Cortona in Tuscany

On 26 April we left London for Cortona, Italy -- flying to Florence and taking the train to Cortona, about 1 hour south of Florence. Chuck was participating in a conference there on the uses of computers and information technology in maritime applications. His office was partially sponsoring the conference and the subject is, of course, of professional interest to him.

The flight to Florence was routine and the train station and railway service were no problem. Cortona is one of the Italian hill towns of considerable fame. As described on a tourist web site: "The town hangs by its fingernails from the top of a mountain, with views of the surrounding landscape below." That's pretty accurate. These towns were heavily fortified during the period of the Middle Ages and it's easy to see they would have been almost impregnable at the time. But many of them, like Cortona, have histories that go back to even before the Romans -- to the Etruscans and, again in Cortona's case, to well before them. The city is believed to be at least 4000 years old.

The actual conference venue was just outside the town walls in a 15th century palace (called "Il Palazzone") built by "Cardinal Silvio Passerini (1469-1529), Bishop of Cortona, who had the stately building constructed as evidence of the power obtained by his own noble family, which had remained loyal to the Medici dynasty". [1] The building was donated in the 1960s to the University of Pisa by the Cardinal's descendants and is quite spectacular, with much of the original furniture still present and with numerous works of art, including excellent frescos on the walls and ceilings of many of the large rooms (including the one where the conference met). It was almost disorienting to sit in a room surrounded in all directions by works of art of the Renaissance while discussing computer technology and its applications.

Of course, being a hill town, Cortona's streets and byways are very steep. In fact, the 30 minute walk from the Pallazone to the heart of the town at Piazza de Republica would probably have taken only 15 minutes if on level ground. The town looks very much as it must have looked in the medieval era -- or maybe even earlier. All around the ancient buildings (still in complete daily use, many nicely modernized inside) are the remnants and walls of earlier buildings and boundary walls -- many from the Etruscan era.

The Pallazone was our hotel for the three nights of the conference, but its doors are closed at 8 pm (there is no permanent hotel staff there) and our arrival on Monday was expected to be at 9:30 pm or so. So we arranged to spend that first night in a hotel in the town proper -- the Hotel di San Michele. It, too, is in an ancient building that was obviously the home of one of the town's richer families, but it has been lovingly renovated. Our room was right under the roof tiles -- see the picture. We moved into the Pallazone for the next two nights where, frankly, the room was not nearly as nice.

On Tuesday evening we walked into Cortona together and had a very nice dinner at a small restaurant run by a young couple just off the Piazza. On Wednesday, during the work day for Chuck, Kathi explored the town at greater length and took many of the pictures you will find at: http://chuck.smugmug.com/gallery/2773087#147628506. One of the unexpected highlights was when she ran across the annual town parade to commemorate the liberation of the area by the US Army in World War II. The conference closed with a dinner at a hotel near the Pallazone which used to be a monastery. On Thursday morning it was back to Florence by train and London by plane, via Frankfurt, Germany.

[1]. Thanks to: http://www.sns.it/en/scuola/luoghi/palazzodicortona

Adelaide and Lorne

We flew from Singapore to Adelaide (with a plane change in Perth) on a Thursday, so that Chuck could meet with faculty members from the University of South Australia as well as with a couple of his colleagues from the Office of Naval Research who flew in from Washington. On Friday, while they were all making plans for future collaborations, Kathi took a self-guided walking tour of Adelaide. Until recently, Adelaide was Australia's fourth city -- after Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane -- but with the recent rapid growth of Perth on the west coast it has slid to fifth. While it is growing a bit slower than these other cities, it has retained a lot more of its "old Australia" flavor, making it actually quite pleasant to visit. (When Chuck accidentally deleted all our Singapore pictures from the new camera, the Adelaide pictures were also lost -- so all the pictures here are from Lorne and along the Great Ocean Road.)

It is a planned city, laid out (by a military engineer) on a grid system with large squares and a wide green belt surrounding the city center. There is still a very large, bustling central market reminiscent of a number of major European cities we've visited, such as Budapest. The expected large, modern high-rise buildings are present, but nestled among them are many of the kinds of buildings that were the height of municipal pride a hundred years ago.

We had dinner Friday night with our University hosts in a beautiful waterfront restaurant that specializes in food based on aborigine food traditions. The menu, of course, included kangaroo and emu; all was delicious. On Saturday we took a bus tour of the Barossa valley, a major Australian wine-growing region just outside Adelaide. There were two winery tasting stops as well as many sightings of Australian wildlife in their natural habitat. The tour brought home very strongly the fact that Australia is in the midst of a several-year-long drought and wine yields as well as many other agricultural enterprises are being adversely affected.

We made a mid-afternoon stop at the rural town of Hahndorf, which was founded by German Lutheran immigrants fleeing religious persecution in Europe -- a bit of rural German tradition in the Australian hinterland.

From Adelaide we flew on to Melbourne and, in a rented car, drove the 80 or so miles to the small coastal town of Lorne, where the workshop Chuck was attending (Waves in Shallow Environments -- lots of good math!) was being held in the Grand Pacific Hotel. The hotel's name is grander than the Victorian era building that houses it -- it claims to have been renovated, but Chuck's guess was that the renovation was probably done in the 1930s. One phone in the whole hotel. But the workshop organizers intentionally planned to meet in the isolated site to minimize distractions and to keep all involved in the work being done. (There were two Koalas feeding in a tree adjacent to the hotel.)

Lorne is a small town of about 1200 permanent residents located on the southern coast of the country along the Great Ocean Road, billed as one of the great coastal vistas in the world, on a par with California's Big Sur coast. Having lived at the north end of the Big Sur coast for 15 years, we'd agree that the Australian version is equally beautiful.

The last night of the workshop was marked with a dinner at a nearby golf course that is famous for the enormous number of kangaroos that inhabit its greens and fairways in the evening -- in fact it would seem that so many of them are involved in munching the grass that the golf course may be able to get by with far fewer lawnmowers than other courses. Unfortunately, the "'Roos" are most plentiful at night and it was very difficult to capture them outdoors at night.

The next day we drove back to the Melbourne airport and embarked for the very long flight to London, with a two hour layover in Singapore.

Additional Australia pictures are at: http://chuck.smugmug.com/gallery/2772173#147566314

Singapore

In early April we made one of our longer trips -- Singapore followed immediately by Australia. We were in Singapore for only a bit over two days, with Chuck meeting with the Singapore Defense Science and Technology Agency, faculty members of the National University of Singapore and being given a tour of the port of Singapore's huge container terminal -- as possible background for some work he may be asked to do back at the Naval Postgraduate School.

We were escorted by a former NPS student of Chuck's from Singapore, Ivan Ng. He couldn't have been kinder -- met us at the airport, took us all over the city, took Chuck to each of his business appointments, escorted us to dinner and took us back to the airport; hospitality of the highest order.

Ivan introduced us to several of the culinary treats for which Singapore is famous. At a riverfront seafood restaurant we had both black-pepper crab and chilli crab. These are really large crabs from the local waters -- not like Alaska king crabs but more like the Chesapeake Bay blue crab, but many times the size. Both versions are spicy, very tasty and very messy to eat! We ate dinner the next night at one of Singapore's famous "hawker" malls, made up of a bewildering array of stalls vending a tremendous variety of Chinese, Malay and Indian food.

At a dim-sum restaurant for lunch, we got to sample a wide variety of Chinese and Singaporean specialties under Ivan's expert guidance. Have you had frog porridge? Well, now we have, along with several other things that took a little less fortitude to try. You may think this is too much about food, but even our guide book pointed out that in Singapore shopping is the national obsession and food the national treasure.

Other great memories include a visit to the Singapore zoo at night for the famous Night Safari and a stroll through the beautiful, large botanical garden located in the heart of the city -- again with Ivan guiding and explaining. Kathi also spent a good part of one of the days strolling along the famous-for-shopping Orchard Road, which is lined for a mile or more with every kind of shop, store or restaurant you can imagine -- most of them pretty up-scale.

We did get some nice pictures, but unfortunately, when we went to Australia right after Singapore and Chuck was experimenting with our new digital camera he unintentionally deleted all the photos in the camera's memory. So we can't show you Ivan's smiling face or any of the beautiful sights of Singapore. Chuck is now required to have adult supervision when he uses the camera.

Tolbys in London, 2007

Our daughter, Julie, with husband Justin and our grandson Tyler, visited us in London in March. They had a busy sightseeing schedule for the first two days of their visit. They took the great London open-top bus tour (the kind where you can get off anywhere along the route and then re-board and continue later) and also took a river tour on the Thames. Both of these tours are great ways to see much of London and to get a feel for the layout of the entire city, as well as to see some of the really great scenic vistas along the river. (Julie and Tyler pictured.)

Julie, Justin and Tyler went to the theater to see "Lion King", which Tyler thoroughly enjoyed -- to the point that on the bus ride home, rather than falling asleep as he normally would at that time of the evening, he commented enthusiastically on what he had seen in the show. It was a great success from the standpoint of his enjoying it.

Kathi and Julie visited Kensington Palace, former home of Princess Diana and did the obligatory walk along famed London shopping thoroughfare, Oxford Street. They were joined later in the day for afternoon tea at the (near our flat) Sherlock Holmes Hotel by our friend Sara Allen.

While the ladies were having this "girls' day out", the guys visited Portsmouth, the major Royal Navy base. Portsmouth is the site of the HMS Victory (the flagship of Admiral Lord Nelson when he defeated the French and Spanish at Trafalgar) as well as many other nautical-history-related sites. Chuck, Tyler and Justin thoroughly enjoyed this "boys' day out" -- though, sadly, Chuck forgot to take the camera!

All five of us, the Calvanos and the Tolbys, went to an afternoon performance at the London Unicorn (children's) Theater of "Jemima Puddleduck". The Unicorn is a very interesting enterprise, devoted to introducing children to theater, but with thoroughly professional staff and actors. We also worked in a visit to the Tate Modern museum which was featuring a temporary exhibit of very large slides offering free slides to the public. Consistent with the Tate's approach, the large slides were considered "art" and, to quote from the museum's own web site "the experience of sliding is best summed up in a phrase by the French writer Roger Caillois as a 'voluptuous panic upon an otherwise lucid mind'. The slides are impressive sculptures in their own right, and you don't have to hurtle down them to appreciate this artwork. What interests Höller, (the artist) however, is both the visual spectacle of watching people sliding and the 'inner spectacle' experienced by the sliders themselves, the state of simultaneous delight and anxiety that you enter as you descend." We just enjoyed the ride -- especially Tyler. But Chuck, Justin and Kathi also shared the experience.

Robyn, one of Julie's law office co-workers (from San Diego before the Tolbys moved to Phoenix) and her husband, Mitch, paid us a visit while the Tolbys were here and we all met for dinner the next night at our local Chinese restaurant, the Phoenix Palace (the favorite restaurant of Tony and Cheri Blair, by the way).

Some photos of the visit are at: http://chuck.smugmug.com/gallery/2743926#145777777

Roots in Calabria

Chuck, of course, is of Italian descent, with his maternal grandparents from Naples and his father's parents from Calabria, a southern province of Italy. His paternal grandfather, Natale Calvano, was born in Cosenza, a small Calabrian city and his grandmother (Concetta) was from the nearby coastal town of San Lucido. Grandfather Calvano died before Chuck was born, but grandmother Calvano lived next door during Chuck's entire childhood and he grew up on stories about and references to San Lucido. He has had a lifelong desire to see the town, but despite many visits to Italy had never had the chance to go there.

Recently, he had business in Naples where Kathi joined him and they planned to drive the 180 miles to San Lucido. While Chuck does not know of any close relatives in San Lucido, his cousin, Rea (who lives in Illinois), has visited a cousin of hers who lives in the town. So Chuck and Kathi took a ride through the beautiful mountain and farm countryside south of Naples, arriving in San Lucido on a Friday evening. Using Rea's contact information, they met Rea's cousin (Franco Filippo) on Saturday morning in the town square, from which Franco drove them on an auto tour of the town and its immediate surroundings.


[The first 2 pictures show the square in San Lucido and Chuck with Franco (left) in the square, joined by a friend of Franco's who had lived in Chicago in Chuck's old neighborhood and was able to provide a small amount of translation help.]


In the tradition of Italian hospitality, he and his wife (Palmira) invited us to their home where Palmira served a fantastic lunch that seemed to consist of seven or eight courses. A delightful visit for the rest of the afternoon then followed. This was made rather more amazing in that neither Franco nor Palmira speak English and Chuck's Italian is extremely limited while Kathi's is just about non-existent. Despite this obvious limitation, the conversation (of about four hours) was entirely delightful and made much use of Chuck and Franco's in-born Italian talent of using their hands to communicate.


[A picture shows Kathi with Palmira in the Filippo home and the last one shows Chuck before the San Lucido war memorial.]

Some additional pictures of San Lucido (and some taken on our drive there) are at:
http://chuck.smugmug.com/gallery/2578013#135787919