Dear Jeril... Love, Dad. Wayne P. Anderson
must be limited since we find ours turning right back to food.
Tuesdays are market days in the village, with street stalls all over the main square. Among the half that don’t sell shoes (Italians are evidently mad, crazy for shoes) are stalls selling great fresh vegetables and fruits and others selling a wide variety of Italian cheeses. The fruits are evidently tree ripened and are much sweeter than anything we’ve eaten in America. Our cheese consumption has also gone up markedly.
Wednesday night after the girls’ gymnastics class is pizza night. Each week we go to a different place to eat pizza. The different place is usually closed for vacation or out of pizza so we come back to Mario’s in Aviano and eat local pizza.
Pizza here is cooked in an oven with the wood burning right alongside the pizza. This gives the pizza a nice charred edge and ashes on the bottom that adds a special appeal to its taste. We find the pizza much better now than we did in 1973. We think they’ve been studying American methods of cooking it and have finally found out how to do it right.
Thursday, and if we’re in town Friday, are the family’s days for experimenting with Italian cooking. The girls have been practicing with new recipes they find in the armload of Italian cookbooks that Carla dragged home from the base library. A little chopping, a little tasting, a little panicky screaming for mother’s help, and we are served Italian food fit for Mama Mia.
Weekends are for exploring the Italian restaurant cooking. We still find ourselves fixated at the pasta level, rigatoni, linguini, spaghetti, tortellini, ravioli, lasagna, and on and on. We particularly enjoy some of the cream sauces they put on them.
The other day we did get a mad craving for American bread and baked up a couple of loaves, and one does need an occasional hamburger or piece of fried chicken in order to not to lose touch with our American roots.
By the way, the general rule here is, “Don’t drink the water.” We carry all our drinking water from the base. It seems that the water here is mostly good, but the use of fertilizer from sewage brings problems when the rain runs off the fields carrying various odds and ends into the water supply. We understand the water can go from safe to dangerous in hours.
The weekends are mostly for seeing Italy. Driving our yellow Volkswagen station wagon, we have sped through many a village. Many because they sit shoulder to shoulder on the back roads. Italy has a very dense population.
There are sections on the map with no roads. We took one of these the other day and found ourselves crossing a two-mile-wide river bed marked in places with just sticks. It seems that northern Italy gets by with temporary rivers. When it rains or the snow melts in the mountains, they have a river for a few days, then nothing but a dry rocky bed.
I’ve fallen into the bad habit of reading about places after we’ve visited them, This allows me to say, “Damn, do you know what was just down the street from that square we were in last week?” Speaking of last week we were in a town fifteen miles from here with many of the main buildings still being held up by large braces—the consequence of the last big earthquake in the area. The buildings that fell down have been cleared out, but those about to fall down have yet to be rebuilt.
In looking at picture books of Italy we have been surprised to see how much we have seen of the major sights between our travels in 1973 and now.
Two comments before I close. Italians in the north are remarkably individualistic looking. The men wear different amounts of facial hair, clothes that are often striking in style but don’t look like the next person’s. And faces abound that would delight any movie casting director looking for clowns, heroes and bad men.
The other thing is Italian drivers—they turn two-lane roads into three-lane roads. The passing here will take your breath away. They allow small tolerances and cut in sharply and don’t know what a safe following distance is. If you have a two-car-length between yourself and the car in front, it will soon be filled with two cars from behind. If you have a half-car-length, a midget Fiat will fill it. It’s a bit like being in a constant road rally.
Love, Dad
Aviano, Italy, November 1978
Dear Jeril,
Usually getting on and off this base is easy, but today the armed guards are out checking everything very carefully. The Red Brigade has threatened to blow up one of our bases so we’re back to maximum security.
Our most recent travel experience has been Yugoslavia. We didn’t know much about the country since it’s not the kind of place that we spend much time reading about, and Time magazine seldom mentions it. As a result most of what we saw was a pleasant surprise or at least unexpected.
Once you get your visa, the border crossing is easy, but at Trieste it’s crowded as Italians cross over to Yugoslavia to buy cheaper gas, meat and leather goods. The Yugoslavs cross to Italy to work and to buy shoes, toys and American jeans.
Old castles abound in the country as a result of frag-mentation and frequent small wars. You see them on hills, built into mountain sides, standing on sheer cliffs and in the middle of lakes and rivers. The best meal we had in the country was in a castle built on a small island in the middle of a river.
Prices are lower than those in Italy, and while not a bargain an American can feel he is not going to go bankrupt. Food is well prepared and plentiful, and you can drink the water. Department stores have a wide variety of goods, and even the common folk seem well dressed and fashionable. Not the older women, however, as they look the same in Greece, Italy and Spain with their dark heavy clothes that like the women are built to last.
Slavs are a particularly handsome people. Some say they have the most beautiful women in Europe. I still opt for the Scotch. I am aware of almost as much a mixture of people as we have in America—a fair number of tall people, and blondes and redheads are not rare. They seem to have a particular aptitude for languages, and with English and German I found I could get along very well.
I think Rosie may have become an opera fan in Zagreb where we saw a highly emotional performance of Tosca. We also took in a performance of the Lipizzaner horses in Lipica and were impressed with the variety of steps they can be trained to do to music.
While we were in Yugoslavia, we thought we felt quite comfortable, which leads to my unusual feeling of the week: when we crossed the border back to Italy, I felt a sense of relaxation as if we had just entered home territory.
The scars of World War II are still around us, and the war has been called to my mind a number times in the last few weeks. A small village up the mountainside from us is the “village of old women.” During the war they sheltered some American fliers, and as punishment all of the males in the village were shot.
We came upon a similar situation in Yugoslavia except their crime had been killing a German officer. For these and similar acts neither group has much love for the Germans.
In addition the Yugoslavians near the border have negative feelings about the Italians. Italy controlled this area until the war, at which point the Germans took over and moved the Italians out since they were singers and lovers and not warriors. Anyway, that’s the Yugoslavian version. Being themselves real warriors, the Yugoslavs hassled the Germans resulting in a loss of about twenty percent of their population.
The cave at Postujna—so huge you tour it on a small train—was the storehouse of ten thousand tons of petrol. A group of Yugoslavs went in a secret entrance and blew it up. Our guide, who at the time was an eight-year-old living near the entrance, pointed out the blackened walls. The caves were also full of potholes that both sides used to dispose of wire-bound prisoners.
While I’m on topic of death, we visited a graveyard on All Saints’ Day. As on our Memorial Day the graves were decorated and a large crowd milled around. The Italians have an interesting custom of putting pictures of the decreased on the headstones. We feel this makes a cemetery a much more interesting place to visit.
Many grave sites are held only temporarily. After you have been buried for ten years, your bones are dug up, put in a box and someone else gets to use the grave for awhile.