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Pian del Tevere farmhouse

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The Pian del Tevere farmhouse is on land register in 1727. It is a typical and suggestive example of the big umbrian farmhouse at external staircase, in the middle of a large and prosperous estate, lands reclamed in the sixteenth century from the Benedictines monks. This religious order (whose motto was ora et labora, pray and work, protagonist of the land reclamation works and of an agrarian culture in different parts of Western Europe) realised big houses, as that one, for more and more numerous families, because of broad hands need. The farmer  – Bartoccio is a character – is an head of a well organised farmer’s family, in which everyone contributes to produce wealth. At the beginning of the twentyth century, at Pian del Tevere resided a big family of twenty-four persons. The share-farming went out in 1965.

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Pian del Tevere’s recovery is a rare and exemplary philological restoration of an Umbrian ancient farmhouse, carefully aimed at preserving perfectly entire the old farmhouse’s shapes, texture and atmosphere. Each particular detail has been carefully cared to avoid falsifications: from the wall’s unevenness, the roofs slopes softness and the small eaves, until the smallest details.

Doorways and windows are the original ones, with their almost invisible sills. Materials have been chosen according to the local housing traditions, from the finding of stones to the river pebbles, to the pure lime mortars. The rooms are the same as they once were, with walling and wood fireplaces, and the hand made floor tiles.

Modern comfort, however, is carefully assured by the presence in the building of absolutely new technological installations, well hidden in order not to be intrusive, with a special care to conceal the novelties, to hide pipes and ducts and to leave intact the external image of the big tiles roof. 

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Il Bartoccio

 

Bartoccio from Pian del Tevere, the Perugia’s “maschera”

Bartoccio from Pian del Tevere is the Perugia’s carnival maschera, as Harlequin is the maschera of Venice and Punchinello of Naples.

Bartoccio is a farmer who tolks local country rough dialect, who goes up to the town and brings every thing back at the primary substance of food, sex, life and death. He’s the burlesque type of the well-off rude countryman , rogue but ignorant, sapid but coarse.

His stock-character comes from the “commedia dell’arte” and represents the mirror into the town is looking  at herself.

The maschera of Bartoccio comes from the seveteenth century and is the favourite reference of the dialect Perugia’s satirical literature.

Photo on the right: la marionetta (1960) di Bartoccio
(da Le Marionette di Anna M. Guardabassi, Volumnia Editrice, Perugia 1991).

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“To save goat and cabbage”

About boats and ferrymen, do you know this saying “To save goat and cabbage” ?

The Italian expression “Save goat and cabbage”, which sounds “run with the hare and hunt with the hounds”, “you can’t have your cake and eat it”, or “manage to have it both ways” in English, (meaning to get out of an impasse, to have it both ways, to keep everybody happy),derives from a well-known problem included in Alcuin’s book.

“To save goat and cabbage” means a decision to safeguard the interests of two subjects that do not seem compatible. It seems like there’s no existing equivalent of the italian idiom “salvar capra e cavolo” in the English language. If is said about a ferryman who carried over the river a goat, a head of cabbage and a wolf, and the wolf did not eat the goat and the goat did not eat the cabbage. It is a riddle of a famous logician, with an ancient origin.

In the far 782 AD, Emperor Charlemagne called to his court in Aachen an English Benedictine monk, Alcuin from York (Flaccus Albinus, 730-804), who became Master of the great Schola Palatina. He was considered the most learned man of his time. In the book Propositiones ad acuendos juvenes (Problems to make witty young people) he picked puzzles and mathematical games. One of these – that was widespread in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance – is the Propositio de lupo et capra et fasciculo cauli (Problem of the wolf, the goat and the basket of cabbages):

Homo quidam debebat ultra fluvium transferre lupum et capram et fasciculum cauli, et non potuit aliam navem invenire, nisi quae duos tantum ex ipsis ferre valebat. Praeceptum itaque ei fuerat, ut omnia haec ultra omnino illaesa transferret. Dicat, qui potest, quomodo eos illaesos ultra transferre potuit.

SOLUTIO Simili namque tenore ducerem prius capram et dimitterem foris lupum et caulum. Tum deinde venirem lupumque ultra transferrem, lupoque foras misso rursus capram navi receptam ultra reducerem, capraque foras missa caulum transveherem ultra, atque iterum remigassem, capramque assumptam ultra duxissem. Sicque faciente facta erit remigatio salubris absque voragine lacerationis.

The ferryman had to carry across a river a wolf, a goat and a basket of cabbages, but the boat could only carry him in the company of one of the two beasts or him together with the single basket of cabbages. If he had left on one of the two banks of the wolf with the goat, they would have eaten. If he had left the goat and cabbage, that would eat them.

How did he do?

He completed the first trip with the goat. He left her on the other side and came back to take the cabbages. He ferried the cabbages and brought back the goat. Then he ferried the wolf, and left him on the other side with the cabbage. Finally he returned to take the goat and the fourth trip ended happily.