THE OLIVE OIL TSUNAMI

Olives waiting to be pressed at a frantoio, Umbria

      In the aftermath of the current olive oil scandal sweeping across Europe, four or five multi-nationals will be chastised for blending oils from several Mediterranean countries and selling them as 100% Italian, or, as Extra Virgin when they aren’t.  This European network of inter-locking corporations, defined by La Repubblica, the Italian newspaper (Dec. 26, 2011) as a cartel and an agro-mafia, will probably be fined. 

     Consumers across the globe will be left with a bad taste in their mouths, determined never again to buy Italian extra virgin olive oil, which has always been thought by many to be the best.

Old olive trees, Puglia

     As a result, thousands of small independent producers, often with families dependent on the annual harvest to put the next year’s food on the table, will be unfairly tainted, tarred with the same brush as the mass market suppliers. They may be producing DOP oil (Protected Designation of Origin, an EU designation), recognized as the best regional extra virgin olive oil, but they might as well be making the same sorry swill stocked on the shelves of supermarket chains around the world.

      Whose job is it to police the industry? There are regulations in place in the European Union and fraud units assigned to the daunting task of finding the cheats in the olive oil trade.  The U.S. passed regulations about olive oil categories in 2010, but they are voluntary. Nobody has enough inspectors. It’s the perfect situation for fraud.

       So, what is the consumer who loves olive oil to do? 

TTPPT:  Taste Trust Price Producer Travel  

Taste.  Educate your palate, just as you would if you were buying wine. There are plenty of alternatives to mass-market olive oil. Specialized olive oil stores have opened around the world and many offer customers the opportunity to taste the oil before they buy it.  Look for the freshest oil. Don’t go for the clear bottles, which don’t protect the oil from spoilage as well as dark glass or tins. Use your oil in a few months and store it in a dark, cool spot.

Trust.   Find a specialty shop that sells oil and develop a relationship with the owner or buyer.  Ask them to set up a tasting of several oils or set one up yourself. (See how the professionals do it by downloading Olive Oil IQ to your smartphone or tablet).

Price.  You get what you pay for, just like when buying wine. You may come upon a jug wine or a mass produced olive oil that’s pretty good, but if you want DOP extra virgin olive oil, or a bottle of DOCG vino, you will have to pay more than 5 Euros or 5 pounds or 5 dollars for it if you want a product that has been picked and pressed by a local producer in the traditional way.

Producer.   Find the producers whose oil you like and ask your local shop to let you know when the new oil arrives. Every year will be slightly different, dependent on the harvest, but eventually you will recognize a group of labels that offer the oil you want.

Travel.   If you’ve followed the wine routes, think about traveling the olive oil routes. All across the Mediterranean, from Italy to Spain to France to Greece, as well as in the New World, there are places to taste and buy local extra virgin olive oil.  Often wineries will also produce oil, so check the websites of the wines you like. Make the experience a part of a culinary vacation, as way of educating yourself to know what good oil tastes like, as well as to experience the ambience that is an essential part of a local olive oil culture. 

    This blog post was originally posted on http://oliveoiliq.blogspot.com.

copyright Sharri Whiting 2012

Life is Just an Ocean of Cherries; What to Do About It

    Somewhere around 1998 we planted a cherry tree at La Casetta Rosa, our house down the road. We just love cherries. For years, we had a few cherries here and there, most of which were enjoyed by the birds and the wasps before we ever got to them. This year, though, things were a bit different. Our cherry tree went on a growth spurt never seen by the likes of humans and 2011 will be a harvest for the ages. We picked cherries and gave them to friends, we picked cherries and ate them and ate them and ate them and gave more to friends.
    Finally, we recognized a problem: we needed to do something about the cherries filling up our kitchen and quick. Otherwise, they would all be ruined. Last Sunday morning I got up early and consulted my recipe books. I went into storeroom #2 and found a dusty box of empty canning jars, left over from the summer Jim and Carolyn stayed and went crazy making fig preserves. 

    I decided to start with Ciliegie sotto Spirito, a tasty concoction of 1) cherries 2) sugar and 3) pure grain alcohol. I found a bottle of the spirits in the back of the pantry, where it had lain since the year we made plum wine. (That's a whole 'nother story; suffice it to say that one of the bottles was left in the sun by some workers painting the living room and it blew up, scattering broken glass and plum wine all over the terrace, where every bee within flying distance arrived within thirty seconds to drown in sweet delight. A real mess).
     So, I started with the white lightning recipe, filling several liter jars. Next, I moved on to pickled cherries with white wine, white vinegar and fresh tarragon (called dragoncello in Italian, such a wonderful name). After that, I still had a few empty jars, so we tried pickled cherries in red wine, balsamic vinegar and brown sugar. Then we were out of jars and, as it was Sunday, the stores were closed. There were still a lot of cherries, even counting what we would eat with our lunch guests, with our dinner, and for breakfast the next day.
     Back to the computer. There is no cherry pitting implement in our kitchen, so I needed a recipe for how to freeze cherries with the stones in. Found out you wash them, dry them, spread them out in single layers to freeze separately and then put them together in Ziplock bags in the freezer. This was all well and good, but my freezer, which isn't the largest, was full of figs and plums from last year, along with a variety of things including a bag of Parmesan rinds for winter soups, half a frozen polenta cake from Christmas, and half a bottle of sorbetto limone with pro secco. The cake and some other over-aged packages (Il Magnifico calls them left-evers) got tossed, the sorbetto was consumed and we were in business freezing cherries. Supposedly, they will last a year and will taste like fresh fruit when defrosted. I will report back.

Umbria, Southern Style: the Bottle Tree Cometh

  
    When the peach tree that shaded our terrace at Yellow House started to die, we thought we'd have to take it out. Poor ole thing had been producing peaches as hard as baseballs for the last five years, it had bunions growing where branches had been trimmed in other generations, and early this spring it developed a terrible case of a wet black fungus that harbored zillions of little black bugs. 


    One sunny spring morning, we decided the old tree had to go. Il Magnifico and I dug around the storerooms #1, 2 and 3, and eventually found a little rusted saw and got to work on the misshapen branches. The flimsy instrument kept catching in the wood, so making any headway was like a trip to the gym -- in about five minutes our tongues were hanging out. Panting like hound dogs, we flopped down on the sofa and a long simmering idea surfaced in my Alabama- bred brain: our peach tree would have a second life, as a bottle tree. At last, I would have a little piece of the American South in my own backyard in Umbria (not counting the Mardi Gras beads strung in the olive trees).


    Il Mag went to the hardware store in Bastardo and brought back the biggest galvanized nails I've ever seen.  I scrounged around among the boxes and debris in the various storerooms for bottles, blue bottles to be exact. I've been following Felder Rushing's gardening show on Mississippi public radio for years, as well as his website (www.felderrushing.net/BottleTreeImagess.htm), so I knew from the hundreds of photos of bottle trees from across Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina and other southern states that this was the color I wanted. 


    According to Felder's history, the desire for bottles trees originated in Arabia after glass was invented, spread through central Africa, and was brought to the southern US by slaves as early as the 17th century.  In the South, bottle trees were a way to have something inexpensive and pretty in the front yard--bottles catch the light, shine brightly at dawn when the sun shines through them, glow at sunset. Cobalt blue bottles have been said to capture and banish the bad spirits, keeping them away from the house. I certainly wasn't going to have a bottle tree without blue bottles and I could find just one. That was not going to do.

© Eudora Welty Collection,  

Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1930s

    A call went out for blue bottles. Friends in Mississippi promised to bring us some, my cousin in Alabama passed along an old Milk of Magnesia, and my aunt in Virginia finished off some German wine and passed along the empty. A Brit with no earthly idea what I was talking about dutifully kept her eyes open and found some blue bottles containing water from Wales. I was making progress.
     

Ann and Dale

   Finally, our friends arrived from Oxford, MS, bringing with them a carefully packed box containing six beautiful blue bottles, along with their unmatched expertise on the South. Ann Abadie is associate director of the Center for Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi and an authority on all things Southern; her husband, Dale, is a historian. With them were law prof John Robin Bradley and, his wife, artsy Laura Bradley. With this level of Mississippi firepower on our terrace in Italy, we had no doubt our bottle tree would be imbued with a special magic. We each hammered in a nail and placed a blue bottle, with Laura's critical eye determining the perfect spot. 
    
   That was day before yesterday. Since then I've added an antique bottle from Cape Town to crown my tree -- since the idea for bottle trees came to the American South from Africa, I think its pale green glass is a fitting addition. Dale says I should move the bottles around once in awhile, for aesthetic reasons if not to confuse the roaming bad spirits. I might even consider adding red or yellow to the mix if I happen to find any. Any and all contributions will be accepted.

Bottle tree experts come to help

Bottle by bottle

   Fun reading about bottle trees:
http://usads.ms11.net/maxpower.html

http://usads.ms11.net/bottletree2.html
http://thiseclecticlife.com/2010/03/31/bottle-tree-at-last-maybe/
     
     

    

Martedi Grasso, Mardi Gras, Carnevale: It Began in Italy

A Carnevale princess on a street strewn with cordiandoli (paper confetti)

Mobile, Alabama, the town founded by Pierre Le Moyne d'Iberville in 1702, was the capital of French Louisiana from 1702-1711. In 1703, the settlers celebrated the first Mardi Gras in the U.S. The symbolic colors of Purple (justice), Green (faith) and Gold (power) became official in 1872. But, it was the Italians who started it all.

For adolescent Mobilians in the mid-twentieth century, Mardi Gras was all about the parades. The shining satin costumes worn by revellers atop mule-drawn floats reflected the flickering lights of the torches carried by the white jacketed muledrivers. Paper confetti and serpentine flew threw the air, landing in our hair, our mouths and the gutters. As children jostled for position among the crowds lining the street, straining for the beat of the marching band and avoiding their mothers' seaching hands, they thought only to go home with a good haul of the Moonpies and glittering cheap necklaces thrown by the masked men or women who rode the floats.

Carnevale in Piazza del Duomo in Milan

Mardi Gras (aka Martedi Grasso, Fat Tuesday), the culmination of Carnevale, was first devised by the Romans, although it is Carnevale in Venice and Viareggio that are famous worldwide. The word Carnevale translates as "go away meat," because during Lent practicing Christians did not eat meat. Much earlier in history, the Roman Saturnalia celebrations began with a parade of floats resembling ships – the carrum navalis. Instead of the colorful costumes we see today, the riders were, in fact, naked men and women dancing with erotic abandon. (And we thought that was a Brazilian idea). Eventually, the more sedate Carnevale celebrations spread to the Catholic countries of Europe and then on to the new world.

These days, Carnevale in Italy, apart from Venice, revolves mostly around children in costumes and food. The King’s Cake may be traditional fare in Mobile and New Orleans, but it is frappe, crespelle, sfingi, castagnole, cenci, nodi, chiacchere, bugie, galani, frittole, berlingaccio, sanguinaccio and tortelli that mark carnival season here.

Carnevale pastries

Children attend parties dressed like princesses or cowboys, while their parents ogle the pastry offerings that appear in the windows of le pasticcerie (bakeries) and clog the aisles of supermarkets. The diets that began on January 1 are forgotten these few weeks before Lent -- no one can resist the crunchy, flaky, sweet delight of a plate of frappe dusted with powdered sugar, and it’s absolutely impossible to eat only one.

In Umbria, Todi produces Carnevalandia, a lively festival packed with costumed children and their smiling parents, and a medieval banquet to localize it all. Other Umbrian towns celebrate with medieval-style flag throwers or Carnevale parties in the piazzas or schools. Costumes are for sale in local shops and i ristoranti decorate their entrances.

The Devil at EMI supermarket

At the supermarket, checkout ladies wear Carnevale hats and pretend to overlook the multiple packages of frappe sailing across their scanners on the way to my grocery bags and our own personal Pastry Saturnalia. And then, too soon, the frappe will be gone and Carnevale will be over until next year.
copyright Sharri Whiting 2011

Will Work for Food, Provided it's Zero Kilometer Cuisine

    Anyone who's willing to come to Italy to spend a week picking olives the old fashioned way is a someone who appreciates biological, organic, fresh, local food and wine. Taking that step back in the process, from consumption to the actual harvest of something they are eventually going to eat, allows us all to reflect on what we do to our bodies when we hit the fast food counter. Fortunately, here in Umbria, our friends can enjoy what the Italians call "zero kilometer cuisine" -- just about everything they eat while here will have been produced in the region.

No olive left behind

    Yesterday, our ten pickers produced six full crates of olives from about ten trees, 10% of what we need to accomplish this week. Today, after a good dinner and solid night's sleep, we expect to fill many more of those green, red and yellow plastic boxes. We still have  the old wooden olive crates used in the old days, but have turned them into kitchen cabinets -- they are so heavy empty it's hard to imagine moving them full of olives.

La Signora picks the leave from her family's olive harvest

     Since food is an integral part of any Italian experience, especially a culinary trip, we offered a "workers'" lunch of fresh minestrone with parmesan and olive oil, salumeria from Norcia (prosciutto, salami), Stilton cheese brought by a friend from England, mozzarella, and a variety of fresh baked breads. There was the endless flow of Omero's garage wine, of course, and a polenta torta, citrus crostata and mandarini for dessert. After a cup of coffee we hit the trees again to work off lunch; we have to begin thinking of dinner.

      Standing amid the olives at La Casetta Rosa, we could hear our neighbors picking their trees further down in the valley. The rythmic cadence of Umbrian-style Italian conversation drifted up our way on the breeze -- they must have listened to us speaking English with accents tinged with Italian, Dutch, American Southern, English, and Namibian origins. We were all doing the same thing: picking olives while talking about our lives, our children and grandchildren, our gardens. In our group there was also talk of test driving Ferraris, future trips, and the anticipation of eating tonight at Le Noci, our favorite restaurant in Grutti.

     At Le Noci, Il Magnifico wrote down the orders ad La Principessa recited the menu. This is not required of all diners, of course, but since we have the fare memorized, we can cut out minutes from the process by presenting the server with a fait accompli -- in Italian. This ensures appreciation from Danielle and the ladies in the kitchen, who send out food out in some kind of reasonable order.

     Old favorites on the table last night included were fazzoletti (triangular ravioli stuffed with ricotta and topped with panna (cream) and fresh shaven truffles, strongozzi with truffles, gnocchi stuffed with porcini, tagliata (sliced grilled beef steak) topped with fresh arugula and balsamic vinegar, stewed cinghiale (wild boar), capriolo (venison), and veal prime rib. All this was followed by tiramisu, bavarese, creme Portuguese, and fresh baked cookies with Sagrantino Passito.

     It's 6:30 a.m. on Monday now and still dark outside. There is some stirring upstairs, so the pickers must be awake. After a quick cup of coffee, we will be back out in the piantoni (big plants -- local name for olive trees). Their picking sessions will be bookended with a coffee break in the field, a farmer's lunch in the kitchen, and tonight's dinner at Frontini, an agriturismo which, by law, serves a menu made up almost entirely of their own or nearby production.

     Olivistas Arise! Day Two has begun.

Copyright 2010 Sharri Whiting

Olivistas to the Table! Soup's On

If you look closely, you can see the olives silhouetted against the sky

6 am. CET, Via Palombaro, Umbria
      The countdown started 364 days ago when the last pickers left to go home to England, Germany, the US, Namibia and the Netherlands. Tomorrow ten friends from around the world will come for our fourth olive picking house party. We call them the Olivistas.

     We've spent this week in preparation. Since I am dealing with a demonic case of jetlag, having arrived from the States three days ago, I have been in the kitchen by five every morning, chopping onions for a soffritto that will form the base of one of the five soups we will have for lunch during the harvest. I am partially cooking each one before freezing it; mixed aromas emanate from various pots, wafting warm jetstreams of onions, rosemary, sage, and porcini throughout the house. There is also the scent of fig bread baking in the oven, making for a confusing cinnamon/onion olfactory experience.
    The Olivistas provide the manual labor to pick our 120 trees and we want them to be glad they came.  Even if it's a chance to get away from the daily routine of office/patients/computers/grocery store, picking olives is hard work. When the sun shines across the valleys, highlighting the autumn red Sagrantino vines stretching across the fields, it can be glorious. If it's damp and misty, it can be romantic (sort of), provided one is dressed for it. But, if it rains, it's just awful.
     This is when a steaming boil of farro, lentil, ceci (chickpea) or minestrone soup can provide the inspiration to get us back in the trees. We sit around the kitchen table, warmed by the fireplace, the soup, Omero's wine (sold by the liter from a kind of gas pump), and the conversation of friends who come back year after year to help us get in the harvest.
     Il Magnifico's job as host is to be the supreme organizer. He makes sure there are enough crates, baskets, nets, and hand rakes -- we pick our olives the old fashioned way. He books the restaurants for dinner (the promise of a traditional Umbrian meal gets us all through the day), makes the grocery runs and the emergency trips to Omero to replenish the vital red liquid. Of course, he has reserved our slot at the frantoio, where we will gather next Friday morning to turn our harvest into "Olivista Olive Oil," extra virgin, first cold press.
     But, now we are watching the stove and the sky. We try to organize everything, but are powerless to affect the weather. Yesterday started with sun, then turned to rain and hail, then recovered itself with a spectacular rainbow. The meteorologists say it will be sunny through Monday and then will rain Tuesday and Wednesday. We need at least three full days to pick, so rain on those two days will be a problem. I keep checking the iPhone weather app for those little sunny yellow symbols. Our guests are here for the week, so if necessary they will pick on Thursday and we will go wine tasting, sightseeing or shopping if it rains on a picking day. Or, we might even enjoy the delights of dolce far niente, the "sweet doing nothing," in the Umbrian countryside.

A wide angle wasn't wide enough

     The last pot of soup is on the boil and the slowly dissolving stars promise a sunny day. The birds are singing as the sky starts to lighten. The olives hang dark on the trees, waiting for tomorrow.
Copyright 2010 Sharri Whiting

Life's overarching moments

  

     There is an overarching theme to life here at Yellow House: someday, Lord willing, we will finish restoring this casa colonica. As we did for a decade down the road at La Casetta Rosa, we pick one project to do every year. We are unwilling to experience the unabated nightmare of construction for longer than six weeks at time. After that, it won't matter how long it takes because we will no longer be living at Yellow House: we will be moved into the closest asylum.

    This year we chose to work on what we had euphemistically called "the laundry room" for the past three years. You may see it to the right. Beautiful, isn't it? Since it shared a wall with our too-small living room, the idea was to join the two, creating more space for living and entertaining. We called Lucio, the geometra who is our ever-ready project leader. Lucio called Donatello. Piero and I met with them amid the junk piles. We decided that what we needed was an arch. 


    The arch. Don't take it for granted.

     According to Wikipedia, an arch is a structure that spans a space while supporting weight (e.g. a doorway in a stone wall). Arches appeared as early as the 2nd millennium BC in Mesopotamian brick architecture, but it was the Ancient Romans who began systemically using arches in their buildings. 

    Donatello (Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi; c. 1386 – December 13, 1466) was a famous early Renaissance Italian artist and sculptor from Florence. His sculpture of David in the Bargello Museum in Florence is considered almost as important as the David by Michelangelo. 

    With the Romans and a namesake Florentine sculptor as his inspiration, Donatello of Umbria set to work. This is a man who is a muratore (stonemason) and plumber, but when faced with the prospect of creating an arch he turned into an artiste.

     First Donatello prepared the support beams, inserting six steel bars into the wall above where the arch would be. To skip this step would mean our 200-year-old two-story house would most likely fall down in a heap of rubble. Next, he began tearing out the stone, piece by piece, of what turned out to be a solid wall almost a meter thick. The pile of stones outside grew...and grew.

     The air was heavy with summer and yellow jackets were swarming everywhere. Our living room furniture at one point was moved outside, along with boxes of liqueurs and aperitifs taken from the bar. At one point, there was so much heat that a bottle of homemade plum wine simply exploded all over the terrace and every bee on our strada bianca was there in seconds to have a drink. (Afterwards, they fell in drugged stupors on the lawn furniture).

    One day the men arrived with an "arch form" they had made. We had an artistic conference, to discuss how the aged bricks would work with the stone in the arch. Donatello was a man possessed; was he embodied by the spirit of the great Florentine sculptor? We chose to go with his design of two bricks turned sideways intersected with a row of bricks set on their narrow ends. How in the world would they put this together without it all falling down on their heads? Aha! They inserted the form into the space and somehow, some way, managed to install the bricks by blindly arranging them on top. Amazing.

    After two days' drying time, Donatello removed the form and voila! we had an extraordinary arch. There was much more work to be done, but this was the centerpiece, the creative experience, the moment of supreme satisfaction. Che bello!

Control, Comfort, Competency, Confirmation. . .Bliss at Yellow House

    There is snow on the distant mountaintops, my winter veggies are planted, and life begins again in Umbria. We've been gone two months, hardly enough time to experience culture shock on our return. Still, living in the country in central Italy is a stark contrast to daily life in Fairhope, Alabama, USA and every time we shift continents it take a little while to re-adjust.

    In my work in cross cultural relations, I often point out the four vital elements everyone needs to feel at home: Control, Comfort, Competency and Confirmation. Do I really need to experience these to fit back into life on Palombaro ridge?

    Ah, the control issue.  It's natural to feel a loss of control when you first arrive in a new place. After all, you don't know how to find your way, and you can't be certain you'll ever get where you want to go. Coming home to Umbria, I wonder if it's time to cede control to Il Magnifico, the Italian in the family, who has settled in front of the TV to watch Roma play Lazio at soccer, earphones cutting off communication with the non-electronic outside world. I decide to share power: I will turn up the heat and he can bring in the firewood.

     Comfort comes with the familiar.  Jetlagged, I crawl into bed, turn on the heating pad, snuggle up in flannel sheets and fall into a deep sleep. For others, acculturation may mean learning to eat without worrying about the taste or ingredients, going into a shop expecting what you will find there, hearing the difference between an ambulance and a police siren and knowing how to plan your travel from one side of town to another. For me, Umbria means the silence of the countryside, the comfort of lying undisturbed in my cocoon, with a hint of woodsmoke in the winter air.

     I explain competence to uneasy students this way:  in a new and foreign setting, you will feel competent when you know how to solve simple problems, such as paying a bill, getting telephone service, finding the emergency room if you need it, even buying an aspirin. In Umbria, competence means I left behind clean towels in the linen closet, longlife milk in the cupboard, a fresh box of cereal, pasta, and plenty of coffee. We can hole up here all weekend without leaving the house. Bliss.

     We can lose our sense of confirmation during culture shock because there are no cheerleaders to applaud us for learning new skills, such as getting on the right bus or figuring out a washing machine with instructions in a new language. During this time we don't feel love from our usual support system and that can lead to loneliness. 

    No problem here. Winona leapt into my arms the instant we opened the door, meowing, nuzzling, black cat hairs flying through the air. In the last 24 hours she has provided confirmation by clinging to one or the other of us like a baby possum, leaving only to open the door to go outside to check the perimeter, something she has greatly missed while we were gone. (Yes, we have a cat who can open doors). We wandered into the kitchen, vaguely wondering about lunch, and found a note, "Look in frig." There was a big pot of homemade vegetable soup left for us by friends whose thoughtfulness was warming confirmation of our support system.


    Control, Comfort, Competency and Confirmation -- the four vital elements of acculturation. Add a fifth: very happy to be home.
   Copyright Sharri Whiting 2010

 

 

The Healing Power of Ceramics

Therapeutic shopping is not today's subject, though indeed it could be, since nothing cures the blues better than wandering the ceramics factories in Deruta to discover something that I don't already own and didn't know I couldn't live without.

This is about completely different kinds of miracles, beginning with the story of a single ceramic cup found in the tiny Umbrian village of Casalina, near Deruta. In 1657, a local merchant named Cristoforo stumbled across a little cup, which was decorated with a picture of Mary and baby Jesus. For some reason, Cristoforo hung the cup in an oak tree near a stream. When his wife became seriously ill, Cristoforo remembered the cup and prayed to the Virgin of the cup to spare his wife. By that evening, she was completely cured. Thankful, Cristoforo placed a handpainted ceramic tile on the tree, depicting his wife sick in bed, he himself praying to the cup hanging in the tree, and the written story of the miracle.

Before long, word got out about the miracle and people started asking the Virgin of the cup for help; other tiles commemorating miracles were nailed to the tree. Eventually a sanctuary, the Madonna del Bagno (Our Lady of the Stream, the name an improvement over Madonna of the Cup) was built around the oak tree, which is still visible behind the altar, along with fragments of the original cup. The walls of the little church are completely lined with hundreds of tiles dating from 1657 to 2005, each one made by an artisan to give thanks to the Madonna for creating a miracle. On many of them are the letters "PGR," per grazia ricevuta, for grace received.

The Madonna del Bagno has performed some very interesting miracles indeed -- tiles from the 17th century illustrate people falling out of trees, getting struck by lightning, gored by bulls, falling through a ceiling or off a horse, and running from packs of red devils. More modern matonelle (tiles) show a man on a bicycle being run over by a big long car in the 1930s; another depicts the day dynamite made a man blind and the Madonna restored his sight. There is also one involving a train -- details about the miracle are not clear. Miracles that saved children cut across all time periods, with babes in arms visible from the 1600s through today.

This little sanctuary near Deruta is one of Umbria's secrets, hidden in the shadows (the word Umbria means shade) until discovered on the way to somewhere more known or popular. A devastating robbery in 1980 resulted in the closure of the sanctuary for seven years, but the people of Casalina, undoubtedly assisted by the Madonna del Bagno, managed to raise the money for restoration. Today it is a reminder of the close ties between art, history, culture and religion that have marked Umbrian life for a thousand years.

When we stopped at Madonna del Bagno, we were actually on the way to what may be Umbria's most divine restaurant. The food at L'Antico Forziere is so good, in fact, that it just may deserve a tile with the letters PGR. To round out a day devoted to ceramics, visit the Ceramics Museum, where the exhibit celebrates the work of the painter Pintoricchio with an exhibit of majolica pieces through June.
copyright Sharri Whiting Umbria Bella 2008