The Underwear of Dictators’ Lovers April 12, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in Uncategorized.Tags: Clara Petacci, Eva Braun, Germany, Italy, Mantiques, US, WtH
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Beachcombing is still reeling from his recent medical misfortunes and, to make matters worse, he has to catch a bus in about twenty five minutes. So yet again today he will be brief. But he had to share this brilliant catch sent in by Invisible, an important ally in the fight for the historically bizarre.
Invisible came across (via a friend) Mantiques in Elmore, Ohio, an antique shop that claims to sell ‘almost everything a man could want’.
Beachcombing was sceptical until he saw this extraordinary picture of their prize exhibit: a silken pair of Eva Braun’s underwear (pictured above). Yes, that’s right, forget Mantiques other offers: the Gilbert’s Erector from 1928, an Auto Ordinance model 1927A1 Thompson Sub Machine Gun (aka ‘the ChicagoTypewriter’), Beachcombing is even going to ignore the various historical electric fans (!!!), what he wants are the unmentionables.
Quite how a shop in Elmore stumbled upon such a treasure is beyond Beachcombing’s ken. He’s done all the calculations and he just can’t work it out.
Clearly, this wasn’t the pair that Eva Braun was wearing when death came knocking. There is not a burn mark on them… Did a looting Russian soldier somehow find them in the bunker, get them home and then – thanks to an unusually pliant Stalin – emigrate to the US? It seems so unlikely and yet Mantiques claim to have documentation: but can you even document ownership of underwear?
Beachcombing will be contacting Mantiques today in the hope that the documentation does not depend on purchase: this particular pair of underpants cost 7,500 dollars that would keep Beachcombing in books for a couple of years. In any case, Beachcombing wouldn’t dare try and ‘slip’ this one past the ever vigilant Mrs B.
Beachcombing is still on his gore embargo – twenty six more days to go – but he can’t resist noting that undergarments also figured on the final day of the life of Mussolini’s beaux, the star-crossed and simpatica Clara Pettaci. When Mussolini and Clara were rushed out of bed by communist partisans for what was to be their last morning Clara was not given time to dress properly and put only her skirt and shirt on. Later she and Mussolini’s dead bodies were exposed, hung upside down before the crowds and her skirt fell down scandalizing the Milanese, who had, though, no problem in pelting the corpses with fruit. The partisans in charge of the spectacle prudishly taped her skirt up to her leg so the desecration could continue. This was Catholic Italy after all.
Any other historically significant underwear stories out there? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Sfiga! April 9, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in Actualite, Contemporary, Uncategorized.Tags: Italy, WtH. Luck
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The last couple of days have been tense for Beachcombing. After seven fabulous, tripping-the-light-fantastic months of having no new symptoms from the illness that was tearing him apart, he was hit – bang – by a ‘change’.
Though in itself minor this symptom may be a sign of worse things to come and Beachcombing is, therefore, priming every gun in his arsenal – yoga, aspirins, bananas with ginger, comic-book reading, avoidance of infants… – to try and forestall a full attack.
But what particularly fascinates him is the cause of the attack and here he has no doubt: it was Paul Johnson’s The Oxford Book of Political Anecdotes (Oxford 1986).
It’s a great book – the only great book by PJ? – but it will be for ever associated by Beachcombing with illness as it was the book he was reading when Beach was first diagnosed.
It was, therefore, with some trepidation – and the root to the problem is presumably in auto-suggestion – that Beachcombing picked it up the other day for his bus ride.
Then three hours after reading about Lord Curzon losing his trousers lightning strikes and Beachcombing finds himself with frazzled hair.
Honestly, what an idiot, Beachcombing might as well have kicked an Aboriginal witchdoctor in the ghoolies…
All this got him thinking about luck in general and sfiga in particular.
Sfiga for those who do not know is the Italian sub-category of luck (or more correctly bad luck) and as Mrs B. has an Italian passport and the Beachcombings spend much of their time in Italy then sfiga figures in an exaggerated way in their lives.
Sfiga came – Beachcombing has done some research – out of the tradition of the evil eye: certainly Beachcombing’s father-in-law – who is a university professor, ahem – has the sfiga mania bad and he applies, without knowing, the tenets of the malocchio, carrying lucky charms around on his wrist, believing that compliments will destroy him…
However, in more normal twenty-first-century Italian lives – and Beachcombing is surprised by how much sfiga has penetrated his own consciousness – certain things and people porta sfiga, carry bad-luck.
Of course, in English we talk about black cats bringing bad or good luck (Beach can never remember which): but – perhaps a product of Beachcombing’s upbringing – Beachcombing just cannot take all that ‘unlucky for some stuff’ seriously.
And bar the sensible expedient of not walking under ladders, he suspects that very few modern Anglo-Saxons can either.
Sfiga is a rather more elastic and is applied to things on a merit basis: in other words some objects – books, for example – and some people are just negative and should hence be avoided or at least only approached with caution and cattle prods.
Beachcombing finds even this a bit monolithic. He has developed his own sfiga-lite philosophy where it is not that certain things and certain people are inherently unlucky, but that certain things and people are unlucky for some people. It is not ‘your’ fault that you are unlucky but ‘your’ and ‘my’ fault. Think healthy parents who in combination risk producing genetically ‘damaged’ children.
Certainly, Beachcombing notes that the person who has brought most luck to his family in the last five years is, in fact, an extraordinarily negative individual whose peculiar habits seem, however, to work well for the Beachcombings and have brought in cash, job opportunities and good will.
Go figure!
There are presumably science-of-the-mind books out there that explain these things to their own satisfaction. Beachcombing though is going to avoid the temptation to collect rules and just judge on a results basis: Paul Johnson’s Oxford Book is about to be exiled to the top shelf of the least penetrable room in the house where no blood relatives will ever touch it.
The present blog is, at least for Beachcombing, lucky and will be celebrated at table.
Beachcombing cannot in good faith return too often to the ‘science’ of luck as this ‘science’ has only so many applications in history. But he will return in the near future (another post, another day) to some rogue researchers on luck and their surprising results and memorable methods.
In the meantime any equivalents of sfiga in the nations of the world… drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Beachcombing will, meanwhile, be running his childhood method of attracting luck, learnt on long walks to school a generation or two ago: what the professionals know as bargaining with God.
Beachcombing toyed with the possibility of getting a tattoo but settled instead, naturally only if the present symptom disappears, on paying for the restoration of a tomb of a close relative of one of his heroes, Gustaf Mannerheim.
It takes all sorts…
The Werewolf of Temesa January 25, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in Ancient, Uncategorized.Tags: Euthymus of Locri, Greece, Italy, Pausanias, Temesa, Werewolves
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A painfully short post tonight but Tiny Miss B is screaming next to the keyboard, Mrs B is out looking for a school for the elder daughter and Little Miss B is making the au pair’s life an inferno downstairs. So in dereliction of parental duty another part of the soon-to-end werewolf series: let’s hope that the social workers don’t find out.
Pausanias, Greek antiquarian – antiquarian sounds so much better than historian doesn’t it? – records the legend of Euthymus of Locri and a woolly Hero.
Odysseus, so they say, in his wanderings after the capture of Troy was carried down by gales to various cities of Italy and Sicily, and among them he came with his ships to Temesa [in Magna Grecia, Italy]. Here one of his sailors got drunk and violated a maiden, for which offence he was stoned to death by the natives. Now Odysseus, it is said, cared nothing about his loss and sailed away. But the ghost of the stoned man never ceased killing without distinction the people of Temesa, attacking both old and young, until, when the inhabitants had resolved to flee from Italy for good, the Pythian priestess forbade them to leave Temesa, and ordered them to propitiate the Hero, setting him a sanctuary apart and building a temple, and to give him every year as wife the fairest maiden in Temesa. So they performed the commands of the god and suffered no more terrors from the ghost. But Euthymus happened to come to Temesa just at the time when the ghost was being propitiated in the usual way; learning what was going on he had a strong desire to enter the temple, and not only to enter it but also to look at the maiden. When he saw her he first felt pity and afterwards love for her. The girl swore to marry him if he saved her, and so Euthymus with his armour on awaited the onslaught of the ghost. He won the fight, and the Hero was driven out of the land and disappeared, sinking into the depth of the sea. Euthymus had a distinguished wedding, and the inhabitants were freed from the ghost for ever.
So where’s the wolf? Well, nowhere to be seen in the legend that Pausanias hands down to us. But it seems likely that originally (or in one early version of the legend) the Hero was lupine because of a picture that Pausanias reports having seen.
This I heard, and I also saw by chance a picture dealing with the subject. It was a copy of an ancient picture. There were a stripling, Sybaris, a river, Calabrus, and a spring, Lyca. Besides, there were a hero-shrine and the city of Temesa, and in the midst was the ghost that Euthymus cast out. Horribly black in color, and exceedingly dreadful in all his appearance, he had a wolf’s skin thrown round him as a garment. The letters on the picture gave his name as Lycas.
Was Lycas then a werewolf? Or are we perhaps dealing with an outcast, common in legends across Euro-Asia, the young man who goes out into the wilderness and ‘wolfs’ around stealing and destroying.
Then there is also the problem of the antiquity of this image. The picture that Pausanias saw was a copy of an ‘ancient’ picture: are we talking then of a century or six or seven centuries?
Beachcombing is hungry for more Greek or Roman werewolf references: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Image: Holy Adowa! January 22, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in Modern, Uncategorized.Tags: Adowa, Ethiopia, Image, Italy, Medieval Photographs, Menelik II, Oreste Baratieri, Weird Wars
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the Abyssinian charge at Adowa
Italy unfortunately never learnt this lesson. In 1935 the Italian invasion would mark the beginning of the end for Mussolini’s regime. While in 1896 an Italian attack ended in bloody Adowa the subject of the remarkable image above, the only time in the nineteenth century that a sub-Saharan army defeated a major European power.
Adowa itself is quickly told. In 1896 Italy’s corrupt political class pushed an inadequate Italian army under General Baratieri, one of a long line of incapaci who have dishonoured the Italian army and spent the lives of Italian servicemen like casino chips, into a rapid advance against Ethiopian forces. The Abyssinians under Menelik II had gathered almost six times as many troops as the Italians and yet the Italians, through delusions of grandeur and a little Latin idiocy, hurled their small army at the Ethiopians expecting an easy victory. The Abyssinians armed with (often Italian) rifles made hay. Of about 18000 Italians and allies, only 8000 managed to make their way back to the coast and the Italian colonies there.
Beachcombing particularly likes the image above because it tells the Ethiopian side of the story. One of a series recording and celebrating the Africans’ victory it is an irresistible combination of the medieval and modern. The matchstick men are using swords and on horseback, there is no perspective to speak of: yet the ‘toy’ soldiers are also firing canon, rifles and primitive machine guns.
Best of all though is the saint – presumably St George? – riding on a ‘pegasus’ in a rainbow bubble: one of a long series of heroes who have accompanied victorious armies, at least in the imagination of superstitious and hopeful warriors. Abyssinia was, of course, a Christian country and had been for centuries – for far longer than say Germany. Menelik, indeed, was praying to the God of the gospels when he heard of the Italian’s advance.
That even 8000 Italians escaped was due to a recent horse disease that had virtually destroyed the Abyssinian cavalry. The Abyssinians would have otherwise cut off, with great pleasure, the retreating Europeans. Beachcombing has always been grateful for that bout of horse measles because among the 8000 fleers was Mrs B.’s great grandfather, not yet married. Beachcombing’s life would be very different today – incalculably worse though with more time to play computer games – if one obscure Venetian noble man had not made it back across the border.
The Italian prisoners were, in fact, for the most part, treated well. But pity their native auxiliaries. The Abyssinians here showed their medieval side.
The Italian native prisoners, soldiers in the Italian service who had fought against the Abyssinians, were tried by a council of war consisting of all the chief Abyssinian leaders, and the horrible sentence of mutilation was passed… The sentence of mutilation — that is, the cutting off the right hand and left foot – is the customary punishment for the offences of theft, sacrilege and treason, of which many of these men were judged to be clearly guilty…. The sentence was carried out in the different camps, but nearly eight hundred of them were operated on at the same place, on the slope from Fremona down to the Assam Sclado river, and the severed hands and feet put in a pile. I [British traveller] saw it when I visited Adowa, a rotting heap of ghastly remnants. The joint of wrist and ankle are articulated and the stumps plunged into boiling fat to stop the haemorrhage; the wound then heals over, and afterwards a piece of the stump of the bone that is destroyed by the contact with the boiling fat comes away. I saw hundreds of these poor people who had survived the operation, and I was enabled, after crossing the Italian frontier, to send several of them back to their homes in the Hamasen. The neighbourhood of Adowa was full of their freshly dead bodies; they had generally crawled to the banks of the streams to quench their burning thirst, where many of them lingered unattended and exposed to the elements until death put an end to their sufferings. At some places the bodies were close together, as if they had sought comfort in one another’s society, and the missing members plainly told to whom the bodies belonged. In Captain De Martino’s house, that used to be the Italian Residency, there must have been some thirty bodies of these wretched people; three at the well in the garden, where they died, evidently trying to procure water, and in the small summerhouse there were seven, six belonging to natives and one to an Italian, and what a horrible death the last of them must have suffered, surrounded by their dead companions.
Beachcombing is always on the look out for notable historical images: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
A Werewolf in 1960s Italy January 16, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in Contemporary, Uncategorized.Tags: Belden Paulson, Castelfuoco, Italy, Werewolves, Wrong Time, WtH
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Regular readers will know that Beachcombing has no great love for sociologists, who are to historians (or should be to historians) what garlic is to a vampire. However, he makes an exception for Belden Paulson’s brilliant The Searchers (1966) a description of life in a small Italian town, Castelfuoco (not its real name!), in the 1960s. Rereading this classic Beachcombing came across a reference to a werewolf that he had not previously registered. He offers it – fully expecting to be slapped down: drbeachcombingATyahooDOTcom – as the most recent werewolf report from western Europe.
Garibaldi del Trucco was the first one to encounter the ‘beast man’ while returning home late one evening from one of his interminable poker games. The moon was full. As he walked down the Corso degli Scalzi, only the splashing of the many aged and scarred fountains interrupted the profound stillness. In order to chase away apprehensive thoughts that dogged his solitary shadow, he whistled a loud cheerful aria. As he reached the crest of the Vicolo della Lumaca [Alley of the Snail], near the fountain of the Pilotta, he saw what seemed to be a man, with eyes flaming like two firebrands and ‘fingernails’ that would be the envy of any cat. ‘Jesu! What is he? I must escape… but what if he follows and catches up with me just as I reach my door? Aiee, no, per carità! Better to crouch here in the shadows…’ The monster had not moved a centimetre; only his features and claws grew nastier. Garibaldi invoked all the holy spirits in purgatory. As the minutes dragged on, the creature started an animal grunting which grew to piercing howls. He clawed at and crawled over the low wall surrounding the fountain. From his torn hands drops of dark red splashed into the turbid water. ‘Good fellow, just let me pass’, Garibaldi nearly croaked out but the words strangled in his throat. He thought of screaming aloud the name of his wife, but his house was located at the bottom of the Avenue of the Dead, the farthest corner of Castelfuoco where only spiders and snails ventured out. ‘If I survive’, he promised himself ‘I will change houses. I will give up poker…’ Meanwhile, the werewolf was flinging himself around convulsively in the water, satisfying some mysterious animal drive to bathe himself. Garibaldi thought the time had come to flee. But to reach the shelter of the Vicolo della Lumaca ten meters away he would have to pass in front of the creature. Another eternity went by. The purple shadows began to give way to a pale light. At this point the werewolf’s baying died to almost imperceptible moans, and rapidly his ‘monster’ semblance changed to a human one. A last shuddering dip into the fountain, a last hoarse roar and he was liberated from his nightmare. The werewolf passed quietly by Garibaldi del Trucco, who was having difficulty staving off a violent attack of nervous diarrhoea. The latter dove into the Vicolo and a few seconds later flung himself onto his sleeping wife who grumbled at this unwonted aggression.
Nor was Garibaldi alone: others in the town, including the normally unflappable Paulson, had heard the wolf cry and so a group of young toughs decided to set themselves the task of catching this solitary creature.
Some of the idle young bucks, the vitelloni [idle young men], saw in the situation a unique kind of adventure. ‘Tonight those of you with strong livers will come with me to catch the werewolf’, their leader announced. As the same swollen moon glanced over the rooftops, the small band stationed itself silently under an arch near the Fountain of the Pilotta. Everyone held his breath in anticipation and fear. Then the werewolf vaulted into the tiny piazza and began to undress slowly, as if in a trance. Under the white brilliance of the moon his bare figure was even more terrifying. With two shrill howls the unfortunate creature began sloshing water over himself, and at this moment the spectators rushed whooping toward him. The werewolf responded with an even more terrible shriek, leaped from the water, and fell to the cobblestones as if mortally wounded. For an instant the vitelloni remained riveted. No one believed his own eyes. The werewolf was no more than a timid day labourer of Castelfuoco who lived for his work in the fields and the sacred evening mass. But on nights of the full moon, he came forth questing for water with wolflike sounds and strength.
If this was anything but a sociologist at work this report would have been forgotten: as soon as mental illness was revealed as the cause the wolf man became an embarrassment to the town. But imagine if ‘the timid day labourer’ had been living in Italy in 1600. The chances are about two to one that he would have ended his life on the stake. As it is we have a precious account here from a community that was only just leaving the Middle Ages behind in the late twentieth century.
Beachcombing does not make a habit of quoting sociologists but for Paulson he’ll make an exception: In such a small rural town, where history becomes legend, where the miracles of the shrine are as much a part of one’s existence as the spaghetti he eats, where communism to its believers takes on the metaphysics of something more than a political movement, where the supernatural and natural become fused, there is little knowledge of mental illness. So it is not surprising that exaggerated, other worldly-myths have grown up around the local ‘werewolf’.
Beachcombing has put the full account in his new source section.
Review: Nuns Behaving Badly January 8, 2011
Posted by Beachcombing in Modern, Uncategorized.Tags: Cenobitism, Craig Monson, Italy, review, WtH
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Crag Monson, Nuns Behaving Badly: Tales of Music, Magic, Art and Arson in the Convents of Italy (University of Chicago 2010)
Mrs B. bade farewell, a decade ago, to a Catholic friend who had decided to pass into a nunnery in the Swiss Alps. Giulia, then in her twenties, said goodbye to family and friends for the last time and married Christ up near the Matterhorn. If she is still alive she wakes up every day at 3.30 AM and spends about six hours in the church in prayer and six hours in her room in meditation day after day, month after month, year after claustrophobic year…
Mrs B. consoles herself that Giulia made her own choice to go ‘to fields where flies no sharp and sided hail/ and a few lilies blow’. But, of course, through much of Christian history nuns and monks went into the desertum not because they wanted to but because their family thought that it would be an excellent idea to have a representative behind the grill. The result? Many young men and women were signed up for a vocation that had been designed to strain those whose will was strongest. In the eye of the Church such lukewarm individuals would be ‘perfected’. Whereas, of course, what actually happened was that religious communities were degraded and began to resemble the inside of the Big Brother House.
Enter our author.
Professor Craig Monson had the happy idea of making merry with five of these irruptions of the world into monastic life in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italy.
The material he has dug up, in part, in the Vatican’s archives, is so good that it could write itself: arsonist nuns, a nun going out to the opera disguised as an abbot, nuns summoning the devil and, Beachcombing’s favourite, nuns volunteering as snowball targets for monks…
If that were all then Beachcombing would still give notice of this book. But reflect. The work on Beachcombing’s table is not called The Limits of the Cloister in Early Modern Italy but Nuns Behaving Badly. The author is pictured on the flap not in a cathedra with book shelves over his bald patch, but with a cowboy hat and very dark shades. Then, instead, of a tasteful etching of a monastery on the back cover there is a bare-bottomed nun being spanked by a lascivious monk…
What Beachcombing is trying to say, as delicately as possible, is that this is one of these cases where subject matter and author are equal to each other.
Nor has CM made the mistake of turning his five ‘case studies’ into micro-histories to be examined, dissected and ultimately destroyed. Instead, we have five ‘events’ told with the cadence of stories that are spun out minus those irritating twenty-first-century cue-boards telling the reader when to laugh or cry. Beachcombing was, in fact, so impressed by the delicacy of the writing that he sometimes found himself wondering: ‘How did he get this past his crowd-pleasing editor…’
But there is more, something that Beachcombing only glimpses but that he wants to try and set down, even if, inadequately.
History is a garment sewn together from many parts. For most of the time the sewing is out of view. But, sometimes while reading about the past we glimpse, Beachcombing will call them, the seams of history. Beachcombing has this sense when he reads early medieval autobiography (in as much as there is any), Victorian erotica, post war declamations… These are all genres that are strangely unsuited to their periods and cause their authors, in the effort of writing, to peel away the pretences and illusions of their time. Beachcombing theorises that works in which Christianity is lived badly are the Early Modern equivalent of, say, Walter: A Secret Life. And on reading these episodes from the Italy of three or four hundred years ago, there is that rare moment when Beachcombing sits up and says: so that was what it was really like…
Beachcombing has only one complaint: not enough lesbianism. Does this reflect badly on the archives, the author, early modern Italy or Beachcombing himself? The resounding reply is duly noted.
Beachcombing is always on the look out for good books with demented subject matter: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
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27 Feb 2011: Judith Weingarten writes in with further reading tips: Guido Ruggiero, /The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice /(New York, 1985), particularly his history of the convents of the time, you should certainly read it. Also on the erotic nunnery reading list should be Pietro Aretino, /The Secret Lives of Nuns/ (trans. Rosa Maria Falvo, Hesperus Press, 2003) — albeit more dubbióso. Thanks Judith!
Image: arresting Trouble December 4, 2010
Posted by Beachcombing in Contemporary, Uncategorized.Tags: Image, Italy, Mussolini, WIBT
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The Beachcombing family has been shook tonight by phantom (?) contractions and Mrs B. is upstairs wondering whether or not she is about to give birth. Beachcombing is a nursing a frullato downstairs confident that the baby is still a month away. But then Beachcombing is wrong about almost everything and that leads him nicely to another error-prone individual, Benito Mussolini…
Now Benito always came out well in photos. From the mug shots of his early arrest in Switzerland, to his hugs-and-kisses pics with Hitler, to his hanging upside down antics in Piazzale Loreto, the head fasces indubitably makes an impression. But Beachcombing particularly enjoys this fabulous picture of the duce being arrested back at the beginning of the First World War, his absolute fave of the Roman lawgiver for five reasons.
First, there are not many pre-First-World-War action shots: one of the few others that comes to mind is another arrest, that of Gavrillo Princep. Yet here Mussolini is being hustled, in full, demented, head-long tilt down the streets by Italian plain-clothes policemen as if he is a particularly naughty schoolboy who has been caught scrumping the headmaster’s apples.
It is, given the technology available and the motion involved, a miracle that the picture is so in focus.
Second, too often the world recalls Mussolini as he was in 1940-45, when he looked like an old man with a tumour in metastasis: skin hanging from his face, the melancholy of impending death in his eyes.
But here, instead, is the Mussolini that changed Italy and indeed the world in the 1920s. The Mussolini that sent Parisian old maids and American dowagers into swoons. The Mussolini who made it into a Cole Porter song: You’re the Tops in case the good reader is wondering – ‘You’re Mussolini,/ You’re Mrs. Sweeney’.
The diabolical, energy is certainly here – as it is in contemporary pictures of Lenin, forget comparisons with Hitler – so much dirt under Europe’s finger-nails.
And they ‘hurled the little streets against the great’.
Third, there is the suit.
There is something in the bulk of Mussolini in a suit that always knocks Beachcombing off balance: it is as if a lumberjack had accidentally put on his wife nurse’s uniform after waking up with a hangover.
Benito’s sartorial pretensions took a long time to fade. He would be in office several months before he was convinced to stop wearing a bowler – the resemblance to Charlie Chaplin was unsettling his adoring public.
Fourth, Beachcombing has a weakness for ridiculous moustaches particularly on policemen… It is so, well, Village People.
Beachcombing also wants to go on record as saying that all those pictured in the photo will have been passionate supporters of Mussolini by, say, 1925.
And fifth and finally there is some confusion (in Beachcombing’s sources) about when this photo was taken.
This might not seem to speak in its favour but allow Beachcombing to make the case for the choice is telling.
Was it taken in an anti -ar demonstration in the fall of 1914 when Mussolini was still ra-raring for the Italian socialist party and annoying the Italian establishment?
Or was it (more probably) taken, instead, in the April of 1915 when Mussolini was speaking at pro-war rallies and annoying the Italian establishment?
Does it even matter?
Here’s Trouble and Trouble is being arrested. Soon everyone will know and praise Trouble’s name and twenty years after that everyone will be denying that they’d ever said anything good about Trouble. But this brings us back Piazzale Loreto and upside-down Muss and poor Clara Petacci.
Beachcombing is always on the look out for striking and little known historical photos: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
Zoological soup and aroused pig: Futurist cooking November 19, 2010
Posted by Beachcombing in Contemporary, Uncategorized.Tags: Food, Futurism, Italy, WtH
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Futurism was one of the twentieth century’s more bizarre ideologies. Founded in Italy just before the First World War – though coming to maturity in the 1920s – it made a cult out of what was new while despising the ‘old’.
So speeding planes, falling bombs or soaring modern buildings were good. Whereas the canals of Venice and the works of the grand masters were bad.
If this had been all then Beachcombing suspects that Futurism would have vanished without a trace. But the Futurists favoured future things with such violence and contrariness that their acts became eccentric – for example it is one thing to hate the canals of Venice, it is another to seriously suggest that they be concreted over and turned into racing tracks…
Here then the good bizarrist can poise fingers over the keyboard and begin to enjoy himself.
Beachcombing will limit himself today to Futurist – a word that against the strict precepts of grammar deserves a capital – excesses in the kitchen. For, yes, the Futurists also donned their kitchen pinnies and determined to do away with ‘old’ food replacing such reactionary nonsense as omelettes and soufflés with FUTURE food.
The Futurist philosophy of alimentation involved reducing food to pure sensory experience. Ideally, human beings would be injected or given tablets for all their nutritional needs and Futurist cooks would then be able to get on with the more important job of wringing every possible reaction out of our inadequately wired bodies: a contemporary account in English from, of all places, the Chicago Tribune (1930) can be found on the web.
Beachcombing has before him La cucina futurista by F. T. Marinetti and does not really know where to start, the madness is so enveloping. So, almost at random, here are Aerovivanda that should give the as yet unshocked reader some idea of how the Futurists got ‘high’.
On the right of the guest there is a plate with black olives, (raw?) fennel hearts and bitter chinotto pieces. On the left there is a ‘tactile’ square of sand-paper, velvet and silk. The pieces of food are then brought to the mouth with the right hand while the left hand runs gently over the tactile rectangle. Waiters spray carnation perfume on the eater’s nape and from the kitchen there comes the noise of aeroplane engines and Bachian dismusic.
Beachcombing wouldn’t sleep for a couple of days after a total experience like this. Luckily though most Futurist dishes limited themselves to ruining the taste-buds: deep fried rose petals, fine vanilla ice-cream frozen with miniscule pieces of raw onion, ground almonds shaped into breast-like hemispheres with ‘nipples’ (strawberries) covered in chilli seeds and black pepper or a piece of salami – Aroused Pig – erect on the plate ‘dressed’ with eau de cologne and coffee. Thank God Beachcombing can plead vegetarianism…
Sometimes the names alone are enough: steel chicken (it was stuffed with ball bearings…), war in bed, the bombardment of Adrianopoli and zoological soup leave so much and yet so little to the imagination.
Now this may just seem like a particularly interesting temper tantrum on the part of some naughty boys (girls were rarely involved) in the 1920s and the 1930s.
But, in fact, there were some attempts to get the enlightened public on board as well. A restaurant the Santo Palato (‘the Holy Palate’) was opened in 1931 in Turin. And one Italian newspaper even suggested that special discounts should be given by the government to citizens who wanted to travel to this Mecca of Futurist food!
Futurist restaurants continue to the present day and can be found in several American cities. Beachcombing cannot help but wonder though if there have been other food movements in history that have deliberately cultivated the bizarre. A few sentences from the Satyricon flick through his mind and he vaguely remembers something about eating gold (Caligula’s horse?) but that is about all. He would be grateful for enlightenment. drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
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1 Dec, 2010: Ostrich writes in about strange ancient food: ‘[as to] Caligula feeding gold to a horse, you’re probably thinking of his race horse Incitatus. Dio Cassius relates, in book 69 of his ‘History of Rome’: ‘One of the horses, which [Caligula] named Incitatus, he used to invite to dinner, where he would offer him golden barley and drink his health in wine from golden goblets; he swore by the animal’s life and fortune and even promised to appoint him consul, a promise that he would certainly have carried out if he had lived longer.’ I recall being told by one of my professors that ‘golden barley’ probably meant barley sprinkled with gold dust, which sounds plausible. Like you, I thought the scene of Trimalchio’s banquet from the Satyricon involved someone eating food covered in gold leaf, but if it’s in there, I can’t find it now.’ Then Anon provided a modern example: ‘an ice cream place in NYC has taken after the example of the Romans…turns out eating gold isn’t as ancient as may have been thought!’ What would gold do to the human (or horse) digestive system? Would it be absorbed or would it just pass straight through? Beachcombing thanks Ostrich and Anon for their precious contributions.
7 Dec 2010: Ostrich has more comments on eating gold – he’s clearly an expert in the field: ‘One belated bit of information does occur to me with regard to the eating of gold: here in the States we’ve a cinnamon schnapps called ‘Goldschlaeger’, the which contains flakes of real gold leaf. I’m assured on trusted authority that the gold leaf simply passes through the system, and that the entertainment value of the effect is a large part of what justifies the higher cost of the liqueur, at least for certain consumers. The wikipedia article on the stuff reports that some people may have suffered possible allergic reactions to the gold.’ Thanks Ostrich!
Those nice Austro-Hungarian machine gunners October 2, 2010
Posted by Beachcombing in Contemporary, Uncategorized.Tags: Austro-Hungary, Italy, WtH, WW1
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Beachcombing recently found himself marveling over a passage in Mark Thompson’s The White War on Italy’s dreadful First World War campaigns. Italy it must be remembered was fighting, for the most part, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Peacock Imperial Throne of central Europe.
Another kind of collusion was so rare that very few instances were recorded on any front. It happened when defending units spontaneously stopped shooting during an attack and urged their enemy to return to their line. On one occasion, the Austrian machine gunners were so effective that the second and third waves of Italian infantry could hardly clamber over the corpses of their comrades. An Austrian captain shouted to his gunners, ‘What do you want, to kill them all? Let them be?’ The Austrians stopped firing and called out: ‘Stop, go back! We won’t shoot any more. Do you want everyone to die?’
Italian veterans described at least half a dozen such cases. In an early battle, the infantry tore forward, scrambling over the broken ground, screaming and brandishing their rifles. The Austrian trench was uncannily silent. The Italian line broke and clotted as it moved up the slope until there were only groups of men hopping from the shelter of one rock to the next, ‘like toads’. Then a voice called from the enemy line: ‘Italians! Go back! We don’t want to massacre you!’ A lone Italian jumped up defiantly and was shot; the others turned and ran.’ [1-2]
The Austrians and Italians it must be remembered were ancestral enemies. The Kingdom of Italy had been carved out of Austrian territory in the north of the Peninsula. And Austria had long resented their upstart little brother to the south. So why this unusual charity?
Beachcombing wondered idly if some of the Austrian soldiers were actually Italian speakers from the north of Italy – what language did the Austrian soldiers shout in? But though the Austrian army had almost as bad a reputation as the Italian army in the First World War Beachcombing imagines that most Austrian Italian-speakers were off at the Russian front where they could do as little damage as possible to Vienna’s Imperium.
So why these unusual acts of mercy on the part of the Austro-Hungarians? Some strange Alpine solidarity that the mud of Flanders failed to bring out in the Germans, French and British? Certainly Beachcombing finds these acts more impressive (if less curious) than a famous Anglo-German game of soccer at Christmas 1915.
Beachcombing would be extremely interested if there were any other WW1 instances of mercy in the midst of battle. drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
San Miniato: renaissance vandalism September 28, 2010
Posted by Beachcombing in Medieval, Uncategorized.Tags: Florence, Italy, Michelozzo, Renaissance, San Miniato, WtH
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Beachcombing has loved the extraordinary monastery of San Miniato (Florence), his favourite continental church, since he first saw it fifteen years ago. Started in a largely undocumented generation in the eleventh century it showed from the beginning an ambition that, though wholly medieval in form, anticipated the Florentine renaissance in terms of its self-confident eccentricity. However, there was, to Beachcombing’s mind, something that did not work with the church, something that was not quite right, the architectural equivalent of an eye-lash in the eye, irritating but unidentifiable.
Beachcombing always had a sense that this ‘eyelash’ had something to do with space and finally identified the problem on a trip to San Miniato this week while being shown around by a brilliant guide, an erudite monk of the foundation.
But before getting to the ‘eyelash’ a little about San Miniato’s use of space. Walking into the church you are immediately struck by an immense barrel of darkness lit only by small windows and the large church doors behind you.
Those doors are the church’s main source of light and one of Beachcombing’s students once commented in a trip in December that San Miniato was ‘creepy’. Certainly without the blue Italian skies coming through the doors the mood inside darkens. Don’t, whatever you do, visit on a rainy day.
But beyond the light of the main doors something very strange happens. As you walk towards the apse the floor rises before you and the church effectively becomes split level. Half of the crypt is visible and the pulpit and original altar and the extraordinary golden mosaic of Christ, the virgin and Saint Minias are raised high above the congregation.
To have been seated at the back in the Middle Ages would have been a remarkable experience. The crypt would have been visible but inky dark, save for candles, with sung voices rising from out of the depths evoking at best death at worst hell. The apse, instead, would have glowed with the precious light of the golden mosaic but the priest would have only been visible while preaching. The altar itself would have been hidden from medieval eyes and the communion bread would have been broken out of sight in almost Orthodox fashion.
Beachcombing has placed everything back in the past here because in the fifteenth-century the medieval space in the church was broken by the insertion of Michelozzo’s altar into the centre of the church: rudely inked in red by Beachcombing on the photos. The hidden, mysterious Christ of medieval times became a communal shared Christ, anticipating the reformation and counter-reformation
. This was Beachcombing’s ‘eyelash’ and the photos give some sense of just how it gets in the way.
Beachcombing blogged only two days ago on a joke about blowing up an airport going terribly wrong and so chastened he is going to be very careful about what he says next. However, the medieval monk in Beachcombing would dearly love to ‘remove’ the ‘eyelash’ from San Miniato and see it, at least for a ten minutes, as it was seen by the faithful in the thirteenth century puffed up with incense and hope.
Beachcombing has no great love for the Italian Renaissance but he can think of no other example of Renaissance arrogance destroying ‘the symbolic language’ of the Middle Ages. Other instances would be welcome: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
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