Festa di Bollito; Boboli Gardens; Olives; Firenze art scene; Sunday Times
PS: The 2ⁿᵈ November Sunday Times edition judged the Green Mountain Trail to be on a par with the Blue Train as a unique SA travel experience; a good reason to join us before the end of the year – Monday 24 November or Tuesday 09 December.
Good Morning
The 11th of November is the feast day of San Martino. San Martino is said to have given his coat to a nearly naked beggar on a cold night. The divine reward for this kind act is ‘three days of summer and a little more’. True to the belief, the weather in Chianti this last week was balmy. The San Martino celebrations, all over Italy, sometimes include the bashing of pots and pans. This I have never seen.
The only pot bashing that I experienced last week was in celebrating autumn and everything boiled (Festa di Bollito) at the Circolo of Lecchi in Chianti. Boiled broth with tortellini followed by an assortment of boiled meats, salsa verde and pureed potatoes. The kitchen team was headed up by the village ironmonger ably assisted by Gionata of the very social Palmira grocery store.
I visited the Boboli Gardens for the first time. One of the four entrance gates is alongside Porta Romana, a really convenient parking spot just outside the Florence city wall. Ticketing in Florence can be ruthless and fines follow you all the way to the driver’s origin, in my case Grabouw Post Office. The gardens in autumn on a crystal clear day were a sight to behold. November is a wonderful time to visit Italy. On my walk across the Boboli Gardens, I saw no more than twenty people.
The gentle stream of nature loving people that visit the gardens of Wildekrans Country House each November brings a different tone to our daily grind. One of nine Elgin charity gardens, ours is a walk on the wild side. This year with diminished roses. During the last week of October, each night the mountain grysbok ate some of our roses, until there were none left. The mind boggles at what life throws at you but there it was. Sustainable farming activist, Jean Kuiper, visited our charity garden and has offered a remedy involving human hair and the assistance of the local hairdresser. We can only but try.
It doesn’t stop there, Tuscan bokkies (Caprioli) have been enjoying our newly planted olive trees. Avoiding the cost of enclosing the entire olive grove, we tried Barry Gould’s method of a single band of wire net at buck head height. Il Contadino, Michele Collella, assures us that buck eat only at their natural head height and will not venture upwards through a deterrent. This has worked well, the new trees are healthy and last year’s survivors are looking stronger. The 2025 harvest was small throughout the province of Siena due to an olive fruit fly infestation in perfect fly conditions when heat follows rain.
The ever changing art scene is yet another compelling reason to spend a day in Florence.
Situated just outside 13th century Porta Romana, DIETRO-FRONT 1984/2000 (Turnabout) by artist Michelangelo Pistoletto consists of two large (about six meters high) female figures, the vertical one pointing toward Rome; the other one (about three meters high) placed on the head of the former and looking toward Via Romana, which begins inside the city walls of Florence. In the words of the artist ‘my sculpture leaves Florence to face the world and at the same time the second figure returns: it is a come-back to modernity from the world to Florence’.
THE MESSAGE is a new site-specific installation for the courtyard of Palazzo Strozzi created by KAWS, ‘an artist renowned for his iconic visual language that reflects a contemporary culture’.
CENTOVENTI, Museo Novecento, explores the 120-year history of the Villa Romana artist residence. Pictured here Ernst Barlach’s Head of the Gùstrow Memorial 1927 (Testa del memoriale di Gùstrow), Kathe Kollwitz’s THE MOTHERS 1923 (Die Mùtter) ‘uses a huddling, protective group of women and children to express intense sorrow and solidarity in the face of war’s devastation’.
Our neighbourhood has been celebrated with a full page in the 2ⁿᵈ November Sunday Times. In the words of Claire Keeton who walked the Green Mountain Trail in August, ‘the Green Mountain Trail in the Western Cape is, like the Blue Train, in a league of its own in South African travel: both offer novel experiences gilded by luxury.’
With love
