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carpi, near modena

our new apartment building

the preferred method of transport for many carpi residents

teaching again! hannah in her classroom, awaiting the next student

"blandscape" of the 21st century

victor jara project

2008: good year for beat series?

piazza martiri on a sunday afternoon plus the cathedral (construction begun in 1514)

holocaust memorial in carpi

close-up of one of the tablets

Something we learnt from our time abroad in 2006 and 2007 was that on arrival in a new place, get out and about as soon as possible under your own steam. This helps to ward off the initial feeling of helplessness and reliance on others to ship you around and tell you what's what that can manifest itself initially. For teachers, this is a dangerously passive state to slip into, and getting out of the apartment and beginning to find one's way around unfamiliar surroundings, plus interacting with local people, helps to build up the confidence required to step into an unfamiliar classroom in an unfamiliar school to teach unfamiliar students a couple of days later.

For that reason, although we were feeling somewhat drained from sitting on various types of transportation, we decided to stretch our legs and go in search of (what else?) wine and pizza! The first thing we discovered is that Carpi is centred around a central piazza (square) called "Piazza Martiri", or "Martyr's Square". There is an impressive castle, formally the residence of the Pio family, of whom Alberto Pio is the most famous, being to Carpi what Dr Johnson is to Birmingham, if you like. To the right of the "castello" is the "Teatro Communale di Carpi", where dance, drama, musical concerts and the like all take place. On the other side, at the north end of the piazza, is a magnificent church about which I'm afraid I know nothing as of this moment! I'll update this entry with an Editor's Note when I've got the lowdown on the church (and a picture). After happening upon a lovely pizzeria called "Freedom Cafe", where we were able to purchase pizza (obviously) and wine (blissfully), we zig-zagged out way back through the maze of tiny streets in sort-of-the-right-direction, arriving back home tired but victorious!

Fri 18th January 2008
The end of our first week's teaching (although I also did an impromptu 90-minute class on Friday 11th). Life in Carpi is very relaxed, with Wednesday and Friday nights being the main event as regards going out on the town. Thursday is half-day closing, most shops close at 19:30 every evening, and on our walk back to our apartment at the end of the working day (which varies between 8pm and 10pm on our schedules at the moment) the streets are practically deserted albeit for a few cars and bicycles. In fact, even in the middle of the day, bicycles are the preferred method of transport for Carpiites, young and old alike. After the horn-honking headache that is Dubai, the gentle sound of bicycle bells and "la campana" from the churches bring a welcome relaxed calm to daily life. CLICK HERE to listen to the bell-ringers of San Bernadino chapel (close to our school) getting into some Reichian phase patterns a couple of days ago.

The students are all friendly and talkative, and most classes are one-to-one or small groups of between 2 and 6, which is a teacher's dream after the 20-30 class sizes of Oman and the 10-15 of Mongolia! It is possible to actually address the needs of each individual student in this teaching environment, as opposed to delivering a straight lecture with occasional interaction and a lot of crowd-control that is an unfortunate by-product of crowded classrooms. Hannah and I have our own classrooms on the 1st floor of the school, which has two levels in a building located on Via Alberto Pio, a delightful cobbled street that leads to the Piazza Martiri to the north. The rooms overlook another cobbled street, Via Rovighi, that runs parallel to Alberto Pio and the feeling that you are actually working at a school in a small Italian town with a history is a very pleasing one.

After all, when you move to a foreign country, you want to feel like you're actually there, don't you? Rather than in yet another of those characterless Western-stye "luxury" apartments or residential areas or shopping malls or purpose-built business complexes that have spread across the globe in recent years, dull as dishwater and stiflingly predictable to boot. This cult-of-the-bland is more dangerous to the development of humanity than any manufactured terrorist threat or perceived global clash of ideologies.

Our time in Dubai was a terrifying glimpse of the future: stretching as far as the eye can see, the earth is reduced to one all-encompassing mega-city of mindless drones inhabiting polished "prisons of gold" (thanks to my student Silverio for coining that phrase this week). Everything is predictable, from the cradle to the grave. Nothing left to chance, no surprises and no room for individual expression. "This is the way the world ends... Not with a bang but a whimper." (from The Hollow Men, 1925 - TS Eliot's much-quoted final stanza, click the line itself for more info.)

Sat 19th January 2008
Arci (pronounced "Archie") is the communist party in Italy. There are many Arci clubs around the country and also here in Carpi. Arci has a card-carrying membership that also extends abroad to some other socialist countries, including Venezuala. Last week I saw a poster in our local "supermercato" for a series of music courses teaching jazz piano, improvisation, double bass, drums, trumpet, sax, voice and more, and of course my interest was captured instantly. I wrote the details down for the place where this teaching was taking place, on a road named Via Genova, which turned out, after consulting our streetmap of Carpi, to be about a half-hour's walk from our apartment.

So this afternoon (after taking delivery of our new TV set courtesy of the school) we took a leisurely walk through the thick fog that is characteristic of Carpi this time of year along to Via Genova in search of this centre for musical learning. Which turns out to be an Arci centre. The "Circolo Arci S. Cabasi" offers Russian, English and Spanish language courses, Dance lessons, has a bar and social club plus a music centre that has been operating for 33 years. This we managed to glean from looking at posters on the outside of the building, since the music lessons only happen between 17:00 and 19:00 Monday to Friday and from 09:00 to 11:30 on Saturday mornings. I am curious to know who is teaching these courses and am hoping to find the musicians for my hoped-for band over here in Italy from this lead. Watch this space!

From another of the teachers at work we learnt that there is also an Arci bar near the library in the centre of town where live bands play on Sundays. I can't help but think that one of these venues (or both) would be ideal for a performance of my shelved project from 2007, The Death & Life of Victor Jara, and also of course Howl, On The Road and Bomb, which are the first three of four special projects of mine celebrating the major works of the Beat Generation. I was bitterly disappointed not to have been able to premiere On The Road last year but have begun the new year with fresh determination to make it happen and was able to record half of Part One with Sid Peacock narrating from the authorised abridged version just prior to our coming to Italy. Maybe the project was simply waiting for Italy, or Arci? Time will tell but the prospect of being able to premiere works over here to an audience receptive to the works of the Beats and also the wisdom of Jara is a happy one indeed!

Sun 20th January 2008
Sunday afternoon is a good time to have a stroll along the streets of Carpi and stop by a little shop and purchase some vino...not! We slipped up today by not realising the supermarkets and shops are closed all day - even the new hypermarket/mall "Il Borgigioso". Alarmed by this discovery we called as a last resort at a garage service station in case they happened to sell alcohol. There was a bar, but it was closed on Sundays. However, as we were walking away contemplating the spine-chilling possibility of a wine-less evening, a door opened and a mustachioed fellow asked us (in Italian) what we wanted. Not being able to speak the lingo didn't stop us from managing to indicate we were after wine and, to our surprise, he motioned us inside the service station bar. Not only did he have wine, but he also offered us a taste of it prior to purchase, plus the offer of coffee and cigarettes, which we declined. So far so good, and we were chuffed but a little worried about how much this off-sale booze would come to. What happened next took us completely by surprise: the two bottles of wine were a gift! Because it was a Sunday, he wasn't allowed by law to take any money for alcohol, but he could offer the wine as a personal gift instead. Amazing! We were of course over-the-moon with joy at free wine and after offering money a couple of times further to the gentleman, we walked off into the fog smiling and offering our heartfelt thanks to this kindly stranger. We might go back next Sunday to see if they're still giving out free wine to confused foreigners!

Sun 27th January 2008
On Italian television today were programmes commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz. On January 27th, 1945, Soviet forces liberated the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, discovering the largest Nazi killing center in Europe. Auschwitz has become a symbol of the Holocaust, representing the depths of man's inhumanity to man. Eighteen governments have legislated January 27 as an annual Holocaust Memorial Day. Recently, the United Nations passed a resolution to make January 27 an international day of commemoration to honor the victims of the Holocaust and urged member states to develop educational programs to impart the memory of this tragedy to future generations.

The city of Carpi received a Silver Medal for Military Valour due to its participation to the resistance against the German occupation during World War II, and there is a striking memorial garden to the victims of the deportation and extermination camps behind the Castello de Pio (see left).

During WWII, Fossoli, near Carpi, was singled out as an ideal location for a fascist concentration camp, known as "War Prison Camp no.73", and earmarked to receive prisoners of war, soldiers and allied non-commissioned officers. By the first few days of September 1943, the camp was abandoned and the military detainees left in Fossoli were shipped to the prison camps in Germany. [Ed's Note: Italy signed an armistice with the Allied Forces at the beginning of September 1945, after which most of the country was occupied by German forces] Immediately after this work began on enlarging the camp. When the first 827 Jews arrived the new buildings had still to be completed, and therefore some of the deportees had to be housed in the barracks of the ex-military camp. Some of the camp’s buildings, although in appalling conditions, still exist today. In 1973, a museum was inaugurated in the Castle of Pio in Carpi, as a memorial to the political and racial deportees of the Nazi extermination camps ("Museo monumento al deportato politico e razziale nei campi di sterminio nazisti"). This information was taken from: Fondazione Memoria della Deportazione, where you can also read the first-hand testimony of a survivor from the Fossoli camp.