I boarded the good ship Queen Elizabeth for the last trip I took away from the little rented house in the Italian village Gabicce Monte. I was on a pilgrimage, traveling along the Adriatic coast from the little  Gabicce-Cattolica harbour to Pesaro, the capital of the Pesaro-Urbino province of the region known as Le Marche. Fishing is still an important industry in these parts so it seemed only proper to spend some of my holiday on the water even if it was only for a short trip along the coast.

..or even, for some, to have a little siesta. I thought of Luciano Pavarotti as we sailed past the beaches near the site of his Pesaro holiday villa.

Sardine guts are a favourite with Adriatic seagulls so they followed in our wake greedily fighting for their lunch.

Maybe I was hungry but watching them feast reminded me of the many excellent meals that I had had since visiting these parts thanks to this sea and the men who go out in their boats.

I had to wait until the return voyage before I was served these delicious and unpretentiously presented grilled sardines reminding me how fish never tastes quite so exhilarating as when it’s consumed on board ship. They were served with an equally no-nonsense plastic cup of sparkling white Lambrusco.

After lunch there was dancing to jaunty Italian accordion music where the highly versatile crew, after their stint at fishing, gutting and waiting at table, took on the role of lounge lizard and encouraged the female passengers to join them in a lively waltz. I escaped this fate and stuck with the Lambrusco and a conversation with a Sicilian farmer called Salvatore on holiday here from Bedfordshire, UK, who insisted that England would have fun like this too if we only had the weather.

It was unfair on Pesaro that I had such little time to see it but I was a man on a mission so I requisitioned a taxi with a willing young driver,  himself a singer who told me he was a major fan of The Beatles and he even invited me to go to his gig at a hotel back in Cattolica that night.

That wasn’t possible but he understood the urgency so we sped merrily along to the house that I wanted to see.

La Casa Rossini may not be a Renaissance palace or an impressive 15th Century cathedral but this, relatively humble house was the birthplace of one of my favourite composers, the very popular but still much under-rated Gioachino Antonio Rossini (1792 – 1868).

Rossini, the 19th Century’s Mozart, was the composer of operas such as his ebullient comedy, The Barber of Seville (1816), so successful that it has probably always been performed somewhere in the world since its first performance nearly two hundred years ago.  I also love his ironically suave comic opera, The Italian Girl in Algiers (1813),  his seriously dramatic Semiramide (1823) with roles so demanding in virtuoso technique that I have only heard it sung convincingly once and, finally, the piece that revolutionised grand opera and gave us the most well-known of all overtures, William Tell (1829). There is much much more but, fan that I am, I will not bore you with too long a list.

I have a particular love for his neurotic mix of the joyful and the disturbing, his sense of humour and for the extraordinary things he can do without straying too far away from the basic tenets of early 19th Century harmony. In the end, we all love his music because it is bewitchingly beautiful and yet very exciting.

I was here to pay my respects to one of the great heroes of my formative years.

The house is now a Rossini museum with his manuscripts and lithographs and busts of the great man at very stages of his career. For me, though, it was enough just to come to the place where he was born and to conjure up his spirit, as I could here, on my own, with a little help from the piped music from recordings of his operas. Now that’s what I call Musak – if only all elevator music could sound like this.

The taxi was waiting outside so there was no time to linger but, short though the visit was, it was a memorable moment in the life of  this musical fanatic.

Pesaro hosts the annual Rossini Opera Festival  (10 -23 August 2013) and one year I am determined to attend. If any of you can get there this summer, the phenomenal Juan Diego Flores will be there performing in William Tell. http://www.rossinioperafestival.it/?IDC=3

I won’t be able to go but I was happy enough to have visited la Casa Rossini and to return to the little house in Gabicce Monte for my last day in Italy this year

It was pleasure enough to sit in the little courtyard with a glass of wine watching the full Moon.

..and a flight back to England from Bologna Airport.

I lied when I went through the nothing to declare door at London Gatwick Airport. There was so much I could have declared about my time on the Adriatic coast if anyone there had wanted to listen. I’ve tried to do that here in these blogs hoping to persuade some of you that this region of Italy is truly well worth visiting.

I feel I should bring these Italian blogs to a musical conclusion and, after my sailing trip to Pesaro, there really is no option than to bring together Signor Rossini and Signor Pavarotti. Luciano Pavarotti sings with wonderful nonchalance in this 1988  performance at New York’s Lincoln Center with a masterly James Levine on the piano. Listening to this music and that wonderful voice, I don’t feel like I’ve left the Italian sunshine behind. Here it is – Rossini’s La Danza:

It would be a very unusual Pavarotti recital without an encore so, here we go, more Luciano and, yes, more Rossini from the same recital. This time Rossini’s La Promesa:

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I wouldn’t have seen Rimini if it hadn’t been for an offer of a lift by Stefano Cecchini,  the very hospitable landlord of my rented holiday house in Gabicce Monte near the Adriatic Coast in the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna.  Rimini was around 12 miles along the coast but, rather snootily, I had always associated it with crowded beaches and group jollity and thought I would keep well away from it.

It’s fine, of course, if you like those kinds of holidays in the sun but, maybe, I’m just not athletic or extrovert enough to have that kind of fun.

Stefano dropped me off in the middle of town, the old town, a long way from the 15 miles of organized beaches that really form their own separate community and there wasn’t a pair of speedos or a can of lager in sight. To my ignorant surprise,  Rimini looked like a rather sedate and civilised.

It has some very pretty buildings and, if there were any crowds, I suspect they were all cheek by jowl down at the beach.

 Here in the main streets of the old town, people were getting on with the kinds of things people in towns do all over the World, getting on with their own business. There were no hordes of party-goers singing along to rave music. Actually there was music but it was supplied by a young Italian bagpiper.

Before my more militant Scottish friends claim ownership of this man’s instrument, I will hurry to tell them that he was playing traditional Italian music on his traditional Italian bagpipes. If you don’t believe me, take a listen – later, at the end of this blog.

I was still exploring and, down the road, found that the market is a very classy affair held in the town’s main square, Piazza Cavour, a very grand setting indeed for an open air market selling summer frocks, knickers and swimsuits.

I preferred to walk in the shade under these elegantly monumental arches.

I wasn’t bargain -hunting so my eyes kept looking up above the awnings to the architecture.

I was also impressed by the statue of Pope Paul V (papacy 1605-1621), erected in 1614, who appears to be blessing the summer frock and cardigan stall. He is best known in my home town of Lewes, in the United Kingdom, for his alleged involvement in the Gunpowder Plot, suspected of sending papal agents to undermine the luke-warm Catholicism of King James I. Every November the Fifth, his effigy is burnt at Lewes’ famous Bonfire celebrations. I think he’s a lot better off at Rimini market.

The real reason for my trip to Rimini though was to see the art and architecture including the impressively sturdy Roman bridge known as the Tiberius Bridge which has been open for traffic since the year 20 AD. The work was begun under the orders of the Emperor August Caesar but finished by his successor Emperor Tiberius and, amazingly, it is open for motor traffic never envisioned by Augustus Caesar.

Augustus Caesar was also responsible for Rimini’s Triumphal Arch, now known as the Arch of Augustus, erected in the year 27 BC and, apparently, the oldest triumphal arch in Northern Italy.

Propping myself up against it after walking through Rimini in the searing temperature, it felt pretty solid and made me feel less like an old ruin myself.

The other famous building in Rimini is the so-called Tempio Malatestiano,  the 15th Century church of San Francisco, commissioned as a rebuild of a Franciscan Gothic church by the then ruler of Rimini, Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta (1417-1468). The architect was one of the most famous of all Renaissance architects, Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472). The church is reputed to be the first ever to use a Roman triumphal arch as its inspiration and it must have been the case that Alberti was referencing the Arch of Augustus just round the corner.

Sigismondo Malatesta was one of those annoyingly brilliant Renaissance men who make the rest of us feel like couch potatoes. He was a very busy man. He managed to be an active soldier, one of those so-called condottieri, who fought for different sides in the many wars of that time between city states but he was also a poet and a great patron of the arts. He inspired many subsequent lovers of the Italian Renaissance. The influential 19th Century Renaissance scholar Jacob Burckhardt called him the “whole man”  and implanting the concept of the ‘Renaissance Man” into common parlance and American Modernist poet Ezra Pound celebrated him in his Malatesta Cantos as, maybe, the first “modern” man – cultured, individualistic and unfettered. It was led him, regrettably, to see a new Malatesta in Benito Mussolini.

His luck ran out in the end and the money started to dry up after a number of defeats by the Duke of Urbino, the very Federigo da Montefeltro that I wrote about in my pervious blog who was also doing his condottiero bit for the Pope, now Pope Pius II, who took a very shady view indeed of Sigismondo whom he suspected of treachery and double-dealing. Sigismondo lost his lands except for Rimini and the surrounding district and consequently the church was left unfinished but, like Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, it has a grandeur and melancholy finishing it might have diluted.

Pope Pius II suspected Sigismondo of other crimes too and even tried him in absentia accusing him of rape, adultery, sodomy and incest with various mistresses and others, even with his own son Roberto Malatesta.  Sigismondo was promptly excommunicated and given the unusual punishment of being “canonised in Hell.” His second wife died in mysterious circumstances but nothing has been proven against him and he appears to have loved his mistress and third wife, Isotta degli Atti, and, some think, dedicated not just his poetry to her but his new church, built as her secret memorial. Over the centuries many people have thought that it feels more like a pagan temple than a Catholic church. If he was planning a temple to his mistress, then Hell’s Saint took the secret with him to his grave.

What he left behind was an exceptional building filled with great art and some intriguing mysteries.

Sigismondo did know about art though and chose some of the greatest artists of his day to ornament his temple. The interior walls are decorated by sculptures by Agnostino di Duccio (1418- c1481)

The wooden crucifix, 1309, over the altar is by Giotto, no less and, predates the present building being commissioned by the Franciscan church that preceded it.

Sigismondo himself can be seen in his church in a mural painted in 1451 by Piero della Francesca (1414-1492) where Sigismondo kneels, devoutly enough, in front of his namesake, Saint Sigismondo.

I have learnt to respect Piero della Francesca here in Eastern Italy not just because of his painting but for his diplomacy after seeing his portraits of both Sigismondo and of his great rival in Urbino, Federigo di Montefeltro. It must have been extremely difficult keeping in with the right people in Renaissance Italy.

Time for lunch, as they say and I headed off to find a fish restaurant recommended to me by an old gentlemen on a bike when I had asked for directions to the Tiberius Bridge. It was time too let let Sigismondo’s extraordinary heritage sink in.

It was time to head back to Gabicce Monte but I suspect that you’ve been gagging to hear that Italian bagpipe player. Well, you’re in luck thanks to my handy iPhone’s video capabilities. Enjoy but don’t be too harsh about those people wanting a photo opportunity not seeing fit to leave some coins for the poor lad. He conjured up for me a bit of old Rimini that you would never imagine from reading the holiday brochures. Join me again tomorrow for the last in this series of blogs about my time on the Adriatic coast of Italy.

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It’s the oldest ducal palace in Italy and maybe the least visited but also one of the most magnificent. The Palazzo Ducale in Urbino was designed by the Dalmatian architect Luciano Laurana (c.1420 -1479) known for his elegant and airy designs. This one, built on solid rock, is the very symbol of the Italian Renaissance and Laurana’s work was soon emulated by many much more famous Italian cities. It isn’t easy to get to without a car because it has no railway connection and can only be reached by rather charming and winding roads that take you into the heart of the region of Eastern Italy known as Le Marche. I had to take the bus from my rented holiday house in the small village of Gabicce Monte to Pesaro where the “rapide” bus was to whisk me away to Urbino in forty minutes. It didn’t arrive of course, as was often the case with buses in these parts so I ended up traveling all the way on a stopping bus but, hey, what’s the rush if you’re being driven through some of Italy’s most beautiful countryside.

When I finally arrived, hot but excited, I was glad that Urbino is so difficult to get to because this tiny University town was practically empty of tourists and I often had the ducal palace all to myself with plenty of time to admire Luciano Laurana’s gracious lines. Architecture, yet again on this trip, made all the more beautiful when contrasted by vivid blue Italian skies.

The absence of hordes of tourists and the fact that Urbino is largely  pedestrianised, meant that a stroll round town was often only accompanied by bird song and the gloriously inventive carillon from the palaces’ clock tower. Very soon, I was on Urbino time.

Walking around, the palace is visible from almost every angle.

I was sad to find that the scaffolders had got to the front of the palace before me but even that looked geometrically interesting on such a clear day.

The original construction in the 15th Century would have been much more perilous for the builders but it would be a braver man than me to clamber up and down those ladders when even ground level was high up on the hill top.

As the Biblical parable tells us, it is a wise man who builds his house on rock and the Duke of Urbino, Federigo da Montefeltro was certainly wise and is remembered as one of the great Humanist patrons of the Italian Renaissance who founded what was seen at the time as the ideal city even if he was very much the centre of his own universe and all the subsidiary buildings served his interests. Enclosed behind the city walls, the population thrived under what was recorded as his benign rule. More of that when we go inside the palace itself part of which now houses the National Gallery of the Marche with one of the most important collections of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art in the country.

The walls enclose a beautifully preserved Renaissance town and look out onto spectacular countryside with the Apennine Mountains on the horizon behind which lie Rome and Florence.

The absence of a railway line as meant that Urbino is still surrounded by unspoiled countryside that hasn’t changed much since the 15th. Century.

In the middle of town, the country is never far away making an idle stroll round town, even on the hottest part of the day, an extremely pleasant experience. There was always a surprizing view or an interesting alleyway to keep my eyes entertained.

Urbino’s town-planners knew how to offer their citizens just enough shadow to protect even the most pale-skinned of English sight-seers from getting a touch too much of the sun.

To me, at least, Urbino that day with its mix of fine architecture and Italian sunshine was pure sweetness and light.

I particularly liked the small hillside alleyways with their well-worn but cleverly designed gradations and where the light at the end of the tunnel really does draw you onwards and upwards.

In Italy the sunlight is always painting pictures.

Urbino has a youthful student population that helps stop the place feeling like it is lost in the past.

It was probably time for lunch so I headed at an excellent restaurant called Il Cortegiana http://www.ilcortegiano.it/. right across the road from the Palazzo Ducale.

Lunch was some good local wine….

…and a deliciously simple dish of gnocchi.

Waiting for another  ‘rapide’ bus that would never arrive was just too much for one day so it was fortunate that Il Cortegiano had a room for the night and that, after lunch, there was somewhere for that excellent Italian habit, the siesta.

It was genuinely a room with a view being immediately across the road from the Ducal Palace but when lunch was cleared away, it was time for a little pause.

Later, that night, I continued my Italian diet downstairs in the restaurant’s garden deciding that it’s foolish to stint yourself when you are in gastronomical heaven.

Dinner was a traditional local dish, the recipe is 15th Century according to the patron – turkey and truffles with a side plate of perfectly prepared potatoes.

Oh, and some more of that rather good local wine followed by Italian brandy.

Siesta over, I awoke in that room with a view and decided it was time to go inside the Palazzo Ducale.

I could see the entrance from my window.

Once inside the powerful looking fortress walls,  the architect Luciano Laurana gets in touch with his delicate side in this delightfully aery arcaded courtyard.

Where outside is all about strength, in here he shows just how much can be supported  by  so little. In this case some very elegant pillars, the stonework delicately colour-shaded.

Laurana knew just how much to do himself and how much to leave to the lighting genius of the sun.

It might sound selfish but it was wonderful to be able to stand here without having to share this beautiful space with anyone else.

Sometimes, rarely maybe,  an architect get the proportions just right.

Luciana Laurana may have been a genius but we owe this example of his brilliance to his employer, the man behind Urbino, Duke Federigo da Montefeltro (1422-1482), the Humanist intellectual and mercenary soldier or condottiero, who commissioned the building and the skills of his courtiers, some of the greatest artists and intellectuals of the Renaissance period, including Francesco di Giorgio Martini who wrote his influential Treatise on Architecture here.  The Duke’s portrait below, with his wife Battista Sforza, now in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, was painted by Piero della Francesca who developed his theories of perspective in Urbino. Paolo Uccello, the artist and mathematician also developed his interest in perspective in Duke Federigo’s library. Piera della Francesca  shows Federigo’s Humanist’s ‘smile of reason’ but the Duke is depicted, as all of his portraits were, in profile because he lost his right eye and the bridge of his nose in a sword fighting contest when he was a young man. He won  his fortune for his brilliance in battle but his true glory was how he used his new affluence.

He created the largest library in Italy apart from the Vatican’s  but, sadly, it was taken to Rome in the 18th Century by the then Pope where it is now incorporated into the Vatican Library. Urbino has suffered a number of artistic losses to Rome and Florence in particular as well as to Venice, 200 miles to the North.

One of the most impressive rooms in the palace is Duke’s small ‘studiolo,’ his study with its intricate intarsia, or wood inlay, imitating small cupboards containing the symbols of the intellectual life.

I think we can still imagine Duke Federigo sitting in here with his books and scientific equipment and lament how few powerful leaders  these days use their influence to advance mankind’s learning.

Federigo’s son, Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, (1472 – 1508) inherited his father’s title and continued to develop the Urbino court as an intellectual and artistic centre and to defend it militarily even, for a time losing his inheritance in battle to a rampaging Cesare Borgia, the son of the Borgia Pope Alexander VI. He was restored to Urbino when papal politics allowed and his court entered its golden age recorded in one of the best-selling books of the 16th Century, Il Cortigiano, The Book of the Courtier (1508 – 1528) by Baldassare Castiglioni (1478 – 1529) who was for a time a courtier at Guidobaldo’s court and who wrote this manual on how to be the perfect gentlemen. He also included a section on being a lady, modeled on Guidobaldo’s wife, the cultured and intelligent Elizabetta Gonzaga (1471-1526), daughter of the Marquess of Mantua and a formidable force in Italian intellectual life in her own right.

Guidobaldo suffered from a wasting disease and was, apparently impotent, but Elizabetta refused a divorce and stayed with her husband nursing him until his rather unpleasant death in 1508. They adopted a nephew from Guidobaldo’s sister, who was also the nephew of the new pope, Julius II,  and she ruled as regent until the new Duke Francesco della Rivere (1490-1538) came of age after which Urbino fell more and more under Papal influence consequently losing its prestige.

“Then the soul, freed from vice, purged by studies of true philosophy, versed in spiritual life, and practised in matters of the intellect, devoted to the contemplation of her own substance, as if awakened from deepest sleep, opens those eyes which all possess but few use, and sees in herself a ray of that light which is the true image of the angelic beauty communicated to her, and of which she then communicates a faint shadow to the body.”

So unspoiled to this day, it is possible to think of the unchanged views from the palaces’ windows and to imagine this place in its contemplative heyday.

Forgive me for also imagining that if I’d had my room across the road in those days, I could have waved to the Montefeltro family from across the square. Then again, they might not have thought that proper behaviour for a gentleman of the court.

The furniture as well as the library was carted off to the Vatican but  the papacy must have had a guilty conscience recently because the magnificent set of Flemish tapestries, above, made from Raphael’s cartoons have been returned  to the palace and there are still enough paintings here to make the visit more than worthwhile with star paintings by Raphael, Giovanni Bellini and Piero della Francesca, some very fine early Renaissance triptychs and crucifixes, and a room dedicated to Urbino artist Federico Barocci (1528 – 1612) who is rapidly being “rediscovered” by the art world and admired for his lively sense of movement as a precursor of the Baroque. There is also Paolo Uccello’s Miracle of the Profaned Host, a set of six panels that formed the predella, the base of an altar. This strange, and unpleasantly anti-semitic, piece tells the story of a Parisian Jewish pawnbroker who cooks the host, or communion bread, which promptly begins to bleed. The blood flows onto the street and alerts the powers that be who come knocking like anti-Semites have during all the succeeding centuries. Putting the distasteful message to one side if we can, Uccello’s work shows his interest in experimenting with perspective and the so-called “golden line”  which can also be seen in a neighbouring room in the palace in Piero della Francesca’s The Flagellation of Christ where the main story is pushed into the background with the foreground “box” dominated by three apparently unconcerned Urbinese gentlemen. The  court, if nothing else, was an ideas factory. The picture that draws the most visitors, but when I visited, I was the only spectator, is the melancholy portrait of a gentlewoman, known as La Muta, The Silent One, by Raphael with its possibly deliberate references to Leonardo da Vinci’s  Mona Lisa. Everyone needs to see this painting face to face.

It was time to leave this fascinating building and its art but I shall think of it and its beautiful rural surroundings whenever I look at the background at many a Renaissance painting and wonder if the artist was thinking of the countryside around Urbino. After-all, if they worked here at the Montefeltro court, they just had to look out of the window.

Another member of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro’s court was the composer  Bartolomeo Tromboncino (1470-1535)  so I will leave you with his gently evocative song  “Sú leva, alza le ciglia” performed by Marco Beasley with the ensemble, Accordone.

The post Urbino, in Italy, an ideal Renaissance town – a place of sweetness and light. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

The temperatures were hot for an Englishman and, being car-less, the journey had to be taken on foot but, as I’ve discovered since having to give up driving, it is at walking pace that you really see the countryside in its many details but I tried to keep out of the sun as much as possible by walking on the shadowy side of the paths and roads sheltering under my trusty hat.

I had seen from my roof that there was another beach on the other side of these hills, one that looked a great deal more interesting than the rather tame resort atmosphere of Gabicce Mare. I had decided to find it in this wonderful  part of Italy where vast areas of green open out onto Adriatic blue.

Part of the way was by footpath but I also joined small and mostly empty winding roads where the only people I saw were passing and necessarily fit cyclists.

Now, in gaps between the trees, I could see the Adriatic Sea in the distance looking somehow more blue because of the green.

Then more cyclists who may be challenged by these hills but who usually greeted the straggling English pedestrian with a friendly “salve!” or even the less formal “ciao!”

This road is known as the Strada Panoramico Adriatica and is a great favourite for competitive cyclists and up here in the hills, they were more of them than walkers.

Walking though allowed me to  stop and to admire the wild flowers that were still growing in abundance along the sides of the road. Another advantage of being in Italy on the cusp between Spring and Summer.

The small gardens that I passed showed just how casually cultivated plants grow in these parts too like this cliff top rose garden that gave me my first view of my beach destination at Vallugola Bay.

On another day I was to see the beach from out at sea where I could put it into geographical context and see that it really was far from the madding crowd.

Now, though, I was ready to lie back on one of those sunbeds on a beach that was still remarkably free of tourists considering the perfect weather.

Italy does beaches well and, even though this was a relatively remote spot, civilised comforts were easily hired. Inevitably, as this is Italy and we weren’t near any towns, most of the sun-worshippers had arrived by motorbike.

First though I needed one of those rather smart umbrellas.

Much better.

Then it was really only a matter of self-indulgent relaxation. It took me a long time to discover the pleasures of lulling around on beaches but now it’s become an annual necessity. All I needed was some good coffee, a little shade and my now indispensable Kindle reading machine where daily copies of The Times of London and the The York Times were delivered by clicking a button.

My main reading experience this holiday was the great epic À la recherche du temps perdu – In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past) by Marcel Proust (1871-1922) in the English translation by C.K. Scott Monchrieff. A massive novel (or really seven novels) written between 1909 and his death in 1922.

So not very Italian, this great French masterpiece that studies memories involuntarily brought into our conscious state by moments such as the famous incident early in the series when the author tastes a madeleine cake with his tea. When finishing the book, the notoriously nocturnal Proust spent three years mostly lying in bed during daylight hours writing.  I thought it was appropriate enough then to read it lying down even if I was allowing more than a bit of daylight onto my skin.

The morbidly nocturnal Marcel Proust was remarkably unlike the two charmingly lively salvataggi (life guards) at Vallugola beach but reading his languorous, long-limbed prose in such a setting, I could imagine Monsieur Proust lying out there on one of those sunbeds conjuring images of moodily timeless Summer days.

Proust is a good awakener of our senses and it was not long before I was drawn to the pleasures of swimming in warm Southern European waters.

It isn’t really very surprizing that human beings like hanging out on beaches.

Soon I was venturing in, delighted to find that the water had been prepared by some mythical butler to the perfect temperature. If only our sea was like that in England.

Adriatic Sea, I’m missing you already.

So there it was, the sun, the sea, some coffee and my Kindle. What else could I possibly crave? Well, music of course. Luckily I had my iPod with me stocked up with holiday listening.

This year it was the always inspiring Joni Mitchell and, new to me, her powerfully moving and very beautiful album Turbulent Indigo (1994) (my Summer project is my own private Proust and Mitchell festival).  Those of you who know might think I’m dodging “the light like Blanche Dubois” but then, I’m reading Proust so no apologies. Turbulent Indigo will now, in true Proustian style, conjure up images of Italian beaches. I had to have some Italian music with me too though and the exciting Italian mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli came up with the answer just for me when she released her thrilling new recording of what is possibly my favourite opera: Norma (1831) by the Sicilian composer Vincenzo Bellini (1801 -1835).

It might not be perfect (what is?) but Cecilia Bartoli’s version of this glorious music is genuinely thrilling and, also as Proust would expect, Bellini’s aria, Casta Diva,  about the Moon will now always remind me of bright golden sunlight on warm Italian waters. More Italian experiences next week.

Meanwhile, I’m getting into gear for the imminent publication (in October)  of my novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

You can already pre-order the book from the publishers, Ward Wood Publishing:

http://wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm 

…or from Book Depository:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Stephen-Dearsleys-Summer-Love-Colin-Bell/9781908742070

…or from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Stephen%20Dearsley’s%20Summer%20Of%20love

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It was possible, quite easy in fact, to go  the mile and a half down the hillside to the seaside resort of Gabicce Mare to the sandy beach where there were sunbeds and umbrellas as well as bars and restaurants. Gabicce Mare is a small town, originally a fishing village that has expanded into a town with the  building of holiday hotels and apartments. Seaside holidays are big business here and so there is no shortage of small shops selling buckets and spades or sun cream. It has the rather gentle atmosphere of a small English resort from the 1950s and I have no problem with that.

In the spirit of toy town too, is the little motorised train, the trenino,  that travels between Gabicce Mare and, up the hill, to Gabicce Monte.

The trenino’s unselfconscious silliness endeared it to me and I soon learnt to accept it as the principal form of public transport especially as the drivers were always friendly, extremely talkative if unconcerned about precise timetables.

Sitting in the trenino, I soon abandoned any attempt at looking cool but it was a useful way of getting around especially as  I am currently unable to drive because of an irritating legacy from my brain haemorrhage.

So I was pleased, and somewhat surprized to find that the little trenino also went cross country to the castle that I could see from my roof garden. Gradara Castle, a medieval fortress, had been beckoning me since my first view of it so it was not long before I went to get a closer look.

My first impression of Gradara Castle was that it was in remarkably good condition considering the main tower was constructed in 1150. Maybe too good perhaps since the major restoration that followed the severe damage done by the 1919 earthquake but, snooty antiquarian thoughts put aside, I decided to go with the experience convincing myself that, in their heyday, medieval fortresses did actually look newly-built.

And anyway, Italian architecture always looks great against Italian blue skies when only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun..

The castle hosts a small village with restaurants and shops, up-dated from medieval times, of course, but then 21st Century human tourists have different needs to Gradara’s 13th Century citizens  who  would’ve found little need for children’s plastic suits or armour or Gradara t-shirts.

It is a fine space and worth the visit even if you only want to go up onto the parapets for the views.

The soldiers in armour, steel rather than plastic, who defended this part of Italy in medieval times  had a very good look-out position. The fortress is half-way between Rimini and Pesaro  and I remembered the story about the great Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca (c.1415-1492) who is  reputed to have walked over this hills to the castle from his home in Rimini when he was working for the region’s powerful bosses, the Malatesta family.

There are no Piero della Francesca paintings at Gradara but, if you can’t visit Italy without visiting its churches and restaurants, and I plead guilty to both of these sins, there is a powerful and grisly 15th Century wooden crucifix in San Giovanni Battista, the castle’s church. Looked at from three different positions, Christ appears to change from agony to death. There’s lots of blood too to  appeal to lovers of horror movies and to fascinate children who like plastic suits of armour.

There are rather more secular horrors inside the main castle itself where you can visit a dank room supposedly, well, let’s not argue about this,  used as a torture chamber. It certainly has an uncomfortable-looking subterranean grilled pit so I can only imagine what horrible things went on here on olden days. When I was there, I too committed a wicked act of mischief when I was joined by four annoyingly talkative English tourists who were joking about being locked in here. As I left them to their mirth, I noticed that the large reinforced door to the torture chamber was easily closed so, without actually locking it, I pushed it shut with a loud bang.

 Was it laughter or screaming I heard as I climbed back to the daylight? A mixture of both I think.

The restoration of the Gradara Castle during the 1920s has given the place more than a touch of Hollywood but, once that is excepted, it should be embraced, just as those English tourists were doing down in the torture chamber. The castle is rich in stories of Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer extravagance.  I was now on my way to see where one of the castle’s most notorious residents was supposed to have lived. The building’s restorers have been charmingly shameless in milking the place’s legends but why not. even if this wasn’t actually her private room, there is a thrill to think that it might have been Lucrezia Borgia’s bedroom.

Lucrezia Borgia (1480-1519), she who was supposed to have murdered her husbands and to have lived a breathlessly lascivious life, is reputed to have lived here at Gradara when married to her first husband, Giovanni Sforza, the Duke of Pesaro in 1491. She was the illegitimate daughter of the  infamous Borgia pope Alexander VI and sister to the equally notorious Cesare Borgia but she may well have been just a nice girl living in difficult times. The marriage was arranged for dynastic reasons but ended in an equally arranged divorce when the pope decided that the Sforza family was a spent force. Poor Giovanni Sforza was paid off but not poisoned by Lucrezia who might even have liked being married to him. Giovanni though took the dollar and stopped telling everyone that his wife committed incest with her father and her brother. Whatever the truth, there was a steamy atmosphere in that little fresco ornamented chamber. No wonder someone had opened the window.

Down the corridor from Lucrezia Borgia’s chamber was an even more talked about room, the place, or so they say,  where Francesca da Rimini (1255-1285) fell in love with her husband, Giovanni “Giancotto” Malatesta’s  brother, the handsome Paolo da Verrucchio Malatesta (c.1246-1285). Yes, it’s that Malatesta family again. This was another dynastic marriage that went tragically wrong and became a cause célèbre at the end of the 13th Century.

This is the very room, well, don’t spoil the story, beautifully furnished in the 1920’s in antique style,  and with the bed neatly remade, where Francesca and Paolo sat reading a book about Sir Lancelot’s love for Queen Guinevere when passion overtook them leading to their eventual discovery by Giancotto, the jealous husband who dispatched them both with his sword. This would be just another tale of love and murder if a certain poet called Dante (c1265 – 1321) hadn’t written it up in Inferno the first book of his Divine Comedy. In Dante’s Inferno, poor Francesca and Paolo are condemned for their uncontrollable passion by being swept around the second circle of Hell in each others’ arms in a perpetual whirlwind.

Dante, who is being guided around Hell by the Roman poet, Virgil (70BC – 19BC), is far from disapproving of the young couple, in fact, he may have even known Paolo and met him in Florence. This was a hot story when he wrote his great epic. In the Fifth Canto of Inferno,  he meets the couple and when Francesca tells him her tragic story of uncontrolled passion, he is so upset that he falls to the floor in a faint. Dante, after all, was no stranger to passion:

“We were reading one day, for delight, of Lancelot, how love constrained him. We were alone and without any suspicion. Many times that reading made us lift our eyes, and took the color from our faces, but only one point was that which overcame us. When we read of the longed-for smile being kissed by such a lover, this one, who never from me shall be divided, kissed my mouth all trembling. Galahaut was the book, and he who wrote it. That day we read in it no farther.”

In the Romance, it was Galahaut that prevailed on Guinevere to give a kiss to Lancelot.

While one spirit said this the other was weeping so that through pity I swooned, as if I had been dying, and fell as a dead body falls.”

At Gradara, if you can’t get enough of Francesca and Paolo you can even have lunch at their restaurant or maybe that’s not authentic either. I didn’t go there but opted instead for the splendid osteria, La Botte, in the town square …

…where I was joined under the umbrellas by a fearless flock of swallows.

Exhausted by all that crime and passion, I opted for a sensible Italian rustic lunch with a carafe of local wine…

..a very special platter of porchetta…

…served with a cabbage salad. Just the thing to dissipate thoughts of steamy love stories.

I can’t imagine what Tchaikovsky was thinking about when he wrote his extraordinarily dramatic and, yes, romantic, symphonic poem, Francesca da Rimini (1876),  but he wasn’t just writing about whirlwinds. When he composed it he was struggling with his own uncontrollable romantic urges. I’m glad this Venezuelan youth orchestra didn’t control its passion though under the baton of the exciting young conductor Manuel Lopez-Gomez because this performance is terrific:

Meanly this cuts off before Tchaikovsky gets to his big romantic tune. If you’re still here, then, go on, indulge yourself and find the rest on Utube or elsewhere. If you get to the end, you might get some idea about what being damned for uncontrolled passion might actually feel like.

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I’ve recently returned from, as it’s become, my annual holiday in Italy. There is still so much in that wonderful country that I could see this become a permanent date in my diary – I hope so anyway. This year I was staying in the small village of Gabicce Monte on the border between Emilia Romagna and Le Marche on the East coast of Italy and that means the Adriatic Sea. I usually go to Italy in June because it’s not quite so hot as even a few weeks later and, sorry to appear unsociable, but it’s comparatively uncrowded for a gloriously sunny, beautiful and for an historically and artistically fascinating country. I always anguish about where I should stay and if I should trust the internet to guide me there. So far, phew, I’ve always been lucky.  Gabicce Monte, sits between Rimini and Pesaro but up there on its own hill it is a place apart. I rented a small house  right up there at the top.

It was really two houses converted into one and it lived amicably with its immediate neighbours in its own little courtyard. I was very happy just to sit there in the morning with coffee or in the evening with wine and to watch the the world that is Gabicce Monte society go by. I could even rustle up just enough Italian to enter into village gossip.

..or, if you can keep your eyes off the view, my new friend the little green lizard.

The view though was exceptional and, yet again, I wondered if I really needed to go anywhere else.

OK, at times, looking at that castle on the neighbouring hill, I was tempted to go and see where Francesca Da Rimini (the star of Dante’s Inferno) met her grisly and romantic fate and where Lucrezia Borgia lived for a time, happily, they say,  with one of her husbands. It is also said that the Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca walked to that castle from Rimini and, taking in the view, put memories of it into some of his paintings.

Looking the other way, I could also take in a view over the Adriatic to Rimini in the far distance.

If I wanted to go out, I thought, why not just head down through the little alleyway into the village.

After-all,  how often do I get these kinds of views at home. Well, Lewes, UK,  actually competes quite well.

There are plenty of places for a good strong cup of Italian coffee but I chose to have it with a view of the Adriatic.

Did I mention the icecream? I’d better not because I don’t think I should make you jealous.

I could even have a simple but wonderful Pizza Rossini, this is Rossini country,  and a carafe of red wine while the sun set over the Adriatic Riviera.

This Italian version of crême brulée was, I suspect, even more delicious than you could possible imagine.

I could take to village life if it was always like this.

I’m told that people travel a long way to see the Gabicce Monte sunsets but I rather stumbled across this one.

So, maybe I should give the rest of Italy a miss, I thought, sitting over yet another superb meal alfresco.

..or the strawberry pana cotta…

…even if dinner under the stars does invite unwelcome guests into your wine. Luckily, I got this inebriated moth out of my glass before it came to a blissful but premature end.

Yet, again, meals in Gabicce Monte are accompanied by the beauty of ever changing light over sea and sky.

The village is home to an impressive ceramics artist, Daniele Foschi, who takes time out, often quite late  on hot evenings, to teach his art to new generations. This little girl was mesmerised and, awkward though it was to carry, I brought home some examples of his work.

So, before too long, I was happy to abandon any thoughts of going any further. I did of course and will tell you about some of the things I saw in this region in another blog but, for now, I’ll keep you here in Gabicce Monte and go back up onto the roof garden where I found the space for another of my holiday essentials.

Somewhere to practice my morning martial arts.

The Damo moving meditation system….

….my style’s own particular form of Taichi, known as Suang-Yuang…

and then my White Crane Kungfu patterns.

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