smile Archivi - Keep Calm and Drink Coffee

KEEP CALM AND POTA

Apr 13, 2024 | ART, ART, CULTURE, CULTURE, WOMEN, WOMEN

Keep calm and pota!

Don’t say you’re not already smiling thinking to Keep calm and pota.

I immediately lit up, also because Keep calm and pota is curated by Piöcc’s Café.

Café! A coincidence, or rather, I would directly say a sign.

A sign that I immediately grasped when I contacted the Teatro Centro Lucia in Botticino Sera.

Yes, you read that right: theatre.

Elena kindly explained that their artistic direction in recent seasons has been proposing a review of dialectal comedies from the Brescia area entitled ‘Èl bel del dialet a teàter’.

As I have already mentioned, I am very fond of dialect.

Keep calm and pota is therefore a dialect comedy, and Cafè di Piöcc a theatre company.

Elena also helped me contact the director: Manuela.

In two words: a revelation!

Quoting Queen Agatha:
A clue is a clue, two clues are a coincidence, but three clues make a proof.

Keep Calm, Coffee and Friendship.

The founders of the Café di Piöcc are three friends who meet in the parvis of the cathedral church in Montichiari.

Money is tight and friends watch the gentlemen eat pastries and drink wine, but they can only afford water from the fountain: the Café di Piöcc then, that is, the poor man’s café.

At Cafè di Piöcc, stories, gossip and historical facts are told.

From these tales, one of the first theatre companies in Brescia was born in 1970, a troupe that was also the subject of a university thesis.

Manuela joined the company, gradually performing various tasks: props girl, prompter, actress with a small part, assistant director.

Until one evening in the rehearsal room she picked up a book from which an envelope came out with a letter that no one had ever seen.

Destiny, magic, what would you call it?

In this letter, Beppe Boschetti, one of the three founding friends, had expressed his wish to leave the company in Manuela’s hands.

A story made up of people, a long journey made up of extremely remarkable theatre works such as I tre innocenti (The Three Innocents), inspired by news events, or Semplicemente donna (Simply Woman): a red chair and 49 changes of clothes representing the stages of life up to menopause.

And yet settings and periods vary while the common denominator remains the titles that are idioms, e.g. Petost che peji l’è mei insi or Ogné come la sàpes stada.

All the way to Keep Calm and pota.

Pota is the word that unites Brescia and Bergamo, an intercalary that, pronounced with the typical accent, is always very nice.

The author had the intuition to combine pota with the expression keep calm, linking up with Freud’s truth, the female Ego interjecting itself with the Super Ego, and communicating a message: love wins.

Speaking of messages, the Cafè di Piöcc also collaborates with the municipality of Montichiari for social work with the Legality in short project.

It can therefore be said that Cafè di Piöcc keeps calm but is unstoppable!

Many many compliments and a special thanks to Manuela Danieli.

RICE FIELDS DON’T RISE FEELINGS

Nov 6, 2021 | ENVIRONMENT, ITALY

According to the annual report published by the National Rice Authority, Lomellina and Pavese are confirmed as the area with the greatest extension of rice paddies.

“The checkered sea” as my cousin used to say when we were children… yes, here we are quite far from the sea and therefore we are content to find beauty with alternative visions.

The checkered sea or rice paddies.

Paddy fields but no laughter.

Or, quoting neorealism, bitter rice since the conditions of livability, or should I say mortality, due to high rate of cancers, certainly do not allow smiles.

I don’t get tired of periodically reiterating the high danger of the poisons we live with, because the damage they cause to the body is terrible.

But as Charlie Chaplin taught us, a day without laughter is a day wasted.

So if the smile is still a little difficult, I would say to start at least with rice.

The most typical recipes of Lomellina, to stay on the subject of rice fields… mention among the first risotto with frogs …

But I would “jump” directly to something else like the simple ris e lac: rice with milk or risotto with black-eyed peas.

Or, better still: why not take a longer jump outside the borders of Lomellina?

The caustic misanthrope proposed a tartare with Nero rice which to describe as delicious is few, and then she also told me about red rice!
I am a mess so on the first try I got the cooking time wrong but … you learn by making a mistake!
Thanks Lu!

Also on Paola’s blog: Primo non sprecare – First don’t waste, which I advise you not to miss, you will find a long series of recipes for cooking rice enriched with valuable advice, and they are one more interesting than the other!

I don’t know if I can choose, and you?

How about: can we dare a Keep Calm version?
Proposals are accepted!

LA PASSIONE DI FRIDA – FRIDA’S PASSION

Oct 8, 2021 | BOOKS, PENDING COFFEE FOR, WOMEN

Frida’s passion published by tre60 is also the passion of Caroline Bernard pseudonym of Tanie Schlie who for her twenty-seventh birthday receives the biography of Frida Kahlo written by Hayden Herrera and begins a journey of immersion in everything that revolves around the artist.

On her website in the foreground the sentence: “And then I sit in Paris at the Café de Flore and I order my inspiration” … same Café de Flore in which Frida also sits on page 270.

The book also talks about a small café called La risa: laughter, but above all it talks about the PASSION mentioned in the title.

A passion so strong and visceral as to be unique and unrepeatable, a real bond made of earth, painting and blood that Frida Kahlo reports not only on her works but also in every single moment of her life.

A painful life, a life without discounts, never.

I particularly received inspiration in terms of living with pain, but it was other types of suffering that raged on Frida that came to me with the same intensity of her determination.

That hole in her heart remains indelible.

But superior is the strength with which her example arrives of how the will transcends the physical, managing to touch the impossible.

As much as fate is cruel.

At her death, her personal items were collected and banned from the public for a period of fifteen years at the behest of her husband Diego Rivera, but in reality the years passed before they were exhibited are fifty.

Among the photographs available thanks to The Guardian I was struck by the boots. Observe them well.

And I tried to imagine the perfumes of Casa Azul

Mexicanidad.
In a sentence in the book, her sister Cristina, who bears the same name as the friend I thank for the book, tells Frida that she is Mexico.

But she is also pain, tangible, inexorable, irreducible.

Thanks to the book, it is possible to witness the birth of some of his paintings following a thread of emotions, as if they could not be thought otherwise.

Do you have a favorite?

You can see them on the Foundation’s website, or here you will find a selection combined with quotes.

I conclude with a news, reported by Fantastic Nonna: the Municipality of Milan has dedicated a square to Tina Modotti who plays an important role in the book.

I fell in love with this photograph.

Do you have one in which your smile explodes radiating joy?

ONE WAY OR ANOTHER

Feb 15, 2020 | A COFFEE WITH, ROCK, WOMEN

I start with Debbie Harry, simply because I particularly like this photo and I hope it can be an inspiration for you too.
I would skip the details of his life more strictly personal and I would speak directly of the mythical times of the CBGB after the meeting with Chris Stein and the creation of Blondie who have characterized the scene since 1974 for a long period full of successes.
Without a doubt, I mention Call Me for the collaboration with Giorgio Moroder, which has become an iconic soundtrack and more generally a piece that evokes an emotional flashback at every listening: new wave, disco music, dance rock.
Debbie stayed with Chris for fifteen years during which they also fought a serious illness together.
A wonderful Heart of glass, but at the same time a strong heart, this is the first thought I have of all about her.
A woman who at fifty-three continues marking history with a first place in the chart that enters Guinness.
A woman who knows how to cross past present and future without distinction, like her portrait made by Andy Wharol with the Amiga 1000 computer.
A woman also celebrated in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, who has been able to become a symbol with her ruffled hair and an uncalculated look but framed by her determination.
And his One way or another, deliberately covered with joy as a “survival mechanism”, resounds sadly current, making us reflect once again on the fact that over time, we persist in not treasuring experiences and that we cannot learn from mistakes, getting worse.
Anyway, let’s start from her smile and her intent to restore lightness and take an example, one way or another …