The Chiusdino Climber

Forgot to mention in my last post the cat we encountered in the Italian hilltop town of Chiusdino. He was stuck about 30 feet off the ground. While being held by his owner's boyfriend, we learned later, the cat had gotten scared by an approaching dog. The kitty had panicked, scratched the boyfriend's face, bitten the boyfriend's nose and then zoomed up the tree. The forgiving boyfriend eventually rescued the kitty with some precarious ladderwork.

If You Didn't Know...
...this Saturday is International Migratory Bird Day in some regions, including here in Maine. (Many warmer spots celebrated the occasion last week.) Roughly 350 species are known to migrate between North America and winter homes in Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America and South America, and this month is a great time to look for returning migrants. We'll have an eye (and an ear) out for a lot of types of warblers. One goal of the day is to make people aware of the challenges faced by migrant birds because of habitat loss in both their summer and winter homes.

To add some humor to your day...
..check this global look at odd and badly translated signs: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/11/travel/funny-signs.html?src=me&ref=general#/4be79e7f8e31df5c7d003d48/

The Notebook in Italy: Our Tuscan Top 10

As I happily devoured a homemade brownie topped with yogurt, honey and delicate white elder flowers, Pamelia did some math. "Of our last nine waking hours,” she reported, “we've been eating for nearly seven of them.” No shame in that; this was Italy. We were sitting at a long table with 26 other people finishing the sixth and final course of a revelatory herbs-and-weeds-themed, slow-food-movement lunch at Tenuta di Spannoccia, an 1,100-acre organic farm and educational center near Siena. The four-hour feast of creative local cuisine was the most memorable meal of our two weeks of art, nature and exploration in Tuscany, though it was just one of many highlights, culinary and otherwise, from which I've prepared what chefs might call a reduction: The Naturalist's Notebook's best-of-our-trip list.

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The nearly thousand-year-old Spannocchia farm complex hosts guests, workshops and educational programs.

1) Spannocchia. We spent eight nights at this sublimely beautiful, nearly 1,000-year-old agricultural estate, which has been named one of the world's top 10 eco-resorts. It's not really a "resort”—it's something better than that, more natural, more homey, more soul-nurturing. Run by Francesca Cinelli, husband Randall Stratton and the nonprofit Spannocchia Foundation (based in Portland, Maine), the hilltop complex is a working farm dedicated to the principles of sustainability and traditional farming. It has endangered-breed pigs as well as cows, horses, donkeys, chickens, an olive grove (the farm presses its own oil), a vineyard (the farm makes its own wine) and a prolific garden that produces fresh vegetables and herbs for the three fabulous meals a day served to guests by an engaging and environmentally-minded crew of college interns. To awaken in a centuries-old villa to the chirps of swallows and Italian sparrows, then sip great coffee while strolling past cypress and lemon trees to a wisteria-draped art studio overlooking a Tuscan valley—well, there aren't many better ways to start a day. And the nightly wine-at-sunset gathering on the patio is not a bad way to end one. Put this on your own list of places to visit. (For a schedule of Spannocchia-hosted workshops on subjects from art to writing to cooking to hiking to yoga, or to check on rates to stay in the villa or rent a guest cottage on your own, go to http://www.spannocchia.org.)

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From the ancient stone tower you can see much of Spannocchia's 1,100 acres of farmland and forest.

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Our morning drawing sessions usually began on the lawn near these lemon trees.

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With food, music and dance we celebrated May Day, which is a much bigger holiday in Europe than in the States.

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Look just beyond the vegetable garden and you'll see me on the stone stairs sketching with ink, pencil and conte crayon.

2) Margaret's Krug's Seeing and Drawing program. Two pieces of wisdom I've gained from 30 years and hundreds of thousands of miles of globetrotting: Don't spend all your vacations lying on a beach, and go outside your comfort zone. This eight-day workshop at Spannocchia was the centerpiece of our trip, and it pushed me—an occasional sketcher at best—into a new, challenging and hugely enjoyable realm. Margaret, the author of An Artist's Handbook and a superb teacher, artist and art historian, guided the six of us in the program (the five others were true artists) through the use of a wide range of drawing media, papers, techniques, perspectives and styles. Her kind and encouraging personality (mirrored by the rest of the group) carried me through blunders like trying to draw with the tip of my indigo-ink pen upside down and doing silver-point sketches that turned out to be invisible. Our sketching trips to gorgeous sites like the walled town of San Gimignano, the abandoned abbey of San Galgano and the piazza del Campo in Siena added historical context to our work. Margaret, who will likely be coming up from New York to demonstrate art techniques at The Naturalist's Notebook this summer, runs both a late-summer painting program and the spring drawing workshop at Spannocchia; for more information, e-mail her at margaret.krug@gmail.com.

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Here Margaret is mixing a coating that we put onto paper to use for silver-point drawing; the silver-point pens etch the image into the coating.

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In the studio one morning I drew a black-and-gray feather I'd found.

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Pamelia with some quick night sketches she did in iron-gall ink; Margaret had us go out after dark to do these so-called nocturnes, which were a blast.

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Lapo, one of the resident dogs, liked lounging outside the wisteria-draped studio.

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At week's end we in the Seeing and Drawing program hung our works for an evening art show.

3) The food. Had we eaten only the daily fare at Spannocchia—preposterously good onion tarts, risotto with artichokes, homemade pastas of all sorts, beef stuffed with mushrooms, swiss chard pie, succulent turkey breast and roast pork, salads, brick-oven pizza and so much more, all made with local ingredients and served with unlimited red wine made on the premises—we would have gone home thrilled. Spannocchia's food is so good that Bon Appetit did a spread on it in 2008. But the slow-food lunch added yet another dimension. Put on by Cavolfiori a Merenda, a traveling crew of college-age friends from the Piedmont region, the meal reflected Italy's role at the heart of the slow-food movement, which emphasizes fresh, local, organic ingredients and an appreciation for what you eat. I dare not give away the menu (we might want to try surprising guests with some of the dishes, including the most amazing presentation of radishes ever invented), but suffice it to say that the meal made use of, among other things, borage leaves and flowers, poppies, mallow leaves, dandelion leaves, Moroccan-style pickled lemons, spelt (or was it farro?), leeks, broad beans, pork, mint, rosemary, sage, clover, ricotta, potatoes, eggs and shaved asparagus.

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Daniela from the Cavolfiori a Merenda team served our borage soup, which included a dollop of ricotta with two borage flowers (also known as starflowers) on top.

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The Cavolfiori group also put on a meal for 60 on the lawn at Spannocchia.

4) La Specola. Florence was once one of the world's great centers of scientific advancement, and this hidden gem—Europe's oldest natural history museum—drew us back for three visits during our two-day stay in that city. The museum has more than 3 million zoological specimens and an observatory tower (specola means observatory) with historic telescopes, an ingenious solar calendar and a stunning 360-degree view of Florence. The specimens on display include birds with horns sprouting from their heads, 497 types of mollusks from Somalia alone and a stuffed hippo that was once a Medici family pet. We'll have more on these creatures at the Notebook this summer.

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The museum didn't label this unicorn-like bird except as part of the cotingidae family; a peacock-sized bird with a similar thorn sticking out of its head turned out to be a South American variety called—gotta love this name—the horned screamer.

5) Strolling in Florence at day's end. After visits to the renowned Uffizi art gallery, La Specola and the medieval Ponte Vecchio bridge, Pamelia and I meandered to dinner as scullers rowed up the Arno River in the late afternoon light. On our way back to the lovely Borghese Palace Art Hotel, we circled the city's dominant landmark, the Duomo, and felt we were back in another century.

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Florence's famous Ponte Vecchio bridge over the Arno pre-dates the Renaissance.

6) Isla Burgess, wild and medicinal plant conservationist. O.K., so she's not Italian. She's a New Zealander. But the former director of the International College of Herbal Medicine spent part of an afternoon at Spannocchia teaching us about edible wild plants and their medicinal qualities—a field that holds vast potential for the future as long as the plants aren't wiped out by pollution, overdevelopment and climate change. We tasted each plant as we went, chewing half a pinky fingernail's worth between our front teeth. (Rule One when testing whether a plant might be edible: taste, don't swallow.) I wasn't so crazy about geranium leaves but chickweed was sweet, almost like lettuce. I learned that in World War II soldiers in Italy chewed yarrow and spit it onto a wound as an astringent, earning it the nickname the "soldier's herb."

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Isla's tutorial on plants had us nibbling mallow, dandelions, sour thistle and other wild treats.

7) The Cathedral of Siena. I will let the photo speak for itself.

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Black and white are the symbolic colors of Siena, and they make the cathedral both striking and fun to sketch.

8) Cats and dogs. Spannocchia has a small population of felines and happy, lumbering canines that wander the grounds, provide comic interludes, occasionally tangle with each other and make any visiting pet-lover feel at home. In fact, we nearly made a deal with Randall and Francesca to bring a really friendly young cat—my Spannocchia buddy—back to Maine.

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My best cat buddy came along for the ride when I went out to do a nocturne drawing.

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Other curious observers came by the studio window to watch us work.

9) Pigs. The Cinta Senese breed, a Tuscan heirloom, was nearly extinct when Spannocchia began its herd. Now more than 200 Italian farms raise the black-with-a-white-stripe hogs, which (alas, vegetarians) are exceptionally tasty. The Cinta Seneses are a reminder that many other varieties of livestock, fruits and vegetables have been lost forever in the quest for supermarket-friendly, shrink-wrapped food.

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The distinctively striped Cinta Senese breed has been a symbol of Tuscany for centuries—but nearly went extinct.

10) Fields of rapeseed. I thought the brilliant yellow expanses that lined the roads were mustard plants, and they are in fact part of that family. But nature's most unfortunately dubbed species (the name comes from the Latin word for turnip, which rapeseed resembles) fills its own niche, providing animal feed, rapeseed and canola oils and biodiesel fuel. By summer it fades from the Tuscan spotlight, replaced by even larger and showier fields of seven-foot-tall sunflowers. I'll have to wait for a future visit to see those.

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The Tuscan rapeseed was so vibrant that you could see the fields of it from the plane when landing.

Quick Hello From Italy

Our two-night stay in Florence is ending all too soon. I can't figure out how to upload photos on this rent-a-computer (it's hard enough to find the correct keys for typing because the Euro-keyboard is loaded with accent marks where other keys usually are), but if you were looking at a photo I'd posted, it might be of a statue of da Vinci or Galileo, or one of the three million (!!!) animal specimens at Europe's oldest and largest natural history museum, or our funky art hotel, or the two of us sketching at the Uffizi art museum, or the dramatic third-floor apartment fire we stumbled upon, or maybe two glasses of Chianti next to two plates of steaming homemade pasta. We will post photos eventually. We have found some treasures to bring back to The Naturalist's Notebook...and wish we had room in a suitcase for others. I made it to a more than 200-year-old astronomical observatory and tried to figure out the principles behind a solar calendar inlaid in the floor (I had inadvertently joined a tour group, but the guide was speaking Italian). Time to head off to the bus station and a trip to Siena. On Tuesday we will move on to the Spannocchia foundation retreat and organic farm outside Siena for a drawing workshop and even more great food and history. And some really interesting animals. Bye until then!

Happy Earth Day

As we head off for a two-week adventure on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, here are some Earthly sights to enjoy. Today is a good day--no, every day is a good day--to appreciate what an extraordinary planet we get to live on. Though computer access could be a problem, I will attempt to post some blog entries from Italy, perhaps telling of the nearly extinct farm animals we'll be seeing, or the art we'll be creating, or the skies that Galileo once gazed up at (an old observatory is on the itinerary). We will be gathering more surprises for The Naturalist's Notebook, which in June will open for the season. In the meantime, I'd love it if any of you started e-mailing us your own photos and observations from your corner of our 4.5-billion-year-old Earth.

Utter Horsetail!

What do you usually find on the roadside? Sand, bottle shards, broken-up pavement, maybe the flattened remains of a porcupine or a Big Mac. Life is hard on the margin, which is why I've admired these striped tan stalks that sprout up every spring on the Oak Point Road here in Maine. Yesterday I decided these sturdy stems deserved more respect. I decided to figure out what they were. 

I first tried a Google search, but I didn't know what key words to use. I typed in TAN STALK THIN and, bizarrely enough, got as one of the first results, "Left-hand-assisted laparoscopic resection of hepatocellular carcinoma in an accessory liver." Whoa! Welcome to the wired age! Now I had to do a separate search to find out what an accessory liver was. (An unnecessary lobe that grows off the liver in very rare cases, as far as I can tell. Apparently, if you want to impress the medical crowd at a cocktail party, just boast, "I can resect one of those babies lefthanded!") 

I tried more searching.  I typed in TAN STALK ROADSIDE and the first result, inexplicably, was the website for the Wellsboro (Pa.) Area Chamber of Commerce. (Turns out Wellsboro—who knew?—is home to the so-called "Pennsylvania Grand Canyon," otherwise known as Pine Creek Gorge.) I tried again. TAN PLANT ROADSIDE took me to a Chinese research paper entitled, "Bioaccumulation and physiological effects of excess lead in a roadside pioneer species Sonchus oleraceus L."  (When I looked up Sonchus oleraceus L., it was a yellow-flowered herb called common sowthistle. ) 

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Then I remembered Tom Vining, a plant expert who lives on Mount Desert Island. I e-mailed him a photo of the tan stalk and he quickly got back to me with the news that it was field horsetail. Because its stem contains silica—essentially, sand; no wonder it thrives on roadsides!—field horsetail used to be used to scour pans. It also was made into a diuretic tea, a cough medicine for horses and a clothing dye. Perhaps most amazing, a subsequent Google search revealed that it "can accumulate gold in its tissues, up to 4.5 ounces of gold per ton of fresh plant material."  At the current price of more than $1,140 an ounce, that's five grand per ton. Proof again that money doesn't grow on trees—it grows in little tan horsetail stalks. 

Bet you look more closely at the plant life the next time you're walking down the road.

Elephant Meets Dog

Thanks to Amy Damboise for bringing this wonderful story to my attention!