A MARKETING MASTERPIECE?

Originally shown at Milan Expo and published on Vimeo in September, the video below has now, with much fanfare, been uploaded to YouTube and is being hailed here as a masterpiece. It is certainly a break with traditional clips promoting Sicily and has been conceived with social networks in mind. The target market is Northern Europe, where people are known to start planning their holidays in January.

I'd very much like to know what all of you think before I divulge my own opinion but I do want to congratulate the Comune di Ragusa for having the courage to do something in a new way and I wish them every success.

Ragusa - easy to reach, hard to leave

Another, shorter version [1m.05] is also available on YouTube. The director is Riccardo Lupo.

SABATO MUSICALE

This song in French from rapper Maître Gims is number 1 or 2 in the Italian charts, depending on which list you are looking at:

 Maître Gims - Est-ce que tu m'aimes?

A NEW "LEOPARD"?

In 2009, I wrote an article for Italy Magazine which began,

"Who really knows when a journey towards fulfilment begins? Looking back, I sometimes think that my journey towards the island of Sicily began much earlier than that first visit in October 1992. And, like most of the important events in my life, it began with a book:

I don’t know quite why, browsing in a bookshop in Pinner, North London in 1967, I picked up a paperback entitled The Leopard, a novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa......."

This is, of course, the book which inspired the famous 1963 Visconti film starring Burt Lancaster, Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale. Who could ever forget the ballroom scene? 

Well, now it has been reported that there is going to be a remake and Miss Cardinale is not happy about it, having asked how anyone can think of making a film version of Il Gattopardo without Luchino Visconti.  However, it turns out that the remake is not going to be a remake but a film about Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's life based on David Gilmour's biography The Last Leopard [which I also mentioned in the above article]. That's all right, then ... or is it?  

The new film is the brainchild of London-based filmmaker Demian Gregory and will include parts of the novel which were left out of the original film but there is some confusion here about rights. According to Variety, Mr Gregory has obtained the adaptation rights of the original film but other reports state that it may be more difficult for him to obtain film rights for the book. Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi di Lampedusa, the author's adopted son, has confirmed that the new project is not a remake but seems to think that more time will be required to deal with the question of the book rights.

The Italian legal system is not famous for its speed so it remains to be seen whether filming will start in Palermo this year as planned.

Pazienza, Mr Gregory!

SABATO MUSICALE

We haven't heard from the lovely Mr Buanne for a long time, so I think we should remedy that:

Patrizio Buanne - Se mai ti parlassero di me [Smile]

MEMORIES OF SIMI

Memories of Simi - Kizoa Online Movie Maker

My lovely little girl, it is only now, a year after your death, that I have been able to bring myself to go through your photos and I have not cried too much, for the memories are happy ones.  I'll try to remember you running up the lawn with your tuggy toy in Cardiff, lying contentedly in my arms on the journey from Catania to Modica after the great adventure of our flight to Sicily and, most of all, your "night game" of bounding towards me from the hallway to the bedroom with tuggy, not realising I could see your reflection in the glass balcony doors.  Some nights, even now, I look for you in the glass and I see you, darling, I see you.  And I see you when I'm out with Bertie-Pierrine, whom I'm sure you sent. Sometimes I say, "Walk with us, Simi" and you do.

We buried you near the sea, with tuggy toy.  There the waves that will one day reunite us lull your sleep.  Thank you again for all the love.

FEASTING AND FIREWORKS

The festive season cannot end without my showing you what I ate on Christmas Day, can it?  I was very happy to be spending the day with friends and to partake of focacce, grilled meat, fruit and perfect crème caramel prepared by Neapolitan chef Pino Mainolfi [on the left in the pictue] whom I enjoyed meeting. His blog [in Romanian] is here.  I made and took along my second Christmas cake of the season:

I spent New Year's Eve at home because I was worried about the effect the inevitable fireworks would have on Bertie-Pierrine, whose first Christmas with me this was. She didn't seem overly peturbed - I was probably more frightened than she was, for Italians do not do things by halves - but I was glad I was here with her.

A lot of town councils all over Italy had banned New Year fireworks out of respect for the environment and animals and thus it was in Palermo, Catania, Siracusa and Ragusa, but not Modica. Nevertheless, a nine-year-old child in Palermo Province had to have his hand amputated after an accident with a firecracker and there were 190 firework-related injuries in Italy as a whole on New Year's Eve.  Is it worth it? 

If I sound like Scrooge here I would just like to say that I am outclassed in that respect by Telecom Italia, who managed to send their email bills out on Christmas Day. Now, that should be illegal as well!

SABATO MUSICALE

Jovanotti - Buon anno

SICILY SCENE'S REVIEW OF 2015

The year that has just ended began, for me, in the worst possible way, with the loss of my darling Simi on January 8th. In the days and weeks that followed, there were several points when I thought I was going to go as well and of course, these days coming up to the anniversary of her death are also difficult.

But in February my Bertie-Pierrine, whom I love not as a substitute but in her own right, bounded into my life and we saved each other:

Other highlights of the year were visiting my new-found sister in Norwich, seeing Charles Aznavour live in concert in London and revisiting Cardiff, all of which I've written about here .

Elm Hill, Norwich, UK

It was also the year which marked the tenth anniversary of my move to Sicily and you can read about that here.

I was surprised, checking my blog stats tonight, to find that my most read blog post of 2015 was this Sabato Musicale  - I must have a lot of readers who are Annalisa fans and very welcome they are! The second most read post was the one I have linked to above about Simi's death.

My recipe of the year. among those I've created myself, is my Brit-Indian-Sicilian Shepherd's Pie:

I don't have a gadget of the year but I do have new [to me] uses for two old ones!  Both Mary Berry and Nigella suggest peeling ginger with a teaspoon in their latest books and I would like to thank them. It seems so obvious but I had never thought of it. Nigella recommends a microplane grater for grating citrus zest into dishes. I've had one for years but never realised how easy that would be!

My book of the year in English is The Dust That Falls from Dreams by Louis de Bernières and my book of the year in Italian is Giuseppino by Joe Bastianich.

Instead of the Italian logic prize this time, I am awarding an Italian scandal of scandals prize and it goes to the TV advert that horrified the nation in January because - are you ready? - it showed a MasterChef winner adding a stock cube to her caponata!  I am pleased to be able to report that this ability to be more scandalised by the use of stock cubes than by all the worst excesses of Italian politicians is alive and well, as a hapless would-be MasterChef Italia 5 contestant found out a week or so ago.  "Ci hai messo del dado?"- "You put a stock cube in?!" exclaimed a horrified Joe Bastianich and the ice-cold eyes of Chef Carlo Cracco turned icier than ever.

It was yet another sad year for migrants and tragedies have continued to happen, not only in the Mediterranean but on the land routes too. Italy's European partners continue to fail her and, consequently, all who are in need of a safe haven. You can find links to all my migration posts here.

My hopes for 2016 are a safe corridor for migrants and an end to migration tragedies. As always, I hope for peace and health for those I love and for all of you, wherever you are.

Happy New Year and thank you for reading Sicily Scene!

Buon anno e grazie di aver letto la Sicily Scene!

OUT OF THE PAST - 6

My birth mother, Violet

My adoptive mother, Violet,
on her wartime wedding day

"Once again it's Christmas time", as the song says, and, at the end of another year, I am thinking about the incredible events which led to my happy reunion with my birth sister, Jill and the rest of my birth family. If you missed them, there are links to all my adoption posts here.

Candles for two Violets

To start with, I would like to take you back to 9th October 2014, a beautiful, sunny day in Modica, Sicily. I am walking along a familiar street, greeting people and looking at what is on the fruit lorries, as I do every day, but my thoughts are a world away, in another era, for today is different:  I am on my way to meet my birth sister, after 64 years. Can you imagine how that felt? All I can tell you is that I was happy, experienced no anxiety and felt as if I was truly going home, a sensation which intensified the moment we fell into each other's arms and sobbed the years away.

Chiesa di San Giacomo Apostolo,
Ragusa Ibla

I had trusted Jill from the first communication we had had just a few months before and I knew I would like her. But as I spent time with her that week, I began to realise how very much I loved her. Yes, she was the person with whom, had the world been a little less cruel in 1950, I might have grown up and we might have shared so much but it was no use going there now, for we cannot know what might have happened. All we could, and can, do is to enjoy what we have and nurture it as if it were a little garden of sisters.

And when we visited another garden one evening that week, the beautiful Giardino Ibleo in Ragusa Ibla, I found, to my surprise, that the charming church of San Giacomo Apostolo was open and there I lit a candle for each of my two mums, who were both called Violet [though my birth mum didn't like the name]. I'm sure they were with us.

A graveside in Norwich

This year it was a great pleasure to be able to spend some time in Norwich, UK with Jill and her husband and to meet the rest of my wonderful birth family, all of whom I would like to thank here for their warmth, kindness, acceptance and love.

When Jill and I visited our mother's grave, I had thought I was prepared but nothing could have readied me for the tide of emotion that would engulf me. In Romina Power's book Ti prendo per mano, a novel based on the time she spent nursing her own mother through terminal illness, there is a poem entitled Il Profumo della vita [The Scent of Life] which expresses all that I wanted to say so I read it out in Italian and in English, thus bringing a little of Italy to my first Violet. Then I fell into my sister's arms again and cried till no more tears would come: all those years of wondering about my birth mother - whether she was still alive [I always hoped], what she was like [spirited, intelligent, kind and brave, I now know], whether she looked like me [the answer is very much so], whether she thought of me sometimes [of course she did, every day] and a thousand other questions. And it all ended here, at this graveside in Norwich - except that it hadn't, because love does not die. In this season of love, I am holding on to that.

I never thought I would receive Xmas cards like this.....

....... or be wearing items that belonged to my birth mum.

Romina Power reads Il Profumo della vita

SABATO MUSICALE

And a lady from the homeland to do the honours today. Take it away, Dame Shirley!

Dame Shirley Bassey and Blake - The Christmas Song

BUON NATALE 2015

I'm going to let my idol Charles Aznavour, whom I was lucky enough to see live in London in November, do the honours this year:

Charles Aznavour - Noël d'autrefois

Buon Natale Joyeux Noël Merry Xmas Feliz Navidad Nadolig Llawen

TORTA 2015

Here is my 2015 Christmas cake for London Town, Modica - Centro Linguistico Internazionale:

Buon appetito, ragazzi!

SABATO MUSICALE

Another centenary this week and it is that of the birth of Édith Piaf, whose music has always meant a lot to me. As it's Christmas, let us hear this song in which she remembers, as always, the "have-nots" of this world:

Édith Piaf - Le Noël de la Rue

MULTILINGUAL CAROL SERVICE 2015

I always think that Christmas has been well and truly declared when we have our multilingual carol service in Modica and this year has been no exception.

We again opened with Venite Fedeli, included the famous Italian carol Tu scendi dalle stelle and closed with  verses of Silent Night sung in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Other carols were sung in all these languages and there were readings in other languages including Malagasy:

I read from Mary Jones and her Bible - not particularly Christmassy but a nice story. I'd been thinking about Mary Jones a lot this year because Mary Jones World was opened in Bala, North Wales at the end of 2014. [One day I'll get there!]

As my contribution to the feast, I made my "Christmas chews" again, as I did last year.  As always, there was delicious food from every country represented:

It wouldn't have been a proper British contribution if someone hadn't made yummy mince pies and Christmas cake......

.... and it wouldn't have been quite Modican without several kinds of focaccia!