Beard of the Week LXII: Saint Isaac
As some of you will already have recognized, this week's beard belongs to Isaac, my beloved partner of (so far) 16 years. For obvious reasons this photograph is known around our house as "St. Isaac", certainly among my top-five favorites.* Whether it is obvious or not, he also deserves the appellation "saint" for putting up with me for all those years. This BoW is a little bit earlier than usual (rather than late) for two reasons. One is that we'll be busy all day today (14 December) with our annual holiday open house and potluck party† that we have every year at about this time because, two, today (14 December) is Isaac's 55th birthday.
I took this photograph in October 2001 in Albano, Italy. Albano is about 60 km southwest of Rome along the Via Appia Nuova (marked "SS7" at some zoom levels in this the Google map), We were visiting our friends Jim & Renzo in Rome (for my first time ever), and Renzo had cajoled his friend Lucio into taking us on a day trip in Lucio's tiny Fiat. (These were the people crammed into the car, along with me.)
We were on our way to see the beautiful Gardens of Ninfa and the nearby mountaintop town of Sermoneta. Albano was a nice place to stop midway and take an exceedingly valuable leg-stretching break. We strolled a bit in a park and came upon this gate, I think it was, with the nimbus design that just cried out to have Isaac stand in front of it for a photo-op.
Sermoneta is a medieval town built in the mountains, of which there are a fair number in Italy; Orvieto, another hilltop medieval town, is a favorite destination of ours that we've managed to visit a couple of times. Renzo tends to think that if one has seen one medieval hilltop town one has seen them all, but I continue to find them interesting, perhaps because we have so few hilltop medieval towns in the US.
We toured the castle at Sermoneta and had a delightful luncheon in a little spot at the side of the road leading up to the town. (One has to park and then walk up the road some distance.) Here we are eating lunch, with a grove of olive trees in the background. (If you've seen one grove of olive trees in the Italian countryside….)
Our visit to Sermoneta came after we had visited our primary destination, the Gardens at Ninfa. The gardens are a charming oasis, quiet and peaceful and beautiful even in October when rather little was blooming. From Italy Travelguide about Ninfa Gardens:
At the feet of the Lepini Mountains, corresponding with a majestic resurgence that pushed the ancient people to consecrate the location to the Ninfe (as is found in the writings of Plinio) rose the important inhabited center in the Middle Ages with the name, as you guessed, Ninfa. In the twelfth century, moment of maximum splendor, the city had seven churches and was surrounded by a city wall, but then in the 14th century devastating fights internally and a war with the neighboring cities brought about the fall of Ninfa and its definitive abandonment.
Estate of the noble Roman Caetani family since the 13th century, at the beginning of the 20th century Ada Wilbraham, of British origin and wife of Prince Onorato Caetani, was impressed by the fascinating ancient remains and of the very old springs, and she decided to transform the entire zone into a garden.
The following generation, Gelasio Caetani and American wife, Marguerite Chapin, brought ahead the creation of the garden, but the actual dimensions and definitive configuration are mostly due to the third and last lady of the lineage, Lelia Caetani, talented landscaper and accomplished painter.
When Ada Wilbrahan said that, at the beginning of the work, the location was in a state of complete abandonment, the remains of the towers and of the old houses, the creeping vegetation that climbed everywhere, the water streamed forming little pools that gave it a wild and romantic appearance.
The layout of the garden was meant from the beginning to safeguard this informal, not geometric, aspect, the apparent spontaneous aspect of a typical English garden.
Oh, look, here's an interesting story about Ninfa (Mark Zakian, "Once it was a ruin. Now it's a beautiful garden.") from the Christian Science Monitor. You might enjoy looking through my photo album from Ninfa. (Here's the google map that locates Ninfa and Sermoneta.)
Getting to see the gardens in those days seemed to take diplomatic connections since admission was by prior arrangement only, but Renzo managed to arrange it somehow. Provided we could be there by some early hour on a Saturday morning, it turned out that there was a tour scheduled and we could slink along with them through the gardens. We did and it was an amazing experience. I understand that it's much easier to arrange to see the gardens these days, but I don't have the information handy. Searching for "Fondazione Caetani" seems to turn up a phone number and possibly additional information of the foundation that looks after the gardens. Someplace there's rumored to be a website–I'll let you know if I find it again.
Since that trip it seems almost like Rome has become "our" city; we've visited twice since then and Isaac says we're going back next year. Fortunately we plan to go in October rather than July, when the heat is enough to make one crazy.
Anyway, let's all sing "Happy Birthday" together now, shall we?
__________
* With such a photogenic subject it can be difficult to choose. For instance, I'm also very fond of this portrait of Isaac in the piazza at St. Peter's, with the colonnade in the background.
† Of course, if you're in the neighborhood you should drop in!
In: All, Beard of the Week, Personal Notebook
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on Sunday, 14 December 2008 at 13.27
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Birthday greetings have been sent from (last night and today) snowy Vancouver Island.
Saint Isaac ought perhaps be BoW LV for reasons of congruity; but for reasons of sequentiality he's surely LXII, not LVII.
Hope the open house goes well.
on Wednesday, 24 December 2008 at 10.06
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Someday, Bill, I'm going to get my Roman numerals right. Perhaps I can make a lesson out of it about the Arabic/Indian system we use today.