inventing my own pilgrimage style as I went.

Elisabetta expected me to show up sometime, though because of my oddball traveling style, she did not know exactly when, but she DID more or less expect me. I didn't know myself when I would be at Il Poggio, but since it had been cold and rainy, I hoped it would be soon.

...

23. Free and Easy

At the time of my life I am writing about I was in a sort of free-fall state of being.

I was in Europe for the first time in my life with no particular ambition or reason to be anywhere or do anything.


I had been a US Navy sailor, rock 'n roll musician and a university professor--divorced twice with my  best latest good lady friend killed in an airplane accident. I had been around the world with a backpack and that is how and where I found myself.


And I was really enjoying my work and stay at Il Poggio. 

I liked Elisabetta. She was different--a "boss" I could both like and respect. She was low-key but got things done. I think she was a few years older than me with a lifetime of European hotel management in a classy Italian/Swiss Lago Majori hotel, and she had bought and restored Il Poggio to be, like I said, her work of art.

Still, I was on the loose--free and easy--and after three or four months I was ready to move on.


So I left--backpacking toward the east with no particular goal--but I also kept in touch by mail.

...

22. Coke Bottle

Elisabetta was first and foremost an artist and Il Poggio was her creation.

She lived in her work of art--like an installation artist might live in a gallery demonstration--and she was always improving and experimenting with her magnum opus. 

All of the staff were her helpers and assistants--she directed the work like a sculptor or fresco artist might have a gang of assistants to do the grunt work--and for a while I was one of her staff.

There was a very good unused stone building near the main buildings and while I was there Elisabetta decided to turn it into an art gallery. I think it was some kind of farm storage building when it was first built god knows how many centuries ago--one big room was two stories high and the rest had been divided at some later time  into separate floors--floored (or ceilinged), as I mentioned, with wood from WWII ammunition crates from the USA. But the whole thing needed work. It was almost empty so not much junk had to be removed but it needed a lot of cleaning--and that was to be my job.

Our garden tools were stored in part of the building and there was a nice dry area for firewood storage. It was cool and darkish and a very nice place for me to work--I could easily visualize a great art gallery there and that is what I was going to help create.

Some of the floor was tiled and some bricked and I found one place where there was a big dressed stone block set into the tiles--I thought it looked like the first step of a stone staircase down, so I got Elisabetta's permission to spend some time digging out some of the dirt in the direction I thought a staircase to a cellar might be located--and, sure enough, there was a filled-in staircase there with stone steps going into a subterranean passage--all filled in with dirt. Aha! Maybe a treasure trove awaited me!

Removing said dirt turned out to be quite a chore and the filled-in cellar room turned out to be almost empty--but in the far corner of what had been the cellar floor I found a Coca-cola bottle of the old green glass kind. I think it had probably been left there by the workmen who filled in the cellar just after the armies had been through during the Battle of Il Poggio.

Elisabetta placed it proudly in her trophy case beside the other antique bottle I had dug up outside the main building.

...

21.Archaeological Dig

 

When I was a high school lad in Albuquerque, New Mexico, we Bulldogs (Go Bulldogs!) owned a ruined Indian pueblo on the west bank of the Rio Grande a few miles outside of town. There was enough interest in the science of archaeology for the school to hire a teacher and conduct one class and I was one of the lucky students in that class.

It was fun to learn about the way to dig old stuff up and think about the culture which had produced the artifact. We took a field trip or two to our Indian pueblo and I even helped find some bone needles buried with the remains of a body beneath the floor of one of the little rooms we excavated--just like Indiana Jones though he came years later!

So when I was at Il Poggio I was wondering if the Old people had left anything under the grass for me to find. 

I was walking up to the main building one day with a spade in my hand after doing some gardening  and just for fun I took a couple of shovelfuls of dirt out below the bank of the access road. 

Holy Cow! There was a cool tiny glass bottle--very old--at the bottom of the hole!

That is the ONLY hole I dug and it was only a foot or two deep. 

I know you don't believe this story but its true.

I gave the bottle to Elisabetta and she displayed it with some other prized objects in a glass-fronted case in the dining room.

 

...

20. Florence Alone

I thought it would be interesting to see the famous city of Florence by myself so early one morning I took the local bus from San Vicenzo a Torre into the old City of Flowers.

The day was a Sunday--my "day off" at Il Poggio and it was high summertime--what I didn't know was that Florence would be jam-pack-sardine  crowded with tourists and Italians. 

To me, awfully, miserably crowded after my free and easy, quiet and spacious life at Il Poggio. 

The city was interesting. The cathedral--huge--awesome construction and the other famous chapels and buildings--more than interesting--but horribly  crowded.

I happened to walk by the famous Uffizi gallery--the place that contains Michelangelo's David and some other totally famous pieces of sculpture--but the crowds packing the entrance and the price of admission was really too much for a country boy like me so I took a pass and I think you might as well too since you can see copies here and there or look at the nice, quiet picture books in your local library without getting elbowed by the sweating crowds.

Maybe it would be better on a cold, rainy winter day.

I got tired and discouraged early in the afternoon but couldn't find my way back to the San Vicenzo a Torre bus stop so I asked a black-robed priest for directions. To my absolute astonishment he gave me a tongue-lashing like I have seldom ever had.

My Italian was not good but I caught his drift very clearly. He despised tourists--especially English-speaking tourists who could barely speak a word of correct Italian--and ME in particular!

We should all GO back to wherever we came from, or to Hades, and STAY there!

I guess what shocked me most was that he was a priest. In fact that is why I asked him--because I thought he might give me a more polite answer perhaps  than one of his harassed countrymen--and maybe he did.

But instead of searching for the bus stop any more or asking anybody else for directions, I just hiked back to Il Poggio. I was used to walking. 

Walking always did me good.

...

19. Florence Shopping

Il Poggio B+B was about eighteen kilometers south of Florence, Italy.

There was nothing urban about Il Poggio and it could have been anywhere out in the Tuscan  countryside--there was no traffic and no noise--no rush and no hurry.

Several times during my stay Elisabetta took me shopping with her into the city.

The drive to Florence with Elisabetta at the wheel of the old company van was a totally enjoyable experience. She was a competent and careful driver and as the traffic increased close to the city she was only more competent and careful--no rush and no hurry.

I was her only passenger and we were going on a shopping trip  to visit a couple of old friends' warehouse-style antique shops. 

This trip to Florence seemed to be the only kind of shopping trip Elisabetta ever took. She seemed totally uninterested in buying anything modern and everything else she needed she had delivered.

She had furnished Il Poggio herself--every last corner of it--with practical, unique antique items.

Her method of shopping was also unique to my experience. Her contacts would call her when they had something very old new and she would drive in to take a look.

While she was in the shops she would also prowl around eyeballing the other merchandise. She knew what she needed and what was not a part of her plan and no amount of salesmanship would sell her anything she didn't need or want--but if she saw something she liked she would get it with fierce determination.

This day she wanted to look at a table the dealer had called her about. We left without the table but with some very used "fire dogs"--the iron things which go in an open fireplace to hold cooking ware up out of the flames. By very old I mean used until they were burned thin, but still useful. Just the thing for her kitchen.

All the way in and out she talked quietly about the countryside and the city--how it had changed--what was what and what was where. She was a marvelous tour guide and seemed to know everything--answering my few questions before I asked them. I really liked that.

We left before noon and were back before dinner since she wanted to help cook something for her guests.

...

18. Battle Scars

Fiori was a family man who worked as a handyman almost full time at Il Poggio and lived with his wife and kids in San Vicenzo a Torre.

He was a nice little guy--literally. He was only about five-foot two. 

He liked  to make conversation and didn't care if I didn't always understand every word.

There was a small forest of fairly old trees surrounding the main buildings of Il Poggio as I have said and there were very few older trees anywhere else in the vicinity and one day he told me why.

"There was a terrific battle here in World War Two." he said.  

"The Germans were in the stone buildings stoutly defending them to the death. The Italians were in the cellars drinking the wine stored there and you Americans were advancing up the hill slope. It was a terrific fight--such a terrific fight that the trees were all shot to hell with lead bullets and that's why they are still standing--because after the war when all the other trees around here were cut down for firewood, those trees near the buildings were so filled with lead bullets that when the woodsmen tried to cut them down their saw blades were damaged so bad that they let the trees stand."

Another time Fiori (the name means "little flower") pointed to the ceiling of one of the stone outbuildings. When you looked up, the wooden slats the ceiling was made with had mortar shell manufacturing marks printed on them in English.

"That wood is from crates made in the your country to hold your soldiers' artillery ammunition. Of course it was pretty high quality milled wood so the farmers here used it to re-build with after the armies passed through. One bad thing about it though, some of the wood had bugs in it that infected the cypress trees around here and that's why so many of them are dead."

This conversation took place more than half a century after said battle.

...

17. Duck Pond Lesson

Well.  It's true even at Il Poggio. 

Not all is beer and skittles.

I was caught off my guard and told a bit of humiliating truth after I helped  drain and clean the Il Poggio duck pond.

The truth teller was a young man, maybe eighteen years old, by the name of Giovanni.

Giovanni helped out at Il Poggio on a once in a while basis. He was not a regular, but when he was around we sometimes worked together--usually on sort of dirty physical projects--gardening, cleaning and whatnot. 

My Italian was improving a little so we could communicate in a very basic way.

Cleaning the duck pond was my idea.

Ducks don't seem to care what kind of unpleasant muck they slurp and paddle about in and this little pond was only about fifteen feet around and a foot deep. Water for the pond came from a nearby outdoor spigot with twenty feet of plastic hose attached. The pond did have an unpleasant odor to it if you got very close but since it was in an out-of-the-way place-- kind of behind one of the stone outbuildings--I probably the only person who noticed the stench.

Anyway, I had the help of Giovanni and explained the project to him.

He didn't see how I was going to drain the pond though to me it seemed a simple matter.

The pond was on a hill. Just take the water hose--stick one end in the pond and carry the other end downhill. Suck on the downhill end being VERY careful not to suck too long and you had a siphon situation. The water would flow to it's lowest level through the hose and out into the nearby garden.

To Giovanni this seemed like a magical trick.

Well, I demonstrated the siphon technique and the pond was drained and we shoveled some smelly stuff out and the ducks had some clean, fresh water for a few days-- but Giovanni got something off his chest by confronting me thus:

"You Americans." he said bitterly, "You think you are so smart. You are so well educated. Italians like me stand no chance! You know things like how to drain a pond with a hose and I don't know anything! No wonder I can find no work and have to to stupid things. You can do anything you want and go wherever you want. It is so unfair!"

That's something I learned about human relations from cleaning the Il Poggio duck pond.

 

...

16. Memorial Bees

Elisabetta arranged for one or two highly trained young women potters from Germany to be working at the Il Poggio ceramica studio all the time.

I don't know what bait she used--free rent in her splendid old Tuscan villa maybe--maybe some cash too--I never asked--but there they were happily at work every weekday in the ceramica studios of the place.

I learned a lot about clay work looking over the shoulders of these nice young women--and they enjoyed my untrained free and easy clay work style too, I think.

One of these--shall I call them girls?--had a cute idea. She showed the rest of us how to make little clay bees and every day we cranked out a few just for fun.

She threw a clay hive which held a couple of dozen bees at a time and all these bees and their hive were duly dried, bisque fired, glazed and final fired again and we used the bees as gifts for the guests of the B+B and the very rare shoppers who visited the ceramica.

They reminded me of the little green fired clay scarab beetles which are so popular in Egypt.  All the tourists pick up a few very cheap on the street and the museum guards at the big Cairo museum are forever whispering and showing you their "Psst! Rare, precious and expensive..." antique fakes.

I expect--I hope--a few of these cool little Il Poggio Memorial Bees are still flitting around the world.

...

15. Pizza

Pizza. 

The national gastronomic delight of Italy which has conquered the world.

How was it served by Master Cook Elisabetta? 

In two words: it wasn't. 

Every Friday evening all the guests of Il Poggio and all the staff who wanted to join the party scrambled into the company van or into willing guest's cars (Everyone arrived at Il Poggio by car--there was no reliable local public transport except for occasional buses in the nearby village of San Vicenzo a Torre.) and we all drove to a respectable old pizzeria in the slightly larger village of Montespertoli about six miles distant.

Elisabetta had made an arrangement with the owner of this pizzeria  to be prepared for an invasion of hungry guests every Friday evening and he was a jolly and reliable host--no matter the size of the group--but always from ten to thirty  people--there was always  plenty of hot, fresh, scrumptious pizza.

And, of course, the ever-welcome classic Chianti wine produced by the surrounding vineyards was also plentifully present. 

So the Il Poggio kitchen staff had the evening off and the guests had the fun of dining in a real, honest-to-God Italian village pizzeria!

This was all paid for by Elisabetta--for the B+B guests it was a part of their regular fee and for the staff, it was a weekly free party.

Well remembered!

...