What Fills My Plate

The purpose of today's blog post is for a small exhibition of my latest pen and ink drawings.  It is accompanied by music by Paul Hindemith, one of my favorite composers.  To view, click on the words (read more). Unfortunately the blog will only accept videos made in a format that is a bit fuzzy and the lines are not as sharp as they are in the drawings.  I do feel that they are well represented, so proceed on and I hope you will have an enjoyable 4 minutes.  Ciao! I would like to know what you think of my drawings.  Please comment below if you have time.  Thank you for viewing.  

All Things Italian This morning in my coffee bar, I spent a few hours on an art project and did my usual people watching. 7 Men came in for a coffee, and 8 women of which half were a group on over 80’s who meet twice a week there. Only one of the men was retirement age, he is a regular who speaks loudly in Veneto to the barista. She always speaks loudly, so they get along fine. I don’t know what it is about baristas, they must have a hearing problem as they are almost yelling at the customers, greeting them with a buongiorno and then asking them which type of brioche they want, and then running through the whole list of what is inside the brioches. One can find chocolate, cream, vuoto (empty), pistacchio (pronounced Kee, not chee) nutty, and more. One other thing about all baristas, they all love to make noise when putting the coffee cups and saucers in the sink. I think that they must be cymbal players in the local town band. When I first went into the bar, my phone told me i

Greetings from my village coffee bar. Yesterday, driving home from Croatia, there was a dangerous downpour made the autostrada dangerous, not only to go forward, but even to pull off. Even if we could finally find a place to escape we were afraid to leave in case of being hit from behind. Fifteen minutes can feel like a lifetime! On the way from home there is a stretch of autostrada near Latisana, which for several reasons has more accidents than anywhere else. This Friday was no exception. A crash being cleared caused a second crash that had occurred just minutes from our passing. A driver had been driving too fast and too close and when he reached the stopped traffic, it was too late. The back end of the lead car was mashed as if a giant sledge hammer had hit is, even the muffler was crashed and hanging down. The driver was out in front on the phone calling for help while holding his head in his right hand. Everyone proceeded even slower after this. This stretch of high

It has been some time since the last posting. Covid has changed our world, it certainly changed mine. We have been to less places, but have managed to escape a few times. We have just finished 3 weeks on Crete Island, Greece. We have been there many times before, so this trip was mainly for just goofing off, and for me, painting. I took some work that was unfinished and then also painted scenes of Crete, which is very beautiful and the beaches are spectacular. The island is covered with thousands of olive trees, so many it makes one wonder how they harvest them all. Olive oil is used most exclusively by the people of Greece much to their good health and lifestyle. The cuisine of Crete is different than here in Italy. We did see spaghetti on a menu a few times, but I think it is for the benefit of Italians who make up a great number of tourists on Crete. The foto is zucchini leaves and also grape leaves wrapped around a lightly spiced rice mixture. We kept looking for this

Welcome back to my Life in Northern Italy blog. Today I am going to write about food and the differences in menus that can occur in restaurants located just a few kilometers apart. I am thinking this will be a longer post as I want to show a lot of photos and comment on them. Google has changed their blog format and I struggle to use the photos as I used to. However, I will try to show you what I call the real Italy, at least the one that citizens live in. I want you to feel as if you are here, etc. We have just returned from taking an hour and a half drive to the south to visit the beach area. This area is at the mouth of the Po river which is quite large and has bird santuaries throughout the area. The Po river near its end has several channels so one does not get to see really how large it is. In times past, before machines, there was a lot of boat traffic to move goods, etc. up and down the Po. Here are two maps that show where we will be in relation to Venice and Padova,