Win Pasquales Nose: Idle Days In An Italian Town Articulated By Michael Rips Represented In Digital Copy
love this human interest stuff! Some of my most entertaining reads have been nonfiction about crazy people okay, not crazy, but definitely colorful!.
Someday I'll be able to afford a vacation in Italy, . . They certainly were Idle days in this small town, and at times I could feel myself there, His discriptions were sometimes, for me, incomplete, . . I wanted so much more, . . but he summed it up beautifully,
"Sutri is a small town and we don't want them to leave, Where else would they go"
What we think is not what they are thinking at all! Everywhere hailed for its quirkiness, its hilarity, its charm, Pasquale's Nose tells the story of a New York City lawyer who runs away to a small Etruscan village with his wife and new baby, and discovers a community of true eccentrics warring bean growers, vanishing philosophers, a blind bootmaker, a porcupine hunter among whom he feels unexpectedly at home.
It took many attempts to read this book,
It's sort of like A year in Provence but instead he's in this beautiful little village in Italy called Sutri nearby to Rome with bizarre characters.
. . Some of the short little stories were amusing but it wasn't put together well, some were so short I wanted them to last longer, some of them very long and sometimes dull.
Also the topics were so ranging some on the people, some of Sutri's history, architecture, I would have liked it to be more organized, less random,
I also didn't find the main character compelling as he seems selfish, His wife is and artist so she persuades him to move to Sutri, He spends his days sitting in the cafe doing nothing, taking care of their child, At one point he moves into the hotel, as he has a habit of living in hotels when he gets a little unsettled.
. . there was a bizarre flashback of his family, He hears a story about a guy who announced he was going to live in the basement and was never heard from again.
The family put food down and the man sent dishes back, . . And he thought it was an interesting story until he realized his mother was very stiff and he realized that was his uncle they were talking about.
. . Yes very bizarre and the people in Sutri are also strange,
The problem with all the bizarre as by the end it's the guy who wants to leave, the guy who will never leave, the man/woman.
. . Nothing really coheses well. This book is a collection of anecdotes from the author's time living in the Italian town of Sutri, which is just north of Rome, over the course of a few weeks.
This book was recommended to me by an acquaintance who owns a home in Italy and knows how much I enjoy travel.
It was a very quick and easy read, I thought that some of the anecdotes were quite interesting and thoroughly enjoyed them, However, there were also a few stories that felt a bit flat, Michael Rips depicts Sutri as a quaint little village and its inhabitants are quite eccentric, in contrast to the people from Rome, and perhaps not very welcoming of outsiders.
Overall, it was a good book, I enjoyed learning about Sutri and their way of life,
A quote from Rips:
”The transgression of Adam and Eve was not in learning the difference between good and evil but in treating the knowledge they received as something that was, literally, internal to thema food that could be seized, devoured, and controlled by the individual.
” Can these stories and people all be real! Either way Rips captivated me in the telling, And, reading this made me want to visit Italy more than ever, A bunch of charming little stories surrounding the cast of local characters in a small town in Italy.
Enjoyable amp light, yet with no real plot line to tie it all together, Reading the book I felt like I would have had to visit the town to "get it, " This book is a catchy little number that keeps the reader smiling from page one to the back cover.
If only we could all revel in the unabashed celebration of human nature like the people of the peninsula known as Italy.
Very amusing and warm hearted, Just read a chapter A quick reading trip to Italy with the requsite quirky characters, history, and food! I got my recipe for supper last night from it pasta with garlic and oil and my after supper company as well.
I met up with Salvatore, who owns Il Buco "The Hole",
Il Buco is located on one of the shortest, narrowest, and darkest streets in Sutri.
True to its name and location, it is a hole dug out of the side of a building, as if the building had been operated on years before and the wound had not properly closed.
The dining room of Il Buco has no more than five tables, with the rest of the room taken up in order of increasing size by the refrigerator, Salvatore, and the fireplace.
On the walls of Il Buco originally white, now covered in a smokegray patina are three small paintings, one of which is a portrait of a woman who appears to be gagging on a sausage.
The painter was a woman who realized some notoriety during her lifetime, and who, Salvatore calims, dined at Il Buco,
Despite the great amounts of heat and smoke generated by the fireplace, Salvatore stands his ground, sliding meat in and out of the flames, his arms down the throat of the fire.
The firedoes not affect Salvatore, He is its master. Salvatore is Vulcan.
This book is a quick read, onlypages but full of amusing anecdotes and Italian eccentrics, an interesting mix of historical fact and myth, as well as the author's reflections on life in a small hilltop town called Sutri.
Sutri is in the Tuscia, where I live, so the book was of particular interest, This region extends from Rome up to the borders of Tuscany in the north, Umbria to the east and the coast to the west.
The largest city in the region is Viterbo and Sutri an attractive hill town in the countryside, is an equal distance between there and Rome.
The inhabitants of the Tuscia are in general unassuming people and tend to be suspicious of stranieri' foreigners, which is probably one of the reasons that the region is still relatively undiscovered, a treasure trove of Etruscan antiquities and nature at its most beautiful.
The book is written as a series of literary sketches some of which I found amusing, others rather weird and the ones where the author tried to compare to familiar situations in the USA where he came from frankly rather boring.
One description too many for me was the recipe for horsemeat and learning that the best horse meat in Italy comes from around Sutri.
Information I could have done without, even when the author goes on to say that the Sutrini's also worship horses holding a festa in their honour!
I am glad that I read it and the next time that I visit Sutri I will certainly be looking around me to see if I can recognise any of the great cast of characters, including Gino, Dina, Vittore, Fiorina, Luciano, Romolo, and of course Pasquale who gives the book its title.
I do think though
that life even in Sutri may have moved on a little since!
I would not recommend it unless like me you happen to be particularly interested in Italy.
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