MIMOSA AND MOTIVATION

Mimosa blossom is very much the order of the day for the festa della donna [International Women's Day] so it was nice to be presented with a sprig of it with my Sicilian orange juice in the bar this morning and lovely to receive the gift on the left from a friend:

I thought it would be appropriate, on this day, to tell you about ten Italian women who have inspired me - well, more than ten, really, as there are whole convents of nuns involved - but it started at ten!

Teresa Mattei

Firstly, if you are wondering why the mimosa is the symbol of International Women's Day in Italy, it was the idea of one Teresa Mattei , activist, partisan and one of the "mothers of the Italian Constitution".  

The other great ladies on my list come in no particular order and I make no apologies for the fact that several of them are writers. I'm just made that way.

Oriana Fallaci has fascinated me since my student days and I learnt only recently that the woman once known as "Italy's most aggessive journalist" could be just like the rest of us when she fell in love!

Elsa Morante was another writer whose work I started reading as a student and in my opinion her greatest novel remains La Storia or History. Of that other literary lady who is so popular both here and in Britain, namely signora Ferrante, I have read only one volume, so I am reserving judgement for now.  If I get hooked you'll be the first to know!

The works of Natalia Ginzburg were a comfort to me in my student days and they are a comfort to me now.

Rita Levi Montalcini, who left us almost five years ago, was a scientist and Nobel laureate who, even at the age of 100, had a special empathy with the young, whom her achievements and words continue to excite. The world is poorer without her.

Rita Levi Montalcini depicted in flower petals at the Noto Infiorata, 2011

Franca Viola

No woman living in Sicily can forget Franca Viola, whose determination not to submit to bullying changed Italian law.  She lives happily today in Alcamo.

Maria Grammatico, Ericean pastry cook who told her story to Mary Taylor Simeti in Bitter Almonds, was brought up in a convent, where she learnt to make pastries. I have yet to achieve my ambition of visiting her pastry shop in Erice.

There are still convents in Sicily where the nuns make and sell pastries to raise funds for maintenance or good causes and I'll never forget the day I bought these, through a grille, from a convent in Agrigento. You have my admiration, dear sisters:

The story of Daniela Spada is one I read recently and who could not be inspired by this lady's courage and the determination with which she fought her way back from devastating illness? I learnt so much from this book.

Artemesia Gentileschi is a woman I've admired since the first film about her came out in the 1990s. More talented than her father and brothers, if ever a woman literally suffered for her art, it was she. Artemesia continued painting, against all the odds, and was the first woman to become a member of the Florentine Accademia di Arte del Disegno.

Finally, the word pazienza is not in my vocabulary and I've often said it should be banned in Italy as it is too often used to excuse inefficiency by the very victims of that inefficiency. However, when pazienza is employed to create great or small works of art, I wish I had it so, as we are coming up to Easter, I would like to express once again my admiration for The Palm Lady.

I hope you've all had a wonderful festa della donna!

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY 2016

"To be a woman is really fascinating.  

It is an adventure which requires so much courage,

 a challenge of which one never tires."

- Oriana Fallaci, 1929 - 2006

The symbol of International Women's Day in Italy is mimosa blossom and you can read how this came about here.  It was nice to find mimosa blossom decorating my espresso saucer in the bar this morning!

SICILY SCENE'S REVIEW OF 2014

Here we go again!

Let's start with my event of the year, which was undoubtedly this:

For those of you who are interested, you can now easily access all my "adoption" posts from "My adoption posts" in the pages bar underneath the blog header photo.

My recipe of the year, from those I've invented myself, was this one:

These polpette came a close second:

My gadget of the year - well, more of an implement, really - is this €0,99 easy-ice-cream-scoop:

Of the books I've read this year, my favourite in Italian was this biography of the journalist Oriana Fallaci and my favourite in English has to be Edge of Eternity, which completes the Century Trilogy by my fellow-Cardiffian Ken Follett. More historical novels please, Ken!

My Scrooge of the year award goes to the Comune di Modica for scrapping the "single inhabitant" reduction when they introduced the hated new rubbish tax, the TARI, a few days before Christmas. Come on, Modica! There's no way I generate the same amount of rubbish as a family of five and I think I'm going to start a twitter campaign about this injustice.

Whilst we're being negative about poor old Modica, my most-read post of 2014 was, surprisingly,  this one, which attracted the attention of the local press. Sorry, Modica - I do love you, really.

On a more cheerful, seasonal note, the most original Christmas decoration award goes to Bar Cicara for their cork tree:

The Italian logic prize goes to the shopkeeper who, having discounted certain items by 50% and sold two to customer number one, then told customer number two - me - that the former had been "extravagant" as soon as she'd left the premises. I give up, Italy!

My favourite Italian TV programme of the year continues to be Masterchef Italia, which has just started its fourth series, closely followed by BakeOff Italia.  For those of you who missed it, here is the contestant who endeared herself to the entire nation by throwing her éclairs around the kitchen when they went wrong. Hasn't every cook been there?

I must show you my fun thing of the year:  it is this makeup box, a Christmas present from two of my youngest students and using it to update my all-important look is a very enjoyable way to pass the time!

My heroes of the year are the Italian Navy, Coast Guard and all who continue to risk their own lives and willingly give up their comfort at this time of year to save and help migrants and others, at sea and on land. Let us hope that there will be no more migrant tragedies in 2015, or tragedies like the two we have seen so far this week.

That brings me to my hopes for 2015:  as always, I hope for world peace, for peace in my own life, for more time with my precious Simi [now 16] and, this new year, for more time with my newfound sister.

Happy New Year to all of you and thank you for reading Sicily Scene!

Buon anno a tutti voi e grazie di aver letto la Sicily Scene!

BOOK REVIEW - "ORIANA, UNA DONNA"

Oriana. Una donna by Cristina de Stefano
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"I had seen them arrive: orderly, disciplined, regimented, a real flock that goes where those who command want it to go, those who promise, who frighten, it proceeds with closed eyes since there's no need to see the road, the road is a solid stream of fleece that will arrive at the square chosen by the power in charge..... long live whoever comes along, long live whoever is at the top of the mountain, never long live the poor bastards that die so that the sheep may become men and women."

I have never forgotten that passage from Oriana Fallaci's Un Uomo [A Man], a fictionalised biography of her lover the Greek freedom fighter Alexandros Panagulis, which I read in 1980.

As an Italian graduate, I had long admired Oriana Fallaci's work and was fascinated by this seemingly fearless woman who had made it as an investigative journalist at a time when it was very difficult for a woman to do so.

Fallaci was once called "la giornalista più turbolento dell'Italia" ["Italy's most aggressive journalist"] by a colleague and Ayatollah Khomeini and Henry Kissinger were two Fallaci interviewees who probably agreed with this view of her. In 1979, she famously took her chador off in Khomeini's presence and, interviewing Henry Kissinger in 1972, she asked him why he was so popular. Kissinger at first denied that he was, then said he put his popularity down to the fact that he had always acted alone, like a cowboy riding out ahead of the wagon train. When the interview was published all over the world, it caused a scandal, as Americans were not very happy about the cowboy comparison. Years later, Kissinger said that agreeing to be interviewed by Fallaci was one of the most unfortunate decisions of his life.

From this excellent biography by Cristina de Stefano I learned a lot about Oriana that I hadn't realised before: that she had been a WW2 partisan, for instance and about her courage as a correspondent during the Vietnam war. I was astonished to learn that in love, the great Oriana Fallaci could be as foolish as the rest of us and the account of her affair with Alfredo Pieroni makes sad reading.

The love of her life, though, was the married French journalist François Pelou, who was her intellectual equal and who, according to de Stefano, taught her to see power through different eyes. Their love affair was all the more intense because it was conducted in the midst of war.

Oriana Fallaci had a love-hate relationship with America and once remarked that she was going to win. She lived happily in New York for many years and it was there that she meticulously researched her own family's history and wrote the first volume of it, Un cappello pieno di ciliege [A Hat Full of Cherries] which I am currently reading. [The book, though very long, was not completed and was published posthumously.] The rather charming title refers to the hat that Fallaci's mother was wearing when she met her father. If you read Italian and are also eagle-eyed, you may notice that "ciliege" in the title is spelled without the final -i. Fallaci had insisted on this because it was both the Tuscan way and the way that her mother had pronounced the word.

When 9/11 came, Fallaci was quick to defend her adopted country and later wrote a much-criticised book, La Rabbia e L'Orgoglio [The Rage and the Pride], about what she perceived as the Islamist threat.

Knowing that she had an incurable tumour, Oriana Fallaci faced death as courageously as she had faced life and planned for it in detail. At the end, she asked to be flown back to her beloved Tuscany, where she died on the night of 14th - 15th September 2006.

This biography has greatly added to my knowledge of Oriana Fallaci and has led me to read more of her books.

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