It’s not often I blog about a book I’m reading. It has to be exceptional or part of a writing or a photography challenge, but in this case it is because I have just discovered a paperback by someone who writes travel articles that really appeal to me, the sort I used to enjoy in the Sunday papers before they turned themselves over to the advertising world.
I found it through Beachy Books, an Isle of Wight publisher whose listings have often included quirky and interesting books. It turns out that Julie Watson is also an Isle of Wight writer, someone I don’t know but someone whom I’d like to meet one day. So, as well as being happy to introduce a travel writer to those here who write on travel, I’m also excited because she’s from my area, a local writer!
Julie’s book is a collection of travel memoirs from her first independent trip to the French Alps to work as a waitress, to later trips to more exotic places like India, Russia, Egypt, Malaysia, Costa Rica and Borneo, to name but a few. And each tale is an anecdote, a story about her trip, not a list of restaurants and hotels, but about the chance meetings that occur on holiday when we open ourselves to new experiences, serendipitous moments that are evoked in exhilarating detail. And all this brought to us in a very personal, authentic prose. I finished the book feeling I’d learned something new about the places and the people.
One of the Contents pages
Above is one of the Contents pages, from which you’ll see that the articles are short, bite-sized, and as the cliché has it “small but beautifully formed”, ideal for dipping into when you have a spare few minutes.
It’s hard to choose a favourite from so many great pieces but I think I’ll opt for Birdsong, an exquisitely crafted piece written in lockdown, a simple tale, yet one that when read, left me with the feeling that I had known that place, and I had known that moment. And I was strangely moved.
Available from all good bookshops and from Amazon, of course.
I thought I’d better try and post something before the year ends and then up popped Cathy at 746 books with her meme My Year in Books. I can never resist a quiz or a challenge, so I looked through some of the books I’d read this year and answered her prompts. Here is the result.
In high school I was Lost for Words (Deric Longden).
People might be surprised by Siracusa (Delia Ephron).
I will never be The Whistleblower (Robert Preston).
My life post-lockdown was Act of Oblivion (Robert Harris)
My fantasy job is The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher (Hilary Mantel)
At the end of a long day, I need The Rosie Effect (Graeme Simsion)
I hate being A Keeper (Graham Norton)
I wish I had A Song for Dark Times (Ian Rankin)
My family reunions are Play All (Clive James)
At a party you’d find me with The Sympathizer (Viet Thanh Nguen)
I’ve never been to The Salt Path (Raynor Winn)
A happy day includes House of Fun (Simon Hoggart)
Motto I live by: Kick Ass (Carl Hiassen)
On my bucket list is Hunting Season (Andrea Camilleri)
In my next life, I want to have Nada (Carmen Laforet)
If you feel like joining in, just do your own list from the prompts and let Cathy know.
I know this isn’t a site on which to post cartoons but this one just seems to apply to everyone and I thought it would make everyone smile on a day on which the news makes laughing or smiling increasingly more impossible.
Excitement is high among fans of The Godfather trilogy, with the release of the newly re-mastered films, three movies that are Shakespearean in drama, operatic, and complex. As one of those fans I delved into my archives to search for photographs I took in Savoca, location of a few major scenes of The Godfather, and a reminder of one of those serendipitous moments that occur from time to time in one’s travels.
A shady spot at the Bar Vitelli
It was in Sicily, about 30 years ago, when we came across Savoca, a medieval village perched on a hill overlooking the Ionian coast. We had driven through the mountains from Taormina, stopping here and there to admire villages clinging to the sides of the mountains and blue seas far below on which floated toy boats. We pulled into Piazza Fossia, saw a parking place opposite a pleasant looking bar with terrace which meant we could sit outside rather than in the inky black interiors preferred by the Sicilians, and entered Bar Vitelli.
The Bar Vitelli
We ordered drinks, and the owner graciously waved me inside to see what else was available. What she really wanted me to see was her wall of photographs of the stars of The Godfather and various artifacts to do with the film. Most were of Marlon Brando – although he was never in Savoca for filming – Al Pacino, Simonetta Stefanelli, who played Apollonia in the film, and James Caan.
Then I made the connection. This was the small, cliff-side café where Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) sat with his two bodyguards (one of whom would later betray him) and drank wine. In fact, this small patio with the dappled sunlight playing on the tables, was the location of several scenes filmed over a six-week period during the shooting of the first Godfather movie.
Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) had fled New York City to escape both police and the Mafia and came to Sicily to take refuge. Out hunting one day, he saw a beautiful Sicilian girl and immediately fell in love with her.
Back room of Bar Vitelli with photographs and connections to The Godfather
The Bar Vitelli, as it is now, was actually the home of the beautiful young girl he’d seen, and it is here he asks the café owner for permission to court his daughter, the lovely Apollonia (Simonetta Stefanelli). A later scene, depicting a traditional Italian family Sunday dinner and a still later scene of the eventual outdoor wedding reception, was also staged on the terrace of the Bar Vitelli and in the tiny piazza in front.
La Signora watched me carefully and when she could see that I was suitably impressed with the display she sat me down and told me tales of what it was like when she had Pacino and Brando in her café. Of course, I knew that Brando had never been there but everyone’s allowed a little bit of licence and in that small village of less than 100 inhabitants, The Godfather had sprinkled a little bit of its magic on both the village and the Bar Vitelli.
La Signora sits outside Bar Vitelli.
Savoca owes it’s connection to Hollywood to the fact that Francis Ford Coppola thought that Corleone, a town near Palermo and the book’s setting for The Godfather, looked too modern for his vision of the Sicilian village from which the family came. After much searching throughout the island, he found two small villages untouched by modernisation for his locations, – Savoca and Forza d’Agro.
At the time we were there, few tourists visited this remote village so La Signora was happy to spend time talking to us and showing us some more pictures of the stars of The Godfather, plus some newspaper cuttings she’d collected.
Back room of Bar Vitelli
I never got back to Bar Vitelli but I saw a short film a while back that showed it looking exactly as it had been when I visited, and as it was in the film – right down to the bead curtain in the doorway. La Signora is no longer alive and the bar/restaurant is now successfully run by her descendants: Godfather tours (along with Montelbano tours) are now big business in Sicily, and Savoca is a port of call on the trail.
It was nice to know that it hadn’t been commercialised at all and that the stone-flagged walls covered in greenery and the terrace with vine covered pergolas, still offer shade to travellers, along with coffee granita, supposedly the favourite drink of both Pacino and Coppola when they were there.
When I watch the 3-hour long film again on March 26th, I will be carried back 30 years to when I sat on Al Pacino’s chair in Bar Vitelli and heard first-hand from la Signora that, although Pacino may have come from New York, he was molto Siciliano.
This was the prettiest house we saw in Savoca, and we were told it belonged to someone very important. I wonder who it belongs to today?
In Savoca, apart from Bar Vitelli, the nearby Church of San Nicola was used as a location for the wedding of Michael Corleone and Apollonia. The church is only a short walk from Bar Vitelli.
Bar Vitelli is housed in the 18th century Palazzo Trimarchi, located in the Piazza Fossia, the town’s main square, near the Town Hall.
The Godfather:
The Godfatherrevolutionized film-making, saved Paramount Pictures from Bankruptcy, minted a new generation of movie stars, and made the author of the book, Mario Puzo, rich and famous. It is compelling, dramatic, and complex and it started a war between Hollywood and the high echelons of the Mob as the makers had to contend with the real-life members of the Mafia. Location permits were withdrawn without notice at inconvenient times, Al Ruddy’s car was found riddled with bullets, and ‘connected’ men insisted on being in the cast (some were given film roles, whether due to threats or talent nobody knows)!
The Buffet table at your holiday resort looks stunning, the food arranged with aesthetic attention to detail, and dominating the centre is a beautiful carving in ice, a pagoda, a ‘plane, a fantasie in ice with coloured lights making it dance and dazzle, or a bird, its neck an opaque white and the translucent wings poised as though to take flight. In a few hours it will have dissolved into a puddle.
The people who create these centrepieces are artists in ice, men and women who have the ability to create these beautiful animals, birds, and flowers in frozen water to add a shimmering brilliance to the tables. And they do this knowing it will all disappear in a few hours. Performance art? Or art installation?
First you start with a solid block of ice
Khun Panas Suchantra at the Dusit Thani Resort in Hua Hin, Thailand, was the resident artist in this ephemeral medium when I was last there. He is involved in every aspect of the work, from the early discussions with the F & B Manager, the chef, and the General Manager if the event is of importance.
I watched him work on various carvings over a three week period and never tired of the theatricality of the scene as he chipped and chopped, moved around with speed (the ice continues to melt as he works on it) and created delicate ice flowers and feathered wings with the precision of a mathematician.
Something begins to take shape
The Wings are now Translucent
Most ice-carving artists use many different types of chisels, plus a saw, to get their effects. Initally, a V-angle chisel is used to score the outline and to draw on the uncut ice, gouge chisels with their round tipped blades are used for making patterns, and flat chisels are for shaving. The saw is used for cutting and carving (see photograph below).
Khun Panas often works outdoors in a covered Pagoda overlooking the sea, a piece of performance art that is much appreciated by the visitors to the hotel who gather round to watch in silence, as a solid block of ice is transformed into a three-dimensional sculpture.
Quick work before the ice melts
Different tools used
Making sure the neck area is free
Chiselling away the last bits
Cameras at the ready
Final touches
As he works, the mateial starts to melt and there is a sense of urgency about his actions but with a few quick movements he saws off a piece of the block on which he outlines a shape before beginning to chisel away the excess.
With the outer shape of the subject delineated he starts on the base cutting into the ice to enhance the main figure. After that it seems but a very short time before the ice-carving is complete, to be taken into the kitchens and stored in the freezer until it is ready to be placed centre table at the buffet.
Finishing Touches
Just the clearing up to do now
The Ice Swan Takes its Place Centre Table
Japan is the country that has elevated ice sculpting to high art: you only have to look at the Winter Festival in Sapporo to see what visions they create. It goes without saying therefore, that the best and most expensive tools come from that country, seasoned by years of experience in making Samurai swords.
Depressed by the current news, the arguments, the depths to which politicians and supposedly clever men and women are sinking, I think back to how years ago Franklin D. Roosevelt was a beacon of light to a world deep in a fiscal depression. As he saw America through a war and put in action methods to help Europe build itself up after the second world war, he laid the groundwork for 20th century democracy in the western world. Less than a century later, we stand to lose it.
FDR had many faults, he was a human being after all, but he was a giant compared to what we see today.
It’s been a tough week one way and another so I thought that rather than tax what’s left of my brain looking for images and thinking up words to accompanying them, I’d just wish everyone a Happy Weekend, and CHEERS!
It’s not that I don’t like the blocks themselves, it’s that the script offering them runs across what I’m trying to write, causing frustration and annoyance. For a while back I was coping but now WP seems to have put a gremlin in the works. Instead of the block for Image showing up, I get a list of blocks I don’t need or use (for business, mostly) so I have to find ways to get the image block up which means time spent searching. If I only use paragraph and image can’t the Blocks intuitively sense this? Why offer me blocks I’ve never used?
Today I was uploading a Sculpture Saturday post and the tools down the right-hand side disappeared, leaving me with a page which held my text and image but nothing else. I couldn’t find categories, tags, slugs, anything like that so I had to add these via the list of Posts. Then I wanted to defer this posting until Saturday, but that button wasn’t there either. I thought if I hit Publish it might give me the chance to put a date in but no, I hit publish and guess what, it’s published it!
Day something in the great lock down and my place is tidier than a monk’s cell so while I’m thinking of what past travels to write about, I’m sorting half a lifetime’s accumulation of trivia, travel books, cards and pamphlets kept from the last great tidying session when I downsized six years ago. It’s been hard, but hey, I’ve managed to throw out two books, and at least five pamphlets I’ll never read again and I have put some of the postcards aside to send to friends! The rest will have to stay put until the next national crisis. More I cannot do!
So here are just a few pictures that remind me of happy times.
This Can Only be Bondi Beach
Sunset: Fisherman in Fiji
Me in Cuba 1981
Midsummer in Stockholm
Negotiating Locks in France
Memories are Made of photos like these
Sifting through my memory box I relive and recall trips which have slipped to the back of my mind. These in turn encourage me to look out photographs, some prints, some transparencies which I must get down to converting to digital images one of these days. Black and white prints, slides, then coloured prints and finally digital prints and computer discs. And then there are the old family photos and my husbands wartime photos in Burma to be sorted through one day.
Mari & Goatherds at Castel de Ferro
Breakdown on road to Granada
Castel de Ferro
Avenida Hotel, Benidorm
Benidorm before Mass Tourism
Late Fifties, early sixties Spain
It was the early sixties when we discovered a little village called Castel de Ferro when the son of the owner of the only hotel there jumped out in front of our car to stop us and invite us in to see the new swimming pool. Those were innocent days when we politely stopped and they actually thought it was a good way to get tourists to stay with them.
And stay we did, for two weeks or so, during which time the local boy-goatherds followed me around wherever I went. They had never seen a ‘foreigner’ before and when my husband took them all for a ride in the green Austin van we had in those days, their giddy pleasure knew no bounds. We spent many hours with them and we’d supply a picnic as they were on the mountains from dawn till dusk with only a few scraps to eat, caring for the skinny goats. On the day we left all the little boys were crying and it near broke my heart.
Spain opened to tourism sometime in the fifties, and those of us who went then were greeted with warmth and friendliness. Franco had kept Spain out of World War Two (it was a broken country after the Civil War 1936-39 anyway) but as he leaned heavily towards the Axis’ powers help was not forthcoming to re-structure the country. Until the advent of the Cold War and the West’s fear of Russia that is, when the need for strategic military basis and airports ushered in the Marshall Plan, and Spain, along with other countries in Europe received aid, mainly from the USA, which helped it get back on its feet again.
It took a long time though, for the infrastructure to get into place. For many years the roads throughout Spain bore the chalked message “Franco, Mas Arboles, Mas Agua, Mas Carreteras” (more trees, more water, more roads). Not only were the existing roads in dire states but there were few of them. The above photo of the car breakdown took place on the main road between Valencia and Granada. Our car hit a rock or stone in the middle of the road and combined with driving on many untarmacked roads throughout our trip, it brought us to a halt. Local farm-workers helped move it and we managed to limp on until we came to a repair shop/garage.
Nowadays Spain has some of the best roads in Europe.
The photo of Benidorm is of the town before it became the biggest thing in tourism and the Avenida Hotel (still there) was one of only a handful in 1959. We stayed there in a room where our balcony looked on to the open air cinema which showed mainly very old, heavily censored films, but with a cheap bottle of wine and some nibbles to enjoy, it made for a fun night. I say ‘night’ because the cinema didn’t start until midnight or later – no-one worried about the possibility of people not being able to sleep. You either slept or you went to the cinema. What? You want another option?
Typical scene in Southern Spain
Orchids always remind me of Thailand
I drank lots of Manzanilla in this bar in Arcos de la Frontera
Serrano Ham & Garlic
Still in Spain, but one photo of orchids in Thailand has crept in.
I think I’d better stop there as the post is getting too long. I’ve still got a bunch of photographs on the computer which I hope to downsize and caption and I’ll put a few more up after I’ve tussled with the garden where the weeds are in a defiant mood. I’ve got to get them under control before they master me.
MARI'S TRAVELS WITH HER CAMERA 