Here we are, staring down another full year and wondering if or how we are going to make the most of it. For a lot of us, that means giving up vices or improving ourselves. For others, a new year holds the promise of traveling to new places or enjoying more of what life has to offer. So why not combine the two by taking a trip to Italy?

In this post, I’m going to look at the many ways to get  or stay fit while on vacation in Italy. If you’re looking for information  on golf in Italy, I’m saving that for its own post.

Biking Tours
It’s easy to want to eat everything in sight on a trip to Italy, but there are also plenty of ways to maintain a fitness regimen or get some exercise. The first thing that comes to mind are biking tours. If you really want to get your heart pumping, check out tours from Ciclismo Classico. Around since 1988, this bike tour company has numerous rides for the athletic traveler, including the Amalfi Stroll & Roll and the Bike Across Italy Tour, considered the company’s signature tour. If you really MUST break your diet, they also include a Giro del Gelato, a one-day mini tour.

Prefer easy cruising through Florence and Rome instead of pedaling through the countryside for days? Romantica Tours offers escorted Cruiser Bike tours, which are easier than walking from landmark to landmark and less obvious than a Segway tour. Here’s what you can expect:

For more information about bike tours around Italy with other companies and logistics of doing your own Giro d’Italia, check out this Italy Biking blog.

Walking Tours
Walking tours in Italy are also popular. These types of tours are for occasionally active travelers who like to take things at a slower pace or for more serious walking enthusiasts who enjoy challenging hikes. Some appealing trips for 2010 include the Wayfarers’ Historical Themed Walks around Italy, Andiamo Adventours’  Dolomite Hiking Tours, and Girosole’s Walking Tours of Umbria.

Horseback Riding
In this instance, the horse – and not you – is doing most of the activity. But horseback riding is considered a sport, so I will touch on a few of this type of tour here. The most unique of these that I have found is the Mount Etna Ride in Sicily offered by Hidden Trails. I was also inclined to include this category of active travel because of a blog I found recently via Twitter called Writing Horseback. I particularly enjoyed Zach Everson’s guest post on his Riding Vacation in Tuscany. This blog is chock full of information for horseback riding enthusiasts who like to travel.

Yoga Retreats
No need to travel the whole world, when you can eat, pray, and love in Italy. Sure, Italy doesn’t seem like the most typical place to study the eastern practice of yoga, but the craze is just as big there as it is throughout the world. Some of the yogi-centric tours available in Italy are offered by YogAdventure (in Puglia), the Hill That Breathes (Le Marche),  Seeds of Yoga (near Rome in the Sabina Hills), and Symmetree (in Tuscany, near Siena). Many, many more yoga courses and retreats, as well as agriturismi geared to yoga lovers are cropping up in Italy every year, and you can find a longer list of the offerings on the websites Yoga in Italy and Retreats Online. There’s also the Roma Yoga Festival going on June 4-6, 2010.

Marathons in Italy
For the seriously fit or those who want to fulfill the dream of running a marathon “someday,” there is the possibility of running that 26.2 miles in Italy. I also can’t imagine better scenery for a such a trying endeavor (see the video of the Rome Marathon below). Several cities in Rome have annual marathons including Rome (March 21, 2010), Milan (April 11, 2010), Florence (November 28, 2010), and Pisa (December 19, 2010).

Photos © jooferr, fbnm

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• New Year, New Italy Deals

First they want to scan my copyrighted books and now Google wants to be a tour guide: has Google gone too far this time? I recently received a Google Wave invitation, so I was browsing Google Labs to see what else was on the backburner. It seems that Google will soon be launching City Tours, putting people like me – travel writers – out of business. Or will it?

Here’s Google’s thinking behind City Tours:

Making holiday planning as easy as searching the web. City Tours helps you identify points of interest and plan multi-day trips to most major cities. You just specify the location of your hotel and the length of your trip and City Tours will map out an itinerary for you.

I thought I’d look up Rome as a test. Google presented me with a three-day itinerary – complete with map, of course. The plan included walking time, distance, and links to the sites included on the tour. The first day had me going to locations such as the Museo del Risorgimento, the Pasta Museum, Les Musées du Capitole (Capitoline Museums – Google’s link was spelled the French way), and about five other place. Fine. Some of these sites, especially the Capitoline Museums, are worthy of a first-day visit even for a first-timer. But the itinerary didn’t tell me, for example, that the Pasta Museum is near the Trevi Fountain (though you can see that fact if you zoom in on the map), or that the Museo delle Cere (the Wax Museum) is totally lame.

I’ll give Google points for being able to add/delete sites from an itinerary and change dates. For example, if I were beginning my trip on a Monday (when many museums are closed), the auto-generated agenda ostensibly should steer me towards sites that are actually open. You can also choose the length of your tour, from 1 to 5 days. Unfortunately, when I chose a one-day tour of Rome, Google came up empty-handed. The program should at least generate a basic tour for one day – ya know, Vatican Museums, Spanish Steps, a handful of churches.

So Google City Tours is still in the Labs stage. And, in my opinion, has a long way to go to get it right. Thankfully, I think this tool, like an online translator, is helpful and pretty cool. But, in a field as subjective as travel, nothing beats the human touch.

Am I right?

Photo from Google

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Fall is a great time to explore Italy’s national and regional parks, what with the beautiful foliage changing colors and the majority of tourists – both Italian and international – having packed up their bags and headed home. Italy currently has 22 national parks – with two more in the process of being established – and dozens upon dozens of regional parks and protected areas.

The best place to find information about Italy’s parks is at the parks portal at www.parks.it. Here you will find information about each of the parks, staying or dining near the parks, and upcoming events, among many other details. Some autumn events that caught my eye are the Night Tour in the Parco in Ussita in Le Marche, Wolf Weekend in Aquila (Abruzzo), and Trekking with Donkeys Between Fairy Tales and Chestnut Woodlands near Rome. And, for you gadget heads, Italy’s park service is experimenting with GPS-guided walks.

One of the best tools for researching and deciding on a park to visit is the parks.it map tool. Here, you can zero-in on parks within regions or provinces. For example, I chose to search parks in the region of Lazio and the province of Rome. The result was 31 protected areas, including one protected wetland. Though you can’t click through on every park to find out more info about it, you can learn which ones are nearby. So, if the din of Rome is getting to you, you’ll see that green space is not very far away!

Have you had an unforgettable visit to one of Italy’s parks? Tell the Italofile Community about it.

Photo by troise

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• The Real Pinocchio

Pinocchio Marionettes in Collodi, Tuscany

Last November, the New York Review of Books released Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio under its NYRB Classics imprint. The tale, as reviewed by Tim Parks in the latest issue, is much darker than the Disneyfied version. After the jump is Parks’ full review. As always, I urge you to subscribe to NYRB; they often review books on Italy and even have an Italian version, La Rivista dei Libri.

By the way, if you’re visiting Tuscany with kids, you may be interested in venturing to the Parco di Pinocchio in the author’s hometown of Collodi (Carlo Lorenzini adopted the town’s name for his nom de plume).

Knock on Wood
By Tim Parks
The Adventures of Pinocchio
by Carlo Collodi, translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock, with an introduction by Umberto Eco and an afterword by Rebecca West

New York Review Books, 189 pp., $14.00 (paper)

A voice yells from within a pine log, “Don’t hit me too hard!” The carpenter is astonished, his axe stayed. When they come unexpected, life and language are unsettling.

Brought into being by blows, the talking log proceeds to start a fight: the carpenter’s friend Geppetto has arrived to ask for a piece of wood and the voice mocks his yellow wig; Geppetto imagines he is being insulted by his friend and in a moment the two are on the floor, scratching, biting, and thumping. Consigned to Geppetto, the lively log contrives to bang his shins and provoke a second misunderstanding and a second fight before it is taken away.

Old Geppetto is something of an artist. His house is bare, but he has painted bright flames in the fireplace and a merrily boiling pot above them; when reality is hard, illusion may offer consolation. Now Geppetto is about to embark on a much greater act of creation: he will fashion a traveling companion who can “dance and fence, and do flips,” so that together the two can earn a “crust of bread” and a “cup of wine.” He’s thinking of company and economic advantage. But no sooner has Pinocchio been carved from his living log than he is snatching off Geppetto’s wig, revealing the reality of his maker’s baldness. Taught to walk, he runs off. When Geppetto catches up and starts to give the puppet a fierce shaking, he is arrested for assault and jailed. The artist has lost control of his creation. Raw vitality with no inhibitions, Pinocchio is freed into a world of hot tempers, vanity, ignorance, and appetite; a violent tussle is never far off.

Himself a creative spirit in hard times, the satirical journalist, playwright, and novelist Carlo Collodi began writing Pinocchio in 1881. He was fifty-five, disillusioned, pessimistic, combative. A Florentine through and through, in 1848 and 1859 he had volunteered to fight in two unsuccessful revolutionary wars that sought to replace a fragmented Italy dominated by foreign powers with a unified, self-governing state. In the 1860s that goal was chaotically and unexpectedly achieved, albeit under the austere Piedmontese monarchy. Like many who had supported the cause, Collodi was dissatisfied with the consequences. Politically united, Italy remained culturally divided and backward, a country in need, as the poet Leopardi had once said, of some collective “illusion” that might give its people a sense of identity. “Now we have made Italy, we must make the Italians,” the patriot Massimo D’Azeglio famously declared. Unfortunately, government policies based on national pride led to tariff wars and further impoverishment, provoking regional resentment and unrest. Some went hungry. Many predicted the imminent breakup of the country.

In this uncertain environment one crucial instrument of unity and stability was the newly introduced, compulsory education system. In 1868 Collodi was invited by the Ministry of Education to contribute to a national dictionary: Italians must speak and spell in the same way. In 1875 a Florentine publisher specializing in children’s literature gave him the job of translating Perrault’s fables from the French; the best works of foreign literature were to be published in a modern, standardized Italian. After completing this translation, Collodi was encouraged to write for children himself: first the stories of a boy, Giannettino, who travels through Italy from north to south (“to give kids half an idea of their new and glorious country, about which they know absolutely nothing”), then the tale of Minuzzolo, a boy who makes fun of all attempts to teach him to be good. Later, Collodi would go on to write some highly successful math, grammar, and geography textbooks.

In short, the rebel and satirist had been drawn into the huge task of educating modern Italians. He was aware that it was not a project children would rejoice in. Nor was his approach conventional. In 1883 the Ministry of Education would reject the tales of Giannettino and Minuzzolo as standard texts for elementary schools because they were “so humorously frivolous as to detract from the seriousness of teaching.” In general, Collodi’s writing is galvanized by the contradiction that while education is understood to be essential, it is presented as generally dull and often futile, if only because human nature is so intractable. Despite being educated in a seminary, Collodi himself was a drinker, smoker, gambler, and womanizer.

The success of his children’s books was welcome but Collodi’s ambition had been to write adult literature. Here, however, his work was criticized for failing to deliver realistic character and incident, and for its underlying pessimism about both the new Italy and human nature in general. Following Zola’s lead in France, the fashion of the day was verismo, a dour realism justified by its commitment to social progress. Out of step with the times, Collodi had a flair for the surreal and absurd that looked back to Sterne and forward to Pirandello; in the 1880s such an approach was considered appropriate only in children’s literature. Thus Collodi frequently found himself invited to work in a genre he sometimes felt was below him. When his publisher insisted he contribute to a new children’s weekly, Giornale per i bambini, he reluctantly delivered the first installment of “The Story of a Puppet,” with a letter remarking: “Here’s some childish twaddle, do what you want with it; but assuming you print, you’d better pay me well if you want to see any more.”

The story would later be retitled The Adventures of Pinocchio. Collodi did not grow more fond of it. A third of the way into the book we now have, he left Pinocchio hanging by the neck from a tree, having apparently put a gruesome end to both the puppet and his tale. It took the magazine four months to convince him to press on. Later, he was so weary with the project that he took another six-month break. Very likely it was this irritation at writing in a genre he thought secondary that accounts for the story’s extraordinary mood swings and unusually cavalier approach to such matters as narrative consistency. Ironically, these are the very qualities that give Pinocchio its extraordinary vitality, qualities that come across in the new translation by Geoffrey Brock. Like Geppetto, Collodi had casually started something that took on a life of its own.

The celebrated and sugary Disney film adaptation (1940), by which most people outside Italy have come to know Pinocchio’s story, announces itself as an example of how, if sincerely desired, even the greatest of wishes can come true: a reassuring message. Nothing could be further from the acid spirit of Collodi’s “Story of a Puppet.” The question with a puppet is: Who will manipulate him? When the puppet turns out to have a stubborn and stupid will of his own, that question becomes: Whom will he allow himself to be manipulated by?

Having got Geppetto arrested, Pinocchio rushes home, only to experience a shock like the one he earlier gave the carpenter: a voice speaks from nowhere: “Cree, cree, cree.” It is the Talking Cricket (Disney’s Jiminy Cricket) who has “lived in this room for more than a hundred years.” Revealing himself on the wall, the officious insect proceeds to give Pinocchio some hundred-year-old advice: “Woe to any little boy who rebels against his parents and turns his back on his father’s house!” A surprisingly well-informed Pinocchio is having none of it: he’s off, he declares,

because if I hang around the same thing that happens to all the other kids will happen to me, too: I’ll be sent to school, and I’ll be expected to study whether I like it or not….

When the cricket warns that this attitude can only lead to disaster, “Pinocchio jumped up in a rage, grabbed a wooden mallet from the workbench, and flung it at the Talking Cricket.” Far from crooning his way through the puppet’s many adventures with blue top hat, red umbrella, and yellow dancing shoes, the creature dies at once, splattered on the wall. It is typical of Collodi that while the rest of the book will show just how right the cricket was, the author nevertheless seems to take as much delight as any child in having this wearisome pedagogue obliterated with such panache. That said, he then has fun resurrecting the insect on two or three occasions to exchange insults with his killer.

Whether the cricket is dead or alive, traditional wisdom is evidently defunct, a tedious chirp no one has time for. Who then will harness the mad vitality of this improbably artificial, newly created Italian? Rather than the uplifting account of a noble wish come true, Collodi’s tale records the thoughtless exuberance of a character whose only talent lies in trading insults and whose inevitable destiny is to be exploited at every turn. The writer’s achievement here was to tap into the zany spirit of Tuscan humor to deliver a Pinocchio who swings alarmingly between lies and candor, generous sentiment and cruel mockery, good intentions and zero staying power. Geoffrey Brock’s accomplishment in his excellent new translation is to get that spirit across in English, albeit and inevitably without the intense flash of recognition one has on reading the original Italian; for Pinocchio does indeed capture a perplexing waywardness that one experiences every day in Italy.

In this regard it’s worth comparing the opening scenes of Disney’s animated film, in which, bright as a new toy, the cute and evidently harmless Pinocchio dances and sings in an oddly Alpine, cuckoo-clock world—not a sniff of Italy about it—charmingly supported by pussycat and goldfish, to the 2002 acted film adaptation by the Italian (and Tuscan) comic Roberto Benigni. Benigni can irritate with his facile high spirits and boundless self-regard, but they are indispensable qualities for this part. His Pinocchio leaps from the artist’s bench into frenetic action, bouncing off the walls, chasing up and down ladders, tripping, skipping, slipping, and simply terrorizing the bewildered Geppetto in a whirlwind of activity accompanied by manic logorrhea. The film may not have been a box-office success, but Benigni convincingly captures the anarchic energy of the original. Plus…the actor is blessed, or cursed, with a long, pointed nose.

Pinocchio, we are told, had “a prodigiously long nose, one that seemed specially designed to be easily seized by policemen.” Again and again, it is the puppet’s nose, emblematic perhaps of his unschooled vitality, that leads to Pinocchio’s being caught out and mortified. And of course it’s a nose famous for growing longer and shorter. The first time this happens, however, it is not because the puppet has told a lie. Having hammered the Talking Cricket to the wall, Pinocchio suddenly discovers a ravenous hunger. So…

Poor Pinocchio ran quickly toward the pot that was boiling on the fire and reached out to remove the lid, to see what was inside—but the pot was painted on the wall.

Just imagine how he felt. His nose, which was already long, grew at least four inches longer.

Initially, then, Collodi seems to have imagined the nose’s growing and shrinking with Pinocchio’s failure or success in distinguishing illusion from reality.

The theme is recurrent, though Collodi never allows us to settle on a single version of what reality might be. Having got his feet wet begging for food in the rain, Pinocchio returns to Geppetto’s house, falls asleep over a lighted brazier, and burns his feet off. Where the brazier was when he ran to the painted fire and cooking pot, we do not know. Freed from jail, Geppetto first threatens and then takes pity on the puppet, makes him new feet, and gives him three pears, the only food he has. It’s crucial throughout the tale that food is scarce and one must learn to like whatever is available. A finicky Pinocchio demands to have his pears peeled; then, still hungry, eats peels and cores too. This is education of a kind. Collodi, it’s worth recalling, was the first of ten children born to parents of the servant class. Six of his siblings died in childhood. He knew hard times.

A full stomach allows Pinocchio the luxury of feeling moved by Geppetto’s sacrifice and he declares his willingness to go to school. Moved by Pinocchio’s being moved, Geppetto rushes out and sells his coat to buy a school primer. Far from gaining economically from his creation, he now has no food and no coat, and very soon no company either. On his way to school Pinocchio hears a drum gathering a crowd for a puppet show and promptly sells his precious primer to buy a ticket. Geppetto won’t see him again until the last pages of the book.

Onstage in the show, Harlequin and Punchinello “traded insults so realistically that they truly appeared to be two thinking beings, two persons of this world.” The audience loves it: illusion that mimics ugly reality. But when the puppets see Pinocchio and recognize him as one of them, they break off the performance, calling him up on stage, hugging and embracing. Despite this “heartwarming spectacle” the spectators are furious that their entertainment has been interrupted and a ferocious puppet master has to intervene to reimpose the real illusion. It was precisely this satirical use of fantasy and paradox that critics disapproved of in Collodi’s work for adults.

Later, as punishment, the wooden Pinocchio is to be burned to roast the puppet master’s mutton. When the big man takes pity on the weeping Pinocchio and decides to burn another marionette instead, Pinocchio shows that he is as capable of a noble impulse as a selfish one: he would rather die himself, he declares, than have someone die in his place. Moved by this generosity, the puppet master forgoes his roasted mutton (but only this once, he warns) and unexpectedly gives Pinocchio five gold coins to take to his poor daddy, Geppetto.

Is it just “childish twaddle,” this constant back and forth between cruelty and compassion, this world where human interaction invariably follows the pattern: selfish impulse leads to pain which prompts shame and good intentions which are quickly forgotten when the next selfish impulse clicks in? Could such a story have relevance today?

His five coins in his pocket, Pinocchio is on his way home when he runs into the Cat and the Fox, the one pretending to be blind and the other to be lame, one supporting the other, one leading the other, in a grotesque charade of solidarity. Unable to distinguish a painted fire from a real one, Pinocchio is unlikely to see through these two practiced con men. “Want to double your money?” the Fox ominously inquires. “Meaning?” the puppet asks.

“Your five gold coins could become two thousand overnight.”

“Overnight!” repeated the Cat.

“But how could they possibly become so much?” asked Pinocchio, his mouth hanging open in astonishment.

Indeed, how could they? The answer is easy: you go to the Land of Gulls and bury your cash in the Field of Miracles. With the confident air of a financial adviser from the Wall Street of a year ago, the Fox explains his Madoff mathematics:

You can count it out on your fingers. Let’s say that each coin grows into a bunch of five hundred coins—multiply five hundred by five, and the next morning you’d have two thousand five hundred shiny new coins.

Like many a modern investor, Pinocchio falls for it. He spends one of his coins treating the swindlers to dinner, only to find they have disappeared when, at midnight, the threesome was supposed to set out for the Land of Gulls. Accosted in the dark by two murderers draped in sacks, Pinocchio fails to recognize his fellow diners, but does manage to hide his coins in his mouth. Unable to prise it open, the Cat and Fox hang the puppet on a tree, planning to return for the cash the following morning. “Oh, if only you were here, Daddy!” calls Pinocchio, in what sounds suspiciously like an allusion to the Crucifixion. Then:

His eyes closed, his mouth opened, his legs straightened, and then, after a tremendous shudder, he went completely limp.

This is where Collodi wanted to bow out, with the puppet reduced to an inanimate marionette dangling from a string: reality. But it was too brazenly pessimistic; there were too many young readers anxious to hear more, and too many loose ends to tie up. In particular, shortly before the murderers caught up with Pinocchio, a new character had been introduced whose spirit would preside over the remainder of the tale when Collodi resumed.

Running for his life, the puppet had seen a small house gleaming whitely in the dark; his banging on the door brings a girl with “sky-blue hair,” as Brock’s translation has it, to the window, “her face white as a waxen image.” Evidently the place is magical, sacred perhaps; clearly there are allusions to the Madonna, last resort of those in need, and ever associated with the color blue. But the girl dashes Pinocchio’s hopes of salvation. No one will open the door, she says, because everyone in the house is dead, herself included: in fact, she is waiting for her coffin to arrive. This is the figure Disney presents in the adaptation’s opening scene as the entirely reassuring Blue Fairy, embodiment of a world where all endings are happy.

One of the thorniest problems for those intent on constructing an Italian national identity was the fact that the Catholic Church had opposed unification, papal armies had fought against it, and the faithful were instructed not to collaborate with the new state and in particular not to vote in elections. But who were the Italians if not Catholics? One of the many ways in which successive governments sought to bridge the gap was by promoting Alessandro Manzoni’s determinedly Catholic novel The Betrothed ( I Promessi Sposi ; 1834) as the great model of Italian narrative. More intriguingly, in the last decades of the century, artists eager to establish a specifically Italian school of painting would seek to appropriate Catholic iconography to secular culture. In Giovanni Segantini’s Angel of Life ( Angelo della vita; 1894), for example, an idealized mother and child sit airily robed in the crook of a gnarled tree whose gothic branches blacken as they reach into a soft glow of pale blue sky.

Collodi could hardly have been indifferent to the issue. He had been educated for the priesthood before joining the cause of the anticlerical Risorgimento liberals. Rather than the pious and respectful appropriations of painters like Segantini, his own vague allusions to Catholic images—particularly the elusive blue-haired fairy— are deeply ambiguous, as though a nostalgia for some comforting metaphysics was constantly being dissolved in mockery. It is curious that while Italy’s best-known adult novel, The Betrothed, is Catholic and optimistic, its most-loved children’s work dramatizes an irreverent and skeptical pessimism. Children perhaps have a thicker skin than their parents.

The story resumes with three resurrections. The blue-haired fairy is inexplicably alive and magically powerful. Why then did she not help the puppet earlier? She has Pinocchio taken down from his tree and brought to her house where he is attended by three marvelously pompous doctors, one of whom is the Talking Cricket. His denunciation of the puppet is so ferocious that Pinocchio bursts into tears and can thus be pronounced alive. Later, when the puppet lies to the fairy about where he has put his money, she causes his nose to grow as punishment. From this moment on the distinction between reality and illusion focuses more sharply on questions of truth and falsehood, responsibility and denial.

Pinocchio’s vicissitudes are many. Determined to reform, every time he sets out in the world he is tempted and succumbs. Tricked again by the Cat and the Fox, he buries his money in the Field of Miracles, loses it, reports the swindlers to the police, and, in a typically paradoxical twist, is jailed himself for his ingenuousness. Released, he returns to the fairy’s house to find a gravestone announcing that she has died of grief because she had been “abandoned by her little brother Pinocchio.” Soon afterward she is alive again, though strangely relocated in town and much aged, to the point that she now takes on the role of mother, guardian, and guide.

These dreamlike shifts of identity tease the reader to construct some interpretation, but without offering a consistent reading. The mixture of portentously symbolic encounters (Pinocchio finding his path blocked by a huge serpent or being swallowed by a huge fish) with more mundane situations (getting a foot caught in an animal trap or being attacked by schoolmates)simply increases the sense of enigma. In one beautifully surreal scene reminiscent of Lewis Carroll, a repentant Pinocchio returns at night to the fairy’s door, but his knock is answered from a fourth-floor window by a snail who tells him the fairy is sleeping and cannot be disturbed. It then takes the snail nine hours to get downstairs and open up, during which time Pinocchio kicks the door so hard his foot goes through and gets trapped. It’s a charmingly light dramatization of frustration and penance.

Startled to find the blue fairy aged, Pinocchio for the first time expresses a desire to grow up. To do that he must cease to be a puppet, the fairy declares; he must become “real” or, as the Italian has it, vero, true. In short, he must be obedient and go to school.

“Reality,” then, has to do with an assumption of responsibility. But it is so hard to want this! After months of good behavior, on the brink of becoming “real,” Pinocchio falls for the idea of a place where every day is play day, and heads for Toyland, a decision that can only lead to disaster and donkey’s ears. Collodi, we recall, was a man who frequently fell in love and never married, or ever gave up his drinking, smoking, and gambling.

But finally Pinocchio does get there. The turning point comes when, transformed into a donkey, he is performing in a circus and spies the fairy in the audience. His joy at seeing her, then anguish as she witnesses his humiliation, is intense. For all the book’s ambiguities, one thing is clear: the mother figure who hopes and suffers for her son is a far more powerful educator than any creaking pedagogue and a more recognizably unifying Italian archetype.

Recovering his puppet form, Pinocchio rescues Geppetto from the belly of the great fish, accepts humble work to feed him, and when he hears that the fairy is sick in a poorhouse gives all his savings to help her. “Imagine his amazement,” Collodi enthuses, when waking the following morning he has become “a boy like other boys.” The straw hut he and Geppetto live in is transformed into a solid house. There is no painted fire. Rather Geppetto is “designing a beautiful picture frame,” as if to separate illusion and reality once and for all.

Some critics have suggested that the formula “a boy like other boys” (or “like all the others” as the Italian puts it) is double-edged: accepting responsibility, Pinocchio sacrifices freedom and individuality for the dubious benefits of conformity. In her informative afterword to the new edition, Rebecca West, a professor of Italian and cinema at the University of Chicago, appears to assent. Yet Pinocchio, made from a log like other logs (the Italian uses the same formula at the beginning of the book), never displays anything so sophisticated as individuality or enjoys any freedom. He is merely a victim of internal whim and external manipulation. “How funny I was, when I was a puppet!” the newly real, responsible Pinocchio remarks, and the Italian buffo suggests “amusing, ridiculous, endearing.”

How exactly the miraculous transformation of growing up has come about, we can’t quite be sure. An educator who savored enigmas rather than dictating solutions, Collodi in 1886 was probably not unhappy to find himself classified thus in Giuseppe Mantica’s fanciful Zoology of Contemporary Literature:

Taenia solium—commonly known as the solitary worm. He fastens on to the tender intestines of young children but does them neither harm nor good.

Photo by Carl Ottersen

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Tuscany, with its beautiful vistas and thousands of hectares of nature preserves and woodlands, offers numerous opportunities for serious hikers and casual trekkers alike. This is the also the thought of the organizers of the Tuscany Walking Festival, a yearly event that happens goes on roughly between the first days of spring until the end of fall.

The festival highlights six of the great hiking areas in Tuscany, including the Maremma, the Monti Livornesi and the Tuscan Archipelago. In addition to the great walks are other events and promotions, such as photography exhibits, birdwatching courses, and restaurant discounts near the walking regions. What a great way to learn about Tuscany’s natural treasures and take a break from art overload!

Photo from Tuscany Walking Festival

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I just learned that today is Venice’s 1,588th birthday, according to blogger and Venice Kayak businessman René Seindal. Here’s a nice, brief history lesson:

Dear Venice, happy 1588th birthday – René Seindal.

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• What’s On in Italy: October 2008
• What’s On in Italy: June 2008

About a year ago, I posted some information about going to Pompeii from Rome on a day trip. Just a few days ago, I was alerted of a new way to get there. When in Rome Tours has private and semi-private minibus tours to Pompeii. They’ll pick you up in Rome, drive to Pompeii via Cassino (site of the Montecassino Abbey) and Naples, take you to lunch, provide you with a Pompeii guide, and get you back to the Eternal City all within the same day (about 13 hours). They also provide walking tours of Rome and smallish bus tours of the Rome environs (no giant motorcoaches here!). So if you’re trying to put together a little jaunt down to Pompeii while visiting Rome, consider checking out When in Rome Tours. Thanks for the tip, Marie!

Photo by Paul Vlaar

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• Day Trip to Pompeii from Rome
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• October 2008 Article Round-Up
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• The Pontines, Perhaps

After reading a post about Free Things to Do in Rome from fellow blogger Jessica at Italylogue.com, I couldn’t resist commenting on one of my favorite places – free or not – in all of the Eternal City: the Protestant Cemetery. Then I thought I should also share this tip with Italofile readers, too.

The Protestant Cemetery, also known as the Non-Catholic Cemetery, is located behind the grand Pyramid or, in Italian, Piramide, itself a burial site for Roman magistrate Gaius Cestius who died around 12BC. Surrounded by tall trees, which miraculously drown out the din of Roman traffic just beyond the Pyramid, the well-kept cemetery is the final resting place of a few names from literature, notably John Keats (whose unmarked epitaph famously reads “Here lies one whose name was writ in water”) and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who died in a boating accident off the coast of Tuscany, but who wrote parts of Prometheus Unbound while living in Rome. Many expats and non-Catholic Italians have been laid to rest at the Protestant Cemetery and you can find lists of others buried there (ordered by name, nationality, etc.) by checking out these databases.

Indeed, it may seem a little morbid to spend time at a cemetery while in Rome. At the very least, it may seem odd to go out of one’s way to visit one of Rome’s least-visited (and certainly little known) sites. But, the Protestant Cemetery is just one of the many free things you can do in the Eternal City and is a great place to recharge your batteries after hours of dodging traffic and long lines.

Photo from the Protestant Cemetery website

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Sharing a carafe of Chianti while the autumnal Tuscan air swirls around you is one of life’s great pleasures. Of course, there’s more to Tuscan wine than the everyday Chianti, and fall is the perfect time to explore the region and its many vineyards.

Did you know that there are 14 wine routes in Tuscany, also known as Le Strade del Vino? By clicking on the image to the left, you can visit the Tuscan Wine Trails website, where, ostensibly, you can devise your own vineyard driving tour. (A note to technically-minded Italophiles: on my wishlist is a Google Maps mashup of these trails.)

The 14 wine routes are as follows. Thanks to waytuscany.net for sorting these out by province.

Province of Arezzo: Strada del Vino Terre di Arezzo
Province of Florence: Strada del Vino Chianti Colli Fiorentini, Strada del Vino di Montespertoli, Strada dei Vini Chianti Rufina e Pomino
Province of Grosseto: Strada del Vino Monteregio di Massa Marittima, Strada del Vino Colli di Maremma, Strada del Vino di Montecucco
Province of Livorno: Strada del Vino Costa degli Etruschi
Province of Lucca: Strada del Vino Colline Lucchesi e Montecarlo
Province of  Massa Carrara: Strada del Vino Colli di Candia e di Lunigiana
Province of Prato: Strada Medicea dei Vini di Carmignano
Province of Pisa: Strada del Vino delle Colline Pisane
Province of Siena: Strada del Vino Vernaccia di San Gimignano, Strada del Vino di Montepulciano

Happy sipping!

Photo © N1ck P Harris

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If you’re the type of traveler who likes to go it alone and doesn’t mind injecting a little technological know-how into your trip, then a GPS-driven self-guided tour may be the ticket.

Information about Zephyr Self-Guided Adventures through Italy just crossed our desks over the weekend. The company offers walks, biking, and driving tours through Tuscany, Umbria, and parts of Lazio, all of which are powered by GPS navigation. According to a press release:

The GPS Navigation systems have pre-loaded waypoints along the driving routes and are designed to accompany written turn-by-turn directions. With simple touch commands travelers can easily get from one destination to another. These portable systems not only allow for a comfortable traveling pace, but are also a cheaper alternative to the typical guided vacation.

In addition to the GPS Navigation systems, these driving tours come with a “virtual tour guide” in the form of a Portable Media Player loaded with short videos. In these videos, Zephyr Adventures President Allan Wright gives a daily route talk summarizing what to expect for each day while certified Italian guide (and Zephyr in-country support representative) Giovanni Ramaccioni gives entertaining cultural and historical presentations about sights on the route. The cultural videos were filmed at the exact spots the travelers pass through.

The combination of these two technologies allows for the ultimate driving adventure.

While Zephyr may have touched on a rather novel concept, we also like the fact that they have worked in the price of hotels and rental cars, so you don’t have to do any extra legwork (unless, of course, you choose to walk or bike your way through central Italy). Rates start at $1,250 per person, not including airfare.

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